ASAO 2017 The Iconic: Afterlife, new beginnings and the return of the symbolic Saturday, February 11, 2017 Iconic houses: Afterlife and new beginnings Tina Engels‐Schwarzpaul In this presentation, I present an overview of the material and literature I have worked with to suggest some context for this panel from a predominantly Western perspective. I also briefly reflect on how this year’s panel builds on previous ones and on the role of our current focusing theme, The Iconic. Our provisional pairing of iconicity with fa’atupua (the likeness that progenerates, as Albert defines it) will hopefully inspire a form of theory‐making that grows out of a process which Paige West described last year as “tack[ing] back and forth” between Pacific architecture and culture and Western architecture and culture. Further developing this method, we want to explore how mana and hau can be recharged in the diaspora, in the realm of icons, spaces, houses and people. What happens in the juxtaposition of the iconic and fa’atupua may shift our understanding of the “displacement of form, and the persistence of the sense of belonging attached to it” (Refiti, 2015: 5). Newly charged concepts from the Pacific may emerge from Pacific scholars’ discussions of fa’atupua and, in turn, bring about a fresh understanding of what we would call iconic practices in Western terms, which rely on the power to re‐present something unmistakably Pacific. Left: Fale Pasifika, University of Auckland's Centre for Pacific Studies (Ngahuia Harrison, 2016); Right: Fale Samoa, Tropical Islands resort, Germany (Sylvia Henrich, 2005) These practices occur in many different forms. For example, around 2003, Malaysian tycoon Colin Au selected a photo of a Samoan house to commission a building which, in his mind, would represent the South Seas to the visitors of the Tropical Islands resort close to Berlin, Germany. It would trigger, by its appearance, their fantasies of living in nature, leisure and sun, and it would make them feel like being in the Pacific. In the same year, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Helen Clark, broke the ground for the Fale Pasifika in Auckland. It was, for people like Albert Wendt, Melani Anae and Damon Salesa at the Centre for Pacific Studies, to become not only a place for teaching and research but also a regional centre for Pacific people. Without a doubt, the ideas and motivations driving Colin Au’s project and that of the Centre for Pacific Studies must have 1 been very different – yet they converged in one point: the deployment of the houses’ iconicity. Damon Salesa spoke of “resonance” and Colin Au of “authenticity” – by their Pacific appearance, the buildings were expected to evoke a sense of place and identity, and to stand for Pacific experiences and stories. Other University committees, government agencies, and hotel and tourism operators have the same impulse, and thus we find the iconic working in diverse ways; yet it always relies on that displacement of form and the attachment of belonging (Refiti, 2015: 5). Now, to create a space‐between, I begin to lay out “ideas next to each other in the form of a constellation, whose elements inform and reflect off each other” (Rampley, 2000: 12). My contribution will consist mainly of ideas derived from two Jewish‐German writers from a minor Western tradition: Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg. Perhaps because of their own experience of marginality, I believe their ideas have an affinity with extra‐modern perspectives elsewhere. Interested in the mutuality of subject‐object relationships, they advance an inclusive understanding of culture that encompasses high and low, aesthetic and anthropological forms. Importantly, they suspend definitions and evaluations, so that something new may emerge. Old‐new concepts and different ways of looking Benjamin and Warburg believed “that the past constantly reinscribes itself in the present”; this re‐inscription can impact both regressively and creatively on cultural traditions (Rampley, 2000: 102). Warburg distinguished the notion of Renaissance from that of Nachleben (afterlife), which describes a “peculiar mode of being” that begins with an image’s disappearance and continues as “revenant after‐life” (Ekardt, 2013: 110). It complicates historical time, “recognising specific, non‐
