Contemplatives In Conversation: Simulacra and the True Image
As the processes of capitalist industrialization led to new forms of popular consumption in the twentieth century, surface and simulation became characteristic of the modern condition. New electronic formats now mediate social and cultural phenomena through images in ways that profoundly alter our experience of being. On April 13th, 2022, I met with Matthew Tan on Zoom to discuss how digital media emulate sacred imagery and how the doctrine of Incarnation can break the spell of hyperreality.
Dr. Matthew Tan is the dean of studies at Vianney College, a seminary and campus of the Catholic Institute of Sydney in Australia. He is also adjunct senior lecturer in theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia. He is the author of two books, the most recent being Redeeming Flesh: The Way of the Cross with Zombie Jesus. His writings have appeared in, among others, Humanum Review and ABC Religion and Ethics. He blogs at Awkward Asian Theologian.
The following is based on our conversation.
Arthur Aghajanian: I’m interested in the ways visual culture shapes our understanding of the sacred. Images mediate belief. A religious community will use images as objects of devotion, means of meditation, representations of the sacred, or as media to communicate its teachings.
Matthew Tan: I'm very much influenced by the work of a theologian named Chanon Ross. He says the act of seeing draws us out of ourselves. Plato always said that every time we see something, especially a beautiful thing, we’re always ecstatically drawn out of ourselves. Ross takes that to another level by saying that when we look at something, we’re not simply drawn out of ourselves. We’re also drawn to a higher order than ourselves.
He goes as far as to say that images themselves occupy a middle space between the temporal space we occupy and the transcendent space the image points to. Images occupy a transcendent realm as well, hence their capacity to pull us to transcend ourselves.
AA: In addition, these images and objects of religious visual culture become part of the ongoing history of a community or place. Religious studies have begun to acknowledge the importance of materiality in the life of the Church. Religious images have a special ontological status for devotees, evoking the transcendent mystery of God. They’re meant to inspire adoration and prayer. But today our economic system, with consumerism at its heart, seeks to fulfill the religious function. The market is its god, offering salvation through ever-increasing production and consumption.
MT: I think that’s the main difference between visual cultures in a religious context and in non-religious contexts. Visual culture in the religious context knows that what they’re doing is making use of the image as a window into transcendent realities. Whereas in non-religious contexts, the image is still being reused for religious purposes. It's just that they're not explicitly aware of that reality. And that can lead to a bunch of other outcomes which are bound up in this whole cultural hyperreality which you’ve hinted at.
AA: Digital media is prone to idolatry. When we consume images, we often participate in a form of hyperreal worship. The human heart tends to create idols everywhere, and our habits of image consumption cause us to look for fulfillment in things other than God. Our hearts are turned toward achievement and competition. We’re made to believe material possessions will fulfill us. We become preoccupied with social status, living in a fantasy shaped by our longing for wealth or fame. These values are all promoted through images that advertise commodities.
MT: Jean Baudrillard says that we’ve reached an age he describes as hyperreal. Rather than having an image that refers to something in the real world, it’s possible for the image to be completely detached from the real world. Images are no longer simply lenses through which we see the world. Images are now world creators. And when you start taking a created object such as an image and turn it into the creator, that is the stuff of idolatry.
AA: Social media has the power to become a false idol partly because it's everywhere, feeding the need for instant gratification. Eventually, the ordinary subject of the social media image is itself reduced to a signifier. We turn ourselves into images for consumption by other users. In this way, we participate in hyperreal worship. We develop a belief system that measures our worth by the number of followers we get, as we obsess over our photos and put apps at the center of our lives. We idolize other people and their content.
This hyperreality also distorts reality. For example, the phenomenon of “alternative facts” results from society's worship of the image commodity. Belief and emotion triumph over facts, statistics, proof, or even one's personal lived experience, which is denied for the sake of the belief system or the tribe's ideology.
Those living in a hyperreal world are impervious to rational argument because their perceptions are distorted. The political scene becomes hyperreal, fed by a propaganda machine which generates misleading information aimed at seducing and manipulating opinion, while blurring distinctions between the real and the hyperreal. Images satisfy our emotional needs, and competing discourses are drowned in the noise. New media forms with greater reach have even empowered ordinary people to become fabulists.
