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Angel dreams: collective desire, resonant myth, and political possibility today

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Angel dreams: collective desire, resonant myth, and political possibility today

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Angel Dreams:
Collective Desire, Resonant Myth, and Political Possibility Today

by

Clare O’Connor

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)
August 2023

Copyright 2023 Clare O’Connor

ii

“Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives
that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes as a monad. A historical
materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad.
In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or,
put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.”

—Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Epigraph………………………………………………………………………………...………....ii
List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………….iv
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………....v
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1
Chapter 1: The Angel as Wish Image ……………………………………………………………17
The Longing for Absolution………………………………….…………………………..30
Weaponizing the Angel…………………………………………………………………..35
The Politics of Dream Analysis…………………………………………………….….…41
Working Through…………………………………………………………………….…..44
Splitting the Atom………………………………………………………………….…….49
The Angel’s Coordinates…………………………………………………………..….….56
Seizing the Angel in Motion……………………………………………………………..59

Chapter 2: Orthodoxy………………………………………………………….……………...….61
Music and Angels in Scripture…………………………………………...…………...….62
Angels of Neoliberal Evangelicalism….…………………………….………………...…72
Coordinates of the Orthodoxy Mode……………………………….………………...…..82

Chapter 3: Antinomianism………………………………………………………..…………...….83
The World Turned Upside Down…………………………………………..………...…..84
Ezra Furman’s Transangelic Exodus……………………………………………..…...….94
Coordinates of the Antinomian Mode………………………………………………...…109

Chapter 4: Deconstruction………………………………………………………….……...…....110
The Dual Character of the Sacred…………………………………………………...…..111
Coordinates of the Deconstructive Mode…………………………………………...…..119

Chapter 5: Waking Up Is Hard to Do…………………………….………………………….….120
Sketches: Modes of Wishful Thinking………………….…………………………...….128
After Surrealism………………………………………………………………………...139

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………....…149
References………………………………………………………………………………………160

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Angel Collage 1………………………………………………………………………..18

Figure 2: Angel Collage 2…………………………………………………….………………….19

Figure 3: Angel Collage 3………………………………………………………………………..20

Figure 4: Angel Collage 4………………………………………………………………………..21

Figure 5: Angel Collage 5…………………………………………………………………….….22

Figure 6: Angel Collage 6……………………..……………………………………………..…..24

Figure 7: Angel Collage 7……………………..……………………………………………..…..28

Figure 8: Absolution Schematization ……………………………………………………………51

Figure 9: “The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia,” Raphael (1517) …………………………………...……63

Figure 10: “Schematization,” AK Thompson……………………………………………....…..124

v
ABSTRACT
In this dissertation I introduce an approach for analyzing people’s identifications with images that
recur frequently in popular culture. Drawing on cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and the dialectics
of anticolonial Marxism, I combine dream analysis with the method of constellation to put forward
a new and promising approach to emancipatory social intervention at the level of the image.
Focusing on the case of the angel, which became a recurrent motif in the visual economy of musical
celebrity in the early twenty-first century, I reveal how the complex dreamwork animating such
images can be mapped, analyzed, and made into a site of conscious political contestation.
Beginning from the angel’s animating paradox—that it is pure spirit that manifests as a
body—I argue that the preponderance of angels in Western music culture today arises from an
intensification of the desire for a one-to-one correspondence between being and doing. Fostered
by anxieties exacerbated by neoliberalism, this desire gives expression to the ur-historical longing
for oneness, or absolution. Following Walter Benjamin, the principal thinker on whom this study
relies, I argue that this longing underlies what he called “wish images,” which arise when social
conditions prompt people to recall elements from myth and history that approximate a possible
future utopia. Because they say nothing about how this longing might be fulfilled, however, wish
images remain politically ambivalent. Indeed, the angel has been mobilized in the service of such
disparate notions as the ideal neoliberal subject and fascist gender norms, as well as the promise
of radical utopian equality. By cataloging musicians’ angel invocations—specifically embodied
angels, or presentations of the self-as-angel—I show how, through analysis, we can use wish
images to devise strategies that help people to embrace emancipatory conclusions, to resist the
“resolutions” put forward by aristocratic or other reactionary alternatives to the despondency of
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liberal atomism, and to confront the material and cultural poverty that this atomism has wrought
under conditions of neoliberal triumph.
To conduct my analysis, I position the angel invocations in my catalogue (~40) as distinct
nodes within a field at once shot through with and held together by three principal dialectical
tensions—sacred/profane, order/disorder, universal/particular—which I apprehend as intersecting
axes. In this way, I identify eight primary modes of wishful thinking by which people compensate
for the unrealized longing for absolution. By constellating historical and contemporary invocations
of the angel, I reveal the “classless society” already animating our collective imagination. But even
as wish images activate a desire to see that promise realized, only through analysis might they be
pushed toward the moment of concrete political reckoning. Drawing on my primary cases to
illuminate challenges and opportunities specific to the contemporary context, I conclude with
recommendations concerning how wish images might be operationalized—that is, made
dialectical—so that people’s wishful identification might finally guide them toward an unmediated
encounter with material conditions as such.
Keywords: dialectical image, politics, popular culture, psychoanalysis, myth, wish image.

