Jean-Pierre Warnier, reporting from Paris,
offers some reflections on Charlie Hebdo and the burgeoning Je Suis Charlie
movement. David Morgan builds on Warnier’s comments by considering the
humble pencil as means and motive of the events in Paris. What both bring to
the forefront is the role that materiality, and, particularly, material
religion, play in this confrontation with and affirmation of the democratic
process. At issue are many serious issues: the rights and privileges of
divergent groups, and their divergent commitments, in pluralistic societies,
the proper balance of respect and transparency between those of different communities, and the proper response to attenuate the necessary frictions that
will always exist whenever people of different backgrounds choose to live
side-by-side in democratic states. Hopefully, in celebrating Charlie we can
celebrate the freedom of speech, a bedrock institution for flourishing
democracies, without celebrating the sparks that fly when critics choose to
depict the prophet Muhammad, an indecorous act, at the very least, but not
something to be responded to with violence and terror, not in this day and age,
and certainly not in Paris.
MLA citation format:
Warnier, Jean-Pierre.
"On Freedom, Pencils and Material Religion"
Web blog post. Material Religions. 14 January 2015. Web. [date of access]
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| Charlie Hebdo Website, January 12, 2015 |
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| Liberty leading the people, Plantu, Le Monde, January 10, 2015 |
Charlie Hebdo is a satirical journal. It is deliberately rogue and
distasteful. It is always testing the limits. I say “is” and not “was”. It was
dying a slow death, and very few people cared about that. It was nearly
bankrupt when it became the target of a terrorist attack. Three months later,
it would have been too late. The priest didn’t like it, the imam didn’t like
it, the rabbi didn’t like it, neither did the military, the hunter, the
magistrate, the government, the businessman, the academic, and the
establishment. Why should they have liked it and cared? Charlie Hebdo is
making fun and ridiculing them all, always beyond the limit. Freedom of thought
and freedom of expression is its motto. It even makes fun of Moses, Christ and
the Prophet. Blasphemy, said some.
Charlie Hebdo is resurrected by a massacre - a religious one, accomplished
with guns, as a sacred act of salvation. Overnight it became world famous. All
of a sudden, many people identified with Charlie. Not everyone by far. On the
social networks, it is easy to see that some rejoice about what looked for a
while like its demise. But now, the priest is Charlie, the Imam is Charlie, the
Rabbi is Charlie, everyone is Charlie.
Material religion
featured prominently in what happened in Paris last week: pencils, drawings,
guns, rifles, cars, flags, kippas, prayers, candles, and of course, marching.
You have seen it all on TV, especially posters that read: “I am a Jew, I am a
Muslim, I am a Christian, I am a cop: I am Charlie."
 |
| We are all Charlie, Plantu, Le Monde, January 11, 2015 |
We are scholars. We take
religion and religious practice as our object of study. What can we contribute
to help people live together and to understand what has happened? How can we
say something useful to our fellow human beings, believers or not, from our
academic viewpoint? We are not cartoonists. We are not journalists. We are
scholars. But we share the same tools: a pencil and a sheet of paper (OK: a
keyboard if you wish. But it is still a material contraption). As items of
material culture, they feature prominently in the controversial cartoons both
in the attack and in the march.
But we academics use our
pencils in an entirely different way than the cartoonist. We want to sit back,
watch and think. We take our time. We do not want to trespass. We want our
ethnographies to draw a faithful, complete, respectful and nuanced image of
what we study painstakingly. Our ethical code forbids any scorn or anything
that is derogatory. Why should it be so important to do so? Why should it be as
important as the satire made by the cartoonist? Because anger, emotion, street
marching, mourning, yelling and rogue cartoons are most important in a state of
freedom.
But also because
enquiring, analysing, pondering, questioning, debating, criticizing, thinking
are most important as well in a state of freedom. Day in and day out, we can
see that our enquiries have been too quick, our analyses too short sighted, our
publications, articles, books and posts lacking in eloquence and stamina. In a
state of freedom, scholars as well as cartoonists and journalists are the armed
guards of the freedom of the people – with their pencil as a weapon. When we
need the help of the armed forces, it means that we have failed to enlighten
and to convince. Let’s not be mistaken: there is so much to be done to analyse
and explain religious fervour, devotion and religious practice to contribute to
an understanding of our world.
In the attached cartoons
by Plantu in the French newspaper ‘Le
Monde’, one can see a pastiche of “Liberty leading the people”
(1830) by Eugène Delacroix, in which the guns have been replaced by pencils
(January 10). In the second one (January 11), three authority figures from
religions of the Book claim that they too are Charlie.
And now, readers of the
Material Religions blog, we do have a very effective tool of analysis. We can
contribute effectively to the debate and make it clear that religion is not
only a question of belief in a number of notions, but a practice immersed in
bodily actions and in the use of material objects, to the extent that taking up
arms against perceived enemies may be seen by some as an act of piety, as it
was during the Christian crusades in the 13th century, or in the
secular religions of the 20th century. Sit back, watch, take your
time, open your eyes, observe the devotee, analyse, take your pencil and write.
Jean-Pierre Warnier
A new iconography of liberty: the pencil
In this age of rapid technological change, when new media rise
and fall in the rhythm of the fashion season, an old medium has surprisingly
emerged as the image of political values and social mobilization. Jean-Pierre
Warnier fittingly calls our attention to the pencil. It seems an unlikely
symbol at first blush. But watch the millions marching peacefully in Paris and
it becomes abundantly clear that the nomination of an old medium, this humble
emblem of the cartoonist’s art of yesteryear, is no mistake. And the
appropriation of Delacroix’s painting only makes it plainer: in the face of the
viciously violent attacks on the staff of Charlie
Hebdo, we turn to old media to convey the values on which modernity is
grounded: the freedoms enshrined in constitutions, the social contracts that
summoned the social and political arrangements of the modern world from the
waning epoch that preceded it.
The French turn to the streets, which their political culture
has always found the very arteries through which the hope for freedom flows.
Marching in the streets performs a face-to-face democracy that acts as the
ground zero of all forms of political and social mediation that follow. It is
theatre, to be sure, but theatre that is powerful. Yesterday, people held
pencils like crosses or flags, carried giant representations pieced together
from cardboard and tape, bearing compelling mantras like “NOT AFRAID.” It was
marvelous to see these images in social media and in news reports because they
put faces—millions of faces—to a struggle that we have found easier to ignore:
the “professionalized” military struggle against terrorism and the politics of
fear that so many around the world have endured in the wake of September 11.
With the Paris march, we have found ourselves in our own story. It is about us,
all of us together who deplore the violence. The fight against fear and terror
is about us. And that makes the humble pencil a superb emblem of the struggle because
pencils are creative instruments that don’t make much of a military weapon.
They are instead powerful devices for freedom. Delacroix’s painting of Liberty Leading the People was about an
idea, and pencils are made for expressing and celebrating ideas. This is the
people’s revolution, and one hopes that the power of the pencil will help keep
it that way.
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