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Written in Stone
John Brigham reviews Sanford Levinson’ Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies
Durham:Duke University Press 1998. 145 pages.
This short book was a pleasant surprise when I discovered it at the 1998 American Political Science Convention. In my experience interest in the built environment is rare among political scientists. When that interest comes, buildings and monuments usually provide background, representing continuity and stability. Sanford Levinson takes a different approach. This is less a critical review than an effort to call a thoughtful book to your attention and suggest its relevance to the representations of justice evident in the built environment.
Prof Levinson, who is from the University of Texas Law School, is trained in political science as well as law. He is an unusually creative intellect and has been a reliable source for clever linkages between two disciplines that usually avoid each other assiduously. I think the avoidance is due to the fact that they have a great deal in common and the implications for their relative stature of sharing knowledge of the law. In little more than a generation legal academics have risen above the liberal arts academy in many of the measures of stature, at least in the United States. To his credit, Levinson seems to get his stature from his insight rather than worrying about disciplinary sources.
Support for his work comes in part through a community of theoretically engaged, doctrinally iconoclastic yet anything but marginal legal scholars. They are mostly in the United States but, like Tony Blackshield, Margaret Davies and Valerie Kerruish in Australia, Peter Russell and Nancy Frasier in Canada, Peter Goodrich and Peter Fitzpatrick in the UK, they are reviving the study of fundamental law, making it more innovative and firmly basing it in society.
The book takes up the social life of monuments. In order to make this life manifest the scholarship focuses on change. Like law studies more generally, the book pays a great deal of attention to controversy. It is traditional in law to use controversy to get at what is enduring. The act of "writing in stone",of actually chiseling the words into a solid medium is of course to make them endure. Like law, such writing seeks to put an end to discursive flux and contention. Levinson stirs up the pot.
The attentions in this book are not to the Statue of Liberty with her assured status in the New York Harbour but to celebratory structures like the former statue of Joseph Stalin in Prague. That short lived monument stood as the tallest in the world when it was built in 1955 but it only remained standing until 1962. Thus, as law has its cases, Levinson has his contested statuary by means of which he examines matters of culture and identity, political change and the longing for stability.
This book is also a more cosmopolitan treatment than legally informed American social science usually produces. The range of examples from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is impressive in comparison to most American material. However, the treatment is short on examples from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Its politics are also distinctly liberal. This sometimes results in a tepid stance that can be annoying. I found this to be the case when Levinson was considering whether a monument should hold the Catholic Church accountable for the deaths of 150,000 native people in California. The alternative proposal, for a monument giving "the Indian point of view," he notes assumes a single Indian perspective (p. 28) but he does not take sides in the controversy.
Naming is one of the foci in this book. Words are taken seriously whether the issue is writing them in stone or on street signs. There is plenty of attention to the evolution from St. Petersburg, to Petrograd, to Leningrad, and back to St. Petersburg where ideological interests appear in the choice of a name. The Russian case is compared to Managua, Nicaragua where the divisions in the society appear in the decision to try and circumvent the problem of a divided society and rely on numbers to designate streets.
Though the book is mostly about the simply and explicitly monumental, it occasionally mentions and lends itself to analysis of buildings that have monumental quality and are representative of some forms of social life. For instance, Levinson calls the Lubiyanka prison in Moscow,"...the instantiation of the secret police"(p. 13). Similarly, there are the cemeteries that memorialize fallen heroes even when they place various heroes side by side, as in the case of the Cimetierre du Pere Lachaise in Paris.
In considering either monuments or buildings with monumental pretensions, Levinson raises the issue of essentialism, of having one point of view and it is more evident in the placing and construction of monuments than in the evaluation of them or the tearing down. This is true of the fate of the Statue of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth C. Stanton and Lucretia Mott, which was placed in the Capitol rotunda because there had been no statues of women in that important public place. This was done over protests by the National Political Congress of Black Women which wanted the inclusion of Sojourner Truth, the black abolitionist.
Reading Levinson after a seminar on governmentality that was convened to consider the work of Nikolas Rose and Mariana Valverde ("Governed by Law?"Social &Legal Studies (1998): 541-551) I am drawn to the phrase in their work that calls us to think about "how constitutions are deployed". Thus the constitution of Supreme Court decisions is only one of many deployments. In addition to the technical issues that often reach the Supreme Court, Levinson suggests a number of constitutive issues. These are the ones that probe who we are. They might rage when reaction to the policies of someone like Millard Fillmore (p. 81) is allowed to surface. They also surface when aspiration for the memorialization of the feminists mentioned above is met with resistance.
But Levinson‘s effort is somewhat superficial compared to the matters at issue in a disciplinary society. In fact, his overriding concern for tolerance and neutrality over partisanship and dogma for the most part reflects the conventional constitutional ideologies rather than challenging them. The centrality of his treatment of politics leaves the analysis at a somewhat superficial level and his primary focus on the grand public iconography generally associated with the State fails to capture the smaller iconographies of desire as promoted by consumer cultures.
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In this regard, the rugged individualism of the Marlboro Man often towers above and is certainly more prominent than even the grandest public buildings. He may fairly be said to have influenced not only cigarette smoking but also a particular vision of the frontier. From this advertising we get a romance with the autonomous male rather than the collectivity. Similarly, the transient nature of popular media figures, the fleeting glare of celebrity, may constitute polity and society in the West as subject to unseen forces of capital and technological capacity that turn out to be more conclusive of our condition than the great public spheres.
What might we say about the successful style of the Vietnam Memorial half buried under the ground and shrouded in non-traditional black? Or the bone white Supreme Court which gives the impression of rising above Capitol Hill? These images are part of our consciousness and remind us of the importance of place in the symbolic consciousness of the people. Perhaps the most important thing about the United States Supreme Court is that it is perceived to be elevated and somewhat removed, both facets being more a part of the presentation in other media than the actual physical reality of the building. The new Boston Federal Courthouse, which serves as the headquarters for the First Circuit Court of Appeals, puts its most dramatic face to the sea and its backside to the gritty precincts of South Boston. This has not lately been a politically savvy thing to do but the grandness of the building and other aspects of its monumental reality, such as the reverence for the past, may save it.
Nevertheless, the book is fun to read since Levinson‘s curiosity and broad intellect leads him from one story of controversy and visual drama to another. The book is full of lively writing as one might expect with subjects like the dismantling of the Lenin and Stalin statues at the end of the Cold War or the contests that rage over the Confederate Flag today. One particularly attractive example involves Fillmore Street in San Francisco that is named after the eleventh President of the U.S. who, among other things, signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This is of course an unattractive policy to be associated with but Levinson captures the fact that few identify the name with the former President. Many more think of it as the home of the 1960s radical music venue run by Bill Graham, the Fillmore Auditorium.
Written in Stone was also written after some tumultuous years in which it seems like it had to be written because of all the monuments that were coming down as well as the emergence of seemingly intractable controversies over monuments that might be erected.