1
Introduction
We’re in the midst of an angelic war. It’s not, to be sure, the War in Heaven foretold by scripture;
it’s being waged at the level of dreams. Throughout history and especially today, angels saturate
the contested arenas of American popular culture and political discourse, invoked so routinely that
they are easy to overlook. Over the past few years, the angel has become for me what Walter
Benjamin once called a dialectical image, and later a “monad”: a resonant image “pregnant with
tensions” through which the attuned historical materialist might apprehend “the entire course of
history” (1969, 263). Through the analysis of such images, Benjamin proposed, we might gain
insights with implications for emancipatory political strategy. To this end, I begin with a simple
contention: resonant images such as the angel can be made the site of interventions that cast us
before the moment of decision demanded by politics.
The angelic war of our time forms part of much wider historical cycles. “That which hath
been is that which shall be, And that which hath been done is that which shall be done, And there
is no new thing under the sun.” So reads Ecclesiastes (1:9). Truer as proverb than as science, to be
sure. Yet, we are indeed still living with the effects of that fight over myth that Immanuel Kant
celebrated as a “Copernican revolution” in the study of mind (Michael 2015) as it spun out from
the Germany of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Thereafter, as chronicled in the
canon of European Marxism, came “a kind of battle in the clouds, analogous to the legend
according to which the fallen warriors of Attila and Aetius continued the battles of Catalunian
fields as spirits in space” (Lukacs 1969, 19).
All of which can sound somewhat lofty. In the United States, contemporary American
musicians of the left have worked to translate it into a popular register. The music of Black
radicalism, in particular, looks with lucidity to this struggle over mind as a material fact, as on
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albums like The Coup’s Pick a Bigger Weapon (2006), which adapts Marxist dialectics to
contemporary politics. On the fourth track, Tariq Luqmaan Trotter (Black Thought) provides
scholars of conscience with our marching orders. Trotter restates the perennial message of all
spiritualisms and all politics of the people: “Some of y’all heads up in the clouds / I’m’a bring y’all
back to earth.” This message, at once old and refreshed, about the dream of heavenly struggles
embodied in our own world, reminds us that a popular politics of the spirit must continually be
regrounded. On picket lines, Euro-American radicals once sang it to the tune of Joe Hill’s “The
Preacher and the Slave.” To step back and consider this dialectically, then, is to hear the same
social substance from The Coup’s Boots Riley as from the Wobblies’ Joe Hill, and so too to see
its condensation in our dreams of the angel.
Dreams of this kind will continue to swirl, and the question of how “battles in the clouds”
touch down to earth is a question of freedom dreams that we cannot afford to ignore.
“My respiration and inspiration,” reads Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” like “the
passing of the blood and air through my lungs,” bring a musicality of spirit into the body of man
(Whitman 2005, 64). From the contemporary Black radical left, too, the Boots Riley of the 2001
track “Heven Tonite” makes a sacred pursuit of oneness with the world (“the revolution in this
tune and verse / is a bid for my love to touch the universe”) at once embodied and profane, like a
prayer for spirit in the flesh: “make my arteries and heart oscillate as one.” Elsewhere, I have
explored the musical manifestation of this instinctive longing through the lens of the poetry of the
late John Trudell, formerly of the American Indian Movement (AIM): “Our DNA is of Earth and
Sky” (see O’Connor 2018, 123). With internationalist principles and a focus on the United States,
I investigate the angel image not as an island unto itself but as a window into this shared dream.
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Before proceeding, then, I should clarify my approach to dialectics, a research method that
insists on looking at each part of a thing in relation to its whole.
The elemental unity of all things is the point of departure for Marx’s dialectics, as it was
for those of Plato. Plato’s Republic makes odes to “the weapons of the dialectician,” as to “the
actual hymn, of which dialectical reasoning is the consummation” (Plato 1920, 294, 290). Within
the traditional American cultural drive towards absolution (or transcendence, i.e. oneness with
God), Plato’s “hymn” of dialectics was most powerfully taught in concert with another: what the
transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, to whom Walt Whitman owed his early fame, styled as
“the hymn the Brahmin sings” (Emerson 1898, 171). Historical materialist analysis reveals within
all these symbols the traces of a world knit together by what Lisa Lowe (2015) has called the
“intimacies of four continents,” the whole of which is experienced in each part of our world.
This interconnection is present even in the main words with which it has been described.
For instance, having come to the United States, like so much material wealth, from British India,
the word Brahma—a disfigured version of the Sanskrit word, Brahman—refers precisely to
oneness. This oneness was held by American transcendentalists to be a truth from which modern
man was alienated by the capitalist division of the world. By implication, the feeling of oneness
was often contrasted with the atomism of Western capitalism. “If the East,” in one version of this
myth, “loved infinity, the West delighted in boundaries,” and those who broke reality into pieces
the better to master it should never forget still to feel and know all of reality as an interconnected
one (Emerson 1850, 56). At this register, just as traditional European aristocrats saw reality as one
and indivisible while keeping the fullness of this truth to themselves, so too could the Boston
Brahmins, with the wisdom of British India refreshing their timeless Greek heritage, serve as the
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guardians of Plato’s Republic: “We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes
into Appearance, and Unity into Variety” (Emerson 1855, 185).
The racial or colonial dimension of American transcendentalism is plain. My research has
been attuned to this old parasitism of whiteness (O’Connor 2018; 2021). Observed Frantz Fanon:
“When the Whites feel they have become too mechanized, they turn to the Colored and request a
little human sustenance” (Fanon 1952, 108). In Emerson we can see the recuperation of our
instinctive drive towards interconnection in a classical American form. Sometimes the East gave
way in his symbolism to an Indigenous American or African foil. Within this flexible mythos of
appropriative transcendence, if “the white man has lost”—as in the Garden of Eden—“his
aboriginal strength,” then to recover felt oneness is the only means for him fully to consummate
the colonial triumphs of arms and of industry (Emerson 1854, 74).
Still, the baby cannot be thrown out with the bathwater. After all, the alienation of humans
from nature and of humans from one another is a trauma. And in the words of one Marxist
Freudian, “the more the human race emerges from these primary bonds, the more it separates itself
from the natural world, the more intense becomes the need to find new ways of escaping
separateness” (Fromm 2006, 9). The twisting against us of this primal impulse does not make that
impulse any less real. The dialectical image of the angel shows just how hotly contested is our
drive to renewed interconnection. We need therefore to take seriously the efforts of anticolonial
thinkers like Aimé Césaire, or Fanon, to join in dream analysis and the study of the collective
unconscious as contested terrain. We can resist the details of Carl Jung’s work on archetypical
myths even as we join Césaire in trying to transform them (Ripert 2021).
The truth, after all, is that the allure of restored interconnection, or what Jung (Jung 1983,
236) called “the archetype of wholeness”—whether we call it absolution, or transcendence, or
5
solidarity—is more durable than any single word, symbol, or context. Hence the need for
dialectics. Indeed, the search for the enduring realities condensed into all poignant images is the
essence of dialectics in the tradition of Plato as well as of Marx. In the United States, to look
through images to the whole they reveal was the elemental precept of Boston Brahminism: “all
symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses
are, for conveyance, not as farms and homes are, for homestead” (Emerson 1855, 38). Or in the
words of Walter Benjamin: “the mental entity that communicates itself in language is not language
itself but something to be distinguished from it” (Benjamin, 1979, 108). To look at an image
dialectically is to look through its specificities to see the patterns that it serves to condense.
In the image of the angel, therefore, we can through dream analysis discern the truth of
Antonio Gramsci’s claim that all that we think and feel “contains Stone Age elements and
principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level
and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over”
(cited in Hall 1996, 42). In this way does the figure of the angel sweep down from the clouds.
Hence is it in the study of mind still possible to speak in the present tense about how “medieval
theologians coin the term intuitus,” whence arises intuition, or “Thomas Aquinas proposes that
angels understand things all in a flash, without recourse to sequential reasoning” (Struck 2016,
20). At issue are older patterns of myth that worked through minds and bodies not so different
from ours. None of these are discrete words or symbols, like artifacts of some then and there, but
are humanly significant to the extent that they translate into the here and now, as in Benjamin’s
sense of our shared history not as a thing done and gone but a powerful, present-tense “memory
as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (Benjamin 1968, 255).
6
No theme could be more canonically American, or more universally human. Between
Stone Age myth and advanced science comes electricity, as a flash from the clouds that lights the
profane with its power. From this was crafted, with pomp and panache, the American myth of
Benjamin Franklin’s discovery of electricity, as dramatized in Patricia Fara’s aptly titled study, An
Entertainment for Angels (Fara 2003). If it was not as an angel, quite, that the Promethean Franklin
was hagiographically rendered in the American press as a bearer of “the forked lightning that
gleams and blazes fearfully athwart the blackness of the tempest,” still it remains that the social
substance of this image is heavily mediated by angel dreams—maybe even of freedom (Wolfson
2015, 755–56). Or so, dialectically and intuitively, has it seemed to me.
This study began with a hunch. I noticed a recurrence of angel invocations within the visual
economy of musical celebrity and, suspecting a pattern, I began to catalogue them. I watched
specifically for artists who had incorporated the angel motif into their lyrics, performance, fashion,
and branding by presenting themselves as angels, often by wearing angel wings. The catalogue
grew quickly, suggesting not only an uptick in the pervasiveness of this generic motif within the
zeitgeist, but also a shift in how the angel is popularly invoked today. Of the forty-odd invocations
I compiled, none is simply the extrinsic angel of the Bible, to which one appeals through prayer,
or even the metaphoric angel, invoked sentimentally as an index of favorable personal traits. These
familiar conceptions are present, to be sure. But the angel identified in this new pattern is distinctly
embodied, invoked through a presentation of the self-as-angel. It is also indisputably cool, invoked
by the most celebrated artists of the moment. In my youth, the angel was too saccharine to take
seriously. Now it appears to me as a crystallization of history as such. What was once a cloying,
sentimental figure has become a key with which to open the social field and contend with its
contradictions.
7
None of this would have surprised Benjamin, on whose word I pursued the angel in the
first place. Writing in early-twentieth-century Paris, he grasped that, in their anticipation of the
“new,” resonant images consistently recalled the past: not just prior moments in human history,
but also mythic ur-history. He described the resulting catalogue of citations as “wish-fulfilling
images” and deduced that such wish images (alternately translated from German as “dream
images”) arise when material conditions prompt people to unconsciously recall elements from
myth and history that approximate a possible future utopia. “Corresponding in the collective
consciousness to the forms of the new means of production, which at first were still dominated by
the old (Marx), are images in which the new is intermingled with the old.”

These images are wishful fantasies, and in them the collective seeks both to preserve
and to transfigure the inchoateness of the social product and the deficiencies in the
social system of production. In addition, these wish-fulfilling images manifest an
emphatic striving for dissociation with the outmoded—which means, however, with
the most recent past. These tendencies direct the visual imagination, which has been
activated by the new, back to the primeval past. In the dream in which, before the eyes
of each epoch, that which is to follow appears in images, the latter appears wedded to
elements from prehistory, that is, of a classless society. Intimations of this, deposited
in the unconscious of the collective, mingle with the new to produce the utopia that has
left its trace in thousands of configurations of life, from permanent buildings to fleeting
fashions. (Benjamin 1986, 149)

This passage has inspired a varied secondary literature, the best of which grapples with its
operational implications: if wish images reveal our collective desire for a social utopia, how might
we harness that desire? After all, wish images do not reveal how their animating longing might be
realized. “[T]he real possibility of a classless society in the ‘epoch to follow’ the present one
revitalizes past images as expressions of the ancient wish for a social utopia in dream form,” writes
Susan Buck-Morss in The Dialectics of Seeing, but “a dream image is not yet a dialectical image,
8
and desire is not yet knowledge” (Buck-Morss 1991, 148). Indeed, Benjamin’s analysis was not
readily prescriptive; his own wish image case studies were historical, not contemporary.
Yet, for Benjamin scholar AK Thompson, whose writing has inspired my own for nearly
two decades, we can operationalize wish images as Benjamin intended by transforming them
through thinking. “Despite his invocation of carefully selected profane objects,” Thompson
explains, “Benjamin remained hard pressed to provide concrete examples of dialectical images
that could yield the effects with which he associated the concept. Still less was he able to
demonstrate how such an image might reliably be produced.” Nevertheless, the path becomes
clearer if we focus on Benjamin’s “treatment of ‘thinking,’ a concept he used to denote the active,
subjective moment in the reflection process.”

No mere contemplative act, thinking for Benjamin was an operational premise, the
concrete means by which the citable elements of material history were brought into
constellation. On this basis (and despite the limits he confronted with respect to his
own creations), it becomes clear that, through his ongoing experiments with literary
montage, Benjamin was actively struggling not only to discover but also
to produce dialectical images in writing. (Thompson 2020)

In this dissertation I operationalize the promise of the wish image as Thompson proposes,
following Benjamin’s premise that thinking is the concrete means by which we can establish the
critical distance that allows us to convert wish images into dialectical ones. “Where thinking comes
to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions,” he explains in The Arcades Project, “there the
dialectical image appears” (Benjamin 1999b, 475).
This analytic process demands that we contend with the wish image’s compensatory
function: a wish image always reflects and stimulates a desire for something that exceeds what it
can provide.
9
To grasp this dynamism of the wish image we need look no further than its resemblance to
the commodity form: both operate as proxies for the true fulfillment of our desires. Both promise
fulfillment but merely defer it. With the commodity, it is precisely this process that “underwrites
capitalism’s uncanny ability to endlessly reproduce itself,” Thompson notes—but “it also
constitutes a gamble… By speaking in the name of that which lies beyond it, capitalism whets an
appetite that it cannot satisfy. The trick, then, is to intensify dissatisfaction with partial resolutions
without giving up on desire” (Thompson 2010, 82). The wish image entails a similar opportunity.
By provisionally accepting the desire that leads people to identify with a given wish image, we
might reveal how the resolution yielded by the identification will always fall short of the desire
that animated it—i.e, we might through thinking intensify the wish image’s animating tensions.
To be sure, this opportunity means a fight. The core assumption of this project is that
fighting over the wish image can make the image dialectical. In this respect, it finds in the wish
image a cultural expression of what Karl Marx observed in the wage relation, whereby capitalism
“creates its own grave-diggers” (Marx and Engels [1848]2018, 15), or what Malcolm X observed
in “the cold, calculating international machine” that exists over and atop us, which guarantees its
own organic comeuppance: “it has the seeds of its own destruction, right within” (X 1989, 114).
1

But this outcome is not inevitable. First, we must become conscious of our dreams.
Drawing on Marx, Benjamin envisioned that in becoming conscious of their latent desires
for a different world, dreamers might discover a greater capacity to realize their wishes, rather than

