Welcome to this podcast hosted by the Middle East centre think tank, Miss College Oxford.
My name is Feisal Dheisheh. And today I will be speaking about a book by Aaron to conduct called The Ideals of ISIS from Syria to the Internet.
And I will be joined by the author who teaches at Bard College, Werlin, as well as by Joshua Crays,
who is a writer and artist in residence at the embassy Foreign Artists in Geneva.
So welcome. And Joshua Aaron, perhaps we can start off by having you say something about your book.
Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Pfeifle, for having me here.
So my book started off with an experience on February 26, 2015,
I was at a lecture in New York at I saw the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.
It was a lecture being given by Zeyno Baran, a wonderful historian, art historian at Columbia.
She was talking about ancient Mesopotamian art and artistic modernism.
And at the end of the lecture, during the Q&A, somebody asked.
What should be done? That there was some type of disaster had happened and what what did Zaynab think should be done?
And I was very confused. I didn't know what she was talking about.
I'd actually been spending the whole day with some former students of mine from Munich who were visiting in New York that day.
And so as a result, I hadn't been on Facebook at all.
And so therefore, I didn't know what was going on in the world.
And so I walked over to the corner of the room and I looked on my phone and there it was on my feed.
This video that ISIS had posted onto the Internet.
I saw it repeatedly, a video of people smashing sculptures in the museum in Mosul in northern Iraq.
And I saw, you know, over and over again this video of smashing of antiquities in Mosul museum.
And after I got over the initial shock and anger of seeing a video like this, I noticed that one of the scenes in particular.
Which showed three men with sledgehammers smashing the sculpture of a king on me, laying horizontally on the floor resembled.
Almost exactly. I mean, incredibly, this.
This ancient Syrian relief sculpture that I that I knew of from start on the second palace,
which also showed three men with sledgehammers smashing the sculpture of a king and this.
This relief was from two thousand five hundred year with two thousand five hundred years older than the video, and yet it showed the same thing.
And it was produced only twenty five kilometres away. Also know what's now northern Iraq.
And so that got me thinking about the relationship between these two images, this uncanny resemblance.
The nature of iconoclasm, smashing of images, why we do it, why we make images of that destruction,
and suddenly I felt like I needed to write a book because here was a topic that
brought together a whole bunch of the subjects that I had been studying for years.
But most people thought what were the result of the fact that I couldn't choose what to study.
And so I had studied art history and political theory and history of religion and theology.
And now suddenly all of these things converged in this video. And I wanted to make sense of it.
So I embarked on this book. And if I may take one more minute, just to to share another sort of angle for myself.
There's also a personal angle from the book. So my my family on my mother's side, they come from Iraq.
They're Baghdadi Jews who had lived in Iraq, probably as far back as the Babylonian exile.
My grandfather was born in Baghdad by the Tigris around 1910.
We don't know exactly what year he was born. It was the nature of being born around that time.
And he grew up in this new country of Iraq, which was at the time an incredibly cosmopolitan place,
very, very mixed with Jews and Muslims, Sunni and Shia and and other minority groups.
And it was this this was the Iraq that he this was the Iraqi Brooklyn.
But at the same time, it was the Iraq that he had to flee after the Farhood the programme against Jews in 1941,
which then led him to leave first to Tehran and then to Tel Aviv and then eventually to New York, which is where I was born.
And so the other story of this book. Right.
So there's this one line which is about iconoclasm.
The other line is about the nature of politics as the possibility of of different people living together,
rather rather than the need for homogenisation or the sort of 10 tendency towards homogenisation.
And that tendency, of course, just continued.
It didn't end with with the Jews leaving Iraq, but continued as a result of separations between Sunni and Shia.
As in the aftermath of the U.S. led invasion. And then at the time of the day, I started the book.
The events that were happening in northern Iraq as a result of ISIS is rampaged through those areas.
Right. And the terrorising of minority communities.
And so this was the other issue that I wanted to think about. How why why this tendency towards monetisation?
How might we actually live pluralistic lives. Right.
What is and and what is and then bringing those two together. What is the role that images play in achieving some kind of life together?
Thanks very much. I found it fascinating how you make this argument about the image and the possibility of politics.
And I have a number of questions about that myself.
But perhaps we can move to Joshua to start off with this fascinating relationship that Aaron draws between those two things.
Thanks, Feisal. And thank you and for your book. And I thought one of the really interesting things about as a mountainous argument that says
that not only is there is a destructive urge in ISIS destruction of icons and a constant,
but it's self-defeating that there's a dream here, which is a world without images.
And you have this unmediated politics which reflects truth to the believer in you.
Look, every time there's a destruction of an image, what does that produce? It just produces more images.
