This conversation between Peter Jones, Evgeny Grishin, and duskin drum reflects on the Notre Dame Cathedral fire on 15 April 2019

duskin drum: Since we are the Material Relations research group, we thought we should have a discussion about the fire at Notre Dame last week. This is especially since we have two historians in our team. So, I am honoured to be here with Peter Jones, a specialist on twelfth-century Europe, and Evgeny Grishin, a specialist of early modern Russia. Both of their work touches on the religious importance of architecture and the arts, and the role of pre-modern Christianity in defining the modern world. So gentlemen, what do you think about Notre Dame? Should we just tear it down and put up a Trump Tower in Paris?

Peter Jones: I found the spectacle of watching Notre Dame burn deeply moving. But as well as being unsettling, I have to admit that it was a perversely exciting process. As a medievalist, it felt like I was watching the particles — the actual matter of the middle ages — disappearing in smoke. But what does it mean for something like that to disappear? We often tend to see something like Notre Dame as if it were a symbol or an archetype. As a tourist attraction, it had become almost banal in our imagination. But as it burned, I felt the irreducible physicality of the building coming back to life. Realizing that it really could disappear, I saw how the physical presence can work a magic on us that we perhaps hadn’t realized.

Evgeny Grishin: I agree with you, but at the same time I would say it’s not only about the Middle Ages. From then until today, the cathedral has changed drastically and dramatically. For example, the chimeras we like so much — and which are possibly the most recognizable symbol of Notre Dame — are actually from the 19th century, from the 1840s and 50s. So, they do not represent the Middle Ages, but rather how the Middle Ages were imagined in the nineteenth century. Therefore, I think, the fire did not destroy the Middle Ages per se, but rather the long and intricate memory of it. More than that, Notre Dame itself is more than just a Medieval church, but a “site of memory,” if we use Pierre Nora’s terminology. It is a manifestation of Frenchness. So, in this sense, the rebuilding of the damaged building will actually just continue to construct and reconstruct French identity. I have just read about the discussion that is going in France right now – it attests to what I just said. People are debating whether the reconstruction should replicate the building prior to the fire, or whether it should alter it. So, to be specific, should the spire be reconstructed in a more modern, more technological style, just like the modernist Louvre pyramid?

PJ: This is the thing about medieval cathedrals — they have always been composite buildings. They were always unfinished projects. Saint Denis, the first of the Gothic cathedrals, was originally designed to have spires on the two western towers. Over eight hundred years later, these spires have still never been built…

DD: So how long did it take to build Notre Dame?

PJ: Around a hundred years, from the late-twelfth to the late-thirteenth centuries.

EG: And the famous gargoyles, for instance, have eroded and been recreated several times. And cathedrals have burned down and been rebuilt before.

PJ: So this is the thing — What is the cathedral? It is not a fixed entity, and it has never been a completed project. Cathedrals are meant to be organic, in that way. They are buildings that continually await the additions of future generations. So in that sense, I believe the new spire should certainly be modern.

DD: So now there is an opportunity to reformulate what the cathedral should be in the next hundred years. It took a century to build, so we don’t need to hurry. Perhaps it should take a hundred years to rebuild, and to reconsider what the building means? Is it just a museum, and a relic of history? Or is it a relic in the more robust sense, as a divine object? And if it’s a divine object, what does that mean now in the twenty-first century?

EG: I just want to add to your thoughts about time. An important dimension of the cathedral is missing here. It exists in a 3D space, but we also need to consider the fourth dimension: Time. So in addition to being an important “object,” the cathedral also is certainly a process. Fire, as well as the process of rebuilding, has already in this sense become an integral part of the cathedral. So we don’t need to overcome the fire: We need to include the fire into the narrative of the cathedral and the rebuilding project. And so, what we will do, in the end, needs to be much more interesting than what we lost.

DD: So the true challenge is how to properly preserve the fire?

