Idolatry Now

While on a trip to Philadelphia in 2005, Old Ken bought a copy of W.J.T. Mitchell's then newly-published "What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). I had taken a few classes with Mitchell back in the day, and was interested to catch up with him. But, the book sat on my shelf back here in London-town until last month when the story of the British primary school teacher Gillian Gibbons and her travails in Sudan with a teddy bear named Mohammad became headline news. Thus, what I thought I'd offer here is a little review of the book, and a suggestion of how it might help us to understand the Sudan teddy bear row.

What is immediately striking about reading Mitchell’s book is how “small” the envisioned world of images feels. That is to say, Mitchell relies on a small and well-worn core of theoretical moves: Marx on commodification, Freud on fetishism and the death drive, occasionally Lacan on the Real, and smatterings of others (Benjamin, Zizek, etc.) A second register is reserved for the British Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and, above all, Blake. Next, there are the theorists who only get cited as phrases—often book titles—that are repeated again and again throughout the essays: Nietzsche’s claim that philosophy should be done with a hammer, not to destroy the idols of the mind, but to make them ring; Bruno Latour’s insight that “we have never been modern”; Arjun Appadurai’s felicitous phrase about “the social life of things”; David Freedberg’s evocation of the “power of images”; and Hans Belting’s idea of “the image before the era of art.” Then, there are all the other ephemera of popular culture that get marshaled in a theoretical reserves: Jurassic Park, Sprite commercials, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, political cartoons from the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, and (shockingly) two references to Garrison Keillor. But, at the core, Mitchell has two constant points of reference: the Bible (and specifically, the episodes surrounding the prohibition of graven images) and his own essays, which are copiously cited. As opposed to (say) James Elkins or Barbara Stafford where the reader frequently feels over-awed by the range of obscure, erudite citations, Mitchell’s book feels very “homely” and familiar in its range of references. All images, it would seem, can be routed back through Freud, Marx and Mitchell, leading back to Moses and the second commandment.

So, if it is not in the theoretical archive that we find any surprises, it is perhaps in the candor of Mitchell’s basic contention. The book’s repeated assertion is that we need to think of images as having various kinds of power, life or animation. Rather than denouncing this fact or trying to destroy its image-incarnations, Mitchell claims that the job of cultural analysis is to uncover what interests image-anxieties betray, in part by sorting out the kinds of “bad images” themselves (the book exposits at least four key categories: idol, fetish, totem, and fossil).

Mitchell gives greatest exposition to the contention that images have various kinds of animation—that they are like parasites and artists are like hosts—in an essay called "The Surplus Value of Images." So he claims, images, “form a social collective that has a parallel existence to the social life of their human hosts, and to the world of objects they represent.” (93) Although such an argument cuts across the orthodoxy of most art-historical scholarship—wherein images are understood (often unconsciously) as kinds of instruments made by humans for various aesthetic, social, rhetorical, political or other purposes—Mitchell is quick to point out that lots of different kinds of support can be found for the idea that images are always on the verge of taking on lives of their own. When confronted by Moses after making the golden calf in the Book of Exodus, for example, Aaron claims that he only put the Israelites’ golden jewelry into the fire and the calf “made itself.” The conceit that paintings found numerous advocates among Abstract Expressionist painters, and might be traced through art-historical concepts of kunstwollen, the notion that artistic styles ultimately respond to their own autonomous necessities, which are in certain ways independent of the instrumental values assigned to them by their supposed makers. And surely, the uncanny possibility that images can come to life is a motif of lots of fictional works: The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Frankenstein, and legends of Pygmalion or the golem being only the most familiar examples.

What the book tries to exposit, then, are the various kinds of ways in which Western culture has processed the problem of image-vitality. Mitchell sees the triad of idol, fetish and totem as central to this story and effectively condensing a history of Western thought. The idea of idolatry is very old in Western culture, Mitchell argues, going back to the religions of the Book; it “discloses the greatest surplus of overestimation (as an image of God, the ultimate value).” (97) Following the work of anthropologist William Pietz, Mitchell sees the fetish as a conception of the living image born in the networks of slave-trading in the early modern period, “associated with greed, acquisitiveness, perverse desire, materialism, and a magical attitude toward objects.” (97-8) Totemism, meanwhile, is a modern and more benign way of understanding the living image. Neither the false god of idolatry nor the perverse replacement of the fetish, the totem (as a category of analysis for the new, nineteenth century science of anthropology) denotes a conception of the image as a brother, protector or friend. Often an animal-form, the totem designates (in the words of Jacques Derrida) “l’animal que je suis”—both the animal that I am and the animal that I follow.

