Parse Journal #6 Secularity by anders wennerström

Parse Journal Issue 6 Autumn 2017

Secularity Edited by Andrea Phillips, Nav Haq and Ola Sigurdson and published in collaboration with the Gรถteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2017: WheredoIendandyoubegin: On Secularity, curated by Nav Haq.

Ahrettin Ersin Alaca, Azadeh Fatehrad, Klas Grinell, Thomas Karlsohn, Ruba Katrib, Simone Kotva, Maddie Leach, Francesc Ruiz, Jonas Staal, Eszter Szakacs & Mi You, The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland, Bengt Kristensson Uggla, Mรฅns Wrange & Maria Karlsson

Platform for Artistic Research Sweden

Issue #6

Secularity

Autumn 2017

Contents Introduction Sealanguage: Field Notes from the Anthropocene

6 14

Simone Kotva On Secularity: Discussing the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2017

Andrea Phillips, Nav Haq and Ola Sirgudson Secularisation in a Post-Secular Age

Bengt Kristensson Uggla The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland: Transubstantiation II (dedicated to Margareta Orreblad, 1934-2016)

Elgaland – Vargaland Art as an Escape from Secularity: The Maryamiyya Case

Klas Grinell Seeing from Secular Spaces

Ruba Katrib On the curves of Turkish-Islamic Heritage: Understanding secularity across “Ottomania”

108

Fahrettin Ersin Alaca

The Street

129

Francesc Ruiz State/Religion: Rethinking Gender Politics in the Public Sphere in Iran

134

Azadeh Fatehrad Monument to Capital: Notes on Secular Religiosity

148

Jonas Staal Differences and Sameness: Secularity in the Case of Nicholas Roerich

156

Eszter Szakacs & Mi You The Idea of the University and the Process of Secularisation

176

Thomas Karlsohn The Sacrosanct Art â&#x20AC;&#x201C; On Art and Religion, the Rise of Populism and the Changing Media Landscape

192

Maria Karlsson and MĂĽns Wrange The Grief Prophesy

Maddie Leach

202

Issue Editorial Team

Dr Andrea Phillips is PARSE Professor of Art at the Valand Academy and Co-Editor-inChief of the PARSE platform, University of Gothenburg. Andrea lectures and writes on the economic and social construction of publics within contemporary art, the manipulation of forms of participation and the potential of forms of political, architectural and social reorganisation within artistic and curatorial culture.

Nav Haq is Senior Curator at M HKA—Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp—and guest curator of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2017. Haq was previously Exhibitions Curator at Arnolfini, Bristol, and Curator at Gasworks, London. He has curated many solo exhibitions with artists, including Hassan Khan, Cosima von Bonin, Shilpa Gupta, Imogen Stidworthy, Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin and Otobong Nkanga. Group exhibitions have included Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction (2012) together with Al Cameron; Museum Show—a historical survey of (semi-fictional) museums created by artists (2011); and Contour Biennial 2007, Mechelen, Belgium. At M HKA he co-curated the group exhibition Don’t You Know Who I Am? Art After Identity Politics together with Anders Kreuger in 2014, and he curated the interdisciplinary exhibition Energy Flash: The Rave Movement in 2016. In 2012 he was recipient of the Independent Vision Award for Curatorial Achievement, awarded by Independent Curators International, New York.

Dr Ola Sigurdson is Professor of Systematic Theology at the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He finished his doctorate in 1996 at Lund University and is the author of more than twenty books in Swedish and English. His interests lie in theology and contemporary continental philosophy, theology of culture and arts, political theology and medical humanities. His most recent books in English are Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Žižek: A Conspiracy of Hope (2012), and Heavenly Bodies: Incarnation, the Gaze and Embodiment in Christian Theology (2016). He has been a Research Fellow at Uppsala, Cambridge, and Princeton universities, as well as Guest Researcher in Nagoya, Stellenbosch, Rome and Oxford. He is also active as a culture journalist in the Swedish media.

Introduction

This issue of PARSE JouRnAl, developed in collaboration with Nav Haq (Curator) and Stina Edblom (Artistic Director) of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2017 (GIBCA 2017), comes at a critical time for European social and political attitudes within a global context, in which many attitudes and principles are fundamentally being challenged. In particular, the very European truce between secular humanism and religious traditions has come under increasing scrutiny, challenged both from within and without. While there may certainly be good reasons to challenge any particular societal configuration, the question inevitably arises how human beings of different beliefs, or no particular belief and of different modes of life should be able to live together in peace and with a sense of equality, rights and freedom. This is the question of secularity. The subject for this issue of PARSE is taken directly from Nav Haq’s curatorial thematic for GIBCA 2017 that he has been developing throughout 2016 and 2017, titled WheredoIendandyoubegin—On Secularity, and is launched to coincide with the opening of the biennial to act as part-catalogue, part-contextual (re)source and part-imaginative interpolation in tandem with events that will be held throughout the biennial.

From early discussions within the editorial team, it became clear that, alongside the high-profile flashpoints of violence, misunderstanding, anger and despair caused by events in Europe over the past decade, including the killing of editors at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris in 2015, the fatwas issued against Jyllands-Posten for the publication of cartoons perceived to be blasphemous in 2005, the attacks by Anders Breivik on the island of Utøya in 2011, the recent suicide attacks in Brussels, London and Manchester, alongside the continued aggressive policies by Anglo-European governments and their agencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Kurdistan and Syria, and the rise of right-wing nationalist and identitarian movements, the idea that the early-twentieth century is a time dominated by a consensualised secular humanism needs to be radically disturbed. Secularity itself needs to be negotiated not simply from the hermetic perspective of the Euro-American world, where it is broadly understood to be hegemonic, but from the perspectives from which belief offers spiritual and social freedom rather than the threat of persecution. As Ola Sigurdson points out in our editorial discussion, many confusions arise between secularism and secularity: “Secularism is a view of life which means that society or state shouldn’t contain religion. Secularity is a condition of society. To speak of secularity is not necessarily something normative.” In this issue, secularity is raised as a topic apropos questions about a space for negotiation between different modes of life, not as a particular world view or a political doctrine. Such troubled territory is complex in the context of both an art biennial and Gothenburg—an apparently bourgeois city on the West coast of Sweden with a strong working class history, a lengthy trading history and a concomitant and still very present history of ethnic and class division. In the discussion carried out between us in this issue that serves as an extended editorial, we grapple with this context, along with the cautionary question of what is to be done, said, produced, by artists and curators within such conditions. As Haq points out in the discussion, there is a long history of visual culture prompting accusations of blasphemy and idolatry due to provocation, naivety and sometimes through new social sensitivities arising. Contemporary art, it seems, has

1 Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge. 1994. pp. 22-23.

its own forms of iconoclasm, but such a legacy does not simply belong to the twentieth century and the epoch of modernism. Art, design, music and craft’s relation to religion is ingrained in many cultures for differing rationales; useful, observant, subservient, doxological, economic, etc. As is discussed by many contributors to this issue, the historical entanglement of secular humanisms and religious traditions means that humanism is never rid entirely of its European religious forbearance; it is haunted by religion as much as majority religion in Europe has never been rid of challenges from other modes of life, religious or otherwise. This hybridity marks the great and violently affective ambivalence of our age. Perhaps ironically, the search for mutual disambiguation, an exorcism of the ghost of the other, has given rise to a profound lack of comprehension between cultures of belief and non-belief. As Jacques Derrida asked in Specters of Marx (1993): How to distinguish between two disadjustments, between the disjuncture of the unjust and the one that opens up the infinite asymmetry of the relation to the other, that is to say, the place for justice? Not for calculable and distributive justice. Not for law, for the calculation of restitution, the economy of vengeance or punishment… Not for calculable equality, therefore, not for the symmeticizing and synchronic calculability or imputability of subjects and objects, not for a rendering justice that would be limited to sanctioning, to restituting, and to doing right, but for justice as incalculability of the gift and singularity of the an-economic ex-position of others.1 In order to disambiguate a shallow narrative of “them” and “us” as the basis for religious and cultural difference, we begin this issue of PARSE Journal with the essay “Sealanguage: Field Notes from the Anthropocene” by philosophy and theology scholar Simone Kotva, who proposes a form of religious parsing in her ethnographic study of language, myth and belief on the Faroe islands. Spending time on the islands, Kotva studies and becomes intimate with words that, rather than “underwriting a ‘savage’” ontology, demonstrate “the mental dexterity required to understand (and perhaps invent) names.” She goes on: “sealanguage did not

decline because the beliefs which it presupposed had begun to erode. Rather, it had begun to decline because the practices from which it is inseparable had begun to vanish, and beliefs immaterial to sealanguage (but important to scholars) were proposed in order to make sealanguage comprehensible as an object of study.” In this we understand that Kotva is pointing to the processes of study as a device which produces hierarchies of beliefs, sustained by the structure of the Anthropocene. In his essay on “Secularisation in a Post-Secular Age”, philosopher and theologian Bengt Kristensson Uggla traces a historical lineage of Northern European religion, particularly through Luther, to find “sacrality” in the secular. He moves from this to posit a question perhaps provocatively within the pages of a journal devoted to artistic research: “Just the thought that a religious room, a cathedral, could in certain situations be more tolerant, as well as accommodate a richer expanse of interpretation interests, than an artistic room, an art museum, is something that feels very challenging in our time and age. Why do we become so surprised, and maybe provoked even, of the state of things?” In “Art as an Escape from Secularity: the Maryamiyya Case”, curator Klas Grinell explores the fact that in response to growing Islamophobia in the West many museums have dedicated room to new galleries for the exhibiting of Islamic art, but calls for “an islamisation of Islamic art [that] might open a space for addressing secularity.” Continuing the exploration of the role and emphatic power of cultural institutions, in her article “Seeing from Secular Spaces” curator Ruba Katrib uses her experience of working with Congolese artists whose practice registers differently in different situations. She says, “The gaps between the construction of Western secular knowledge… and other forms of knowledge must be acknowledged—and without falling into the impulse to transform what is unknown into something that can easily be understood or studied through Western secular lenses.” The broader conditions of cultural production are tackled in “On the Curves of Turkish-Islamic Heritage: Understanding Turkey’s Contemporary Secularity across ‘Ottomania’”, by PhD scholar Fahrettin Ersin Alaca. He describes how the growing power of

Turkish Islamic capital and the ensuing politicisation of consumption forces designers, artists, and architects to challenge their modernist educational background when performing professionally. Establishing the possibility of his own “internalised orientalism”, Alaca says, “commodification may represent… that both Islamism and secularism, as constantly reproduced co-constitutive ideological and political positions in Turkey, are socially constructed. This construction cannot be formulated and solved in a certain and linear fashion. In addition to political and ideological affiliations, commodification incorporates a myriad of socio-cultural and politico-economic domains with no regular boundaries, but rather with interpenetration of these domains and related positions.” Artist and PhD scholar Azdeh Fatehrad looks at the momentous and controversial implications and political situatedness of Reza Shah’s 1936 Unveiling Act in Iran. In “State/Religion: Rethinking Gender Politics in the Public Sphere in Iran” she analyses how one of the consequences of Shah’s modernising project, which allowed for more open and progressive gender norms, which gave women access to education, work, and other opportunities, was the alienation of the vast majority of conservative Iranian families who no longer recognised the new secular public sphere they found outside their door. Moving back and forth between mysticism and politics, the issue continues with “Differences and Sameness: Secularity in the Case of Nicholas Roerich”, in which historians and curators Eszter Szakacs and Mi You explore the continued legacy of Roerich, theosophist and Buddhist; “a curious figure who rose on the ashes and ruins of multiple broken orders: the empire/transnationalism, traditionalism, religiosity and Communism, as opposed to nation- state, modernity, secularisation and liberal democracy, yet paradoxically his failures surmount the categorical limits of the latter.” Returning to the location of our own ventriloquism of secularity within a Northern European academic context, in “The Idea of the University and the Process of Secularisation” intellectual historian Thomas Karlsohn sketches the history of the development of education—and particularly university education—from a monasterial project towards a post-Enlightenment tradition

of thinking “independently”. Rather than wanting to support the idea of a distinct space of education Karlsohn says, “[b]y elucidating the religious impulses that determined guiding ideas when the modern academic institutions once were established and reinforced we also better comprehend what is at stake in our own day. Moreover, the normative power of these ideas now tends to diminish and orientate us to a lower degree than before.” Interspersed throughout this special issue of PARSE Journal, five of the participating artists to GIBCA 2017 have contributed with a series of interventions. These contributions, which range from textual provocations to visual interpolations, relate to the new projects the artists have developed for the biennial. The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland (Leif Elggren & Carl Michael von Hausswolff) present a visual project on historic figures of monarchy, who in many nations embody the union of church and state. Maddie Leach looks at the phenomenon of Swedish black metal subculture, in particular the story of Jon Nödtveidt, vocalist of the band Dissection, who murdered Josef Ben Meddour in a homophobic hate-crime in Gothenburg in 1997. Francesc Ruiz’s visual project depicts, via the comic-strip medium, the plurality of cosmopolitan street life, including signs of its subcultures, minorities and other modes of living, which he will also install in Gothenburg. Jonas Staal reflects on how capitalism has replaced religion as the dominant form of faith in society through an analysis of the curious mirroring between the construction of each of the world’s tallest buildings and the biggest collapses in the stock exchange. Finally, Måns Wrange and Maria Karlsson contribute an essay which discusses the recent discourse around freedom of expression and censorship, using case studies from contemporary art. We hope that this issue of PARSE Journal provides food for thought regarding the relations between religious histories, their socio-economic and territorial foundations and contemporary visual cultures. We are delighted to be collaborating on this issue with GIBCA 2017 and believe that the biennial provides an important locus for these debates, both within Gothenburg and within its growing international context.

Sealanguage: Field Notes from the Anthropocene1 Simone Kotva

Dr Simone Kotva is a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where she teaches Philosophical Theology. She is currently in the process of completing two books: The Dialectic of Effort: A Study of French Spiritualism and Nature and Style.

Abstract

In the Faroe Islands, long-standing but now rapidly declining practices of tabooing have governed the language of fishermen at sea. Based on fieldwork that combines ethnography with intellectual history, this article explores the continuity of this allegedly superstitious practice within the broad framework of Western secularity. In the 1990s, local practices of naming found expression at a national level with the compilation of the first ornithological handbook written entirely in Faroese. The example of this field guide, in which local names were made to conform to scientific nomenclature, is used to interrogate tensions between orality and literacy. Contrary to the tradition that would oppose folk-taxonomy to classical systematics, it is shown that among field observers both practices of naming are used simultaneously, and, frequently, non-competitively. Through these and other examples it is argued that what is at stake in practices of naming is a habit of paying attention to the environment, premised not on lexical expertise or ideas of knowledge but on a singular hedonism of taking pleasure in the thing named. It is the cultivation of this habit that is proposed as the critical foundation and future purpose of any planetary consciousness.

Skulls of raven and fulmar. Workshop of Jens-Kjeld Jensen, Nolsรณy. All photographs by Simone Kotva.

Sumba, Suðuroy 1 These notes are based on interviews given by four informants in the Faroe Islands, 1–7 February 2017. Informant 1: Poulsen, Aksal. Retired fisherman, Sumba, Suðuroy. Informant 2: Eirika. Retired housewife, Midvágar, Vágar. Informant 3: Mats á Skur. Retired fisherman, Nolsóy. Informant 4: Jensen, Jens-Kjeld. Ornithologist, Nolsóy. To protect the identity of informants 2 and 3, their names have been altered.

It is late afternoon and too warm for February, the breeze hardly tempered by the cold showers of rain that clear away almost as soon as they arrive. Slowly, I make my way up the paved street of Sumba, listening to my guide, Aksal Poulsen, who knows every bird of the region by sight and can imitate their songs and distinctive calls perfectly. As we walk, Aksal pauses occasionally, gesticulating as he speaks: I didn’t own a pair of binoculars until 1967. I just went out, every day, paid attention. Fifteen seconds is enough: just look, and you’ll see something new, something astonishing. That’s what it means to know a bird, to be a good knower of birds. To make observations, to take note, to look—all the time. For as long as one lives. Aksal was born 1945 in Sumba, the southernmost settlement in the Faroese archipelago. Like most Faroese of his generation, Aksal is a fisherman, but illness eventually forced him to leave the sea and take up lighter work on shore. After a spell at the post office in Tórshavn, Aksal retired to his home town where he chose a house with large glass windows overlooking the waterfront. The view allows Aksal to trace the sun as it rises and sets below the North Atlantic, and watch as fulmars descend from basalt cliffs. His life’s work is a magnificent collection of over one hundred stuffed birds. A few years back the town council bought the collection for 300,000 Danish Kroner, and it is now housed in the village museum of Sumba. Later that afternoon Aksal walks me to the museum, to which he has his own key. Unlocking the door, he greets the birds like old friends and tells me the story of how each specimen found its way to his

workshop. The prize of his collection is a vagrant Canadian sandhill crane, a bird that died before Aksal’s brother could nurse it back to health. “Look,” he says, “look at the curve of its neck, see how small the bird is much smaller than an ordinary crane…” Aksal’s expertise has earnt him a nickname in the Faroe Islands: “The Birdman”. Bird collecting became Aksal’s informal profession, but he does not believe a dead bird replaces the living specimen, and he does not kill birds in order to preserve them. The birds in Aksal’s collection are birds that have fallen, dead, from the sky into a neighbour’s back garden; they are birds that flew too far North and perished in the cold; birds shot accidentally by trigger-happy sportsmen. These birds were sent to Aksal, who—with the aid of a taxidermist friend—preserved them in his spare time. “Before one learns how to preserve a bird,” he says, leaning against the glass case behind which the sandhill crane jostles with eider and guillemot, “one must first have observed the bird in life, with one’s own eyes.” This is doubly true in the Faroe Islands, where bird names were only standardised in 1990 with the publication of Søren Sørensen and Dorete Bloch’s Fuglar í Norðhøvum.2 When the Faroese Museum of Natural History commissioned the book, Aksal was asked to act as advisor to the editorial committee, helping them to compile a list of bird names. So together with the fisherman Niels á Botni (with whom Aksal had studied taxidermy) and the ornithologist Christer Alstrøm, Aksal spent three years naming birds in the mid-1980s.

2 Bloch, Dorete and Sørensen, Søren. Fuglar í Norðhøvum. Tórshavn: Føroya Skúlabókagrunnur. 1990. 3 As does the Old Norse fúlmár, literally. “stinking mew”. See Lockwood, W.B. The Faroese Bird Names. Hafniæ: Ejnar Munksgaard. 1961. p. 54. Lockwood, however, is silent on the exact meaning of náti.

I ask how Aksal and his colleagues went about this formidable task. Unhesitatingly, he responds: “We had to be artists.” After a pause, he continues: “We used colours a lot, and behaviour, of course, when we invented new names. And we compared our names to those in other languages.” But the native names, Aksal explains, proved the most difficult. How does one decide which name should become official, which name is the most appropriate? The fulmar, for instance, is known in the Faroe Islands by two names. In the South, where Aksal grew up, the bird is sometimes called náti, which means “foul”, on account of the evil-smelling oil that the fulmar spits at aggressors.3 But in the North, the same bird is more commonly referred to as havhestur, which means “horse of the sea”, perhaps alluding to the way in which the bird heralds a storm. The geographical distinction is not strict, however, and both names are used in the South as well as the North.

The committee had to make a decision, and chose havhestur as the official name of Fulmarus glacialis. “It has nothing to do with horses, of course,” says Aksal, sipping from the cup of coffee his wife has placed in front of him, “It has to do with how one understands the bird.” I wanted to know what made the committee’s understanding of birds different from Aksal’s. “In a handbook,” he explains, “there has to be a single name, because it’s useful. But no name is more appropriate than another. Birds have different names depending on when they are seen, how old they are, where they are found. There is no correct name, only many names.” In his battered Danish edition of Petersen and Montfort’s Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe a careful, spidery script records the work of naming. The entry for each bird is annotated with the corresponding name in Faroese. But most entries have multiple proposals. Fuglar í Norðhøvum sometimes ignores these variations, sometimes indicates them by listing a few of the alternative names after whichever local name had been selected as the official name of the bird. Aksal smiles: “Plenty of my names were disqualified, or demoted to second place.” Overnight these disqualified named became guerrilla words, a lexicon of resistance: We were amateurs, and they had PhDs, but we were the ones with the experience. The one with an eye for birds can tell if there is something different about a particular individual, even if it looks almost identical to the others around it. It might be the way a bird lifts its head more frequently than its companions, the way it thrusts its beak into the ground. The name one gives to a bird should reflect that experience. Many of the names that Aksal recalled during our conversation, such as náti and havhestur, derive from the detailed knowledge of birds preserved in the oral culture of Faroese fishermen. If a raven, to take the most common example, was sighted from the ship’s deck it was considered an omen, and the name of the bird was tabooed. The bird was then referred to not by its proper name, ravnur, but by a new name, such as the onomatopoeic gorpur and krunkur. These invented names eventually became lexicalised, generating the maze of alternative names that created problems for the editorial committee with which Aksal collaborated in the 1980s.

Docks, Tórshavn.

In Faroese the tabooed birds, as Aksal explained to me, were known as feigdarfuglar, meaning birds that were anomalous or “marked”: “birds that were in the wrong place, birds that somehow broke the pattern of things. Like seeing a puffin at Christmas, or finding a storm petrol on deck, or a swallow in doors, or a fulmar chick without its parent…” When I ask if superstition has anything to do with it, Aksal shakes his head, bemused: “It’s not about birds as such, or anything negative—it’s about how they are, what they’re doing. How they fly.” To Aksal, bird taboos record a practical wisdom, a way of knowing birds. A name such as náti is the result of observation, capturing some characteristic of the bird, whether it is a foul smell, a call, or a resemblance to other animals. But, as Aksal explained to me, the knowledge conveyed by word taboos is not strictly utilitarian: “Of course we needed to know about the birds to survive, but to recognise a bird as feigdar, and give it a new name—that was, different, that was pleasure.”

Tabooing and the invention of new names expresses what made a fisherman’s hard life at sea worth living. Aksal’s eyes light up as I ask him about the feigdarfuglar encountered when working on trawlers in Norway, Iceland, Greenland and Canada: “Whenever there was a snow storm, hundreds of eider ducks would crash into the boat and land, stunned, on deck, and we would have to barrel them out, throw them back into the water.” Aksal stands, throwing his arms up as if releasing a bird into the air: “ And during the migration season we would be visited by thousands upon thousands of arctic redpoll, who would come to try and drink the water that gathered on deck. They were that thirsty! But of course the salt water made them sick, so we always put out buckets of fresh water—and fed them bread. Thousands of redpoll!” Steering into a flock of arctic redpoll was a strange, beautiful experience, which Aksal and his colleagues interpreted as a feigdar, an omen, and when an anomaly like this occurred, the fishermen would invent a new name that described something about the special appearance of an otherwise unremarkable bird that its ordinary name did not. For this reason, Aksal sees no contradiction between the ordinary name of a bird and the names a bird receives when it is tabooed. In the same way, Aksal sees no contradiction between the single, scientific name of the fulmar in a handbook such as Fuglar í Norðhøvum and the many names found in oral culture: “They say the same things, but in different ways,” he reflects, lips twitching into a half-smile, “and they are all needed for different situations. Scientific names are incredibly useful when one is talking to ornithologists from other countries!” During our conversation, while walking along the cliffs of Sumba and, later, as we sat poring over bird books in Aksal’s living room, I learnt that part of the reason Aksal finds the practice of naming more interesting than the names themselves is that he acquired his first knowledge of birds informally, without the aid of a field guide. Sumba has no library, and when Aksal was a boy the only bird book available in Faroese was Mikkjal á Ryggi’s Fuglabókin (1951), which was also used as a reading primer in the village school. Fuglabókin introduces each bird with a naive watercolour and a short prose account of the bird’s habits and characteristics. This was enough to give Aksal a basic knowledge of taxonomy, the rest he had to figure out for himself:

“Mikkjal’s pictures were terrible! No, if I wanted to learn anything I would have to go out, climb the cliffs, notice things,” he recalls, “then I would return home and write down what I had seen in a little pocket book.” Along with his first pair of binoculars, Aksal did not acquire his first field guide until he was already well into his twenties. “I learnt a lot from books,” he says, “but in a sense I already knew it, or I was learning to look in a different way, looking for different details.” As I leave, Aksal walks me to the bus stop, so that he can show me his two geese and four rams, wintering in an enclosure across the road from his house. Aksal smacks his lips at the geese, who cackle in return. “I don’t need to keep them anymore, of course, because eggs and meat are so inexpensive,” he says, “but I still do, because it would be dull not to. Imagine the hills without geese, without sheep!”

Miðvágur, Vágar I had come to the Faroe Islands to discover what remained of the word taboos of the Faroese fishermen. Aksal had proved to me that the practice had not died out completely, but Aksal was an ideal informant, having spent much of his adult life preserving not only birds, but knowledge of their local names. Would I find similar memories among those who had not worked at sea, in particular, among the women of Aksal’s generation? And would they interpret the names as Aksal had done, appreciating them as a form of knowledge unfounded in superstition? In the village of Miðvágur on Vágar, en route from the airport, I met Eirika and her niece. Like Aksal, Eirika was born in the 1940s, and when I asked her about the bird taboos she smiles and nods, remembering that her husband, who worked as a chef on a Danish cruiser, used to refer frequently to these special names. “I know very well what you mean,” she says, “because we have a proverb in Faroese: ‘stones break before the tongue of man’ [Steinur brestur fyri manna tungur].” The rules surrounding gannets are a good example of the efficacy of words in the Faroe Islands. To the West of Vágar lies Mykines, the only place in the Faroe Islands where gannets breed in the summer season. “On Mykines,” Eirika recalls, “one has to say ‘The Gannet is

4 Gaard, Guðrun. Tilblivelsen af en skriftlig færøsk litteratur. Tórshavn: MA Dissertation. 1991.

good’. If one speaks ill of the Gannet, it will keep away from the island, and then the islanders will starve.” A similar custom was observed in Hvalba (Suðuroy). One winter when the villagers were starving, a whale beached and gave itself to them. A sacrifice. Because they could eat the whale, the villagers survived. After that they always said “the whale is good”, and so the whale would come, each year, only to that village. But one year they saw it from afar and someone said, “I think it’s a tree”. And the whale never returned. The niece eyes her aunt sceptically and leans over to me, says, “That was in the old days, you know. In the old days they believed, they believed anything.” But Eirika disagrees. Like Aksal, she does not think that taboos were used because people held superstitious beliefs. “It’s a story, of course, but it says something about what they knew, and they knew so many things in those days.” Eirika’s greatest regret is that she did not record her mother, because her mother knew more stories like the one Eirika shared with me. In Eirika’s neat, white kitchen overlooking the bay of Vágar, I learn what it is about a taboo that makes it worth remembering. “It’s something to do with knowing how to look, how to look with… respect? Love?” Eirika hesitates, searching for the right word. “That whale in the story,” she says, finally, “it’s not that a wrong word would send the whale away, it’s about looking at the whale in the wrong way. Not recognising it for what it is, thinking it’s a tree, not looking closely enough.” As I prepare to leave her flat, Eirika embraces me, repeats her regrets: “I wish I could remember what my mother knew, but one doesn’t think about these things, anymore.”

Nolsóy Things have changed, I learnt, because Faroese culture has changed: from being, until very recently, a predominantly oral culture, it is now a literary culture.4 On Nolsóy, a small island twenty minutes by ferry from Tórshavn, I met Mats á Skur, a retired fishermen who can still remember the last time the government tried to stop Faroese being taught in schools. The Faroe Islands have been

Rubbish dump, Nolsรณy.

5 The Ballad of the Birds is preserved in the Corpus Carminum as Fugla kvæði II. In Bloch, J. and Grundtvig, Sv. (eds.). Føroya kvæði: Corpus Carminum Færoensium. Vol. 6. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. 1972. pp. 282–293. Nólsoyar-Páll sang or dictated the ballad to his brother, Jacob Nolsøe, who was secretary for the Commercial Monopoly. On the kvæðir and Faroese oral culture, see Jones, W. Glyn. “Ballads, Songs and Snatches: The Eighteenth Century in the Faroe Islands”. In Marianne Alenius et al. (eds.). Digternes paryk: studier i 1700-tallet. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum. 1997. pp. 87–10; and Malansdóttir, Malan. “From Oral Poetry to Rap in the Faroes”. In Lanngård and Kristen Thisted (eds.). From Oral Tradition to Rap: Literatures of the Polar North. Nuuk: Atuagkat. 2011. pp. 39–62. Like the kvæði, the táttur uses a simple ABCB rhyming scheme with a verse refrain, but unlike the ballad, which is anonymously composed and which borrows its themes, typically, from folklore or the Bible, the táttur is set in a local environment and its author is usually known. 6 The best study of Faroese fishing culture is still Williamson, Kenneth. The Atlantic Islands: A Study of the Faroese Life and Scene. London: Collins. 1948.

self-governing since 1948, but remain part of the Kingdom of Denmark, and Danish is the lingua franca, though the younger generation will often prefer to use English when conversing with visitors from other Scandinavian nations, like myself. Until the early twentieth century, when standardised Faroese was introduced into the national curriculum, the main source of Faroese literary culture was the ballad or kvæði, performed as part of the Faroese chain dance. When I ask Mats how he learnt about birds he recites a few lines from Nólsoyar-Páll’s Fugla kvæði yngra, or Ballad of the Birds (called yngra to distinguish this nineteenth-century song from the medieval ballad of the same name). “But you’d have to get me drunk to see me dance!” he laughs. The Fugla kvæði yngra is a political satire or tattur, and was the first text in Faroese to be distributed and sold in printed form. The ballad contains many names that derive from word taboos, and many jokes about feigdarfuglar. “Yes, that’s where I learnt most of the names,” says Mats. He also explains that the younger generation of fishermen no longer learn them, or not exactly. “Oh yes, they study the kvæðir at school,” he admits, “but they don’t know them, don’t use them.”5 Mats learnt the Fugla kvæði yngra by picking it up from informal gatherings and impromptu performances in a ship’s cabin or in someone’s kitchen. But ballads are no longer part of a fisherman’s informal tuiton. Although the Faroe Islands, like Iceland, remain a traditional fishing economy, fishing itself has changed dramatically since Mats was a young man.6 Mats suspects that fish-farming has had something to do with it. “Who would want to work there?”, he asks me, waving at the floating pens that dot the bay of Tórshavn just visible beyond the grey mist outside the window. “They all leave. My children live in Norway and Denmark. They’re right to leave. But what about the future?” To Mats, the change from oral to literary culture is inseparable from the disfigurement to the environment caused by aquaculture exacerbated by consumerism: “When we were out at sea we didn’t earn much but we were happy. At home we kept our own sheep and didn’t need to buy anything.” In Nólsoyar-Páll’s Fugla kvæði yngra Danish falcons buy and sell goods with other nations while prosecuting the small birds, the Faroese, for attempting to scrape a living through trade. “We were the plucky oystercatchers, and we still are!” says Mats, “but the young

people nowadays, they don’t see it that way. They stare at computers. When I look into their eyes, there is nothing there. Emptiness.” He blinks at me: “So I say, thank God I am old. Soon it will all be over.” I met Mats in the kitchen of Jens-Kjeld Jensen, an ornithologist who, like Aksal Poulsen, studied taxidermy with Niels á Botni in the 1970s. Jens-Kjeld moved to Nolsóy from Denmark, and remembers a time when the men would gather every day on the bench beside the bone architrave at the entrance to the village and talk fowl, fish, whales. Today that bench is empty. Jens-Kjeld muses: “You were born too late,” he says. “Maybe if you had come here as a little lassie”—he indicates my imagined height with the flat of his hand—“maybe when you were five years old, then you could have seen it too.”

7 Lockwood, W. B. “Word Taboo in the Language of the Faroese Fishermen”. Transactions of the Philological Society. Vol. 54. No. 1. 1955. pp. 1–24 (p.1). 8 Ibid., p. 24.

Jens-Kjeld has written a book on the fowling practices of Nolsóy, documenting the different spots on the island where puffins were traditionally caught with the net and pole. Like Mats, he is not optimistic about the future, but his concerns are for the birds, rather than the fishermen. “I predict,” he says, cutting himself a slice of lemon cake, “that the puffins will all be gone in twenty years. And the gannets and guillemots too.” Though he supports the hunting prohibitions put in place for their protection, he thinks that pollution has had a greater impact than traditional hunting on the rapidly declining number of sea birds. “The sea is dead,” he says, simply, “we have killed it.” He points at a photograph featuring a wet, technicoloured tangle of debris: “This is what they found in the gizzard of one fulmar—one! And Faroe has the cleanest waters in the world! Imagine what it’s like in other parts!”

Sealanguage In the 1950s William Burley Lockwood, a linguist and ornithologist, described the word taboos of the Faroese fishermen as a “sealanguage” (sjómál).7 Sealanguage, argued Lockwood, “vividly recalls ancient belief in the magic power of human speech.”8 Lockwood’s source for this interpretation was James Fazer’s The Golden Bough. Frazer had suggested that, “unable to discriminate clearly between words

9 Frazer, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Abridged Edition. New York, NY: Macmillan. 1922. p. 244. 10 Lockwood, “Word Taboo”, p. 2. 11 Svabo, J. C. Inberetning frae en Rejse í Færøe 1781 og 82. Quoted in Lockwood, Ibid.

and things, the savage commonly fancies that the link between a name and the person or thing denominated by it is not a mere arbitrary and ideal association, but a real and substantial bond which unites the two in such a way that magic may be wrought on a man just as easily through his name as through his hair, his nails, or any other material part of his person.”9 Lockwood concluded that a similar principle was at work behind sealanguage: “the use of secret words […] would help to confuse unfriendly spirits intent on ruining the fishermen’s chances.”10 Lockwood, like Frazer, believed that the hypothesis of superstition would help to explain not only the appeal of word taboos but also their eventual demise: if the mystique of word taboos required certain beliefs in the magical power of names, then the disappearance of these beliefs would coincide with the disappearance of tabooing itself. But my conversations with Eirika, Mats and Aksal had shown me a different story. On the Faroe Islands I found many who still remembered and spoke sealanguage, but among these none who believed the practice was a form of superstition; the only person who did suggest such an interpretation (Eirika’s niece) was also the only one to possess no first-hand knowledge of these names. Eirika had dismissed the hypothesis that taboos were originally superstitious, preferring to describe them as way of paying attention to the flora and fauna of the Islands. Aksal had even argued that word taboos were a form of knowledge, an opinion confirmed by Mats, for whom word taboos were part of an oral expertise, which, though inessential to survival, was essential to making survival enjoyable. This suggested that sealanguage, whatever its origins, was appreciated and practised less as a relic of a savage ontology and more for the mental dexterity required to understand, and invent, names, such as náti and havhestur. Hence the popularity of word taboos in drinking games, as recorded by Jens Christian Svabo in the 1780s (drink up if your tongue slips! meanwhile the wise stay sober inventing new rules).11 Sealanguage, then, did not decline—as Lockwood supposed—because the beliefs that it presupposed had begun to erode. Sealanguage began to decline because the practices from which it is inseparable had begun to vanish. That the key to magical practices such as word taboos might lie in their use rather than, as Lockwood argued, in their origins was an early criticism raised against the Frazerian method by Ludwig

Wittgenstein. “What we have [in the case of magic] is not an error”, writes Wittgenstein, since no hypothesis of development succeeds in making a magical practice “less impressive”.12 As a practice, magic describes “the environment of a way of acting”; it becomes superstition only when mistaken for science. Thus, what one can conclude about a magical practice is not its reasons but its efficacy, the fact that it “aims at some satisfaction and it achieves it”.13 In the case of sealanguage, satisfaction is achieved when a familiar bird, such as the fulmar or the raven, is made strange by the gift of a new name. One famous example, recorded by Lockwood and still remembered in the Islands, was the incident of a vagrant female black-browed albatross known as the “gannet king” or súlukongur. This bird was seen flying with the gannets of Mykineshólmur every summer from 1860 until shot by a vandal in 1864; during this time it was known as the “gannet king”.14 Lockwood was of the opinion that tabooing emerged from a superstitious belief in the direct link between a name and the thing denominated, but súlukongur—being the name not of a bird but of a bird in a configuration of other birds—is a good example of what in classical semiotics is known as indirect or ordinary signification. 15 In semiotic terms, what makes the name súlukongur similar to the female black-browed albatross is not a bird-shaped thought in the head of the viewer, but an experience (or “affection”, to use the classical term) that coincides with the sighting of the bird. The significance of this gloss becomes evident in practical terms when we consider that súlukongur could not signify the albatross directly, because the name would not be generally applicable to all albatrosses. Nor does the name signify directly the particular female albatross that accompanied the gannets between 1860-1864, since in order to earn its name this bird depended on a context of gannets and would not have been called súlukongur if sighted when flying solo. This is because súlukongur is not a proper name, but, like many words in sealanguage, a euphemism or “kenning”, and doubles as a riddle, the full form of which would be: who is the king of the gannets? Like many riddles in Old Norse and Old English súlukongur is constructed around a known answer.16 In the case of the súlukongur it would be impossible to solve the riddle without knowing beforehand about the event in question.17 This situation to which the name refers is what enables it signify indirectly, rather than directly, to the bird.

12 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. ed. Rush Rhees. trans. A.C. Miles and Rush Rhees. Bishopstone: Brynmill. 1979. p. 2e, p. 6e. Emphasis in the original. 13 Ibid., p. 4e. 14 Lockwood, Faroese Bird Names, p. 20. 15 Manetti, Giovanni. Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity. trans. Christine Richardson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1993. pp. 14–35, p. 72. On the classical formulation of Aristotelian semiotics, see for instance Aquinas: “words are signs for thoughts and thoughts are likenesses of things, so words refer to things indirectly through thoughts.” Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. 1a. 13. i. [Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Vol. 3 (Ia. 12–13): Knowing and Naming God. trans. Herbert McCabe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1964. 16 Tigges, Wim. “Signs and Solutions: A Semiotic Approach to the Exeter Book Riddles”. In Erik Kooper (ed.). This Noble Craft: Proceedings of the Xth Research Symposium of the Dutch and Belgian University of Teachers of Old and Middle English and Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 1989. pp. 59–82.

17 Just as the Philistines discovered when Samson gave them an impossible riddle: “If ye had not ploughed with my heifer, ye had not found out my riddle.” (Judges 14:18). 18 This is quite different from a belief in the occult causality proposed by Frazer and much closer to the ordinary causality of names for which Socrates argues in the Cratylus: “a name is a tool for giving instruction, that is to say, for dividing being.” See Plato, Cratylus 388c [Plato: Complete Works. ed. John Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett. 1997]. 19 Berlin, Brent. Ethnobiological Categorisation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1992. pp. 3-51. 20 Aristotle. The Parts of Animals 643b20-30 [Aristotle: The Complete Works. 2 vols. ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Bollingen. 1984]: “It is impossible that a single differentia, either by itself or in combination shall express the whole of a species.” 21 Slaughter, M. M. Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomies in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1982. pp. 15–84. 22 Bloch and Sørensen, pp. 66–67.

To the speaker of sealanguage súlukongur would have derived its magical efficacy indirectly from the situation in which the bird appeared, rather than from its connection to the bird itself, since what súlukongur signifies is the way in which a female black-browed albatross was experienced and interpreted by the islanders at a particular time and place. While this does not, of course, rule out a belief in the magical power of words, it does narrow the sense in which this “magic” operates. If names reveal the nature of what they name it is not through an occult causality but because they are “natural” tools for thinking about how we know the thing named—and it is the latter analysis, rather than the memory of a superstitious belief, which the practice of sealanguage records.18

Styles of Naming The misrepresentation of sealanguage as superstition, which we find in Lockwood’s study of Faroese oral culture, is similar to the regular misrepresentation of folk taxonomy as primitive science, which we find in modern zoology.19 In his works on natural history Aristotle had asked: what is the logos, the account, of an animal? And he had concluded that there was no definitive name, no single definition.20 But in classical systematics, which established the style of nomenclature used by ornithologists today, a bird receives only one taxonomic label (binomial or trinomial) as its proper signification.21 This was the style adopted by the editorial committee of Fuglar í Norðhøvum, a style which, as I learnt from Aksal, would often result in unsatisfactory compromises when it clashed with sealanguage, which favoured many names for the same bird. Thus, when composing the entry for Fulmarus glacialis the editors chose to list náti after havhestur as a secondary name of the fulmar.22 Although this preserves náti as an alternative name of the fulmar, it also gives the misleading impression that náti and havhestur are synonyms used interchangeably. But although both names may refer to a fulmar, they do so in different situations: when sighted at sea and heralding a storm it is appropriate to call the fulmar havhestur, but when the bird is within spitting range it is more appropriate to call it náti. As Aristotle knew, knowledge is pleonastic, intimate knowledge in-

finitely so; by listing the two names havhestur and náti as synonyms, the handbook mistook pleonasm for inconsequence and therefore misrepresented the logic of the alternative taxonomy it sought to commemorate. Similarly, the once ubiquitous puffin is known by the handbook as lundi, the closest to a general name for the adult bird. Historically, however, lundi refers primarily to the bird when cooked and stuffed with cake batter. A migratory puffin, by contrast, was called klædseksdrongur, or “luggage boy” (because it announced the arrival of the larger arctic skua) and a puffin in winter plumage was a høganevið, while a young bird was a vangagrái and a young bird “fallen on the field or into a river” was an áarpisa—finally, an old non-breeding puffin was known as karkarakkur, on account of its long, curved outside claws, a danger to fowlers.23 Thus, what to the classical systematics of the handbook looks like a division of one species into many kinds of bird, is to the fowler or fisherman a useful tool for distinguishing between different situations in which the bird, as sign, may be implicated. Historically, amateur field observers—such as Aksal—were the most vocal opponents to the taxonomical style of naming adopted by handbooks, perhaps because, unlike other branches of zoology, ornithology always enjoyed a strong amateur following.24 In 1858 the Swedish ornithologist Sven Nilsson expressed the dissatisfaction which many students of birds found with classical systematics when he complained that taxonomy “is only the means, not the ends, of […] science.” Just as it would be unreasonable to claim that only the person able to use a dictionary could appreciate the beauty of poetry, so too, Nilsson argues, “it would be even more unreasonable to believe that only the person who knew the names, from cedar tree to fungus, could for this reason grasp and understand nature or intuit its essence.”25 Aksal would no doubt have agreed with this critique of taxonomania, but would perhaps have added that even folk names are not exempt from classification once they become—as they were for Lockwood—the object of study. Thus, while I had not discovered in the Faroe Islands a dead sealanguage, neither had I found a living one: what I found in the Faroe Islands were people who knew sealanguage, but none who still used it, that is, none who still invented new names with which to enjoy and experience the fauna of the archipelago. Like the creatures it named, and the practices which made the names possible, sealanguage was indeed disappearing.