EG: True, certainly because fire gives us an opportunity to rethink how we approach the Middle Ages, the nineteenth century, and the spectacle of modernity itself. All of this should become part of the structure.

PJ: In a strange way, this is what I found uplifting about the fire — or at least, uplifting about the fire being brought under control. At that moment, it felt like the cathedral was almost being unmasked. We were able momentarily to see it for what it really is: a space with the startling power to form and shape religious subjectivities.

DD: So the response to the fire reveals that the cathedral is not dead? It is not a butterfly pinned inside a glass case…

EG: It’s a phoenix!

PJ: Now we’re really into the language of religious resurrection…

DD: But is that part of what is special about these objects that hold a long duration of history? They refuse to let us escape some essential human part, something that includes a spirituality or theology?

(part 2)

DD: Let’s be realistic. That plot of land has potentially much more value to be redeveloped into something else, given its location and all the needs of the people of Paris. Can’t we just make a virtual reality of Notre Dame, and take advantage of this opportunity to get rid of an old pile of rocks and build something new? We have the memory and story of Notre Dame, why do we need the rocks?

EG: It’s not only memory, or some information or impressions in your mind. It’s very much the relationship with those stones that define Notre Dame, and define Paris and people’s feelings about it. It’s not just seeing it, but being there with Notre Dame that matters. Otherwise, it would just disappear from memory.

DD: What about doing a “Berlin Wall” on it, chopping it up into little pieces and giving it to pilgrims?

PJ: The building of Notre Dame itself, and the space it occupies, is also an accumulation of human memories and relations. It has performed so many political and spiritual roles over the centuries, and the reaction to the fire reveals how it still has an enormous role to play in the identity of Paris. But, in answer to your question, why shouldn’t we have both? Can’t we have something functional and beneficial for Parisians, as well as this old cathedral?

DD: But are those memories and relations still there? Imagine they swept the whole site clean, divided up the cathedral’s remains and gave it all away as relics, put a nice plaque on the ground and built something else there…

PJ: You would create a new kind of myth, in that case. It would be like Penn Station in New York, or the Temple of Jerusalem. It would be one of the great lost buildings, and that would create a very new mythology for the Middle Ages…

EG: Have you been to Mexico City? Do you remember the cathedral in the city centre, which is built from other buildings that stood on the spot before? That structure creates a very different feeling. You touch the stones, you walk around, and at the same time you feel something of the deep space and time of the city. By building something new, and leaving Notre Dame to memory, you would lose the experience itself.

PJ: I think it’s a huge problem when we try to subjugate or tame the materials of history. Standing inside Notre Dame, you realize that you cannot master that material. Instead, it masters you. The building overwhelms us. By contrast, when we cut a structure like the Berlin Wall up into small pieces, we are really attempting to dominate it. The building becomes subject to our imagination, rather than us being subjected to it…

EG: Belonging and loneliness are important here. I often feel lonely in new buildings. That’s because they don’t possess part of me, and I don’t possess part of them. In old buildings, like an old castle, feeling hundreds of years of warmth and the coolness… I feel at home, I feel rooted, I feel the essence of things. I don’t feel this at all in new buildings, in the plastic world of newness…

DD: What about Familia Sagrada in Barcelona? It’s interesting, it’s a cathedral that has been being constructed over these last hundred years, in the debate of how to construct it, and how to do it right.

PJ: I’m wondering about theories, outside of the West, about objects and materials as possessing “soul?” This was a category that we in the Material Relations group were tackling at some point…

DD: Do you mean “soul” as the accretion of presence from marks, both visible and invisible, of use? Or in the transcendent, material sense? Or both?

PJ: I remember this is a debate we had. For some of us, soul is a projection. You know, we have to imagine a soul in an object. So we see a building that looks to be old, even though perhaps it has been designed by a studio to look old, and we can still come to see soul in it. But on the other hand, there are the more transcendent views…

EG: Let’s think about this through video games. Being in Notre Dame in Assassin’s Creed, does it create the same experience?