1
To get ahead of objections to “false consciousness”: insofar as it is conceived as content, all consciousness
is false consciousness. True consciousness refers not to content but, rather, to method. This conception of
consciousness is corroborated by the psychoanalytic tradition and by Durkheim’s assessment that all
thought originates as religious thought, both of which suggest a process of working through. For Benjamin,
this conception appears most explicitly in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, by way of metaphor:
“As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism, the past strives to turn toward that sun
rising in the sky of history” (Benjamin 1969).
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disavow them. However, because wish images are ambivalent, they are often sites of political
contestation; wish images like the angel might be harnessed to the ends of commercial or
aristocratic class projects if they are not claimed for the cause of emancipation. Because the desire
that stimulates our attachment to wish images cannot be realized through the image itself—whether
it arises within the market or within the church—the task of the revolutionary is to parse this
longing from its inadequate object resolution and redirect it toward emancipatory struggle. The
iconography of the angel in American Christian rebellions such as the Harpers Ferry raid, which
showcased John Brown’s self-conception as an abolitionist “avenging angel,” speaks to the
malleability of a wish image that can also facilitate turns toward absolution through material
struggle.
Of course, it is not necessarily through the image of the angel that the Prometheus of true
freedom struggles looks to the clouds. Even in the seventeenth century, when an English feudalism
of divine hierarchy seemed unassailable, William Shakespeare gave voice to dreams from below
for a spirit embodied in constellations of flesh and blood. “’Tis pity,” says Helen, in All’s Well
That Ends Well (Act 1, 175),

That wishing well had not a body in’t
Which might be felt, that we, the poorer born,
Whose baser stars do shut us up in wishes,
Might with effects of them follow our friends,
And show what we alone must think . . .

From this concept emerged, too, an early modern icon of abolitionism: a near contemporary of
Benjamin Franklin named Boukman. “But not Shakespeare himself,” wrote C.L.R. James (C. L.
R. James 1989, 292), could write myths with these powers of fact. James conveys what records
exist of the single most important abolitionist speech of which we have any records at all. It came
11
under lightning, says James, in the stormy skies of French San Domingo, in August of 1791.
Freedom dreams spoke, in this case, through the person of Boukman, a spiritual leader held in high
esteem by the fellow slaves with whom he worked:

Boukman gave the last instructions and, after Voodoo incantations and the sucking
of the blood of a stuck pig, he stimulated his followers by a prayer spoken in creole,
which, like so much spoken on such occasions, has remained. ‘The god who created
the sun which gives us light, who rouses the waves and rules the storm, though
hidden in the cloud, he watches us… Our god who is good to us orders us to revenge
our wrongs’ (C. L. R. James 1989, 87).

So it was, as with a starter’s pistol shot, that into the revolutionary cycle that swirled out from
France exploded the freedom struggle of Haiti.
On this much we can agree with William James, a founding father of American
psychology: “The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use” (W. James 1902, 324).
James anticipated today’s laboratory analysis of electrical activity in the brain, a subject that has
often been discussed in the same breath as lightning. What is often at issue is a sort of
Prometheanism of mind, a control exercised over the interface between heaven and earth as it takes
shape in the vital functions of man. In one brain or the next, the manifestation was to James’s eyes
simply clinical. What was physiologically in play was such measurable phenomena as the
“inhibition-quenching fury” that grouped together the cases of “a Fox, a Garibaldi, a General
Booth, a John Brown” (James 1902, 260). In like manner, the sacred inspiration for actions profane
threads its way back from Brown through the plantation revolt led by Nat Turner—“a slave
preacher who was heavily influenced by passages in the Bible that advocated retributive justice”
(Henderson 2005, 205)—and from there back through Boukman, and throughout histories of
inspired rebellion wherever these can be found.
12
History therefore reminds us that the dreams that have come to be condensed in the figure
of the angel, or the human impulses underlying them, are prior to the angel and can in their
elemental substance find expression in different forms. Just as Boukman drew on pre-colonial
African thought in order to translate his anticolonial freedom dreams into reality, I have elsewhere
explored the politics of spirit, embodied in the contemporary freedom songs of Tanya Tagaq.
Especially illustrative is Tagaq’s ground-breaking track “Sila,” which features a throat-singing
above words, the supraverbal expression of the muse within one anticolonial frame. The
word Sila refers in Inuit cosmology and philosophy to what Ancient Greek thought tried to
approximate in the language of pneuma, denoting both “breath” and “spirit/soul,” as rendered in
Latin as spirare (to breathe, flow), from the root of words like “spirit,” “inspire,” and “aspire.”
The point is not to flatten this history into a false uniformity, but rather to see in Boukman’s
initiation of the Haitian Revolution the fullest expression of that elemental human substance which
struggles to root itself in available forms, sometimes including that of the angel.
The direction in which inspiration sparks action has never been static. It was from the top
down that the American concept of Brahma as oneness was wielded by the New England
transcendentalists. The pure spirit that animates man was then said to invest him with transcendent
powers: “For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but
children of the fire, made of it” (Emerson 1855, 10). And yet, I think, it is to the popular
transformation of this vision that freedom dreams of the angel can beckon. They who taste oneness,
taught Emerson, will musically beam with its light: “their speech shall by lyrical, and sweet, and
universal as the rising of the wind” (Emerson 1854, 245).
2
At its most hopeful, the angel image
can therefore condense within itself the kaleidoscopic potential of the Chicago Surrealist program,

2
For orienting me to Emerson’s thought and its historical implications, and for his general intellectual
comradeship and engagement with this project, I extend my sincere thanks to Dan Freeman-Maloy.
13
which said for the people at large that with “our wildest dreams” we can yet fight for “the creation
of a free society in which everyone will be a poet” (Kelley 2000, xxi). Amen.
Here I can offer a further methodological note about the conceptual armature of this project,
which is complex and tightly bound. The wish image is my primary analytic tool, but in my effort
to outline how it might be concretely operationalized—to proceed in the constructivist manner that
Benjamin intended—I deploy several concepts that operate together and simultaneously, but which
can only be presented one at a time. The sequencing of their presentation is therefore one of the
significant questions addressed by this project, which is valuable only insofar as its internal logic
is intelligible.
As the preceding pages suggest, the reader must first orient to the wish image as an analytic
and political tool. This entails grasping the relationship between the wish image and the dialectical
image, and in particular the possibility that we might apprehend the wish image in order to make
it dialectical. To realize this potential, the next step is to contend with the ur-historical longing for
absolution—a word that, while commonly associated with forgiveness, refers to the condition of
being absolute: oneness. (In the coming pages I unpack absolution as the project’s primary
organizing concept.) Finally, because the longing for absolution finds expression in the wish
image, to raise consciousness of its pervasiveness—and thereby contend with its political
implications—it is necessary to facilitate a psychoanalytic process of working through (another
conceptual element to which I will return). Through such a process, I propose, it becomes possible
to redirect the longing for absolution toward the field of political struggle, the only strategy capable
of its realization. Specifically, we might in this way instigate what Thompson calls a “political
reckoning” regarding our common dreams (Thompson 2020).
14
Such a procedure, whereby we use the wish image to instigate an unsettling moment of
political decision, is useful precisely because it can be applied within social settings that seem
separate or removed from the domain of intentional political activity. The current study takes up
the wish image of the angel because it has become resonant within popular culture, where its
political implications are unclear.
The angel has become an especially rich image today as a result of the representational
tendency toward angelic embodiment. With the embodied angel, the angel’s animating dialectic—
that it is both sacred and profane—reaches its point of greatest intensification. Of course, the
angel’s resonance is not new. Angel depictions saturate the social field, adorning storefronts,
billboards, a neighbor’s front lawn; arising in everyday conversation as familiar metaphor;
routinely appearing in films, sitcoms, and commercials. In his influential book Speaking into the
Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, John Durham Peters argues that the angel’s enduring
resonance derives from its animating “dream of shared interiorities” (Peters 1999, 77). Drawing
upon their cosmological role as divine messengers, he recounts, AT&T famously marketed its
early network using images of angels adorning telephone lines, and Deutsche Grammophon
adopted as its logo an angel holding a stylus.
For Peters, however, we would be wise to overcome the dream of angelic communication,
which he deems “an error” that projects mediation and distance as corruptive and therefore leads
us to overlook how non-resolution is itself productive. “That we can never communicate like the
angels is a tragic fact, but also a blessed one… A sounder vision is of the felicitous impossibility
of contact” (1999, 29–30). Peters’ argument is compelling in its pragmatism, but it fails to consider
what leads people to “dream of shared interiorities” in the first place. His strategic recommendation
is thus limited by a decisive presupposition: that if people simply decided to, they could disconnect
15
from the desire that sustains this dream. Twenty years after the publication of Peters’ book,
meanwhile, the angel is still all around us.
In the United States, where approximately 72% of people believe in angels, the dominant
conception of the angel accords with its elaboration in Christianity, even in its secularized forms
(Newport 2016).

Although angels are also present in Judaism (conceived in relation to their
multiple roles in the Hebrew Bible) and in Islam (wherein belief in angels is one of the Articles of
Faith), the angel of Christianity is the hegemonic conception in the United States; non-Christians
know what it is and might invoke it. In this context, of course, the manifest content of the angel is
bound to vary widely, and it is not unusual to encounter depictions of the angel that simultaneously
draw upon symbolism from other spiritual traditions. Yet, even in instances of religious synthesis,
the angel consistently refers to its animating paradox: it represents spiritual unity with God while
at the same time manifesting as a body, finite and corporeal.
The angel’s ontological ambivalence—topic of the much-ridiculed medieval debate about
how many angels can dance on the head of a pin—is evident throughout the Bible. Foregrounding
their corporeality, an angel wrestles with Jacob (Genesis 22:22–32), angels perform jailbreaks to
rescue apostles (Acts 5:19–20; Acts 12:7–9), and the Angel of Death kills the firstborn sons of
Egypt in the story of Passover (Exodus 12:23). In each story, the angel’s being, pure spirit, coexists
with the finite corporeal reality of what it is doing. On this basis, invocations of the angel alert us
to people’s latent desire for a one-to-one correspondence between being and doing. Peters
describes one iteration of this desire: the reconciliation of being and doing, after all, is an implicit
precondition for “shared interiorities.” This desired reconciliation, I propose, is a manifestation of
the more general longing for absolution, oneness, restored interconnection.
16
For Benjamin, the longing for absolution animates all wish images. The strategic upshot of
contending with this collective striving is twofold. First, by becoming conscious of our own
invocational practices, we can come to recognize the longing itself and begin working through its
concrete implications: we can reorient to the image not as the representation as a future utopian
ideal, but as an expression of desires that might be realized concretely, in the profane world, by
political means. When followed to its logical conclusion, the dream of oneness that animates the
angel implies a world organized on the principle of equality and toward a reconciliation of human
and natural history. Wish images produce rich opportunities to intervene and facilitate conscious
processing of this dream, especially in those moments of despair when the latest purported solution
(i.e. traditional angelic embodiment) collapses and the next has yet to be found. Second, as
Benjamin understood, resonant wish images come into prevalence as a result in transformations in
the means of production. By contending with a resonant wish image such as the angel, not only
can we deduce a clear diagnosis of contemporary social problems, but we can analyze variations
in the expressions of desire—for our purposes, variations of the angel—for how they correspond
to the material forces that organize our lives, from social relations to emergent technologies.
So, why the angel? Why now?