23 See Ryggi, Mikkjal á. “List of Faroese Animal Names”. In S. Jensen, W. Lundbeck, Th. Mortensen and R. Spaerck (eds.).The Zoology of the Faroe Islands. Vol. III, Part II: Aves, Mammalia, Faroese Animal Names. Copenhagen: 1935–1942. p. 5 (separate pagination); and Lockwood, Faroese Bird Names, p. 18. 24 Streseman, Erwin. Ornithology: From Aristotle to the Present. trans. Cathleen and Hans Epstein. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1975. On the divergence between the eye of the amateur and the eye of the professional, and its significance for the development of modern ornithology, see the invaluable essays collected in Ibis. Vol. 101. 1959. 25 Nilsson, Sven. Skandinavisk Fauna, Foglarna. 3rd edition. Lund: Gleerups, 1858. p. xxv. My translation.

Rubbish dump, Nolsรณy.

Orality

In the Faroe Islands, sealanguage was a way of taking pleasure in and thus developing an attention to the archipelago that was inseparable from an ethics of caring for its environment. Consequently, many of the speakers I met connected the neglect of sealanguage by the younger generation to the latter’s neglect of the environment. In recent years Robert Macfarlane has documented oral cultures of naming in the outer Hebrides similar to those I found in the Faroe Islands, and has drawn similar conclusions to those I have suggested regarding the disorientation towards place caused by loss of names for local flora and fauna.26 Because the care with which these names were given seems to correlate with the care given to the environment that the names describe, oral cultures of naming are seen as a resource not only for scholars, but also for those seeking ethical practices that might be used to resist the worst effects of the consumerist revolution. Thus, since the 1990s—and particularly since the Anthropocene was accepted as the name for our current geological epoch27—writers concerned for the future of the planet have begun to recognise in oral cultures an alternative to Western paradigms of being human.28 Yet, as the anthropologist Philippe Descola remarks, in the question of seeking a way out of the present crisis “no ontology is better or more true in itself than another”.29 Although there is a distinction between sealanguage’s naming according to situation and scientific naming according to prototype, there is no strict division between the two. On the contrary, my conversation with Aksal suggested that sealanguage and ordinary naming are not competing accounts of knowledge, but non-competitive modes of knowing, both equally important in order to communicate, know and care for birds. Descola agrees: “rather than regard those two cognitive mechanisms as mutually exclusive, it is more reasonable to suppose that we use them alternately, depending on the object to be classified and along with other classificatory schemas such as spatial contiguity, origins, and spheres of activity.”30

26 Macfarlane, Robert. “A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook”. In Gareth Evans Gareth and Di Robson (eds.). Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and Its Meanings.. London: Artevents. 2010. pp. 107130. See also Macfarlane, Sven. Landmarks. London: Penguin. 2016. 27 Crutzen, Paul J., McNeil, John R. and Steffen, Will. ”The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio. Vol. 36. 2007. pp. 614–621. 28 Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Langauge in a More-Than-Human World. London: Vintage. 1997. pp. 131–193. 29 Descola, Philippe. The Ecology of Others. trans. Genevieve Godbout and Benjamin P. Luley. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. 2013. p. 66. In this passage Descola is responding to the work of Tim Ingold. 30 Descola, Philippe. Beyond Nature and Culture. trans. Janet Lloyd and Marshall Sahlins. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2013. p. 240. 31 Ibid., pp. 66–67.

What is at stake, then, when we as writers of the environment are attracted to oral cultures is not—or at least ought not to be—the attempt to find in their lexicon the most environmentally friendly world-view with which to replace a failed Western ontology, but

32 Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, p. 305. 33 Aquinas, Summa, Ia. 12. 1. co. 34 Latour, Bruno. The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2004.

the task of resisting the spell of world-views as such.31 This does not mean that the attempt to emulate oral cultures of naming is misguided romance. It simply means that what one emulates in oral culture is not material or visible, but formal or invisible: not the names themselves, but the way of naming which enables the names to be invented and come into use. Although sealanguage is a fascinating case and in itself a kind of poetry, it is the style of this language, rather than its particular phonemic structure, which is significant and points to a possible shared ethic of being human: sealanguage is a list of names, but it is also a habit, a way of naming. Descola terms such a shared experience the “relative universal”: universal because determined by the organism, relative because, although always mediated by context, that universal is indifferent to socius.32 To Descola the relative universal is a pre-reflexive experience of exteriority and interiority, of being embodied or alive. Aksal offered me a less abstract definition of this universal when he explained to me that the purpose of sealanguage was not survival, but enjoyment or pleasure. If the Anthropocene is predicated on the consumerist revolution, we might be surprised to learn that I am suggesting hedonism as a way of responding to the world it describes. But unless there is delight in the thing known, there can be no knowledge of it, which is why the ancients would often repeat that reason is pleasurable and the highest happiness.33 And, if there is no knowledge, there is also no politics, or rather, there is politics that will recognise nature in name only—as Nature—but not nature in practice, as the pleasurable naming of so many birds, so many sightings, appearances, arrivals and departures.34 The point is epistemological, but epistemology, as we saw earlier, is never divided from practice. While birds do not exist to be known by humans, when unknown by humans the task of caring for them (which only humans can perform) becomes very difficult, if not impossible. Learning from oral culture, then, is less a question of listing its words in place of our own, and more the hard task of reorienting our words and speech attentively by learning to speak every language as sealanguage: as the form of naming without the formalism of names, as enjoyment without division from knowledge. Today, when names are quickly becoming relics of what they once signified, contributing to this work can be the only standard and reward of speech.

On Secularity: Discussing the Gรถteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2017 Andrea Phillips, Nav Haq and Ola Sigurdson

Abstract

In this interview between Professor Ola Sigurdson, Nav Haq and Professor Andrea Phillips, Haq discusses his reasoning for choosing â&#x20AC;&#x153;secularityâ&#x20AC;? as the theme for the biennial while Sigurdson expands on the history and politics of the term. The interview situates secularity within an artistic, curatorial and contemporary context, taking into account the biennial's location in Gothenburg.

Andrea Phillips: Ola could you define secularity in a contemporary context?

Ola Sigurdson: I think, for me the most productive definition of secularity would be a space for negotiation between different modes of life, but that is not a self-evident definition of secularity. To begin with, I think we need to distinguish between secularism and secularity. Secularism is a view of life, which means that society or the state should not contain religion. Secularity is a condition of society. To speak of secularity is not necessarily something normative. What the secular is has of course changed through history. To begin with, in pre-modern or early modern Christian society, the secular wasn’t opposed to religion at all. It was just a legitimate dimension of society as it was conceived. The distinction was between the secular, which meant the worldly, and the religious, which was the space of the church or religious institution.

AP: Are you talking within a European context? OS: Absolutely, yes. You only find the concept of the secular within a Latinised Christian history. It’s not necessarily a term you would find used elsewhere—even in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, for instance. The term comes from the Latin saeculum, which means “age”. In Swedish, “century” is sekel, which is roughly the same. The pre- and early modern idea of the secular was that if the church owned something and sold it to someone, say, a worldly prince, then that thing became secularised. Something changed from one status to another. It did not have an irreligious meaning. In the Catholic church you have secular priests, who are not priests who don’t believe in God, it’s just that they are working in the secular

1 See, for instance: Eisenstadt, Shmuel. “Multiple Modernities”. Daedalus. Vol. 129. No. 1. 2000. pp. 1–29. 2 See Arendt, Hannah. Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlaß. Second edition. Munich/Zurich: Piper. 2005. p. 9: “Politik ‘handelt von den Zusammenund Miteinander-Sein der Verschiedenen’.”

world and not in holy orders. They don’t belong to a particular monastery, for instance. As European culture developed into modernity and high modernity, the value of the word changed, so that the secular came to be more and more opposed to the religious: if you were a secular person it meant that you were a non-religious person. Now, the way the word is used in the media is usually in opposition to religion. In some Enlightenment versions of the story of modernisation, there is a presumed correlation between modernisation and the disappearance of religion: the more “modern” a country becomes, the less religious it will become. Today the story would go more like this; the more “modern” a country becomes the more pluralistic it becomes. The Israeli sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt speaks of multiple modernities.1 So there are many ways of being modern, some encompassing different kinds of religion and some not religious. In a country like Sweden, which is increasingly plural, it is hard to uphold the idea that there is only one religious option today. The religious market, so to speak, has been deregulated, since there is no longer a state church. The many religious options on the market have meant that the demand for religion is actually increasing and diversifying. This means that secularity has now taken on a different meaning, and this is where we come to my own definition: that secularity is a space for negotiation between different modes of life, some of which are religious, some not religious and some in-between. Secularity is not an anti-religious concept in this way, whereas secularism is. Rather it produces questions about how we should live together if we are so different. Hannah Arendt’s definition of politics is how those who are different could live together in a community.2 Secularity is about the problem in this definition.

AP: This is actually very contentious within and at the borders of contemporary Europe, is it not? This utopian conceptualisation of secularity and politics?

OS: Right. On the one hand, this process of secularisation means the fall of any traditional state-church regulated religion. On the other, it means the increase in some countries of state religion, which for the most part goes against plurality. Hungary comes to mind. Turkey comes to mind. Other countries too. This idea of secularity is definitively contested. In Sweden it is not contested as such, but I see a

problem in the development of a secularistic hegemony, which tries to avoid religion as much as possible and drive it out of the public sphere. This is also a threat to the idea of secularity as a space of negotiation. It looks different in the Northern part of Europe compared to the Southern part of Europe, obviously, but also different in the West and the East. So secularity is something very specific to a particular context. France, for instance, looks very different than the UK, and some parts of the UK look different than other parts of the UK, and so on. So this problem is very localised.

AP: This reminds me of the ban on the burqa and other forms of head covering in France as a state rendition of the secularisation that you’re describing. In the UK, if the UK Independence Party had gained seats in the June 2017 election, they would also have banned the head scarf in public. In France we also witnessed the “burkini” crisis and ensuing disturbing enforcement of headscarf removal on women on French beaches in the summer of 2016. Nav, I know that these violent cultural moments, where the secularisation of European cultures brought about through historical patterns of migration are brought into question, are very much the context of your development of the 2017 biennial.

Nav Haq: Yes, this is absolutely part of the backdrop. I have definitely been focused on the European situation, which is also partly to avoid this bad habit that biennials have developed of attempting to speak to and for a global audience. My experiences are primarily of living in Europe, where this question of secularity somehow seems to have become even more topical in the two years since I was invited to be guest curator of the biennial on the basis of the proposal I made on this subject. It was only since I started working on the biennial that I learnt about the Lars Vilks story.3 It made me realise that there are things that the world knows about, but there are also more localised events that create a certain climate around ideals of secularity. The burkini fiasco/regulation is one manifestation of that, where secularity itself is used as a form of violence. What is really strange is that a scenario developed in which both sides of the argument are using the exactly same argument: that a burkini ban and the freedom to wear the burkini on a beach are both about the liberation of women. It demonstrates that there is no consensus around what freedom is. This is most palpable in the USA, where for many people freedom might mean having a gun.

3 The Lars Vilks Muhammad drawings controversy began in July 2007 with a series of drawings by Swedish artist Lars Vilks that depicted the Islamic prophet Muhammad as a “roundabout dog” (a form of street installation in Sweden). Several art galleries in Sweden declined to show the drawings, citing security concerns and fear of violence. The controversy gained international attention after the Örebro-based regional newspaper Nerikes Allehanda published one of the drawings on 18 August as part of an editorial on self-censorship and freedom of religion. While several other leading Swedish newspapers had published the drawings already, this particular publication led to protests from Muslims in Sweden as well as official condemnations from several foreign governments including Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Jordan, as well as by the inter-governmental Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The controversy occurred about a year and a half after the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in Denmark in early 2006. See Wikipedia (Accessed 16-06-2017.)

4 Mahmood, Saba. “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?” In Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood. Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA/London: University of California Press. 2009. pp. 64–92.

In the ever-present “state of emergency” in many nations, there is the suspension of the laws of what secularity is at a local level. Without wanting to dwell on doom and gloom, I wanted to know what happens exactly to secularity in these crisis moments. When I started working on this project, I read a text by Ola in which he suggests that Europe is in a certain sense a religious periphery compared with the rest of the world, but in which he also unpacks the idea that belief in religion is in decline, revealing it in fact to be a myth in a global context. What has actually been happening is a pluralisation, not just in belief but also in non-belief, in different forms of how you might understand yourself as a non-believer.

AP: In the Swedish Lars Vilks scenario—as well as in the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris in 2015—the concept of blasphemy was strongly invoked. Blasphemy sounds very alien to the European context of pluralistic belief patterns that you suggest. And yet, the notion of blasphemy is part of legal frameworks, as far as I understand it. Is this right?

OS: Yes, in some countries. I am not an expert on blasphemy, but I think what is put in the spotlight is a particular way of understanding images that has been taken for granted in Europe. This is something that Saba Mahmood has pointed out; images don’t mean the same thing to all people.4 I am sure you are aware of this in the art world, but this is coming from somewhere else. So definitely, there’s been talk about blasphemy, which sounds alien, as you say, although it has been part of the European history. In such situations of accusations and counter-accusations, plurality suddenly erupts. There is a negotiation of power, images, gender, freedom, etc. AP: In many European states, there are legal frameworks around racial discrimination. You can use the juridical system to punish someone who has been racist, for instance, or has demonstrated racist ideology within an institution, a school, for example. This is a contemporary form of opposing blasphemy. But, from what you say, we must also understand this as blasphemic production within a pluriversal perspective.

OS: There was a debate when Salman Rushdie released his book The Satanic Verses as to whether it was a case of double standards, in that his satire of Islam was praised in the press, whereas a satire on Juda-

ism was more controversial. There is a certain given understanding in the contemporary European consciousness, whatever that is, that religion should be something private and individual. This can no longer be taken for granted. Since 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia agreement—organised to put an end to the so-called European wars of religion and the ability of one state to interfere with the beliefs of another—we in Europe have had the idea of religious homogeneity and the rights of private belief. But today, no belief, whatever it concerns and wherever it comes from, is taken for granted in the same way it was maybe 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 300 years ago.

AP: You referred to Saba Mahmood’s writing on the image. Nav, you and I know that there is a long history of Anglo-European artists making provocative, blasphemous images within contemporary art. Whether it be Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) or Christoph Buchel’s 2015 Iceland Pavilion at the Venice Pavilion in which the artist converted a Catholic church into a mosque (The Mosque: The First Mosque in the Historic City of Venice), image-blasphemy can be understood in a broad sense. My impression is that your approach to the biennial is not necessarily through those kinds of images, but you’re trying to work in a slightly different way.

NH: Primarily yes. But I think it’s definitely been interesting for me to see what the parameters are and I am definitely coming across these in different ways. There will be a work we most probably won’t show because of fear from some of what response it might get.

AP: So just to be clear, it’s a work that you were going to show but you’ve decided not to show.

NH: I haven’t made that decision. I have concluded that I can’t be the person to decide not to show something, because then that becomes censorship. Unless it is for whatever practical reasons, if something is not shown it is because someone else has made that decision, and I think it’s important to discuss why that decision might have been made. I’d been really interested to exhibit a work by John Latham from the series he made called God is Great (1990 onwards) which, like a lot of his work, incorporate books. In this instance those books are religious; the Quran, the Torah and the Bible (the books are embedded in a shard

5 See Smith, David. “Artist hit at Tate ‘cowards’ over band”. The Guardian, 25 September, 2005, available online at https:// www.theguardian.com/ uk/2005/sep/25/arts.religion (Accessed 2017-06-16.) 6 See Andersson, Lars M. En jude är en jude är en jude … Representationer av ”juden” i svensk skämtpress omkring 1900–1930. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. 2000.

of glass, and the glass cuts through the books). While the work has been shown regularly over the past few years in various international contexts, how people receive the work seems to have changed. The Tate in London, for example, has a work from the series and following bombings on transport in London in 2005 they took it off display without any particular known threats, as far as I am aware.

AP: The books could be understood to be détourned (to use a modernist description) or otherwise destroyed, rendered illegible, etc.

NH: Yes, but for Latham it’s really a work about energy, as well as the connections between religions. These books are containers of energy, energy of the universe, and these are prominent themes in his work. Latham belonged to a certain generation of artists who were somehow very anti-modern and looked to forms of mysticism. When the Tate took the work off display, the Muslim Council of Great Britain was very critical about the assumptions the institution was making about how religious people might respond. Latham himself called the move ‘cowardice’.5 But then there have been one or two other things that have happened in other places that have only just come to light to me. So it seems that these works might never be shown again, for these reasons. This situation, I think, wouldn’t have been like that, certainly when the work was made, in the 1990s. This period of the 1990s is somehow coming up again and again in the biennial in curious ways. It seems important to reflect on the change that has happened since then. I also aim to exhibit some examples of anti-Semitic drawings and comic strips from Sweden, collated in the dissertation by Lars M. Andersson.

OS: Yes, it’s a dissertation completed in 2000 by Andersson, who is a historian, the title of which is A Jew is a Jew is a Jew... Representations of “The Jew” in Swedish Comic Press 1900-1930s [En jude är en jude är en jude- : representationer av “juden” i svensk skämtpress omkring 1900-1930].6 It contains hundreds of caricatures of Jews from the Swedish comic press between 1900 and 1930. These cartoons, which remind you of some of the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo, for instance, were drawn not by Nazis but by “well-meaning” people who believed that they just wanted to be funny. But it was acceptable then to draw these caricatures of Jews, stereotyping them.

NH: I am really interested to exhibit some of these, because I think they hold up a mirror to the society that created them. But of course, for some people they are very hurtful things. So there has to be a negotiation. I think there are many good reasons to exhibit them. So if they are not going to be shown, it won’t be me that makes that decision. I hope we will exhibit them. AP: I am presuming that Andersson’s thesis was to highlight this as a neglected part of Swedish history and to demonstrate a criticality around it.

OS: Right, the history of anti-Semitism in Sweden. AP: And the complex history of Sweden and National Socialism. NH: I would probably describe these cartoons as lazy stereotypes, especially when you compare them with, say, the anti-Semitic propaganda that you would have found in Germany or other countries. They create an image of the Jew as being the polar opposite of the Swede. The Jew is caricatured as overweight, unhealthy looking, unclean, dark-haired, conniving and ripping off the innocent Swede. In this process, a Swede may create their own self-image in relation to this other presence somehow, which I think is also a very contemporary issue relating to the stronger presence of identitarianism that we have seen developing in various nations: the construction of national monoculture, or the myth of national monoculture created in relation to its supposed other.

AP: Nav, you are opposed to censorship on the grounds of potential offense caused to different religious communities as a result of exhibiting certain artworks. As a curator you won’t make the decision to withdraw work from display yourself, but it might be made in the larger context of the biennial organisation, which we don’t know yet.

NH: Yes, I would say that is quite possible. But I certainly have no intention to offend for its own sake, nor do I think have any of the participating artists. AP: This puts you and the organisers in different positions of decision-making and responsibility. If we take Ola’s definition of secu-

larity as a “space of negotiation” then the implication here is that such negotiation takes place at different times and involves different groups of people: it is complex but also ambiguous. The title of the biennial, WheredoIendandyoubegin—On Secularity, which is a title taken from a work by Shilpa Gupta, suggests your wanting to produce a more complexly ambivalent approach to these contemporary concepts of secularity that also brings us back to Ola’s definition.

NH: Yes. The title is, in a way, a piece of concrete poetry, because the spaces are removed between the words. The work will also be presented next to the tramline between the city centre and Angered—a sort of “in-between space” or industrial no man’s land which is quite typical for such a segregated city as Gothenburg.

AP: I’d like to dig a little bit further into this choice of title, because it evokes a very clear sense in the reader, or somebody who is approaching the biennial, of knocking certain conventional media-led discourses around secularism and religion off-centre, at the moment when they are rising within our cultures, particularly European and American cultures. To me this seems to be a clear curatorial and political decision.

NH: What I find interesting about this subject is that on the one hand, for a lot of people secularity is a very abstract thing. It’s taken for granted to a certain degree. But on the other hand it’s also very real, because people feel the impact of it in everyday life in one way or another. It’s also a way to talk about many different things at the same time, because it touches on things from gender equality and minority rights to freedom of expression and questions of governance. The notion of secularity joins up a lot of these things. One of the artists participating in the exhibition, Rose Borthwick, was telling me about the terms “ambiguity tolerance,” and “ambiguity intolerance”. I had never come across the idea before, which is about a fear of something that you find in one way or other to be ambiguous. This might be, for example, somebody’s race, sexuality or gender. So you might be a racist, but actually if you see someone of mixed race it’s somehow even worse for you because of the ambiguity. OS: This may have to do with the idea of the abject as identified by Julia Kristeva. In a sense that something that is close to me but

not different from me, is actually worse than the opposite of me. I don’t have to worry about that. But this is close and distant at the same time.

AP: This also has a strong psychoanalytical dimension.

7 See Brown, Wendy. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2006.

OS: There is a book by Wendy Brown on tolerance, called Regulating Aversion, in which she exposes how the concept of tolerance is, as you say, quite problematic.7 Because who is tolerating whom? Tolerance exists within a power structure. So the majorities tolerate minorities, but what does it mean to say that minorities should tolerate majorities? Tolerance is, sometimes, a polite way of keeping someone away. NH: But I think “ambiguity intolerance” also relates to people’s experience of art in a strange way. Because people can get really angry if they have an ambiguous experience with a work of art.

AP: This relates to Santiago Mostyn’s set of images you will be using in the publicity campaign for the biennial paired with this title Wheredoiendandyoubegin. In these images bodies are wrapped together and the photographic images are cropped in such a way that it is difficult to tell their race, sexuality, gender, passion, anger in the ways they relate to each other.

NH: True, true. But they are also somehow not far away from the images you get in magazines, in adverts for Calvin Klein. So they have that sort of familiarity.

AP: Can we address Gothenburg and its relationship to the concept of secularity and how that has emerged within the city itself ?

OS: I think one of the interesting recent things that has happened is the inter-religious council in Gothenburg, which gained momentum after the so-called Backabranden in 1998, the fire in Backa, a disco, where a number of young people, who were predominantly Muslim, died. There was big controversy about the fire. This incentivised people to form a council of inter-religious dialogue.

8 The Million Programme (Miljonprogrammet) was an ambitious building project undertaken by the Swedish Government between 1965 and 1974 to build a million homes to tackle the chronic housing shortage developed gradually in the country through its transformation from an agrarian to an industrialised economy over the previous century. Utopian in its planning aspect, the areas chosen for building were largely distant and segregated from town and city centres, with promised transportation links often being provided only years after the houses had been built. Due in large part to this isolation the expected level of integration of class take-up of the homes did not occur, and now the areas are often described as “ghettos” in which migrant communities have historically settled. See, for example: Zilliacus, C.P. “A Million New Housing Units: The Limits of Good Intentions”, available online at http://www.newgeography. com/content/003811-amillion-new-housing-unitsthe-limits-good-intentions (Accessed 2017-06-16.)

Religion has historically always been mixing. Christianity is basically a Jewish sect, right? It hasn’t been so clear, which is which, so to speak. And in a pluralistic situation it is not obvious where one religion ends and the other begins, if we don’t absolutely want those borders to be very important. I find that interesting and this is also a utopia, right? But contemporary Gothenburg is far from being a hybrid city with fluid borders between different religious groups, in any sense of the word.

AP: My impression and experience is Gothenburg is hugely racially divided and therefore, in many ways, also divided through organised religion. It is also organised through its landscapes, through the river, the port, poverty and through histories of state-building as well as such governmental initiatives as the Million Programme—all of those things feeding into this city being immensely divided.8 OS: Yes, you are right. But perhaps this city can draw upon a historical legacy in some way, a tradition of people coming from other countries?

AP: It is a port city, one with a history of violent and non-violent racism.

OS: It is a port city facing towards the West and so to England and Scotland. There is historically a presence of British and Dutch people here, which has made it somewhat culturally different from other parts of Sweden.

AP: I guess we need to acknowledge that there is this political tension and violent tension between the utopia of the term WheredoIendandyoubegin and the realism of the divisions of the city and the violence that is meted out through image-making, etc. And I know that the biennial is dealing with the polarities of that. Art can also be accused of pedaling utopia. In the same way inter-faith centres might also be accused of pedaling utopias.

OS: On the other hand, they are actually in a very small way trying to do work towards reconciliation. They are definitely aware that they don’t live in utopia.

Secularisation and Religion in a Post-secular Age Bengt Kristensson Uggla

Bengt Kristensson Uggla is Amos Anderson Professor of Philosophy, Culture, and Management at Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland. Following his doctoral thesis on Paul Ricoeur at Lund University (Sweden) in 1994, he has been associated with a number of European and American universities, alongside fulfilling significant management positions, such as that of Dean at the IFL (Swedish Institute of Management) and head of the Nomadic University for Art, Philosophy and Enterprise in Europe (www.nurope.eu). Uggla is a frequently invited speaker in academia and wider society and has developed a kind of cross-disciplinary hermeneutics. Books include: Slaget om verkligheten: Filosofi—omvärldsanalys —tolkning (2002/2012), Ricoeur, Hermeneutics, and Globalization (2010), Gränspassager: Bildning i tolkningens tid (2012), Trust and Organizations: Confidence Across Borders (2013), Katedralens hemlighet: Sekularisering och religiös övertygelse (2015), Becoming Human Again: The Theological Life of Gustaf Wingren (2016), and Reformation Theology for a Post-Secular Age: Løgstrup, Prenter, Wingren, and the Future of Scandinavian Creation Theology (2017).

Abstract

This article elaborates on the conditions for secularisation in a post-secular age starting from the complications associated with the story of Columbus and how this narrative, configured among the growing controversies on knowledge between church and nation-state in the latter part of the 1800s, may be considered as part of a larger narrative—the story of secularisation. For a long time it was assumed that there was a necessary, sine qua non connection between modernisation and secularisation, yet this is challenged today by “the return of religion” and “the new visibility of religion”. It is argued instead that secularisation needs to be comprehended in a non-binary way, beyond the dichotomous opposition between religion and secularisation, superstitiousness and scientificness, intolerance and tolerance, reaction and progress. Furthermore, secularisation should not be considered as an opposite to, but as something produced by Christianity.

In school,

I and subsequently many children in Scandinavia were told the story of Christopher Columbus: the hero, who courageously and defiantly crossed the Atlantic in 1492. In one and the same act, he was assumed to have realised two unprecedented achievements: he “discovered” America, and he proved to his astonished contemporaries, who believed that he would sail over the edge of the earth, that the earth was, in fact, round. The story of stupid medieval people who thought the world was flat, and how this heroic son of Genoa sailed away with his three ships towards an unknown, uncertain horizon, is one of the world’s most famous adventure stories, and has come to be an unquestionable and integral part of our cultural and scientific history. The only problem with this steep story, however, is that there is no truth in it whatsoever.

1 Bergreen, Laurence. Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1992-1504. New York, NY: Penguin. 2011; Kristensson Uggla, Bengt. Slaget om verkligheten: Filosofi—omvärldsanalys—tolkning. Stockholm/Stehag: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion. 2012 [2002].

Columbus never discovered America—for the simple reason that he never understood where he had come to. In our entire history there does in all probability not exist a voyager of discovery who was more wrong in his understanding of his actual position: Columbus thought he was sailing outside the coast of China—when he was actually in the Caribbean. He wasn’t even on his way to America! His intention was to find a sea route to Asia but Columbus lived and died in the belief that he had actually come to the Asian archipelago and that it was just a matter of finding his way to the mainland. And, by seeking beyond a few more islands, to be able to visit the glistening, golden cities and the fairytale-like riches that Marco Polo had told stories about following his voyages some three centuries earlier.1 Columbus’s “discovery” is also the beginning of a process of brutal exploitation, racism, annihilation of almost an entire population,

2 Dussel, Enrique. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of ’the Other’ and the Myth of Modernity. New York, NY: Continuum. 1995[1992]. trans. Michael D Barber. I have elaborated on this dark side of the Columbus myth in Uggla, op. cit., pp. 25-7. 3 Wootton, David. The Invention of Science: A New Theory of the Scientific Revolution. London: Allen Lane. 2015. p. 57.

slave trade, colonialism, etc. If we shift our perspective from a Eurocentric concept of “discoveries”, a quite different and much darker narrative reveals itself that tells us about the violent conquest and brutal invasion of a continent where people had lived their lives long before they were being “discovered”.2 We might also better understand the cognitive challenges that Columbus was faced with if we remind ourselves that the verb “to discover” had not even been invented as an established concept in his time and age yet. David Wootton, who has elaborated on the importance of “discoveries” for the Scientific Revolution, has stated: “Columbus discovered America, an unknowned world, when he was trying to find a new route to a known world, China. Having discovered new land, he had no word to describe what he had done.”3 It was also not a matter of Columbus having to prove to his astonished contemporaries that the earth was round—the earth’s spherical form was something that had been clear to people since ancient times. Therefore, there were hardly any people in Columbus’s times who were so totally ignorant that they claimed that the earth was flat—so it was not a matter of a sea captain from Genoa, with his superior combination of reason and courage, being able to astonish his superstitious contemporaries in the late 1400s with the fact—and to everyone’s surprise—that the earth was round. There was quite simply no one to convince, and Columbus had neither intended, nor was it the outcome and result of his travels and voyages. But then we must ask ourselves the question: if people in the late Middle Ages did not believe that the earth was flat, where on earth does all this talk about the flat world come from? And how is it possible that the story of Columbus is so vividly alive in our cultural heritage that it continues to be told over and over again—constantly reccurring in the teaching that takes place in schools in an Anglo-European context—while it also has such an unshakable and solid position that it presented as a matter of fact? There appears to be something that is as leading as it is misleading in the power and matter-of-factness of this story.

The Story behind the Story Behind every story, another story always hides. As we have seen, this is also the case here due to the fact that the standard version of the Columbus narrative obscures the dark side of conquest and brutual colonisation. But every story also has a story itself. The fact is that (the medieval) earth was “flattened” in a story that took shape as late as 1828—and the earth was flattened, good and proper, even later, in the 1870s. So even if we include a pre-history from half a century earlier, the myth of the flat medieval world is still less than two hundred years old.4

4 Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Inventing the Earth Flat: Columbus and Modern Historians. New York, NY: Praeger. 1997 [1991]. 5 Garwood, Christine. Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea. London: Macmillan. 2007.

The first time this version of the Columbus story was presented in its complete form was in Washington Irving’s bestselling book The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, which was part of one of his larger works, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828). In line with that time and age’s many “robinsonades”, the book combines fiction and narrative in such a way that it is clearly signalled to the reader that this is meant as entertainment. It is not until half a century later that the story is to become a history connected to truth claims, and, therefore, also becomes a serious matter. It was not until the 1870s, in the wake of the controversies surrounding Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) that the relationship between science and religion took a complicated and conflict-ridden turn, and during the half century that followed, ended up in lasting conflict and mutual suspicion. It is in this situation that the story of a totally ignorant (religious) medieval flat world, and Columbus, as a modern secularised hero of rationality and science, comes into being and establishes itself as a “truth”.5 How did this happen? Columbus certainly was anything but a modern, secularised and scientific-thinking human being. On the contrary, he was medieval through and through, and he was fully and completely obsessed with the matter of the dangerous amalgam produced by mixing a thirst for God with a thirst for gold. How then could Columbus, somewhat later, be transformed into a super-hero of modernity, who was to have discovered America, and, before astonished contemporaries, was also to have proven that the Earth was round?

6 Cavanaugh, William T. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009. 7 Garwood, op. cit.

We must understand the story of Columbus and the notion of the flat medieval world within the scope of a larger context: a history dealing with the progress of knowledge. To be more precise: behind the story of Columbus from around 1500 hide stories of a completely different nature, as well as controversies associated with the influence over a most important European institition of knowledge that took place in the latter part of the 1800s. In the 1870s universities had begun to form themselves into institutions that demanded greater autonomy and independence. This was taking place at the same time as the tug-of-war between the church and the nation-state’s influence over this strategically important institution. The invention of the modern category “religion” may be considered as part of the transfer of power from church to the new secular nation-state.6 During the second half of the 1800s it was therefore decreed that a story be written to depict the Middle Ages as an epoch, during which the lack of scientific progress, religion and dogmas dominated. Furthermore, this was also to be a story that could strengthen the status and legitimacy of science from a historical perspective, where the latter was allowed to take up the hard struggle to win its autonomy in a time when the church as a religous institution still had significant power and influence.7

Part of a Larger Story The story of Columbus is therefore the story of secularisation. In compliance with August Comté’s positivist story of progress, the history of mankind has developed from a religious stage, via a philosophic-metaphysical stage, to the “positive” and scientific stage of transparency and translucency that only a scientified society had been able to offer. In alignment with Max Weber’s version of this story, this is a matter of a constant and continuous process through which the world and human beings are to be disenchanted: from formerly having lived in a world of the spirit, and the qualities of such a world, humans are then to learn to explain the world in terms of cause and effect. Secularisation, thus, meant a transition from mythos to logos—leaving religion behind.

For a long time it was assumed that there was a necessary, sine qua non connection between modernisation and secularisation, where, from this kind of perspective, the process of modernisation per se appeared as a story about secularisation, with as consequence that the secular can only gain its meaning when seen in opposition to religion. In other words, modernisation signifies the overcoming of religion. In compliance with this story, the more modern a human being becomes, the more secularised they must become—and the more secularised a human being becomes, the more modern they can be said to be.8 And to be more precise, to be religious seems identical to not yet having become really modern. Since modernisation proceeds and progresses mercilessly, the dichotomy between religion and secularisation, superstitiousness and scientificness, intolerance and tolerance, reaction and progress, is as inevitable and inescapable as it is inreconcilable and unrelenting.9 In Sweden, this secularisation story has gained particular impetus and energy because it is interwoven with the success story of the state as “the most modern country in the world”, accompanied by the never-ceasing repetition of the chorus from a Swedish song: “better and better, day by day”. In a story of this kind, religion had no part to play at all, other than as a dark historical contrast to a scientific future where light is dawning.10 The extraordinary success of this narrative, and our keen need for it, resonates with the fact that the meaning-making capacity of the secularisation story made it possible to make the meaning of life and the development of society understandable in a time of profound and brutal transformation. The secularisation story had the capacity and ability to create cohesion and mark out and indicate a future direction for people whose orientation in life and the world had been destabilised as a result and consequence of modernisation, industrialisation, urbanisation and de-traditionalisation. The social sciences that emerged and flourished during the 1800s also found their grounding in this story; religion was soon to disappear anyway, the only question was how long it would take.11

8 Ibid.; Habermas, Jürgen. Between Naturalism och Religion: Philosophical Essays. trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2007 [2005]; Eagleton, Terry. Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press. 2009. 9 Cavanaugh, William T. “The Invention of the Religious-Secular Distinction.” In William A. Barbieri Jr., At the Limits of the Secular: Reflections on Faith and Public Life. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 2014. pp. 105-128. 10 Jackelén, Antje. Gud är större: Ett herdabrev för vår tid. Lund: Arcus förlag. 2011; Gerle, Elisabeth. Farlig förenkling: Religion och politik utifrån Sverigedemokraterna och Humanisterna. Nora: Doxa. 2010. 11 Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harward University Press. 2007.

A Crack in the Secularisation Story 12 Sigurdson, Ola. Det postsekulära tillståndet: Religion, modernitet och politik. Göteborg: Glänta produktion. 2009. 13 Dixon, Thomas. Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008. 14 Sigurdson, op. cit.; Joas, Hans. The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights. trans. Alex Skinner. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 2013; Joas, Hans. Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2014.

However, in the course of time, the secularisation story started to crack, and its assumptions and suppositions essentially questioned. For some decades now we have experienced “the return of religion” and “the new visibility of religion”, which, in turn, has led a number of scholars to start to describe our times as post-secular.12 It is, therefore, no coincidence that in a time when the secularisation story has reached a point where it begins to crack visibly, we have begun to take to heart the understanding of how problematic the Columbus story really is. One can have different understandings and conceptions of what course a development is taking—and one can interpret the post-secular state of things in different ways—but the fact remains that few people today seriously believe that religion will disappear in the foreseeable future. There is, indeed, a possible connection between secularisation and modernisation, but the relationship is not essential and not imperative. It is easy to draw attention to examples where secularisation has taken place without modernisation, and, in the same way, we can see successful modernisation without secularisation following suit. Accordingly, the post-secular age means that we must correct and adjust our writing of history as well as our self-understanding. The history of science, not least, seems to have been written from the perspective of the secularisation thesis, and, therefore, full of surprise, we are reminded that so many leading scientists have at the same time also embraced a religious conviction.13 In other words, it is so much more than a matter of, or, in fact, a question of, the position of religion that is at stake. In our times the secularisation story finds itself being constantly renegotiated, and being continuously revised and pluralised.14 Such an interpretation of the post-secular condition resides and remains in a binary order, regulated by linear developmental logics. With this interpretation of the post-secular as the point of departure it also remains unclear how so many of the people that are carried by a religious conviction still do not, for that very reason, experience themselves as less secularised than their fellow humans. In other words, the post-secular is not situated after secularisation. If anything, we seem to be living in a time characterised by “the return of

religion”—at the same time as the secularisation process progresses and proceeds. Ambiguity often arises here, and this must be taken seriously, especially when it signals how closely intertwined secularisation and religion in fact are.

Secularisation as Part of a Theological History of Effects In a time when many tend to moralise, in an unqualified way, about how secularised the church has become, we need to remind ourselves that secularisation is not first and foremost to be regarded as an outside threat—secularisation also comes from within Christian faith itself; it is a legitimate consequence of the Christian tradition.15 To be more precise, secularisation is a child of the Christian tradition, even though many people would indeed like to regard it as an “unwanted” one.

15 Persson, Per Erik. Att tolka Gud idag: Debattlinjer i aktuell teologi. Lund: Gleerups. 1971. 16 Cavanaugh, op. cit., p. 34; Cf. Cantwell Smith, Wilfred. The Meaning and End of Religion. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991 [1962]. 17 Taylor, Mark C. After God. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. 2007. p. XIII.

In order to understand how religion and secularisation have become intertwined within Christianity—an intertwinement that becomes more and more complicated in the Lutheran tradition—we must remind ourselves of the distinction between the religious and the secular. William Cavanaugh has argued that the religious-secular distinction is not a description of a historical reality, but rather an invention accompanied by distinctions like private-public, religion-politics, and church-state, with the aim to legitimise the liberal nation-state. In accordance with Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Cavanaugh also observes that before the Enlightenment, it was religion that included the public values that secularism later claimed.16 Against this background we can also understand the close connection between modernity theories and secularisation theories. Mark C. Taylor has stated: “religion and secularity are not opposites; to the contrary, Western secularity is a religious phenomenon.”17 When we are confronted with questions on how secularised, for example, Sweden really is, it is important to reflect on what the question means. Does the concept of secularisation in this context refer to how many declared atheists there are in this particular society? Is this a

18 Thurfjell, David. Det gudlösa folket: De postkristna svenskarna och religionen. Stockholm: Molin & Sorgenfrei. 2015. 19 Mentieta, Eduardo and VanAnthwerpen, Jonathan (eds.). The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere: Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Cornel West. intr. Eduardo Mentieta & Jonathan VanAnthwerpen. afterw. Craig Calhoun. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 2011; Williams, Rowan. Faith in the Public Square. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. 2012. 20 This phrase, inspired by Gunnar Olsson, was the organising principle in my 2002 book, see note 1.

question of how many see themselves as secularists, that is, who claim secularisation as the norm? Is it a question of what position religion has in society or to what extent the state is non-confessional? Or is it rather a question of how disenchanted life in this society can be understood to be? This question could also be about how much “forgetting” characterises our understanding of this society. In and through the secularisation process we have become blind to the original religious background of key institutions in our society, such as schools, universities, hospitals, and so on and so forth, as they are regarded as secularised phenomena. Our entire culture is so impregnated with (more or less secularised) religion that it is in fact impossible to imagine something that could in any way liken a “purely secular society”, which is sometimes sought after. The conviction that this would mean us cutting off the branch we are sitting on is further reinforced by the fact that, in Sweden and elsewhere, religion has had a totally decisive and productive significance for the modernisation of society.18 Today, secularisation and religious conviction can therefore no longer be addressed and discussed as alternatives that exclude each other. There are, indeed, many good and theological arguments for them being understood together instead.19 To be more precise, the concepts of religion and secularisation make up two sides of one and the same taxonomy, thus the one becomes meaningless without the other. In the same way as it is only by sharing the world that we can share the world with each other, it is not possible to talk about the religious if there is not also something that is not religious.20 The secular only becomes understandable in and through the contrast to the religious, and vice versa. Historically, it was when monks left the monasteries, and, more generally speaking, when institutions that were formerly run under the direction of the church developed autonomously and started to pursue their activities outside the eschatological field of the monastery, that a saeculum (“the secular”) came into being. One could say that, in modern times, at the same time as secularisation established a sphere outside religion (“the secular”), “the religious’” also becomes visible as a separate field, as an autonomous sphere alongside politics, economy, and science. Accordingly, religion can itself be said to have produced the secular—in the same way as it is continued secularisation that has, to a large extent, given religion a “new visibility”.