natural temporalities in the cultural world”; a form can survive its own death, symptomatically and phantomatically, by “disappearing from a point in history” and “reappearing much later at a moment when it is perhaps no longer expected”, and thus survive “in the still poorly defined reaches of a ‘collective memory’” (Didi‐Huberman, 2002: 68). Consequently, Nachleben can transform modern understandings of tradition: no longer a river carrying people, thoughts, events, actions and objects from up‐ to downstream, tradition is “a drama that unfolds between the river’s flow and its whirling eddies” (Didi‐Huberman, Rehberg, & Belay, 2003: 276). Tradition requires Auseinandersetzung (confrontation and engagement) with present and past (Bing, 1965: 310). By relinquishing universal teleology, one can engage with the historical complexity of each and every culture (Didi‐Huberman et al., 2003: 284). Benjamin had a similar conception of history and he was, like Warburg, interested in the juxtaposition of opposites (Rampley, 2000: 32). This juxtaposition can produce a mimetic and immersive sensitivity towards the world and amplify “the lost significance of details” in particular constellations. A constellation is never a closed totality but embraces different elements, in a tension that need not be resolved. By now, you have probably guessed that our understanding of the iconic has little to do with simplistic, catchy, instant representation of objects, people or ideas. Such icons condense cultures into bite‐sized signifiers, quickly to evoke meanings and associations. They occupy one, extreme end of a range of possible iconic uses – from the sacred to the banal, from art to technology, etc. They are used instrumentally, rather than creatively and critically, in advertising, entertainment and tourism. At the other extreme, there are ancient icons of God or the ancestors, for example, which prompt contemplation and reverence. Iconicity has recently, for reasons that I cannot describe here, attracted increased interest amongst sociologists and art critics. Sociologists Jeffrey Alexander and Dominik Bartmansky emphasise affective, embodied and performative aspects of the icon, suggesting that extant definitions of icons need critical investigation before they can be appropriated for a study of the 2 iconic. One such critical review concerns the fact that, since the 18th century, anthropologists have imputed an unmediated understanding of the world to so‐called primitive societies. In this, they adopted Giambattista Vico’s idea that early humans had an imaginative, mimetic relationship to the world. However, they abandoned Vico’s cyclical understanding of history (as córso and ricórso, Kelly, Herwitz, Horowitz, & Soussloff, 2014) to replace it with a teleological, linear one. They then contrasted this imaginative and immersive thinking with the conceptual thinking they regarded as an achievement of civilisation (Rampley, 2000: 15‐16), thereby creating a principal distinction between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’ cultures. It all depends on context: Dean MacCannel traces a link between the iconic and mimesis via the aspect of likeness (concerning both “physical resemblance and mental analogies”1992: 240). He analyses iconic practices in tourism, both within cultures and in cross‐cultural contexts and notes that the icon depends for its existence and efficacy on a devoted community: “an icon cannot be suspended in a single consciousness but can only exist in a group setting” (1992: 237). By con‐ and affirming, performing and exalting the iconic image, the community participates in its semiotic production. Thus, taking his cues from Mikhail Bahktin, MacCannell urges a close attention to “the participation of real people in real situations” as they generate “iconic representation” (242). Some anthropologists have recently claimed that iconic signification predominates in the cultures they studied: Gillian Goslinga (2006) confirms the “significance of the iconic in producing meaning through relationality” in Tamil culture, endorsing E. Valentine Daniel’s argument that iconicity tends to be “the dominant or valued mode of representation” (1984: 231). Likewise, Webb Keane (2005) observed in Indonesia that icons are powerful signs which draw their force from their materiality and embeddedness in concrete circumstances. He considers icons as bundles of forces, which give rise to and transform “modalities of action and subjectivity” (186). Iconic power arises to different degrees from the different ways in which such bundles are arranged or ordered. In the Pacific Spaces cluster at AUT, we have begun to look for parallel or resonant Pacific terms or concepts and have so far considered fa’atupua, or tupua a va’a (Fraser, 1896) and tupua a le fanua (Pratt 1893) – symbolic personifications that provide direction, connection, growth and relationship. Here is a brief overview of the semantic field these terms engage: TUPU, v, 1. to grow, to increase. 2. To spring up, to sprout 3. To be born. 4. To arise
from, to cause. 5. To become a king.
TUPUA, v. pass.of TUPU.
TUPUA, s., 1. a stone supposed to be a man petrified. 2. An image. 3. A riddle.
4. A fine mat, when torn. 5. Certain privileges in seuga and alafaga.
TUPU' AGA, s., ancestors. See TUPUGA. (Pratt, 1893: 329)
FA' ATUPU, v. 1. to cause to grow. 2. To cause, to originate, as a quarrel, &c. 3. To
raise a post, by filling in the hole under it with earth; pl. FA'ATUTUPU; pass.
