Steven Grimwood

Abstract
This paper advances a theology of iconicity that attempts to negotiate the
ambiguity of the image witliin postmodern society. Beginning with the
challenge made by Jean Baudrillard concerning the Byzantine icon, it
argues that his concept of the simulacrum has important parallels with
Jcan-Luc Marion’s concept of the idol, and that this necessitates a
re-evaluation of their respective positions. By then considering the
relationship between the icon and postmodern experiences of space and
time, it is possible to articulate a theology that can view the iconic as that
which disrupts the hegemony of the (profoundly idolatrous) simulacrum,
holding open the systems of meaning, the narratives, of which we are part.

I. INTRODUCTION

IN HISbook Simulacra ami Simulation, Jean Baudrillard suggests that the Byzantine
icon masks the death of God, a god who met his demise ‘in the epiphany of his
representations But given that the proliferation of signs and images is one of the
defining features of contemporary western culture ‘one can say that the icon
worshipers were the most modern minds, the most adventurous Baudrillard thus
presents us with a challenge when we
consider iconography in the context of postmodern culture. For though we might
expect to find openings for a renewed appreciation of the icon (and religious images
in general), we are also made aware of what Baudrillard describes as ‘the murderous
power of images’ — the capacity of the simulacrum to efface the real.2 What we are
faced with, therefore, is a profound ambiguity,' for in such a context the image
(religious or otherwise) would be of paramount importance whilst at the same time
potentially lacking in any depth of meaning.
What I wish to offer in this paper is a way of thinking about iconicity that is
capable of negotiating the ambiguity of the image within western, postmodern
culture whilst remaining loyal to an orthodox theology of the icon. In order to do
this. 1 shall bring Baudrillard (the postmodern iconoclast) into dialogue with the
Catholic philosopher Jcan-Luc Marion, whose work Cod Without Being4 is perhaps the
most influential contemporary reappraisal of the themes of
Utniiliire & 77'tcology 17/1
< Oxford University Press 2003; all rights reserved.
 ST E VE N G R IM W O OD 77
icoiiicity and idolatry, i shall explore how, although the two approach the image from
different directions, with different agendas, and with apparently irreconcilable
conclusions, there are a number of significant and illuminating points of convergence
which force 11s to re-evaluate the claims of both thinkers. 1 shall also consider the
correspondence between the art of the icon and postmodern art and architecture,
drawing upon some of the work of Michel de Certeau in order to expound a theology
of iconic/idolatrous space. Finally, I shall look at how the iconic might be understood
in terms of that which disrupts the hegemonic code of the simulacrum, thus holding
open the horizons of meaning.

I I . THE I C O N . T H E I D O L A N D T H E S I M U L A C R U M

Jean-Luc Marion’s discussion about the icon and its counterpart, the idol, fornLs part
of his critique of traditional metaphysics and ontotheology; it provides an
introduction to his attempt to enunciate a theology that is distinct from metaphysics
and which places Cod beyond all categories of being. In this scheme, God must be
thought of as beyond even Heidegger’s idea of ontological difference and can only be
conceived of through the dynamic operation of the gift of love (which precedes
being). We can no longer think of God in terms of being or Being, but as *G#d°—a
God without, or beyond, being. God ‘givc[s] himself to be thought as love, hence as
gift and only such thought is beyond idolatry'. This means, however, that for Marion
the idol and the icon must both belong to an essentially different category to God, and
thus exist not as opposites but as a complementary pairing which represents two
different ‘manners of being’.
In short, the icon and the idol are not at all determined as beings against other
beings, since the same beings (statues, names, etc.) can pass from one rank to
the other. The icon and the idol determine two manners of being for beings, not
two classes of beings.7
Consequently, unable to escape from the same class of being as the idol, even the
most spiritually powerful images will always be darkened by the shadow of idolatry.
Conversely, the idol will never be wholly idolatrous; it will always be marked bv a
hint of divinity. This is what allows for the idol and the icon to ‘pass from one rank to
the other.’ As Graham Ward has put it: 'Both idol and icon are related by being
respectively the low and high water marks of an all- encompassing divine.” For
Marion, an image may pass from the ranks of the idol to that of the icon and vice
versa, because, for him, the question of iconicitv is decided by how the image directs
(or arrests) ones apprehension of it: the ‘gaze’. The icon is that which allows the gaze
to pass through it, beyond it; the idol is that which stops the gaze, satisfies it, and,
ultimately, turns it back upon the viewer in the manner of a mirror. The idol reflects
the observer, but shows nothing beyond its own reality'. ‘The decisive moment in the
erection of an idol,' writes Marion, ‘steins not from its fabrication, but from its
investment as gazeablc, as that which will fill a gaze.'> Immediate, satisfying, visible
— often, no doubt, brilliant and spectacular—the idol is its own truth: one sees
78 ICONOGRAPHY AND POSTMODERNITY
nothing but it.
It is possible to determine certain points of correspondence between this
understanding of the idol and Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum.1" First, for
Baudrillard the simulacrum is a fabrication which does not represent any reality
beyond that which it creates in and of itself It is self-referential, and as such cannot
gesture towards anything other than the signs from which it is constituted.
Therefore, one might say that the simulacrum fills to allow the apprehension of the
observer or participant to pass beyond the limits of its own ‘reality’. In Marion’s
terms, it freezes the ‘gaze’ and becomes an idol. Secondly, there is a sense in which
the simulacrum acts as a mirror, reflecting the intentions of the viewer back on
herself. Consider Baudrillard’s example of the simulacrum par excellence: the Theme
Park.

Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra. It is first

of all a play of illusions and phantasms: the Pirates, the Frontier, the Future
World, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to ensure the success of the
operation. But what attracts the crowds the most is without a doubt the social
microcosm, the religious, miniaturised pleasure of real America, of its constraints
and joys.11

Just as the idol acts as a mirror, reflecting back the intentions of the observer, so too
does the social microcosm of the theme park, reflecting back the dreams and
aspirations of those who leave the ‘real’ behind them at the gate. Indeed. Baudrillard
regards it as a simulation of America itself, reflecting the ‘real’ America back on itself:

Thus, everywhere in Disneyland the objective profile of America, down to the

morphology of individuals and of the crowd, is drawn. All its values are exalted
by the miniature and the comic strip.

Baudrillard’s identification of this as a religious phenomenon leads us to a third, and

very* significant, observation.
According to Baudrillard. religion itself, like Disneyland, is a simulation. Not only
are religious images and icons simulacra, but also the wider systems of meaning of
which they fonn an integral part. Baudrillard thus speculates about the possibility of
simulating God—for if God himself is a simulacrum:

Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a
gigantic simulacrum—not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never
exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit
without reference or circumference.13
This claim Is best understood in the context of Baudrillard’s general contention that,
in post-industrial society, the mechanisms of exchange and value have become
unhitched from their referents (Byzantine icons and Jesuit manipulations providing
curiously anachronistic, pre-modern examples of this process). No longer does ‘value’
 ST E VE N C R IMW O OD 79
(symbolic, economic, etc.) refer beyond itself and the structural system of which it is
part. Signifiers, cut adrift, are left to revel in the interplay of their own significations.
This is the nature of the simulacrum: networks of signification that signify nothing
‘real’, nothing beyond themselves. What remains is a ‘radiating synthesis of
combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere’: the hyperreal, the
‘liquidation of all referentials'. Thus, in Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard
writes:

Referential value is annihilated, giving the stnietural play of value the upper hand. The
structural dimension becomes autonomous by excluding the referential
dimension, and is instituted upon the death of reference. The systems of
reference for production, signification, the affect, substance and history, all this
equivalence to a ‘real* content, loading the sign with the burden of‘utility’, with
a·>

gravity—its form of representative equivalence—all this is over with.

This analysis, which draws heavily on Marx (and also Saussure), rests upon the
relationship between labour and production, and their collapse into the logic of
reproduction, consumption and the ‘omnipresent code’.16 It is this essentially
economic foundation which invokes the precession of simulacra. From this
foundation we see almost everything being absorbed into the hyperreal: everything
from fashion to public opinion.
Thus Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacrum can be applied to both specific, visible
items—such as icons—and to vast ideological systems. We can therefore say that it is
a concept that permits a degree of ‘slippage’ from the concrete to the abstract, a
tendency that Ward has identified in Marion's God Without Being. Here, ‘a certain
metaphorical slippage takes place as we move from discussions of visibility ... to
discussions of the conceptual idol in which “the measure of the concept comes not
from God but from the aim of the gaze” (God Without Being, p. 16)’. The conceptual
idol, like the physical idol, is that which freezes the ‘gaze’ (in this case the intellectual
gaze) and prevents it from progressing beyond its mirror.1 υ Thus, though appearing
to represent God, the conceptual idol is merely the reflection of human thought
about ‘God’. Like physical images and simulacra, it too is ‘radically immanent’ and
‘impassable’, satisfying in itself It is to this order that the ‘God’ of the philosophers
belongs—including the ‘God’ of ontotheology.20 Such gods can only exist as
simulacra.
Clearly then, Baudrillard’s simulacrum ofFers a parallel to Marion's idol— both at
a physical and a conceptual level. But in making this claim, I would note
8ο ICONOGRAPHY AND POSTMODERNITY
sonic further connections—and distinctions—between Marion, Baudrillard and
Orthodox tradition.
First, using the distinction between 'sign' and ‘symbol’ employed by Leonid
Ouspenski and Paul Evdokimov- -put simply, a sign is that which signifies some
‘other’ that is beyond die sign, whereas die symbol directly mediates the reality that is
being represented within itself- —we can say that the de-referential signifier of the
simulacrum is closer to the logic of the ‘sign' than it is to the svmbol. It is, however,
never entirely one or the other. It is distinct from the symbol because it does not
directly mediate any extrinsic reality (it can offer only the spectacle of itself). Yet
because it never gestures beyond itself(except to interconnect with other signifiers), it
is never entirely of the order of the sign. Put another way, we could say that the
signifiers that constitute the simulacrum are ‘signs’ that have been reduced to their
lowest level of iconicity. What matters here is less the idea of reference than that of
the ‘code'—the determining structure, of which the signifier is part. To confuse
matters further, Marion employs another term, ‘signa’, to talk about iconicity. Again,
the sigttum is closer to the idea of the sign than it is to that of the symbol, possessing
a capacity to point beyond itself and direct the gaze elsewhere. ‘ The diversity of these
ways for signalling and becoming sign a no doubt, however, decides everything
between the idol and the icon.’-*’ To be iconic the sigttum must point beyond itself to
an undetermined referent, gesturing towards an openness of meaning. Indeed, the
icon would become a simulacrum (and an idol) the moment the signtnn rests upon
(and becomes determined by) another signifier.
It is striking that, despite difficulties with the vocabularies employed, there is little
substantial difference between the positions of Baudrillard and Marion. The main
difference would seem to be that Marion allows for the possibility of iconicity, and
explores how some ‘images' (physical and conceptual) might permit the passage of
the gaze—a notion that Baudrillard does not concern himself with. The latter instead
focuses on the simulacrum, highlighting how in contemporary western societies the
real is increasingly absorbed and effaced by simulation. This is important, because by
linking the simulacrum (with which we can now identify the idol) to the cultural and
economic system of post-industrial society, Baudrillard highlights, in a way that
Marion does not pause to consider, the possibility that in western society we have
now entered a cultural phase in which there is little, if any, sense of iconicity left. We
are caught up in a system that is fundamentally idolatrous. And, if we accept this, we
are faced with the need to re-evaluate Marion’s claim that the idol merely represents
the low-water mark of iconicity. For if we accept the equivalence of the idol and the
simulacrum, we must take heed of the fact that, for Baudrillard, the simulacrum is
founded on the symbolic value of death.
 ST E VE N G R IM W O OD 81
For Baudrillard, the possibility of the simulacrum depends upon the separation of
representation from referent. Tins separation, he argues, comes about at the point
when, in a society, the value of labour becomes divorced from the labourer (‘the
agency of mediation and representation flourishes in this rupture’). 23 But this rupture
in turn surrenders the establishment of‘value’ over to the ‘system’—a system which is
self-regulated, self-driven, and programmed for survival. In such a system, death and
the dead have no value, cannot be tolerated, and must therefore be abjected. ’ No
longer ‘beings with a full role to play, worthy partners in exchange’, the dead are
‘thrown out of the group’s symbolic circulation’."^ The consequence of this is that
‘the price we pay for the “reality" of this life, to live it as a positive value, is the
ever-present phantasm of death'. ’