In a similar way, a secular sphere having arisen alongside the monasterial and ecclesiastical does not, however, appear as problematic at all, when considered from a theological point of view. This is particularly the case if one uses theological resources to affirm the secular, founded on an interpretation of our lives as part of a shared world perceived as God’s creation, like Gustaf Wingren did, one of the founding figures of Scandinavian creation theology (the other two being K.E. Løgstrup and Regin Prenter). In accordance with this Grundtvigian recognition and reception of Luther, Christianity thus affirms secularisation by not claiming superior ethical knowledge or privileged political standpoints in favour of the church.21 This theological affirmation of secularisation is further reinforced by the fact that the concept of saeculum originates from within Christian theology. For the Romans, saeculum was not a room, but was a question of time; the word referred quite simply to the maximum length of a person’s life, being approximately a “century”. When the early church used the concept, it was to talk about the time between Jesus’s first and second coming to Earth—in other words a time that stands in contrast to God’s eternity (saecula saecolorum: “from ages to ages”). It is also in this sense that Augustinus uses the concept in order to talk about an era when Christians and heathens had to live and work together for the common good, a meaning that is close to a post-secular understanding. The complexity of this historical background is further strengthened by the fact that, during the Roman era, Christians were actually called atheists because of their refusal to sacrifice to other gods or to pray to the emperor as the Godhead; the Christian holy was therefore the heathen profane and the heathen holy was the Christian profane.22

21 Wingren, Gustaf. An Exodus Theology: Einar Billing and the Development of Modern Swedish Theology. trans. Eric Wahlstrom. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. 1969 [1968]; Gregersen, Niels Henrik, Kristensson Uggla, Bengt and Wyller, Trygve E. Reformation Theology for a Post-Secular Age: K.E. Løgstrup, Regin Prenter, Gustaf Wingren, and the Future of Scandinavian Creation Theology. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 2017. 22 Breemer, Rosmarie van den, Casanova, José and Wyller Trygve E. (eds.). Secular and Sacred: The Scandinavian Case of Religion in Human Rights, Law and Public Space. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 2013.

Is Secularisation in Actual Fact Christian? It is against this background that one can understand why this distinction does not occur in non-Christian cultures, or in Byzantine Christianity even, and why it is, generally speaking, impossible to translate the modern meaning of the word “religion” into

23 Casanova, José. “The Two Dimensions, Temporal and Spatial, of the Secular: Comparative Reflections on the Nordic Protestant and Southern Catholic Patterns from a Global Perspective”. In Breemer, Casanova and Wyller, op. cit.

Classical Greek. According to José Casanova, whose tracks I follow here, it was not until the Middle Ages that the temporal concept saeculum came to be a spatial term that established a binary distinction between “religious” and “secular”. This took place through the differentiation of monastic life, the division between priests who lived in monasteries (as an eschatological place where the transcendent city of God was anticipated) and “secular priests” who carried out their duties at the diocese, in society together with ordinary laymen outside of the seclusion of the monastery. In and through the Christian church’s dominance in the West and the consolidation of medieval Christianity, the secular was, accordingly, transformed from having been associated with temporality to it also being used as a spatial category within the framework of a binary classification system comprising two separate worlds: the religious-spiritual-holy world of salvation and a secular-timebound-profane world. By way of the latter, the grammar that would make it possibe for modern man to develop a binary distinction between religious and secular—which was later developed into a stage theory where the secular was perceived as something that took place in the times after the religious—had also come into being. However, the meaning and significance of the secular had radically been displaced to being about a world (or a limited area of the world) without religion or divine presence—which was actually unfamiliar to medieval theology.23 In order to protect ourselves from the great number of anachronisms that come into being when we try to use the relatively modern categories “religious” and “secular” with regard to the history of Christianity, we can remind ourselves that there is hardly a single medieval book that addresses religion as a distinct greatness alongside politics, economy and culture. Neither did Thomas of Aquino or Martin Luther regard themselves as religious in this sense and meaning of the word. With this somewhat motley history as our backdrop we can maybe better understand the concepts that are formed, and flourish, when we are to talk about secularisation (as a historical and sociological process of functional differentiation) and the secular (as a modern epistemic category that refers to the lack of religion, or a phase after religion has been overcome), as distinct from secularism (in the meaning of a normative, political doctrine on a strict separation between state and church, which also requires a privatisation of religion). This

consistently becomes a question of: that which does not belong to the ecclesiastical domain, and the converting of religious people and things to secular greatnesses by way of “worldly-making”. However, the fact that in European culture we made some kind of distinction between a secular and a religious sphere of society reveals that this language and these categories have in fact come into being in a Christian imaginary world. Since the distinction as such, and already from the start, is a product of Christianity, it can neither be interpreted as a unequivocal threat to this belief, be used as a tool to understand other, non-European cultural traditions, nor be essentially associated with a state of things after or without religion. Religion and secularisation, as conviction and critique, are elements of the Christian tradition that are in fact deeply intertwined.24 Furthermore, it is also apparent today that key concepts of modernity, such as freedom, tolerance and universal human rights, are part of, and can be understood as a movement within the Christian tradition’s history of effects. Gianni Vattimo has also extensively elaborated on the argument that secularisation as concept and historical reality is in actual fact to be considered Christian, originating from kenotic thinking about the death of God and “weak thinking”.25 In Lutheran theology, especially in the interpretation tradition that had been developed within the framework of Scandinavian creation theology from Grundtvig via Løgstrup to Wingren, a concurring sacralisation of the world and a secularisation of the church has taken place. In compliance with this theological perspective, the world does not need to be Christian or in any way part of the church’s domains in order to be perceived and understood as a part of God’s life and works. Correspondingly, creation, like ethics and morality, is not to be regarded as unchangeable, but is to be handled as a practical issue that can be organised freely in order to serve people’s well-being in the best way possible, to enable the sustenance of human life, and so that the gospel may be heard as really “good news” (where the necessary horizon for understanding the gospel is the human condition—shared by all). One might say that both the world and the church be regarded from a sacred and secular perspective at one and the same time, that is, when people move between church and society, people move from God to God, according to Wingren and Scandinavian creation theology.26

24 Ricoeur, Paul. “Religion, Atheism, and Faith.” In Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, The Religious Significance of Atheism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 1966. pp. 57-98; Ricoeur, Paul. Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay. trans. Katheleen Blamey. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 1998 [1995]. Kristensson Uggla, Bengt. “Ricoeur as Other”. In Ulrich Schmiedel and James M. Matarazzo, Jr. (eds.). Dynamics of Difference: Christianity and Alterity. A Festschrift for Werner G. Jeanrond. London: Bloomsbury. 2015. pp. 95-103. 25 Vattimo, Gianni. After Christianity: Italian Academy Lectures. trans. Luca d’Isanto. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 2002. 26 Kristensson Uggla, Bengt. Becoming Human Again: The Theological Life of Gustaf Wingren. trans. Daniel M. Olsson. Eugene, OR: Cascade. 2016; Gregersen et al., op. cit.

27 Casanova, ”The Two Dimensions”. 28 Wingren, Gustaf. Luther on Vocation. trans. Carl C Rasmussen. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. 2004 [1942].

If one thus looks at the secular through this Lutheran theological lens, completely different interpretation possibilities appear in comparison to conventional models. José Casanova has discerned a third secularisation dynamics in Lutheran northern Europe, alongside southern European (Catholic) and American models that have long predominated discussion. This third model purports to overcome the binary relationship between the religious and the secular by integrating them within a common dialectic relationship. This in turn becomes a question of recognising an internal Christian secularisation—a process that can be said to have begun in the reform movements of the late Middle Ages, which was then institutionalised in the Protestant Reformation, and which had consciously “made spiritual” the worldly, as well as having brought religious life out of the monasteries into the secular world. One goes beyond the dualism between religious/ secular by erasing the limits and confines that exist between holy and profane, with as the result of this the mutual mixing one encounters in church, nation and state in the Scandinavian countries.27 Historically, one of the consequences of the Lutheran reformation was the abolishment of the sacred canon law and the transfer of legislation from church to king, who was regarded as the only legitimate secular regent; in a modern democratic society, this would be the equivalent of parliament and government. Luther’s thought of a universal, general priesthood, signified at one and the same time a “laymanification” of priests and a “priestification” of laymen, by way of the sermon and teaching of priesthood being secularised and transformed into a secular calling among other callings, at the same time as vocations among laymen in society became a question of a divine calling.28 The Protestant Reformation in which the number of sacraments was reduced could also be seen as secularisation, when, for example, marriage came to be regarded as a civil institution, instead of being a sacrament regulated by the ecclesiastic order. Accordingly, processes of secularisation and sacralisation seem to take place at the same time in Lutheran Protestantism, which also opens up to the possibility for the secular and the holy co-existing and forming a point of departure for new logics. In this context, the often criticised (but in my opinion often underestimated) teachings on the two kingdoms of God (Zweireiche Lehre)

and the two uses of the law, together with the idea of Larvae Dei (how God works behind a mask in our everyday deeds) have promoted a theological affirmation of the secular. Thus, from a Lutheran position, the secular welfare state does not need to be perceived as a competitor to the church, but can, instead, purely and simply, appear as something that can be accepted as legitimate and recognised with heart and soul, by it being interpreted theologically as an expression of God acting—without any church or religion having been involved.29 The notion that all is holy and all is profane thus causes the traditional categories of the secularisation discourse—of religious/secular and holy/profane—to collapse. Maybe one might say that this “Lutheran secularity”—or “the hidden sacrality of secularisation”—discloses perspectives that open out onto two completely different views: either a mono-cultural Lutheran society, or a secular, multi-religious society. This may, however, mean that this model of thinking —on condition that Luther is not perceived as a rigid binary thinker, but as a master of dialectics and a master of the art of drawing distinctions—could have significant relevance in our time.30 A question of vital importance for a society that is bound up with the secularisation story having such a strong grip on our thinking will therefore be how we can make use of theology in order to relate secularisation and religious conviction, critical thinking and belief, to each other.

29 Witte Jr., John. “God is Hidden in the Earthly Kingdom: The Lutheran Two-Kingdoms Theory as Foundation of Scandinavian Secularity”. In Breemer, Casanova and Wyller, op. cit., pp. 56-84. 30 Cf. “the art of drawing distinctions which is at the heart ot Lutherʼs theology”. Schwöbel, Christoph. “Promise and Trust: Lutheran Identity in a Multicultural Society”. In Carl-Henrik Grenholm and Göran Gunner (eds). Justification in a Post-Christian Society. Eugene, OR: Pickwick. 2014. p. 33.

The Cathedral and the Art Museum—Post-Secular Ambiguities You are standing on the threshold to an old cathedral. Your body has become warm from being on the move in a warm summery Europe and you need cool and shade. That’s why you now look forward, just that little bit extra, to a pleasant moment together with the beautiful art of the medieval cathedral that you’ve already become familiar with by way of the guide book. That it’s morning and Sunday has not been something you have reflected upon so much, so that when you have actually stepped across the threshold, you are taken by surprise that lots of other people besides tourists interested in

art have found their way to this cathedral of cultural historical interest at the same time as you—and these are people taking part in a church service. Well yes, you’ve been to church services before from time to time, but in this very moment, in this now, you are anything but a pilgrim; you are unmistakably a cultural tourist, and the friction you experience in the room when religion and art butt up against each other makes you shudder and retreat. You feel somewhat uncomfortable with this situation, but not more than you fulfil your intentions. Through the aesthetic interest of interpretation, which steers your culturally hungry holiday gaze, you now systematically transform the cathedral into an art museum. At the same time, a religious cult is going on in the room. Parallel to your cultural historical adventure, people taking part in the service are deeply sunken in devotions and prayers. But when you raise your camera to take your photographs, the people who are praying in the demarcated pews do not seem to be markedly disturbed. They are probably used to the situation. The fact remains, however, that they are there to serve, you are there to observe. The situation is not an entirely uncomplicated one, but still the equation seems to work: the religious experience and the aesthetic experience do not necessarily need to exclude each other. For the most part they can coexist very well under the high arches of a cathedral. It is, after all, not stranger than the fact that no one has really been able to steer or control what particular interpretative interest it is that has turned your gaze those times you have been to funeral or baptism services, early morning Christmas Day services and church concerts, not to mention all the end-of-term services in churches and cathedrals you have been to. Some time after your return from your holiday trip you visit an art museum to experience the opening of an exhibition of icons that has attracted much attention. Once more your aesthetic desire awakens, but this time you are moving—in the double sense of the word—on home ground. You are fascinated by the icons and admire this splendid form of religious art. Discreetly you wander around the rooms of the art museum, saying hello to acquaintances with a glass of bubbly drink in your hand—a true art experience. All of sudden this idyll is destroyed. Your aesthetic observation of the art is disturbed by a group of people who, collectively and unanimously, have fallen down on their knees to pray in front one of the icons. By way of the surprising way they act—which is made up of serving instead of observing —they

embark on as conscious as provoking a process, which, if it is carried through, seems, by extension, to be able to transform the art space into a room of religious service. This won’t do at all. It is noticed quite clearly that the religious cult that suddenly emerges creates a sense of uncertainty among the worldly art lovers, who, until a moment ago, moved around the room without being disturbed. The art liturgy doesn’t seem to be able to do itself justice and be carried through when it must coexist with a religious cult that is staged in the very centre of the art museum. Despite the fact that the people who are praying and serving in and through their way of communication—their communion—are only reminding everyone of that which is just a matter of course and obvious—that it is, in fact, religious art that is being shown on the walls—both your and the other visitors’ art experience are, in fact, marred. Most of us probably feel that it is rather tiresome to enjoy and view art in a museum if we must share this with people who are praying in front of icons. And that’s why you’re not alone when drawing a sigh of relief as the people in charge decide to remove this disturbing, and to all intents and purposes, strange feature from the museum. The religious act is interrupted in a polite and firm way, and those taking part are discreetly asked to either make their behaviour fit the form of the art experience offered, or quite simply leave the premises. Order is reclaimed, and calm spreads across a room that is now exclusively reserved for the aesthetic experience once again. 31 How these types of dramas, which I have sketched in the two examples above, can indeed actually proceed in their respective contexts is certainly difficult to foresee, since it is usually the case that special times are reserved for those who wish to devote themselves to aesthetic admiration, while there are other times for those who wish to worship and pray before the pictures. What remains, however, is a provoking experience of contrast, which raises questions of what uses cathedrals and art museums—respectively—allow, are able to accommodate, and encourage, as well as the insight that is as astonishing as it is convincing that religious rooms sometimes (although far from always) actually seem to have a greater ability to accommodate separate experiences and interpretative interests than artistic spaces reserved for aesthetic use. For since the religious and the aestheic experience actually seem to be able to coexist very well in the cathe-

31 The embryos for these two scenes that came into being in the cathedral and the art museum, are inspired by the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, in an essay that reflected on what he calls the ”Sant’Ivo experience”. See Vattimo, Gianni. Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy. trans. David Webb. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1997 [1994]. pp. 5859. In retrospect, I have recognised that Vattimo only indicates vague contours for two scenes and that my own imagination has apparently taken me far beyond Vattimo’s text. When I went back to reading Vattimo’s text, I was a little surprised to find that the two scenes I imagined in the text were actually only one and that Vattimo only suggested the possibility of a second example in the form of an analogous, and, symmetrically, reversed situation. The dramas that occur in the cathedral and the art museum, in my mind, seem, in other words, to have lived their own lives; they have hovered in space, like two incompleted scenes in search of a common drama. But the meaning of what actually was happening in the cathedral and the art museum remained unclear to me, as it also did to Vattimo. What are these narratives trying to say? They remain narratives that I can not really comprehend. Over the course of a few years, Vattimo’s incomplete thoughts have continued to trigger my imagination, provoked

my thoughts, and have regularly returned in my reflections without giving me any rest. Perhaps it is because they articulate a fundamental ”ambiguity”—which is also ours.

dral—even though, as mentioned, one sometimes tries to refer them to different times—this is, without exception, contrary to the code of conduct and rules that apply to how time and space are organised in art museums, exhibition halls and galleries. I have not heard about art museums and galleries reserving special times for those who wish to pray and have a service in front of icons and religious art.

Is It Possible to Think Differently? The idea that a religious space, a cathedral, could in certain situations be more tolerant, and accommodate a richer expanse of interpretations than an artistic space, an art museum, is something that feels very challenging in a Western context. Why are we so surprised, and maybe provoked even, of the state of things? And how did this occur? It is probably connected to us increasingly perceiving religious conviction as something that stands for and represents intolerance and dogmatism. But can it—at the same time—be that the cathedral bears a memory of a different religious experience that is characterised by generosity, hospitality and tolerance, and an interpretation of life whose grammar and paradigm seem to have gone astray in our time and age? The shift in perspective between the cathedral and the art museum as a consequence of the astonishing contrasting of these positions, uncovers and destabilises at one and the same time some of our basic distinctions—of secularisation/ religion, tolerance/intolerance, critique/conviction, public/private— which we use without thinking in order to share the world with each other so that they tend to become invisible to us. Is another way of sharing the world possible? And could another way of sharing the world with each other open up a new creative alliance between art and the Christian tradition—both in its religious and secular shape and form? The dichotomic order of the secularisation story—where religion is identified by superstition, irrationality and intolerance, in comparison to the reason, rationality and tolerance of modernity —reduces religion to a dumb remnant of times past. In and through this way of sharing the world with each other, religion is robbed and stripped

of every form of inner dynamics and power of self-criticism and transformation—abilities that are instead in a one-sided way ascribed to the enlightened and critically reflecting modernity of contemporary times.

32 Kearney, Richard. Anatheism, Returning to God after God. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 2010-2011.

Through the strong tendency to immediately ascribe the understanding of religion, and what it means to have a religious conviction into an order sustained by opposing pairs—modernity/religion, rationality/irrationality, reason/superstition, tolerance/intolerance and, as an extension of this, public/private—not only does an unreasonable image of religion and religious conviction appear, but also an unreasonable picture of science, together with its conditions, possibilities and potential. The time has come to question the self-evidence of this predominant understanding of what it means to have a religious belief and conviction. I do not claim that religion and theology are generally, and everywhere, to be characterised by a greater ability and power of tolerance—far from it. But I want to bring out into the light that those indicators that speak in favour of it can also be read and interpreted as a theological and religious tradition, and that this may actually act as a source of inspiration for the development and growth of a more tolerant and more hospitable world. Of course, for this line of argument to gain firmer footing, a hermeneutical perspective is required, which does not only act as grounding for a greater abundance of interpretations and points of view, but also develops the ability and power to actively take responsibility for such varying ways of seeing. A wealth of interpretations, in which each conviction is constantly and continuously set off against a critical act of thinking can, accordingly, act as an exercise in meeting a stranger with hospitality, as well as acting as an opening towards a more multi-faceted reality.32 The most profound reasoning in favour of the existence of tolerance, a feeling of freedom, and a culture of hospitality under the high arches of the cathedral, does not need to be the result of theological spinelessness and laxness, or a general religious lukewarm- and halfheartedness, but can be connected to that which is maybe the most important impulse behind modern hermeneutics; the experience of

33 This interpretation of Luther is represented, for example, by theologians such as Gustaf Wingren (cf. Kristensson Uggla, Becoming Human Again) and Eberhart Jüngel. Cf. God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism. trans. Darrell L. Guder. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 1983 [1977]. 34 The substantial argumentation of this essay is, in many respects, extracted from and inspired by my previous book Katedralens hemlighet: Sekularisering och religiös övertygelse [The Cathedralʼs Secret: Secularisation and Religious Conviction]. Skellefteå: Artos. 2016, in which the reader may find more references and further argumentation.

nos poni extra nos—an experience of us putting ourselves outside of ourselves, a figure of thought that has strong theological roots, and that became a major theme in Luther’s Reformation.33 This decentring of the subject, which, in its turn, opens up for human action within a dialectic between decentring and centring, is a condition required for the interpretation of a text or an artwork that not only takes the form and shape of a distanced observing, but of an act in which one also exposes oneself to the text and the work in the form and shape of a hermeneutics of the self. If one regards the ability to put oneself outside oneself as a natural process, as an obvious part of every healthy self-identity, it also becomes clear that this approach to our identity is a prerequistite for us to become human. In the course of its history, Christianity has not only served as a significant source of inspiration for tolerance, it has also demonstrated proof of its extraordinary ability and power to develop tolerance. It is important to reveal the freeing potential that exists in Christianity—and other religions—by exploring their memory for other more hospitable and radical orientation efforts. However, such an interpretation of Christianity is difficult to access, since it requires that one’s point of departure is that it takes a tradition that has cultivated vulnerability, generosity and hospitality as starting points within the frame of an understanding of life, in which the economy of gift and task, freedom and responsibility are the focal points of theology and what makes us human. Matters of this kind are difficult to summarise in a few simple theses, certainly in a time of polarisation. I do, however, believe that it is both possible and necessary to rediscover, recapture and reclaim religion as one of the most important foundations to develop forms of life characterised by diversity, tolerance and openness—as well as the production of secularisation. In addition to greater dogmatism and moral intolerance there are traditions that have wanted to accept and recognise the enabling of different interpretations, and that have realised the inescapable connection between recognising the other, at the same time as accepting that which is also different in oneself and in one’s own tradition. However, the furtherance of this potential becomes visible only when one ventures on a “detour” via hermeneutics and conflicts of interpretations, placing ourselves extra nos, which also requires us to put our own convictions at risk, and thus at stake.34 Translation by Lynn Preston Odengård.

The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland Transubstantiation II (dedicated to Margareta Orreblad, 1934-2016) Elgaland-Vargaland

“Elgaland-Vargaland is the largest—and most populous—realm on Earth, incorporating all boundaries between other nations as well as Digital Territory and other states of existence. Every time you travel somewhere, and every time you enter another form, such as the dream state, you visit Elgaland-Vargaland.” —elgaland-vargaland.org Founded by Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Leif Elggren 1992.

Art as an Escape from Secularity: the Maryamiyya Case Klas Grinell

Klas Grinell is Curator of Contemporary Global Issues at the Museum of World Culture, Gothenburg, and Associate Professor at the Department for Literature, History of Ideas and Religion at Gothenburg University, specialising in Islamic history of ideas and critical heritage studies. He is coordinator and researcher in the Swedish research council funded project “Museological Framings of Islam in Europe”, from where this article stems. He is also a board member of Cultural Heritage without Borders. Recent publications include: Imamen, kuppen och tjänarna: Gülenismen och Turkiet (2017), Islams filosofihistoria (2016), “The frames of Islamicate art” (forthcoming), “Carpets and ceramics: Misrepresenting Muslim cultural heritage in Europe” (Eurozine. org, 2016), “Challenging normality: Museums in/as public space” (2014), and “Der Islam— Ein aspekt zeitgenössiger Weltkultur” (2014).

Abstract

Islamic art is a narrowly defined field with a tight canon and limited set of themes for contemporary practitioners. This article traces the modern framing of this field in the World of Islam Festival in London 1976, and the Sufi Maryamiyya traditionalist paradigm that was constructed there. The Sheikh of the Maryamiyya order and one important inspiration for the contemporary presentation of Islamic art is Seyyed Hossein Nasr. The traditionalist understanding of art sees it as an expression of a perennial truth that stands in stark opposition to the dividing forces of modernity and secularity. Rather than trying to politically defy secularity, the Maryamiyya use art as an escape from secularityâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;itself a very secular move with roots in European Romanticism. Islamic art is seldom presented as the aesthetic expressions of contemporary Muslims, but rather as a timeless refuge from secularity. Besides the presentation of the Maryamiyya paradigm of Islamic art, the article reconnects to discussions on the Islamisation of knowledge and their application to the art field within the tawhidic paradigm. A decolonial Islamisation of art might open up a space to address secularity in new ways. Through this discussion, the Christocentrism of secularity becomes visible, and new prisms of the concept surface.

“Lovers on the terrace”, Mughal miniature painting, Hyderabad, India, 1750. Photograph: Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Setting the Secular Frame 1 See Berg, Magnus and Grinell, Klas. Musealt islam. Stockholm: Molin & Sorgenfrei förlag. Forthcoming. 2 See Grinell, Klas. “Carpets and ceramics: Misrepresenting Muslim cultural heritage in Europe”. Eurozine.org. 2016. http://www.eurozine. com/carpets-and-ceramics/ (Accessed 2017-07-25.) 3 Taylor. Charles. A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2007. p. 1. 4 See Ferro, Marc. Colonization: A global history. London: Taylor & Francis. 1997; Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2000.

In response to growing Islamophobia in the West many leading museums have produced new galleries for the exhibition of Islamic art. Many of them are funded by patrons from Saudi Arabia or the Gulf.1 They are all presented by the secular custodians of the museums as contributions to intercultural understanding and social tolerance. The perceived secularity of art makes it politically convenient to express tolerance for Islam via such a channel, while public support for mosques, for example, meets strong resistance in most Western cities.2 Such is the political frame of this article. The major premises are that we live in a secular age; that art (as it is practised, understood and displayed in today’s globality) is a secular institution; that Islam, like Christianity, has had an inherent secularising logic; and that those who deny or want to escape secularity today, do so from within the secular age. The first premise is a quote taken from the first sentence in Charles Taylor’s monumental A Secular Age. Taylor qualifies his statement by saying that “I mean the ‘we’ who live in the West, or perhaps Northwest, or otherwise put, the North Atlantic world—although secularity extends also partially, and in different ways, beyond this world.”3 Taylor finds the “judgement of secularity” hard to resist when “our civilization” is compared with for example “Islamic countries”. Unfortunately Taylor here rests on a division between civilisations that hides the long history of “our” civilisation’s colonial and imperial strive for dominance over the rest of the globe.4 Not only does this history question how secularity partially extends across the world, it (and the whole historical trajectory of Islam) also means that Islam is not an outsider to the North Atlantic world. According to the Pew

Research Center, there were 43 million Muslims in Europe and 3.5 million in North America in 2010.5 With population growth and migration there are thus today at least 50 million Muslims living in the Northwest. Setting Islam apart as something outside of the secular world and age hides this, even if it is hard to say what, if anything, really holds all these different people categorised as Muslims together. In Taylor’s A Secular Age there is an almost total Islamic vacuum. There are only a few passing remarks on Islam in the whole book, like when he says that “in pre-modern Christendom […] there was an important role for the Christian warrior […] as in much contemporary Islam.”6 In this massive historisation of the contemporary secular age the sole focus is on “our Christian tradition”. As articulated by the second premise, most discussions on contemporary art are similarly closed in by the post-Christian secular paradigm.7 In the close to 800 pages of the Oxford dictionary of modern and contemporary art there is an expressed aim to be “more international”, but still, what in line with Taylor’s vocabulary would be called “Christian countries” and Christian tradition dominate the entries entirely.8 In order to counter this Christocentrism, I will open a little window into how the relation between art and secularity is being discussed within an Islamic frame. This is of course a vast topic that either calls for a book of Taylor’s size, or for further distinctions and delimitations. I will mainly look at one contemporary position, which I will call the traditionalistm or more precisely the Maryamiyya paradigm. It is a paradigm arguing for the importance of Islamic art as an escape from secularity from within the secular age. This snapshot of the role of Islamic art for Muslim intellectuals in the secular age, interesting enough as it is in itself, will also reveal new prisms of the concept of secularity.

5 See Pew Research Center. The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050. 2015. http://www.pewforum. org/2015/04/02/religious -projections-2010-2050/ (Accessed 2017-07-25.) 6 Taylor, op. cit., p. 283. 7 See Stallabrass, Julian. Contemporary art: A very short introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006. 8 See Chilvers, Ian and Glaves-Smith, John. Oxford dictionary of modern and contemporary art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009. 9 See Sedgwick, Mark. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the secret intellectual history of the twentieth century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004.

One of the prime articulations of Islamic art as an Islamically significant activity is the Maryamiyya sheikh Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s 1987 book Islamic Art and Spirituality. Nasr’s conception of spirituality builds on the writings of Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schoun, who in turn took their departure from the Theosophical Society, going back to Madame Blavatsky.9 The roots of this esoterical understanding of spirituality are common with modern new age

10 Hanegraaf, Wouter J. “The New age movement and Western Esotericism”. In Daren Kemp and James R. Lewis (eds.). Handbook of New Age. Leiden: Brill. 2007. pp. 25-50. 11 Said, Edward W.. Orientalism: Western conceptions of the Orient; with a new afterword, London: Penguin, 1995. pp. 98-103. 12 See Grabar, Oleg. The Formation of Islamic Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1973. 13 Hodgson, Marshall. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and history in a world civilization. Vol 1.The Classical Age of Islam. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 1974. pp. 31-58.

religiosities. They can in turn be traced back to a Romantic effort to secure a space for the sacred in the post-Enlightenment secular age.10 In this time the divide between East and West, that might in some respect be said to have some precursors in Greek antiquity, was institutionalised and drawn into a chain of equivalences with other Enlightenment dichotomies such as female/male, emotional/rational, holy/secular, traditional/developing, barbarian/civilised.11

What is “Islamic” Art? Islamic art is a notoriously difficult label. Most of what goes under this label in Western museums was not necessarily made or used by Muslims, but simply consists of handicraft objects made under Muslim rule in Muslim majority cultural milieus.12 This generalising use of the label Islam and Islamic makes it easy to misinterpret the relation between belief and non-belief, and between sacred and secular, in the very different phenomena and discussions that the term “Islamic” refers to. This is obvious also in the very brief references to “Islam” in Taylor’s A Secular Age. The historian Marshall Hodgson introduced the terms “Islamicate” and “Islamdom” to exchange the biases and ambiguities of the term Islamic for a terminology that can differentiate religion from society and culture. Hodgson started by making a distinction between Islamic as a term for religious phenomena and Muslim for cultural traits common among Muslims. In order to talk about the areas under influence from Islamic religion he coined the phrase Islamdom. In analogy with Christendom, Islamdom is simply the society that carries a culture/civilisation. Hodgson urges us to talk about “the society of Islamdom and its Islamicate cultural traditions”. This would leave Islamic as a term for religious aspects of these cultural traditions. Like the term Christian art, Islamic art would thus only cover artistic expressions of religious ideas and functions.13 But this terminology has unfortunately not been adopted widely. We live in a secular age—and that also applies to those who argue for the religious importance of Islamic art. In the wide and differing

Islamic textual traditions not much is written on the religious significance of the objects nowadays displayed and discussed as Islamic art.14 The question, and the very label “Islamic” for this group of handicraft objects, architecture and artworks, arose after Western collectors had created a canon and collections of Islamic art, a process with very little care for the religion of Islam.15

14 See Leaman, Oliver. Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2004; Hamdouni Alami, Mohammed. Art and architecture in the Islamic tradition: Aesthetics, politics and desire in early Islam. London: I.B. Tauris. 2011. 15

On the contrary (even if it is often over-interpreted today) there were critical arguments against the use of art in Islamic traditions. Oliver Leaman highlights three of these: “1. Creative visual representation will result in reason being overwhelmed.”16 This could overthrow the balanced perception that by the critics was seen as a key to understanding creation, and for behaving correctly. “2. Concentrating on the visual obstructs understanding how things really are.”17 Even if the natural world was often described as a book to be read and understood, the understanding should seek the patterns and meanings of the phenomena, rather than the visual surface. “3. The Prophet criticized idolatry.”18 There is a huge discussion as to how to interpret the critique of images that take the critical remarks attributed to the prophet Muhammad as their departure. Does it really apply to art?19 In one hadith the Prophet is asked by a man if it is permissible to pray in a direction where there is an image (tamathil). The Prophet answered that the man should put a piece of cloth over the image when he prayed. This means he didn’t say that images were bad as such, just that one shouldn’t pray in front of one.20

See Vernoit, Stephen (ed.). Discovering Islamic Art. Scholars, Collectors and Collections, 1850-1950. London, New York, NY: I.B. Tauris. 2000; Gonella, Julia and Kröger, Jens (eds.). Wie die islamische Kunst nach Berlin kam. Der Sammler und Museumsdirektor Friedrich Sarre. Berlin: Museum für Islamische Kunst. 2015. 16 Leaman, op. cit., p. 57. 17 Leaman, op. cit., p. 59. 18 Leaman, op. cit., p. 60. 19 Leaman, op. cit., pp. 57-61. 20 Naef, Silvia. Bilder und Bilderverbot im Islam: Vom Koran bis zum Karikaturenstreit. Munich: C.H. Beck. 2007. p. 16. 21 See Bloom, Jonathan and Blair, Sheila. (eds.). The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture.

The World of Islam Festival of 1976 and the Paradigm of Islamic Art Despite the critical remarks and problematic aspects there is a well-established field named “Islamic art”,21 and Monia Abdallah has highlighted the World of Islam Festival in London in the spring of 1976 as a foundation for its contemporary paradigm. This big festival was held at a time when the secularisation paradigm enjoyed its peak.22 It was also a time before the resurgence of Islam, before

Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009. 22 Swatos, William H. J.r and Christiano, Kevin J. “Secularization theory: the course of a concept”. Sociology of Religion. Vol. 60. No. 3. 1999. pp. 209-228. 23 See Inkeles, Alex and Smith, David H. Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing Countries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1974.

24 See Abdallah, Monia. “World of Islam Festival (Londres 1976): Naissance d’un nouveau para-

the Iranian revolution, before the Afghan war—Islam was still largely viewed as a quaint remnant from a traditional way of life deemed to disappear in the ongoing modernisation of the world.23

digme pour les arts de l’Islam”. RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne. Vol. 39. No. 1. 2014. 25 Lenssen, Anneka. “Muslims to take over the Institute for Contemporary Art: the 1976 World of Islam Festival”. Middle East Studies Association Bulletin. Summer/Winter 2008. pp. 40-47. 26 Grabar, Oleg. “Geometry and Ideology: The Festival of Islam and the Study of Islamic Art”. Islamic Art and Beyond. Vol. III. Constructing the Study of Islamic Art. Franham: Ashgate. 2006, pp. 47-52. 27

The festival’s presentation of Islamic art created a paradigm focused on cultural continuity within an Islamic civilisation.24 Art historian Anneka Lenssen has similarly argued that the “Islamic Week” held at auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s during the 1976 festival, and that have since become a tradition, was paradigmatic in creating a market for contemporary Islamic art of a mystical and formal model centred on abstract unity.25 This paradigm was connected to the major part of the World of Islam festival that consisted of exhibitions of collections of traditional Islamic art in the major museums of London. Much of what was exhibited as Islamic art was collected by English arts and crafts propagators at the turn of the twentieth century seeking inspiration from its ornamental styles. Most of the objects came from what would be considered secular court milieus.26

Salamandra, Christa. “Cultural construction, the Gulf and Arab London”. In Paul Dresch and James Piscatori (eds.). Monarchies and nations: Globalisation and identity in the Arab states of the Gulf. London: I.B. Tauris. 2005. pp. 73-95. 28 See https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/ jameel-prize-4/ (Accessed 201707-25.) 29 Bruckstein Çoruh, Almut Sh. and Budde, Hendrik. “Taswir—Ein Bildatlas zu Moderne und Islam: zur Genese einer Ausstellung”. In Almut Sh. Bruckstein Çoruh and Hendrik Budde (eds.). Taswir—Islamische Bildwelten und Moderne. Berlin: Nicolai. 2009. p. 10. 30 See Fakatseli, Olga and Sachs, Julia. The Jameel Gallery of the Islamic Middle East: Summative evaluation report. London: Victoria and Albert Museum. 2008.

The World of Islam Festival was “a watershed for the Islamic art trade”.27 Its legacy can still be seen in most major exhibitions of contemporary art, as well as in for example the Jameel Prize hosted by the Victoria and Albert museum in London: “the Jameel Prize is an international award for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic tradition. Its aim is to explore the relationship between Islamic traditions of art, craft and design and contemporary work as part of a wider debate about Islamic culture and its role today.”28 Even if the prize does not have any religious connotations, it works within a traditionalist paradigm (a paradigm that is possible and makes sense only in the secular age). The same narrow understanding of Islamic tradition could be seen, for example, in the large Berlin exhibition Taswir (meaning “image”) held in 2009, juxtaposing “traditional” (old) and “modern” (new) Islamic art on the classicist themes of calligraphy, ornament and miniatures.29 In Islamic art, Islam is framed as a separate and past civilisation without direct contact with lived experiences in Europe today.30 What Abdallah and Lenssen do not mention is how the World of Islam Festival was deeply formed by a traditionalist Maryamiyya understanding of sacred and Islamic art.

The Traditionalist World of Islam The traditionalist paradigm of Islamic art was formulated by Sheikh Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Titus Burckhardt, Martin Lings and Frithjof Schuon, who were the World of Islam Festival’s most influential curators and writers, as well as core members of the Maryamiyya Sufi order. Not much has been written on this festival, and even less on the conceptualisation of Islamic art it promoted and institutionalised. Only a few have noted it. According to historian Mark Sedgwick “Traditionalist views of Islam—and Maryamis—predominated the festival.”31 The Maryamis, including the leader Nasr, are reticent to talk publicly about their affiliation, and it is thus difficult to trace their influence, which has also led to some conspiratorial thinking as to their impact, in part due to the friendship between Prince Charles and the UK Maryami leader Martin Lings.32

31 Sedgwick, Mark. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the secret intellectual history of the twentieth century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004. p. 168. 32 Sedgwick, Mark. “Guénonian traditionalism and European Islam”. In Martin van Bruinessen and Stefano Allievi (eds.). Producing Islamic Knowledge: Transmission and Dissemination in Western Europe. London. Routledge. 2011. p. 177; Dickson, W.R. Living Sufism in North America: Between tradition and transformation. PhD Dissertation. Wilfrid Laurier University. 2012. p. 146.

“The Aleppo room”, painted wood panels 2.6✗35 m, by Halab Chahibn Isa for a Christian merchant’s home, 1600-1603. Photograph: Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

33 Keeler, Paul. “Example of Islam attracts West”. The Times, March 20, 1975. 34 Said, op. cit. 35 Lamborn Wilson, Peter. “The World of Islam”. Sophia Perennis. Vol. 2. No. 2. 1976. pp. 105-14, p. 108. 36 Grabar, op. cit., p. 50. 37 See Burckhardt, Titus. Art of Islam: Language and Meaning. London: World of Islam Festival Publishing Company Ltd. 1976. 38 Dickson, op. cit., p. 216.

Against a coming “world covered with concrete from Las Vegas to Peking” the festival’s director Paul Keeler posits the world of Islam as an intact civilisation where “unity and equilibrium has always been paramount”, and predicts that “Islamic culture and civilization will be for the modern world as new and startling a discovery as the Greco-Roman world was for the Italians.”33 In this he closely mimics the Romantic idealisation of the East, as well as the Orientalist way of approaching the East as a passive source for Western consumption. This also means that there is no prospect for development or change in the Islamic world.34 To realise this idealised and self-centred representation of the counter-cultural “unity of Islam”, Keeler brought in leading Maryami scholars who shared his a-historical and Orientalist focus on Islam’s esoteric cultural essence. Peter Lamborn states that “if there could be said to be a single man who stands for, and indeed to a large extent inspired the batin [inner meaning] of the Festival, it is Frithjof Schuon.” Lamborn also calls Schuon’s book Islam and the Perennial Philosophy, published by the Festival Trust, “the heart of the heart” of the festival. The perspective of the festival fitted into the context of Western seekers for an Eastern spiritual path who had hitherto developed their ideas mainly in relation to India and the Far East, to Hinduism and Buddhism.35 Islamic art was understood as governed by a few esoteric and timeless principles.36 This concept of a spiritual Islamic art was formed in the secular age, and informed by a traditionalist nostalgia for hierarchical order.37 As William Dickson concludes “Nasr tends to view traditional social formations, including gender differentiations, as expressing an archetype of human goodness, one not to be compromised for modern social movements.”38

The Tradition of Traditionalism The birth of traditionalism is located in nineteenth-century Catholic resistance to secularity and the Theosophical Society’s interest in the esoteric in Eastern traditions. One of the important theorists of modern traditionalism that finds its expression in sacred Islamic art is Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), who from 1932

until his death developed what he called the philosophia perennis. In his private library in Boston, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who was a student at MIT, became acquainted with the traditionalist works of René Guénon, Schuon and Burckhardt in the early 1950s.39 Together with Coomaraswamy, René Guénon (1886-1951) can be said to be the founder of modern traditionalism. Guénon had already embraced Islam in 1912 and in 1930 moved to Egypt where he joined the Shadiliyya Sufi order, of which Maryamiyya is a branch.40 Traditionalism was further codified by Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998), who became a sheikh (leader) in the Alawiyya Sufi order in the 1940s, and in the late 1960s renamed it Maryamiyya in response to a strong vision of the Virgin Mary. The present sheikh of the Maryamiyya is Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who by Burckhardt is said to “ha[ve] been the first in the West to expound seriously the inner meaning of Islamic art”, according to Nasr.41 In the book Knowledge and the Sacred, Nasr states that the opposition between tradition and modernism “is total and complete as far as principles are concerned”.42 This is an important key to interpret the Maryamiyya traditionalist paradigm of Islamic art. The influential books written by Burkhardt, Lings and Nasr are all concerned with principles and metaphysical grounds. Their interpretations of works of art are always related to a true traditional wisdom, the philosophia perennis, as an opposite to the destructive intrusion of the modern secular West.43 This supposed wisdom is abstract, and there is very little variation in the descriptions of different art works and traditions. It is thus easy for the reader to feel insecure and unsophisticated when trying to grasp the deep and perennial metaphysical principles that the Maryami writers distil from the objects under discussion. Even after having read a considerable part of Nasr’s voluminous oeuvre, I still have trouble understanding how his traditional wisdom could find a place in any tangible world, traditional or secular. Maybe the point is that it can’t. Life is fundamentally esoteric for Nasr, and art is important because it is a material manifestation that can take us beyond the tangible world and let us escape its degrading secularity. There is no political programme aimed at defying secularity, even if Nasr and other traditionalist have tended to favour monarchic rulers who, like the Shah in Iran, uphold traditional hierarchies.

