UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) The urban veil: image politics in media culture and contemporary art Fournier, A. Publication date 2012 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Fournier, A. (2012). The urban veil: image politics in media culture and contemporary art. [Thesis, fully internal, Universiteit van Amsterdam]. Eigen Beheer. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:13 Mar 2023 Chapter 1 The Image-As-Veil, the Image-As-Folds, and the Islamic Aesthetics of the Veil 1.1 Woman in a Burqa, Reuters. Taken in Afghanistan November 2001. An image found on the website September11News.com presents a figure in a bright blue burqa set off against the rugged camouflage pattern of an army tank. The green, white, and black flag flying at the rear of the military vehicle communicates that it belongs to the Afghan Northern Alliance. The folds and pleats of the burqa create a sculptural blue mass in the center foreground of the image, calling to mind the tradition of drapery found in paintings and sculptures in the history of Western art. The woman’s awareness of being photographed is suggested by her turned head, which that is directed towards the camera’s point of view. And yet, the act of returning the look is impeded. Here, the veiled woman finds herself bracketed off between the presence of the camera’s gaze that captures her, transforming her into a legible sign for foreign eyes, and the 31 patriarchal law of her immediate context, which enforces veiling and bestows the man on the tank the power to look back. This play of looks within and without the photograph drives the entanglement of geopolitical and gender relations home with particular force. In one stroke, the photographic gaze allows foreign eyes to penetrate a local context and see the visual proof (the veiled woman) of the need for “benevolent” military intervention. This gaze from the outside is met by its own physical presence on the inside, embodied by the Northern Alliance, supported by international powers in the overthrow of the Taliban regime. Significant contributions in the fields of art history, feminism, and psychoanalysis have critically addressed past and present representations of the Muslim veil.16 These studies have been crucial for unpacking normative readings and the political projects subtending the veil as sign. However, their arguments are specific to historical, cultural, and geographic contexts. To transpose these theories to the contemporary specificities of the Muslim veil outside Muslim majority countries would be to disable new understandings of the urban veil as an integral component of these societies. I am interested in examining why the image of the veiled woman continues to be mobilized as the most politically charged symbol of the Middle East, Islam, and its oppressive treatment of women. I contend that inherent to the image of the Muslim veil 16 See Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits, 1883-1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Massachussets: MIT Press, 1994), Christine Peltre, Orientalism in Art, trans. John Goodman (New York: Abbeville Press, 1998), Roger Benjamin, Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880 – 1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press: 2003), David A. Bailey and Gillane Tawadros ed., Veil: Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2003), and Inge E. Boer, Disorienting Vision: Rereading Stereotypes in French Orientalist Texts and Images (Amsterdam: Rodopy, 2004). 32 are formal operations that resonate with particular cultural codes in a manner that hold Euro-American imaginaries in thrall. Even more important for this study is how the semantic channeling of these formal characteristics frustrates, and even disables, the possibility of new readings specific to the urban veil. This chapter therefore begins with the operative side of images and develops two theoretical modalities: the image-as-veil and the image-as-folds. These two proposed models of imaging the Muslim veil diverge with regard to the notion of representation, and as a result, bring a set of different modes of looking, identification processes, and individual and collective identity formations into play. Both articulations of the image are crucial for understanding the image politics of the Muslim veil and for new readings of the urban veil. As a result, they are crucial theoretical tools throughout this dissertation. This chapter is divided into three sections. In the first, I define the image-as-veil. An analysis of several images, ranging from colonial postcards to a video installation by contemporary artist Shirin Neshat, enables me to identify what I call the modus operandi of the image-as-veil: the suggestion of a beyond analogous to the workings of an architectural screen. Within Western regimes of visuality, this modality of the image-as- veil harbors a set of binary oppositions that are readily channeled into a politics of difference and discourses of othering: in terms of gender, culture, and geographic location. In this line of thought, I adopt Kaja Silverman’s notion of the cultural screen to highlight how the modus operandi of the image-as-veil moves beyond individual images to create a screen at the level of the cultural imaginary—which mediates our relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the world around us. 33 In the second section, the work of contemporary artist