I want to discuss how the public sphere is contested through images that are controlled and transformed on behalf of specific political agendas. Specifically I want to focus how the symbolic expression of religious identity is suppressed or violently transformed in the public space. Everything that is in the realm of reality we perceive as real. The things we see we give ontological meaning or we interpret them as reflections of objective truth. For example this chair I am sitting on right now, I will not doubt about its ontological substance or its real existence because I can sense (see and feel) it. This chair though is, without me being aware of it, connected with my beliefs, convictions, perception and ordering of reality. There is more than what we see, because our view is constantly influenced by unconscious “discriminative” decision and perception. There are things we see and there are things we do not see because we do not want to see them. In this context, a lot of ways of denying truth can be found: closing your eyes, eliminating messages, constructing and transforming images. Internally, this is what we do every minute. Externally and very concrete this takes place through media, which constantly transforms and shapes images. They present what people want to see and hide what should not meet the eye. This is what I call the politics of visibility.
By eliminating what should not be seen, the public sphere becomes contested. As I said before, we believe that the things we see belong to the realm of the Real. Following this logic, what we do not see, can be kept out of the realm of reality. Keeping something invisible is a way of pushing it to an imaginary space, a third space. Even if we do know that it exists, as long as it is not visible, we might as well not know it. This is a basic human condition. People tend to believe their eyes. “I only believe it, when you show it to me.” This is the basis of a very important biblical narrative about Thomas who didn’t want to believe the resurrection of Christ, until he could sense the wounds of Christ (feel and see). Ask yourself the question: “What do you believe more, your eyes or my words?” If you believe in an invisible reality despite the absolute different character of reality, this belief underlies a radical logic of optimism or resistance. As Zizek sees it, this “disavowing the Real” is “the most elementary metaphysical gesture”. But this radical rejection of reality is not what I want to focus on here.
Rather I want to talk about how the politics of visibility have a discourse-constructive character. In a severe Foucauldian way, this represents how knowledge/truth is created through power/politics. This being said, a similar logic plays an important role in the discussion on symbolic expressions of religious identities in a multiconfessional and multiculturalist society. What ought to be seen and what ought not to be seen? Which level of visibility of symbolic expression is allowed? Do we really want to have a visibility of multiple identities in our public space? In this discussion I like to introduce the concept of “heterotopia” because I believe that the concrete symbolic expression of multiple religious identities (in for example religious buildings, the veil, etc.) can function as discourse-challenging symbols/places in the way heterotopias do. The heterotopia is a "totally different" arrangement of space that is absolutely other to the normal space.
Heterotopias have the power of representing social reality, but also of challenging and overturning them. They turn the rules that prevail somewhere else upside down.
To give an example, the opposition to the building of religious buildings (whether it concerns the discussion about mega-buildings or "normal" mosques) could be analyzed in a new way with this concept of heterotopia. Religious buildings in post-secular space represent social and urban diversity (do we want cultural diversity to be that visible?), but on the other hand also challenge our post-secular space (because it questions the level of secularization) and overturns the reality of egalitarian accessible secular space (because it constitutes a sacred space, which is only accessible under restriction of membership,...). In other words: the symbolic expression of religious identity in multicultural society reflects the objective truth of a multiconfessional reality (and do we want that?) and it questions the secular space (are we as secular as we pretend?). That is the main reasons why symbolic expressions of religious identities are suppressed: they question the secularity (where we believe in so much) in a very disturbing way.
Something similar can be said about multiculturalism. The paradigm of multiculturalism has sadly not (never?) been interpreted as the co-existence of different symbolic expression of religious identity. This is the result of a semantical confusion of the concept of secularization. What originally should have functioned as a vehicle for multiculturalism became an overarching ideology which bears in itself the failure of multiculturalism because it depicts secularism as a condition of integration in a modern Europe. This is the fundamental tension within the secular multiculturalist project. Or to say it in Habermas words: “equal ethic liberties require political secularization but forbid the political overgeneralisation of the secularized world view.” The failure has been to let secularization become an overarching world view. As a result of this confusion, the symbolic expression of religious identity has been falsely interpreted as an adherence to traditional/fundamentalist/protectionist religious identity, which is incompatible with liberalist project of equal/tolerant multiculturalism. Therefore: instead of seeing different symbolic expression of religious identities as expression of sincere self-understanding and non-competitive with other symbolic expressions, the decision has been made to try to create a neutral public sphere, suppressing all “radical” expressions of identity from public space.
Society has become afraid of the synchronic expressions of religious identities because (once again) 1. They show the not-totally-secular character of Western European public space. 2. Interpreted in a competitive way they are a reflection of the failure of multiculturalism. Therefore it is thought that it is important to keep up appearances and try to eliminate all symbolic expressions from the public sphere. There are multiple things that should not be seen. This is also because of the normative power of the expression of multiple identities: if you allow the visibility of different symbolic spaces, this creates a reality/truth to which you need to adapt. This concretely means: if on the level of visibility and expression you allow co-existence of multiple expressions of identity, you need to implement this in your politics. In order not to admit that we do not really want to have entirely sincere multicultural policies, the only thing that needs to be done is to remove the visibility out of the realm of the Real.
Therefore what cannot be pushed away entirely or the emergence of symbolic expressions as a result of suppression, like mosques, veils, crucifixes, sacred places function as heterotopias for this idea of neutral and secular public sphere and are post-secular confessions for the inherent deficiency of multiculturalism. The problem of multicultural failure is not the fact that cultures do not go together or that the different expressions of religious identities are inherently incompatible, but that failure is imbedded in the interpretation of it. The multicultural policies are not tolerant, not neutral, but trying to Christianize and secularize traditional expressions of religiosity. I can only conclude with following statement. The nowadays politics of visibility concerning the symbolic expression of religious identity constitute a form of cultural occupation. As every kind of occupation, this ultimately results in defensive identities. If the opportunity to express your identity on a symbolic level in public sphere is taking away from you, doing so will become a violent act...
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