17
Chapter 1: The Angel as Wish Image
At first, my catalogue of angel images grew by virtue of personal idiosyncrasies. Eventually I
devised a more systematic approach, but my inventory is inevitably partial. Chronologically, it
opens with the feathered angel wings that Fiona Apple wore on stage touring her successful 1996
debut album, with its award-winning single “Criminal”: “What would an angel say? The devil
wants to know.” It then moves to Bjork, who from 1997 to 1999 wore an “angel dress” designed
by Jeremy Scott to tour Homogenic (1997). Next is Jennifer Lopez, who launched her recording
career in 1999 and appeared on the cover of Notorious wearing large white angel wings. The
catalogue then leaps to Kanye West in expansive white wings at the 2005 Grammys, then to Mariah
Carey’s 2009 album Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, and then the motif really gathers steam.
In 2010, Sufjan Stevens promoted Age of Adz wearing small angel wings, and Annie
Lennox performed in angel wings at Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee concert. Katy Perry wore
an angel-winged dress to the 2011 Grammys. Justin Bieber’s 2012 Believe tour shows opened with
him wearing angel wings made of musical instruments. Britney Spears donned wings in 2013 upon
launching her Las Vegas residency. At the 2014 American Music Awards, angel wings unfurled
on screen behind Selena Gomez during a weepy performance of “The Heart Wants What It Wants.”
The practice then proliferated rapidly. In 2015, Stevens upgraded to large wings for his Carrie and
Lowell tour, Harry Styles wore wings during One Direction’s On The Road Again tour, Melanie
Martinez wore them to promote her debut album Cry Baby, and Grimes played the angel in the
music video for “Flesh without Blood/Life in the Vivid Dream,” the lead single from her album
Art Angels. That year, Kanye also recorded “New Angels,” a track leaked online and then removed,
which proposed an ethos for this trend: “The new angel/Still learning how to fly/And lay your love
on the line/New angel/Who will make the sacrifice?”
18

Figure 1: Angel Collage. Fiona Apple, Björk, Kayne West; Sufjan Stevens; Justin Bieber.

In 2016, when Beyonce wore couture angel wings to the Video Music Awards and Chance the
Rapper implored listeners to “Wear your halo like a hat / That’s like the latest fashion” in his hit
song “Angels.” In 2017, Lady Gaga staggered under broken wings in the music video for the track
“Angel Down,” Madonna appeared in angel wings in a short film for German Vogue, and Kesha’s
“Praying” music video depicted her in large white wings. In 2018, pop stars Lana Del Rey, Sza,
and Katy Perry all invoked the angel in response to the Met Gala’s “Heavenly Bodies” theme;
Rosalia appeared as an angel on the cover of her breakout second album; Nilüfer Yanya wore angel
wings in the video for “Heavyweight Champion of the World”; Troy Sivan performed in angel
wings on tour; Kali Uchis donned wings for a Galore photo shoot; and Blood Orange’s album
cover for Negro Swan was a photograph of a teenage “it” boy of New York’s queer art
underground, Kai the Black Angel, who, having elevated the angel invocation to the level of
persona, is shown donning his signature white wings.
3
That year, Cardi B wore an angel-wing
inspired dress to the Grammys, where the celebrity fashion so consistently invoked this theme that

3
Some artists in this catalogue live in but are not originally from the United States, including Justin
Bieber (Canada), Rosalia (Spain), Troye Sivan (Australia), Anna of the North (Norway), Amaarae
(Ghana), Elton John (England). This suggests that the motif’s resonance is not restricted to the U.S.
19
E! Online reported: “They stepped out of their limos with white lace trailing behind them, halos
on their heads and wings protruding from their backs. Good heavens, we saw a lot of angels”
(Joseph 2018).

Figure 2: Angel Collage. Selena Gomez, Grimes; Beyoncé; Lady Gaga; Madonna.

In 2019, Camilla Cabello promoted her hit single “Liar” with an image of herself wearing angel
wings, Bebe Rexha wore large angel wings to promote her single “Last Hurrah,” Anna of the North
played a rural angel on the cover of her album Dream Girl, Billie Eilish fell from the sky and
dragged oil-soaked wings through a hellscape in the music video for “All the Good Girls Go to
Hell,” and Kelsea Ballerini closed her performance at the Country Music Television (CMT) Music
Awards with pyrotechnic angel wings. On the track “Figure 8” from her acclaimed album
Magdalene, also released in 2019, FKA Twigs sang “I am an angel (hush now) / My back wings
give the hardest slap that you’ve ever seen,” later posting these lyrics on social media alongside
an image of herself wearing wings.

20

Figure 3: Angel Collage. Kesha, Katy Perry; Cardi B; Kai the Black Angel; Kali Uchis.

The pattern persisted in 2020, when Chloe x Halle wore silver angel wings on the cover of their
second studio album Ungodly Hour, Megan Thee Stallion performed in massive white wings for
the finale of the HBO show Legendary, Kali Uchis sang “I’m your little angel, baby boy we’re
goin’ biblical” on “Angel” and wore angel wings on the cover for Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros
Demonios), and Amaarae made the angel her persona on the album The Angel You Don’t Know.
In 2021, Lil Nas X leaned into biblical imagery for his album Montero, appearing as an angel in
the cover art and later posing in white wings for French magazine M, le magazine du Monde;
Jennifer Lopez wore large angel wings in the music video for “In the Morning”; Doja Cat became
the angel on stage for the All for One Music Festival; Harry Styles revived his wings to perform
“Only Angel”; and the members of Little Mix danced in white wings in the video for “Heartbreak
Anthem.” In 2022, Nilüfer Yanya donned pink angel wings to promote her single “Midnight Sun,”
Grace Ives wore a simple white pair in the music video for “Angel of Business,” Yaya Bey and
her friends were portrayed as “Angelic Bitches” in the music video for “fxck it then,” Latto was
an angel of heaven in the video for “Big Energy,” FKA Twigs becomes her own “Meta Angel” in
the video for a song by that title, and Carrie Underwood promoted her new album wearing white
wings against Nashville’s twinkling nighttime skyline, citing the single “Crazy Angels”: “Yes, I’m
21
one of those crazy angels/Tilted halo with a neon shine/Call me one of those crazy angels/Even
good girls wanna have a good time/Heaven knows I’m flying low tonight.”

Figure 4: Angel Collage. Camila Cabello, Bebe Rexha; Anna of the North; FKA Twigs; Chloe x Halle.

The images included here are a selection, and I surely missed some relevant cases and other
forms. Angel-themed tattoos make up a subtrend within this catalogue, for instance. Justin Bieber
has angel wings tattooed on the back of his neck, Ariana Grande has an angel wing tattooed inside
her right ear, Justin Timberlake has angel wings tattooed across his upper back, Rita Ora has angel
wings tattooed on her right ankle, Demi Lovato has a back tattoo of three doves carrying a fallen
angel, and Dua Lipa has the word “ANGEL” tattooed in all caps on her right shoulder. Not all such
tattoos become newsworthy, but the trend is another iteration of the embodied angel tendency
within the broader field of angel invocation.
Of course, pop stars have invoked embodied angels in the past. In 1973, Elton John’s iconic
“Rocket Man” getup was a white leather jumpsuit with small white feathered wings on the
shoulders. (This costume reappeared on Lady Gaga during her performance for a 2018 Elton John
“GRAMMY Salute,” and then again on the posters for a 2019 Elton John biopic.) In 1987, David
Bowie began encores during his Glass Spider Tour by emerging in angel wings from the head of
a large spider perched 60 feet above the crowd. After all, angelic embodiment has likely always
been a dream for those who form an attachment to the angel. A watered-down version of it is on
22
display every Halloween, an occasion to embody the angel that pop stars like LeAnn Rimes,
Mariah Carey, Beyonce, Cardi B, and Ariana Grande have all at some point embraced. Still, the
frequency of the recent invocations suggest that there are more angels in popular culture now than
there used to be. The noted abundance of angel invocations at the 2018 Grammys, for instance,
has no precedent at that award show.
4

Figure 5: Angel Collage. Megan Thee Stallion, Lil Nas X; Jennifer Lopez; Doja Cat; Little Mix.

Why has the angel motif gained popular traction in the music industry? And why does the
gesture seem to resonate with people? Recurrent images within popular culture cannot be attributed
to a single source; they circulate according to the rapid rhythms of identification and reproduction,
adopted on the basis of some combination of artistic preference and market pressures. When a pop
music celebrity or an aspiring musician invokes the angel, this aesthetic selection corresponds to
strategic calculations about what will sell, what will bolster the artist’s brand, and what will
resonate most with a desired audience. Scholars of culture and marketing, including those focused
on the music industry, thus understandably describe this process as “the conquest of cool” (Frank
1998)—a process Boltanski and Chiapello have located within the capitalism’s broader twentieth-
century success in recuperating “the artistic critique” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005).