MT: Information can also be hyperreal in the sense that it’s disconnected from what’s happening on the ground. Anything can be commodified, so anything can be turned into a fact. Because of that, alternative facts also have the same capacity to build worlds of plausibility.
AA: It’s all the more important to remain critical of media. I've always felt media literacy should be a required course in secondary schools. This is critical if you want an active, engaged citizenry.
I’m fascinated by the difference between the digital image and the true image, and the idea of religion as a radical alternative to hyperreality. Baudrillard and other French postmodernists have articulated the concept of “gift” in their political critique of the market as something with the power to disrupt an economy based in utility. The gift, in its unaccountability, ruptures the closed system of signs that ensnare us. It's an act that subverts the symbolic exchange of images. The Christian knows this as God’s unconditional love. The experience of infinite mercy and the transformative power of the Gospel teach us that the gift of God’s love is unearned and undeserved, although this is hard to grasp from within the meritocracy of capitalism. Through Christ’s giving of himself, we have direct access to God. Jesus states in John 6:56, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” Going back to the teachings of Jesus by way of the image of Christ, we can liberate ourselves from worldly traps that distract us from our true nature.
MT: One of the ways in which we can try and cut through a lot of the cultural maladies that you’ve identified is when one's conception of the world is grounded in an image that’s true. And as you say, it’s actually through the religious language of Christianity, particularly around Eucharistic theology, that we can get this conception of a true image.
In philosophical language, you can say that in hyperreality the sign (the image) and the signified (the reality) have disconnected. Christianity works precisely because of the fact that contrary to hyperreality, there’s an attempt to try and unify the sign and the signified. Drawing upon Catholic Eucharistic theology, we can go one step further where, when Jesus takes up bread and actually says, this is my body, the philosopher Catherine Pickstock says that in that act, what we’re seeing is a perfect union between the sign and the signified. And I think that’s the critical edge that Christianity brings to the culture of the hyperreal. It recognizes images as things that point to realities rather than things that create realities.
AA: The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is a profound mystery. The whole of Christ is present under the appearances of bread and wine. Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. Baudrillard's procession of simulacra is the unavoidable result of a metaphysical forgetfulness. Forgetting the meaning of being and replacing that primordial encounter with a system of signs. If we don't know our true nature as part of the body of Christ, we remain helpless to the seduction of images. Living with an awareness of our true self in God, we can release our images of identity in the thoughts, feelings, and stories that we mistakenly take to be who we are.
MT: Christianity has this critical edge, precisely because the ground of its being is also radically material. The true image in Christianity is a body. When we talk about the symbols in Christianity, we’re always drawn to the material reality that gave rise to the symbols in the first place. And that's something Christianity brings to the discourse: a constant reminder of the past, but a reminder of the past that’s also material. And it refuses to disengage the ground of being from this material reality called the body of Jesus Christ.
AA: I think that's what's really beautiful and unique about Christianity. Everything centers on the body of Christ as God's willingness to connect to us in our human suffering. In the contemplative tradition there is an insistence on embodied experience in knowing God. There’s a discipline of cultivating attentiveness, detachment, patience, humility, and silence. Engaging with art can be an extension of this work as well. Which, when done with silent attention, is completely different from how we normally interact with images.
MT: You don't counter hyperreality by wanting to disengage from the digital world and just shut down social media accounts, rip telephones off walls and not use any digital media ever again. One counters hyperreality by a much deeper immersion in reality, in all its forms. There’s a material base to this reality. And I guess what this means is that Christians have a special duty to engage reality in all of its forms and remind ourselves first, and then others, that reality has a material base.
AA: Joining others in an awareness of our unity, we overcome the subject-object split that’s been our conditioning. When we regularly connect with people in real ways, we're less likely to see them as disembodied. We’re also less likely to objectify them.
MT: That's right. And that love is also made manifest materially is also something we need to bear in mind.
Arthur Aghajanian is a Christian contemplative, essayist, and educator. His work explores visual culture through a spiritual lens.