I. Expositio

In order to understand what grace (gratia), fashion and power have to do with each other, one has to start with  Catholicism. Within the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, it is the Holy Ghost that fulfils the function of gratia, says Augustine (De Spiritu et littera, III,5). Of all the persons, it is the third, gratia, which guarantees the coherency of the Trinity’s theological arrangement. To embed the Oedipal figure of the revolting Son within the orthodox Christian narrative is psychologically and power-politically the most important structure of Christianity, it is also a delicate and ingenious manoeuvre. The fragile structure of Trinity is permanently endangered by the abandonment of the relationship between the law-giving Father and the revolting Son - a relationship that is in itself an impossible one (Chesterton 2008). That is expressed exactly in the famous complaint of God-Son for having been abandoned by God-Father. It is here, in God’s self-abandonment, that the impossible relationship between the authoritarian demiurge-God of the Old Testament and the androgynous hysterical-God of the New Testament finds its fulfilment. In spite of the a priori impossible relationship between Father and Son - the point of this excursus – within the concept of Trinity, the relationship between Father and Son is mediated through the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost adds what this oedipal relationship between authoritarian Father and rebellious Son obviously lacks most: Gratia (grace/mercy/beauty). The most important function of grace is that through her transcendence and immanence remain connected to each other, as depicted in God-Father and God-Son.

The political-theological layer also cannot be imagined as a monotheism, instead it displays itself under the paradigm of the Trinity. At least Giorgio Agamben continues Peterson’s critique of the Schmittian notion of political theology in that sense (Agamben 2005; Peterson 1994; Schmitt 2006). In accordance with Agamben, one pole of the political theological Trinity corresponds to the legislature, whilst a second corresponds to the executive. Especially in Liberalism, a gap spans between the pillars of the political machine, as gouvernemental power over the life world and individual freedom are inherently incompatible.

Corresponding to the Christian notion of Trinity, a third element closes that gap in the political machine. That element is charisma (from charis: grace) (Agamben 2007a). Miraculously, charisma enables the political-theological machinery to circulate, insofar as it suggests coherency where there is none. Political charisma simulates an intimate meaningful connection where abstractly legal individual freedom and factual gouvernemental bondage naturally drift apart. This charisma can be produced by the most tautological of speeches by political leaders or – what occurs more often in the case of Liberalism – by the quasi magical invocation of the “name-of-the-people“ or the “consent-of-the-people.” In respect to their political-theological function, such ritual acclamations can be compared to the medieval acclamations of the king as they are examined in Kantorowicz’s study of medieval Ruler worship (Kantorowicz 1946).

Beyond that, another form of charisma seems to exist in liberal democracies, and it bears considerable political-theological relevance. I would like to define this form of charisma as “glamour.” It is not consent that glamour acclaims, but dissent and difference. In spite of that, and because of that, glamour significantly contributes to the maintenance of the political-theological machinery. What separates glamour from the form of charisma, which is a product of public acclamation, is that glamour is situated within the informal sector of the political machine. Glamour is bound to the privately regulated realm of fashion. “Fashion and style are smallest particles within the whole of a system, nevertheless they must be granted an important mediating function within social dynamics due to their molecular Omnipresence” (Poschardt 1998). With great accuracy, Poschardt also describes the political function of fashion and glamour in Liberalism by referring to the example of a walk in a park in the 19th Century:

During the weekend, the urban parks and promenades served as a stage for a ritual walking exhibition, to which success of a strategic distinction was paid in currencies that were of much importance for the bourgeois, such as envy, pride, jealousy and shame. But as long as these emotional currents flowed, all the participants of that walking exhibition could comprehend themselves in unity. The feelings stemmed from a common world view and a common conception of the world.

Thus glamour connects the separate parts of the political machine insofar as it is able to mediate the unity of the political machine via its different parts - a unity of difference which manifests itself in “emotional currents” as envy, pride and jealousy. In addition, glamour creates the illusion that the machinery of socio-political theology could know something like the unpredictable, the miraculous or the gracious which may be able to solve the antagonism between universal gouvernemental power and individual freedom – a conflict which is inherent to today’s political-theological machine. As glamour has become ubiquitous and is no longer reserved for the upper levels of society, its molecular and miraculous presence grants the coherency of the political-theological machine. In a seemingly unpredictable way, glamour can surround members of the high society as well as crack junkies with an aesthetic aureole. Furthermore, because glamour is connected to desire in a very basic sense, it not only guarantees the appearance of the coherency of the social realm but also increases the intra-societal mobility of desire. The individual desire that acts as a "lignes de fuite" (lines of flight/building lines) (Deleuze/Guattari 1980) can be reterritorialized by the means of glamour and therefore be kept within the political-theological mechanism.

