Architecture of Thought

Closing Remarks: The West

It may be useful to reflect more generally on the Western perspective against which the examples in this book have been analyzed. All material practices studied here revolve around the thinkability of represented concepts and the control of their meanings. Dominant powers have always laid claim to control over the way people know things, but the West seems to have been the most successful in fusing power and knowledge, its primary tool being the elimination of other, complex, or critical ways of thinking. Even the limited examples discussed here show that the other modalities of thought that European powers attempted to or did suppress shared distinctly less possessive characteristics. For instance, representing divinity in Byzantium could be seen as sharing the attitude toward religion of Mayan practices of cosmic vision. Their theological principles were clearly different. However, they must have shared the belief that verbally structured systems of interpretation are emblematic of the human desire to control symbolic reality, and that only by reaching beyond such limitations, by giving up the rational control over thoughts, can a person enter the domain of god(s). They relied on visual representation and experiential phenomena because the vagueness or richness of visual stimuli escapes the reductive character of textual interpretations . When a believer pondered the implied presence of light in the naos of the Katholikon of Hosios Loukas, or while a ritualistically intoxicated priest engaged with the evocative compositions of painted books in Mesoamerica, it was a similar absence of an explicit authority of the symbolic—or the lack of an all-controlling system of interpretation— that opened up their experience to complex processes of sense-making. In both cases, instead of deciphering an already-coded message, the very process of constituting thought created a possibility of a religious meaning. What one could learn from such an experience was to a large degree unpredictable. It is also significant that the artistic production of the Reformation dealt directly with the issue of symbolic authorities. The purpose of the so-called mannerist representations was to destabilize the dominant structures of symbolic order. Compositions in Mantua or the Commonwealth of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania discussed here encouraged critical reflection in search of new, nonhierarchical systems of social and political relationships . While representations of Byzantium or pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica identified Closing Remarks The West 259 Closing Remarks thoughts that are possible in the absence of a centralized authority of the symbolic, early generations of Protestants and their sympathizers used visual forms to explore alternatives to the already-existing system of control. In all the examples discussed in this book, it was the West, or rather the forces that shaped European power elites, that silenced or dismissed other modalities of thought by rendering them unintelligible. The identity of the West has been framed by the accumulated memory of such processes and mechanisms of cultural expansion. Thus the so-called invention of the Gothic style provided the way to distill and articulate emergent structures of power in France. Their sense of superiority was fully perceivable only when considered against the relationship existing between the Roman West and the Byzantine East. The church of Saint-Denis earned its place in politics and history by taming those idiosyncratic aspects of Eastern Orthodox imagination that perturbed and fascinated the crusading elites. This new way of controlling meanings made it into what Simson called “the conservative ‘language’ of Christian architecture throughout the Western world,” one that was still at work when it reemerged in the nineteenth century as the visual system of English national identity.1 The Mesoamerican experience seemed to have proven to Europeans that their superiority resided in the ability to control communication. The Spaniards remade religion, language , and education into operational tools designed for the task of cultural appropriation. To do this they had to place the content of Catholic religion in polar opposition to the means of religious communication. The meaning of religious beliefs had to become dogmatic— strictly fixed by memorized narratives—in order for the practices of message delivery to operate like promotion. The stricter the dogma, the more permissive the methods of attracting potential believers. When thousands of Amerindians gathered in the Catholic theaters of conversion, the Spaniards thought that they moved them away from their pre-Hispanic beliefs. Without the Spaniards knowing it, the strategy failed in Mesoamerica but, when enhanced and imported back into Europe (or perhaps in a reciprocal process of exchanges, such as the example...