4
This claim is the outcome of a partial review of past years of the award show; based on this preliminary
survey, my data suggests that no prior years were marked by the trend.

23
At the same time, to see Lady Gaga or Beyonce in angel wings is to know that these
powerful artists have consented to the motif’s use, that their teams of stylists and marketers support
the selection, and that all of them have the impression that it will pay off. Confidence in the angel’s
commercial traction therefore attests not only to market considerations but also to the elaboration
of individual and collective identification beyond the market. Recounting this complexity in his
influential Why Music Matters, David Hesmondhalgh notes that despite being susceptible to the
appropriative logics of the market and nation-building “music can consistently provide hints, or
perhaps better, reminders, of more complex notions of identity and belonging” (Hesmondhalgh
2013, 164). We therefore must consider the basis for people’s angel identification.
For their part, pop stars are uniquely positioned to embody the angel. Not only does their
celebrity status mirror the ontological ambivalence of the angel (pop stars are transcendent but, at
the same time, still there, much like actual stars), but angels are cosmologically musical, depicted
for centuries playing instruments or singing in their angel choirs. This association is bolstered by
the pop concert’s appropriation of religious rituals—like singing from a dais, performing before a
choir, and audience call-and-response—and the mythological attributes of music itself, which,
according to Jacques Attali, is historically inseparable from the experience of prayer (Attali and
McClary 1985, 27). For these reasons, pop stars are primed to model cathexis with the angel and
are compelled to do so by both their own angel attachments and by those of their fans.
5
The broad

5
This study is primarily theoretical, and so departs from the methodological conventions within the
scholarly areas of fandom studies and audience studies. I gratefully acknowledge that this area of study has
helped to legitimize the important social function of audiences and fan communities, particularly their
productive participatory role in the elaboration of cultural and political forms and practices (Jenkins 1992;
Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington 2017). Related, although I do not extend upon it directly, I also take for
granted Stuart Hall’s (1980) canonical “encoding-decoding” synthesis of scholarship on media “effects,”
audience “uses and gratification,” and semiology, and embrace his insight that messages are not open to
any interpretation whatsoever but necessarily correspond to the shared terms of reference supplied by codes.
Indeed, the angel (the message of the messenger) directs our attention to what Northrop Frye influentially
described, in reference to the literary heritage of the bible, as “the great code” (Frye 1982).
24
popularity of the motif suggests that fans share wishful identification with the angel; nevertheless,
Instagram angel-wing selfies do not allow for the type of reflexive exploration that pop stars can
achieve though their elaborate costumes and staging.

Figure 6: Angel Collage. Harry Styles, Nilüfer Yanya, Grace Ives, Latto, Carrie Underwood.

Instead, fans have the option to cathect to their favorite musical artists. As Joseph Roach
explains, celebrity exerts a unique power, predicated on “the illusion of availability,”
“vicariousness,” and “personality-driven mass attraction” (Roach 2007, 3). Celebrities are not
merely agents of cultural production but are also objects onto which people project and negotiate
their desires. Today, such attachment is facilitated by (para-)social media, which collapses (or,
creates the illusion of collapsing) the class-based social distance between celebrities and fans.
Meanwhile, as relentless media visibility and the commodification of authenticity (a process
described momentarily) come to define celebrity life, stars themselves are incentivized to
demonstrate that “they’re just like us!”
Today, amid the social dissolution that characterizes neoliberal capitalism’s drive towards
the unreality of atomism, the angel must be assessed in relation to the logic of the ideal neoliberal
subject, who is expected to embrace the strategic manipulativeness of entrepreneurialism yet

25
remain “authentic.” At the level of experience, this produces an overwhelming sense of anxiety
that pervades the present—and, in particular, anxiety over whether we are being authentic. Indeed,
within entrepreneurial capitalism, Sarah Banet-Weiser argues, “economic imperatives and
‘authenticity’ are expressed and experienced simultaneously” (Banet-Weiser 2012, 5). Yet,
authenticity is but one more cognate term for absolution: something is “authentic” if it is the same
as itself, characterized by oneness, from the Greek autos “self” + hentes “doer, being,” from PIE
root *sene- “to accomplish, achieve” (Friedrichsen and Burchfield 1966). As a result, the manifest
desire for authenticity tends to find its way back to this more general unresolved latent longing.
The wish image of the angel is thus not only a symptomatic expression of the latent longing for
absolution, but, given the uptick in the image’s contemporary circulation, also suggests that this
longing is exacerbated by the conditions of neoliberalism.
Considered this way, it seems that people now dream of becoming the angel because its
animating paradox—that it is both sacred and profane, pure spirit that manifests as a body—
reflects the paradoxical striving that the market imposes on all of us, albeit in different ways,
depending on where we fall within its stratified system. Indeed, this dream entails something more
than the recourse offered by religion, wherein one can become the angel only through the pursuit
of an afterlife. Instead, this pattern reveals a vision of becoming the angel by profane means.
To be sure, the hegemonic conception of the angel in the United States derives primarily
from Christianity. Yet, to grasp the significance of this conception we must revisit the angel’s
historical development, which predates Christianity. Philosopher and theologian David Albert
Jones reminds us that “the religions that claim Abraham as their father, Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam, all continue to tell stories of angels” (Jones 2011, 3). In his brief history of angels, Jones
foregrounds the scriptural provenance of these stories in the encounter between Abraham and three
26
angels who deliver the message that his wife, Sarah, will bear a son. First recounted in the Hebrew
Scriptures, this story is “the oldest strand of religious tradition to speak about angels,” and it
continues to animate faith traditions built out of Abrahamic mythology. Jones thus reminds us that
although the angels of the New Testament are the dominant point of reference in American popular
culture, they continue to resonate widely in part because of their similar importance in the Hebrew
Bible, the Quran, and New Age spirituality.
6

Many angel-like figures predate the story of Abraham. Indeed, if the angel’s defining visual
representation is a human form with wings presumed to signify the divine, then numerous pre-
Abrahamic myths meet the criteria. Zoroastrianism, the dominant religion of ancient Babylon,
featured angelic beings called fravashi commonly understood to inform the primary Zoroastrian
symbol, the faravahar, which depicts a winged human figure. The goddess Isis was similarly
portrayed winged in the polytheism of ancient Egypt. So too was the ancient Greek goddess Nike,
along with the Greek god Eros and his Roman counterpart, Cupid. Hinduism, too, features angel-
like beings. To be sure, Jones advises against associating these ancient figures with the category
“angel,” lest we distract from crucial differences between their corresponding faiths or presume
an historical influence where none exists. Even the known influence of Zoroastrianism on the
development of Judaism is very difficult to assess, he explains, “and, if the faravahar symbol now
seems like an angel, this is as much to do with modern Christian influence on Zoroastrianism as
with ancient Zoroastrian influence on Judaism” (Jones 2011, 11).
Such caution is warranted for Jones’ purposes. But for ours, it is precisely of interest that
ancient mythological figures can “seem like” angels. After all, pop cultural invocations are not
beholden to the constraints of scholarly historicization. Several examples leap out from among the

6
In this work, “American” refers to the United States of America unless otherwise indicated.
27
most famous musical celebrities in my catalogue: in 2012, Rihanna revealed a tattoo below her
breasts in the image of a winged Isis; Katy Perry portrayed Isis in her 2013 music video for “Dark
Horse”; and the 2018 music video for “Apeshit” showed Beyonce dancing in front of Winged
Victory of Samothrace, a Hellenistic votive monument to Nike, with the pop star’s white gown
mimicking the sculpture’s folded tunic.
During the time of their cult status, each of these ancient goddesses was associated with
broad symbolic meanings. According to Encyclopedia Britannica (useful here precisely because
it has greater common traction than scholarly sources), Isis was “a principal deity in rites connected
with the dead… mother… role model for all women,” while Nike symbolized “success not only
in war but in all undertakings… mediator of success between gods and men” (“Isis” n.d.; “Nike”
n.d.).
7
Both Nike and Isis, meanwhile, are likely derivations of the Mesopotamian goddess
Inanna/Ishtar, “Queen of Heaven,” the “goddess of war and sexual love,” who was often depicted
winged and whose cult flourished for four thousand years (“Ishtar” n.d.). Contemporary
invocations of these figures are syncretic in spirit, inflected with ideas that are often at odds with
the cited cosmologies. Perry pairs her winged Isis with the lyrics “make me your Aphrodite,” citing
the Greek goddess who is mythologically entwined with Eros and the Erotes, winged gods of love
and sex. Rihanna’s Isis, officially dedicated to her late grandmother (in honor of her having been
a “Complete Woman” and “Model for future generations”), is also sexualized, if only implicitly,
through its location on her body (Nessif 2012). Beyonce’s Nike appears in montage alongside
other art housed in the Louvre, and the video opens with a reference to the Christian angel in the
image of a Black man crouched under white wings.

7
Encyclopedia Britannica is useful because it is common, not scholarly. Alert to the circulation of
derivative myths, Benjamin insisted that “the production of lesser writers, whose works frequently
contain the most eccentric features, will be valued no less than those of the great writer” (Benjamin and
Steiner 2009, 58).
28

Figure 7: Angel Collage. Rihanna’s Isis tattoo; Katy Perry for “Dark Horse”; Beyonce, for
“Apeshit”; Goddess Ishtar, Akkadian Empire seal, 2350–2150 BCE.

What becomes clear through these invocations is that they have less to do with each distinct
figure’s corresponding cosmology or myth than with the underlying desires activated by or drawn
toward the resonant image. These invocations abide by the chaotic logic of what Benjamin called
a “citation without quotation marks” (cite), where what is cited is not “actual” history but, instead,
what Benjamin understood as the absolutizing reflection through which the cited content opens
onto the entire course of history (Benjamin and Steiner 2009). Even the Christian angel may first
have emerged in this way. According to art historian Therese Martin, “the earliest Christian angels
with wings are modeled on pagan female personifications, such as Nike. Only subtle differences
of drapery distinguish the portrayals of Victories and winged angels” (Martin 2001, 23).
8
Early
Christians also assimilated the imagery of Erotes, for instance (Jones 2011, 27). This pagan
influence falls within a vast history of theological, cultural, political influences that have shaped
Christianity.
It is important to clarify the relationship between Benjamin’s conceptions of citation and
constellation. Citation happens as a matter of course: invocations occur as people simply call
things to mind, and this becomes the means by which the thing called to mind manifests itself in

8
Niké translates as “victory.”
29
some new form or context. Constellation, meanwhile, is a conscious process: it refers to the work
of thinking and abides by a constructive principle. In other words, citation is to the wish image
what constellation is to the dialectical image. An invocation of the angel is always a citation, and
through each citation we have the opportunity to contend with all of its prior iterations. When we
constellate these citations, we are able to compress them as if into a single frame: a monad. “[I]t’s
not that what is past casts light on the present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather,
image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a
constellation.”