FA'ATUPUINA; redup. FA'ATUPUTUPU. 4. To change into, as fa'atupuma'a, to
change into a stone. (Pratt, 1893: 140)
Tupua has been used by missionaries to translate idol, and there is an interesting connection between icon and idol in which quite different values assigned to both. This valuation probably illuminates the relationship between Christian and other cultures in ways that are yet to be fully explored. But Samoan Head of State, Tui Atua points out that tupua can mean god, as well as riddle, and that the search for wisdom in Samoan indigenous knowledge is “a conscious attempt to connect the proximate, the tangible, the visible […] with the distant, unreachable, tantalizing 3 (and obviously mysterious)” (Tui Atua, 2008: 209). Icons have been attributed similar functions (Alexander, 2015: 4). These are interesting semantic fields to explore side‐by‐side. If there is indeed an affinity between the iconic and indigenous Pacific concepts like fa’atupua, then their juxtaposition may revive discussions of signifying practices and the symbolic from a different, displaced angle. It is interesting in that regard that Charles S. Peirce, who worked extensively with the notion of icon, emphasised its relational aspects (particularly in diagrams). This suggests that the icon is a fortuitous figure of thought to couple with Pacific concepts, particularly given its dynamic openness to new forms of re‐presentation – due to its inclusion of mimesis, as the assimilation‐
to and becoming‐like the object. I speculate that the relational and contextual qualities of icons, as well as their material and performative elements, lend themselves to be linked to the notions of relationship, orientation, generation, aspiration, deep interest, and identification that seem to be wrapped up with tupua or fa’atupua in Pacific contexts. Together, these terms may turn out to be seeds from which a reorientation, recharge and revaluation of existing concepts (both Pacific and Western) can grow to support the exploration of Pacific material and spatial cultures, particularly in the diaspora. But how can such “iconic symbols” (in Appiah, 2016, p. 42:25mins) be understood without resorting to dichotomies like emotional/rational, authentic/illusionary, traditional/contemporary (or even primitive/civilised)? Perhaps one has to resist, with philosopher and cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah, “the inclination to suppose that everything is either emotional or rational – we use reason to organise our feelings” (42:30mins). The iconic, “the nested ideas of icon, iconic power, iconosphere, and iconology” (Bartmanski & Alexander, 2012: 11), accommodates both. Icons can be ambivalent or multivalent in many ways, and the very fact that they “reduce complex meanings down into simplified and easily repeatable and replicable symbols” makes them equally effective for diverse strategies. They can circulate in adspace (Springer 2009) “without causing a ripple in the social fabric” (Sturken, 2015: 2), or they can become global icons that provide shared meanings and identification to galvanise alternative social movements. Icons can highlight the presence of the past in the present (Müller, 2011) when forms and forces survive in collective memory through “felicitous performative arrangement[s] of visually arresting phenomenon and socially potent meanings” (Bartmanski, 2015: 3). Materially and aesthetically, the iconic thus objectifies collective and individual thoughts, feelings and experiences. “Iconic power” (4) rests partly on a recognisable relationship (not necessarily, but often, visual) between the iconic sign and its referents: ideas, thoughts, feelings, experiences and objects. And it is the icon’s embeddedness in shared practices and experiences that brings about collective recognition (26). New iconic schema in the diaspora Crossing the sea and migrating to new places generates new practices, contexts, needs and experiences. The loss of social and ritual contexts from the homeland may increase the need for an iconic presence that helps develop new forms of belonging. Through the displacement of iconic forms (Refiti, 2015: 5), the sense of belonging to one’s original culture can often be made to persist until a new sense of belonging develops. Thus, a collective cultivation of what are considered iconic traits of the homeland culture typically takes place in diasporic constellations. In the Pacific, the sense of a plural self and of community, for instance, is more pronounced than in many host countries, and the collective creative faculty of Pasifika groups tends to heighten the similarities between members compared with outsiders. This tendency can create out of shared individual experiences an icon that is “not one individual or thing among others but contains the 4 total reality of the group. They all share in and fully embody its identity.” (“Vico, Giovanni Battista”, in Kelly et al., 2014). Its appeal rests on the collective remembrance of an “historically significant event or phenomenon, activating