Glamour is the grace of the political theology of Liberalism. As something that is incomprehensible, marginal, coincidental und useless, glamour joins the machinery of the Trinitarian political theology of Liberalism, but provides it with everything that maintains the functionality of this machine in spite of its inherent contradictions. Thus, glamour seems to directly correspond to the function of gratia in the theological idea of the Trinity. The following research is dedicated to disclosing the kinship of gratia and glamour and glamour’s political-theological function.

II. Grace and Benevolence: On Aquinas and Augustine’s Theologies of Gratia

Glamour is essential to the political-theological machinery of Liberalism. In times of a reasonably safe minimum income, glamour - or the distinctive gains connected to it - is an important reason to participate in the political-theological complex. Although glamour is one of the constitutive elements of the political-theological Trinity of Liberalism, and therefore also bears an economic significance, the principle of glamour itself is completely non-economical. Although glamour – like Aristotle’s conception of the bios theoretikos – mainly requires a reasonable amount of money, it cannot be bought. Wealth is absolutely no necessary precondition of glamour, it might even be a hindrance to it. In that respect, it must be noted that glamour by far transcends the un-economical aspects of luxury as examined by Veblen (Veblen 2008).

It is exactly this un-economical aspect of glamour that it shares with gratia. Although gratia enables the economic circulation (oikonomia) between God-Father, God-Son and Holy Ghost (Agamben 2007b), gratia is in many respects that which revokes economic rationality. The Dictionnaire de théologie dogmatique, liturgique, canonique et disciplinaire of Nicolas Bergier (1718-1790) defines “grace” as: “(…) un don que Dieu accorde aux hommes par pure libéralité et sans qu’ils aient rien fait pour le mériter.” (a gift that God grants men out of pure liberality and without their having done anything to deserve it) (Bergier 1850). Gratia is therefore as much the characteristic of the Liberalité of God as it is completely un-economic, because it is free (fr.: gratuit, ger.: gratis).

Augustine defines gratia as a “gift of the Holy Ghost”- Gratia vera est donum Spiritus Sancti (De Spiritu et littera, III, 5). In a decisive passage from Augustine's reflections on the notion of grace - his treatise de gratia et libero arbitrio - he explicitly confronts the followers of Pelagius, who claim that grace is something that can be “earned.” In the passage contra Pelagianos dicentes gratiam Dei secundum merita nostra dari Augustine quotes a passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans (4,4) in which Paul writes that merits are not distributed according to grace, but according to duty, non imputatur merces secundum gratiam, sed secundum debitum (De gratia et libero arbitrio I, 5, 11). Therefore, the principle of grace seems to signify the opposite of merit for both Paul and Augustine.

Moreover, gratia, like glamour, also has an aesthetic aspect. Among the gods of antiquity, the graces were indeed depicted as three beautiful women. In scholastic tradition too, gratia has an aesthetic aspect. For example, Thomas Aquinas speaks of the lumen gratiae (the light of grace). As per Aquinas, the lumen gratiae seems to represent something like the condition of possibility (Bedingung der Möglichkeit) of any intellectual cognition, that is – he accentuates – neither strictly limited to the enabling of natural cognition nor to the enabling of supra-natural cognition. Opposing the supra-natural quality of the concept of gratia itself, the lumen gratiae can also emerge on the visual sector, on bodies, and even during the application of the ratio naturalis (natural reason):

Et tamen quandoque Deus miraculose per suam gratiam aliquos instruit de his quae per naturalem rationem cognosci possunt, sicut et quandoque miraculose facit quaedam quae natura facere potest (Summa Theologiae Ia IIae, q. 109).

Concerning this improbable case of a material effect of an inherently immaterial principle, Aquinas speaks about a “miraculous” (miraculose) act of God, as it took place, prominently, during the first incarnation of the Christian God as God-Son, for example. Similar to that, Aquinas stresses that the “pulchritudo et perfectio Ecclesiae” (beauty and perfection of the church) have emerged from gratia, whereby the effect of gratia in respect to the pulchritudo et perfectio Ecclesiae must also be located in the concrete material decoration of the Christian churches (Summa Theologiae Ia IIae, q. 112). Although Aquinas explicitly opposes the antique concept that gratia is elegance (gratia est nitor), for him too, grace has a aesthetic-material component (Summa Theologiae Ia IIae, q. 110).