Against the senseless illusion of the living of willing the living to the exclusion of
the dead, against the illusion that reduces life to an absolute surplus-value by
subtracting death from it, the indestructible logic of symbolic exchange re-
establishes the equivalence of life and death in the indifferent fatality of survival.
In survival, death is repressed; life itself, in accordance with that well known
ebbing away, would be nothing more than a survival determined by death.27

The order of the simulacrum is death-bound, saturated by death in trying to fend it

off. In attempting to purge itself of death, the simulacrum ends up denying life—or at
least denying any sort of life that is not already the equivalent of death. Therefore it
seems that we may no longer be permitted to accept the idol/simulacrum as merely
the low ebb of divinity; the idol, at least in the context of a postmodern society, must
be seen for what it is: anti-life. Rightly, then, does Baudrillard write about the
‘murderous power of images’.28 This being the case, how are we to assess the validity
of the Byzantine image within a culture that is founded on idolatry, which is
saturated with images, and where the stakes in the argument appear to be so high?
One possible way forward is to do what neither Baudrillard nor Marion have been
prepared to do, and that is to consider the actual form and content of the icon itself
For if the icon finds new points of contact with the logic of postmodemity on a
conceptual level, it seems reasonable that we should expect to find such connections
on a physical level—between the icon and the treatment of space, time and
participation that we find in postmodern art and architecture.

III. ICONIC AND IDOLATROUS SPACE

In postmodemity we witness the collapse of the ways of experiencing and
understanding space and time that characterised modernity. Frederick Jameson
illustrates this collapse using the example of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los
Angeles. This, he suggests, is a building which creates its own reality. It ‘achieves a
peculiar and placeless dissociation ... from its neighbourhood’, its language is
‘autoreferentiaF, its space obeys its own logic, and it offer» the dizzying spectacle of
its own image. As Jameson puts it: ‘You arc in this hyperspace up to your eyes and
your body ...V Or, in Baudrillard’s terms, the Westin Bonaventure is hyperreal: a
82 ICONOGRAPHY AND POSTMODERNITY
simulacrum. And if such a treatment of space, time and meaning that we find in the
Westin Bonaventure Hotel is characteristic of the simulacrum, it is also characteristic
of the idol. This being the case, it behoves us to examine the Byzantine icon in
relation to postmodern experiences of space and time, exploring how such
experience might inform our understanding of the iconic code—and, conversely, how
our understanding of iconicity might inform our experience of postmodern space and
time.
The shift from modernity to postmodernity witnessed a change in the perception
and representation of space. The hegemony of grid and perspective characteristic of
the modem era was dispelled and, once again, space became something to be
experienced. No longer, then, the god’s-eye view, where the onlooker could take her
position and look upon a scene as if she were utterly removed from it. Rather the
scene and the spectator were brought together in a way that set the experiential over
the mathematical. This postmodern space is one that both elevates the subject and
decentres her, making her both viewer and participant. Postmodern art is witness to
this, particularly installation pieces—works that the observer can often enter, inter-
act with and become part of, adding to both the aesthetic value and meaning of the
piece.31
Similarly, the Byzantine icon creates a space that involves the viewer as a
participant. For example, in many icons we observe the elimination of all
conventional use of perspective; there is no single vanishing point, lines converge
and separate without any regard for the ‘grid’, curves appear where one would expect
straight lines, scale and proportion seem to be disregarded, indeed, the architecture
in the icon is uncannily ‘postmodern’ in its treatment of space.