DD: I would say “no.” I like the simulation, it’s gorgeous and fun. But there’s a thickness, a viscosity of the experience of being in and amongst the stones…

EG: But it’s not only feelings, or smell or touch. It’s something beyond that, something deeper…

PJ: But is that imagined? Or is it something that is immediately apprehended when you walk into a space like Notre Dame? Do you have to imagine the thousand years of pilgrims? Or is that affect present to you through the atmosphere, or through the dimensions, or through some other physical means?

DD: An alternate is that some people are more or less sensitive to the presences that are there. Some people would say it doesn’t matter whether you believe in them or not, the ghosts are there. Maybe that’s what great about somewhere like Notre Dame? You have an experience where you have to reckon with the limits of your certainty about the distributions of the physical — and perhaps beyond-physical — world.

PJ: But a lot of that goes into the subconscious, as well. I found that the experience of watching the fire revealed to me the role — a role I had not otherwise realized — that Notre Dame may have always been playing in my subconscious. In the same way as you are describing, perhaps there are resonances that we often do not know that we are receiving and processing?

DD: So, then it was a proper sacrifice for you? One that produced a kind of revelation. Something has been sacrificed through fire, and something has been revealed in the process…

PJ: That was my hope, that the fire might reveal something to the collective. I hoped that it might awaken us to how the Middle Ages are embedded, as resonances, in a history that we don’t always see.

3

DD: I’m interested in ways that our overlapping positions get dismissed. What is really shining through our conversation is that all three of us seem to agree that, at some important real or empirical level for humans, there is a non-equivalency between this block of limestone (Notre Dame) and that block of limestone (not part of Notre Dame).

EG: How do we make the choice? I completely agree with you, and I am actually troubled by that quite strongly. Why don’t I feel attachment to this plastic, but I still feel attachment to a plastic toy from my childhood?

DD: But plastic things can get soul. If you find a Japanese toy washed up on the shores of Washington State, seven years after Fukushima, you get something that is deeply invested with soul. It has both the “soul” of your ideas of Fukushima, but also the ocean, and escaping the plastic vortex, the gyre. But what I am interested in — and maybe this is something we could include as part of our work as the Material Relations team — is to work with others who say that the smallest pieces you can break things into are not necessarily fundamental. In the case of Notre Dame, and a block of limestone that has become part of the historical and spatial-temporal being as Notre Dame, this is not the same as a block of limestone being quarried right now in Oise. Even though they supposedly have the same molecular structure, and could even be from the same deposit of sand on the ocean floor 50 million years ago. So our work is to define another kind of foundation, and to hold strong against the philosophies of reduction as essence or fundaments. We need to stop mistaking the fractured pieces for foundations.

PJ: I agree.

DD: So what do people who disagree with us say to that? How does that get explained away?

EG: It can be said that it’s all about us and about our imagination. We intellectually process the world, in the Cartesian, Kantian, or whatever tradition, and therefore, nothing in the matter itself matters. All that matters does so through our imagination, our touch. It is a compelling argument, and it seems to be reasonable. But it doesn’t seem to be comprehensive. In my perception, it is missing something very important, something which we are trying to review through love.

DD: I think it is missing an accounting for both people’s inter-subjectivity, and people’s inter-objectivity. So, inter-subjectivities are the shared relations we have with other subjects, and those who may nor may not be subjects, that produce our own subjectivity. But we are also composed of things and stuff that exist beyond our subjectivity. We have an object-like being, and so are inter-objective. So when you walk by a shrine, and touch the piece of wood in front of where a relic is in glass, you are not just leaving or gathering the sentiments of those who have gone there before. You are also marking that wood, and there are oils and greases saturated into that wood. The philosophical reduction of different molecules of the same types into equivalency is missing the constitutive importance of difference in the expressions of those molecules. We mistake the convenience of measuring carbon molecules as equivalent with them actually being equivalent. For us and for our lives, and perhaps for our epistemology as a practical thing, the specificity is as important, or more important…

EG: Are you saying we need to have two ontologies? In addition to the scientific ontology, where everything is reducible to atoms, and atoms are not matters of our experience but are the essence of things—

DD: They are not the essence of things.