And within that sort of process in which there's simply sort of this where we're forced to live with the ambiguity of images,
the uncertainty of images you oppose towards the ends of the book.
The figure of destruction to this figure of time.
And you use nature and you say, look, rather than trying to destroy images, we need to learn to live with them.
And what I've been trying to do in this book. I'm paraphrasing, Aaron, is to capture the images, to see the resonances between them.
And I thought that was a really powerful image. And I wanted to both ask you a bit more about what tapping involves.
But I also wanted to sort of give a provocation in a way which is that what makes destruction not a form of tapping?
Because actually one of the things I think you do really well in the book is you say, look, there's a real problem with our defence of heritage.
Right, with our attempt to sort of depoliticise images. Depoliticised statues are in museums.
These are, as you beautifully show, parts of very explicit political nationalist projects and have been since the inception of the museum.
And the sort of defence says we shouldn't destroy things because they're not political. They're part of some putative humanity.
That's not convincing. These images are always going to be political.
And what struck me relative to what ISIS was doing was a line from Walter Benjamin
where he says the consecration of things can destroy them even more than destruction.
And what I take him to mean there is that there's something about what ISIS is doing which activates images
and activates them as part of a political discussion such that we're now forced to pose the question,
well, what is the our relationship to Syria, to a Mesopotamian heritage of to humanity?
And as you show, it's not like ISIS destruction has the final words right there immediately as you show a series of office,
eventually take up that video footage that ISIS show the images of their own iconoclasm and make even further images.
So I guess I ended the book thinking so I finished this book knowing that Aaron is a tapper.
He's someone who attacks images to find their resonances,
but actually isn't ISIS and isn't the beginning of the book to come to the end of the book at the beginning of the book,
again, the person who tapped you or the group that tapped used such that enabled the writing of this book.
So thank you, Axel. Absolutely. I think that that's I mean, I think that that's very rich.
And I think we could you know, we should be trying to nuance it.
But I your comment makes me remember a comment that I make towards the end of the second chapter,
which is this chapter on museums and this chapter on,
as you refer to write this chapter that makes us recognise that these objects in museums that we that were called that that we'd like to call heritage
and are embedded within a kind of binary between civilisation and barbarism that I think needs very much to be tapped that that that dichotomy.
And I say and here I'll just quote, Nobody who has viewed the Mosul Museum video can experience ancient Mesopotamian sculpture in quite the same way.
Again, if avant garde art is meant to disrupt conventional ways of seeing the world, then the Islamic State's video is, quote, good work.
And I think that that's to the point of what you're saying. I actually I agree that if we take the video as a as a kind of tapping right.
Then I and tapping the assumptions underlying museums and certain and and and all that museums can contend for,
I think that that's very much the point. And I think the two are connected, though, to the alternative between tapping an end and smashing them.
Right. Would be. Well, what is. The what is underlying the desire to achieve some kind of purity?
Right. And so, I mean, and I'm hesitant here because I wonder whether it's necessary to think about think about this in terms of intention.
We can talk about that. But but if we do introduce the notion of intention, right.
We could say, well, that there certainly it's certainly the case. The video can perform a certain tapping function.
Right. That makes people think about things differently and sees the limitations of things that they might have might not have before.
So I think that that is one part of the story. The other part of the story is the desire to escape that ambiguity.
And in a sense, here I'm I'm using ISIS as a as a placeholder for what I take to be a much wider human tendency, a perennial human tendency to escape,
to escape the ambiguity of images, to escape the fact that, as I as I say elsewhere, that if our politics requires images.
Right. And yet our images are necessarily partial, they necessarily only tell the half of the truth.
And therefore, they they are necessary. They they have these false elements.
And they're also and and that and that they're also part of our production.
Right. The things that we have made. There's a desire to try and escape that to put some kind of some kind of veil or deny
the the fact that we have that we can do no better than to live in that state of.
Imperfection or ambiguity? And so the other thing that I'm tracking in the book, right.
And then I'm using ISIS in a way is just a place holder for.
Is that impulse impulse to break free of that human.
What I take to be a human necessity. I don't believe we can break free of it.
Right. I can say really what you end up getting instead are these new images.
Right. But nevertheless, the impulse to break free of images is there.
And so maybe the best thing I can say to to wrap up a response to your question
is how I hope that the book can try and help us see both sides of this.
Right. Both the the desire to escape images and what's involved in that.
Whether it's in the case of these specific figures who are smashing the sculpture in Mosul museum or more generally just human art,
human tendencies to desire this escape.
On the one hand, and the fact, as you say very rightly, that images, at least images of destruction can certainly play the form of tapping.
You know, I've just come to add to Joshua's question comment.