39 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. “An intellectual autobiography.” In Lewis Edwin Hahn, Randall E. Auxier & Lucian W. Stone Jr. (eds.) The philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr: The library of living philosophers, vol. XXVIII. Chicago: Open Court. 2001. pp. 3-86.; Mark Sedgwick. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the secret intellectual history of the twentieth century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004. p. 154. 40 Ernst. Carl W. “Traditionalism, the perennial philosophy, and Islamic studies: a review article”. Middle Eastern Studies Association Bulletin 28:2. 1994. p. 177. 41 Nasr, Seyyed Hossein and Jahanbegloo, Ramin. In search of the sacred: A conversation with Seyyed Hossein Nasr on his life and thought. Oxford: Praeger. 2010. p. 236. 42 Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Knowledge and the Sacred. New York, NY: Crossroad. 1981. p. 84. 43 See Donald R Hill. “Model Engineering: review of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Science”. Times Literary Supplement, 30 April. 1976.

44 See Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Islamic art and spirituality. New York, NY: SUNY Press. 1987. p. 181. 45 Ibid., p. 69. 46 See Sedgwick, Against the Modern World. 47 Nasr, Sayyed Hossein. Traditional Islam in the Modern world. London: Keegan Paul International. 1987. p. 14.

Nasr’s method in writing about art might be described as a kind of teleological phenomenology that reads meaning into every aspect of the objects he has chosen as expressions of tradition and truth. It is not so much about interpreting the work of art; it is more of a spiritual meditation on beauty and creation. Everything is abundant with meaning, and through contemplating the meaning of art we can reach the “world of imagination (alam al-mithal)”. Art is thus the gateway to a world “wherein are contained the original forms, colours, smells, and tastes of all that gives joy to man upon earth. The space of the Persian miniature is a recapitulation of this space and its forms and colours are a replica of this world.”44 This is an original, perennial Platonic world of ideas that the true connoisseur can enter via his contemplation of sacred art. In this world everything is balanced according to an original hierarchy. And there is no aspect of secularity present there, since secularity can only mean a destruction of sacred hierarchies. The escape to this imaginal world is the way to a good, true and happy life before and beyond today’s secular age. For the Maryamis art, rather than politics, is the route to find relief from what they see as a degrading and fragmented secularity. This emphasis on the contemplation of meaning also raises a methodological difficulty, since according to Nasr “one could not understand […] works of sacred art without penetrating deeply into the religion which has produced these works”.45 That might be true. But what we can still do is trace this particular understanding of sacredness via discipleships to Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and René Guénon, back to Philippe Encausse and Madame Blavatsky, to see that it has as much to do with Western Romantic Theosophy as it has to do with Islam.46 This should not be understood as a simple critique. Every tradition is always lived in relation to new surroundings, the Maryamiyya as well as any other. Even if decolonial critics might want to see more exclusively Islamic sources, this is not my point. I rather want to contrast this entangled and deeply secular genealogy with the idealised concept of it that Nasr produces. If traditionalists insist on the complete opposition between tradition and modernism, it is precisely because the very nature of modernism creates in the religious and metaphysical realms a blurred image within which half-truths appear as truth itself and the integrity of all that tradition represents is thereby compromised.47

The view of Islam as one archaic monolith disconnected from contemporary contextualisation is mirrored by present-day Islamophobia, as well as by Salafism. The Maryami perspective has not only been formative; the positive Western interest for Sufism is also very much coloured by the Maryamis’ selection, translation and presentation. But, as Carl Ernest has stated, this has been “one of the least well known aspects of the rejection of Western modernism”.48 Sufi concepts are presented with what might be called an esoteric and traditionalist terminology in English. How this has affected the study of Islamic mystical expressions is still under-researched.49 What we can see is that it is quite visible in popular framings of Islamic art as an ahistorical and abstracting category, and that it has blended well with the older framing of Islamic art objects as masterpieces from a lost civilisation.50

Secularity and Islam The division between state and church read into Jesus’ answer in Mark 12:14-17 to the question if it is ok to pay taxes to the Emperor has no equivalent in the Qur’an or Sunna. Muhammed and his successors were both religious and political leaders. Many contemporary Muslim intellectuals, as well as Western scholars like Bernard Lewis, have taken this as proof that Islam is incompatible with secularity.51 Others, like Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim, have argued that this perception is “really the product of propaganda of Islamist groups based on the ideological views of Abul A’la Maududi and Sayyid Qutb and not on the actual history of Islamic societies.”52 The difference between the stances of Faruqi and an-Naim is that the former talks about an Islamic theological ideal, while an-Naim talks about Islamic societies as historical realities that have never seen an exclusively religious state.

48 Ernst, op. cit., p. 176. 49 Lewisohn, Leonard. “Sufism in the thought of S. H. Nasr”. In Lewis Edwin Hahn, Randall E. Auxier and Lucian W. Stone Jr. (eds.) The philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr: The library of living philosophers, Vol. XXVIII. Chicago, IL: Open Court. 2001. p. 671. 50 Leaman, op. cit.; Troelenberg, Eva-Maria. Eine Ausstellung wird Besichtigt: Die Münchner Ausstellung von Meisterwerken Muhammedanischer Kunst 1910 in Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichtlicher Perspektive. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 2010. 51 Lewis, Bernard. “The roots of Muslim rage”. The Atlantic Monthly no 9, 1990. 52 an-Naim, Abdullahi Ahmed. Islam and the secular state: Negotiating the future of shari’a, Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. 2008. p. 45.

State and church are categories that have taken shape in European history, and they do not easily translate into non-Christian settings. The church is by definition a Christian institution with specific, but also internally different, Christian understandings of its functions and limits in the regulations of religious beliefs and its relation to the state. Even if no equal institutions are found in Islamic traditions, it is vital to stress, as an-Naim does, that every actual Muslim state

53 See Foltz, Richard C., Denny, Frederick and Baharuddin, Azizan (eds.) Islam and Ecology: A bestowed trust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2014. 54 See http://www.parsejournal. com/journal/call-for-contributions/secularity-in-collaboration-with-gibca/ (Accessed 2017-07-25.)

has had laws and institutions that haven not stemmed from religious beliefs or religiously determined rulings. A somewhat similar dichotomy as church and state is made between the sacred and the secular. This is a difficult pair for many who believe that the world is created by God, and that everything is therefore in some sense holy. This is, for example, an important starting point for many Islamically grounded environmental activists and thinkers.53 GIBCA and PARSE state that “secularity is based on the principle of a separation of religious belief (and non-belief ) from the state”.54 In Arabic this translates into a separation between iman and mulk. But, as in Christianity, the understandings of both religion and state have developed over time and the spheres to be separated have thus had different boundaries at different times. They have also been given different names. In the Qur’an no clear concept

“Bowl with bloodletting scene”, Iran, 1st half of the 13th century. Photograph: Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

of a state is expressed, and it has therefore been argued that the state is not a divinely sanctioned institution. The concept of a national Islamic state (dawla Islamiyyah) is most often said to be formulated by Maulana Maududi in a context of twentieth-century anti-colonial struggles in British India, while the idea of an Islamic Caliphate functioning as a state for all Muslims was formulated in the 1950s by Taqi al-Din al-Nabahani, founder of Hizb ut-Tahrir, in stateless Palestine.55 The Islamic concepts of belief and state are more fluid and historically situated than an attempt to fit them into an abstract secularisation theory assumes.56 Secularity translates into Arabic as alamiyyah, or dunyawiyyah, or hubbu al-alam. Al-Alam means “the world”, as does dunya, and hubbu al-alam translates as “love of the world”. These terms thus denote the worldly, most often in an implicitly negative aspect of being caught in a worldly rather than after-worldly (akhira) perspective. Still, there is no strict dichotomy between din and dunya, and the main strands of Islamic scholarly traditions have been sceptical towards ascetic ideals of turning away from the world that have been much more prominent in Christian circles.57

Another Escape from Secularity: Islamisation as a Decolonisation of Islamic art

55 Eickelman, Dale F. and Piscatori, James. Muslim politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1996. p. 53; Ayoob, Mohammed. The many faces of political Islam: Religion and politics in the Muslim world. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. 2008. p. 138. 56 See Salaymeh, Lena. Beginnings of Islamic law: Late antique Islamicate legal traditions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2016. 57 Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2003. pp. 206-209. 58 Ibid. and Markus, R.A. Christianity and the Secular. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 2006.

It might seem as if I have become totally lost in translation. Maybe. I simply hope to make the point that secularity is a Christian conception imbedded in modernity/coloniality, and that it might therefore be far from unproblematic to impose its concepts on other traditions, even if secularity has affected all contemporary states in one way or another.58 There is no escape from secularity. But for many who want to break with the Western and Christocentric framing of institutions and traditions, a struggle with secularity is inevitable. I bring this up in order to show that there are broader decolonial contexts where Islam and art (could) meet. As it stands today this does not get recognised because of how Islamic art is framed. Decolonial studies has a strong base in Latin America,

59 Rodriguez, Ileana (ed.) The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, Durham: Duke University Press. 2001. 60 Lockwood, Alanna et al. “Decolonial Aesthetics Manifesto”. 2011. https:// transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/ (Accessed 2017-07-25.) 61 SeeTuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. 1999; Phillips, Ruth B. Museum pieces: Towards the indigenization of Canadian museums. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2012; Adriana Muñoz. From Curiosa to World Culture: A history of the Latin American Collections at the Museum of World Culture, Sweden. PhD dissertation. Gothenburg: Gotarc. 2011. pp. 134-140. 62 See Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2011. 63 Said, op. cit., p. 37.

and a partial beginning in the Latin America subaltern studies group and the work of social theorists like Anibal Quijano and Walter Mignolo.59 As stated in the Decolonial Aesthetics Manifesto: The goal of decolonial thinking and doing is to continue re-inscribing, embodying and dignifying those ways of living, thinking and sensing that were violently devalued or demonized by colonial, imperial and interventionist agendas as well as by postmodern and altermodern internal critiques.60 For many museums and art institutions, the break with classical objectifying, exclusive and practised in reconnections with the epistemological perspectives of the people(s) from where objects have been collected.61 This practice has not gained any currency in the field of Islamic art. In many other art institutions decolonial fragmentation is seen as a tempting option. The point being that there is no way to sum up all the differences present in a society that is not imperialistic, and most historical efforts to display foreign culture and art in the West are tainted by colonial frames.62 One of the problems is that representations stemming from artworks, facts and experiences that do not fit in the “Western master narrative” tend to look illogical, and risk being written off as exoticism, lunacy or terrorism. They do not have an understandable beginning or end.63 A decolonial recognition of other world views as organically hybrid epistemic resources, paired with a focus on inequality and the power of global designs, is a topic contemporary art institutions and museums must address. Even if there is a real danger that such a decolonial ethos can foster an orientalist misconception that different peoples are truly different. In order to connect these abstract theoretical observations with the discussion on Islamic art and secularity I will widen the scope a little, and look at what the Islamisation of knowledge debate has had to say about art. I will propose a reading of the aims of Islamisation as a decolonial practice. The Islamisation of knowledge movement was at its strongest in the 1980s, but it still has supporters and interpreters around the world, for example in its home institution IIIT (International Institute for Islamic Thought) in Herndon, Virginia, and its branches

in twelve different countries, as well as in the IIUM (International Islamic University Malaysia). The term Islamisation of knowledge was introduced locally by Malaysian philosopher Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas in 1969, in his Preliminary statement on a general theory of the Islamization of the Malay-Indian archipelago, and universalised and popularised by his 1978 book Islam and Secularism. It was taken up and formalised into a programme in the US by the influential American-Palestinian intellectual Ismail Raji al-Faruqi (1921-1986) of the IIIT in 1982. The programme of Islamisation was put forward as an answer to the secularisation of Muslim debates, where many arguments from the modern West had become key building blocks. It was a time when most emancipatory efforts were framed by Marxist praxis and theory. The Islamisers called for an enlarged and indigenous emancipatory decolonisation of Islamic thought via the (re)creation of knowledge, culture and art built on purely Islamic sources. This would be the way to future Muslim self-reliance and prosperity.64

64 Sardar, Ziauddin. “Islamization of knowledge: A state-of-the-art report”. In Ziauddin Sardar (ed.) An Early Crescent: The future of knowledge and the environment in Islam. London: Mansell. 1989. pp. 27-56. 65 Ibid.

The different positions within the Islamisation debates all share the view that the modern world of the secular age is fragmented, and that Islam needs to be re-thought in this new environment in order to lift Muslim societies from the sad state that they are in. The problem is not with Islam as such; they all think that the problem stems from the lack of truly Islamic institutions and practices. They are all as vague in their use of the term Islamic as the Western scholars are. In order to correctly understand the modern predicament, Muslims must reconnect to their tradition and create institutions and paradigms that stem from their own grounding. All academic knowledge today is organised in Western categories that lack Islam’s organic unity.65 There are of course different perspectives within the Islamisation of knowledge debate. The traditionalist perspective of Seyyed Hossein Nasr is one. His view of knowledge is built on conceptual realism, meaning that the Islamic concepts are said to carry an essential and perennial truth unaffected by time and place. True knowledge comes from knowing the concepts that structure creation. It is a very Platonic idea. Ismail al-Faruqi and the IIIT instead focus on the need for interpretation (ijtihad). Islamic tradition needs to be reinterpreted in light of modern developments, and Islamic history is a kind of prototype

66 Stenberg, Leif. The Islamization of science: four Muslim positions developing an Islamic modernity. PhD Dissertation. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. 1996. 67 al-Faruqi, Ismail Raji. The arts of Islamic civilization. London/Washington DC: IIIT. 2014 [1986]. p. 2. 68 Mughal, M.J. and Ali, M.M. “Methodology of Islamization of Human knowledge: A comparative appraisal of proposed approaches”. Arts and Social Sciences Journal. Vol. 6, Issue 5. 2015. p. 3. 69 See Roel Meijer. Global Salafism: Islam’s new religious movement. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. 70 Amina Sayyid Muhammed. “Islamization of the visual arts” in Towards and Islamization of disciplines, 2nd ed. Riyadh: International Islamic publishing house. 1995. p. 487.

for how to think, rather than a source for truths. A third important perspective in the broader debate, which did not have that much to say about art, is represented by Ziauddin Sardar and the Idjmali group. They argued that each civilisation has its own knowledge that is adapted to its own needs and ethics. Western academic knowledge is unique in that it has detached itself from tradition and thus lost its ethical guidance and holistic perspective. This is why modern, secular knowledge is often destructive. This is why knowledge (and art) needs to be Islamised.66 According to Faruqi the message to be aesthetically expressed in an art that can merit the label Islamic art is tawhid, which literally means “making one”.67 Implicit in this statement is Faruqi’s understanding that the oneness of God and creation, which he sees as the heart of the Qur’anic message, is a disqualification of any division between a secular and a sacred sphere. Islam is ever-present and therefore all human effort should express this presence of God. This is sometimes called the tawhidic paradigm, because of its claim that the dualism between the religious and the secular “created by the West is completely alien to the Muslim world”.68 A similar argument can also be found among different strands of contemporary Salafist interpretations, which are also more inside the secular age than they want to acknowledge.69 But in contrast to the traditionalists, the call for an Islamisation is clear about its modernity: “Islam is suitable for all times, and therefore a reinterpretation, or a more fully developed understanding of it is called for at each phase in man’s history. Precisely because of these changes, the roles of art in the past cannot simply be adopted wholesale.”70 This idea about adapting to the secular age contrasts Islamisation from the traditionalist paradigm, even if it depends quite heavily on Maryami writers when it comes to art. There seems to be some similarities between decolonial curating and the Islamisation of art’s efforts. Still, the Islamisers have not been taken up as a part of the growing decolonial trend within museums and art institutions, and it has had next to no impact within the field of Islamic art. A secularist division that sees any Islamic art as part of religion, and thus separated from politics, further hinders art from playing an openly decolonial, political role.

Conclusions One of the main points of this article is that all those who write about the religious significance of Islamic art do so from within the secular world, and in relation to the secular Western category of Islamic art. This is maybe most evident in the writers calling for an Islamisation of art and more broadly of knowledge, science, and ultimately for an Islamisation of society. If Islamic art was already Islamic it wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need to be Islamised, would it?

71 See Ziuddin, op. cit.; Leaman, op. cit.

More particularly I have tried to show that Maryamiyya traditionalism might be classified as anti-secular. But, it must be noted that all its major proponents, with the possible exemption of Titus Burckhardt, who resided in the Moroccan city of Fez, have lived their lives in the North Atlantic world. They have worked deeply embedded in secular institutions such as universities, libraries and publishing houses. Their very understanding of tradition is a part and a product of the secular age. The Maryamis never express a political agenda, and their efforts to promote a traditional Islamic civilisation are only furthered via the call for a preservation of tradition. Traditional and sacred art is in their view the product of a life immersed in a naturally traditional society. Once it is lost, it is forever lost. Any political struggle to reinstall the traditional values is futile and will betray the values it sets out to save. Luckily for the traditionalists, the traditional truth is not lost. Via sacred art we can reconnect to the Platonic ideas or divine names and thus escape the fallen society that surrounds us. This is why I label their view of art as an escape from secularity. Their sacred art is a reclusive abode where the aristocratic connoisseurs can withdraw from the world that sustains them and contemplate perennial wisdom. They do not need to change the world. And why should they, given that they tend to enjoy its material privileges at the same time as they are deeply appalled by the vulgarity of secular modernity and its disrespect for natural hierarchies and standards. The conception of the sacred, as well as the concept of art that is the foundation for the traditionalistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s explication of Islamic art does not have a very deep genealogy.71 They are rather derived from a Romantic

Western understanding of art, stemming from the turn of the nineteenth century. Rather than being traditional, their claims about what is traditionally Islamic are ideological and a product of the secular age. Ismail al-Faruqi and the broader field of Islamisation of art might seem to have a similar stance, and Faruqi builds on Nasr and Burckhardt. Still, his promotion of Islamised values was socio-political and future-oriented. The Islamisation of art was one small building block in the creation of a decolonised Islamic society. This activist goal also forced him and his follower to be much more pragmatic in their theorising about the role of art in the future society. Art and aesthetics should play a vital part in the creation of a grounded and complete Islamic world view in tune with contemporary practical and socio-political demands. It should be political and decolonial. The traditionalists on the other hand are fundamentally reactionary and esoteric, seeing art as a field where connoisseurs can escape the fragmentation and politicisation of modern secularity. Islamic art as it is exhibited, discussed and practised today is often enclosed in a traditionalist frame, and functions as an escape from secularity. As such it is disconnected from the broader contemporary art scene and the struggles to understand, and emancipate, our secular age. Like in Charles Taylorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s A Secular Age, Islam is imagined as outside of secularity.

Seeing from Secular Spaces Ruba Katrib

Ruba Katrib is Curator at SculptureCenter in New York City. At SculptureCenter she has produced the group shows The Eccentrics (2015), Puddle, Pothole, Portal (2014) (co-curated with artist Camille Henrot), Better Homes (2013), and A Disagreeable Object (2012). Recent solo shows organised include exhibitions with Sam Anderson, Teresa Burga, Charlotte Prodger, Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) (all 2017), Cosima von Bonin, Aki Sasamoto, Rochelle Goldberg (all 2016), Anthea Hamilton, Gabriel Sierra, Magali Reus, Michael E. Smith, Erika Verzutti, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (all 2015), Jumana Manna, and David Douard (both 2014). Katrib also regularly organises panels, lectures, and performances at SculptureCenter. Katrib contributes texts for a number of museum catalogues and periodicals including Art in America, Artforum, Cura Magazine, Kaleidoscope, Parkett and Mousse.

Abstract

What are some of the issues at play when minority religious perspectives are brought into the discourse of contemporary art? Following an exhibition of the Cercle dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) at SculptureCenter in New York City, several considerations around the presentation and representation of traditional spiritual beliefs and their hybrids are assessed. Questions around the decolonisation of the spiritual come to the fore: how are religions deemed primitive considered and accommodated within contemporary art discourse? From secular academic perspectives, it is important to leave space for traditional beliefs and their contemporary hybrids to emerge without over-determination. Reducing, misinterpreting, over-intellectualising, and fetishising minority religions within works of art can reproduce damaging colonial frameworks. How can contemporary art in the European and American contexts navigate the presentation of a more diverse range of artists so that they may retain respect for traditional spiritual belief systems, and allow audiences to grasp part of their meaning?

“How My Grandfather Survived”, Cedrick Tamasala, 2015. Installation view, SculptureCenter, New York, 2017. Chocolate. 15✗8.3✗9.4 inches (38✗21✗24 cm). Courtesy the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; and KOW, Berlin. Photograph by Kyle Knodell.

A sculpture made

by Congolese artist and plantation worker Cedrick Tamasala, How my Grandfather Survived (2015), features a wise man—as indicated by a long beard and cloak— standing next to a boy and showing him an open book, presumably a bible. There is a large phrase imprinted in the pages, “heureux les pauvres”, referring to the biblical phrase, “blessed are the poor”. The work evokes the story of Tamasala’s grandfather, who was saved from poverty by a British missionary. It was included in a recent exhibition curated by myself at SculptureCenter in New York City, where artworks by Congolese plantation workers were on view, all of whom are members of the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC). The central aspect of the union’s work as artists is sculptures fabricated from mud in the rural plantation town of Lusanga where they are based. After they are constructed, the sculptures are photographed in Lusanga so that molds can be 3D printed in Amsterdam. They are then cast in Belgian chocolate, a material reference to Congo’s colonial history, as well as the cocoa beans and palm oil fruit that the workers gather for multi-national corporations for poverty wages. The sculptures, and more recently, drawings and video works made by the members of CATPC, circulate in exhibition venues and commercial art contexts throughout the Euro-American art world. In the exhibition, most of the content of the artwork engaged with spiritual beliefs and activities, enmeshed with representations of multinational corporate systems. Within a mixed group of artworks depicting ritual and folk beliefs, Tamasala’s sculpture offers one of the most direct critiques of Congolese colonial history in its depiction of Christian missionaries who were deployed by Belgium to convert the native population. The phrase “blessed are the poor”

1 Plantation workers Djonga Bismar, Mathieu Kilapi Kasiama, Cedrick Tamasala, Mbuku Kimpala, Mananga Kibuila, Jérémie Mabiala, Emery Mohamba, and Thomas Leba come from three plantations in the south of the DRC. Together with ecologist Rene Ngongo and the Kinshasa-based artists Michel Ekeba, Eléonore Hellio, and Mega Mingiedi they form the organisation’s leading personalities. Currently, the CATPC is actively recruiting new members. See http://www. humanactivities.org/en/catpc/ (Accessed 2017-07-26.)

“Si j'avais su”, Daniel Mvuzi, 2016. Ink and graphite on paper. 12.2✗13 inches (31✗33 cm). Courtesy the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; and KOW, Berlin. Photograph by Ernst van Deursen.

is filled with tragic irony, as it is well documented that colonial era Christianity was imposed on the Congolese people to the detriment of existing religious practices and cultures; especially in regards the victims of forced labour, who were expected to give up any desire for wealth and power, abdicating many of their rights in the name of Christian religious piety. Now entrenched in the full-blown capitalist exploitation of the twenty-first century—of a different order than that experienced by his grandfather—Tamasala has joined a union of artists who are selling artworks within the commercial market, and the profits are reinvested in their activities in Lusanga. The money they may potentially earn from their artworks, some of which are made from the same raw material they gather for pennies, can bring substantial capital to their impoverished community. The members of CATPC—defined as agricultural workers who have also become artists—are aided in these efforts by European nationals, as well as by a few wealthier and educated Congolese citizens.1

2 Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. 2011. p. 13.

The system of critique that the artists, their works, and the project organisers engage in is complex, fascinating, and has a tendency to overshadow the highly visible belief-oriented content of their works. However, the capacity to receive and engage with the spiritual aspects of these works in relation to their sociopolitical and economic entanglements is certainly possible within the sphere of contemporary art, although it is difficult to do so without creating an intellectual remove from the religious content. How can viewers outside of the artists’ community ascertain and articulate the spiritual significance of the artworks to their makers, and its meaning within a local and international context? Further, the religious content within the artwork is tied to Western categories of “primitive” beliefs. Spiritual traditions in former colonies have often been systematically prohibited and viewed as anachronistic. The “progress” that imperial powers imposed was not only technological, but also cultural, including European religious views. The priest who helped Tamasala’s grandfather also disabused him of what were perceived to be “primitive” religious views. Yet, aspects related to those beliefs are evident in the contemporary work of CATPC. How is this religious belief system received now? As Walter Mignolo has discussed, the production of knowledge through a Western secular lens in many ways has had catastrophic global impacts—often replacing the power of religion in the West —and continues to reproduce colonial frameworks if not properly interrogated and revised. Historically, Mignolo explains, “as far as knowledge was conceived imperially as true knowledge, it became a commodity to be exported to those whose knowledge was deviant or non-modern according to Christian theology and, later on, secular philosophy and sciences.”2 Mignolo argues that the colonial era’s theological approach towards dominance also underpins secular institutions. To interrogate these power structures, strategies towards decolonisation are required, which also extends into the spiritual. The colonisation of spiritual beliefs comprises a realm that must also be freed from a particular imperial and secular outlook, which poses challenges to academic perspectives and formations of rationality within contemporary art. As the field of contemporary art attempts to be more inclusive of non-Western and indigenous artists (made evident in two major exhibitions in 2017, documenta 14 and the Venice Biennale), it is imperative to address the modes of which the spiritual is comprised, practised, and orders

systems of knowledge that may seem contradictory to secular reason. Further, it is essential to examine tendencies to make “primitive” minor religions, and even major ones perceived as “foreign” to the West. In the US, where the CATPC exhibition was on view, the content depicted was alien to most viewers; it was largely illegible. At first glance, there might be the inclination to fault the artists and the project for catering to Western and now well-rehearsed expectations of African art, either performing the essentialist or problematic. Indeed, the works come from the Pende region in Congo (the tribe that famously made the objects that influenced Western avant-garde artists in the early twentieth century). A hesitancy to trust the content presented as being original comes from training in the discourses of postcolonialism, which has helped create awareness around cultural exploitation, including that performed by the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century, who were inspired by ideas stolen from African art. While these considerations are appropriate, there is another facet to the works to take into account. Although objects of cultural identity were physically taken from the Pende region by colonising forces, and their activities around object making were forbidden, today it is possible to avoid inadvertently repeating these mistakes by intellectually and spiritually removing the authority CATPC has over their works in a well-intended attempt to repair past misdeeds. Contemporary iterations of complex belief systems that should not be quickly discounted are represented within the work. The artworks mean something specific to their authors, part of which plays to a Western art world, while another aspect does not. This more abstract removal of authority over cultural content continues the complexity of colonial plunder of objects and artefacts that Ariella Azoulay puts forward in a text tangentially related to the project of CATPC. She states that “… plunder cannot be studied as the mere appropriation of discrete objects; it must simultaneously be analyzed as the destruction of the politico-material world in which people had their distinct place, and their subsequent coercion into imperial formations.”3 How might the assumption that the artists of CATPC are accommodating Western desire—because they are overtly working with Westerners and critically circulating their works in the Euro-American art world—and thus lacking in legitimacy or authenticity as artists inadvertently reproduce colonial modes of cultural denial?

3 Ariella Azoulay, “Plunder, the Transcendental Condition of Modern Art and Community of Fabri”. In Eva Barois de Caevel and Els Roelandt (eds.). Cercle d’art des travailleures de plantation congolaise. Berlin: Sternberg Press. 2017. p. 351.

Installation view, Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, SculptureCenter, New York, 2017. Courtesy Courtesy the Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise and SculptureCenter. Photograph by Kyle Knodell.

Nonetheless, there is certainly room for doubt that the works by CATPC are “authentic” depictions of spiritual beliefs that belong to local culture—the depiction of a palm oil spirit in a sculpture, a religious leader performing a ceremony in a video, and in several drawings representing violent and transformative rituals, to name a few examples. Are these images of and related to true spiritual practices or are they meant to mimic a general idea of tribal depictions in art aimed at Westerners? Do they fulfil a “primitivist” fantasy of the West, or does the Western primitivist fantasy continue to undo their contemporary validity? Do they represent pre-colonial memories? Or are they truly hybrid perspectives, informed by traditional views, mixed with Christianity and

capitalist economic structures? The hybrid is the most likely, yet least legible or understandable in its seemingly contradictory formations.

Installation view, Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, SculptureCenter, New York, 2017. Courtesy the Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise and SculptureCenter. Photograph by Kyle Knodell.

For viewers of the exhibition in New York City, the exhibition generated a range of responses from excitement for its potential to change the lives of the artists to concern that it was perhaps too close to reinforcing the very systems of exploitation it critiques. However, the spiritual dimension of the works is rarely discussed; even as the primary subject matter of the works, it often becomes secondary to the initiativeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s conceptual intricacies. The religious content originating from the works may seem almost antithetical to the critique of the governmental and corporate exploitation of workers and the circulation of contemporary art that CATPC also engages in. That these worldviews come together under the rubric of the project is a compelling aspect, as the aesthetics of institutional critique and the spiritual are not often linked.

4 Okeke-Agulu, Chika. “Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs Congolaise”. Artforum. May 2017; and Bishop, Claire. “Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs Congolaise”. Artforum. May 2017. pp. 322-324

The disbelief experienced from Western academic art viewers in regards the source and meaning work upon encountering them in a secular context is part of an important critical reading, but it also creates a distancing effect to the religious aspects of the work. In two reviews of the exhibition in Artforum, writers Chika Okeke-Agulu and Claire Bishop both dismiss the quality of the works on view, and connect them to past instances of African artifacts made solely for Westerners.4 It seems that they simply do not believe the artworks are sincere enough, skilful enough, or even critically aware enough to fulfil the operations they claim. The artists, however, have endowed their images and objects with power, knowing that they will circulate in places they are unable to go to themselves. Some of the artists engage in rituals around the objects and images they create as they make them. The figures and images represented originate from cosmologies, object histories, and experiences from

daily life that are largely foreign and unknowable to those who encounter the works outside of the communities in which they were made. However, even taking all this into account, the CATCP members are perhaps still making naive art, but the content of the works is not as simply or easily comprehended as it might seem. Perhaps because the artists have entered into forms of institutional critique around their works and the systems in which it circulates, it is difficult to take the spiritual content at face value. When the content is ignored, it is almost as if the project is an empty frame, and it does not really matter what is inside. This is in part the fault of the directness of the framing, but also of the capacity of the viewers, other artists, critics, historians, curators, etc. Why do these aspects, criticality and sincere religious belief, seem at odds with contemporary art making? The lack of attention to the works’ image-based content within its reception within the Euro-American art world, and the main emphasis placed on the economic systems it engages with, is also in part tied to issues around the legibility of the religious aspects depicted in the work. This perhaps indicates a tendency towards overlooking the presence of the unfamiliar or unknowable, without the language, experience or references to engage with it. On the other hand, the discussion around the changing systems of oppression and exploitation that the artists have experienced, or the critique of contemporary art production and circulation that the project explores are more commonly employed within intellectualised art discourse. And after all, we are not exactly certain what religious activity is depicted, whether it is “authentic” or performed for our benefit. This uncertainty creates a gap in the reception of the work, highlighting that despite the evidence of religious content as part of the work, it is less easily discussed or described within the exhibition context. While these works are intentionally shown within a Western art system, they also invoke traditions of art-making, community, and belief systems that have been appropriated and confiscated during colonial rule. They are intentionally re-invoked through this project, but they also reflect a changing culture of origin that is being consumed within the current art system—and may not behave according to expectation. As Azoulay writes briefly of this history:

102

5 Azoulay, op. cit., p. 348.

The colonization of Africa, Asia, and the Americas facilitated the transformation of a different modality, under which objects were converted into raw materials for stocking the encyclopedic museums of the West, while the infrastructure for such practices—what permitted these objects to be performed, used, displayed, and shared in their own communities—was simultaneously destroyed.5 While pointing to religious objects and symbols and their impact on cultural formations, Azoulay speaks to historical acts of cultural seizure and their impact on communities. This discussion can be extended to the contemporary context, albeit under different conditions. While CATPC willingly show their works, and are in fact making them for the West, they are also endowing them with ritual content. It is too restrictive to only recognise the works as originating from another cultural and belief system. It is also imperative to recognise the limitations of a secular academic perspective critiquing this work. There is an aspect of these artworks that is closed off to the outsider, yet this aspect should not to be ignored or subjected to a solely Western secular scrutiny. The gaps between the construction of Western secular knowledge (as described by Mignolo) and other forms of knowledge must be acknowledged—and without falling into the impulse to transform what is unknown into something that can easily be understood or studied from a Western perspective. Perhaps letting the space exist between knowing and not-knowing may provide a means to avoid the unnecessary violence in resisting the factors and perspectives that permit these works from coming into being, versus fixating on the object of study and/or disregarding its undecipherable aspects. What is the capacity of contemporary art institutions and discourses to engage with minority religions and practitioners—not as subjects to be studied and analysed, but as a valid way of perceiving the world? Undoubtedly, minority or other religious systems are often misunderstood, because they do not conform to the normative culture of the West. The 2017 Venice Biennale had a pavilion dedicated to the “Shaman”, with a generic range of artworks depicting many, usually romanticised, ideas of a native spiritual leader. The interest espoused in this subject by the curator has become a re-inscribing of primitivist frames around an idea of “other” religious practices. These kinds

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of broad generalisations are perhaps not the best way to represent a diverse, yet under-recognised, scope of living spiritual belief systems within an exhibition context. How can we avoid repeating these histories of colonialism towards other religions within the secularised field of the contemporary art world? Within the CATPC exhibition, religion underpins the work and lives of the artists. It is a hybrid belief system, one that is unknown to me as the curator of the exhibition and to most of the viewers. I also did not fully recognise the dominance of the religious presence within the works until they were all on site and assembled togetherâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;in part because many of the drawings that contain a lot of this content were brand new, and also because the cumulative effect of this content was more evident within the exhibition space. While I cannot fully grasp the content (what exactly is being depicted, to whom, by whom, why, for what reason, etc.), I also cannot deny it. It is in the messages that the works convey; it is in the challenge experienced upon learning that the sculptures are intended as fetishes, endowed with intentions by the artists, and remembering to consider this and take it seriously when viewing the work, and not just as an amusing story to share with visitors. It is a balancing act, trying not to fall into the trap of either sterilising the spiritual dimension or exoticising it. It would be tragic to occlude the participation of artists who practice and come from other belief systems out of fear of misrepresentation, yet it is also not the place of the Westernised curator or academic to claim intimate knowledge of these perspectives. Between these approaches, there is room to explore methods for transmitting the spiritual content of the works without over-inscribing them. I admit that I did not do the best job of anticipating and elaborating on this work in terms of its spiritual aspects; however, I did not reject its presence. I would articulate this part of the project differently in the future, but I also recognise that this should not only be a curatorial concern, but one that extends to critics, historians, artists, and others who view and think about contemporary art. Is there enough sensitivity and space within the contemporary art field to engage with the scope of beliefs and worldviews that secularism cannot encompass, even when our societies do not seem able

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6 Mahmood, Saba. “Religious Reason and Secular Affect”. In Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. 2013. p. 64.

to reconcile these differences? In contemporary art’s supposed embrace of difference, particularly with indigenous artists and artists from religious countries and communities, what is the responsibility to seriously engage with the spiritual context? When minority religious positions are presented in the US, they are often done so in a negative context. The most obvious example would be the increasing fear and disdain for Islam, a major world religion that ironically has become more alien even as it becomes more familiar in the West, as it is often represented as primitive and regressive. Islam is often presented as being at odds with Western secular societies in mainstream news outlets (and as the most horrendous thing in the tabloid press). And these representations of Islam are mostly constructed from Christian majority perspectives, where actual first-hand experience of Islam is limited. Beyond the negative representations of “other” religious beliefs that clog media networks today, contemporary art is a field invested in representation, and that can consider what it means to think of religion, culture and images in a non-reductive way. Further, this is an urgent inquiry as artists come from cultures in which other religious and belief systems are dominant and are politically instituted; an aspect of the work that is often ignored. Addressing the complexity of how images are read in regards to religious cultures, a specific concern for the field of visual art, anthropologist Saba Mahmood discusses the Danish cartoon controversy in which a newspaper depicted the prophet Mohammed. Perceived as blasphemous by Muslim communities, the claim to injury by the images made by Islamic leaders was also widely countered in Europe and put under secular scrutiny. Regarding the realm of representation, freedom of speech was invoked to reduce the claim of harm that the images of Mohammed caused Muslims. For others, it was further proof of irreconcilable differences, or seen as an irrelevant discussion—they were “just cartoons” and there are bigger things to worry about. In her text however, Mahmood complicates these reactions by expanding questions of representation via images into what she calls “attachment” and “cohabitation”.6 Her argument is a reminder that there are multiple modalities for relating to semiotic forms, and some that are completely ingrained into societies. She suggests that a comparison could be made between the “shock” proselytising

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missionaries experienced upon encountering “non-Christian natives who attributed divine agency to material signs”, and the “bafflement many liberals and progressives express at the scope and depth of Muslim reaction over the cartoons today.”7 Her examples articulate the differences in linguistic and representational perspectives and conceptions of sacred signs and symbols.8 But it also points to a tendency to regard a contemporary religion as incompatible with contemporary society. Indicating a secular disconnect in understanding how Muslims could be hurt by mere representation, the misapprehension arises from different symbolic orders originating from religious outlooks. Mahmood points to the Protestant originations of the semiotic order, a la Ferdinand de Saussure, that dominates secular Western societies, to make the point that religious influences have very much contributed to a secular Western idea of language, meaning and objects.9 The divide that arose out of the Danish cartoon controversy in the early 2000s, and has continued to come to attention through the Charlie Hebdo attacks just a couple of years ago, underlies a deeper confusion about the scope of difference when it comes to belief, representation and symbols, and reveals the normalising power of the secular state in matters of religion and culture. Violent reactions towards problematic imagery is abhorrent and completely unwarranted, but these acts of violence should not completely undermine what is at stake in the imagery, as well as the millions of otherwise peaceful yet still disturbed reactions to them. Attempts at expanding the scope of approaches to the offending material should not be jettisoned or closed off because of the tragic violence that ensued. As Mahmood states in reference to the inherent call for minority religious perspectives to conform, “the hope that a correct reading practice can yield compliant subjects crucially depends, in other words, upon a prior agreement about what religion should be in the modern world.”10 By suggesting that the Muslims who were offended did not perceive the images properly or progressively enough, it is thus suggested that they are backwards, primitive and unsophisticated compared to their secular Western counterparts. And if this is indeed the case, the colonial reach of Christianity is perpetuated into the present, and the modern project of secularism suffers for it.

7 Ibid., p. 67. 8 Ibid. 9 In a discussion of Webb Keane, Mahmood indicates how Protestant Christianity not only contributed to the creation of the notion of modern religion, but also to current semiotic forms. She explains Keane’s connection between Protestant Christianity and Ferdinand de Saussure’s model of language, she writes: “One finds in Saussure, argues Keane, a preoccupation not entirely different from that which agitated Calvin and other Protestant reformers: how best to institute the distinction between the transcendent world of abstract concepts and ideas and the material reality of this world.” Mahmood, op. cit., pp. 65-66. 10 Ibid., p. 69.

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11 Mignolo, op. cit., p. 62.

Mahmood’s arguments are provocative in that they reveal the normative effects of secularism on minority religious and cultural conceptions of images and objects. Within the realm of art, a field invested in images and objects, is it possible to reconcile a secular concept such as freedom of speech with a spiritual investment in an image or object? Mahmood’s examples arise from negative reactions and conflicting semiotic frameworks. However, contemporary art is similarly entrenched in Saussurean formations. Contemporary art projects that include art and artists from minority religious practices indicate a desire to move away from limiting Western symbolic orders and explore those that come from other spiritual traditions. However, many of these projects shy away from exploring the continued existence of related spiritual practices and worldviews, instead turning to science, history, and/or anthropology. Intellectually and rationally engaged, Euro-American contemporary art is tied to Western philosophical traditions, which are themselves tied to historical Christian perspectives. Under these conditions, what is the capacity for comprehension of other conceptual systems, not only past, but present? In Mignolo’s argument for decolonising religion, he speaks to the dismissal of spirituality by “hardcore materialists”. He claims that these dismissals by, “progressive secular intellectuals indirectly support capitalist’s arguments for modernity and development”.11 The articulation of minority religious beliefs, those that have been subjected to colonial forces, and those that are outside the reach of Western secular familiarity, extends into cultural realms that deepen considerations of difference. The capacity of contemporary art to not only examine issues of globalisation, economics, and politics, but to consider religious perspective as essential to the construction of world views beyond Western secular discourse, is key to an expanded notion of identity formations. Further, it is paramount that Euro-American perspectives are interrogated in their assumed secular neutrality. Within exhibition contexts, the specifics of cultural spiritual dimensions and their complications should not be subsumed under more familiar frameworks of representation. This is the challenge.