In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the
present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-
been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.
(Benjamin, p. 462)

Our conceptions of prior invocations of the angel are informed by the conditions of their citation.
Our view of the past is necessarily marked by the assumptions that animate the present. Pre-
Christian angel-like figures resonate today because of our contemporary Christian context, but this
could be because they resemble the Christian angel or, alternately, because they are recognizably
not Christian and are therefore presumed to offer something less compromised (or even, more
primordial) than the mythology of Christ. It was precisely this sense of the “plasticity” of Christian
iconography that animated the classical New England theology of, say, a Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Rather than limit our analysis to the manifest meanings associated with any one figure, therefore,
the more pressing task is to grasp what preserves their common allure. To do so, we can constellate
them at the level of their underlying, unresolved desire, which remains consistent even as the form
changes with each iteration. And by becoming aware of each failure to work through this
30
underlying desire, we can more precisely discern its contextually specific character and thereby
move closer to instigating the moment of decision.
We might never resolve the historical questions Jones bring to light, but that is not the
object of this study. Instead, I am interested in the desire associated with the latent content of the
wish that animates the image’s recurrence. Under these conditions, pop-star biographies become
metonymic encapsulations of the collective unconscious social process of working through the
longing for absolution.

The Longing for Absolution
Theological conceptions of absolution vary, but the word is commonly defined as “remission,
forgiveness.” This dominant usage places emphasis on remedy, on the forgiveness and subsequent
purgation of sin.
9
However, the word also paradoxically denotes the principle of totality, the idea
of God’s oneness and of oneness with God. This tension reflects philological antimonies (see the
Latin absolvere: “to set free, acquit, complete, bring to an end, make separate”) that become
clearest in chemistry: a chemical solution has two discrete elements (solute and solvent) but, at the
same time, is one substance. Similarly, the root of absolution, *leu- (“to loosen, divide, cut apart”),
is shared not only by words that presuppose two elements (absolve, “to declare free of blame, guilt,
or responsibility”) but also by words that denote a single, undivided substance (absolute, “not
qualified or diminished in any way; total”) (Friedrichsen and Burchfield 1966, 5). The first
conception (two elements) moves toward the second (one substance) through the process of

9
The idea of absolution appears in most religions, though it is not always ritualistic: contemporary
Judaism no longer uses sacrificial rituals of absolution, although Jews ritually atone and seek forgiveness;
in Islam this practice is called Istighfar; in Hinduism it is called Prayaschitta; Buddhism, too, has a
tradition of confession and absolution.
31
purgation, but in the moment of being absolved, the object is made up of two elements, e.g. that
which is to be kept and that which is to be purged.
This ambivalence also finds expression within Christianity itself. Puritanical reasoning
presupposes that sin is a corrupting substance to be expelled through purification rituals. This
singular vision of absolution emphasizes remedy for the individual or the sect and is theologically
reliant, for instance, on Matthew’s exacting maxim: “And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge
it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be
thrown into the fire of hell” (Matthew 14:9). But though it is theologically engrained, this singular
vision is not easily reconciled with Christianity’s equally significant totalizing vision of absolution.
If God is “Alpha and Omega” (Revelation 22:13), and is “over all and through all and in all”
(Ephesians 4:6), then, logically, nothing—even sin—is outside of God. Here, God encapsulates all
substances, which are not in solution but are instead absolute. At its threshold, this formulation
suggests that people themselves are or might be God.
To understand the political significance of these competing visions, we must first
distinguish between their normative and analytic elaborations. Normatively, the singular vision of
absolution yields fantasies of a resolved desire predicated on expulsion. Analytically, therefore,
this vision corresponds to any line of reasoning invoked to justify this process. Christianity’s
singular vision has historically primed adherents to accede to the mythic analyses proffered by the
medieval church and adapted by fascists for modern deployment (race fantasies, bloodlines, sexual
hierarchies). Because such analytic justifications are necessarily mythic, the singular vision is
always dangerous. Today, as neoliberal social dissolution seeks its resolution through the proto-
fascism nurtured by figures like Donald Trump, this danger has become acute. And it is in this
32
context, today, that the angel gives form to an ambivalent desire for absolution that might be
harnessed to the fascist project if not first seized by that project’s enemies.

Redirecting the longing for absolution away from the singular vision is no simple feat, not
least because totalizing visions are themselves prone to mythic embellishment. Consider Saint
Augustine:

All have their offices and limits laid down so as to ensure the beauty of the
universe. That which we abhor in any part of it gives us the greatest pleasure when
we consider the universe as a whole. The very reason why some things are inferior
is that though the parts may be imperfect the whole is perfect. . . The black colour
in a picture may very well be beautiful if you take the picture as a whole.
(Augustine, On True Religion, xl, 76).

Because Augustine posits that God is absolute, this is a totalizing vision; however, it is still a
normative assertion, to be believed, rather than an argument to be demonstrated. Nevertheless,
because its mythic content explains something material—the condition of interconnectivity—it
also opens an analytic pathway beyond myth. Unlike normative puritanical claims, the totalizing
vision of absolution can stimulate a process of working-through that starts with the recognition of
desire’s unresolved character. At its threshold, it becomes an analytic demonstration of
interconnectivity, oneness, absolution. Although Augustine portrays God as separate from humans
and unknowable, his totalizing conception also implies the opposite: that God is present in (and
even is) those earthly manifestations that appear unholy.
In moments of heightened political activity, the normative (mythic) expression of this
totalizing vision tends to take on a materialist expression. “We are caught in an inescapable
network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” Martin Luther King Jr. famously wrote
in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Addressing the letter to his “fellow clergyman,” King
revealed how this normative claim, pushed to its logical conclusion, might yield a materialist
33
analysis—specifically, an analysis of segregation and of direct action. “In any nonviolent
campaign,” he argued, “there are four basic steps: (1) Collection of the facts to determine whether
injustices are alive. (2) Negotiation. (3) Self-purification and (4) Direct Action.” Here, the step of
self-purification accords with the singular vision of absolution and posits violence as the corrupting
substance to be expelled. However, because King conceived of self-purification as a means, he
implicitly revealed the inadequacy of any vision that takes purification to be an end in itself. In
contrast, his totalizing vision suggested a means of collapsing the distinction between God and
people; through concrete analysis and action, people themselves might repair the “single garment
of destiny” riven by racism and white supremacy.
As these examples make plain, the longing for absolution is not solely religious. As myth,
it saturates the entire social field and finds expression in countless profane forms and practices.
Within popular culture, classic examples include the stoner who uses drugs to feel “one with the
universe” and pulp romance descriptions of sex as spiritual desubjectivation. “When we be makin’
love,” sings Prince in his 1987 hit “Adore,” “I only hear the sounds / Heavenly angels cryin’ up
above / Tears of joy pouring down on us / They know we need each other.” Such illustrations
suggest that the desire for absolution is prior to religion, and that religion itself is but one
manifestation of the human struggle to resolve a feeling of lack that is in fact ur-historical. This
view is corroborated by the tradition of psychoanalysis, wherein all desires ultimately point to
absolution: whereas Eros pushes us toward a oneness achieved through connection, Thanatos
accomplishes this aim by returning us to stasis (Freud, 2010a). Understood in this way, the concept
of absolution allows us to work from within the entanglement of the religious and the secular
without disavowing their useful distinction.
34
Considered at the level of the dream, we discover that the vision of absolution within
Christianity is conceptually analogous to the communist principle of totality: a vision of relating
to the world without externality, whereby human history and natural history would be reconciled.
Indeed, for Karl Marx the abolition of class antagonisms was always conceived in absolutist terms.
By his account, communism was founded on the premise that “the condition for the free
development of each is the free development of all” (Marx and Engels [1848]2018, 25). Prior,
within Europe, to Marx and the development of scientific socialism, the idea of absolution
expressed itself mythologically in the idiom of the utopian socialists, many of whom invoked
Christianity as their primal scene. As E.P. Thompson recounts, antinomian sects during the English
Revolution inferred from Christian myth that they were already God and on this basis pursued
their vision of earthly reconciliation (E. P. Thompson 1993, 23–26).
For Marx, absolution was more wisely pursued through the profane study of historical
contradictions than through the invocation of utopian myth, but he nonetheless held utopian
socialists’ absolutism in high regard, aware of the elemental bond between the two projects.
10
To
be sure, and as Georg Lukacs in particular has famously affirmed, totality cannot be represented—
but it is also not inevitably something “out there,” beyond comprehension.
11
If we can resist the

10
Absolution refers to an idea that goes by many names. To specify my usage in this project, which derives
from the scholarly convention of referring to this entity as “the absolute,” I invoke “oneness” as a clarifying
shortcut—but as a shortcut it lacks the richness I reveal through my etymological and conceptual unpacking
of “absolution.” “Oneness” does not, for instance, disclose the crucial paradox that complicates the idea of
the absolute (i.e. a single solution contains solute and solvent). I can't think of another word that does this
work (metaphysics, God, transcendence: all of these introduce distracting conceptual and contextual
burdens). “Wholeness” comes somewhat close, as it does suggest constitutive parts (of the whole), but, like
“oneness,” it lacks the value of being an explicit concept within Christianity, which (although not the only
religion to conceive of the path to God as passing through forgiveness) is the focus of this study.