EG: They are not the human essence of things. They are the essence of things for the sake of a grand scientific project—

DD: They are only the essence of things for scientific purposes. They are the essence diminuendo — like in music, where you make the sound smaller and smaller and smaller?

EG: At the same time, you need to have another ontology, one that considers the humanness of humans, and considers the materiality of humans and the materiality of the material world in a different sense.

PJ: The problem is measurement. Ultimately, the attempt to measure things in this way is itself a mistake…

DD: Or to mistake the measurement as a reality…

PJ: Yes, and I suppose we think of Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science,” and so on. But then, if we are going to talk in any meaningful way about the accumulation of different relations in an object, or if we are going to talk about soul, then we need a new language. How can we talk about the difference of equivalency between two kinds of limestone, such as Notre Dame and newly quarried rock, if not with a language that reduces things to some kind of measurement?

DD: We have to not hold one kind of measurement to be more accurate or rigorous than another. That is really difficult. But every time we are measuring something, we need to choose more than one measure, and measures that are operating in more than one metaphysics (of reduction or non-reduction). In other words, we need to consider measures along with their epistemic location. But then the really important task is to describe why you use one system for ascribing meaning and value and not others. So, for example, we are interested in the question, Is there a possibility of using love as a measure of meaning or value for relationships between humans and non-humans? And if we do that, how do we do that? And how do we put it effectively alongside, say, the reductive equivalency of universal measures, in a way that doesn’t just turn off people who prefer those universal measures?

EG: So can we say it’s a fifth dimension, perhaps?

PJ: I like that idea. But what are the conversations that people want to have about objects, or matter, or material things, in which they had been using universal measures but now they might want to use love as a different kind of measurement? These kinds of conversations are usually very qualitative, anyway — You know, such as the relative value of that building versus this building. What are the kinds of conversations where you think this work might be useful? After all, this should not just end up as an abstract game for university scholars.

DD: There’s a calculus for evaluating how much love overcomes monetary value of the site of Notre Dame. This is where the Notre Dame case is valuable for us. It’s a clear-cut case where love, perhaps, is one of the components of a non-monetary valuation that is going to overcome a monetary valuation.

PJ: I think about a case in my own life. My father died a few years ago, and he left his bass guitar to my brother. One month my brother ran out of money, and he was on the verge of selling the guitar. Of course, we were all horrified by this possibility and it was obvious he shouldn’t sell it. But it’s funny, it was in the moment of losing this object, or of almost losing it, that its full meaning and our love for it came into view. It was like seeing, in a flash, a kind of measurement that could not really be seen in any other way. We realized, only in the moment of losing it, how much that object was saturated with life. And it felt similar with Notre Dame. It’s almost a mystical process, a sudden recognition of some hidden significance (or “measure”) that we couldn’t otherwise comprehend.

DD: Is that an apophatic meaning?

PJ: At some level, yes. In negative theology, you cannot talk about God; you can only talk about what God is not. The apophatic mystical experience is one where you exhaust all of the non-Godly things until eventually, at the bottom of all the negation, you find the positive that is God. Where this might be applicable is that, for me at least, it’s very difficult to talk in positive terms about the things in my life that are most valuable. I only recognize value, fleetingly, when something gets destroyed.