And from what you just said, you know, if you if you consider that relationship between idolatry and iconoclasm as that between perhaps.
Imminence and transcendence. Two factors which are often found together and which are involved and often in some kind of struggle,
you know, perhaps you see in ISIS, in the iconoclasm of ISIS, an effort.
To attain a kind of absolute transcendence without any evidence at all.
And as I take it, what your argument is stating is not simply that that is an impossibility.
And you show that very nicely, like how even the destruction of images can only occur by the creation of new images.
But you go beyond that paradox to show that images are absolutely crucial for political life.
Because and you, Marshan, a whole host of really interesting evidence for this,
including that I would like to come back to this Torabi, the famous philosopher, Muslim philosopher.
How images make for consent of various kinds.
That what would otherwise be a relationship of pure force. And therefore, in that sense, not really political.
Because it is not self-sustaining. What the image does by as it were.
Being constitutional. Kind of almost third party.
That makes for the agreement of others that represents the agreement, even if divided of parties A and B, you know, the image is the party.
See, that brings them together in this triangular fashion. Consent to end participation in politics only is achieved by way of image.
But doesn't that suggest that the effort of ISIS is therefore anti political by definition, that what we have here is not, in fact, political Islam?
That term that we have come to hear so much about, but the opposite?
Absolutely. I think I like that it's it's a. Political Islam.
No, I think that's great. I.
I suppose to add to that, right, is the intuition that as you as you were just describing and as I think at least my reading of Al Surabi,
who is, you know, how health I'll helped me to understand that I'm not going to claim that I got him right.
But I can say I can claim what I've learnt from him. Right. That politics, that that politics is therefore necessarily going to be imperfect.
It's not going to be fully satisfying. Right.
And I think that there I think that maybe at the heart of the book is this intuition that there's something deeply connected between the.
Non fully satisfying miss of politics. And yet I would say necessary if we want to actually live together.
I especially want to live together without just resorting to force. Right.
On the one hand. And the necessarily partial or imperfect nature of all images.
Right. I think that's. And therefore, in that sense, all images are going to be idols.
They're always going to fall short of the truth. That doesn't mean we destroy them.
Because. Because then we would be left with nothing. We would be left in a situation that we couldn't live politically.
But rather, what we need to do is find some way to. Live with that imperfection, and in a sense, that's what the book is all about for me, right.
How how do we come to be able to live with this imperfection rather than.
Right. You know, try and smash it. Try try try to escape it.
He was really insulting. Yes, go ahead, Josh.
It's time you said is a book about learning to live with imperfection images, but as much it's a book about people who make images.
And I guess just to come back to find a distinction between this is an opposition
between sort of imminence in which one lives in images and transcendence, which takes a life without images.
Actually, the term that came to me when reading the book all the time was the medium term,
just fetishism, which is how does one create and create a life with images?
And both, Aaron, wonderfully in your book. Also, Feisal, in your writing, you've looked at this urge.
Advice is to live a life on a quote on the surface, as it were, which attempts to dispense with any ambiguity.
That seems to be a very true story about ISIS. But another story, one to tell is the great image makers.
They're huge makers of images. Right. And you detail some of those in the book. You teach you if you look at the way you look at the videos.
So I guess my question isn't quite satisfied by your first answer.
Is this one opposition in the book,
which is between the sort of the the self-defeating urge to live a life without images and then how to live with the ambiguities of images.
But then the question that remains for me is which images and which images should we make?
Because it seems to me there's a lot of disagreements in the book about the images that we
live with and that the disagreements between makers sort of unfair question to post Jupiter,
which are the images that we should live with if we want to, politics, which can deal with ambiguity.
And what are the sort of images that one might reject or even destroy?
So a key question. Right. And I'm not going be able to answer it satisfactorily.
I try to deal with it a little bit towards the end of the book by at least
suggesting two ways to get to that point where you can live with the ambiguity.
And I suppose one. So one of them is I try to speak about images that are intentionally ambiguous rather
than ones that try to hide the thing that they're that the that they're leaving out,
but rather ones that try to. To get our audience to recognise that ambiguity and get them to think and I think
that and I use for an example here are photographed by by the German photographer,
strewth. Of people looking at objects in the pregnant museum in Berlin.
And I think that there is something to explore down that line.
But at the other on the on the other hand, I said this explicit in the book,
I don't think that you could actually build a regime of images that are ambiguous
and constantly forcing kind of forcing people to be philosophical in that way.
I think that I would have to think more about this, but I think at least one problem is that they they will become they'll lose their power.
I think very to do that very quickly, they become domesticated.
And I think also that's probably not an actual life that any of us, even the muscle,
soft skill of us would ever be able to endure is another is another thing to think about.