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On the Curves of Turkish-Islamic Heritage: Understanding Turkey’s Contemporary Secularity across “Ottomania” Fahrettin Ersin Alaca

Fahrettin Ersin Alaca is an industrial designer and a doctoral candidate at Aalto University’s School of Arts, Design, and Architecture, located in Helsinki. His research focuses on creative design and crafts heritage management strategies that trigger social transformation towards sustainable consumer culture. Developing an interest in theoretical and operational frameworks of sustainable development models, he currently works with clients to create brand identities and design strategies. His academic publications include the fields of design history, design culture, and service design. His most recent academic study has been working for the research and curation of a temporary exhibition, entitled Every straight line bends by its own weight, for Helsinki’s Design Museum. By combining his research interests with professional agenda, he pursues the aim to contribute to the formation of sustainable business and consumer communities.

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Abstract

After the fifteen-year continuous ruling of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), the tension of secularism has evolved to another level as national Islamic imagery and has turned from the “exotic Other” to privileged institutional identity. Signalling dynamics of populism and capitalism, politically motivated commodification of Islam is continuously reproduced by a glorified national history imagination in popular media and cultural frameworks. Revivalism of Turkish Islamic roots, for example, has become a sine qua non of contemporary state architecture. Ottoman symbolism has boomed in design, architecture, and craft works, involving pastiche applications in a myriad of household objects. This trend resonates in contemporary art too, such as in the case of Islam-inspired Erol Akyavaş’ paintings, which sold successively for record-breaking prices.

As Turkey’s secularity crisis escalates, the peculiar convolution of Islamism and consumerism catalyses phenomena where one can apply secularity as a deconstructive term to scrutinise emerging social encounters and negotiations. In this contribution, I focus on creative professionals who style, design, and create consumer items that are engaged in the commodification of Islam and diverse secularities of the everyday. Via a set of interviews I attempt to show how designers and applied artists develop philosophies and strategic capacities, apply tactics and negotiate tensions in order to reconcile their creative authority with various market pressures.

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A considerable segment

of Turkish consumers conspicuously identifies itself with the historical and ideological framework of Turkish-Islamic heritage, including a sentimental yearning for the glorious Ottoman Empire.1 Recent decades in Turkey have witnessed the emergence of the phenomenon called “Ottomania”, a consumerist interest in the Ottoman era, in which a peculiar combination of Islamist and nationalistic values serve the nostalgic yearning for a collectively imagined and glorified past. Once excluded by early Republican thought, which pursued a new foundational modern national identity, Ottoman/Islamic culture is increasingly re-appropriated in commodified symbolisms by design, marketing and consumption. As this commodification addresses the discursive intersection of business interests, politics, ideology, artistic creation and consumer aspirations, Ottomania could partly reflect complex phenomena with diverse extensions across socio-cultural, economic, political and artistic fields. Exploration of this intersection may help us gain some insight into how secularity is experienced in everyday encounters by the Turkish population that is increasingly mediatised as a polarised society due to social divisions, including those concerning secularity.

1 The Ottoman Empire existed for over six centuries and was abolished with the proclamation of the modern Turkish Republic in 1923 by a revolutionary independence movement.

A sophisticated research focus could, for example, be put on creative professionals who style, design, and create the consumer items that are engaged in the commodification of Ottoman heritage and diverse secularities of the everyday. Such a focus may help explore an untapped research of human resources who join—or deliberately avoid—the politicised consumerist ethos from the standpoint of creative production. Researching the efforts and insight of artists and designers—either employees in businesses, self-reliant entrepreneurs, or skilled workers engaged in applied arts and crafts—may

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2 Sandıkçı, Özlem and Ger, Güliz. “In-Between Modernities and Postmodernities: Theorizing Turkish Consumptionscape”. Advances in Consumer Research. Vol. 29. 2002. pp. 465-470. 3 Ottomania as a trend is on the radar of global brands too, such as the fast food company Burger King. Batuman includes Burger King’s Sultan meal menu in the Ottomania trend. Other examples of Ottomania that Batuman refers to are: “a proliferation of Ottoman cookbooks, Ottoman-style bathroom concoles, wedding invitations with Ottoman calligraphy, and graduation gowns and flight-attendant uniform designs inspired by caftans and fezzes.” Batuman, Elif. “Ottomania: A Hit TV Show Reimagines Turkey’s Imperial Past. Letters from Istanbul”. The New Yorker. February 17 & 24, 2014. http://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2014/02/17/ottomania (Accessed 2017-05-01.) 4 Sandıkçı and Ger, op. cit., p. 468. 5 Appadurai, Arjun. “Democracy Fatigue”. In Heinrich Geiselberger (ed.). The Great Regression. 2017. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 1-12.

produce a thus far unvisited perspective towards understanding the contemporary secularity in Turkey. This exploration may be carried out via a specific example of applied artists and designers who produce works referring to the cultural heritage of Turkey. I position these creative professionals on the margins of the values adopted by their modernist training and current market demands. In this vein, I argue that being on the margins makes them develop philosophies and strategic capacities, apply tactics and negotiate tensions in order to reconcile their creative authority with market pressures. This could help us to develop a pluralistic reading of varieties of secularities as dynamic constructs that are continuously built and rebuilt instead of passively accepting the stereotypical dichotomous class segmentations of secularists and Islamists as homogeneous and static frontiers.

Ottomania: Beyond a Trend In 2002, a consumer research study defines Ottomania as “highly stylistic and image-driven” and describes Turkish urbanite consumers in their “Ottoman inspired historical consumption” that stretches from “semiotically charged domains of leisure activities” to “home decoration, art, and fashion.”2 In this vein, Ottomania may be conceptualised in a framework based on consumer whims or ephemeral trends.3 Nevertheless, as the same study indicates, Ottomania allows for “softening the harsh political connotations as well as opening them up to the consumption of a broader audience.”4 Today, after fifteen years of continuous rule of the AKP—a political party whose alleged domestic and foreign political agenda is critically framed within the “neo-Ottomanism” ideology—Ottomania attracts an even greater audience. What particularly concerns this essay is the association of neo-Ottomanism with the political efforts to “marginalize and replace” Turkey’s modern secularism with “a more religious and imperial style of rule”.5 A nostalgic interest in the Ottoman era is not a product of the 2000s. Ottoman nostalgia has long been a driver for revivalist ideological

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movements in pursuit of nationalistic or Islamic unification of Turkic peoples and Muslims.6 Besides these overwhelming political ambitions, Ottoman nostalgia can be found rooted in the miniscule details of everyday life. Such a phenomenon was identified and explored by one of the most prominent authors of modern Turkish literature, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962), with the term hüzün, and more recently by the Nobel laureate novelist Orhan Pamuk. These authors have articulated hüzün as “Istanbul’s collective melancholy” that emerges as a “symptom of both Ottoman imperial loss and anxiety about future-oriented national secularism.”7 Here, inclusion of secularism when constructing hüzün may be connected to the characteristics of Kemalism, due to how its modernist reforms are structured, governed, and executed as a state policy.

6 Ottoman nostalgia is associated with the revival of pan-Turanist and pan-Islamist movements. Kaylan, Muammer. The Kemalists: Islamic Revival and the Fate of Secular Turkey. New York, NY: Prometheus Books. 2005. 7 Göknar, Erdağ. Orhan Pamuk Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel. London & New York, NY: Routledge. 2013. p. 141. 8 Toprak, Binnaz. “Religion as State Ideology in a Secular Setting: The Turkish-Islamic Synthesis”. In

The imposition of Kemalist secularism, for example, is identified as “radical secularism” that forms “a fundamental aspect of the republican ethos in Turkey”.8 Kemalist secularisation was not a declaration of a position against faith, but rather a process in which the state aimed to create a “puritan secular version of faith” instead of Islamic Law, Sharia.9 Accordingly, instead of a clear-cut separation of state institutions and religious affairs, the early Republic aimed to “subordinate” religion to the state, just like the French model Laïcité (as adopted into the Turkish constitution), and exert control over the religious practices of the public.10 Etyen Mahçupyan argues that secularism took on “alternative functions to religion”.11 This necessitated a systematic regulation institution to directly authorise the state to influence mosques, one of the most central public spaces in Turkey.12 A distinctive attempt to this end was the establishment of the regulatory state institution, the General Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı) that enabled the state to actively articulate the reformation of Islam in the context of providing religious public services, such as the education of mosque employees.13 The institution seems to be positioned at the very centre of the interrelationship between the state’s secular tasks and religion, where secular tasks are sought to nurture religious legitimacy among believers.14 Today, the institution’s authority stretches broadly across the granting of permissions for building mosques and organising pilgrimages. However, its Sunni orientation as the basis of the reformed Islam has had a “displeasing” effect on the other sectarian communities, such as those of the followers of the Alevi faith.15

Malcolm Wagstaff (ed.). Aspects of Religion in Secular Turkey. Durham: University of Durham. 1990. pp. 10-15. 9 Shankland, David. The Alevis in Turkey: The Emergence of a Secular Islamic Tradition. London & New York, NY: Routledge. 2003. p. 14. 10 Dole, Christopher. Healing Secular Life: Loss and Devotion in Modern Turkey. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2012. Dole points that some authors prefer to translate the Turkish term “laiklik” with “laicism” instead of secularism due to its strong reference to the French model of “laïcité”. For a discussion on the appropriaty of laicism and secularism for the Turkish context, see p. 240, note 8. 11 Mahçupyan, Etyen. Türkiye’de Merkeziyetçi Zihniyet, Devlet ve Din. Istanbul: Yol Yayınları. 1998. p. 262. 12 Ibid. 13 Dole, op. cit.

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14 Turan, İlter. “Religion and Political Culture in Turkey”. In Richard Tapper (ed.). Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics and Literature in a Secular State. London & New York, NY: I.B. Tauris. pp. 31-55. As Turan puts it, such a religious legitimacy is sought via sermons that are offered at mosques. For example, sermons encourage believers to pay taxes that help to render secular acts “religiously desirable”. 15 Shankland, op. cit., p. 15. In 2016, the European Court of Human Rights, in a Grand Chamber judgement, criticised the General Directorate of Religious Affairs due to its classification of the Alevi faith as a “Sufi order”. See “Turkey: Court rules freedom of religion breach in Alevi faith complaint”. Published 26 June 2016. http:// www.humanrightseurope.org/2016/04/turkey-

The “transition to democracy” with the elections in 1950, however, marks a turning point as the free-market Democrat Party started the process of “re-Islamification”, which has been continued by different political parties across the following decades.16 In the 1980s, re-Islamification could be seen as entering a new phase. Partly as a result of a global trend towards conservatism, the republican ethos was replaced by a new formulation called the “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis” in which, for example, Kemalist “pagan nationalism” was replaced with Islamic elements.17 In line with this, the 1980s marked the rise of a political Islam that went hand in hand with economic liberalisation programmes that paved the road for the emergence and development of Islamic businesses. Hardly surprisingly, this era witnessed also dramatic budget increases for the General Directorate of Religious Affairs.18

court-rules-freedom-of-religion-breach-in-alevifaith-complaint/ (Accessed 2017-07-05.) 16 Shankland, ibid. p. 15. 17 Toprak, op. cit., p. 10. 18 Tapper, op. cit.,pp. 1-27. 19 Navaro-Yashin, Yael. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2002. p. 79. 20 Sandıkçı, Özlem and Ger, Güliz. “Funda-

In this context, in line with economic liberalisation, the cultural role of commodification has arisen when claims of socio-political positions are carried out via consumerist practices not only by Islamists, but also by secularists as a “historically shared” “context and activity”.19 In contrast, to conceptualisations that characterise the rise of Islam in opposition to globalisation and consumerism, a considerable segment of Muslim consumers in Turkey (except the orthodox) adopt consumption patterns that are appropriated religiously.20 As some businesses aim to blend “Islamic ambitions with a capitalist ambition”, consumerist practices may serve to construct distinct consumer identities.21

mental Fashions: The Cultural Politics of the Turban and the Levi’s”. Advances in Consumer Research. Vol. 28. 2001. pp. 146-150. 21 Ibid., p. 148. 22 Sandıkçı, Özlem and Ger, Güliz. “How Does a Stigmatized Practice Become Fashionable?” Journal of Consumer Research. Vol. 37. June 2010. pp. 15-36. 23 Ibid., p. 16.

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Perhaps this could be best exemplified by urban women who distance themselves from a secular lifestyle with their politically-laden clothing, tesettür, which had previously been stigmatised by secularists as a political symbol and banned from state institutions such as offices, schools, and universities.22 The tesettür transformed from a stigma and uniform outlook into different styles that became “fashionable, popular, and ordinary” by the late 1990s.23 Moreover, this growing popularity and diversity stimulated internal debates among different Islamist groups about the proper way

of tesettür clothing. An “internal struggle”, influenced by a series of “countervailing interests” of different political and class-related positions. As new class and gender hierarchies have emerged, one can identify different types of tesettür, such as “soft tesettür” that signals “… middle-class notions and practices of modernity, individuality, and fashion”.24 Ottomania may incorporate a greater pluralism than the Islamic consumptionscape, both in scope and scale. An attempt to distinguish unconventional “consumption styles” among the Turkish middle classes, for example, offers four categories. These are: “spectacularist consumption”, “nationalistic consumption”, “faithful consumption”, and “historical consumption”. The authors present Ottomania under the category of “historical consumption”, where consumers symbolically refer to “collectively imagined pasts”. The categorisation indicates, however, that these categories do not necessarily exclude each other, but involve “conjunctions”.25

24 Ibid. p 32.

25 Sandıkçı and Ger, op.cit. pp. 466-469. 26 Perhaps, one of the most interesting product that is named after the show is a massage service provided by a hotel. Hürriyet.”Muhteşem Yüzyıl’ın masajı da oldu”. Published 31 December 2012. http://www.hurriyet. com.tr/muhtesem-yuzyilin-masaji-da-oldu-22265863 (Accessed 2017-04-29.) 27 Batuman, op. cit.

A striking example is Magnificent Century, a record-breaking Turkish soap opera based on the life of the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent in whose reign the Ottoman Empire achieved its zenith in the sixteenth century. Broadcast between 2011 and 2014 in 52 countries, the show has become a quintessential product of Ottomania. Its popularity stimulated the boom of a myriad of products, ranging from perfumes to jewellery, inspired by the show’s glamorous portrayal of the royal family’s life.26 Despite its popularity and excellent capacity to promote the Ottoman culture internationally, the show ignited harsh criticism from AKP members and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself in late 2012. The criticism of the depiction of the sultan’s way of life, such as spending too much time in his harem, spread across the population, with demonstrations demanding the termination of the show.27 This may illustrate that Ottomania is inescapably intertwined with politics, in the sense that it is required to address politically approved version of Ottoman culture. Like the tesettür case, there is a debate of properness—proper ways of the depiction of the Ottoman royal family and the sultan himself—although the subject of the debate is this time a fictitious soap opera. Moreover, the properness is here

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28 Ibid. 29 Balcıoğlu, Tevfik and Emgin, Bahar. “Recent Turkish Design Innovations: A Quest for Identity”. Design Issues. Vol. 30. No. 2. 2014. pp. 97-111. 30 What should be added to the research methodology is the acknowledgement of a potential agency of my personal values and world view that are partly crafted by a hard-line secularist and modernist education. Although I think that this acknowledgement helps me to avoid a biased research approach to some degree, there is still the possibility that my personal agency may have influenced the analysis of interview results and their articulation throughout the article. In this context, I have attempted to communicate my inner voice that may reveal such an agency openly and therefore it could be problematised by readers. 31 Cindoruk, Ela and Pak, Nazan. Interview on ECNP Design Studio. Istanbul. 15 November 2016.

monitored and governed by the very Head of State. The demonstrations and state pressures, such as by the Radio and Television Supreme Council, forced the show producers in subsequent episodes to include more battle scenes to adapt to the politically approved narrative of heroism rather than trysts in the harem.28 The hierarchies and countervailing interests within both the Islamic consumptionscape and Ottoman-inspired market may suggest that there are complex, interpenetrating relationships that are part of contemporary secularity in Turkey that transcend static dichotomous conceptualisations. Developments in Turkish arts, craft, design, and architecture are not isolated from the political atmosphere and the rise of Ottomania that may have commercial and popular ramifications on these creative disciplines. In pursuit of the formation of a Turkish design identity, exploration attempts in design practices and scholarly engagements have examined and employed traditional and cultural forms as well as historical and aesthetical conventions. These attempts do not only include methods of cosmetic design reinterpretations of these forms and conventions, but also innovative solutions.29 A closer look at the design environments in Turkey may reveal how Ottomania resonates with Turkey’s modern designers and their experience of secularity. This may provide an untapped research perspective. To this end, I have chosen three well-known design studios founded by female designers and a ceramic artist, each having over twenty years of professional experience in the Turkish design and applied art scenes. The specific choice is based on the effective employment of cultural heritage by these businesses in their collections that mainly depend on jewellery and home accessories. The choice is also influenced by these studios’ productive engagement in collaborative networks with traditional artisans, which I see as conflict and reconciliation platforms where modern designer and conservative artisan identities both clash and transform each other. The contact was established via semi-structured interviews that are strengthened through friendly conversations during four visits between late 2016 and early 2017.30 All located in Istanbul, the studios selected are ECNP Design, founded in 1993 by Ela Cindoruk and Nazan Pak, with training backgrounds in industrial design;31 Sasanna Design, founded in 2004 by Hülya Çelik Pabuçcuoğlu and Elif Gönenç Camcıgil, with training

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backgrounds in industrial design;32 and Özlem Tuna Design founded in 2003 by Özlem Tuna with a training background in ceramic arts.33

On the Horns of the “Designer’s Dilemma”: Building a Dialogue “Perhaps, back in those days, it was not as frightening as it is now,” says Cindoruk with slight laughter to accentuate the irony in her answer. Browsing the catalogues of her design company, ECNP, a distinctive set of jewellery design from the early 1990s stands out. Entitled “Eyüp Rings”, the set is inspired by the classical Ottoman architectural examples from the traditional Eyüp district, such as mosque domes that dominate the district’s landscape. The set clearly reflects Turkey’s unique Ottoman heritage that inalienably involves the Sunni Islamic ethos, unlike her company’s more recent design agenda. The above quote comes out after me asking her why the company’s recent design models do not incorporate the Ottoman and Turkish-Islamic heritage anymore. The irony in Cindoruk’s response is open to interpretation. To me, this may epitomise an example that may help us gain a nuanced understanding of how secularity constitutes a multi-layered framework that hosts interpenetrating roles in the contemporary design environment in Turkey. The irony, for example, may implicitly point to an obscure cultural anxiety peculiar to Turkey’s creative professionals.34 This obscurity may be partly—but not entirely—explained with the term “designer’s dilemma”, coined by Balcıoğlu and that underlines the tensions in designers’ creative decisions when they approach and reproduce the “rich cultural heritage” of Turkey.35 For Balcıoğlu, employment of certain historical contexts of national heritage is felt as a risk that involves being labelled “as an Islamite, neo-Ottomanist or nationalist of any kind, based on the works they have created.”36 Balcıoğlu argues further that there is not yet a “clear-cut political division” among designers who adhere to opposing ideological positions. Currently, Turkish designers who received a modernist education shaped by Bauhaus principles seek to establish a design identity

32 Pabuçcuoğlu Çelik, Hülya and Camcıgil, Elif Gönenç. Interview on Sasanna Design. Istanbul. 6 February 2017. 33 Tuna, Özlem. Interview on Özlem Tuna Design Studio. Istanbul. 17 November 2016. 34 I categorise creative professionals in this text as artists, designers, and architects who operate in the multi-layered intersection of artists’ creative autonomy and a combination of political, ideological and social values dictated by market forces. 35 Balcıoğlu, Tevfik. “Redesigning Turkish cult object: from tradition to ‘Modern’?” In Priscila Lena Farias et al. (eds.). 8th Conference of the International Committee for Design History & Design Studies —ICDHS 2012, Design Frontiers: Territories, Concepts Technologies, 3-6 September, 2012. São Paulo: Blucher. pp. 130-134. 36 Perhaps, I should include myself too when defining the dilemma as I have been looking for ways to deal with a similar feeling. As a researcher who received a hard-line modernist education and attempts to outline design implications of Turkey’s arts and craft heritage, I possess an inner voice that constantly tells me to maintain a delicate balance to conserve a

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secular perspective in order to avoid labels based on the above categories. In this vein, the designer’s dilemma may be relevant to the greater concept of other creative professions that include artisans, artists, and architects who offer “commodities” to the consumerist practice of ideological manifestations. 37 Balcıoğlu and Emgin, op. cit., p. 107.

of “their own”. For him, achieving such an identity may overcome the anxiety of being labelled, as long as they can achieve and maintain a characteristic design philosophy in a consistent fashion. Such a philosophy is somewhat outlined by Cindoruk as she continued her above response by saying that their company has never been “a trend follower”. She states that the company’s production agenda is shaped solely by their creative autonomy and that depends on how they define design, excluding, for example, stylistic replication of traditional motifs and forms. This account can be justified referring to Balcıoğlu and Emgin’s categorisation attempt of Turkish designers’ approach to their own heritage: they define the rubric of “design innovation”, in which “links to culture are made discursively rather than materially”. One of the examples of this category is given in Cindoruk’s plate design for a shish kebab dish that responds to a “traditional” function with an unprecedented, “contemporary design aesthetic”.37 Cindoruk’s position may also demonstrate the tension in the dialogue between an artist’s creative autonomy, shaped by the individual’s own world view, and the complex convolution of market dynamics when Turkish-Islamic heritage is involved. As these dynamics are simultaneously composed of a great diversity of internal and external factors, (e.g. profit opportunities, consumer aspirations as well as political populism and ideological diversity) the artistic dialogue itself seems to be of key strategic importance to analyse further how secularities are crafted in the creative production and consumption scenes in Turkey.

Employing Heritage in the Face of Ottomania The emergence of Ottomania is certainly not isolated from global market trends, where cultural historical capital is translated into various forms of commodities, from nostalgic heritage attractions to popular retro applications for authenticity seeking consumers. In an attempt to theorise the contradictory interrelationship between the qualities of commercial activity and authenticity, Outka coins the term “commodified authentic”. She posits the term as an “attractive package” where consumers can enjoy a unique blend of

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both camps as authenticity. It provides, for example, the values of “stability and permanence”, while commodification assures consumers to “possess and reinvent”.38 Exploring commodified authenticity as something that is not an inherent value in an object, but that can be commercially constructed and exchanged, brings us to the city planning and architectural ideas from the turn of the century. Commodified authenticity resonates with Ottomania in the sense that nostalgic revivalist attempts try to unite stability and supremacy as authentic values of the centuries-long imperial history and the heritage of the Sunni Islamic Caliphate with dynamic commercial and nationalistic ambitions. At an increasing pace, the urban landscape includes buildings with superficial transfers from Turkish-Islamic architectural motifs and symbols, as expressions of a state-sponsored revivalist culture based on the new political climate. New public buildings, such as schools, imitate Turkish-Islamic architecture styles by way of pastiche facade treatments. Nevertheless, these attempts of Ottoman commodified authenticity are subject to mounting criticism from some commentators.39 An example that concerns the architectural context comes from Kahraman, who states that although traditional arts, such as miniatures, gilding and calligraphy, have received fresh public interest in recent decades, this has failed to generate a “productive and constructive relationship” able to “systematise” the conservation of the past. Rather, it establishes a highly “theatrical” approach that involves a deep relationship with the concept of kitsch.40 This theatricality seems to be somehow connected to the contemporary secularity issue in Turkey when considering the deeply rooted bonds between consumer culture and secularity, as well as Ottomania’s potential contradiction with the ideology of Kemalist republicanism. The architectural expansion of Ottomania includes furniture in the public domain, if we include the pre-Ottoman, Turkish-Islamic civilisations such as the medieval Turco-Persian Seljuk Empire (eleventh-fourteenth centuries AD) that substantially shaped Ottoman aesthetics and culture until the emergence of the Ottoman classic era. A striking example is the design of public mailboxes currently installed on streets across Turkey by the national post and telegraph directorate. In 2008, the directorate initiated an online survey in

38 Outka, Elizabeth. Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic. Oxford & New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 2009. 39 Nevzat Sayın, one of Turkey’s most distinguished architects, for example, criticises the lack of authenticity in the emerging architectural projects that attempt to address the Turkish-Islamic historical capital. He describes the architecture of the president’s new official residence and principal workplace, inaugurated in 2014, through the analogy of a man who, in a confused state of mind, suffers from short-sightedness both when looking back [at history] and forth [towards the future]. See “Mimar Nevzat Sayın: AKP Selçuklu’yu da Osmanlı’yı da bilmiyor, AK Saray tam bir kafa karışıklığı!” Published on 26 October 2014. http://www.diken.com. tr/mimar-nevzat-sayin-akpselcukluyu-da-osmanliyi-dabilmiyor-ak-saray-tam-birkafa-karisikligi/ (Accessed 2017-07-12.) 40 Kahraman, Hasan Bülent. Türkiye’de Görsel Bilincin Oluşumu: Türkiye’de Modern Kültürün Oluşumu—1. İstanbul: Kapı Yayınları. 2013.

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41 NtvMsnbc. PTT’nin mektup atma kutusu anketi sona erdi. Published on 200803-28. URL: http://arsiv. ntv.com.tr/news/440674.asp (Accessed 2016-12-25.) 42 Jacobs, Jane M. Tradition is (not) Modern: Deterritorializing Globalization. In The End of Tradition? Nezar AlSayyad (ed.). 2004. London & New York: Routledge. pp. 29-43.

which visitors were asked to vote for the model they would like to use, choosing from 16 design options. According to the nearly 33,000 participants, the option of a small-scale architectural replication of iconic Seljuq mausoleums, kümbet, was the most popular (figure 1).41 But the public demand for this historical referencing of Turkish-Islamic heritage also registered a level of “ambivalence”.42 This ambivalence is related to the contextual shift, as the traditional design for the repository of the remains of the dead turns into a receptacle and storage place of postal envelopes. On the one hand, this dramatic shift rings alarm bells for commentators irritated by the theatrical reproduction of cultural heritage. On the other hand, an alternative reading of the constitution of design heritage as commodified authenticity may reveal a different kind of productivity and articulation of the project. Pinning down a category such as kitsch, based only on the formal qualities of design, may fall short of identifying consumerist drivers and aspirations that make up the complex relationship among the actors in the network of heritage production and consumption. The online survey for the choice templates is something entirely different from democratic user participation in design decision-making processes. Despite this shortcoming, it may still demonstrate that a public demand and political climate cross-fertilise each other. Public taste shapes Turkish-Islamic heritage as artefacts of everyday life, even though these artefacts represent dramatic shifts, like in the case of the translation of Islamic burial customs into modern secular functions.

Figure 1 The post box is a miniaturisation of the Seljuk mausoleum architecture with octagonal torso, pyramidal dome, and façade treatments.

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This does not only entitle public furniture to become an agent in the making of secularity, but also provokes reactions among designers who observe these shifts to debate the characteristics of the peculiar blend of populism, commercialisation, commodification, heritage and secularity in Turkey. For example, the all-encompassing nature of Ottomania appears to influence designers in becoming increasingly selective when drawing from heritage. Pabuçcuoğlu, from Sasanna Design, defines the current popular methods of employment of heritage as commercial opportunism when comparing to her early career experience in the 1990s. Back in those years, the employment of heritage was undertaken within a smaller circle of designers and based upon a meticulous research process that focused on a much broader historical time frame, including all Turkey’s former civilisations from the Hittites to Byzantium: All the civilizations constitute our heritage, an obsession on the Ottoman emerged in the last ten or fifteen years along with the rising power of the conservative party […] As a designer, I have never excluded any civilisation and seen all of them as my ancestors. After all, we share the same blood […] However, these recent fifteen years marked such a [political] division that I have started to lose my sympathy towards the Ottoman and feel the need to distance myself. For Pabuçcuoğlu, the division has achieved such a significant degree that Ottoman heritage has become almost synonymous with certain political meanings, based on the abusive use of historical capital for political and commercial benefit. As this statement illustrates the concerns typical to the aforementioned designer’s dilemma, Pabuçcuoğlu’s partner Camcıgil highlights an alternative perspective that stresses quality issues of the market. For her, the distance has grown not due to the intimidation of political labels, but because of the endless imitation of their creative works by money grabbers and oversaturation of the marketplace that has greatly emptied the heritage value of the Ottoman. In an effort to dissociate its design agenda from Ottomania, Sassanna Design has accelerated efforts to expand its collection towards pre-Islamic Turkic heritage, referencing shamanic and pagan beliefs. Nevertheless, heritage awareness of the public has been shaped so much

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by Ottomania that both Paubuçcuoğlu and Camcıgil have numerous times come across customers who confuse pre-Islamic heritage with the Ottoman. Pabuçcuoğlu explains this as follows: I would not like to call [the lack of awareness] ignorance but rather it is all about finding the right narrative on design that may work out like a talisman, besides a secular taste for ethnic motifs, attraction of a trend, or just an aesthetical decision […] Consumer choice on our products is not necessarily based on the framework of a certain religion but a blend of beliefs, even though Turks fall short to accept that they still maintain and practice remnants of their pagan faith. A somewhat similar public awareness problem is also underlined by Özlem Tuna. Tuna runs her ceramic art studio and she is the only one among the interviewees who employs Byzantine heritage. Inspired by the Christian mosaic wall tiling located in the famous Hagia Sophia Museum, she re-designs mosaic motifs that are then applied on her ceramic tableware products. Tuna is critical when explaining that there is a certain sense of indifference to Byzantine capital among Turkish consumers because of biased conceptualisations of Istanbul’s pre-Ottoman periods. The consumer “denial” of Istanbul’s non-Islamic history harms heritage attempts in a way that restricts and confines it to a historical period and political discourse. Tuna echoes Pabuçcuoğlu when she references a consumer awareness problem that paralyses the heritage market with the oversaturation of similar historical concepts. Consequently, Tuna’s customer portfolio in Turkey mainly includes tourists rather than local consumers.

The Secular Lens upon Islamic Heritage This awareness problem may relate to a more in-depth issue that substantially shapes the commodified authenticity of Turkish-Islamic heritage and its involvement in the collective making of secularity. The Turkish model has similar dynamics as many Islamic countries where the change towards modernism takes place not due to internal societal developments and dynamics, but instead proceeds

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primarily through a top-down process. This process is dominated by a ruling bureaucratic elite that seeks to reshape society, even though its subjects remained reluctant to cooperate in the course of the entire modernisation process. A result of this process is the generation of social crises.43 For almost 200 years, and especially during the Republican period, the history of Turkish modernism has produced a “memory” dilemma. Collective memory was meant to be erased and re-constructed in line with the new Western ideals of the Republic.44 Kahraman conceptualises the revolutionary transformation in the context of Orientalism critically. While establishing an Orientalist approach towards its own culture, for him the republic generated an imaginary West and remained incapable of understanding the West as anything other than the sphere of Occidentalism. This suggests a simple mimesis of Orientalism and the bulk of the latter’s attendant problems.45 He suggests that the model of the modern Republic in Turkey goes beyond being a “political ideological practice”; instead it produces a “specific epistemology” that is built on a sense of “internalised Orientalism” (italics in original) (içselleştirilmiş Oryantalizm).46

43 Çetin, Halis. “Gelenek ve Değişim Arasında Kriz: Türk Modernleşmesi”. Doğu Batı, Modernliğin Gölgesinde: Gelenek, Vol. 25. 2003. pp. 11-40. 44 Kahraman, op. cit. 45 It should be noted that Western modernism processes produce specific, plural Orientalisms. Kahraman, Hasan Bülent. “İçselleştirilmiş, Açık ve Gizli Oryantalizm ve Kemalizm”. Doğu Batı: Oryantalizm 1. Ağustos. Eylül, Ekim. 2002. pp. 159-185. 46 Ibid., p. 184.

The radical and all-encompassing reforms that took place in the cultural, social, economic and political spheres following the establishment of the secular republic included the abolition of the Caliphate—the Islamic theocratic leadership that had been maintained by the Ottomans for four centuries. As Sharia Law was replaced with a secular civil code, such changes addressed the public sphere in radical ways. It rendered religious institutions and dervish lodges illegal as part of the broader conversion of the Ottoman social order, which was based on religious affiliation, to a modern nation citizenry with civil rights, such as gender equality. This comprehensive conversion involved almost every aspect of life, with a mantra that labelled Ottoman history as backward, and created a national ethos centred on “contemporary civilisation”. These reforms extended from language and script, to appearance and the education system, with active bans and regulations on aspects of all the latter. Centuries-old complex traditional social values and customs were sought to be removed from everyday circulation in private and cultural spheres by modernist idealists. In this context, we should recognise that consumption became a political instrument long before the modern Republic era. The late

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47 Deringil, Selim. “The Invention of Tradition as Public Image in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1808 to 1908”. Comparative Studies in Society and History. Vol. 35. No. 1. 1993. pp. 3-29. 48 Himam, Dilek and Pasin, Burkay. “Designing a National Uniform(ity): The Culture of Sümerbank within the Context of the Turkish Nation-State Project”. Journal of Design History. Vol. 24. No. 2. 2011. pp. 157-170. 49 İhsanoğlu, Ekmeleddin. “Modern Türkiye ve Osmanlı Mirası”. Doğu Batı, Modernliğin Gölgesinde: Gelenek. Vol. 25, November-January. 2002-2003. pp. 41-58. 50 Kahraman, Hasan Bülent. Postmodernite ile Modernite Arasında Türkiye: 1980 sonrası Zihinsel, Toplumsal, Siyasal Dönüşüm. İstanbul: Everest Yayınları. 2004. pp. 38-42.

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Ottoman period, for example, saw a banning of the male head gear, the fez. The ban was oriented towards both Muslim and non-Muslim communities to eradicate any visible distinctions among these communities, as a sign of rising liberties and of the social equality of the era.47 Of course, consumption’s ideological link to culture was extended during the early years of the Republic, through dramatic reforms related to appearance. An expansive set of regulations emerged, which sought to moderate the role of centuries-old traditional social values and customs. The aim was to remove them from circulation in private and cultural spheres for modernist ideals. Sümerbank— the state-owned bank and industrial holding established in 1933, best known for clothing and textile production—serves as a good example to illustrate the scale and depth of how consumption was instigated as a deliberate ideological affiliation. Informed by a sense of national awareness, Sümerbank promoted a uniform and secular appearance for all citizens of Turkey through the production of clothes and fabrics that were based on a certain fashion, aiming to cultivate Western lifestyles and social practices.48 Hence, we can see here that design and fashion were effectively used by the Turkish revolutionists to impose modernism in the interplay of private spheres of Turkish consumers. As the new modern Turkish nationalism was constructed, the problematic relationship with memory may have shaped the perception of Ottoman cultural heritage among emerging Republic generations. The Republic, for example, used a strict differentiation in the thesis of official history between Ottoman and Turkish cultures, putting the two concepts at extreme, contrary poles. These poles were based on the idea that Turkish nationality is dramatically associated with all positive values, whereas the overthrown Ottoman received little but condemnation. This pushed the understanding of what it means to be Turkish to seek new roots, bypassing the context of Islamic heritage, and instigating a “break in the consciousness of history” for Turkish people.49 For Kahraman, the modern revolution of the Republic generates an “epistemological rupture” (bilgibilimsel kopukluk) with the adoption of Western rationalism and authoritarian modernism. It has done so in a way that has not adopted the thought of “Enlightenment”, however, lacking its material conditions and critical approach, as well as its romanticism.50

Both İhsanoğlu and Kahraman’s opinions may be set in contrast with the extremely low life standards of large segments of the population in the late Ottoman period. Instead of a single causal explanation, the collapsing imperial economy and a succession of devastating, large-scale wars that shook down the entire empire hint at a series of complex and intertwined reasons for the memory dilemma. Nevertheless, given the awareness problems that were highlighted in the interviews several times, it appears that some specific characteristics of Ottomania can be partly associated with various dimensions of collective memory. With the consumerist relations between Ottomania and secularity in mind, these dimensions may point to a complex link between how Turkey’s contemporary secularity is socially constructed and how the national and imperial pasts are collectively remembered, reproduced, and consumed in the circuit of consumption and production of heritage. It may be critical at this stage that I include not only consumers, but also myself, as the author, and the interviewees, when problematising the memorial and epistemological approaches to the Turkish-Islamic heritage. In this sense, this article’s perspective could have been influenced by the specific epistemology defined by Kahraman, which is constructed through a Western lens to gaze upon the culture into which I was born. Moreover, internalised Orientalism could have an inevitable agency, especially when translating the Islamic content into the secular context as a re-design or styling act. An illustrative example may be Camcıgil’s coaster design that contains the stylised Arabic letter “Waw”. As a popular letter in Ottoman calligraphy art, the letter symbolises God’s uniqueness and oneness in Islamic philosophy. As a result of its symbolic significance, the calligraphy examples include a diversity in terms of styling and artistic placement, where more than one Waw letters are nesting with another. This includes the “double Waw”, which contains two Waw letters that mirror each other on a diagonal axis (figures 2 and 3). The transfer of a fundamental symbolic meaning from the sphere of faith to a secular everyday function seems to illustrate a commodified authenticity in which stability and authenticity of Islamic philosophy seek a union with the fashioning of home decorations.

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Figure 2 The box, in the front, contains beverage coasters that present Camcıgil’s stylisation of the Arabic letter “Waw”.

Figure 3 The “double Waw” constitutes the main surface of the box cover. Behind, you can see another stylisation attempt of an Ottoman motif.

What differentiates Camcıgil’s design attempt from the Islamist consumptionscape or Ottomania remains a question. On the one hand, it seems certain that she does not aim to promote Islamic values, but rather, as she explicates, that she appreciates “the cultural and historical depth of Islam” in a secular [or perhaps in an Orientalist] way in search of business ends. On the other hand, gaining critical insight into her secular approach underlines the complexity and ambiguity of the commodification of Turkish-Islamic heritage that is affiliated with fluid and shifting values and practices without clear boundaries for a simplistic social dichotomy. Secularity in Turkey has so far largely been studied in ideological and political domains and focused on co-constitutive state actions and opposition positions claimed by ideologically-oriented communities such as Islamists. Perhaps, studies on the Islamic consumptionscape can show a different focus on everyday productions of secularity in consumerist societal practices beyond a bureaucratic framework. As these studies display internally heterogeneous and increasingly fragmented social strata of the Islamist consumer identity, a similar

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focus on Ottomania may demonstrate an elevated level of heterogeneity because the phenomenon stretches across a broader arena of political, ideological, and economic fields. Despite this heterogeneity, the current political atmosphere, contaminated by a referendum for constitutional change in April 2017—where Turkish voters were asked to vote for the change with a “yes” or reject with a “no”—has consolidated the existing dichotomous readings of Turkish society as a polarised nation on several issues, including secularity. Political and ideological divisions may be present and pervasive, however, imagining societal sections as passive, homogeneous and static blocks is very likely to undermine interactive dialogues that occupy various levels of everyday life and develop secularity as a social construct. These dialogues, as explored in the field of creative production in the heritage industry, can be seen as passages through which one can develop pluralist readings on how secularity is collectively negotiated and continuously reproduced, beyond the mere framework of a central authority’s political ambitions, categorical labels or normative classifications. Given the well-established and strategic importance of consumption as a political instrument in Turkish modernism, the commodification of Islamic and Ottoman symbolisms offers a key position to deconstruct the social nature of contemporary secularity in Turkey. I have argued, in this vein, that a sophisticated focus on creative professionals who style, design, and create the objects of commodification may demonstrate an untapped research area of human resources from the standpoint of creative production. This focus has manifested that such a deconstruction cannot be formulated and solved in a singular and linear fashion. In addition to political and ideological affiliations, for instance, reading secularity via commodification of Turkish-Islamic heritage incorporates a myriad of socio-cultural and politico-economic domains without regular boundaries, but rather with interpenetration of these domains and related positions. These positions are substantially influenced by the radical nature of Turkey’s modernisation history that has shaped to a certain extend

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how people collectively remember, imagine, claim, and consume the imperial and national pasts. Consequently, commodification of Turkish-Islamic heritage resonates differently in various sections of society, generating market demands and social pressures on creative professionals who employ heritage in their design and art works. What adds to these pressures is the state’s agenda to establish normative boundaries for a Turkish-Islamic identity in varied guises, from the regulation of TV programmes to the claiming of the urban landscape through references to preferred versions of Ottoman heritage. As a result, the interviewees are trying to avoid the excesses of overtly politicised and commercial forms of heritage. Their strategies include going further back in history than the Ottoman period and incorporating, for example, shamanic Turkic faith symbols or Byzantine historical capital. Employment of Turkish-Islamic heritage in their designs is justified as a secular tactic, as Camcıgil, for example, combines the exploration of “the cultural and historical depth of Islam” with profit interests. Given the deeply-rooted instrumentalisation of consumption in the modernisation of Turkey, “commodified authentic” can be seen as an agent in the social construction of secularity. As in the case of secular urban furniture, inspired by the Seljuq mausoleums, for instance, the tangible product joins the discourse as it imbues daily life with symbolism. In an attempt to deconstruct this material agent, in other words the materiality of Turkish-Islamic heritage design and the mind-set that shapes and demands it, I have introduced an array of criticisms that challenge the paradoxical relationship and the modern union between authenticity and commodity. Emerging hybrid contexts in the articulation and consumption of Turkish-Islamic design heritage may illustrate the complex nature of secularity in Turkey that cannot be recognised via stereotypical categorisations that popularly mediate Turkey as a polarised nation. The dialogues that negotiate and construct secularity are rich in nature and enormously complex. A full exploration of them exceeds the scope and capacities of this paper. However, I hope that this essay highlights the need for more design and art research with focused attention from various fields for the social construction of secularity not only in Turkey, but also in other countries of the Muslim world.

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The Street Francesc Ruiz

Francesc Ruiz builds from the comic book as aesthetic, narrative, and intellectual substrate, and as historical and operational material. Reality is produced, changed, reconstituted, and assembled in his comic books, generating stories that potentially reveal the apparatuses through which individual, social, urban, and sexual identities are constructed. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (Valencia), Gasworks (London), Centre d’Art la Panera (Lleida), Contemporary Image Collective (Cairo), and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Soﬁa, Madrid. He was one of the artists representing Spain at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Francesc Ruiz works and lives in Barcelona.