Drawn in defiance of human logic, architecture in iconography creates an

evident denial of all constructional functionality. Correct proportions are not
only completely ignored, but they do not correspond at all to the height of
human figures pictured in the icon. The same is true of doors and windows,
which are drawn strangely with whimsical measurements.32

It is important to note that this treatment of space is part of a symbolic system that
strives to involve the viewer in a reality that transcends (but without negating or
escaping) the earthly or physical. For example, one of the most common devices
employed within iconography is that of inverse perspective (a device which Charles
Jencks points out had become a ‘conventional motif' in architecture by 197133). This
reverses the normal perspective of linear space, with the effect that the vanishing
point is not hi the distant horizon, but where the viewer is standing.3" As Michel
Quenot puts it. ‘[t]his means that the focus point actually moves out away from the
icon toward the beholder, and the icon figures come forth to “meet” him’. 33 Thus, the
viewer is brought into the reality depicted in the icon and, as part of that image, is
invited to see himself as participating in its reality. Furthermore, the icon, in bringing
forth a presence, introduces an alternative dimension into the landscape of ‘normal’
 ST E VE N G R IM W O OD «83
space. Iconography thus shares both postmodernism’s tendency to collapse the logic
of linear space and its concern for the experience of space. Iconic space is
space that is saturated with meaning—a meaning which the viewer himself
f 36
is part or.
There is also a sense in which the icon collapses linear, ‘modern’ time. For because
the icon presents an image of a scene or a figure from the past—a symbol that, for an
Orthodox Christian, manifests the reality of its prototype—we can say that it allows
an ‘alternative time’ to enter into our own. This should not be seen so much as the
past breaking through, but rather the proleptic presence of an eternal, sacred time:
heavenly time made present within the earthly. We may witness this disruption of
earthly time most vividly in composite icons or an iconostasis, where events spanning
many years are brought together in a series of symbols that allow the viewer to stand
before the whole of salvation history. Indeed, such iconography permits the viewer to
see himself as stepping into this alternative space/time and participating in its
reality.37
That this alternative space/time is not merely viewed, but actually participated in,
is underlined by the fact that the icon cannot be properly understood outside the
logic of the liturgy. This is a point that Ouspenski emphasises early on in his Theology
of the Icon, and which is linked to the crucial distinction between sign and symbol
that we noted earlier. ‘ For Ouspenski, symbolism is dependent upon such
participation and vice-versa—neither may stand alone:

The symbolism of the Church cannot be effectively studied outside of the

Liturgy, because it is a liturgical symbolism and it is through the Liturgy that the
Fathers explained it. Separated from the divine services, symbolism loses its
meaning and becomes a series of abstractions.u

We might say that the liturgy not only explains the holy images, but also provides the
rhythm, spaces, syntax and grammar around which they articulate their meaning.
And furthermore, the worshipping participants in the liturgy also form part of this
language game. They are, if you like, embodied symbols—enriching, modifying and
extending the meaning of the whole symbolic system, a system in which they
participate alongside the iconic symbols of the saints.
What I want to suggest, then, is that the passage of the body of the worshipper
through the liturgy, and the interaction of symbols that it produces, creates its own
text—a constantly evolving narrative of a type akin to Michel de Certeau’s spatial
stories. For Certeau, the passage of bodies through the fabric of the city creates a text.
These bodies ‘follow the cursives and strokes of an urban “text" they write without
reading’.40 Or, indeed, it is like narration:

The act of walking is to the urban system what the act of speaking, the Speech
Act. is to language or to spoken utterance.41
84 ICONOGRAPHY AND POSTMODERNITY
This might be seen as being analogous to the relationship between hi fatigue and la
parole, the synchronic and the diachronic, or even (following Kristeva’s usage) the
semiotic and the symbolic. Certeau considers how a narrative is built up from these
elements through the relationship between objects and people, the paths they take
(‘turns of phrase' or ‘stylistic devices’)4' and the formal grammar and literal meanings
of the urban space (constructed by the city planners and architects).4' Similarly, there
is a sense in which the life of the Church, most explicitly as it is articulated through
the liturgy, takes on the aspect of what Certeau might call a ‘pcrambulatory
rhetoric’.4' The passage of the body of the worshiper (interacting with the iconic
bodies of the saints) becomes a speech act; the possibilities of enunciation welling up
from within the richness of the Church’s liturgical life, history and community
become a semiotic chora—the raw material of speech, from which the faithful weave
a divine story. For Certeau, the interaction of bodies in the urban space creates
‘strange poems’; in the liturgical space, with the believers and the iconic saints, it
creates a psalm or a hymn.
But we meet a similar phenomenon in postmodern architectural and artistic
spaces—in the idolatrous simulacra of contemporary culture. The idea of the spatial
narrative produced by the interaction of subjects passing through their environment
is one that has been seized upon by the engineers of postmodern spaces. Charles
Jencks, for example, suggests that postmodern space is like ‘Chinese garden space’, in
which the subject experiences her surroundings as an array of signs to be read and
interpreted. Such space creates its own narrative—full of meaning, though never
closed. ‘Post-Modern, like Chinese garden space, suspends the clear, final ordering of
events for a labyrinthine, rambling “way" that never reaches an absolute goal.’4* A
similar point about postmodern spatial language is found in Jameson’s analysis of the
Westin Bonavcnture Motel. Like the Chinese garden, the space of the Westin
Bonaventure Hotel creates a narrative through the passage of its occupants; however,
this narrative lacks the ambiguity and openness of the Chinese garden due to the
over-determination of meaning that is produced by the
 ST E VE N G R IM W O OD ^5

system itself:

I lore the narrative stroll has been underscored, symbolized, reified, and
replaced by a transportation machine which becomes the allegorical sigmfier of
that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our own: and this
is a dialectical intensification of the autoreferentiality of all modern culture,
which tends to turn upon itself and designate its own cultural production as its
content.1 2 3 4^