11
On this question Benjamin and Lukacs are largely compatible, despite the common presumption of their
opposition.
35
temptation of the analytic escape hatch of deeming something “overdetermined,” there is a great
deal of understanding to gain by instead striving for the impossible.

Weaponizing the Angel
Religious images saturate popular culture, attesting to their power in organizing religious life and
to their resonance among non-adherents. And from corporate “angel investors” to the U.S. Navy’s
“Blue Angels” airshows, capitalism and the state routinely draw upon the angel’s promise. These
invocations signal a range of possibilities: a commodification of faith, a conservative return within
the culture of permissive liberalism, the collapse of formal distinctions between the religious and
the secular (suggesting a corresponding collapse of the separation between church and state), or a
familiar reference point to which people gravitate in their longing for another world. Like any wish
image, after all, the angel is ambivalent and can therefore be affixed to any program. Grasping the
fact of the angel’s ambivalence is thus a precondition for harnessing its power; but, as Rene Girard
reminds us, “[w]hen we speak of ambivalence, we are only pointing out a problem that remains to
be solved” (Girard 1979, 1).
How is the angel used, and to what ends? I focus on the pop star angels in my data set, but
they have emerged amid a cultural prevalence of angel imagery. This includes variations on the
embodied angel motif, such as ubiquitous angel wing tattoos and angel wing street murals designed
for “selfie” photography—the latter a culmination of a public art project launched in Los Angeles
in 2012 “to remind humanity that we are the Angels of this Earth”—but the angel is also invoked
in political and religious discourse, in popular film and television and visual art (Miller 2012). To
varying degrees of consciousness, each invocation stakes a claim on the angel. I have chosen to
focus on angel invocations in popular music because they arise, I contend, from primarily
36
unconscious processes, and thus present an opportunity for the richest form of working through.
To bring this distinctiveness into view, it is useful to compare these less conscious invocations to
more conscious ones, and for this we can do no better than American political rhetoric.
In the tense days following the 2020 U.S. federal election, when Paula White-Cain,
“spiritual advisor” to Donald Trump, inaccurately prophesied the success of his second presidential
bid. Between rounds of awkward glossolalia, the Mississippi-born, millionaire televangelist
warned of “high levels of demonic conspiracies.” Still, she assured viewers that she could “hear a
sound of victory,” proclaiming that angels were being sent to support her candidate. “Angels are
being dispatched from Africa right now!” she rejoiced, “from South America! They’re coming
here!” (Right Wing Watch 2020). The sermon came two days after the polls had closed, and Trump
had called for ballot counting to halt in states where he was losing but to proceed where it seemed
that he might win. His bombast was predictable, as was his support among white evangelicals,
81% of whom had voted for him in 2016. But his success among non-white voters caught pundits
by surprise. “The more I look at this election, the less I imagine I understand,” tweeted The New
York Times’ Paul Krugman. “Racism is Trump’s brand—but he outperformed the polls in large
part with Hispanic and some black votes” (Krugman 2020). Despite the overwhelming whiteness
of the 68 million voters who doubled down on Trumpism, confounded liberals scapegoated the
people of color seduced by Trump’s strategy. Meanwhile, Trump’s base embraced this
demographic development, which seemed to echo in White-Cain’s sermon: “From Africa! From
South America! Angelic forces! Angelic reinforcement!”
The spectacle became an instant viral internet meme. “We are African angels! We got
African responsibilities,” declared one Black comedian pretending to be among White-Cain’s
summoned angels. “You better call on Charlie’s Angels, Angels in the Outfield, angel food cake,
37
Anaheim Angels! We is not helping y’all” (KevOnStage 2020). People using the hashtag
#AngelsfromAfrica mocked Trump’s electoral defeats. “The angels are being dispatched from
Africa and Latin America but they didn’t get visas,” someone joked when the courts rejected
Trump’s baseless voter fraud lawsuits (Sharro 2020). Others were more direct in their
condemnations, as when journalist Ayesha K. Faines tweeted: “Y’all didn’t take enough from
Africa? Y’all want the angels too? The ancestors can’t even rest in peace without you calling up
the mainline for some foolishness???” (Faines 2020).
In these critical interpretations, White-Cain’s angels were themselves Black and Latinx, a
divine reflection of Trump’s non-white supporters. As if to validate the inference, conservative
Black activist Candace Owens—founder of the Blexit foundation, launched in 2018 to encourage
minorities and especially Black voters to leave the Democratic Party and register as Republicans—
appears pacing and praising emphatically in the front row during the relevant sermon clip. For
political theorist Cristina Beltran, figures like Owens represent the Trump-era phenomenon of
“multi-racial whiteness,” the promise that people of color “can lay claim to the politics of
aggression, exclusion and domination” on which whiteness is predicated (Beltran 2021). Yet, this
promise is ultimately at odds with the pretense of multicultural inclusivity, Beltran explains. And
because multiculturalism remains the official orientation of the Republican Party and white
evangelical celebrity culture, White-Cain’s critics found her formulation funny because it seemed
like a slip—as though she had disclosed a crass wish for non-white Trump voters.
It wasn’t long, however, before exvangelicals clarified the provenance of White-Cain’s
phrase. Rebecca Diamond, a woman raised in a small fundamentalist Pentecostal community in
Louisiana, explained on Twitter that according to “the White Supremacy Gospel” into which she
had been indoctrinated and that she eventually disavowed, great numbers of angels are always in
38
Africa and South America, “engaged in ‘spiritual warfare’ a la The Book of Daniel. They can be
summoned from this great warfare as needed.” Large angel armies are gathered in these places, so
this interpretation goes, “because Black people have especially nefarious demons attached to
them… So [White-Cain] was summoning in angels from those places very specifically to combat
the Black votes being counted” (Diamond 2020). According to this explanation, the angels White-
Cain called upon were divine warriors within an unapologetic white supremacist race fantasy.
How should we account for the discrepancy between this “theological” provenance and the
popular impressions of White-Cain’s vision? How can the angels she invokes not only be
simultaneously, and exclusively, white or Black, but also simultaneously sacred and profane? To
be sure, White-Cain’s celebrity attests to the success of Christian fundamentalist movements in
courting the mainstream by way of conceptual slippages and associative leaps. It’s unsurprising
that she didn’t clarify what her angels looked like; in the elaboration of American evangelicalism,
racist discretion has helped to preserve white supremacy as what religion scholar Anthea Butler
deems “a feature, not a bug” (Butler 2021, 1). Trump’s alliance with evangelicals builds upon a
coalition of right-wing and evangelical traditions wherein “Christianity is whiteness as well as
belief” (Butler 2021, 9).
12
And evangelicalism’s foundational investment in whiteness has held
steady, Butler shows, even as many believers come to harbor earnest objections to racism and as
the milieu itself becomes more diverse—a diversity effort that White-Cain has benefited from
insofar as it entails supporting women in leadership (so long as they are heterosexual and
cisgender). For her part, White-Cain is an apostle in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a
powerful contemporary evangelical movement that has adopted neoliberalism’s “diversity”

12
Trump has specifically aligned himself with Pentecostals and Charismatics, evangelicals once derided
by other Protestants for their belief in miracles and prophecy, but who now represent “the fastest-growing
group of Christians in America”) (Christerson and Flory 2017, 5).
39
discourse and, as antifascist historian Matthew Lyons explains, exemplifies “the far right’s
capacity to harness liberatory impulses toward authoritarian and supremacist goals” (Lyons 2021).
In this context, she is emboldened to assert commonality with Black and Latinx Christians—even
crediting the famous Black Bishop T.D. Jakes as her “mentor,” an honorific from which he
distances himself—while defending Trump as “absolutely not a racist” (Green 2021; Gryboski
2018).
The divergent interpretations of White-Cain’s prayer defined her summoned angels
according to different social locations and specific purposes, but their meanings ultimately
converged. Whereas the popular interpretation was that White-Cain wanted people of color to vote
for Trump, the “theological” explanation disclosed a desire to prevent them from voting at all, or
to prevent their votes from being counted. As such, both spoke to the goal of ensuring Trump’s
victory. That White-Cain’s public critics presumed the former interpretation is a testament to the
effectiveness of neoliberal “diversity” in masking the visions of expulsion that ultimately animate
white racial fantasies. It also reminds us that “diversity” politics derive from the precarious
ideological project of managed difference enshrined in U.S. jurisprudence with the Fourteenth
Amendment. With this amendment, which granted citizenship to formerly enslaved men, “came a
new ethical project for the American nation-state, one that would try to administer difference for
the expansion of national power and territory,” explains Roderick Ferguson (Ferguson 2012). This
project has always been marked by ambivalence, simultaneously reflecting the vision of a
democratic utopic ideal and serving as a cover for its sabotage. So, although the interpretations of
White-Cain’s prayer diverged in their manifest content and her supporters could latch on to either,
the basis for their resonance could be traced back to the same white nationalist, theocratic dream:
“Make America Great Again.”
40
But dreams are chaotic. They are the products of an elaborate psychological process of
deferral and displacement that we enact when confronted with something we desire but can’t talk
about. Accordingly, in psychoanalysis, the principal task of dream interpretation is to recognize
that the dream’s manifest content—what Freud called “dream-images”—simultaneously
expresses and disguises a latent desire that the dreamer cannot name directly (Freud 2010, xxiii).
In moments when the mechanics of dreaming become transparent, we therefore find that our latent
desires can produce endless sequences of manifest expressions, often drawing from the expansive
catalogue of resonant symbols circulating within the social field. Within this chaotic process, the
content of such symbols is never fixed. As a result, not only can we trace seemingly contradictory
iterations of the same symbol back to a common dream (as with the divergent inferences about
White-Cain’s “angels from Africa”), but any given symbol can be invoked for competing political
aims. So it was that two days after White-Cain’s sermon, president-elect Joe Biden invoked the
angel with equal confidence, citing Abraham Lincoln’s unsuccessful 1861 attempt to avert the
Civil War by appealing to “the better angels of our nature.”
“It’s time for our better angels to prevail,” Biden declared, summoning a force that was
antithetical to the one invoked by White-Cain (Beem 2020). In Biden’s usage, angels symbolized
an opposition to Trump’s supporters, who would storm the Capitol bearing crosses and nooses
several weeks later. To be sure, the intentions underlying Biden’s strategic deployment of the angel
should be held in suspicion. After all, the ideology of managed difference, of which Lincoln was
an architect, finds expression today not only in Republican ethnocentric xenophobia but also in a
capricious liberal “anti-racism” that defines the Democratic Party’s leadership elite. At best,
Biden’s appeal to our better angels demonstrates how this ideology has “inscribed itself on
oppositional maneuvers, threatening them with a domiciliation that could enlist them in power’s
41
archive”—a dynamic that has defused emancipatory efforts in the U.S. and internationally
(Ferguson 2012).
13
Still, even for those who oppose U.S. empire outright, the image of Biden’s
angel army was at least preferable to White-Cain’s, and perhaps desirable in its own right. This is
because the basis for a symbol’s resonance needs not align with a speaker’s intentions.
Intentions matter, however, and if we seek to seize the wish image in motion and subvert
its capture by dangerous social forces, we must be attuned to the degree of consciousness with
which people invoke such images. In the realm of electoral politics, the wish image of the angel is
deployed like a weapon, its dream world converted to a tool of maneuver, much more directly
bound up with the operations of political economic interventionism and the cold calculations of
warfare. In the cultural realm, however, invocations of the angel pertain to the struggle against
hegemonic norms, giving expression to a collective will that remains the stuff of dreams.