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Some variations on “The Street”, a project by Francesc Ruiz for Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2017. Image courtesy of Francesc Ruiz.

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State/Religion: Rethinking Gender Politics in the Public Sphere in Iran Azadeh Fatehrad

Dr Azadeh Fatehrad is an artist and curator based at Kingston University in London. Fatehrad’s research engages with postcolonial feminism. She has made extensive use of archival material including that held at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main, the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam, and the Institute for Iranian Contemporary Historical Studies (IICHS) in Tehran. This has allowed her to develop new insights into feminist history, in particular Iran’s women’s movement, and devise a related series of public programmes, including exhibitions, conferences and workshops, such as Hengameh Golestan: Witness 1979 at The Showroom, London (2015), and The Feminist Historiography at IASPIS, Stockholm (2016). She has presented papers on “The Neo-traditionalist: The Representation of Women in Post-revolutionary Iran” (Moderna Museet, Stockholm); “The Captured Everyday Life: Akerman and the Politics of Representation” (Westminster School of Media, London); “Challenging Gender, Embracing Intersectionality” (University of Stockholm); and “The Communal Social and Inter-political Stage of Curatorial Practice” (Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE). She is currently curator of Beyond the Frame in partnership with Iniva, University of the Arts London and the Liverpool Biennial. She has exhibited her work internationally in London, Vancouver, Amsterdam and Tehran.

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Abstract

Gender politics and the public sphere have been two key areas of intervention on the part of both the secular Pahlavi monarchy of Iran and the religious government under the Islamic regime. One of the consequences of Reza Shahâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s modernising project, which allowed for more open and progressive gender norms and gave women access to education, work and other opportunities, was the alienation of the vast majority of conservative Iranian families who no longer recognised the new secular public sphere they found outside their door. Unsurprisingly, while a small number of Iranian women managed to benefit from the changes that were supposedly enacted for their benefit, for the vast majority these reforms were hardly liberating and family life remained fairly traditional.

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Public Sphere in Iran In the late-nineteenth century, before the Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911), in the male-dominated society of Iran, women were confined to the home and rarely venturing outside. If a woman did need to go outside for a particular reason, she would have to cover herself from head to toe with a heavy veil. Thus, women were essentially prisoners in their own homes, or, in the case of concubines, the harem; at the very least, they were under the veil or cloak.1 There was no opportunity for women to socialise or gather aside from rare occasions when they could meet in mosques, at baths, at times of religious mourning, or within their neighbourhoods in the small alleys between their houses. It is important to note that this limitation for women was based on traditional beliefs among Iranian families that encouraged a male-dominated public space, a highly segregated space for men and women.

1 “To cover” or “to veil” are the equivalent of the Farsi words poshesh or hijab, meaning that the hair and body of women should be concealed by fabric. Hijab from the word hojb means “modesty” and “shyness”. A bi-hejab woman lacks such propriety. 2 Dabashi, Hamid. Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future. New York, NY: Verso. 2001. pp. 251-259.

The homes of Iranian notables reflected the segregation of space within that time period. Their houses were divided into two sections: the outer apartments for the master and his man servants and the inner apartments for the wives and their maids.2 Men and women entering the divided space had to notify one another by making some sort of noise or sound. For instance, men entering the inner quarter had to say loudly ya allah to announce their entry, and, in return, women passing through the outer quarter would walk quickly and nervously wrapped from head to toe in chadors. As it appears, the division was very strict; walls, veils and constantly keeping men and women away from each other were daily practices in Iran, in both the public and private spheres. This situation continued until the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. With a representative government and educational

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3 Badr ol-Molul Bamdad et al. From Darkness into Light: Women’s Emancipation in Iran. ed. and trans. F.R. Bagley. Irvine, CA: Mazda Publishers. 1980. p. viii. 4 Khiabany, Gholam and Sreberny, Annabele. “The Women’s Press in Contemporary Iran: Engendering the Public Sphere in NOAMI SAKR”. In Women and Media in the Middle East: Power Through Self-expression. London: I.B. Tauris. 2001. p. 18.

reform and modernisation chief among the objectives of the constitutionalists, this was a great time for women’s awakening. Indeed, women’s education was seen as a critical part of reforms that would pave the way for the creation and development of a modern Iran.3 A group of educated and enlightened women, including feminist activist and journalist Sediqeh Dowlatabadi and Al-Saltaneh (the daughter of Naser al-Din Shah of the Qajar Dynasty), played a very strong role in this time in terms of the schools and societies they founded, the articles that they wrote and the journals they published. In such a traditional society, promoting women’s education was not an easy task to take on, but despite all the setbacks, the movement endured and, around 30 years later, the government finally gave its official support to the schools for girls the women founded (Act of Unveiling, 1936). The aim of these passionate women was also to make cultural and educational material, both from a Western and traditional perspective, accessible to Iranian women. From 1925 onwards, two magazines were published, namely Nameye Banevan, Dokhtarane Iran and Etelaate Banevan (by Etelaat, one of the great publishing houses).4 The women who were active in the new political and educational realms that were created were the wives, daughters and sisters of male politicians, who could support and protect them in their endeavours. Thus, the presence, or possible presence, of women in Iran can be said to have been started by bourgeois families and was not a grassroots movement. These elite or upper-class families had the means to travel abroad and have their daughters, sisters and wives educated there. The progress they made during 1907-1926 was later built on by a larger network of middle-class women that attended their gatherings, classes and events. By the mid-twentieth century, women from different social classes and ethnic groups had become part of the movement’s activities and the male-dominated society slowly opened to women, culturally, politically and socially. It is important to note that this was the time that also marked the birth of secularisation (1924-1941) in Iranian history. Secularism in Iran was established as state policy shortly after Reza Shah was crowned king in 1924. He was very much against any kind of traditional or religious ceremony or public gathering. For instance, he banned any public

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display or expression of religious faith, including the wearing of the headscarf (hijab or chador) by women. The Islamic clergy were forbidden to preach in public, and mosque activities were heavily restricted and regulated. Badr-el-Molok Bamdad calls the first Pahlavi monarch “the Daybreak” and points to the “momentous decree” delivered by the Shah on January 7, 1936 that banned the veil in public. On this day, Reza Shah attended a graduation ceremony at the University of Tehran and gave a powerful speech in support of women generally.5 In it, he encouraged women to be more active in society, considering them to be valued members, in particular stating that he wanted to see more women being educated. He believed that, since women made up half of the Iranian population, their education would not only benefit them but also society as a whole.6 He set out a vision for the future in which women were as active and powerful as men, giving them a higher status than they had ever enjoyed before. At this point, it seemed that Iranian women would emerge out of a situation where they had been kept in ignorance to one where they would become enlightened. In fact, following the ceremony, Reza Shah actually changed the rules regarding women’s attire in public, imposing a Western-style dress code of skirt and blouse while banning the veil or, indeed, any type of hijab.

5 Badr ol-Molul Bamdad, op. cit., pp. 7-23. 6 This speech more or less echoed what Taj al-Sultan had said in 1906. See Abbas, Amanat (ed.). Taj Al-Saltana: Crowning Anguish: Memories of a Persian Princess from the Harem to Modernity 1884-1914. trans. Anna Vanzan and Amin Neshati. Washington DC: Mage Publishers. 2003.

This act can be seen as a kind of widening of the boundaries of the domestic to the public. One of Reza Shah’s aims in passing the Unveiling Act was, in fact, to democratise gender roles, in imitation of the Western model, by unveiling women and encouraging mixed social gatherings. Prior to this decision, the space outside the home was a male-dominated area; only a very limited number of women were to be found in places such as cafes, workplaces, educational settings and shops. The Act of Unveiling thus forced women to become active participants in life outside the home. In this way, women gradually became more independent and participated alongside men in society, meaning that society became a more balanced and mixed-gender environment. At the same time, following Reza Shah’s decree, any woman found covered in public was to be forcibly uncovered. One must remember that for many years previously women had been covered, and this sudden change was unsurprisingly perceived by some as an act of violence against women. Indeed, feminists like Badr-el-Molok Bamdad noted the verbal and physical harassment that veiled women were subjected

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7 Badr ol-Molul Bamdad, op. cit., pp. 7-23. 8 Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”. Social Text. Nos. 25/26. 1990. p. 62. 9 Daragahi, Haideh and Witoszek, Nina. “Anti-totalitarian Feminism? Civic Resistance in Iran”. In L. Trägårdh, N. Witoszek and B. Taylor B. (eds.). Civil Society in the Age of Monitory Democracy. Oxford: Berghahn Books. pp. 231-254.

to as Reza Shah’s soldiers forcibly unveiled them. As a result, the Unveiling Act ultimately ensured that women who had spent their entire lives wearing the veil would, in fact, remain in the private confines of their homes since, for them, walking the street unveiled was tantamount to walking the street naked.7 They perceived the “new” street as a dangerous and disconnected space (namahram) and, in order to maintain their safety and modesty, chose to stay away from this domain. Thus, after this seminal day in Iranian history, women became policed by men, and their bodies became a site of enforcement. This situation is very similar to the situation that exists in Iran today, except that now, as a result of Khomeini’s decree, women must cover themselves. This was the point at which he consolidated his power and effectively turned Iran into an Islamic state. Whoever is in power, it seems that a woman’s body is perpetually a site of state control. Despite the level of violence and aggression surrounding the Act of Unveiling, the dominant feminist response at the time was celebratory. It was seen as such an important milestone that Reza Shah made 7 January “National Women’s Day”, replacing International Women’s Day on 8 March. In essence, Reza Shah was modernising the country by destroying the boundaries between the andaroni (the private and inner domain) and the bironi (the public and outer domain). It can be said that, in a way, the official bourgeois public sphere was an institutional vehicle for major historical transformation in the context of political domination.8 Slowly but surely, progress was made in terms of women’s rights and status in Iran; however, this progress was not consistent. For instance, while women readily had access to birth control pills and abortions, to travel abroad they still needed written permission from their husbands.9 Reza Shah, and later Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, essentially pushed through quick dramatic changes without any real platform that would allow women to negotiate their life outside of the home. On the surface, these changes might appear progressive, but the core structure was not stable and much was still needed to be done for women’s rights. Under the iron rule of Reza Shah, the judiciary was secularised in 1931, but family law was left to the jurisdiction of the clergy and the dictate of Sharia law. This said, one great achievement during Reza Shah’s son’s subsequent reign was the passing of the Family Protection Law in 1967,

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which set up special courts to deal with family law matters and put useful safeguards in place with regard to the minimum marriageable age, divorce and child custody.10 On the other hand, it was during Reza Shah’s reign that the first instances of Islamic extremism also appeared in Iran as a backlash against his secularist policies.

10 Ibid. 11 Based on The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, a total theocratic control of all aspects of individual existence is being referred to as totalitarianism. The Islamic Republic of

Government and Public Life In 1941, Reza Shah was dismissed from his position and a new era in the Iranian secularist movement began. His son, Mohammad Reza Shah took power and made outstanding changes to the restrictions in place from the time of his father’s rule. From 1941 until 1953, a form of democracy was restored to Iran that improved relations with the religious clergy and softened the rules for women’s dress. This did not last long, however, as Mohammad Reza Shah gradually started to increase the level of regulation again. After 1953, the Iranian government became less democratic but increasingly secularised. In that context, it began to reduce the influence of the Shi’a clergy and organised religion in government and public life. One of the most controversial actions by Mohammad Reza Shah was in the late 1960s, when he forced the Shi’a clerical novitiates to attend public state-run universities in order to gain religious certification and license to preach, similar to the requirements on Christian schools of theology. The imposition of this new requirement was seen as extreme action towards religious members of Iran. In response to these developments, Islam really started to become a powerful force in Iranian politics in the 1960s. During this time, Shi’ite fundamentalists started to become more active, encouraging students to stand up and fight against the modernisation of society (and, in turn, against the Pahlavi monarchy). This movement was started by Ayatollahs Najafabadi and Khomeini. Their aim was to halt modernisation and establish an Islamic idealist culture. Eventually, the Islamic Shi’ite fundamentalist movement succeeded in initiating the 1979 Revolution and they have governed the country ever since. There was a short break of eight years during Mohammad Khatami’s reformist presidency (1997-2005), but apart from this fairly brief period, since 1979, Iran has been ruled

Khomeini in post-revolutionary Iran did not leave any area of life—political, social, private, public or otherwise—to the discretion of its citizens. The comparison is made in this context, but the author is aware that Arendt’s description of Hitler’s state as totalitarian is a contested matter and that it is more likely based on Gleichschaltung (the process of Nazification); thus, any comparison between the Nazi regime and Islamic Republic might be somewhat controversial. 12 Motahhari, Morteza. The Problem of Hijab, Tehran: Basir Publication. 1986. p. 29. 13 At the same time, there were many other changes to women’s lives in Iran. Most notably, sweeping reforms to family law saw the legal age for marriage for girls lowered from 18 to just 9; this shocking reform was perceived as opening the way to legalised child abuse. The number of women in the workplace also fell dramatically within three years. Between 1979 and 1981, women who did go to work (where they were kept separate from men) were checked at the gates of their workplace to make sure they were properly veiled and not wearing make-up. A de facto gender apartheid

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segregating men and women was also established in the streets, extending to public transport, cinemas, queues, and so on. Film and TV were heavily censored, with unveiled female actresses having to be blacked out. The morality police could forcefully break into private parties at any time to check who was present and what was going on, and no socialisation was allowed between unrelated men and women. Primitive laws, including flogging and stoning, were also passed, in response to the re-actualisation of the concept of “an eye for an eye”. National Women’s Day was set as 12 June, the birthday of Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad. Gradually, the Islamic government also started to demolish local cultural centres (marakeze refahe khanevade) where women would meet to learn about childcare, housework and other pursuits. Due to the disappearance of these places, the National Unity of Women’s Associations decided to run private sessions in

by Islamic fundamentalist Shi’ism. While Reza Shah and his son had established a dictatorship prior to the dominance of Islam, a form of totalitarianism was at the heart of the Islamic Republic.11 In 1979, after the deposition of the government of Prime Minister Shahpor Bakhtiar in February, an interim government was established headed by Mehdi Bazargan, but just a few months later, in November that year, most of that government resigned en masse after the US Embassy takeover by a group of radical students (the Iran hostage crisis). It is important to note that the end of Bazargan’s government officially marked the end of state-directed secularism in Iran. By February 1980, the Islamic Republican Party of Iran was officially in power, with Ayatollah Khomeini as its supreme leader. Inevitably, any secular opposition to the new Islamist government was supressed and dismantled. In fact, it took no more than four years for all secularist activity to be eradicated (by 1984). The people behind this secularist activity were branded “heretics” and “apostates” by the clerical hierarchy, and eventually jailed, executed or exiled. The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 called for the foundation of an Islamic state based on Islamic principles and the upholding of Islamic law. Islamic fundamentalists believe that women should cover themselves in order to prevent sexual tension in society, because men are not capable of controlling their sexual desire.12 They, therefore, imposed the veiling of women as a visible symbol of that commitment.13

Tehran and beyond, to keep trying to educate women and pass on the most up-todate information available, away from the control and interference of the Islamists. 14 Razi, A. Complete History of Iran (Tarih‐I-Mofassal‐I-Iran). Tehran: Eghbal and Shorakae Publication. 1956. pp. 659‐664. 15 Craik, Jennifer. Fashion: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg. 2009. p. 42.

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As previously mentioned, the compulsory wearing of the veil to hide the hair and body of women has been introduced and repealed many times throughout Iran’s history, beginning with Reza Shah’s 1936 ban on the headscarf and chador as part of his Westernising and secularising project.14 This position is, of course, in stark contrast to what occurred some 40 years later when, following the 1979 Revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini reversed this decision and decreed that women should now cover their heads. Wrapped in a black chador, these women became icons of the Islamic Revolution and, two decades later, their more relaxed, colourful and vibrant hijabs became the symbol of a new era of progress and reform in the Islamic Republic. The restriction on clothing for women in Iran is based on governmental “authoritative politics”, which turns fashion into a political statement.15 Attention may be drawn to The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, a work which

looks at Gleichschaltung (the process of Nazification) in Germany.16 With its total theocratic control of all aspects of individual existence, Khomeini’s state had a similar approach to Hitler’s state as described by Arendt, although it was not, of course, the same. In other words, the Islamic Republic (Khomeini) did not leave any area of life—political, social, private, public or otherwise—to the discretion of its citizens. One hypothesis is that the Islamic Republic’s humiliation and suppression of women in Iran is a policy designed to control society as a whole. As such, the Iranian women’s movement should be viewed as a form of civil resistance, with implications far beyond the national boundaries of Iran itself. If this holds, the Iranian women’s movement is thus an anti-totalitarian movement. Upon close examination, it appears that the focus of the feminist movement in Iran has always been about reclaiming human dignity for all people. While Swedish and Dutch feminists, for instance, ask for more and better childcare facilities for their children so that they can go out to work, and gain more leadership positions for women in industry, Iranian feminists, in contrast, are still struggling to achieve basic human rights in their own country.17 It is instructive to note that women were the first to notice the totalitarian threat of the Islamic government, a fact that was expressed clearly and unambiguously on 8 March 1979. As already noted, the emphasis of the feminist movement in Iran is on human dignity, and opposition to theocratic power. Such a movement transcends cultural and gender boundaries, which is why both men and women, and people from other countries and cultures, were so keen to become involved and show their support.

16 Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution, London: Penguin Books. 1963. 17 Daragahi and Witoszek, op. cit., pp. 231-254. 18 Amir-Ebrahimi, op. cit., p. 92.

The new veil worn following the Revolution soon came to represent the “state”. It was no longer simply an expression of religious belief and, as such, it was seen in a different way to the traditional covering. Before 1979, women who had worn a veil had done so of their own volition, since, at that time, what women wore was a matter of personal choice and was not stipulated by law. In other words, women could choose what they wore as long as they respected certain broad conventions, for instance, with regard to what type of clothing deemed suitable for their social class. However, after the Revolution, women who had previously chosen not to wear the veil were suddenly branded “infidels” (bad hijab).18 Veiling soon became indissociable from a wider Muslim identity and the veiled Iranian woman’s own religious belief became subsumed to her status as an Islamic icon.

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19 The unifying theme of the papers contained in this volume is women’s traversal of public space and the process of negotiation of their gendered identities that this entails. Many of the papers detail women’s exploration of avenues that enable self-empowerment. The notion of empowerment here connotes the idea of the carving out of public space by women for themselves, sometimes paradoxically by not even leaving the home; they are able to benefit from this and impose their presence on society as a whole. 20 Peirce, Leslie. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1993. p. 45. 21 Afsaruddin, Asma. HERMENEUTICS AND HONOR: Negotiating Female “Public” Space in Islamic/ ate Societies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. 1999. p. 10.

On the other hand, the veil is now perceived by women as more than just an instrument of segregation as it has come to facilitate their access to the public arena and given them a means to renegotiate boundaries. Veiling has been particularly useful for traditional women who now actively participate in public spaces and institutions they did not have access to before.19 This has deeply changed the existing class hierarchy, since, historically, within the Iranian context, public inaccessibility was an indicator of both male and female high social status (“conventional notions of public and private [were] not congruent with gender”; rather, they were related to the social class of the individual).20 Similarly, Asma Afsaruddin reflects on the dichotomy of private/public and questions the misconception that power is equated with visibility by citing examples of upper-class women’s seclusion from public space contrary to lower-class women’s participation in it as a result of the “new” compulsory dress code.21 Thus, the enforcement of the dress code in Iranian society since 1979 has, in fact, been an empowering tool for traditional women. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam refers to Islam as a via media between the authoritarian status quo in Iran (and the Arab world) and a liberal order that would ensure democracy, freedom of belief and religion and ultimately a liberated society. Adib-Moghaddam continues that in “all theories of Islam, freedom comes first and religious ordinances are relegated to individual choice.” The question that arises here is, how could Islam be secular or, indeed, how could freedom be interpreted under Islamic fundamentalist beliefs? There is a constant underlying notion of superiority within the Islamic belief system that does not let the existence of democratic form evolve. Adib-Moghaddam notes that “at base, secular Islam remains an ‘identitarian’ project that does not sufficiently connect the Muslim ‘self ’ to the rest of humanity.” Other religions such as “Bahais, Christians, Jews, Heathens, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, etc. continue to linger on the side roads of the Islamic highway.” Thus, there is not much space for “free” choice within the Islamic hermeneutic structure.22 If Islamic secularists exist in any form in Muslim society, they “share with their ideological, Islamist counterparts the conviction of superiority despite the nascent philosophical and critical content of their ideas.” They strongly stand for this united view point that “Muslims

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hold the holy grail of truth and that they are obliged to invite and persuade others to understand it.” Thus, Islam, even in its provisional liberal garb, could be contaminated by different forms of hegemony. Therefore, within Islamic fundamentalist culture, convincing others to follow Islam, enforcing a dress code and killing infidels is all seen as “civilising society” and not as war or aggression.23

22 Arshin Adib-Moghaddam. “Islamic Secularism and the Question of Freedom in Iran”. Middle East Critique. Vol. 25. No. 1. 2016. pp. 71-82. doi: 10. 10.1080/ 19436149.2015.1101873. 23 Ibid.

Metaphorical Public Space in Iran The restrictions on clothing for women in Iran are based on governmental “authoritative politics”, which turns fashion into a political statement.24 Frantz Fanon notes that one of the most significant elements of Muslim society is the Act of Veiling for women.25 Visitors to a Muslim country may not necessarily be aware that Muslims do not consume pork, or that Muslims avoid sexual relations during Ramadan, but, for the majority, it is the veiling of women that represents and symbolises Islamic culture.26 Veiling, therefore, is a clear and distinctive political statement in Muslim society. We can argue here that women of today in Iran are appropriating the most visible political statement at their disposal, i.e. clothing, in order to express their resistance against the conditions imposed on them. Over the past 80 years, the condition of unveiling (1936) or veiling (1979) has been violently imposed on women in Iran by political/religious powers. Even when away from such powers, the manners, behaviours and views attached to years of wearing or not wearing the covering cannot be done away with so easily, and certainly not overnight.

24 Craik, op. cit., p. 42. 25 Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. New York, NY: Grove Press. 1967. p. 162. 26 Ibid.

The hijab I iffat (hijabisation of behaviour) is another form of veiling that exists within Iranian society. The hijab I iffat is not a piece of cloth external to the female body, but rather “an invisible form of veil to be acquired through modern education, as some internal quality of self, a new modern self, a disciplined modern body that obscured women’s sexuality, obliterated its bodily presence.” Therefore, it seems as though, aside from the physical veil, there is also an invisible/metaphorical veil for both men and women in Iran, between what is and what could be seen, heard or experienced. The values that keep this invisible veil in place were established by the Islamic religion long

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27 Milani, op. cit.

ago, and have been protected and passed down between families (tradition) and societies (authoritative power). The strength of these values differs between families and is dependent mostly on social class, but for the majority of modest Muslim Iranians it is customary to be surrounded by walls and veils. An Iranian woman is expected to be constantly aware of and respect her boundaries and to keep herself protected by the interior walls of her home or by the fabric walls of her veil or covering. Farzaneh Milani notes, “[w]omen have been veiled and unveiled by force but they will remain enfolded and covered by physical and psychological traces of their modes of acceptance or rejection of the veil.”27 This description of women responding to veiling in its physical and metaphorical forms raises a very contemporary concern about veiling. I myself can very much relate to this quote, in that I live in a comparatively free society in the UK and yet struggle to unfold layers of immaterial veil that cloak my every behaviour.

Language and Architecture It can be said that veiling is perhaps one of the most symbolically significant structures of a complex cultural heritage that expresses, among other things, Iran’s prevailing attitude toward the self and other. Veiling and unveiling have had much more of an impact on Iranian society than simply covering and uncovering women. For instance, in architecture and urban planning, the need to keep the genders away from each other has necessitated particular re-arrangements, notes Professor Fataneh Farahani. In this regard, the basic architecture of the city of Tehran could be viewed as providing a glimpse into Iranian veiling culture, with Farahani stating that “the normative regulations of veiling, similar to other social, cultural and political characteristics, are embedded in architecture conventions as well as in aesthetic features.” For example, windows in houses must be above 170cm from the ground to prevent passers-by from looking in, i.e. the stipulation provides a form of protection and privacy for the people living inside the house. There are, of course, many situations where the sexes are segregated, with women typically being expected to sit at the back of the classroom and bus (as well as other modes of transport) and behind men in the mosque, as well as walking close

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to the wall.28 At the same time, veiling is also visible in the language used in post-revolutionary Iran. Various words have been replaced in favour of a more shielded/guarded and covered form of expression that has become common in both written and verbal communication. For example, pestan (breast) is now sineh (chest), pestan-band (bra or, literally, breast holder) is now sineh-band (chest holder) and kun has become a more innocuous version of basan meaning bottom. In recent years, there has been a major shift in the way the veil is perceived by women. In post-revolutionary Iran, women are allowed to appear in the public realm so long as they are separated from it by their veil (shield).29 No longer solely an instrument of their segregation, the veil has, therefore, come to facilitate women’s access to the public arena and given them a means to renegotiate boundaries. The traditional equation of veiled = absent is no longer as clear or immutable as it once was, because a woman can now be veiled and also have a public voice and presence at the same time, meaning that the situation today is double-edged.30 There is no state of full or absolute “veiled-ness” or “unveiled-ness”; whether veiled or unveiled, there is a constant duality.

28 Farahani, Fataneh. Diasporic Narratives of Sexuality: Identity Formation among Iranian-Swedish Women. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. 2007. pp. 145-149. 29 Ibid. 30 Milani, op. cit., p. 9. 31 Naficy, Hamid. “Veiled Version/Powerful Presence: Women in Post-revolutionary Iranian Cinema”. In R. Issa and S. Whitaker. Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema. London: NFT. 1999. p. 53.

The protection zones and boundaries created by veils and walls suggest a general lack of trust among Iranian men. The veil or wall expresses their “possession” of a particular female body, and, as such, their masculinity drives them to protect or hide it from other men.31 “Insiders” and “outsiders” are categorised as mahram and namahram respectively. This means that fathers, brothers, husbands and uncles are allowed to see the woman without her veil, but others are not. However, these traditional beliefs are no longer held by a new generation, and many youngsters have found a way to transgress all these barriers, albeit strictly underground. It is important to note that this observation is set within an urban middle-class vision and might differ between the social classes to a certain degree. My visit to Tehran in 2015 differed greatly from the picture I had in my mind of my previous visits in 2012, 2013 and 2014. I encountered open and relaxed male/female relationships being conducted behind closed doors in homes and in private companies (as opposed to state-owned companies). Parties in the lobbies of modern apartment blocks in West/North Tehran are now attended by men and women alike, who will dress up for the occasion. Comparisons can be made to London’s

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32 Urf: a custom or practice that forms part of a secondary source of Islamic law, which is established by high-ranking Islamic scholars based on the primary source of Islamic law (the Qur’an and Sunnah) to determine acceptable ways of doing things in an Islamic society. The issues covered by Urf are not explicitly or directly mentioned in the Qur’an or Sunnah and that is why supplementary guidance is needed. 33 Amir-Ebrahimi, op. cit., p. 89. 34 Ibid., p. 93. 35 Jenks, Chris. Transgression, London: Routledge. 2003. p. 8. 36 Ibid.

Soho on a Saturday night, the only difference being that in Tehran, these parties take place clandestinely, out of sight of the moral police. When inside people’s homes I was reminded of the London lifestyle, but its Islamic counterpart does continue to prevail on the streets of Tehran. Each time I visit my home town I seem to encounter more and more conflicting and bizarre combinations of fashion, trends and lifestyles. Public space in post-revolutionary Iran does not only encompass physical space; virtual space and blogs are also important liberal platforms for public expression. Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi, a noted Iranian feminist and sociologist, remarks, “[i]n the past two decades, gradual transgressions of Urf32 and Shari’a have become a sign of modernity and resistance for many women and young people who wish to generate changes in their situation.”33 She further explains that, “If ‘improperly veiled’ women in urban public spaces are considered a challenge to Shari’a and the rules of public conduct in the Islamic Republic, the acts of self-narration and self-disclosure in ‘Weblogistan’ are considered a transgression of Urf and the rules of patriarchy.”34 Transgressing Urf, a common practice among urban middle-class women and youths in Iran, refers to resisting the Islamisation of society. The English sociologist Chris Jenks defines transgression as “that conduct which breaks rules or exceeds boundaries”.35 As such, he considers it an indicator of modernity: “A feature of modernity, accelerating into postmodernity, is the desire to transcend—limits that are physical, racial, aesthetic, sexual, national, legal and moral… Modernity has unintentionally generated an ungoverned desire to extend, exceed, or go beyond the margins of acceptability or normal performance.”36 Even though women are fighting on this common and shared web platform, the movement is largely based upon individual acts of pushing these boundaries and restrictions. The women of today’s Iran publicly express their resistance in the form of an aesthetic rather than actual protest, appropriating the object of oppression and turning it into an object of aesthetic pleasure. It is interesting to note that the hijab, which is the primary signifier of the Muslim faith in the field of visibilities, has now been turned into an “accessory”, that is, something that can be added to and complements an outfit.

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Monument to Capital: Notes on Secular Religiosity Jonas Staal

Jonas Staal is an artist and founder of the artistic and political organisation New World Summit (2012-ongoing) and the campaign New Unions (2016-ongoing). Staal’s work includes interventions in public space, exhibitions, theatre plays, publications and lectures, focusing on the relationship between art, democracy and propaganda. Recent solo exhibitions include Art of the Stateless State (Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, 2015), New World Academy (Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 2015) and After Europe (State of Concept, Athens, 2016). His projects have been exhibited widely, including at the 7th Berlin Biennial (2012), the 31st São Paulo Bienal (2014) and the Oslo Architecture Triennial (2016). Recent books by Staal include Nosso Lar, Brasília (Jap Sam Books, 2014) and Stateless Democracy (BAK, 2015), and he is a regular contributor to e-flux Journal. Currently, Staal is finalising a commission for the design and construction of a new public parliament assigned by the autonomous Rojava government (Northern Syria), part of his long term PhD research Propaganda Art in the 21st Century at the PhDArts program of the University of Leiden.

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Abstract

Using his ongoing research project Monument to Capital as a starting point, here Staal argues that capitalism’s alienation has bred an “authorless world” to which we can only respond religiously. The Monument to Capital project represents through video and installation the artist’s ongoing research into the structural relationship between economic crisis and the construction of the highest buildings of the world. It departs from the so-called Barclay’s Skyscraper Index, which the company uses to advise its clients in which countries to invest into real estate.

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Monument to Capital (lightbox, 2013)

I would like to share some introductory notes on

my research project Monument to Capital (2013–ongoing) in the context of Nav Haq’s curatorial proposition for the ninth edition of Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, entitled WheredoIendandyoubegin—On Secularity. My friend, theologist and activist Ernst van den Hemel, argues the secular should be understood threefold. First, as the secular, a term that defines the formal separation between religious institutions on the one hand, and governmental as well as administrative institutions on the other. Second, as secularism, which relates to an ideological doctrine of which the French notion of “laïcité” is exemplary: in this case, the notion of secularism becomes inherently tied to the idea of Western progress and superiority versus the so-called “sealed time” of Islam.1 Third and final, as secularisation, a term that describes a process in which all societies will eventually naturally embrace secularism as a part of the project of modernity, leaving behind supposed “backward” religious beliefs. Secularisation is thus the ultimate consequence of the institutionalisation of secularism. Nav Haq’s use of the notion of secularity on the other hand, seems

1 The concept of sealed time is borrowed from Sven Lütticken, with which he aims to describe the caricature made of Islamic civilisation living in a state fundamentally counter-posed to progress. See Lütticken, Sven. Icons of the Market: Modern Iconoclasm and the Fundamentalist Spectacle. Berlin: Sternberg Press. 2009. p. 65.

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2 An example could be the stateless democracy of the Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava (Northern Syria), in which secularism forms one of the foundational pillars of their project of autonomous self-governance. In a region with a majority of Muslim citizens, as well as Christians, Yazidis and others, secularism in this case represents the capacity of emancipatory governance to recognise and protect different religious spheres and practices in the public domain. Such multi-religious co-existence enacted through the notion of secularism could be understood as “secularity”. 3 Walter Benjamin famously went so far as to argue that capitalism is to be considered a “pure religious cult” despite the fact that “it knows no special dogma, no theology”. See Benjamin, Walter. “Capitalism as Religion”. In Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds.). Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1 1913–1926. Cambridge/ London: The Belknap Press. 2002. p. 288.

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to indicate yet another engagement with the notion of the secular: namely as a proposition that could operate as a political paradigm of cultural and religious diversity, or even liberation.2 The Monument to Capital project is an ongoing research into the structural relationship between economic crisis and the construction of the highest buildings of the world. It departs from the so-called Barclay’s Skyscraper Index, which the company uses to advise its clients in which countries to invest into real estate. Barclay’s argument is that when the construction of a new highest building of the world is announced, this indicates an excess of speculation on the housing market and an impeding economic crisis. Although Barclay’s analysis is primarily informed by finance, it is a highly relevant document as a form of critical cultural theory. It is as if the highest buildings of the world are unconscious societal responses to the trauma of crisis, attempting to capture capital in these buildings—these gigantic ghost banks—at the very moment that capital is melting into air. As such, the highest buildings are not a symbol of economic capability, but rather monumental witnesses to its loss: a global monument to capital, continuously in the making. No longer should we consider them as separate buildings, but as one ongoing construction that essentially performs the power—and losses—of high finance capitalism. But Monument to Capital is relevant for possibly less apparent reasons as well, namely as a case study of secular religiosity. The skyscrapers that form the Monument to Capital are intended to be symbols of power of a system of rational speculation, profit engineering and calculative control over the spheres of human life and exchange. And indeed, few would declare capitalism as their “religion”, except in an ironic way. But the rituals that we engage in regarding capitalism’s performance are most certainly religious in nature.3 Rather than believing in capitalism as religion, we act religiously in relation to capitalism. Crises are the most telling in that regard. The trillions of Euros and Dollars invested to “save” the economy saw corporations and governments around the world pray at the opening of the Dow Jones Index, as if the relation between their acts (investing money) and the result (saving the economy) were completely beyond their control. In the capitalist cultural revolution the world is not what we make, but what is made for us, through powers beyond our compre-

hension.4 While mockery of ancient traditions of sacrifice are norm, it is hard to not see an equivalent of offering fruits and meats to calm some evil spirit in the “rational” operations of contemporary liberal governments. Capitalism’s alienation has bred an “authorless world” to which we can only respond to religiously.

4 Lütticken, Sven. Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice After Autonomy. Berlin: Sternberg Press. 2017. p. 7.

In this light, Monument to Capital is not just a research project into the monumentalisation of crisis; it is equally a case study of an architecture of secular religiosity.

Monument to Capital (video, 2013)

Monument to Capital (video, 2013) Selected Script

The British multinational bank Barclays, which provides financial services worldwide, annually publishes its Skyscraper Index. First developed in 1999, it shows—according to the 2012 edition—the “unhealthy correlation between construction of the next world’s tallest building and an impending financial crisis: New York 1930; Chicago 1974; Kuala Lumpur 1997; and Dubai 2010.” From the 142-foot high Equitable Life Building in New York built in 1873 at the beginning of what became known as the Long Depression, to the 2,717 foot Burj Khalifa built in 2007 at the onset of our own

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contemporary Great Recession, Barclays’s research shows that when markets go down, skyscrapers rise up. Or, conversely, whenever the world’s highest buildings pop up, the Dow Jones plunges. The Skyscraper Index thus shows a direct correlation between the world’s highest buildings and its deepest crises and may therefore be considered a unique form of capitalist self-critique. The skyscraper is a monumentalisation of capital, a desperate attempt to invoke a certain materiality of contemporary capital that has long been lost, ever since the gold standard was abolished in 1971. The skyscraper-phallus is the obscene symbol of capital, intimidating its subjects through an excessive culmination of concrete and steel, as if this absurd totem could restore the relationship between power and concrete, material wealth. Capitalism’s complete loss of control over its own dynamics, its complete reliance on an excess of surplus value, results in a reinstitutionalisation of some form of material understanding of value and possession. The building of the skyscraper is a form of exorcism, a shock therapy to recover from capitalism’s continuous self-alienation. But instead of implementing any kind of new stable material standard, the tallest buildings of the world herald precisely the opposite: they only inflate capitalist anxiety. By the time its buildings reach the top, capital is lost. And back on the ground, society falls into poverty. Thus, the anxiety resulting from the loss of capital is accompanied by a total schizophrenia: to make capital radically present, it should be permanently out of reach. In cities like Johannesburg, where Barclays itself inhabits one of the most prominent skyscrapers, social deprivation is at its highest. Its skyscrapers function as a screen preventing one from ever realising how bad the situation really is. Even though capital has evidently been lost, the towers that remain still project some form of symbolic prosperity, preventing us from confronting the actual levels of poverty and inequality. They have stored parts of capital’s “ghost” as it fled our societies, effectively suppressing our actual trauma of the loss we experience: our money is supposedly still in the bank, it will just never come out. We adore our skyscrapers, landmarks waiting for prosperity and growth to return, as magically as it came before. These skyscrapers,

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this collection of the tallest buildings in the world, form our very own “Monument to Capital”. It makes “solid” what would otherwise melt into air, yet air is all that remains once we are faced with the fact that these impenetrable ghost banks hold nothing but our traumas as asset. The Barclays Skyscraper Index thus provides us with insight into the conditions underlying this global Monument to Capital. Today, we tend to understand the history of the tallest buildings in the world as an architectural history, focusing on the aesthetic specificities of each of their visual manifestations and the specific social and political conditions of the country in which they arose. But now that our economies have lost all autonomy in a global exchange of capital, this approach, taking as its departure point the unique aesthetic character of each of these buildings, is clearly delusional. The French sociologist and philosopher Jacques Ellul argued in his 1964 book, The Technological Society (published in French as La technique ou l’enjeu du siècle in 1954), that the end of the second Industrial Revolution had resulted in an increasingly global technological society. He went on to propose in a later book, Propaganda—The Formation Of Men’s Attitudes (1965; published in French as Propagandes in 1962), the analysis of the technological construct of our contemporary cities as a form of sociological propaganda. This meant that instead of focusing on the publicly proclaimed intentions behind the construction of the highest buildings in the world, we should focus on their actual morphology. The question is not what the buildings are supposed to mean, but how they perform their meaning. Following Ellul’s line of thought, we should consider the city as ideology in action. This is the real meaning of Barclays’ Skyscraper Index. As such, their research into the highest buildings of the world is strangely Ellulian in nature; by merely looking at the correlation between the highest buildings in the world and financial crises, their collective morphology is that of an assemblage of seemingly decontextualised architectural units, each part of one and the same Monument to Capital. By approaching Barclays’s Skyscraper Index through Ellul, we are able to map out the global pulse formed by the correlation between collapsing stock indices and the rise of the highest skyscrapers. It reveals the organism of our cities, the way they contain and display

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our hopes and anxieties. Hold the Dow Jones Index upside down, and you would be able to distinguish each of the highest buildings in the world based in the chartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s peaks. Each peak, an inverted meltdown, representing its accompanying tower. Now the fundamental question arises concerning the Monument to Capital is: who is the author? If the reversed Dow Jones Index shows the perfect global blueprint of the Monument to Capital, then what is the architect more than an illustrator of an already defined economic model? The pulse of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s world. Asking about its authorship would be like asking who decides about our heart beat. When we allow ourselves to visualise the Monument to Capital, we are staring at a worldwide design for a global monumental commemoration of capital that has moved out of our reach. The Monument to Capital memorialises a world without author, a capital without capital.

Monument to Capital (installation study, 2017)

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Differences and Sameness: Secularity in the Case of Nicholas Roerich1 Mi You and Eszter Szakács

Mi You (由宓) is a curator, researcher, and academic staff member at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Her long-term research and curatorial project takes the Silk Road as a figuration for deep-time, deep-space, de-centralised and nomadic imageries. Under this theme she has curated a series of performative programmes at the Asian Culture Center Theatre in Gwangju, South Korea, and the inaugural Ulaanbaatar International Media Art Festival, Mongolia (2016). Her academic interests lie in performance philosophy, science and technology studies, as well as philosophy of immanence in Eastern and Western traditions. She is a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany) and serves as advisor to The Institute for Provocation (Beijing).

Eszter Szakács is a curator and editor based in Budapest. She has worked at tranzit.hu since 2011. There she is curator-editor of the ongoing collaborative research project Curatorial Dictionary that has been realised as an online dictionary with various offline research events, among other work. She was co-editor of the book IMAGINATION/IDEA. The Beginning of Hungarian Conceptual Art. The László Beke Collection, 1971 (Budapest/ Zurich: tranzit.hu, /JRP|Ringier, 2014) and has since 2016 been co-editor of tranzit.hu’s online international magazine on art and culture Mezosfera. Her research interests include concepts of internationalism in art and curatorial discourse, especially in relation to Eastern Europe. From 2013 to 2016 she was a guest lecturer at the Art Theory and Curatorial Studies Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts.

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Abstract

The article explores the conceptual structures behind secularity and associated concepts such as immanence versus transcendence and progress versus anachronism by drawing on the life and activities of Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947). Roerich was a Russian painter, theosophist and archaeologist. He established his reputation both as a spiritual leader and as a painter mixing syncretic religious symbols, from Orthodox Christianity, Theosophy to Tibetan Buddhism. Together with his wife, he pursued—and ultimately failed—to establish Shambhala (paradise in Tibetan Buddhism) in the area from Tibet to Southern Siberia, in a time of great geopolitical tension. We argue that Roerich’s enterprise emerges from the ruins of multiple broken orders: the empire/transnationalism, traditionalism, mysticism, religiosity and Communism on the one hand, and nation-state, modernity, scientism, secularisation and liberal democracy on the other. His curious path transgresses ideological divides and points to the categorical limits of the dichotomies they produce. His legacy is appropriated today by various, often conflicting lines of thought, canonising him in the context of Russian art, esoterism, and in Russia’s revived geopolitical interest of Eurasia.