Right. And so the other is to try to cultivate.
More sophisticated way of engaging with images such that you are attuned to trying
to look for what they what they leave out to try and find their ambiguities,
even if they're not, if even if the images themselves. Right. Are not trying to be ambiguous.
And that's, in a way, the kind of thing that I'm trying to cultivate with the book.
Right. That kind of is a kind of pedagogical move. How do we cultivate that in ourselves?
I am I'm a committed teacher of the liberal arts,
and I believe that that's one of the things that the liberal arts and humanities can can really instil in students.
And so that's probably there's a part of it that's connected to that.
But maybe the other thing, too, to say, Joshua, is I mean, in terms of how do you choose which images.
Right. I can't tell you which images to choose, but I can say that in order to do that, we need to cultivate judgement of the faculty of judgement.
And I think that that's also a key part of the book. Right. Trying to get us to recognise how there is no automatic way to get the right images.
There's no way that would short circuit human involvement in human political you political judgement in order to get the right images.
And that's why and that's why I end the book in the end of the third chapter with a discussion of algorithms and social media.
You talked about who? How do we choose the images?
Well, for all for Obbie, it gives us a picture of of this ideal prophet knows all and is able to choose the right images for the people.
Right. Well, I tried to think about that and adapt it to our more democratic age and think, well,
what what would it mean for us as a democratic, as democratic regimes to choose our images for ourselves?
And how does that work on Facebook? Are these other kinds of social media that we think of as incredibly democratising on the one hand,
where now we're all taking photos and posting them up? Right. So we're taking these we're taking these images.
We're making these images and we're circulating them.
But on the other hand, that circulation is mediated by algorithms that are run by major corporations that we have to think about that part.
On the one hand and then the algorithm, this is where I connected more to other themes in the book.
This this false notion that the algorithm is, again,
a kind of escape from the political right that we can just like the hero played by a ton of the Middle Ages, the actual work made without human hands.
Right. That that says, well, this is not an idle.
It's an icon of Christ because it was made without human hands.
Well, I think that the fetishisation of maybe I don't want to use that word,
but, ah, the way that we think about the algorithm can can link up with that.
And I think that we need to try and fight that tendency.
I mean, in that might we also argue, for instance, that what the kind of relationship ISIS is setting up is in one sense,
a perverse vision of direct democracy in so far as they want or dialogue.
There is no image, right. You know, you just have you and me and the third the day is absent.
And the day might serve as society or opinion to use a far Obion term or image or representation.
And that all must be destroyed. There is only you and me.
And in a way,
it allows us to think about how democracy in its non-direct form requires the image in the form of representation in both senses of that word,
not just someone representing you. Yeah. Representative democracy in the sense that an image is a representation.
It surely cannot just be the individual voter. Right.
The individual voter's views must be mediated through.
The representative who does something to them is not simply a transparency.
This means looking about two different ways of thinking about. Politics or of even democracy?
So this makes me think about one of the parts of the book that was the most fun for me to write,
which is the part of the book where I talk about the significance of first first person shooter video games,
which had been recognised fairly early on as a kind of aesthetic model for ISIS
videos and and usually talked about as a means of kind of recruitment technique.
And as I say, I think that that was OK as far as it goes.
But the. More interesting thing, what I was trying to do is actually to think about, well, what is actually at stake in terms of these question,
these political questions about wanting to live within a video game and how there is no.
Politics within a video. Right. And there is no judgement within a video.
Oh, right. And it's actually in a sense, it's like just the way you are when you're talking about Feisal, just outright.
That's just the individual with the with the rules of the game moving through it.
But there's no but. But there is no space for politics in a videogame.
And I think that that's precisely the vision that I'm trying to say.
Well, I think it can be very, very seductive. And ISIS is certainly not the first to be seduced by by that by that image of what human life can be.
But I think it's also deeply problematic.
And I think that it's like a kind of vision that we should try to hold at bay in order instead to cultivate the imperfect,
but yet, in my opinion, better capacity for living together politically.
Thanks. Fluting remark. Well, I don't really have the last word.
I mean, I just. My only last word is I hope you enjoyed the book and I hope you find it you find it in the thought provoking.
I certainly found it thought provoking and I urge our audience to buy this book, it's published by the University of Chicago Press.
It's a slim volume, but really packed with very interesting thoughts, all of which deal with Mesopotamia, broadly speaking.
And at an image in its own right to be found in museums, to be found in the streets of Mosul and to be found in our own works of analysis.
So thank you very much, Aaron. And Joshua, for this conversation.
Thank you, Feisal. Thank you, Joshua. This is wonderful. Thank you both.
Let me talk and she.