However, the antique origin is crucial to the understanding of the Christian concept of grace. The Christian concept of grace remains indeed an aesthetic one, but it is so strongly related to the transcendent “God”-entity that the material experience of grace becomes nearly impossible or precisely a miraculous incident. It is this fundamental impossibility of gratia that is reflected in its anti-economical and anti-legal character: grace is a form of beauty. But the rules for the production of gratia are hidden in the infinite distance of transcendence. Inspite – or because – of that impossibility, gratia, in the form of lumen gratiae (light of grace), contains for Aquinas the very condition of possibility (Bedingung der Möglichkeit) of any aesthetic experience. It is only through the lumen gratiae that the infinite distance between the first mover in transcendence and the movements that he effects in immanence can be perceived. The light of grace approaches the intellect of man, which is according to Aquinas solely passive (Iª q. 79 a.: “intellectus est potentia passiva”), only as the other, completely distant “gift of the Holy Ghost.”

III. Glamour as a Grammar of Silence

The notion of glamour shares many of its aspects with the notion of gratia. First of all, both are foreign bodies in the philosophical discourse, insofar as they resist any linear description. He who could explain gratia would have aborted God with that description, and with that abortion of God he would have erased the very condition of the possibility of gratia. Even more radical is the refusal of any participation in a discourse on the concept of glamour. In a way that is much more radical and complete than the concept of the Other - highly revered during the Seventies - or even Derrida’s concept of the différance, glamour not only eludes any kind of discursiveness, but it goes so far to implicitly ridicule the discourse itself, its participants and any form of intellect.

One who says glamour and who writes glamour and especially the one who thinks of glamour has irretrievably gambled away any chance to be glamorous her- or himself. In that sense, one must interpret a sentence spoken by designer Ida Gut at a congress on the subject of “Glamour as Work and Knowledge.” Shortly after she appeared on stage, Ida Gut took a look at the audience and immediately ascertained that it would be clear that “nobody in this place has any glamour,” (TAZ 2004). But Gut wouldn’t have had to even take a glimpse in order to know that. It would indeed be paradoxical to participate in a congress entitled “Glamour as work and knowledge” and to be glamorous oneself. Glamour is not only quite the opposite of work and knowledge, it is notoriously elusive to those who want to know about it and talk about it.

In the same sense, Anja Seeliger quite hit the spot with her review on Poschardt’s very good and scholarly monograph on fashion: “With the greatest nonchalance, fashion moves between worlds that normally have nothing to say to each other. Fashion is too light to allow anybody like Ulf Poschardt to stem it,” (DER SPIEGEL vom 18.05.1998). To fully evaluate the irony of this sentence, one surely has to remember that Poschardt’s book is quite an outstanding approach to the subject, including treatments of topics ranging from fashion during the French Revolution via dandies like Beau Brummel, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust and more complex figures like Claude Cahun and Jean Genet, to contemporary fashion designers such as Martin Margiela, as well as the photographs of Terry Richardson. Nevertheless, the book is powerless to even quickly grasp the idea of glamour or of being glamorous. Witnessing someone reading it is, of course, not glamorous at all but, in fact, one of saddest sights ever.

What connects the notion of glamour to that of gratia, aside from its reluctance towards any discursiveness, is its mediating function between material and transcendent levels. Like gratia, glamour is, in a vague sense, magical and mysterious. Etymologically speaking, glamour is a heathenish variation of gratia. In the English language, the word “glamour” originally signified “magic.” The word also bears a kinship to the originally French word “grimoire,” which signifies a book containing magical spells. “Glamour” is also closely connected to the Scottish term “gramarye,” which signifies “magic.” “Grimoire” and “gramarye” find their source in the Latin word “grammatica,” which signified all different kinds of scientific abilities during the Middle Ages, including such practices as Astrology and Alchemy. Surprisingly enough, in the very core of “glamour,” we can find the Greek word “gramma,” which signifies the written word.

The basic deduction of this etymology is that “glamour” slightly signifies a minimum of charisma (from charis, Greek for “grace”), which is attributed to all the arts understood as grammatica by those who were illiterate to what the grammatica dealt with and therefore mistook them for magic (“gramarye”, “grimoire”). From this point of view, it is very understandable that glamour eludes any form of discursiveness. Glamour signifies a non-significative function of a sign, which results from unawareness of the meaning and the context of a sign. Glamour is actually a sign that requires an unawareness of its meaning. Therefore, within glamour, one can indeed find a form of language, as Barthes postulated for fashion in general, (Barthes 2006). But the language of glamour does not signify anything. More precisely, it transports something like an experience of language as such, an “experience (...) of the circumstance that someone is speaking,” which is necessarily connected to the unawareness of the significance of a certain linguistic system, (Agamben 1993). For somebody who possesses glamour, it is not important what she or he says, but that she or he says it. She or he is in danger of being less glamorous inasmuch as what she or he says is in danger of being understood in a discursive way. As the lumen gratiae only shines because the gap between sinful man and God can, in principle, not be bridged, glamour can only be found where meaning is distant.