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Svetoslav Roerich. Portrait of Nicholas Roerich, 1928. Oil and tempera on canvas. Courtesy The State Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow.

This essay aims

to examine and problematise some aspects of the conceptual history of secularity in the case study of the Russian theosophist and painter Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947). More precisely, it looks at conjunctions of secularity and politics through the tracing of Roerichâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s messianic life project to bring about the mystical kingdom of Shambhala, a pan-Buddhist state in Central-East Asiaâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a plan that also coalesced various conflicting strands of political ideologies. Following Charles Taylor, we treat secularity as it arises from the modernisation process of European societies, through which religion is taken as only one option among other ways of self-fulfilment and human flourishing, and the latter as an indicator that self-sufficient humanism has never existed on the same scale before in European societies before the Enlightenment.2

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1 We would like to thank the V-A-C Foundation as well as Beatrice von Bismarck, Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer and Maria Mkrtycheva who made it possible for us to participate in 2016 in the 5th Moscow Curatorial Summer School. The Curatorial School was that year based at and around the State Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow, which also houses a major collection of paintings by Nicholas Roerich and his son Svetoslav Roerich. We would also like to thank Kathleen Reinhardt for the many discussions and ideas we had together about Nicholas Roerich at the 5th Moscow Curatorial Summer School. 2 Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. 2007. 3 Klimentieva, Victoria. Nicholas Roerich: In search of Shambhala. MA dissertation. Graduate School of the University of Texas. 2009. p. 6. 4 Leek, Peter. Russian Painting. Bournemouth: Parkstone. 2005. p. 256. 5 Klimentieva, op. cit., pp. 9-13. 6 Ibid., p. 14. 7 Troncale, Joseph C. “The transcendent as theatre in Roerich’s paintings”. In Manju Kak (ed.). Nicholas

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Nicholas Roerich [Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh], born in Saint Petersburg in 1874, is today a renowned, and also infamous, figure in Russia and the Western world, especially in the US, as well as in Asia. Roerich was a versatile figure: already in his youth he was drawn to archaeology and ethnography, throughout his life he published literary works, he was an especially prolific painter, in the 1910s he was a successful stage designer, and he was regarded by many as a guru and a leader who, as a makeshift diplomat, was capable of exercising power and convincing people at the highest levels to support his cause in Central-East Asia.

Nicholas Roerich and the Debated Roerich Legacy Today Upon his father’s wish Nicholas Roerich studied law in Saint Petersburg, and art at the Academy of Arts in the landscape studio of Arkhip Kuinji.3 Throughout his career, Roerich created more than 7000 paintings of various themes and series, and his oeuvre is often contextualised within the broader art movement of symbolism.4 At the turn of the twentieth century Roerich belonged to the conservative part of Russian art circles, and was not always well-regarded by the more European lenient, Art Nouveau-style group and magazine Mir isskustva (World of Art). Nevertheless, he collaborated with them, and in 1910, after the movement’s heyday, he became its chairman.5 Roerich’s most notable and highly regarded theatre design works for Borodin’s Prince Igor (1909), and particularly Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) were the productions of Sergei Diaghilev, co-founder of Mir isskustva and later founder of the Ballets Russes, who trusted Roerich as an expert in ancient history and Russian medieval architecture.6 In his early period, including his stage designs, ancient Slavic culture characterised the theme of his works, such as in his 1905 painting Slavs on the Dnieper.7 This period was influenced by journeys and observations made in 1899 along the ancient trade route from Lake Ladoga to Novgorod, and in 1903 and 1904 to a range of old Russian cities—such as Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Uglich, Vladimir, Suzdal, Pskov, Izborsk and

Smolensk.8 Especially after his marriage to Helena Shaposhnikova in 1901, he turned towards mysticism and Eastern religions (Helena Roerich also acted as a medium to communicate the messages of higher powers), and together they created their own school of mysticism, the theosophy-based Agni Yoga in the 1920s. His “oriental” interest also signalled a shift in his paintings in the mid-1910s: he departed from the theme of the roots of Russian culture, and based his painterly work more on Eastern mysticism and spiritualism, creating “philosophical landscapes”.9 This metaphorical-mystic interpretation of the world subsequently defined the style and the iconography of Roerich’s work, which he practised until his death. With their two children, later Tibetologist Yuri (George) Roerich and later painter Svetoslav Roerich, the couple emigrated in 1918, after the October Revolution, from Russia to Finland, subsequently to London, and then to the United States, and they finally settled in India in the 1930s. In terms of iconography, Roerich often merged motifs of Byzantine, Western European and “Oriental” art, resulting in syncretic representations, such as in the case of his “madonnas” (Mother of the World 1924 or Madonna Oriflamma, 1932).

Roerich: A Quest and A Legacy. New Delhi: Niyogi Books. 2013. p. 201, p. 204. 8 Leek, op. cit., p. 256. 9 Troncale, op. cit., p. 204, p. 209. 10 Another significant facet of Nicholas Roerich’s life is the so-called Roerich Pact/Banner of Peace that pushed for international alliances for the preservation of cultural heritage and that essentially served as a basis for the UNESCO charter for the “Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict” See McCannon, John. “By the shores of white waters: the Altai and its place in the spiritual geopolitics of Nicholas Roerich”. Sibirica. Vol. 2. No. 2. 2002. p. 183.

Even though Roerich produced a massive body of paintings, and he is especially famous for his lavish and vibrating depiction of Himalayan, Tibetan, and Mongolian mountain ranges, his art—while its reception is still debated—we consider as rather circumstantial, not as an end in itself, but as a means (financial and spiritual) to fulfil a greater purpose. That is, the ultimate goal, the so-called Great Plan, of Roerich was not merely intellectual or artistic, but to physically establish the mystic-metaphorical kingdom of Shambhala, a “pan-Buddhist” state that would stretch across the politically heavily charged territories of Southern Siberia, Mongolia and Tibet. To achieve this, he departed on his first great expedition to Central Asia and the Himalayas between 1925 and 1928 and went on the second, so-called Manchurian expedition, to Central and East Asia from 1934 to 1936. To achieve all of these very complex goals10—especially to realise the expeditions—Roerich indiscriminately mobilised financial and diplomatic support from the Bolsheviks, the US government under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and wealthy private supporters, who regarded

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11 Ibid., p. 178. 12 See especially McCannon, John. “Competing legacies, competing visions of Russia: the Roerich movement(s) in PostSoviet Russia”. In Birgit Menzel, Michael Hagemeister, and Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (eds.). The new age of Russia: occult and esoteric dimensions. Munich: Kubon & Sagner. 2011. pp. 348-369. 13 Ibid., pp. 349-350. 14 Ibid., pp. 350-351. 15 Ibid., pp. 348-369.

him as their guru, making a peculiar case of the intertwining of the secular and the religious, and even the occult, on these missions.11 Roerich’s highly complex life project, and particularly his political ties and motivations, however, contain still many nebulous parts, due also to the fact that many ideologically opposed forces are trying to claim Roerich’s legacy as their own.12 The reception and contemporary interpretations of the Roerichs over the last decades have been just as manifold as the activities of the family itself. After Nicholas Roerich and his works were made to be forgotten in Stalinist Russia, because of their religious-occultist path, his rehabilitation started in the late 1950s. As John McCannon outlines, George Roerich returned to the USSR from India in 1957 at the invitation of Nikita Khrushchev, and a major exhibition showcasing Roerich’s painting was organised in 1958 in Moscow, thus re-canonising Roerich as an artist—but not as person of occultism, not to mention his political ties—who also proved valuable during the Cold War to position the USSR as a propagator of world peace and friendly relations with Asia.13 However, the strongest support came later, during Glasnost, when Mikhail Gorbachev embraced the Roerich legacy, eventually leading up to the securing of state funds for a Roerich museum/centre in Russia in 1989 (the so-called Soviet Roerich Foundation), and skyrocketing the interest in Roerich in the 1990s, and especially in the 2000s.14 All of this paved the way for the various, oppositional claiming of Roerich as an ideal figure through the prism of anti-Marxism, nostalgia for communism, contemporary occultism and esoteric movements, neo-Eurasianist ideas, Russian patriotism, a model for (new kinds of ) international relations, as well as the art market through the increased value of Roerich’s paintings at prestigious auction houses.15 Furthermore, the Roerich museums, galleries, memorials, and research centres (in Moscow, in Naggar, in New York, and in Saint Petersburg) as well as the different followers of Agni Yoga today also contribute to the cultivation of an intricate Roerich legacy. The latest chapter in the dispute over Roerich’s legacy and his paintings concerns the forced closure in April 2017 of one of the most visible museums dedicated to the polymath; the Nicholas Roerich

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Museum at the International Centre of the Roerichs (ICR) in Moscow. While the events are still unfolding at the time of writing, there are a few things that can be noted. The origins of the current feud also need to be traced back to the 1990s, and even earlier, to how the collections of paintings of Nicholas Roerich and his son, Svetoslav Roerich, came about in two important institutions in Moscow: the International Centre of the Roerichs and the State Museum of Oriental Art. The latter, a state-owned museum, acquired its core collection of Roerich’s paintings, drawings and the family’s personal belongings in 1974—as per the wish of Svetoslav Roerich—through the donation of Katherine Campbell-Stibbe, a close friend, follower and collector from New York.16 The Museum of Oriental Art (MoOA) subsequently opened a Roerich Hall in 1977, and later a memorial room (both of them still exist today), as part of the museum’s permanent display. 17 The question of the “rightful” heir of Roerich’s legacy, however, arose with the creation of the Soviet Roerich Foundation. While, according to the website of MoOA, a government decree ordered the establishment of a state-owned Roerich Museum as a branch of MoOA on the Lopukhin’s estate in Moscow under Yeltsin in 1993, it did not come about then. Instead the (Soviet) State Roerich Foundation was created, which received a collection of about 280 paintings by himself and his father from Svetoslav Roerich—and which (both the estate and collection) has been, as MoOA claims, illegally seized by the ICR.18 The brains and the main force behind the establishment of the ICR and the subsequent Roerich Museum was Liudmila Shaposhnikova, an Indologist who was well connected with the Soviet elites.19 The ICR has functioned as a private, non-governmental institution, however, through the funding of patrons they consider themselves as the institutional continuation of the Soviet Roerich Fund as it is stated on the ICR website.20 Through Svetoslav Roerich Shaposhnikova was also able to acquire a major donation of 432 paintings and various personal objects for the Soviet Roerich Fund, and thus for the collection of the Museum by name of Nicholas Roerich. This included portions of Nicholas and Helena’s ashes from the Roerichs’ home in India—the “airlifting” of which to Moscow, as MaCannon underlines, bordered on a potential violation of Indian law.21

16 Hacлeдиe PepихoB (The Legacy of Roerich). The State Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow. See http:// www.orientmuseum.ru/art/ roerich/default.aspx (Accessed 2017-05-16.) 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 McCannon, op. cit., p. 351. 20 Museum named after Nicholas Roerich. International Centre of the Roerichs, Moscow. See http://en.icr.su/museum/ (Accessed 2017-05-16.) 21 McCannon, op. cit., p. 352, p. 358. 22 Ibid., p. 358. 23 Holdsworth, Nick. “How an art museum in Russia became the target of Kremlin police raids”. The Christian Science Monitor. 3 May 2017. See http:// www.csmonitor.com/World/ Europe/2017/0503/How-anart-museum-in-Russia-became-the-target-of-Kremlin-police-raids (Accessed 2017-05-16.)

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Museum display, The Hall of Living Ethics, The Nicholas Roerich Museum at the International Centre of the Roerichs (ICR), Moscow. Wall labels indicate that the artistic conception of the hall was by L Shaposhnikova and were realised by A Leonov and N Cherkashina. In the foreground: the installation Messengers of the Cosmic Evolution (2008) comprising busts and on top a sculptural copy version of Nicholas Roerich’s painting Mother of the World (the original painting was made in 1937 and is now at the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York). Photo courtesy Eszter Szakács, 30 July, 2016. (As of now, according to reports, The Nicholas Roerich Museum at the International Centre of the Roerichs in Moscow is closed down.)

Throughout the years the ICR has pushed for the cosmic-messianisticspiritualist interpretation of Roerich on the one hand, and that was clearly visible in the temple-like exhibition display of the museum. On the other hand, as the ICR declared itself the sole heir of the legacy, it often collided with MoOA, and hence with state structures, by dubiously claiming rights for the Roerich collection of MoOA that the museum acquired in the 1970s and 1980s, long before the establishment of the ICR.22 The latest, and probably, for the time being, final chapter of this struggle between the two institutions came in spring 2017. On 9 March 2017, reports allege, state investigators from the Russian Ministry of the Interior, backed by riot police, raided the museum and seized 197 works of art, and on 28 April 2017 the museum carrying the name of Nicholas Roerich was evicted; in effect the museum was closed by the state.23 The artworks were taken to the Museum of Oriental Art. As has been reported, the investigators claimed that those artworks taken from the museum were allegedly bought with “stolen money” by ICR patron

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Museum display, The Hall of Living Ethics, The Nicholas Roerich Museum at the International Centre of the Roerichs (ICR), Moscow. Wall labels indicate that the artistic conception of the hall was by L Shaposhnikova and were realised by A Leonov and N Cherkashina. In the background of the installation Messengers of the Cosmic Evolution (2008): a sculptural and merged copy version of Nicholas Roerich’s three paintings, from left to right, Song of Shambhala (the original painting was made in 1943 and is now at the State Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow), Agni Yoga (the original is a design for a fresco made in 1928 and is now in a private collection), and the Burning of Darkness (the original painting was made in 1924 and is now at the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York). Photo courtesy Eszter Szakács, 30 July, 2016. (As of now, according to reports, The Nicholas Roerich Museum at the International Centre of the Roerichs in Moscow is closed down.)

and oligarch Boris Bulochnik—who was himself a follower of Roerich and whose Master Bank, named after Roerich, was already forced out of business in 2013 because of money laundering charges.24 Whereas, according to reports, the ICR denies the suspicious provenance of the works, they also seem to insinuate that state officials have accused them of being a sect to facilitate the banning of the institution, and thus nationalising a private institution.25 Although it is hard to judge at this moment what exactly has taken place, and may take place in the near future in the institutional landscape of the Roerich heritage in Moscow, the current situation attests to the contemporary relevance of the Roerich family as well as to a current clash between the spiritual/ religious and scholarly/secular interpretations of the Roerich legacy.

24 “Russia’s oriental museum takes custody of Roerich paintings seized in fraud probe”. Tass. 9 March 2017. See http://tass.com/society/934671. (Accessed 201705-16); Bershidsky, Leonid. “Even a Putin couldn’t launder Russia’s seediest bank”. Bloomberg. 20 November 2013. See https:// www.bloomberg.com/view/ articles/2013-11-20/even-aputin-couldn-t-launder-russias-seediest-bank- (Accessed 2017-05-16.)

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Context of Russian AvantGardism, Interest in Other Cultures and Cosmism 25 Holdsworth, op. cit. 26 Lee, Steven Sunwoo. The ethnic Avant-Garde: minority cultures and world revolution. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. 2015. 27 Ibid., p. 50. 28 Ibid. 29 Simakova, Marina. “No man’s space: On Russian cosmism”. e-flux Journal. # 74. June 2016. See http://www.e-flux.com/ journal/74/59823/no-man-sspace-on-russian-cosmism/ (Accessed 2017-03-05); and Siddiqi, Asif A. “Imagining the cosmos: utopians, mystics, and the popular culture of spaceflight in revolutionary Russia”. Osiris: Intelligentsia Science: The Russian Century, 1860-1960. No. 1. 2008. p. 283. 30 Young, George M. The Russian cosmists: the esoteric futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and his followers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012. p. 4. 31 Simakova, op. cit.

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Inspired by Bolshevik proclamations, Russian avant-gardists envisioned a revolution wedded with lost civilisations and religions. Steven Lee gives a colourful survey of the development of what he calls the “ethnic Avant-Garde”.26 Examples of Roerich’s contemporaries abound: Velimir Khlebnikov has famously proclaimed that Russia must embrace its Asian-ness and spoken in favour of a panAsian liberation in his “An Indo-Russian Union” manifesto (1918), while Aleksandr Blok’s Scythians (1918) depicts the Bolsheviks as the ancient nomadic tribe sweeping Eurasia in battles. Among those who identified the distinct path of Russia between West and East, modernity and antiquity, is the star of Russian futurism, Velimir Khlebnikov. More than indigenising the foreign term “futurist”, Khlebnikov himself coined and preferred the Russian budetliane (people of the future), which one critic described as distinct from futurism in its embrace of the past, its “creation of new things, grown on the magnificent traditions of Russian antiquity”.27 This was in line with Khlebnikov’s stated goal of enabling the human brain to grasp the ever-elusive fourth dimension, that is, “the axis of time”. He envisioned artists and writers retreating to an “independent nation of time”, free from everyday life and consumerism.28 While Roerich himself is not considered a cosmist par excellence, his ties to artists closer to the movement, such as the group Amaravella, has been asserted.29 Russian cosmism had at its centre notions of cosmic evolution, futurism, human resurrection and immortality, scientific-technological advancement, especially in relation to space travel, as well as occult and esoteric ideas.30 Similarly to the heightened contemporary interest in Roerich, cosmism, also previously banned because of its affinity with religiosity, has recently resurfaced in Russian philosophical and intellectual discourse, starting from the late 1980s, early 1990s and peaking in more recent years.31 Due to cosmism’s syncretic nature, and again not unlike the legacy of Roerich, it lends itself to leading to, or being deployed by, not only

technological-utopian optimism, but also eugenics or nationalism.32 Recently, prominent contemporary art theorists, artists and art institutions have also started to re-examine Russian cosmism.33 As we unpack the conceptual history around religiosity recurring in political debates and contemporary life in the following section, we will end up considering socialist realism and Roerich’s mystic worldism as two sides of the same coin. Both strive to reach a higher, perhaps transcendental, goal. Roerich, though never active or even self-aware, is not so far away from the orbit of the early-twentieth-century development of what we today acknowledge as the Russian avant-garde.

On Progress, Power and Secularity Taylor asserts that modernisation brought about a paradigmatic shift in concepts, which manifested itself in the distinctions we make today, such as that between the immanent and the transcendent, the natural and the supernatural. Crucially, compared to the medieval man for whom the transcendent is the only construal of the world, it is our ability to understand both sides of the dichotomous concepts regardless which side we take that marks the modern conceptual world. This can be seen in, for instance, the “hiving off of an independent, free-standing level, that of ‘nature’, which may or may not be in interaction with something further or beyond.”34 It is exactly this differentiation that has come back as a spectre in contemporary society, for this kind of differentiation confirms only difference of the same, thereby essentially leaving the same conceptual structure intact. How can a society that on the one hand is to a great extent intolerant to certain religious practices, and on the other experiences the resurgence of certain spiritual if not religious aspiration be accounted for?

32 See Siddiqi, op. cit., p. 265 and p. 268; and Scanlan, James P. (ed). Russian thought after communism: The recovery of a philosophical heritage. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe. 1994. pp 26-28. 33 See, among others, Anton Vidokle’s film trilogy Cosmism (2014-2017), as well as Simakova, op. cit.; and Groys, Boris. “Cosmic anxiety: The Russian case”. Supercommunity, e-flux Journal 56th Venice Biennale. 9 September. http://supercommunity.e-flux. com/authors/boris-groys/ (Accessed 2017-03-05); Zhilyaev, Arseny (ed). Avant-garde Museology. New York, NY: e-flux, in collaboration with the V-A-C Foundation in Moscow. 2015; Groys, Boris (ed.). Russian Cosmism (in Russian). Moscow: Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, in collaboration with Ad Marginem Press. 2015; the Center for Experimental Museology project by the V-A-C Foundation in Moscow; as well as the upcoming exhibition Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (September-October 2017). 34 Taylor, op. cit., pp. 13-14.

Time appears as an important vector in the discussion of secularity. “Secular” comes from “saeculum”, a century or age or a shared world of human experience. “Death of God” theologian Gabriel Vahanian argues that saeculum does not mean the opposite to sacred in the primary sense, but instead underlines the secondary opposition

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35 Crockett, Clayton. Secular theology: American radical theological thought. London and New York, NY: Routledge. 2001. p. 1. 36 Taylor, op. cit., p. 55. 37 Massad, Joseph. Islam in Liberalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2015. 38 Buchanan, Ian. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: a reader’s guide. London and New York, NY: Continuum. 2008. p. 115.

between sacred and profane for “a saeculum is a theological notion which implies that we live in a world of immanence which functions as the location of human and divine meaning and value.”35 Taylor emphasises the disenchantment of time: “People who are in the saeculum, are embedded in ordinary time, they are living the life of ordinary time; as against those who have turned away from this in order to live closer to eternity. The word is thus used for ordinary as against higher time.”36 Whether the conflation of human and divine experience together, or the carving out of ordinary time against higher time, time becomes a dimension through which worlds are played out. In this teleological view of time, non-Western cultures were or still are relegated to an earlier stage of development (the Muslim world is an example), or on the “benevolent” side of the same coin, they are romanticised and often categorically depicted as frozen in a pristine past (Tibet is an example). For both, there are always groups with power whose interests are best served under the condition of history as telos. In recent years, the West has experienced categorical reactions to Muslims as “the Other”. In his eloquent study Islam in Liberalism (2015), Joseph Massad traces how liberalism has systematically established dualistic oppositions between Islam and Europe and Protestant Christianity, Western democracy and Oriental despotism, European/Christian women’s freedom and Muslim women’s slavery, European/Euro-American sexual freedom and “Islamic” repressiveness and oppressiveness of sexual desires and practices, the tolerance of modern Europe and the intolerance of Islam and Muslims.37 In the everyday, we are confronted with practices that seemingly pertain to a religious order, such as the wearing of a headscarf in societies of moderate Islam. Is our reaction not victim of the normative function of secularism? Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s analysis, Ian Buchanan sees the French Muslim schoolgirls’ voluntary wearing of the foulard (headscarf ) as an act of “neoterritoriality”, an archaism with a perfectly modern function.38 The hegemony and normativity of liberalism is based on the moral superiority co-extensive to the conceptual structure of difference of

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the same, hence the universalisation of secularity becomes a weaponised ideal against the Muslim community. And behind these ideological debates often a blatant political game resides, leading to wars in the name of rescue and help. Talal Asad rightly argues, “Violence is embedded in the very concept of liberty that lies at the heart of liberal doctrine. That concept presupposes that the morally independent individual’s natural right to violent self-defence is yielded to the state and that the state becomes the sole protector of individual liberties.”39 In the West now, the normativity of secularity serves concrete domestic power leverage, such as those propagated by rightist movements in the very heart of Western societies (e.g. banning the burkini). In all of these public outcries, the fundamental idea of the self versus the other, the difference to the same can be discerned, which in turn validates the position taken on secularity versus religiosity.

39 Asad, Talal. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press. 2007. p. 59. 40 McCannon, John. "By the shores of white waters: the Altai and its place in the spiritual geopolitics of Nicholas Roerich". Sibirica Vol. 2, No. 2, 2002: pp. 166–189. 41 Ibid., p. 171.

When one analyses his paintings, Roerich can be seen to have consciously and unconsciously participated in the romanticisation of the “Orient”. His life path, however, suggests something even more curious. As John McCannon pointedly highlights in his essay on Roerich’s “spiritual geopolitics”, Roerich was interested in the cultures and religions of Central and East Asia inasmuch as he could integrate them into his own eclectic mysticism centred around the realisation of Shambhala and the coming of Maitreya, the “Buddha of the Future”—in the unfolding of which he saw himself and his wife as key figures.40 McCannon likewise highlights that despite the fact that Roerich was initially in line with his time’s anthropological understanding about the origins and paths of Indo-Iranic cultures, and was once keen on historical-geographical exactitude, his turn towards the occult yielded a more metaphorical interpretation and the flattening of differences in cultures in his mind: the “‘virtually identical’ natures of, for example, the Himalayan peoples (especially Tibetans) he encountered on his expeditions and the ‘Red Indians’ he had met during his travels in the American Southwest.”41 If the benevolent version of an Orientalist gaze casts the Other in anachrony, and romanticises it as harbouring higher truth (other than the self ), then Roerich has reproduced the structure and maximised its inherent problematics less by reinforcing the other-than-the-same, but by inserting himself into the other

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42 Reynolds, Michael A. Shattering empires: the clash and collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908 1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2011. p. 254.

and performing exactly the anachronism that defines it. His action could have constituted a “neoterritoriality”, albeit one that needs to rewrite the rules of authenticity as to who is entitled to speak for whom. Yet, conditioned by the difference-of-the-same scheme, his proposals seemed incongruous with the expectations on either side, as we shall see.

Geopolitics Then and Now Parallel to the intellectual history, the conflicts around Tibet, starting from the nineteenth century onwards, are complex and have left the region in a vulnerable position, Tibet had been overshadowed in the Great Game between the British and Russian expansionist forces (and in its extension into the Cold War and postCold War era, but which is beyond the scope of this article). As the Qing, the imperial monarchy in China collapsed in 1911, regions that were not under direct rule (or had not been for a long time), but had been integrated into the empire in a tributary relation, found themselves enmeshed in a global movement of nationalism. Following the Bolshevik “Declaration of the Rights of Peoples”, in which peoples of the empire were bestowed the rights to national self-determination and essentially to forming sovereign states, US President Woodrow Wilson embraced the self-determination principle and popularised it as the fundamental way for a post-imperial world. Yet, as Reynolds rightly points out, the principle was accommodated when it served the interests of the great powers and bent when it did not. Consequently, backed by the British and French, Poland was strategically attributed a part, despite it ethnographically being only one-third non-Polish, to create a buffer zone between Germany and Russia. In the Middle East, out of interest of connecting with the overseas colonies as well as creating a power balance against Russia, the British and French created “mandate” zones and effectively took control over Iraq and Palestine, and Syria and Lebanon respectively.42 As Roerich planned his Shambhala expeditions, both Tibet and Mongolia made for increasingly important leverage for geopolitical interests in Central Asia, inner China and East Asia—against an increasingly militant Japan.

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Not disheartened by the geopolitical turmoil, and indeed absorbed in his own mission, Roerich walked on thin ice when carrying out his plans with partners such as the USSR and the US. Roerich left for his first expedition (1925–1928) from New York, where the family was residing in the early 1920s. They travelled first to Sikkim, with the ultimate goal to reach Tibet from there, which in effect transpired as his desire to unite all Tibetan Buddhist people of Asia in the “Sacred Union of the East”—that is, to bring about Shambhala.43 Yet, the magnitude of support he was able to accumulate from various sides attest to the fact that Roerich’s mystical geopolitical plan—that was put forth as an expedition to paint landscapes and do archaeological research—was, in its principles, not so out of touch with reality.44 As McCannon notes, in the 1920s and 1930s, British, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, and Soviet authorities equally considered it “dangerously plausible” that someone like Roerich, appealing to local-traditional heritage, could ignite Asia, and thus negate the formers’ ambitions.45 Therefore, for his first journey with American supporters, Roerich managed to gain help—permission to enter Soviet territory and supplies for travel—from the USSR as well, in return for the hope of, among other things, the expansion of Soviet influence in Asia or undermining British rule in India.46 The expedition and the first attempt for the Great Plan, however, fell through at the Tibetan border when Roerich and his team were halted for five months during the harsh winter and only let in to be rushed through Tibet to arrive in Sikkim—thanks also to the workings of a British spy tracking Bolshevik activities. 47

Nicholas Roerich. Song of Shambhala, 1943. Tempera on canvas. Courtesy The State Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow

43 Znamenski, Andrei. Red Shambhala: magic, prophecy, and geopolitics in the heart of Asia. Wheaten and Chennai: Theosophical Publishing House. 2011. p. 166, p. 175. 44 Ibid., pp. 181-182 45 McCannon, “By the shores of white waters”, Op. cit. p. 181. 46 Ibid., pp. 179-180. 47 Znamenski, op. cit., pp. 201-203.

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48 McCannon, “By the shores of white waters”, Op. cit. p. 183. See also Osterrieder, Markus. “From Synarchy to Shambhala: The role of political occultism and social messianism in the activities of Nicholas Roerich." In Birgit Menzel, Michael Hagemeister, and Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (eds.). The new age of Russia: occult and esoteric dimensions. Munich: Kubon & Sagner. 2011. pp. 101134. 49 Znamenski, op. cit., pp. 209-212. 50 Ibid., pp. 217-18. 51 Osterrieder, op. cit., p. 132.

In the second and last expedition (1934–1936), Roerich had formed a different plan. The mission was funded by the US government, under the guise of a botanical expedition for drought-resistant grasses that could help alleviate the US Dust Bowl crisis—due to the fact that Henry A. Wallace, Secretary for Agriculture under Franklin D. Roosevelt was initially a great supporter of Roerich’s occult teachings.48 This time Roerich hoped to use Mongol revolts against the Bolsheviks, who had hardened their religious policy to the discontent of the Mongolian Buddhists while at the same time siding with the Japanese, who had occupied the vast territory of Chinese Manchuria and offered to ally with the immediate neighbouring Mongolian territories. En route to Mongolia, Roerich was stopped by Japan and he acted like a US dignitary without any official decree, and praised Japanese operations in the occupied Manchuria.49 His scheme, however, backfired. Japanese intelligence, instead of embracing Roerich, started a smear campaign against him in the press, which was coupled by queries from the US press about the government’s involvement in the expedition, and finally Wallace suspended his support and turned against Roerich when it became clear that he was rather a “diplomatic embarrassment”—all of which forced Roerich not only to abandon his Great Plan, but also to remain in India until his death.50 Roerich’s extensive plan for the unification of the East also resonates with Russia’s current neo-Eurasanist aspirations and anti-Western stance, as, Markus Osterrieder underlines: it is manifested by the “geopolitical Grand East (Bol’shoi Vostok) strategy”, coming into force especially under the second presidency of Vladimir Putin (2004– 2008), which also builds on the prominent status the Roerichs were able to establish for themselves in Asia.51

On Scientism Because the transcendent is left unresolved, it slips in through the backdoor in other disguises, such as scientism. From the development of twentieth-century information theory, such as cybernetics, one can trace how it has developed from a theory of information,

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Museum Display, The Banner of Peace Hall, The Nicholas Roerich Museum at the International Centre of the Roerichs (ICR), Moscow. In the foreground: A model of planet Earth, with the Mir space station and a space shuttle around it. In the background, among others: archival photos of the meeting of Svetoslav Roerich with Soviet cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova and husband Andriyan Nikolayev in Bangalore India in 1965, various photos documenting the display of the Roerich Banner of Peace flag on space crafts and mountain peaks, as well as a light box copy version of Nicholas Roerichâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s painting Star of the Hero (the original painting made in 1936 and is now at the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York). Photo courtesy Eszter SzakĂĄcs, 30 July, 2016. (As of now, according to reports, The Nicholas Roerich Museum at the International Centre of the Roerichs in Moscow is closed down.)

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52 Hayles, N. Katherine. How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. 1999. p. 13 53 Siddiqi, op. cit., p. 260.

communication and control abstracted from processes of life, to become the dominant model that replaces the material world, so that the world has to be explained in terms of virtual information and material bodies—the echo of the body-soul duality is obvious. Popular media and sci-fi have done nothing less than anthropomorphise the image of computers: the portrait of a deep-learning algorithm structurally designed with layers of artificial neurons is fondly likened to newborn babies who sift through and organise information in the world. Science has not reached the point yet of fully being able to account for how the brain functions, let alone of drawing computational designs modelled on the brain. In her study of this posthuman view of the world, Katherine Hayles highlights, ‘The point is not only that abstracting information from a material base is an imaginary act but also, and more fundamentally, that conceiving of information as a thing separate from the medium instantiating it is a prior imaginary act that constructs a holistic phenomenon as an information/matter duality.”52 This tendency of seeing the world in terms of information and material further manifests itself in the more recent debate around human genome cloning and editing, presupposing that the DNA codes are the holy grail of human life, a book of life as it were. The field of epigenetics has shown that many tangible and intangible factors co-determine the expression of a DNA sequence. Still, the virtual codes enjoy a privileged position in popular imagination, which is no less than the place occupied by God a few centuries earlier. The way we turn to science today is the way we turned to religion then. As suggested earlier, the underlying problem is that the transcendent slips in through the backdoor and in a different disguise. Under this condition, it is interesting to observe the attempts of both Roerich and others from his cultural milieu at reaching out to other realities through science. Here mysticism and science are bound together to explore the space of the unknown in a way that challenges the principle of science as a determining factor in the dualism of secularity and religiosity. In the words of Asif Siddiqi “the modern rocket with its new Communist cosmonaut was conceived as much in a leap of faith as in a reach for reason.”53 While Siddiqi

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argues that cosmonautics and the space fad, which started also as a religious-mystic kind of enterprise and idea in the early twentieth century, lost its religious overtones when actual space travels came about during the Cold War.54 What is peculiar in the case of the contemporary legacy of Roerich, however, is a kind of return: how, for instance, the International Centre of the Roerichs in Moscow— which is at the forefront of preserving Roerich as a mystic but not as a political figure—stretches the line of a kind cosmism by being a force behind renaming the planetoid #4426 as Roerich, or displaying the Roerich Banner of Peace flag on the Columbia space shuttle and the Mir International Space Station.55

54 Ibid., p. 288. 55 McCannon, “Competing legacies”, p. 364. 56 Buchanan, op. cit., p. 89, p. 96.

A Long Conclusion: the RoerichComplex In the above we have seen that Roerich took as his mission the righting of wrongs of the time. Along the way, he sometimes fell into the same trap as Western do-gooders, sometimes he landed himself in deep water of conflicting ideological and geopolitical positions, and at other times he made rather radical (though incidental) proposals, such as with the coupling of science and mysticism. We could see the problems that infuse our society through him. To understand the real and conceptual realms Roerich moved through in a larger Deleuzian and Guattarian historical perspective means to understand desire in a new light. The primary flow of desire that submerges everything becomes mitigated through the historical stages of development. Whereas pre-capitalist societies code desire through inscription, the capitalist machine frees the flow of desire. Inscription entails marking bodies (the human, the non-human bodies and abstract bodies) to create representations of things and to attribute meaning, and this in turn suppresses the flux of desire. This process lies underneath the development of social formation—in other words, desire is socialised by coding. Ian Buchanan emphasises that there is only desire and the social, for social production is molar and consolidated, and desiring-production is molecular, dispersed and unruly.56

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57 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. AntiOedipus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 1983, pp. 192-193. 58 Ibid., p. 194. 59 Buchanan, op. cit., p. 115 60 Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 260

In the next stage of their philosophy of history, the despot comes in and imposes a new alliance system and places himself in direct filiation with the deity. This can be observed when a spiritual empire arises or when a new empire replaces the old one: “It may be that the paranoiac himself is either a gentle creature or a raging beast. But we always rediscover the figures of this paranoiac and his perverts, the conqueror and his elite troops, the despot and his bureaucrats, the holy man and his disciples, the anchorite and his monks, Christ and his Saint Paul.”57 What comes with it is an absolute structure of hierarchy that the blocks of debt become “an infinite relation in the form of the tribute”.58 This abstraction rings true in cases of Christ, Moses, and indeed of Roerich too. The despotic state dreads the flow of production and exchange and tries to rule by tightening control. Yet what will overcome the despot state is the capitalist machine, which captures these flows of desire by making them part of its own operation, that is, through the appropriation of production—capital begets capital, bypassing the production of commodities. This is the post-imperial and capitalist society that Roerich was living in and we still live in, and his seemingly archaic endeavour could be understood thus as a wish for achieving order pertaining more to the despot machine than the capitalist machine. This can be seen in his visual depictions of pristine spiritual worlds, embedded firmly in a time far away from our disenchanted, ordinary time. This can be seen as well in his quest for scientific advancement and cosmology. Buchanan sees the role of religions and traditions practised today as “the absorption of the deracinated energies capitalism has detached from its body” and “the tying back down of desire”.59 The archaic appearance of Roerich’s undertakings should be read less as a self-sure choice of returning to any purer states, than as a result of a socio-historical condition in which we have never been fully secular. Roerich was a curious figure who rose on the ashes and ruins of multiple broken orders: the empire/transnationalism, traditionalism, religiosity and Communism on the one hand, and nation-state, modernity, secularisation and liberal democracy on the other. Yet paradoxically his failures surmount the categorical limits of both sides. Roerich fully embodied the paradox of modern societies, which are “torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neoarchaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia”.60

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The Idea of the University and the Process of Secularisation Thomas Karlsohn

Thomas Karlsohn is associate professor and senior lecturer at the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala university. Karslohn specialises in the intellectual history of the university with a particular focus on the German territories at the turn of the eighteenth century. Karlsohn is also a regular contributor to the Swedish public debate about current developments in research and higher education. Recent works include: Universitetets ide: sexton nyckeltexter (”The Idea of the University: Sixteen Key Texts”) (2016, ed., translation and introduction); Ensamhet och gemenskap: en brevväxling om universitetet (”Solitude and Fellowship: Letters on the University”) (2016, together with Per Magnus Johansson); The Humboldtian Tradition: Origins and Legacies (2014, ed. with Peter Josephson and Johan Östling); Till vilken nytta? En bok om humanioras möjligheter (”To What End? A Book About the Humanities and its Possibilities”) (2013, ed. with Tomas Forser); Originalitetens former: essäer om bildning och universitet (”Forms of Originality: Essays on Bildung and the University”) (2012).

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Abstract

This article deals with the question of the historical secularisation of the university. It takes as its starting point the common assertion that the university essentially became a secular institution towards the end of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth century. But, when studying the different historical ideas about the university we can discern quite a different pattern. On the level of intellectual historyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and when it comes to self-images, norms, values and rituals and practices governing academic lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Christian outlooks and originally theological approaches have continued to exist. The article discusses a series of examples supporting its main argument. First, it traces the idea of the university historically, focusing on the main figures of John Henry Newman and Wilhelm von Humboldt and the traditions they represent. Thereafter the article discusses the idea of the university in relation to the process of secularisation, drawing on a number of examples dating from the turn of the eighteenth century to the post-war period. In the concluding remarks, the account turns to a recent example in which the idea of the university is discussed and where the process of secularisation also plays an important role.

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Introduction When reading most of the influential scholarly overviews over the history of the European university, a standardised account will in all probability be discovered.1 Roughly summarised, it tells of the universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s emergence in the Middle Ages, with it being a religious institution with close affiliation to the Church, in both geographical and physical, as well as intellectual and spiritual senses. What happens later is that the university in various periods and in different ways breaks away from the Church. Successively, according to this story, the power to govern is transferred to the secular authorities during Early Modern times. And once the proper breakthrough takes place, around the turn of the nineteenth century, it signals that the last remnants of the religious influence yield to secular modernity and are about to vanish. The university liberates itself from the Church in the institutional sense at the same time as it opens itself to growing modern science, which at that point had already existed outside of higher education for two centuries or more. The same process sees the acceleration of theologyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s slide from its position as the queen of sciences to a marginalised activity with a distinctly shaky status within research and higher education.

1 Compare for instance the contributions in Ridder-Symoens, Hilde de (ed.). A History of the University in Europe. Volume II: Universities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996.

This is my rough summary of the emergent image of the universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s secularisation, as it is often presented in literature. The complexity of the process is of course great, and the scholarship of the last decades has rightfully indicated that. National patterns, for instance, tend to look quite different, and the historical processes vary quite significantly on an empirical level. Therefore, I would rather not reject categorically that standard account, since in many ways it is not unfounded. However, what I would like to do in the following article is to question our understanding of the process of secularisation on

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2 Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1996 [1852/1873]. 3 See, for example, Collini, Stefan. What are Universities for? London: Penguin. 2012. 4 See, for example, Simon, Paul. Die Idee der mittelalterlichen Universität und ihre Geschichte. Tübingen: Mohr. 1932; Ködderman, Achim. ”Why the Medieval Idea of a Community-Oriented University Is Still Modern”. Educational Change. No. 1. 1995.

the level of intellectual history. The example I will discuss is the debate about the idea of the university, which runs parallel to the institutional, organisational and intellectual changes that we normally discuss in terms of the university’s secularisation. First, I trace the idea of the university historically, and thereafter I discuss it in relation to the historical process of secularisation. In my concluding remarks, I then turn to a recent example in which the idea of the university is discussed and where the process of secularisation also plays an important role.

