30 August - 5 September 2001
Issue No.549
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 30 August - 5 September 2001 Issue No.549 |
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See no evil
Many years ago -- almost a decade, probably, before the birth of the blockbuster exhibition -- I attended what then seemed a much- hyped show of Spanish painting at the National Gallery in London anticipating, it must be admitted, a great deal of blood and gore. Wall to wall martyrdoms was what I expected, and in the most grotesque detail. Flayings, since they have a respectably biblical pedigree, and the whole gamut of horrible ends that seem to be the lot of the more unfortunate, and needless to say, most holy saints. Scenes of horror, though, were in surprisingly short supply, and while there were a few images that, in their lurid technicolour detailing, might have been mistaken for a still from a late 20th century snuff movie, the exhibition was, on the whole, surprisingly decorous.
It was Charles V who introduced the papal inquisition in 1521. In 1535 he reinforced it with an imperial edict specifying that although unrepentant heretics were to be burned, repentant males were to be executed with a sword and repentant females buried alive, not a particularly chivalrous form of sexual discrimination.
If anything, though, things got worse under his successor Philip II, about whom the kindest thing one might say is that he was barking mad. By 1568, when the holy office denounced the entire population of the Netherlands (then a rebellious Spanish province) as heretics, Philip ordered their execution en masse, regardless of age, sex or condition.
Failing imperial powers have never been noted for their kindnesses, and Spain's potential loss of its cash cow -- for many years the low land provinces had been remarkably profitable, largely as a result of the inhabitants' mercantile acumen -- must have come as something of a shock, though quite how the wholesale slaughter of every inhabitant would compensate for the loss of revenue has never been wholly clear.
Strangely, though, imperial Spain's determination to turn large tracks of mainland Europe into a killing field, had very little impact on the work of artists. Perhaps one should not be surprised that the artists patronised by the Spanish court should continue to produce conventionally iconic (though by no means innocent ) portraits of the Holy Roman emperors. Less understandable, though, is how an artist like Breughal the Elder, working in the Netherlands, then under the bloody sway of Archbishop Granville, Philip's regional Reichkommisar, could produce so many bucolic landscapes when bodies must have been hanging from every tree in every village.
That the type of victims in vogue at any given moment goes hand in hand with the ideological definition one gives to one's society is perhaps not a very original observation: whether or not they are airbrushed from official histories does not alter the basic truth of this contention. (Court portraiture, in this context, operates very much as an official history. And you can engage in all the iconographic hair splitting you like and still be unable to detect a whiff of burning flesh.) Techniques of airbrushing, though, have of necessity become rather more sophisticated in the years that have followed Philip II's reign, not least because the world has, practically, become a much smaller place. Official histories, these days, cannot usually hide the victims by totally ignoring them. Such a course of action has become all but impossible. The existence of victims has an unfortunate habit of leaking out, and once out, spreading across cyberspace as if propelled by a supernova explosion. Which means that this year's victims in vogue, rather than being painted out of the official portrait, need to be villified, and to such an extent that they are, at the very least, no longer recognisable as anything that might be considered a member of the community from whence they came, and certainly not by other members of that community.
Yet the main object of such systematic villification is often less to humiliate the victim -- that has already occurred, after all, and once designated victim, such is the density of contemporary centres of authority, there is nothing the "victim" can do to alter that designation -- than to reemphasise, or redefine, the position of the victimising authority. It is simply an exercise in what Althusser termed ideological hailing. The intention is not simply to assign a subordinate position to the addressee -- to interpellate him as an ideological subject, as Althusser would have it -- but to define, or redefine, the position of the authority. And this latter, the engineering of a redefinition, has become particularly pertinent in contemporary societies, where the creation of victims is unlikely to occur independent of the media, which in literate societies continues to mean, primarily, the press.
Philip II did not have to worry about what the papers said, or what the televised news programmes would say. He did not have to worry about human rights groups, or external pressures. Which might suggest that in the intervening centuries there has at least been some progress. Unfortunately, though, not too much progress. A great many governments operate, after all, observed only by the tamest of news media, whether broadcast or printed. (The press, in many societies, has come to serve the same function as the official court portraitist.) And the vested interests that might exert external pressure seldom do, precisely because they are that, vested interests. Which leaves only those peculiarly ineffective institutions of civil society, the human rights groups. Hardly reassuring, given that the relation between universal human rights and the right to cultural difference is one of the greatest antinomies of our time.
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