What is produced here is a closed system, a system in which the narrative is imposed
upon the participant, who in effect has become part of the intense autoreferentiality
that is the hallmark of the simulacrum and the idol.
Jencks and Jameson therefore present two different interpretations of postmodern
space—one emphasising openness, the other closure of meaning. To put this in the
terms we considered earlier, one offers a view of space that might be called iconic,
the other idolatrous—a simulacrum. But, this means that a comparison between the
narrative woven by the passage of a worshipper through the liturgy and postmodern
spatial narratives, no matter how illuminating it may be, doesn’t resolve the question
of the iconicity of the image and its context. We need to assess the iconicity of the
narrative itself, and that requires a judgement concerning the very openness of the
system, its ability to allow meaning to pass beyond its limits, its transparency to the
conceptual gaze. For is it not possible that both the icon and the liturgy belong to the
order of simulacra and are thus potentially idolatrous and death-bound?
There is a further point, which accentuates this ambiguity. Paradoxically, the icon,
though eschewing the god's eye perspective of the map and the tyranny of the
chronometer, substitutes an alternative perspective that is, in a sense, equally
god-like. The symbolism of the icon and the liturgy takes us out of the space-time of
modernity and presents us with a new dimension from which to regard reality. This,
however, introduces a difficulty: for although the subject is invited to participate in
this reality—his or her body constituting an element within it—there is a sense in
which he or she might simply stand as an observer regarding the spectacle, as it were,
from ‘above’. The sense of this might be vividly felt when viewing an iconostasis or
the interior of an Orthodox Church. The icon invites 11s to participate, but it also
invites us to spectate. Indeed, in ‘Practices of Space’, Certeau’s ‘perambulatory
rhetoric’ is contrasted with the viewpoint once offered by the observation deck of the
World Trade Center in New York:

1 Iis altitude transforms him into a voyeur. It places him at a distance. It changes
an enchanting world into a text. It allows him to read it; to become a solar Eye, a
god's regard. The exaltation of a scopic or gnostic drive. Just to be this seeing
point creates the fiction of knowledge.4
86 ICONOGRAPHY AND POSTMODERNITY
Tor Certeau, then, such an elevated perspective creates a lie, a ‘fiction of knowledge’
— an illusion no more real than the grid-fines on a map:

The city-panorama is a ‘theoretical’ (i.e. visual) simulacrum: in short, a picture,

of winch the preconditions for feasibility are forgetfulness and a misunderstand-
ing of processes. The seeing god created by this fiction, who, like Schreber’s,
‘knows only corpses’, must remove himself from the obscure interlacings of
Io

everyday behaviour and make himself a stranger to it.

If the icon presents us with a perspective which is in some sense analogous to this,
then it too presents us with a fiction, a simulacrum—the ‘god’s eye’ view of a
necropolis. This is a ‘view’ which is doubly death-bound, for it removes the viewer
from lived reality in order to offer itself, fixing him at a point where he can no longer
act as a participant or a producer of meaning.
In what sense, then, can we say that this is iconic, and how is it possible for a
viewer to go beyond what is offered in this spectacle?

I V . TΗE ΗORIZONS OP ΜE A NI NG

In his book Camera Lucid a, Roland Barthes draws a distinction between the
pornographic and the erotic photograph. The distinction that he offers is significant
for us. as it is one that can be mapped directly onto the distinction that Marion draws
between the icon and the idol. Recognising the way in which the pornographic
photograph offers the spectacle of its image to the gaze, Barthes speaks of it ‘making
... [the sexual organs] ... into a motionless object (a fetish), flattered like an idol that
does not leave its niche ...Vw Barthes' recourse to the language of idolatry here
highlights how he, like Baudrillard, is keenly aware of the negative potential of the
image. For example, the thing captured in the photograph is, he writes:

a kind of little simulacrum, any \sic] eidolon emitted by the ob ject, which 1
should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains,
through its root, a relation to ‘spectacle’ and adds to it that rather terrible thing
which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.50