DD: Remember I wrote about Don Norman, the cognitive science and design guy, who writes about being friends with his kitchen knife? It’s his example, where he is discussing friendship in a very narrow way, that has to do with trust and expectation. So you can become friends with things because you trust them, and they perform as you expect them to perform. And I was thinking, in your description of Notre Dame, there’s something in the cathedral that far exceeds your expectations and trust. Similarly, you might not love your old funky car until it stops working and you have to take it to the junk yard. That’s like a Heideggerian tool-being sense, of only finding the love when it stops working. Or you only feel the essence of it, beyond human instrumentalization, in the moment of it breaking. So there’s something about use that performs our relation, avoiding the more-than-human in our companionship. The cathedral burns. Something big and so invested with humanness like a cathedral, and a cathedral in one of the crucial theoretical cities in history. Because Paris is obviously also one of the ideal-type cities. How many histories of politics have you read that are just about Athens, Rome, Paris, and Philadelphia or New York? In the burning, for a moment, the more-than-humanness of Notre Dame appears, and marks its participation in history.

PJ: For better or worse, Paris is at the centre of how many people imagine what it is to be “civilized” or “Western.” A lot of voices responding to the fire suggested it revealed enormous hypocrisy, or that we were only complaining so much about this because we have acquired a disproportionate concern for Western objects…

DD: So like, we could blow up even more ancient stuff in Syria all day long and pretty much people wouldn’t care?

PJ: Precisely, and that is definitely a problem in itself. But it is also an index to the fact that people don’t really choose what they value. The value happens…

DD: That’s really important. People don’t choose what they value, and that is the super-subjective or inter-objective part.

PJ: Paris works on you even if you don’t want it to, and Notre Dame worked on you even if you never cared for a second about it. It was always there, forcing itself upon you and building a relationship with you…

EG: I can relate to that through my adoration of ancient coins. For some reason, they attract me. I find modern coins fairly interesting, but I can give them away without a problem. But selling an ancient coin I possess? It’s something personal. I have several seventeenth-century talers, large silver coins, and I can’t stop thinking about them. Knowing that they existed before me, they existed with me, and they will exist after. And they have meaning, all along. It’s just absolutely mind-blowing.

DD: So what about when we can’t recognize the history? What about when you encounter a relic, but you can’t recognize it as a relic? Like when you see a beautiful wilderness, and don’t know that it’s a cultural landscape? Or you go to a mountain in Turkey, and don’t realize it’s actually a building?

PJ: This will be happening now in the wreckage of Notre Dame. People will be discovering those relics in the debris, and they will be encountering them just as splinters of wood. Obviously these objects don’t have the same effect when we perceive them like that…

DD: But if you can recognize a lost civilization’s stones, then they do have soul. I would be really curious to see what Japanese scholars are writing about Notre Dame, because in Japan there is a more common sense philosophy of everything being endowed with soul. And that includes every class of things. So there have been recent mass-funerals of various smart devices, or of robots that are no longer getting support. People are hiring priests to chant for them. So what if we went the other way? What happens when we take soul as the assumption, and lack of soul is the minoritarian position, the position of doubt or insurgent position?

EG: I think relics are a perfect example of that. Because, no matter what you think of them, they are still relics. It is not we who make them relics. It is a very doubting and sceptical position to take them as an invention of humans. But if we take them as they are, by the definition of relics, they are relics whether we adore them or not. They do possess something of divinity, something very much material, something that is not of this world.

PJ: In the Western Christian tradition, many people believed that saints’ bodies would be perfectly preserved. So you could dig up a three-hundred-year old saint, and they would smell beautiful and be as fully intact as the day they died. And there are accounts, of course, that this is exactly what happened…

DD: So you should write with an archaeologist, and reinterpret the preserved remains of bog bodies as saints!

PJ: A great idea!

DD: This makes me think of the harvest of ancient micro-life from these exhumed bodies. What is it, from a biological perspective, that makes these saints’ bodies sweet-smelling? And me, being the naughty materialist, I would say that maybe part of the sign of divinity comes from our inter-objectivity with micro-organisms and other organisms that make us up but that we don’t usually count as us.