Aniconism
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Aniconism is the absence of any representations, in a restricted sense those of living or divine beings, and more generally, any type of human substitution. The word itself derives from Greek εικων 'image' with the negative prefix an- (Greek privative alpha) and the suffix -ism (Greek -ισμος).
This article is a general discussion of aniconism and introduces some less popularized areas where it appears. Aniconism in religion is presented in greater detail in separate articles (see below under "Manifestations: Religion").
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[edit] Categorization
Aniconism is a particular case of representation (the absence of images) and taboo (the prohibition of images). The difference is that one expresses only the absence of images, while the other contains also an injunction conceived to regulate their absence. An avoidance and repugnance of representations is called iconophobia, its antonymic reaction being that of an iconodule. When unformalized predispositions or clearly stated legislations are put in practice and enforced, leading to the removal and destruction of representations, the aniconism becomes iconoclasm. Aniconism relates also to censorship, which takes place after a representation was already produced, but before, or shorthly after, it is made public, and also involves less violence than iconoclasm. In common usage, "aniconism" is used to designate the absence of paintings and statues, "taboo" characterizes behaviours, "censorship" is applied to written materials and "iconoclasm" to the destruction of paintings and statues.
Semantic field of aniconism (from general to particular).
OBJECT > REPRESENTATION: |- aniconism |- iconophobia |- taboo > censorship > iconoclasm
[edit] Object
According to the occurrence considered, the object of aniconism extends to God only, to all deities and saint characters, to legendary and historical characters, to all humans, to animated beings and living beings, and finally to everything existing in the physical or supernatural world.
Some parts of the objects subjected to aniconism are more sensitive than others to representation. The eyes and the face are markers of identity for the species and the individual (the iris pattern is a powerful biometric identifier; portraits are the most common art subject; masks appear throughout cultures as means to protect one's privacy or take a new one; enocculation was supposed to remove the power, life and soul from depictions). The representation of genital parts are often avoided, usually on moral grounds, because they represent biological, social and symbolic power (suppressed through clothing of statues and paintings or digital blurring and ink blackening of photographs).
The forms of representation concerned by aniconism are in a wide sense, as well as etymologically, not restricted to particular ones, thus encompassing visual, auditory, odorific, gustative and tactile representations (examples are the periods of opposition to figurative music in musical history and criticism and the social marginality of actors—mimes of body and language—in many pre-modern societies). However, it is more common to see the term aniconism applied to material occurrences, bi-dimensional (painting) and three-dimensional (statues), thus leaving out ideas, language or performance, which are also types of re-presentation, re-enactment or re-embodiment.
[edit] Impact
While seemingly a futile issue, aniconism has fueled many social unrests and cultural damage throughout history (Byzantine and Reformation iconoclasm) and continues to be an unobtrusive yet determinant factor across social areas, from religion and politics to science and arts.
Yet its most dramatic impact is for the future. Genetic modification, cloning, artificial intelligence and robotics aim at reproducing the living body and consciousness. Already visible are the Byzantine arguments resurrected today about likeness, some arguing restraint and moratoria, some prophesizing an outphasing of humans by their own creations (Ray Kurzweil inter alia).
[edit] Distribution
Aniconism is a gradual phenomenon, having appeared at various times in many cultures across the world and within the same culture during its history. It is usually restricted to specific circumstances of space (figurative images are absent from mosques, but not outside their walls), time (synagogues are not painted, but the oldest preserved one was (3rd c. CE, Dura Europos, Syria)), object (in Africa the High God has no statue or painting, but lesser deities do) or modality. The intensity of aniconism is characterized by periodicity (e.g. the alternance of iconoclast and image overloaded periods in Christianity).
[edit] Causes
[edit] Cognitive
The fundamental cause of aniconism is embedded in the problematic nature of representation itself. There is an unavoidable need to represent the world since this is how our cognition works, but what is the validity of a representation not perceptible to our biological senses of something outside their reach or immaterial (God, time, ultraviolet)? Furthermore, how to present a general model by a specific occurrence (everybody knows what a human looks like, but everyone will draw him or her in a different way). Because these are inherent and not transitory problems, they generate a perpetual search for solutions, making of aniconism a continuously fluctuating phenomenon.[1]
[edit] Religious
Although aniconism is better known in connection to Abrahamic religions, basic patterns are shared between various religious beliefs. In monotheism aniconism was shaped by specific theological considerations and their historical contexts. It emerged as a corollary of seeing God's position as the ultimate power holder, and the need to defend this unique status against competing external and internal forces, such as pagan idols and critical humans. Idolatry is a threat to uniqueness, and one way that prophets and missionaries chose to fight it was through the prohibition of material representations. The same solution also worked against the pretension of humans to have the same power of creation as God (hence their banishment from the Heavens, the destruction of Babel, and the Second Commandment in the biblical texts, or the myth of Golem in Jewish literature).
[edit] Economical
The production of representations involves an expenditure of valuable human and material resources for ends that do not yield benefits critical for the survival of communities and individuals (paintings and statues). Especially in moments of crisis, representations come to be considered as threatening luxuries, that take away resources from where they are needed. Economic reasons are a culturally non-specific factor that has contributed to many instances of aniconism.
[edit] Manifestations
Although aniconism is usually related to religion, it is manifest in many cultures and areas of life. A selection is presented below.