The parallels with Baudrillard here are more than superficial. What Barthes discerns
in the photograph is a doubling of the subject, his absorption into the system, and his
reduction to the level of a product whose meaning is determined by the code. 31
Barthes writes: ‘... when I discover myself in the product of this operation, what 1 see
is that I have become Total-Image, which is to say. Death in person’.3" But, this being
so, how does Barthes gesture towards a way of re-evaluating Marion’s concept of
iconicity? As we have noted, the idol, for Marion, is that which blocks the passage of
the gaze. It is that which offers itself (and only itself) as a ‘first visible’ and, acting as a
mirror,
 ST E VE N G R IM W O OD «87
doubles the gaze back upon the spectator. Barthes, 1 suggest offers us a way forward
inasmuch as he suggests a way of evaluating how the intention of the ‘gaze’ can be
permitted to pass beyond the image—in this case the photographic image.
The erotic photograph provides the clearest example of how this might work. For
Barthes, what is important in the erotic image is not what the picture depicts (in
contrast with pornography, where the spectacle of what is depicted is all that is
important) but rather what the picture does not show. Or, put in slightly different
terms, what is at issue in distinguishing between the erotic image and the
pornographic is whether the gaze is directed beyond what is given in the
representation or whether it is arrested by it. For example, in his discussion of a
photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe of a young man with his arm outstretched (in
which all but the head, arm and part of the torso are visible), he suggests that the
image directs our desire beyond the figure’s nakedness and towards ‘... the absolute
excellence of a being, body and soul together’. A ‘divined body’34 This, of course, is
something that could never be directly represented; Barthes, however, employs two
important terms which help explain how such ‘excellence* might be revealed: studium
and punctum. The studium is formed by those elements in the photograph that are
interesting, but conventional, studied and saturated by particular codes—clothing,
backgrounds, scenery, poses, etc. The majority of photographs are dominated by the
studium. The punctum, on the other hand, is that element which evades
determination by the code, ‘punctuates’—or punctures34—the studium and permits
the viewer to pass beyond what is represented whilst at the same time bringing his or
her own meaning to it. In the instance of Mapplethorpe’s photograph of the young
man, Barthes describes the punctum as a ‘kind of subtle beyond’; it is that which ‘takes
the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and
that it animates me’.33 In contrast, the studium, through the imposition of coded
elements, determines the observer’s response to what is represented. In instances
where the studium dominates an image we witness a closure of meaning beyond
which the viewer is unable to pass. The viewer, far from being permitted to
participate is, Barthes suggests, silenced by the code.3*'
In effect, this ‘silencing’ is the same phenomenon that Jameson highlights in his
analysis of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel. Here the code imposes itself on the
observer as she passes through its space, it overrides her active contribution to the
narrative that her passage creates and thus produces a closed, over-determined set of
meanings. It does not allow her to speak. There is no ‘beyond’, no punctum to allow
the rupture of the code. A similar point can be made about the view from the World
Trade Center, where a god’s eye view was attained only at the cost of the observer
being barred from adding to or participating in its meaning. In contrast, the Chinese
garden space is also a coded space; but, as Jcncks points out. is also an ambiguous
space. It is tins ambiguity which permits the narrative to remain open; we might say
that it provides a form of punctual, which allows the observer to go beyond the code
and incorporate her meaning into the spatial narrative. This being the case, we might
88 ICONOGRAPHY AND POSTMODERNITY
now be in a position to look at the icon from the point of view of whether or not it
acts as, or contains within itself, a punctum. We must ask: does the visual image
puncture the code (and one might easily substitute the word ‘code’ with the word
‘simulacrum’ or ‘idol'), hold the horizons of meaning open, and permit the viewer not
just to view but also to ‘speak’?
The insistence that any consideration of iconography should allow for the subject
to ‘speak’ at once distances it from Marion, for in God Without Being such a subject is
curiously absent. At first, this seems almost paradoxical, because in Marion’s scheme
it is the ‘gaze’ which determines iconicity, and where there is a gaze there must be an
observer. Marion, however, considers the gaze without any consideration of the gazer
or his context; furthermore, in the case of the icon, the gaze of the viewer is actually
overwhelmed by the intention of the gaze of the icon itself (which summons the
viewer’s gaze towards the invisible). Thus, in the icon, the gaze ‘... belongs to the icon
itself, where the invisible only becomes visible intentionally, hence by its a i m * . ' S o ,
in Marion’s account, it is not merely the physical icon that is vaporised,3* but the
beholder also. At the very least he is silenced, overpowered by the gaze from beyond.
We cannot accept this double vaporisation. Hirst, such a manoeuvre overlooks the
fact that the icon is part of a highly developed, highly refined symbolic system within
which each icon articulates a message that is intended to be read by the Church
community. Marion, however, fails to acknowledge that the iconic (or idolatrous)
image—together with the observer—is part of a system of meaning from which it
cannot be isolated.0 Indeed, as we have seen, by emphasising the role of the subjective
gaze, Marion necessitates the disappearance of the physical image—but such a move
also necessitates the disappearance of the physical viewer. One cannot stand without
the other: either one acknowledges the importance of both or one attempts to
dissolve both. Marion takes the latter course, bracketing off the significance of the
observer and contradicting what the Orthodox theology of the icon insists upon and
which postmodemity has, to an extent, rediscovered: the participation of the subject.
We have seen the importance of this in the Chinese Garden, Mapplethorpe's
photograph and, of course, the liturgy: the meaning of the space or image, its
language and the narrative that is woven from it depend upon the active involvement
of an observer or participant. In these instances, the viewer is never the passive
recipient of a set of meanings which are imposed upon him. This is not, however, the
case with Marion's icon, which, at the moment when the observer is overwhelmed by
the iconic gaze and silenced (just before lie is evaporated), becomes indistinguishable
from the simulacrum. At that moment, the place and the ‘value’ of the viewer
becomes determined from outside: he is no longer an originator of meaning, but a
terminal.
Terminal: Baudrillard uses this word to describe the place of the individual subject
within the simulacrum. No longer able to produce anything, no longer able to
generate any value, the individual is now merely a terminal in a great machine.
 ST E VE N G R IM W O OD 89
... 11 ]t is essential that everyone be a terminal for the entire system, an
insignificant terminal, but a term none the less—not an inarticulate cry. but a
term of the langue and at the terminus of the entire structural network of the
language. ’