strong emotional response” like identification (Bartmanski, 2015: 16). Understanding such migratory cross‐overs of people and forms requires disciplinary openness, and Warburg’s iconology offers just that, with its engagement of anthropology, material culture, and art. Paired with an interest in overlapping media, bodies and materialities, such openness can create new spaces and “lay bare phenomena and relationships whose profile precisely does not coincide with the boundaries of specific disciplines” (Krämer & Bredekamp, 2013: 27). While later developments in iconology (e.g., Panofsky and Gombrich) tended towards abstraction and were firmly based in Western traditions, Warburg’s original scope has recently been revived and iconology has been used increasingly in wider cultural contexts (Müller, 2011). Warburg’s Nachleben, which is as “various, haphazard, retentive, protean, liquid, oceanic in scope and complexity” as life itself (Didi‐Huberman et al., 2003: 282), could be one significant force in the iconic bundles impacting on modalities of action and modes of subjectivity. Working towards Pacific notions of the iconic, we could begin to develop a shared vocabulary, capable of questioning, as well as empathising with, both the fale at Tropical Islands in Brand (Germany) and the Fale Pasifika in Auckland (Aotearoa/New Zealand). Iconicity may help us understand what Tomlinson and Tengan (2016) call “transformation in appropriation” and answer questions about the ways in which iconic power may be harnessed to consolidate Pacific identities in the diaspora and to present Pacific culture in the world. Returning to the very different constellations of the Samoan fale at Tropical Islands resort and the Fale Pasifika at the University of Auckland, it seems clear that icons operate “in different regimes, and across time and space contexts” (Bartmanski, 2015: 18). Both buildings epitomise the style of Samoa and the Pacific and provide, to different degrees and in different ways, an anchor to the region’s identity (18). At the Fale Pasifika, the icon’s reductive treatment of type works to sustain collective identification and responds to the “social desire to have [feelings] expressed with or attributed to specific material constellations” (19). The iconic shapes and patterns crystallise, evocatively and sensuously, shared and “often visceral collective feelings” and generate identification and effervescence (Bartmanski, 2015: 27). Similar shapes and patterns are deployed at Tropical Islands resort to evoke the yearning for a different life, a life that is still imagined along the same lines as it was presented to Germans during ethnographic shows at the turn of the 20th century. No doubt, authenticity (as a judgement of taste) is very much in question in both buildings. However, such judgement of a building or its ornamentation is complicit with a contempt for pictorial signification, which was considered ‘superficial’ in modern Western aesthetics (Bartmanski, 2015: 4). Later, deconstruction and other forms of demystification of “the fetishism of tools and equipment” (or objects and buildings as “verhicles of iconicity”, Bartmanski, 2015: 6), have paradoxically obscured “their very reality” (Regis Debray [2000: 84] in Bartmanski, 2015: 9). Yet, seen with an interest in their material, corporeal, performative, atmospheric, political and community building functions, such “visually arresting objectifications” are “striking in form and highly charged in content”, interweaving and performing different domains (Bartmanski, 2015: 7). From both anthropological and architectural points of view, then, icons are “good to think with” and, as a composite category, iconicity is useful in rethinking “the complexity of culture in action” (Bartmanski, 2015: 27). Warburg’s Nachleben (which may well draw on Edward Tylor’s survivals) can help explore displaced forms and practices, as symptoms of a kind of permanence in culture that has nothing to do with the expedient use of icons. The latter intends to evoke archetypes or instantly recognisable features of an already defined culture (Didi‐Huberman, 2002: 63), whereas Warburg avoided essentialisms and generalisations by constantly attempting “to tug at all 5 threads, to identify each strand” (Didi‐Huberman, 2002: 69) to deal with each case in its specific context and development. References Alexander, J. C. (2015). Afterword: The strong program and the iconic turn. Sociologica Sociologica, 9(1). Appiah, K. A. (Writer). (2016). Mistaken Identities: Country [Broadcast]. In BBC (Producer), The Reith Lectures. London: BBC World Service. Bartmanski, D. (2015). Modes of seeing, or, iconicity as explanatory notion: Cultural research and criticism after the iconic turn in social sciences. Sociologica Sociologica, 9(1), 1‐34. Bartmanski, D., & Alexander, J. C. (2012). Introduction Materiality and Meaning in Social Life: Toward an Iconic Turn in Cultural Sociology. In J. C. Alexander, D. Bartmanski, & B. 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