Zineb Sedira serves as a case in point for a different articulation of the image that builds upon Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the fold. This second model is dependent upon an alternate understanding of representation that emphasizes the image’s materiality, its relation to thought, and its capacity to effect change. The fold, as opposed to the architectural notion of the screen, avoids the pitfall of framing questions of the Muslim veil in terms of visuality, and by extension, negates the spatial operations that maintain the veil as a sign of cultural and geographic otherness. Instead, I will argue that the image-as-folds emphasizes a movement of connectivity with the specifications of the image’s immediate geographical and historical context. The last section proposes that the image-as-folds corresponds, in part, to an Islamic aesthetics of the veil. The writings of Abdelkébir Khatibi, Oleg Grabar, and Dominique Clévenot help illustrate how the aesthetics underpinning many of the works of art discussed in this dissertation speak to the central role that the veil as metaphor plays in Islamic thought. To be sure, such an aesthetic does not always underpin the intentions behind the analyzed works. However, I maintain that the image-as-folds often frustrates the predominantly visual processes inherent to commonsense understandings of the Muslim veil, interpolating the viewer via the materiality of the image, for example, through ornamentation, textures, and a mode of perception more akin to reading. The aesthetics of the veil recuperates that which is lost in understandings of the veil when it is reduced to questions of visuality. 34 1.1 The Image-As-Veil To map out the discussion of this first section, it is helpful to recount the infamous contest between the Roman painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius as told by Pliny the Elder in Naturalis Historia. The objective of the competition was to see who could paint in a manner that created the greatest illusion of reality. When Zeuxis completed his work, the image was so successful that birds tried to eat the berries on his painted trees. Certain that he had sealed his victory, Zeuxis walked over to Parrhasius’ painting and attempted to remove the veil to reveal his image, only to realize that he had been deceived. The veil itself was painted: it was one with the surface of representation. The veil in Parrhasius’s painting exemplifies a set of Western ideals about representation and how their disruption affects the viewing subject. Through mastery of technique, the two artists were asked to transform the surface of their canvases into that which denies itself and points to a beyond, becoming, in Albertian terms, a window onto the world. In an act that may be called self-reflexive, Parrhasius did not implement but rather represented this ideal, using the veil as a representation of “pointing beyond.” Furthermore, his representation of the veil successfully evoked a beyond and simultaneously denied revealing it to the anticipating viewer. This gesture clearly displaced the viewer in his capacity to see and know. In this case, Zeuxis was able to see, but the wish to know what was imagined to lay behind the veil’s materiality was not satisfied; he was ultimately fooled. I recount this story as a way of engaging the culturally specific terrain in which the image of the Muslim veil circulates: a predominantly European and North American landscape embedded in a tradition of scopic regimes. Within this tradition, the imaged or 35 real veil is perceived first and foremost as a physical barrier that obstructs vision, and hence suggests a beyond: what I call the modus operandi of the image-as-veil. This operative mode of the veil, as exemplified in Parrhasius’ painting, articulates a front and a back, and correlating visible and invisible spaces within the painting. When the Muslim veil is depicted, such spatialization channels meaning into binaries, which have conceptual and geographic repercussions. In the next section I look at two such encounters that are contingent upon the tensions at the heart of modern life: first, the desire to see and to know underlying a colonial will to power, and its confluence with the scopic regime of modernity; and second, the anxieties surrounding the experience of modernity and the role that the visual plays in psychoanalytical theories of subject formation and articulations of difference. The Coextension of Colonial and Scopic Regimes of Modernity The geographer and theoretician David Harvey reminds us that modernity is marked by conjoining and even conflicting formulations. One facet of the experience of modern life, as elaborately theorized by Walter Benjamin, is characterized by continual fragmentation of time and space, and the perpetual play of possibilities, struggles, and contradictions. However, another facet of modernity is concerned with the scientific development of rational forms of social organization and thought, the aim of disciplining all spheres of human life: including economic structures, law, bureaucratic administration, and the arts.17 17 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 36 In relation to the rational movement of modernity, the historian Martin Jay has further discussed how vision has played a hegemonic role in the modern era and how visual experience is intimately tied to psychological processes of the Western subject of representation (in this study this term refers to both the maker and the viewer of representation).18 Jay coined the term Cartesian perspectivalism, which combines the Enlightenment’s linking of subjective reason to notions of truth and progress along with a modern will to master, possess, and control the visual realm. This term emphasizes the epistemological project in which the disinterested gaze is considered a central agent in the acquisition of knowledge.19 In this section I discuss how the modus operandi of the image-as-veil, its suggestion of a beyond, is deeply entwined with the ideals and anxieties subtending the visual realm, which are foundational to the project of modernity. A series of postcards reproduced in Malek Alloula’s Le Harem colonial: images d’un sous-érotisme20 of veiled and unveiled Algerian women during the first three decades of the twentieth century serves as a first case in point. The postcard is arguably one of the first uses of photography that was meant for the masses. The first few decades of the twentieth century are in fact often referred to as the golden age of the postcard, a period that corresponds to the height of French colonial presence in Indochina and North Africa. During this time, hundreds of “harem-postcards” were taken by European photographers and circulated through a landscape that bridged European elite and non- 18 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 19 Ibid., 69. 20 Malek Alloula, Le Harem colonial, images d'un sous-érotisme (Paris: Séguier, 2001). 37 elite spaces alike.21 The reproduced postcards in Alloula’s book reveal that the women in the photos have no names, merely classifications such as “Woman from the Maghreb,” “Woman from the South,” and “Woman from Algiers.” Even more debasing are those with captions, such as “Oh! Is it ever hot!” [Ah! qu’il fait donc chaud!]. Alloula’s book, which was written in 1981 in Paris, in which the author “collected, arranged, and annotated” picture postcards of Algerian women was meant to deliver a delayed response to the degradation that the images enact.22 Alloula’s argument suggests that a personal offense has been committed by these photographs. The disrespect inflicted on these women is described by him as an insult to Algerian society at large. Alloula reproduces ninety of the postcards of Algerian women which, in accordance with the unfolding of his argument, are arranged in order of increasing debasement. The proliferation of postcards of (un)veiled women at the turn of the century together with Alloula’s response highlights how the image of the veil exacerbates the conflicting formulations of modernity underlying the Cartesian perspectivalism. First, the postcards demonstrate how the failure of the colonial subject of representation in his capacity to see and know the veiled woman directly evokes erotic desires to unveil and visually possess her through the photographic act. Second, once the visual barrier has been breached, the photographs are made to circulate for foreign eyes, concomitantly serving as a visual marker of the consuming public’s cultural and geographic outside. In this way, the image of the veiled woman performs a second 21 Jennifer Yee, “Recycling the ‘Colonial Harem’ Women in Postcards from French Indochina,” French Cultural Studies 15; 5 (2004), and Carlos Shloss, “Algeria, Conquered by Postcard,” New York Times, January 11, 1987. 22 Barbara Harlow, “Introduction,” in Malek Alloula: The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986): x. 38 register of suggesting a beyond, organizing what Edward Said refers to in his influential work Orientalism as an “imagined geography.”23 The postcard images therefore extend the entanglements of sexual and cultural power relations underlying Orientalism.24 In Colonial Fantasies: Toward a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Meyda Yeğenoğlu argues that the veiled Muslim woman becomes an “imaginary anchor” 25 in a process that concerns above all the Western and masculine production of identity through difference. In Yeğenoğlu’s words, “in imagining this hidden Oriental/feminine essence behind the veil as the repository of truth, the subject turns the Orient into an object that confirms his identity and thereby satisfies his need to represent himself to himself as a subject of knowledge and reason.”26 I concur that these images must be seen as imaginary anchors for the European subject who attempts to secure a sense of self within the spatial and temporal maelstrom of the modern experience. It is important to stress here that the encounter with the colonial other via modes of technological reproduction only intensifies such spatial and temporal compressions. Furthermore, if the image of the Muslim veiled woman is meant to inscribe an imaginary cartography indexing the boundaries of a rational and orderly European self, then her fleshy mass and abounding folds represents the bodily, irrational, and disorderly nature of its defining other. Alloula’s attempt to classify the postcards through an argumentative logic suggests the uncomfortable position he is allocated via the spatializing operations of these images. Alloula finds himself aligned with that which 23 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). 24 Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 25 This is a term that Yeğenoğlu borrows from Teresa Brennan, in “History after Lacan” Economy and Society, 19/3 (August 1990). 26 Ibid., 49. 39