For Baudrillard, drawing on both Marx and Saussure, this termination operates on an
economic and a linguistic level. The human terminal is a term, a coded signifier, a
value, a meaning. This value may be variable, but nevertheless the person still
functions as a unit within the coded exchange of signs. The term becomes ‘terminal’
(and the deathly overtones are unavoidable here) when it, and the meaning it
generates, is taken over by the system. This is why, because the gaze of Marion’s icon
must determine the gaze of the viewer (and the gaze is all that there seems to be to
this phantom) in order to be iconic, it terminates her in the process. This cannot be
any less idolatrous than Baudrillard’s simulacra or the Westin Bonaventure Hotel.
The embodied subject cannot be elided if we are to speak of true iconicitv. She
must be allowed to stand as an agent of meaning. Only in such an incarnated form
can Marion’s distinction between idol and icon be salvaged, for only by insisting that
we talk about the generation of meaning by embodied subjects in relation to the
image—transcending the coded representation, the stadium—instead of the passage
of a disembodied gaze into a vacuum, is it possible to understand the relationship
between the icon and the viewer in terms of creative participation within the life of
the Trinity rather than mutual vaporisation.
The insistence on the embodiment of both image and observer punctures the
logic of the simulacrum on two levels. First, because the ‘reality·’ of the simulacrum
(with which we now join Marion's idolatrous ‘icon’) is sustained by the
autoreferential interplay of signifiers and the circuits of meaning that they produce,
the intrusion of values extrinsic to these circuits has the potential to create a
punctual—a rupture in the code that allows new meanings to break through. The
icon, which according to orthodox tradition physically shows forth the divine reality
of its prototype (with both icon and prototype sharing in the life of God through the
grace of the Holy Spirit),62 challenges the hegemony of the simulacrum’s code. The
icon breaches the limits of the coded space by opening it up to a beyond—a
transfigured, eternal space, into which the observer is brought into relation. This is
not to claim any supernatural powers for the icon; rather that the icon, through its
rich visual language and artistic conventions aims to show forth the divine reality
within which all sensible things participate. The icon testifies to the incarnation of
God within creation and looks to the transfiguration of creation within the divine.
There would be no theology of the icon without the incarnation. As St John of
Damascus wrote during the iconoclastic controversies of the eighth century:
‘Therefore I boldly draw an image of the invisible God, not as invisible, but as having
become visible for our sakes by partaking of flesh and blood.’ °
This representation, which captures the concrete person sustained and
90 ICONOGRAPHY AND POSTMODERNITY
transfigured by his or her incorporation into the life of the Trinity, showing forth the
participation of creation within the divine, comes close to the vision that the
theologian Phillip Blond has recently sought within modern art/’* Blond criticises the
way that modern art developed along paths which either celebrate pure objectivity
(in, for example, the case of Cezanne), or pure subjectivity divorced from the
representation of reality (as in the case of Kandinski). Blond argues that neither
option is theologically acceptable, because they result in the artistic equivalents of
either atheism or Gnosticism.
I lowever, in advocating the later work of Kazimir Malevich as an example of how
these two poles—visible-invisible, real-ideal—might be restored to each other in a
satisfactory way, he is surely incorrect; and in this respect, the Byzantine icon offers a
much more satisfactory alternative. He is incorrect for two reasons. First, unlike the
Byzantine image, Malevich’s works lack any sense of direct reference. The Sportsmen
might represent ‘the ideal in the real’/0 but there is no sense of there being any
concrete referent—there is no real sportsman, no symbolic presence. Secondly—a
point made by Paul Evdokimov in relation to abstract art generally—what is apparent
in paintings such as Malevich's is the absence of a coherent code that can be read and
understood within the community and context in which they belong. The Byzantine
image, with its internal codes and conventions, provides a coherent language, the
lexicon of which is developed precisely to convey the presence of the divine in the
human, the potential in the actual, the invisible in the visible, the ideal in the real.66
Consequently, the icon has a revelatory value, but the message that it carries can
only be made sense of within a community that has learnt to read the image in a
certain way. Outside of such a community the icon can have little, if any, meaning.
Rather, it is within the community, in the interaction of worshipper and icon in the
liturgy, that its true value is revealed. In a sense this means that the icon can never
impose its meaning in the way that some postmodern spaces can, because its
meaning is always being generated in relation to the narratives woven by the
worshipping community—a community of which both image
 ST E VE N ( .’ . RIM W O OD yi
and prototype arc part. We can see the relevance of this when we consider Rowan
Williams* essay, ‘Trinity and Revelation*. Here Williams suggests that revelation
should properly be seen as an ongoing, generative process:

Revelation, on such an account, is essentially to do with what is generative in our

experience—events or transactions in our language that break existing frames of
reference and initiate new possibilities of life.67

Williams argues that when revelation is seen as a generative process within the
self-understanding of the Christian community it ceases being a ‘simple heteronomy’
... ‘delivered to us from a normative “elsewhere”’. *' Thus it ceases to be hegemonic,
like the code of the simulacrum, and can instead become creative and liberating. We
might say that Revelation, creates a ‘kind of subtle beyond'u) in the self understanding
of the community or opens new horizons of meaning for the narrative of the Church.
As we have seen, the icon may be judged by its capacity to direct the intention of
the gaze ‘beyond’ the screen of the visible. Yet this ‘beyond’ is only accessible due to
the involvement and relationship of the observer and the image within the context of
a linguistic community that sees both as being supported by and participating in the
Divine reality. Thus the ‘beyond’ that the icon opens up is in no sense a ‘beyond’ that
depends on the evaporation of the physical or a transcendence of the material (at
least where such transcendence is taken to imply the ‘leaving behind’ of bodily
existence). Rather it is a ‘beyond’ in the sense that it is an ‘adding to’, or ‘surpassing’
of what is already there, of going beyond what is given in the code. The icon is that
which, within its context, facilitates this by ensuring that the meanings we generate
in our relationship to the physical image and the perambulatory rhetorics we weave
with them remain open, and according to a grammar which ensures that the
narrative which grows is one that is open to saturation by the Divine. The physical
format of the Byzantine icon does this through the dynamics of the language of its
representations; the visible is read through the lens of the invisible, the mundane is
looked at in the light of the transfigured, the temporal is viewed from the perspective
of the eternal. Meaning is layered upon meaning.
This being the case, we might now return to the perambulatory rhetoric and the
view of the iconostasis. In a sense it is still true that the iconostasis represents the
icon at its most ambiguous. 1 lere the viewer—at least one who is unfamiliar with the
language of the icon, and the community and liturgy of which it is part—is presented
with a spectacle, a spectacle which they might admire and which might overwhelm
them. As such it may well place the viewer ‘beyond’ a world in which they are unable
to participate, indeed they might enjoy the view ‘from above’ in the same way as one
might have once
92 ICONOGRAPHY AND POSTMODERNITY
enjoyed the view from the observation deck of the World Trade Center. 13ut tliis is
not the final word. For when one regards the iconostasis within its context, as part of
a rich, visual, liturgical language, it is clear that it does not offer itself as a 'first
visible’, a spectacle to satisfy the gaze. Rather, the iconostasis always points beyond
itself, its entire symbolic code directing the intention of the gaze through the royal
doors into the space that lies on the other side of the threshold/" The narrative that
the observer weaves Is thus directed into a space, a space dominated not by the
image but by the altar. In this profoundly open and ambiguous space, the logic of the
icon and symbolic presence is consummated in the bread and wine. Here only does
the distinction between icon and prototype collapse. Indeed, in this collapse, which
takes place in a space beyond the icon, our gaze is directed to a point where the
liturgical stories of which the communicants are part are drawn together, focused
and harmonised. But they are always held open, in a h y m n that is constantly in
progress, but modulated by the rhythms of unification, fracture and dispersal. Our
words, and the words of which we are part, are gathered into the mystery of The
Word, unified, and, at the point where meaning appears to close, scattered again.