[edit] Arts
Religious art and art with religious references make a substantial part of humanity's artistic production. As such, religious aniconism—discussed below—is in fact much about art. While not usually classified as aniconism, it occurs frequently in profane art, as a quantitative characteristic of amount of details present in objects. Extremes range for example between the 18th c. Rococo and the 20th c. Minimalist art; or between (so to speak "zen") Finnish design and Hippie luxuriance. The term itself appears to have been coined by Oleg Grabar, in the "Postscriptum" to his The Formation of Islamic Art[2].
Q.v. The figurative representation in Islamic Arts (French).
[edit] Politics
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While politics heavily rely on the representation of governors and pretendants as an instrument of power (the presidents on US banknotes and the stylized portrait of Che Guevara are examples where the power comes from the image of dead persons), there is a very short—yet essential to the political process—moment of aniconism. It is the lapse between the removal of the symbols of an outgoing power and their replacement with those of the incumbent. For example, part of the French Revolution was also the smashing of royal statues, as so often repeated during social unrests. The covering of the head of a Saddam Hussein statue with first the US, then the Iraqi flag during the 2003 invasion of Iraq [3], is a special example where the politically offending is hidden from sight before being destroyed. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the fall of Romania's Ceauşescu in 1989 produced (apparently independent) examples of political symbol based on the void — the Hungarian[4] and Romanian revolutionary flags, where the Communist coat of arms are cut out. There are also reclusive leaders that base their power on the absence of their image, like the Taliban Mullah Omar of which only few images are know.
[edit] Religion
Note: A number of modern scholars, working on various cultures, have gathered material showing that in some cases the idea of aniconism in religion is an intellectual construction, suiting specific intents and historical contexts, rather than a fact of the tangible reality (Huntington for Buddhism, Clément for Islam and Bland for Judaism — references in the appropriate follow-up links).
[edit] Science and technology
For most of its history, science and technology was essentially aniconic. (Even for such critical activities as architecture, there are few if any master-plans for structures like the pyramids, the gothic cathedrals or urbanism, not to mention the less complex private houses. Cartography, important for the civil administration and the military, was before modern societies either inexistent because relying on the mental memory of guides, or schematic, recording only significant landmarks.)
The success of scientific visualization as a valuable method, research field, academic department and multi-million dollar industry is fairly recent, despite its long and sometimes illustrious history (the Sumerian maps of the sky, Leonardo da Vinci's drawings). Some fields like Mathematics continue to be almost devoid of representations other than formulas and writing, and staunchly adverse to them (Benoît Mandelbrot, who popularized the theory of fractals through the use of computer graphics to an extent rarely attained by a mathematical theory, was scoffed by his fellow scientists for daring to use imagery to think about intellectual concepts. Note also the role played by the famous Einstein-tongue portrait for the popularity of the theory of relativity.) Non-visual thinking is a feature of many scientific traditions, but certainly not the only solution: in geometry for example, it is possible not only to visualize as figures the objects studied, but by using ingenious drawings, the process of demonstration itself. [5] For many fields the abandonment of a purely aniconic science has represented a revolution in the way problems are thought and solved, and how science is presented to the public, the policy makers and the investors (the use of artists by NASA to paint the worlds the agency’s scientists want to study).
The scientists' issue with representations is the potential for data falsehood of something "re-presented", that is having subsisted a transformation. Depending on the field, the problem is variously apprehended. In contrast with mathematicians, whose iconophobia is of an almost religious nature, physicist are confronted with material dilemmas on how to represent such elusive phenomena like quantum mechanics or the string theory. In the medical world images can be mistrust, avoided or suppressed, depending on whether they are sources of errors in treatments (the size of a head tumor depends on the color map and the image contrast [6]) or on privacy and ethical issues (not all parents wish to visualize the unborn during echography screenings; forensic photography of corpses is not easily released to the public). There is also a material substratum to scientific aniconism: the difficulty of producing images (capture, processing, distribution; aspects of technology, finance and intellectual proprety rights).
[edit] Medias
How much the appearance of medias (and more generally the exterior of all sorts of manufactured products) are devoid of images is a question of both subjective trends and willfully manipulation of citizens (the difference between the blank detail of Google and the overloaded CNN website is superficially a difference in function and structurally a difference between a society made of individuals who ask questions and one of establishments that provide affirmative sentences.)
[edit] Various cultures
In Africa aniconism varies from culture to culture from elaborate masks and statues of humans and animals to their total absence. A common feature, however, across the continent is that the "High God" is not given material shape. On the Germanic tribes, the Roman historian Tacitus writes the following: "They don't consider it mighty enough for the Heavens to depict Gods on walls or to display them in some human shape." [7]. His observation is not general to all German people as documentary evidence suggests (see Ardre image stones).
[edit] Notes
- ^ Jack Goody, Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence Towards Images, Theatre, Fiction, Relics and Sexuality (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1997): 68, ISBN 0-631-20526-8.
- ^ Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven (CT): Yale University Press, 1987): 209.
- ^ "U.S. military, not Iraqis, behind toppling of statue", The Honolulu Advertiser., 2004-07-05.
- ^ Heller, Andor (1957). No More Comrades. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, pp. 9-84. ASIN B0007DOQP0.
- ^ Various examples from the 16th and 19th c. Europe and 3rd c. China in Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information, (Cheshire (CT): Graphics Press, 1990): 16, 84-7, ISBN 0-9613921-1-8.
- ^ Joseph Dumit, Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (In-formation) (Yale (CT): Princeton University Press, 2003), ISBN 0-691-11398-X.
- ^ (German)/(Latin) Publius Cornelius Tacitus, "9. Götterverehrung", Germania (De origine et situ Germanorum liber), Reclam, Stuttgart, 2000, ISBN 3-15-009391-0.