IV. Corpus mysticum gloriosum

It is the fluctuative constitution of glamour, that this concept shares with gratia, and that mainly defines its political function. Glamour is the difference between sign and meaning, and it represents that difference in a way that is not discursive. Glamour, therefore, suggests a connection between disparate elements of the social field which are not connected to each other in any real way. That these disparate elements are not interlinked to each other by any real connection is not the problem of the overall context that glamour suggests, but it is exactly the precondition for glamour. Especially by means of the un-economic structure that it shares with gratia, glamour suggests the possibility of a hole through the structures of economic power though no such hole actually exists. The forms in which glamour materializes in the emotional sector are mainly jealousy, hope, enchantment, admiration and attraction. Glamour emotionalizes the possibility of communication between disparate elements, which is actually only imaginary. In doing so, glamour fills the gap, which it stands for in a vague, impossible way.

Glamour transports the dream of the extremely wealthy music producer who accidentally drops by Mariah Carey’s diner and orders three burgers in a row just to hear her singing while frying. But glamour also builds up attraction “from the top downwards”, towards the lower rungs of the social ladder (Svendsen 2006, 43). The glamorous way in which photographer Nan Goldin knew how to view junkies in the late Eighties was indirectly responsible for the fact that around the turn of the millennium, some young men from good families nearly starved themselves to death in order to look like the junkies they weren’t. The glamorous, paradoxical attraction to the lower classes has also been brilliantly formulated by Daryoush Haj-Najafi. As an explanation of the latest fascination for the grime-scene, the British journalist mentioned that it is “about making music for the people who might beat you up” (Flasher 2007).

But although glamour can be subversive, it also has a stabilizing effect. Insofar as glamour suggests a possibility for breaching the socio-economic dynamics of power, it maintains the basic energy of economic activity, which consists of the will of the individual to alter the circumstances in which she or he lives. Glamour can bind the frictional fleeing line (“ligne de fuite”) that is created by the individual and her, his dreams exactly insofar as those dreams are of a non-economic nature and, therefore, principally transcend the political-theological field of Liberalism. In this way glamour functions as a machinery of coherency that is nourished by incongruence.

One might think, for example, of Irmgard Keun’s “Artificial Silk Girl” who walks through 1932 Berlin detached from her economic reality and dreams of being a star. “It is always like that with us children of poor people: I love my mother indeed with longing but yet I am so happy that I am away in Berlin and that I have freedom. I will become a star” (Keun 2002). For Keun’s protagonist, the solution for the conflict between glamorous dream and unglamorous reality can only be found within the realm of the imaginary: “I want to write like a movie, because my life is like that and it's going to become even more so. And I look like Colleen Moore, if she had a perm and her nose were a little more fashionable, like pointing up. And when I read it later on, everything will be like at the movies – I’m looking at myself in pictures.”

Glamour means iconization and deauthentification. Although glamour grows out of economic antagonisms, those antagonisms are not bridged by glamour, but are practically erased by means of imaginary forms of transubstantiation with the star, with the icon. If economic-political distances are being bridged through glamour, then this can only happen by applying the imaginary strategy of the imitatio of a popular icon. This strategy of imitatio by far surpasses mere identification. According to Lubac the imitatio christi and transubstantiation in Eucharist, for example, forge all Christians to the collective body of the corpus mysticum christi that transcends individuality (Lubac 2007). In the same way, the imitatio p. diddii or the imitatio parisae hiltoniensis or imitatio raf simonsi are one or more corpora mystica. The end of these cult communities is the administration of the political-theological difference between liberal pretence and economic constraint. Through her or his participation in such communities, the individual experiences a permanently postponed freedom inasmuch as its contours vanish in the collective imitatio of the corpus mysticum glamourosum and she or he becomes inconceivable to her or himself.

The basic element and crucial function of these corpora mystica is alienation, that is to be “imaginary flowers on the chain” in the language of Marx (Marx 1976, 379). Insofar as the membrae (members) imitate the caput (head) of a mystical body, they act as an “other,” meaning they act in discord with their own economic-political circumstances and in the habit of those who they imitate. Through this form of alienation and deauthentification, glamour returns the difference from which it emerges to the receiver or believer. The not-being-oneself and maybe not-being-at-all during the process of imitatio of an icon creates a distance between the believer and her or his everyday life. This distance is desired and becomes bigger and more effective, according to the original distance between the source and the receiver of glamour. It is oneself’s deauthentification that enables one’s partaking in the economic section of the political-theological machine. Glamour transfers one’s own sadness, boredom and hopelessness into hope, jealousy and attraction. Glamour converts social friction into cohesive forces. Therefore glamour is something like the hidden matrix of the political theology of Liberalism that is paradoxically dominated by individual freedom and gouvernemental control at the same time. Glamour is the gracious and graceful escape that leads to the inner workings of liberal logics.

Illustrations: Rachel de Joode & Leon Neal (courtesy)

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