V. CONCLUSION

Jean Baudrillard describes ‘the murderous power of images'—the power to efface the
real and to bind up life within an economy of death. Few writers are as chilling or as
prophetic. To see western society through the lens of Baudrillard’s writings is to see
the spectacle of a system that is saturated by signs and images—signs and images
that are woven into the fabric of the simulacra that have risen to swamp us at so
m a n y levels. l ittle wonder, then, that Baudrillard suggests it was the iconoclasts who
recognised the true value of images, and, because ‘they predicted the omnipotence of
simulacra’, were moved to destroy them/ Faced with this observation—and with the
profound ambiguity that has always haunted the religious image—we can perhaps
understand the enduring appeal of iconoclasm.
Indeed, one might suggest that, when faced with a surfeit of images, the stark
simplicity of a Methodist chapel or Gospel hall might offer a more appropriate
response than the dazzling splendour of an iconostasis. In entertaining this claim,
however, we must recognise that although they may lack an abundance of religious
images />er sc, these too are spaces laden with codes—codes that one learns to read
and interpret within the context of a living community. Similarly, Churches may
reject all forms of liturgical art as idolatrous whilst making use of visual media and
imagery borrowed from secular, consumer culture in order to make their message
accessible. (But it is hard to see how this does anything to challenge the power of the
image, as all that is achieved is the substitution of one visual language for another—a
substitution which, given
 ST E VE N G R IM W O O l) 93

the link that Baudrillard identifies between tlie serial image, consumerism and the
simulacrum, must be of questionable wisdom.) Therefore the issue cannot simply be
one about the use of religious art.
For this reason 1 cannot accept that iconoclasm (narrowly understood as an
antagonism towards religious images) is an appropriate response to the challenge
that Baudrillard presents us with—just as 1 cannot accept that iconicity is merely
about what is given in an image. Rather, as I have argued in this paper, what is
important is that within any system we are enabled to move beyond what is merely
offered to us by the code, through participating in the narration of a story of which
the horizons of meaning are constantly held open. Understood in this way, iconicity
is about finding the pimctum, transgressing the limits of the simulacrum, discovering
openings that rupture the hegemony of an over-determined, auto-referential system:
an exercise in discerning the iconoclasm latent within that w h i c h is truly iconic, one
might say. Given the various levels at which the idolatrous simulacra operate—from
the mass images to the socio-economic systems that spawn them—this quest for
iconicity is one that would do well to begin with the Byzantine icon, finding its
touchstone there, but must move outwards from it into the physical and social
spaces of postmodern culture. This is a theological endeavour that must not only
engage with art and imagery, but which also must examine how these are woven into
and from the lives of the communities of which they are part: the constant labour of
reading and understanding the signs of the times.

University of Manchester, Manchester Mi j 9 PL

snihgriniwoo([email protected]

REFERENCES

1
J . Baudrillard, Simtilaaa and Simulation, trans. account of the development of iconography,
S.F. Glaser, ( A n n Arbor, Ml: Michigan UR the historical controversies surrounding holy
1994), p. 5. images and the theology of the icon can be
Ibid., p. 5. found in Leonid Ouspenski's two volume
The Orthodox writer Michel Quenot 7hcology of the lam. trans. A. Gytliiel, with
suggests that ‘the utter ambiguity and selections of vol. 1 trans. by E. MeycndortF
occasional negative influences* of the icon (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary
underpins contemporary iconoclasm. Press, 1992).
Quenot highlights how, historically, such ' J.-L. Marion. God Without Iking: Hors-
ambiguities have always haunted the icon. Texte, trans. T . A . Carlson (Chicago/
(M. Quenot. Ihe Resurrection and the lam. London: Chicago UP. 1991).
trans. M. Brock (Crestwood, NY: St ‘The unthinkable forces us to substitute the
Vladimir’s Seminary Press. 1997). pp. 43f.) idolatrous quotation marks around “God"
For an overview of the development of the with the verv God that no mark of
*

icon and the iconoclastic controversies. see knowledge can demarcate; and. in order
M. Quenot. The lam: Window on the
Kingdom, trans. a Carthusian monk
(Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 1991), pp. 1 $f. The most comprehensive