The Idea of the University Where does the possibility of and a need for the idea of the university come from? This question obviously refers in some sense to the English cardinal and university founder John Henry Newman and his famous lectures held before the opening of the new University of Dublin during the 1850s. These lectures were subsequently published under the title The Idea of a University.2 Very few texts in the intellectual history of higher education have played a role of the same significance as this trendsetting volume of Newman’s, and the subject of the idea of the university is thus forever tied to his thoughts on the subject. After this initial input, numerous thinkers, debaters, historians, philosophers and theologians have referred to the Newmanian idea of the university. Today the literature is ever-widening, and leading debaters are constantly referring to Newman’s thoughts on education.3 But in spite of Newman’s importance, the idea of an idea of the university is older. One answer given by some scholars is that the university actually right from the start, when it first emerged in the Middle Ages, was sustained or based on a specific idea. Some intellectual historians have actually made considerable efforts to pick out and present this idea.4 Most commentators are nonetheless in agreement that something radically new made an entrance with the emergence of the modern research university two hundred years ago. It was at that point in time that many debaters, philosophers and reformers of education began to talk explicitly of the

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university’s idea, and put forward the thought that it was necessary to formulate such an idea.5 The thought that a university as an institution should be defined by a given idea actually comes—first and foremost—from the German tradition, cultivated by the idealists and romanticists around the turn of the nineteenth century. Newman himself never mastered German, but his conviction of the possibility of a specific idea guiding the university bears the pronounced stamp of German influence. The primary reason for that was the deep impression left on him by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, not least by Coleridge’s thoughts on the character of social institutions.6 Newman adopted Coleridge’s sharp criticism of utilitarianism and its idea of social institutions’ purpose being the satisfaction of individual desires. Above all else, this influence arrived by means of Coleridge’s work called On the Constitution of the Church and State from 1829.7 The ideas presented in that book were permeated with German idealism under the influence of which the author had fallen during his stays at German universities at the end of the eighteenth century. Coleridge did away with all shallow notions of social institutions as establishments designed to serve the immediate benefit of humans. Instead, institutions were endowed with a deeper idea epitomizing their goal and the purpose of their activity. This view was accepted by Newman, who always remained a fierce critic of every utilitarian idea in the field of education. He viewed utilitarian demands as a key adverse aspect of secular modernity that university education needed to resist even when stripped of its former task of fostering good Christians.

5 See, for instance, Josephson, Peter, Karlsohn, Thomas and Östling, Johan. ”The Humboldtian Tradition and Its Transformations”. In Peter Josephson, Thomas Karlsohn and Johan Östling (eds.). The Humboldtian Tradition: Origins and Legacies. Leiden: Brill. 2014. 6 Rothblatt, Sheldon. The Modern University and Its Discontents: The Fate of Newman’s Legacies in Britain and America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1997. pp. 4-12. 7 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Volume 10: On The Constitution af the Church and State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2015 [1829]. 8 Compare Howard, Thomas Albert. Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006.

The German states with which Coleridge acquainted himself around the turn of the nineteenth century were, when it comes to academic life, immersed in a revolution, at least if we limit our perspective to the Protestant lands.8 The scholarly interpretations of that situation have been much discussed and also altered in recent decades. But there is no doubt that during long periods in the 1700s many universities in German territories were marked with a decline. Certainly, the trend-setting reformist universities in Halle and Göttingen were established. But in general universities attracted a progressively smaller number of students and they suffered from diminishing legitimacy within society.

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9 Paletschek, Sylvia. ”Die Erfindung der Humboldtschen Universität: Die Konstruktion der deutschen Universitätsidee in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts”. Historische Anthropologie. No. 10. 2002; Ash, Mitchell G. (ed.). Mythos Humboldt: Vergangenheit und Zukunft der deutschen Universität. Wien: Böhlau. 1997. 10 Humboldt, Wilhelm von. ”Ueber die Innere und Äussere Organisation der Höheren Wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin”. In Wilhelm von Humboldt. Werke in fünf Bänden. Band IV. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. 2010 [1809-1810]. 11 See, for instance, Scott, John C. ”The Mission of the University. Medieval to Postmodern Transformations. The Journal of Higher Education. Vol. 77. No 1. 2006; RidderSymoens, Hilde de (ed.). A History of the University in Europe. Volume I: Universities in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992.

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But change was to come, and the symbol in our own time of that change is without doubt the prominent linguist, philosopher and Prussian public official Wilhelm von Humboldt. Today he is often regarded as the father of the modern university, but at the same time many researchers have pointed out that he attained this label for the wrong reasons.9 The stage was actually to a great degree set even before Humboldt’s contribution. During the decades preceding his founding of the university in Berlin (1810), a number of the most prominent intellectuals had formulated different types of defences for the university. Even though this new idea of universities was more multifaceted than how it is usually adopted in the commentary literature, it allows summary of a number of fundamentals or principles. These principles brought together constitute the idea of the university. I will focus only on three of them here. The first principle is the university’s independence from the state. Teachers, researchers and the institution they represent should not have any ties whatsoever to political power. They should, in the words of Humboldt, conduct their activities in “Einsamkeit und Freiheit”, in solitude and freedom. This expression appears in Humboldt’s most famous statement on educational policy; namely, a short memorandum from 1809 called Ueber die Innere und Äussere Organisation der Höheren Wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin [On the Internal and External Organisation of the Higher Scientific Institutions in Berlin].10 As a result of the new autonomy, an important ingredient in the newly formulated university life was that the community was now perceived as a collegiate body. This idea of autonomy in itself was not new, as it actually dates back to the Middle Ages, when university teachers succeeded in establishing the right to choose colleagues and elect their leaders, for instance.11 But because the notion of autonomy was now so central, collegiality was emphasised even further as the basis for the university’s independence. The university dwellers were supposed to form a community that could only be joined by means of academic merit. Through this body all the activities were governed. In other words, we see here the first stage of the principles of internal government defined today as collegiality within academic institutions.

Another fundamental principle—which was also laid down around the turn of the nineteenth century—was the eternally endless character of knowledge. From this period onwards, research understood as the genuine production of knowledge, is taking place in the fold of the university, and the originality in both the approach and the result is therefore appreciated more distinctly than before. Here we see, among other things, a clear distinction from the tradition of liberal education that we are used to associating with Newman. Certainly, Newman was by no means as narrow-mindedly hostile towards research in the new German sense as later annotators have chosen to make out.12 But nonetheless, he does not allow research to play the same part as that assigned to it by Humboldt and his contemporaries.

12 Ker, Ian. ”Newman on Education”. Studies in Catholic Higher Education. December. 2008. 13 Hereto, see the discussion in Karlsohn, Thomas. ”On Emotions, Knowledge and Educational Institutions”. Confero: Essays in Education, Philosophy and Politics. Vol. 4. No 1. 2016.

That this is the case is also indicated by how those different traditions defined the border with lower level education. For Newman and the college-tradition he represented, the notion of the university in loco parentis—a substitute for parents—is significantly more acceptable than in the German tradition. In the latter, the line that separates school and university is drawn much more distinctly, as for instance by Humboldt himself in the memorandum I mentioned. At school, pupils receive education; at university, students participate in the knowledge process. Therefore, according to Humboldt, the relationship between the professor and the student is also reshaped. As he puts it in the memorandum, the former is no longer there for the latter. Instead, both are there to jointly achieve truth. At the same time the connection between research and teaching is being accentuated in a completely new manner in the German tradition. Not only did Humboldt and his contemporaries emphasise this connection in a loose meaning, but they actually suggested a real and concrete unity of research and teaching. Die Einheit von Forschung und Lehre, has ever since been the formula for all practices at the modern research university. It can also be pointed out that a university, which takes form using this idea as a guiding light, soon became characterised by practices, norms and values that we are familiar with today and that have played a crucial historical role. One example is that a researcher is obliged to keep a proper distance from the object of the research—he or she is obliged to cultivate a certain form of disinterestedness.13 He

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14 Kerr, Clark. The Uses of the University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2001 [1963]. Chapter 1.

or she is also involved in a common and systematic knowledge process, where in an ideal scenario a good argument has priority over all hierarchy and status. The same process should also guarantee the individual freedom. A researcher has the right to study anything and everything without regard for political and ideological issues, while a teacher has the right to teach at their own discretion without restrictions. In the German tradition these principles are called Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit, the freedom to teach and the freedom to study. So, what patterns do we detect if we turn to our own times, or at least the developments taking place in recent decades? What immediately becomes obvious, once we ask ourselves what has happened to the idea of the university, is that for a long time it has been seen as something on its way to extinction. An overwhelming number of commentators from the early 1960s to our own day have at least claimed that the idea of the university has grown obsolete and that it is no longer meaningful or constructive to discuss such an idea. One very important example is Clark Kerr, the legendary leader of the Californian higher educational system in the 1960s. In a famous book from 1963 he insisted that the modern university was no longer held together by a unified idea; instead, it consisted of separate entities, which were linked simply because the institutions shared the same name or the same administration.14 Scholars and teachers were, in short, a bunch of hardened individualists, joined together only by their common grievance over parking. Since the times of Kerr, predictions about the demise of the idea of the university have been repeated in innumerable versions and along a broad range of the emotional spectrumâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;stoically, triumphantly and melancholically. Simultaneously, each generation has fostered new debaters attempting to pick up on the legacy of the idea and formulate it afresh with regard to the requirements of the changing times. I am not intending to take a closer look at these attempts or at the discussions surrounding them. However, what I would like to state is that this extensive debateâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; which in some ways has been going on since the days of Humboldt and Newman themselvesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;has been misinterpreted in important ways.

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I also would like to argue that this misunderstanding concerns established ways of viewing and understanding the process of secularisation.

The Process of Secularisation

15 See, for instance, Shrimpton Paul, The ”Making of Men”. The Idea of Newman’s University in Oxford and Dublin. Leominster: Gracewing. 2014.

A rather common way to frame the debate about the idea of the university as it has developed during the last two centuries is to identify its first champions as standard-bearers for the change towards secular institutions of research and higher education. The principles of Humboldt and his contemporaries, for instance, put an end to the compulsion to mediate the eternal truths of the Christian tradition according to this line of interpreting the intellectual history of the university. The focus on modern scientific and secular truth-seeking, with its openness and critical stance, became the forefront. According to the representatives of this approach it was also—among other things—with the help of Newman’s reasoning that contemporary reformers finally were able to get rid of the notion that higher education’s task was to turn students into pious Christians. Newman believed that the latter was the mission of the Church. The university, for its part, had the obligation to educate and form gentlemen who were well prepared for an active life in modern secular society.15 If one understands Humboldt and Newman in this way, it then becomes possible to interpret the continuing debate on the idea of the university as ever-increasing evidence for an ongoing process of secularisation. Even the very emergence of the debate on the idea could actually—according to this line of reasoning—be seen as a manifestation of how the Christian intellectual heritage lost its grip on higher education and had to be substituted for something else. Once the Christian dogmas and the Church as the centre of power lose their influence, they are replaced, so to speak, by the secular debate on the idea of the university, which tries to capture the institutional goal and meaning without any reference to a religious past. However, the problem is that once you take time to study the sources closely, it soon becomes obvious that this line of thinking is clearly at odds with empirical facts. As far as I see the matter, it is both possible

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and reasonable to discuss the debate on the idea of the university from the times of Humboldt and Newman and onwards in terms of a persisting religious perception of the university. This religious perception is discernible in formal structures and regulated ceremonies as well as in the content of central ideas and its expressions in norms, convictions and beliefs. I do not have the space now to give a detailed account of all parts of the argument in favour of this interpretation, and neither can I cite every single empirical proof. But allow me to highlight some of the especially significant examples to clarify what I mean. Let us first go to die GrĂźnderzeit, the German context around the dawn of the nineteenth century. When commentators describe what happened, it is usually said that the university resolutely broke away from the religious sphere, as I have mentioned. However, what actually becomes evident as one studies the most noted programme statements on the educational policy from these times closely, is that the situation was rather the reverse. To get access to the subject it might be worth examining more specifically how the debaters on the idea of the university expressed themselves in respect to the phenomena that at that time were quite new in the academic context. I will limit myself to two examples originating from two leading figures in the university debate during the period: the new understanding of the role of the academic teacher and the new theories and practices of the academic seminar and academic lecturing. Firstly: the new role of the academic teacher. To put it simply, one could say that earlier in the history of the university a teacher, in general, had played the part of the mediator of an already given knowledge. But now the ideal was rapidly swinging towards an understanding of a teacher as an agent with his own authority and powers to talk freely to students and listeners. Philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, under his controversial professorship in Jena right before the turn of the nineteenth century, was the first to lecture in front of the public without a ready script. Such manner was perceived as enormously scandalous, but soon spread within the university world. What is interesting in that respect is how Fichte put into words what a new teacher was. In his famous lecture series on the vocation of scholars, Einige Vorlesungen Ăźber die Bestimmung der Gelehrten, from

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1794, he presented the thought that an academic teacher, a learned professor, was actually a new (secularised) clergy and that they had taken over the function that once belonged to the priesthood.16 The university developed, so to speak, more as a continuation of the Church by other means, rather than as an institution that had entirely broken away from its religious past. Similar observations can be made when it comes to the emergence of a modern academic seminar. This currently well-established practice is, actually, relatively new within the university. Certainly, a model existed already during the Early Modern times, not least within theological education. However, in its pure modern form— the practice we know in today’s higher education—the academic seminar developed during the second half of the eighteenth century, and acquired significance no sooner than the early nineteenth century. The fundamental idea of the modern seminar is that all the participants should be engaged in a free but ordered interaction, in which a fellowship as well as the consensual attraction and love for knowledge should be achieved. And interesting enough, it is quite often the case that this new academic practice was described in a way that is greatly reminiscent of a parish communion. In some cases, it was expressed in notions, clearly influenced by pietism, of an intimate coexistence in a close-knit group with distinctly marked borders against the outside.

16 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. ”Einige Vorlesungen Ueber die Bestimmung des Gelehrten”. In Johan Gottlieb Fichte. J. G. Fichte-Gesamtausgabe. Band I:3. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann. 1966 [1794]. 17 Schleiermacher, Friedrich. ”Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten im deutschen Sinn. Nebst einem Anhang über eine neu zu errichtende”. In Ernst Anrich (ed.). Die Idee der deutschen Universitet: Die fünf Grundschriften aus der Zeit ihrer Neubegründung durch klassischen Idealismus und romantischen Realismus. Darmstadt: Hermann Gentner. 1956 [1808]. 18 Karlsohn, Thomas. ”The Academic Seminar as Emotional Community”. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy. No. 2. 2016.

Specific examples of the notion of a seminar as something that appears to be influenced by the picture of a parish communion can be seen, for instance, in the writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher. He was, among other things, the author of a text that was to be of crucial importance for the design of the modern Prussian university; namely, his Gelegentiche Gedanken über Universitäten im deutschen Sinn [Occasional Thoughts on Universities in the German Sense], published in 1808.17 This text contains the first elaborated theoretical and philosophical explanation of a seminar as an element of academic life. And it is fascinating how Schleiermacher in his writings to a great extent appears to interpret this new substance in terms of an intimate parish communion, a free association with interpersonal love as by far the most important unifying bond. A seminar for Schleiermacher is, one could say, an “emotional community”, to borrow a concept from medieval scholar Barbara Rosenwein.18

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19 Jaspers, Karl. Die Idee der Universität. Berlin: Springer. 1980 [1946]. 20 Said, Edward W. ”On the University”. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics. No. 25. 2005 [1999].

Another confirmation of the university as a sort of Ersatzreligion, a substitute religion, can be found in how an academic lecture was perceived at the time. In this respect as well, the period around the turn of the nineteenth century is the time of change. As I mentioned, the oral address was given a new role within the university, and one of the reasons for that was the dramatic increase in reading and writing skills as well as the huge cultural expansion of the printed book. When representatives of the university started formulating the new understanding of a lecture against the background of such changes, it is strikingly noticeable how often they adopted Church models. Quite commonly an oral address was understood as a sort of sermon. Thus, one could draw further analogies with the earlier Christian-dominated understanding of an institution, rather than interpreting it as a break away from the past caused by secularisation. It could be possible to go far into pointing out how intellectual constructs and interpretation models are transferred from the Christian sphere to the emerging modern university, right in the middle of the very period that is widely described as the phase of the secularisation breakthrough in the university’s history. But instead of proceeding with more examples of that sort, I would like to highlight another phenomenon that is seldom noticed. This manner of extracting intellectual models namely characterised not only the initial stage of the modern research university. It also continued its life in many shapes and forms within the rich and manifold tradition of debating the idea of the university. In the middle of the 1940s, philosopher Karl Jaspers could, for instance, explicitly talk about the university as a so-called Church community. This was done in his work Die Idee der Universität, published in 1947.19 The book in many important respects set the agenda for the first phase of reconstruction of the German academic institutions after World War II. And one could continue citing examples of phrasings similar to those of Jaspers in the German context. But I will limit myself to just one, which came significantly later and shows more connection to the legacy of Newman rather than of Humboldt. I am talking about a lecture called “On the University”, delivered by the influential Palestinian-American scholar of literature Edward Said, at the American University of Cairo in the late 1990s.20

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Despite an expressed secular self-perception, Said followed on from Newman and highlighted the British cardinal as an unprecedented paragon in terms of the thought of the goal and meaning of the modern university. Furthermore, in his lecture Said stressed that, in order to understand the university correctly and to protect it from destructive forces, we must experience it and interpret it in terms of something sacred. One could say that, according to Said, the university is a stand-alone holy place, beyond the range of the commercialism and power play in the secular world. Here one could without doubt use theologian William Cavanaugh’s concept of the “migrations of the holy” to interpret Said’s understanding of the university.21

21 Cavanaugh, William T. Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 2011. 22 Thrift, Nigel. ”The University of Life”. New Literary History. Vol. 47. Nos. 2-3. 2016.

Concluding Reflections It is possible to name plenty of other instances of what could be called the transfers of religious intellectual energy into the sphere of the university. But instead I would like to conclude with some reflections on where this takes us in the current debate on research and higher education. What I would like to stress is that our understanding of the modern university’s historical and present-day character will stay limited if we do not include the religious aspect of its intellectual history into our analysis. If we fail to see the extent of the concepts, constructs and approaches based on Christianity and its theology that has permeated the discussion, we run the obvious risk of being one-sided and blind towards what is at stake in today’s debate. I would even dare to claim that one of the most important dividing lines in the current debate on the university goes between those who—often without actually being familiar with the background—want to see the university as an institution with essential ties to Christian culture, and those who would want to cut off this link and erase any sort of religious dimension from the university. Let me then conclude with the striking contribution of a present-day debater who laid a strong emphasis on the necessity to cut the link to Christianity. Former Vice Chancellor at the University of Warwick and renowned geographer Nigel Thrift has recently published a text based on a talk titled ”The University of Life”.22 Perhaps, the

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23 Ibid., p. 399.

most important central statement in this text is that the ideas of the university formulated by thinkers and reformers such as Humboldt and Newman must now be abandoned once and for all. According to Thrift, the idea of the university since the 1800s has essentially been based around values. Those values, however, are highly problematic and make up a “moral-epistemological honorifics, which deals with absolutes as a currency, politics as a faith, belief as a rule and transcendence as a goal.”23 They are therefore a hindrance to a much needed development of the university, Thrift insists. Values make us think solemnly of ourselves as insulated and self-sufficient academics, and make us incapable of contributing pragmatically to affluence, problem-solving and social and economic development. In short, according to Thrift, academic institutions lose their legitimacy in our ever-changing world if they are compelled to embody systems of belief. What Thrift consequently points out, is the fact that the idea of the university is, more than anything, a moral vision. This insight has often remained unnoticed, or at least not sufficiently reflected upon in the political debates surrounding the university. The deep roots of the moral vision in Christian culture have largely stayed unseen. But for Thrift, these roots are not at all invisible. Towards the end of his lecture he explicitly says that the only way for the traditional university to survive is to transform itself back into an openly religious institution. It is hardly surprising that he considers this solution a dead end and highly unlikely. For my part, I’m not at all that negatively disposed towards a productive rediscovery of the modern university’s intellectual roots in religious culture. On the contrary, I believe that this sort of rediscovery must be an essential part of the ongoing reflection on the fate of the idea of the university in our time. By elucidating the religious impulses that determined guiding ideas when the modern academic institutions were established and reinforced, we also better comprehend what is at stake in our own day. Moreover, the normative power of these ideas now tends to diminish and orientate us to a lower degree than before. History clearly seems to be on the side of debaters like Nigel Thrift. One sign of the process is that the rule of independent professional judgement is questioned, and that it has also become

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increasingly difficult to uphold the traditional distance vis-Ă -vis political life and economic interests. In systems of research and higher education in many Western countries, value-based internal attitudes and practices have been challenged in the last decades by active governing from outside and far-reaching external demands for cooperation and concrete, relevant contributions.

24 Zijderveld, Anton C. The Institutional Imperative: The Interface of Institutions and Networks. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 2000.

This process has by no means been one-sided and negative, but ultimately it has had a destructive effect that is making itself felt all across the university. Aspects of academic life that are connected to values, meaning and professional fulfilment have in many places been pushed into the background. The university has gradually become what has been called a thin institution, lacking a solid backbone of inherited moral standards and firm convictions among teachers and researchers.24 But this development is by no means isolated to academia. On the contrary, it hasâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to different degreesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;made its imprint on most of the central institutions of modern society, such as school systems and healthcare. In other words, at the heart of this contemporary debate lies the question of the very possibility of autonomous and self-contained institutions as part of contemporary societal life. Historically, such institutions have had an obvious link to the church as a model, being a distinctly separate and otherworldly, but yet mundane institution, protecting its independence and yet serving the world for the sake of the common good. If we allow this tie connecting us to the past to fully dissolve, the future of the university will have a very different shape to what we have inherited.

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The Sacrosanct Art: On Art and Religion, the Rise of Populism and the Changing Media Landscape Måns Wrange and Maria Karlsson

Måns Wrange is an artist based in Stockholm who works with long-term projects that explore the sophisticated methods and technologies that influence human behaviour, as used by financial market actors, national security agencies as well as the political lobbying and spin-doctor industry. Wrange’s work has been widely exhibited internationally, including Manifesta 4 & 7, ICA in London, Kunsthalle Wien, PS1 New York, Shirn Kunsthalle, Moderna Museet, Santa Monica Museum of Art, de Appel, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museo Tamayo Mexico City, ICA Boston, and Hamburger Kunstverein. He has held positions as Rector of the Royal Institute of Art Stockholm, Professor at Konstfack Stockholm, and Visiting Professor at Stockholm University.

Maria Karlsson is a PhD in Literary Studies and Senior Lecturer in Rhetoric at the Department of Literature, Uppsala University. Karlsson is part of the steering committee of the interdisciplinary research programme “Engaging Vulnerability” (EV) at Uppsala University where she investigates the narration of vulnerability in radio documentaries and how Selma Lagerlöf’s readers used vulnerability in their begging letters to the author. Between 2008 and 2011 she collaborated with Måns Wrange in the research project “Public Speaking” at Konstfack and Uppsala University.

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Abstract

In Sweden, as in a number of European countries, it has been possible to discern a shift in the attitude of politicians to culture in general and to contemporary art in particular. Every elected politician is entitled to have views on individual works of art and to discuss themâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;like any other citizen. But Swedish art controversies since the millennium have not dealt with aesthetic judgments but moral condemnation and the ensuing demands for exhibitions to be closed, cultural funding withdrawn, and the dismissal of leading members of staff of cultural institutions and academies of art. In this article Wrange and Karlsson argue that art scandals are an â&#x20AC;&#x153;ethical kaleidoscopeâ&#x20AC;?, particularly as they are seen to transgress religious mores in a secular regime.

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The public discourse

of the last years has been characterised by increased social, political and cultural polarisation in Sweden, as well as in other parts of the world. This development is due to a combination of a number of factors, such as the recent economic crisis, widening income gaps, increasing migration flows, rising populism and racism and lastly, the changes of the media landscape with the rapid growth of social and alternative media. This polarisation has also become apparent in the public debate on art, which has never occupied as much space in the public sphere in Sweden as it has in the last two decades due to a series of art controversiesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;or as the media often prefer to label the eventsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;art scandals. Most media attention has no doubt been directed to art that, in provocative ways, has dealt with religion. As a cultural, social and political phenomenon, art scandals are a relatively neglected area in art history as well as in other fields of research.1 Most of the studies that have focused on scandals more generally, for instance political and media scandals, indicate that the source can generally be traced to a transgression of norms in some way.2 Even though, on the whole, scandals challenge some degree of consensus, since the mid-nineteenth century visual art has occupied a unique position, as transgression of norms has played a central role in it. And as an institutionalised element within the concept of art, today artistic provocation is encouraged and has acquired the function of both renewing art and altering the internal hierarchies between practitioners as well as others active in the field.

1 Among the few studies that have been made on art scandals are: Steiner, Wendy, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1995. This is a broad study of artworks and literature that have caused controversy. See also Adut, Ari. On Scandal, Moral Disturbances in Society, Politics, and Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2008. This book includes a chapter that focuses on art scandals from a sociological perspective. 2 This is, for instance, discussed in Allern, Sigurd and Pollack, Ester (eds.). Scandalous! The Mediated Construction of Political Scandals in Four Nordic Countries. GĂśteborg: Nordicom. 2012. p. 11; see also Thompson, John B. Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2000. p. 13ff.

Art scandals share most characteristics with other categories of scandals, such as political and media scandals: the offending of fixed social values, norms, or moral codes; the event by which the norm

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3 Allern and Pollack, pp. 38-49. 4 Ibid., pp. 38-49. 5 JĂśnsson, Dan. Estetisk rensning: Bildstrider i 2000-talets Sverige. Stockholm: 10tal Bok. 2012.

is transgressed must be known to more than the parties involved, as scandal can only arise in the glare of publicity; people must be indignant and shocked, and action must be taken by entities interested in criticizing the event publicly.3 The kind of norm transgression that gives rise to scandal is, of course, dependent on the cultural and socio-political context in which it occurs. In several countries where religion plays an important role, the major art controversies in recent decades have involved blasphemy and sex, often in combination. In more secular and liberal parts of the world, such as the Scandinavian countries, blasphemy or sex on their own seldom give rise to scandal, as long as references to these areas do not transcend the heteronormative matrix and merely concern the majority society. In Sweden, major political scandals in the last decade have rather been caused by financial irregularities and misuse of the taxpayersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; money, as the issue of money is considered more of a taboo than sex in Sweden.4 And this is also symptomatic for many earlier art scandals in Sweden, where several of the controversies were not caused by the transgression of a norm itself, but by the fact that the violation of norms was paid for by the taxpayers in being produced, funded, or exhibited in public institutional frameworks.5 A typical art scandal scenario in Sweden has for decades often followed the same pattern. A controversy originates through the indignation of some of the local population in the area in which a work of art has been shown, which would then be reported by the local media with a small note in the middle of a newspaper. The cultural world would routinely defend the controversial artwork, and the local politicians, especially those involved with cultural policy, would be very cautious about involving themselves in the public debate. This has been true for many years in Sweden, but during the last decade this situation has changed. In Sweden, as in a number of European countries, it has been possible to discern a shift in the attitude of politicians to culture in general and to contemporary art in particular. Naturally, every elected politician is entitled to have views on individual works of art and to discuss themâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;like any other citizen. But the Swedish art controversies since the millennium have

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not dealt with aesthetic judgements, but with moral condemnation and the ensuing demands for exhibitions to be closed, cultural funding withdrawn, and the dismissal of leading members of the staffs of cultural institutions and academies of art involved. In the few cases in which politicians have criticised works of art on the grounds that they break the law, this has been based solely on sensational media reporting long before any internal inquiry has been made, prosecutions initiated, any actual crime has been demonstrated, or sentences been passed. And the critical politicians have not only come from so called populist, or even conservative parties, but also from established parties in the middle of the political spectrum. In several cases, the criticism expressed by a leading politician has not consisted of spontaneous remarks but strategically considered public statements and articles in the major daily papers or established political blogs and forums.6 Art is vulnerable in the sense that it is—and certainly has been historically—an easy target for politicians to exploit. This is why the arm’s length principle is stated in the Swedish law. Why then, have some leading politicians started to break with that principle, by applying the same rhetorical strategies against contemporary art as used by the same populist parties that they otherwise are taking pains to distance themselves from? We would argue that there are several reasons for this development. The first is the change of the political landscape. Sweden had not seen the same development of right-wing populist parties as in other European countries until the last decade. This delay is explained by the dominant position occupied by socio-economic questions about welfare, employment, and economics in the Swedish political debate.7 But, during the last decade there has been a shift in the political discourse, in which socio-cultural issues such as culture, national identity, and traditional family values have also acquired importance. This development is partly the result of the inclusion of the socially conservative Christian Democrat Party in the Swedish liberal-conservative coalition government in 2006-2014, as well as the entry of the xenophobic party Swedish Democrats into the Swedish Parliament in 2010. Both parties have adopted a profile in which socio-cultural values have become the main issues on their political agenda. The

6 Rydberg, Birgitta. “Konstfack måste göra etisk konst”. Expressen. 3 March 2009. See http:// www.expressen.se/debatt/ konstfack-maste-gora-etiskkonst/ (Accessed 201705-14); Sundin, Mathias. “Inga mer skattepengar till Konstfack”. 15 February 2009. URL: http://www.mathiassundin. se/2009/02/inga-mer-skattepengar-till-konstfack.html (Accessed 2017-05-02); and Dragic, Mariana. “Han klottrade för miljoner”. Aftonbladet. 16 February 2009. See http:// www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/ article11657715.ab (Accessed 2017-05-02.) 7 Rydgren, Jens, Sweden. “The Scandinavian Exception”. In Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell, (eds.). Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European Democracy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2008. p. 149; and Rydgren, Jens. “Radical Right-wing Populism in Denmark and Sweden: Explaining Party System Change and Stability”. SAIS Review of International Affairs. Vol. 30. No. 1. pp. 57-71. (Accessed 2017-06-21, from Project MUSE database.)

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8 Löven, Stefan. “Vi backar aldrig från svenska värderingar”. Aftonbladet. 15 June 2017. See http://www. aftonbladet.se/debatt/article23001998.ab (Accessed 2017-05-15); and Kinberg Batra, Anna and Norlén, Andreas. “Svenska värderingar behöver försvaras”. Svenska Dagbladet. 6 June 2016. See https://www.svd. se/svenska-varderingar-behover-forsvaras/om/debatt (Accessed 2017-05-15.) 9 Laclau, Ernesto. “Populism: What’s in a Name”. In Francisco Panizza (ed.). Populism and the Mirror of Democracy. London: Verso. 2005. pp. 1-10; and Surel, Yves. “Berlusconi, leader populiste?” In Janine Chêne, Oliver Ihl, Vial, Éric and Waterlot, Ghislain (eds.). La tentation populiste au coeur de l’Europe. Paris: La Decouverte. 2003. p. 186. 10 Pasquino, Gionfranco. “Populism and Democracy”. In Albertazzi and McDonnell, p. 28. 11 Karlsson, Maria and Wrange, Måns. “Scandal Success—The Political Economy of the Art Scandal”. In Nina Möntmann (ed.). Scandalous. A Reader on Art & Ethics. Berlin/ New York, NY: Sternberg Press. 2013. pp. 88-105.

huge success of the Swedish Democrats, which in the polls of 2017 have become the third and most recently the second largest party in Sweden, has led to a development where also some of the established political parties are adopting a more nationalistic oriented rhetoric, for example by using concepts such as “Swedish values” in their party program, speeches, and rhetoric.8 The rise of populist parties has in Nordic countries, such as Denmark and Norway, also led to a development where some of the established parties have adapted their politics and rhetoric. Similar tendencies have also recently been seen in Sweden. The term “populism” is here not used to signify a certain type of movement or ideology on the extreme right, as it often is by the news media. In accordance with scholars on populism such as Ernesto Laclau and Yves Surel, the term is instead used to describe a political and rhetorical strategy that can be used across the entire political spectrum and that unites a number of disparate movements from Right to Left.9 One of the characteristics of the political logic of populism is a form of division into opposition and identification, in which populists attempt to create identification with the “people” and position themselves in opposition to an enemy—“those who are not like us” —which could be either political, technocratic, intellectual, or cultural “elites”, or minorities such as immigrants or homosexuals.10 There may be the same kinds of reasons for the frequency of art scandals in Sweden in recent years as for the rise in moral political scandals. The transgression of moral norms, as has already been pointed out, lies in the very nature of art scandals. Art scandals are structured in the same way as political scandals in the media. They have a clear, cliffhanger “story,” with a beginning, middle, and an end—but they can be taken up again and angled differently. If the changes of the political landscape offer one reason for the growth of populism in Sweden as well as the rest of Europe, then the transformation of the media landscape naturally offers another.11 In a period of crisis for the established media in combination with a reorientation of values in the political discourse, the rhetoric of the news media is increasingly driven by emotions, polarised, and exaggerated—it becomes melodramatic, which involves a shift from

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logos to pathos. Opinions and feelings take priority over facts, which has resulted in an increase in opinion articles by commentators, columnists, and celebrity writers at the expense of the more costly investigative and fact-based journalism. Opinions do not call for facts to be checked or sources to be confirmed. Audience-focused research on the media has consequently also linked media stories to the genre that embodies emotion and excess—melodrama—and its unerring capacity to adapt to the techniques of the different media.12 Empirical studies have also shown that the general public remembers a scandal because of its gradual development into a coherent, exciting, and dramatic “story” that is simple to headline and has a clear point.13 Almost all art scandals match the characteristics of melodrama: they deal with moral values; they are presented emotionally and as embodiments of some form of opposition between a victim (for instance, the taxpayers) and a perpetrator (the artistic elite); the events take the form of a series of spectacular actions, heated outbursts, threats, vandalism, complaints to the police, cancelled exhibitions. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media and Internet forums enable a scandal to be augmented and transposed, and the reverberations of its origination passed on to other media, both nationally and globally. The scandal spirals, it does not rise and fall.14

12 Martín-Barbero, Jesús. Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations. trans. E. Fox and R.A. White. London: Sage. 1993. p. 119. 13 Bird, Elizabeth S. “What a Story! Understanding the Audience for Scandal”. In Lull et al., p. 103. 14 Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York, NY: NYU Press. 2006. p. 15ff.

The values at stake in an art scandal have also shifted. For a long time most art controversies involved basically the same moral issues as political scandals. An artwork accused of religious blasphemy would hardly create any headlines. Not any longer. Some of the art controversies that have attracted most media attention in Sweden during the last two decades, have in some aspect or another dealt with religion. The first major controversy occurred in 1998 when the exhibition Ecce Homo, by the Swedish photographer Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin, was shown at the cathedral in Uppsala and subsequently toured among churches in Sweden. The exhibition, which contained twelve photographs portraying people from the LGBTQ community in biblical situations was accused of desecration. The exhibition was to a large extent defended by columnists in the major newspapers with reference to the principle of freedom of expression. This standpoint was at first glance rather uncontroversial, since many of the protesters were white, Lutheran Christians, which is the largest religion and was the state religion in Sweden until 2000, and the pro-

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15 About the exhibition, see for instance Gabriella Ahlström, Ecce Homo. Berättelsen om en urtställning. Stockholm: Bonniers. 1999. For a description of the exhibition in English, see Ecce Homo (exhibition). Wikipedia. 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Ecce_Homo_(exhibition) (Accessed 2017-05-01.) 16 About the controversy in English, see Muhammad drawings controversy. Wikipedia. 2017. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Lars_Vilks_Muhammad_drawings_controversy (Accessed 2017-05-01.) 17 Orrenius, Niklas. Skottet i Köpenhamn. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag. 2016; and Jönsson, op. cit. 18 Linderborg, Åsa. “Sluta mumla, Vilks”. Aftonbladet. 15 February 2015. See http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/kronikorer/ linderborg/article20329013. ab (Accessed 2017-05-01); and Arpi, Ivar. “Replik till Åsa Linderborg”. Svenska Dagbladet. 21 September 2016. See https://www.svd. se/replik-till-asa-linderborg (Accessed 2017-05-17.) 19 Adut, op. cit., p. 224.

tests were by many commentators also interpreted as homophobic. The situation was, however, a bit more complex since the exhibition also caused some critical debate within the Christian church and the LGBTQ community.15 Eight years later, another artwork was accused of blasphemy, in this case, derogation of Islam. It involved the drawing Muhammed som rondellhund [Muhammad as a roundabout dog] by the Swedish artist Lars Vilks. However, the ethical equation was here even more complicated and the commentaries on the controversy were consequently more divided.16 While some of the commentators defended Vilks’s right to offend Islam with reference to the principle of freedom of speech, others argued that even if Vilks has this right, and any threats against him are therefore totally unacceptable, it was still ethically unnecessary to provoke a rather oppressed minority group in Sweden, especially if you are a male, white and (former) art professor with the publicly declared objective to challenge political correctness in the art world of Stockholm.17 A left-right dimension has become gradually visible in the public debate about the artwork, where the defenders of the drawing are to a large extent coming from the liberal-right, while the critics tend to be leaning to the left.18 The controversy became even more politicised after Vilks received the active support of several far right groups and organisations, accepted the invitation to speak at “Islam critical” conferences, and made some critical comments on Islam, which some commentators have interpreted as islamophobic. What made the discussion about art that is accused of offending Islam even more complex is that it also includes aspects of the escalating fear of terrorism, especially after the terror attacks in Denmark in the Mohammad drawings controversy, in Paris with the killings of twelve people in the building of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, and the attacks on Vilks, the latest of which resulted in the death of one civilian and three wounded policemen. These terror threats and attacks have furthermore led to a more cautious attitude from some leaders of cultural institutions as well as some editors of news media. Ten years ago the sociologist Ari Adut described art scandals in liberal democracies as generally “low stake affairs” that concern a limited circle and seldom lead to legal penalties or social sanctions.19 This

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no longer applies in Sweden, nor in many other countries. Individual works of art have provided front-page stories and have at times been featured in television and radio news programmes. Leading journalists, academics, lawyers, spokespeople for various religious denominations, and politicians have debated ethical, legal, and political aspects of artworks. Social media have seen lively controversies with heated blogs, Twitter storms and Facebook campaigns for and against works of art. Individual works have been reported to the police, threats have been made against artists and exhibitions, and even terrorist attacks have been aimed at an artist. In Sweden, one of the most secular countries in the world, art controversies that involve religion have become an exceptionally socially and politically sensitive issue. These situations are in many cases ethically complex since there is often not just one ethical principle at stake, but multiple, which can also be in ethical conflict with each other. This can in its turn result in a kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario: the art scandal as an ethical kaleidoscope, where just one twist in either direction will totally change the ethical view. Or as an ideological litmus test that exposes less visible ideological cracks and frictions in society. Parts of this article have been previously published under the title “Scandal Success—The Political Economy of the Art Scandal”. In Nina Möntmann (ed.). Scandalous. A Reader on Art & Ethics. Berlin/New York, NY: Sternberg Press. 2013. pp. 88-105.

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PARSE announces upcoming issues, conference and changes PARSE Journal Issue #7: Speculation Release: Autumn 2017 Contributors: Didier Debaise, Isabelle Stengers, Costas Lapavitsas, Valérie Pihet, Fabien Siouffi, Katrin Solhdju, Jonas Staal, Ming Tsao, Krzysztof Wodiczko Editors: Dave Beech, Anders Hultqvist and Valérie Pihet This issue of PARSE addresses art and design practices under a condition in which financial speculation and populist political visions sit uncomfortably with modes of critical action in probing alternative futures. Speculation has been suspect for its correlation with the logic of financial markets and dynamics of capital within which arts and design practices embedded. But speculation is also a characteristic of utopian thinking and revolutionary prefigurement. Could ‘speculation’ in artistic practices be regarded as revitalising and redefining what risk and wealth can mean, what agency can be? Could speculation be related to the creation of possibilities, rather than to the abstract logic of probabilities?

EXCLUSION: 2nd Biennial PARSE Conference Dates: November 15-17, 2017 Venue: Gothenburg, Sweden Registration open. Details: http://parsejournal.com/conference/ parse-conference-2017/ How does exclusion operate at a local, national and international level in the arts, in education and in cultural production? Within the arts, how can we improve access to learning and the formation of experience? Within and beyond the field of cultural production, individuals and groups of people are excluded from territorial, subjective, environmental and imaginative spaces, be they national, institutional, or virtual. To what extent do strategies and infrastructures of inclusion risk replicating

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and reinforcing individualised imaginaries within broadly hierarchical social structures? How do images of exclusion circulate? What are the politics of access? What forms of research and which actions can be taken within the artistic and pedagogical environment that may open and provide spaces of contact and forms of rights? To register: PARSE2017@meetagain.se

PARSE futures Following the publication of issue 7 of PARSE journal on Speculation in the autumn of 2017 and our conference on Exclusion (see above), PARSE will be changing format. Having published a physical journal and facilitated open access to this via the PARSE website 2015-2017, we now enter a phase in which PARSE will become a digital-first publishing and research platform. We will continue to print papers, books and special journal issues when physical publication is motivated by methodological, aesthetic and distributive logic. However, as we seek to widen and transnationalise our research community, the digital future of the platform will enable a more fluid and ambitious remit. As part of this, and in order to register solidarity with a growing community of publication platforms that are challenging the highly capitalised and homogenised direction of academic publishing, PARSE is currently exploring a number of avenues including multi-site collaborative productions and editorial processes, alternative citation indexing, open peer review formats and commons-based writing approaches. From 2018 onwards, rather than publishing ‘themed’ issues, we will be committing to a series of longer term research ‘arcs’ that reflect interests of our local community as they intersect with global intellectual and practice-based currencies. As part of this we will be seeking collaborators in the form of satellite editorial teams. We will distribute details and launch our new approach in the spring of 2018. We thank our international community of contributors, reviewers and readers so far and look forward to working with you in the near future.

Colophon PARSE Journal Issue #6 GIBCA 2017 and PARSE Journal special issue on Secularity Autumn 2017 Published in collaboration with Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art

Issue Editorial Team

Nav Haq Andrea Phillips Ola Sigurdson

Copy Edit

Gerrie van Noord Graphic design

Leon&Chris Editors-in-chief

Andrea Phillips Mick Wilson Advisory Board

Simon Critchley Darla Crispin Vinca Kruk Bruno Latour Valerie Pihet Henk Slager

Exakta Print Publisher

University of Gothenburg ISSN 2002-0511 Distributor

Art and Theory Publishing Online edition (available November 2017)

Working Group

Pia Ahnlund Dave Beech Erling Björgvinsson Kanchan Burathoki Ingrid Elam Kristina Hagström-Ståhl Anders Hultqvist Markus Miessen Andrea Phillips Mick Wilson

www.parsejournal.com/journal Front cover image

Project Manager

Kanchan Burathoki

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ISSN 2002-0511

Gรถteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2017