This talk of animals and animism leads us back to the uproar surrounding Gillian Gibbons, a teacher from Liverpool, who worked at Unity High School in Khartoum. The colonial context is important because, as with so many other places, Sudan has had first-hand colonial experience of British, who governed it from the arrival of Lord Kitchener in 1899 through devolution of power in 1956. From what the London Times reports, Unity High School is both product and reminder of this history; founded in 1902 by the Anglican Bishop, Llwellyn Gwynne, the office of the school’s director still displays “sepia photographs of the school’s colonial heyday.”

The specific incident causing the uproar seems to have unfolded in the following way: a seven-year old girl brought a toy bear into Gibbons’ class in September, at the beginning of the school year. Against Gibbons’ own suggestion, the class voted to name the bear “Muhammad.” As the Times (London) explains, the bear “was dressed in old clothes and was sent home each weekend with different pupils who were asked to keep a diary of its activities. Each entry was collected in a book with a picture of the bear on the cover, next to the message ‘My name is Muhammad.’" Although the exact circumstances of how this naming became known to authorities are slightly unclear, Gibbons was arrested on November 28, 2007 under section 125 of the Sudanese criminal code, charged with insulting faith and religion. Facing six months in jail and forty lashes, Gibbons was convicted, although eventually pardoned under substantial pressure from Muslim groups in the UK and British diplomacy. She has since flown back to the UK.



Now, I think a pretty compelling case could be made that, in the Anglo-American mind, the teddy bear is close to Mitchell’s idea of the totem. It is a friendly creature, a protector and benign denizen of the childhood (or “child-like,” as early anthropologists might have said) imagination. What is more, the perception in the Anglo-American press is that, in this case, a totem has been mistaken for an idol. That is, the Sudanese government’s condemnation of Gibbons has been described in the press as as much a product of the idolatrous implications of the bear as the more generalized insult to Islam implicit in it. In this view, Gibbons was at worst guilty of lacking in cultural sensitivity and, more likely, a victim of over-zealous religious fervor—if not a highly orchestrated spectacle designed to draw international attention away from the atrocities committed by the Sudanese government in Darfur. One can imagine an interpretation of this incident that would examine how the conceptualization of the teddy bear as totem, idol, fetish or so on enables various kinds of ideological work, reinforcing the West's idea of itself as an enlightened and tolerant community or of the Muslim world's conception of the West as lacking respect for its beliefs.

Topics like this would seem to be exactly the kinds of things for which Mitchell’s book is useful, insofar as it provides strategies for analyzing what people think others think about images that seem to take on various kinds of animism. At the same time, Old Ken cannot help but feel that this is also the book's biggest shortcoming or the return of the "small world" problem. Surely, most of the millions of images made and destroyed everyday come and go from the world without a peep of response or objection from their distracted viewers. The attempt of Mitchell's approach, by contrast, is to allow this distracted viewer to say something that sounds meaningful about those few, isolated cases in which images actually do arouse certain types of controversy. But, by framing these controversies in and through the Big Books and Big Issues of Western culture, almost any set-up will sound meaningful, whether or not it gets at the specifics of the individual case. In thinking about the Gibbons case, Old Ken kept wondering: what exactly did Gibbons' bear mean in Sudan? Who exactly was protesting against it and her? And how is the term “teddy bear” translated into Arabic? That is, does the name of an American president be significant? What are the larger available ideas about bears in Sudanese or, more broadly, Arabic-speaking cultures?

Mitchell's book is great for the blogosphere. It provides matrices for placing almost any given image controversy in relation to big theories and big stakes, whether or not the interpreter knows much of anything about the specifics of the given case; as you have seen here. But, whether it works as a model for studies of images in art and beyond ... well, Old Ken ain't so sure about that.