The Politics of Dream Analysis
Resonant images are the stuff of dreams: we latch onto them based on our latent desires. They can
always be analyzed to disclose hidden longings—longings that are deliberately shored up by
politicians, religious leaders, and advertisers. But if this general dynamic is easy to comprehend,
it has proven extremely difficult to subvert. Capitalism’s utopian dreamscape reminds us of the
revolutionary desires animating popular culture, but these desires are caught up in the very process
of deferral that Freud sought to analyze at the level of the individual’s unconscious. Although not
always citing the influence of psychoanalysis, various influential experiments have aimed to
politicize the analytic task of holding true to the desires subtending our collective dreams. Bertolt

13
The scope of this study is limited to political struggles within the U.S., but it is crucial to note that the
U.S. constitutional project unified “the modern idea of empire and the modern idea of difference; under
that ideological formation, the management of the international would coextend with the management of
diversity” (Ferguson 2012).
42
Brecht’s “epic theatre,” Guy Debord’s “situation,” Stephen Duncombe’s “ethical spectacle,” and
Robin D.G. Kelley’s injunction to “keep it (sur)real”—to cite only a few examples—all foreground
a process that entails the objectification of our unconscious desires so that we might more
forcefully seize the means to realize them (Brecht 1977; Debord 2000; Duncombe 2007; Kelley
2002).
But the ability to identify with a dream’s content (both latent and manifest) while remaining
alert to its dream form is not easily cultivated. It is achieved only through the repeated conscious
return to the task, a practice that must keep up with the chaotic movement of our attachments. This
analytic pursuit—of operating at once inside and outside of one’s dreams—is also a necessarily
collaborative practice, as we tend to have the greatest difficulty recognizing dreams that have the
most meaning in our lives. According to Freud, becoming conscious of one’s dreams, or
“phantasies,” begins with recognizing and becoming acquainted with our own repetitive habits of
repression—what he described as “resistances.” However, naming a resistance is only an
“introductory step” in the work of analysis. Referring specifically to the clinical context in his
essay Repeating, Remembering, and Working-Through, he explained that a skillful analyst “must
allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance with which he has now
become acquainted, to work through it, to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic
work according to the fundamental rule of analysis.”

Only when the resistance is at its height can the analyst, working in common with
his patient, discover the repressed instinctual impulses which are feeding the
resistance; and it is this kind of experience which convinces the patient of the
existence and power of such impulses. The doctor has nothing else to do than to
wait and let things take their course, a course which cannot be avoided nor always
hastened. (Freud 1914).

43
We need not accept his clinical pretext or language to grasp that the process recounted here also
finds expression at the social level. Indeed, Benjamin’s process proceeded on a different basis than
the clinical one but arrived at the same conclusion: the repetitive compulsion to repress manifests
within collectives much in the way it does in the individual psyche. And just as the patient
overcomes such repetition by working to remember the experiences and thoughts that feed it, so
too can social transformation be pursued through a process of individual and collective working-
through. Moreover, Freud explains, that which is neither remembered nor repressed also still
remains as an unconscious force that is “acted out.” Benjamin refers to this dynamic in his essay
on Kafka, subverting the simple opposition between memory and forgetting when he explains that
the “fact that it is now forgotten does not mean that it does not extend into the present. On the
contrary: it is actual by virtue of this very oblivion” (Benjamin 1968b, p. 130).
Although rarely addressed in these terms, these dynamics are active within the social
movement left. Movements, after all, are animated by dreams of another world: whether we’re
tactically invoking the edicts of liberalism (“We hold these truths to be self-evident”) or generating
resonant slogans for radical struggle (“No One is Illegal”; “Black Lives Matter”), this entire
paradigm is habituated to proclamations that are not true at the moment of their enunciation.
14
As
we experiment with interventions that might subvert capitalism’s dreamscapes, activists are
simultaneously engaged in the production of dreamscapes. This is not to diminish these habits. On
the contrary, the most effective activists are those able to analyze the indispensable and
complicated role of dreaming in the elaboration of collective desire and emancipatory struggle. As

14
These slogans of course correspond to something true at the level of experience; Black lives matter to
those who live them, and to those who live alongside and love Black people. But the slogans are
oppositional in the first instance; they resonate because they contain a silent “should,” intentionally
directing our minds to the “ought” and against the “is” of white supremacy and the border regimes of the
modern nation state.
44
Kelley explains in Freedom Dreams (2002), “We must remember that the conditions and the very
existence of social movements enable participants to imagine something different, to realize that
things need not always be this way” (Kelley 2002, 9). This insight is proven by history, but much
less stable is the historical relationship between our imaginations and our capacity to realize
“something different.” Even slogans that more directly foreground a strategic premise—“Black
Power”; “The Personal is Political”; “Workers of the World Unite”—do not disclose how another
world might be won. It makes sense, therefore, that we sometimes get lost in our dreams. We
succumb to futile repetition; amnesia takes hold.
Contending with these dynamics is useful because it allows us to work through the
“resistances” that undermine the political projects to which we’re committed. But such an
approach has another strategic value: by recognizing our own propensity for dreaming, and then
working through our repetition compulsions, we might come to comprehend the force of
dreamwork itself more precisely. Through developing our own analytic capacities, we might
reorient to the latent desires that animate dangerous ideas and thereby devise new strategies to
challenge their influence and redirect people who are primed to organize around them.

Working Through
A dream is not a thing. A dream is a relationship—with oneself, others, the world. And if the chaos
of dreams attests to the dreamer’s relentless search for something more, this process is nowhere
more overt than in the domain of religiosity, where “God” is always the search for God.
Epistemologically, this phenomenon of searching corresponds to the significance of religion as the
foundation for our conception of society and politics. In addition to being a major industry that
mobilizes resources and people on a grand scale to shape culture, religion provides a concrete
45
historical index of the process by which people have come to understand the world. “[T]he
criticism of religion,” writes Karl Marx in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “is the
prerequisite of all criticism” (Marx [1843]1970). Emile Durkheim would later conclude that
religion is “like the womb from which come all the leading germs of human civilization… [T]he
most diverse methods and practices, both those that make possible the continuation of the moral
life (law, morals, beaux-arts) and those serving the material life (the natural, technical and practical
sciences), are either directly or indirectly derived from religion” (Durkheim 1965, 223). This
insight would later inform James W. Carey’s attribution of the dominant American conceptions of
communication to “religious origins” (Carey and Adam 2008, 12). Thus, focusing on religion to
analyze our contemporary dreamscape entails a return to the source.
Like dream life, religion is a form of wish fulfillment, the refraction of a desire that remains
occluded. At the social level, the manifest content of religion corresponds to the manifest content
of those dreams nurtured by the individual, and both can be analyzed and traced back to a latent
desire that, for whatever reasons, can’t yet be wanted directly. By bringing dream analysis to bear
on cultural patterns of religiosity, we can more precisely account for the collective desires that
animate our social reality.
Granted, religion is also distinct from dreams: religion is objectified in a way most dreams
are not or can’t be. Most dreams are never written down or even recounted at all. Religion,
meanwhile, is the historical sedimentation of and circulation of the dream’s manifest content. As
such, it can take on a life of its own. If dreams are fantasies that we’re not conscious of having,
and fantasies are dreams that we’re attentive to in waking life, then religion is more closely
associated with the latter. The difference between analyzing a dream and analyzing a religion,
46
therefore, is that rather than attending to the development of an individual mind, we are attending
to the collective reifications of manifest content.
15

These reifications shift over time, even within religious formations that from the outside
appear relatively static. Indeed, religion also involves its own process of working through, though
the aim is not to get to the latent content. Instead, it is to reconcile the manifest images so that they
become coherent. In this way, religions become closed systems and resist the kind of analysis that
Freud proposed for dreams, where the psychotic profusion of images tends to remain disordered—
and, for that reason, to invite dream analysis.
Although he barely mentions Freud in the Arcades Project, Benjamin’s work with the
problem of dreams speaks to how much this category of psychological and social life had come to
shape the work of thinking in the period that he was writing about the wish image and its political
promise. To be sure, this has always been an aspect of the communist project, even though it has
not always been acknowledged. In an 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge, Marx offered the following
summary of the problem: “The reform of consciousness consists entirely in making the world
aware of its own consciousness, in arousing it from its dream of itself, in explaining its own actions
to it. Like Feuerbach’s critique of religion, our whole aim can only be to translate religious and
political problems into their self-conscious human form.”

Our programme must be: the reform of consciousness not through dogmas but by
analyzing mystical consciousness obscure to itself, whether it appear in religious or
political form. It will then become plain that the world has long since dreamed of
something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality.
It will then become plain that our task is not to draw a sharp mental line between
past and future, but to complete the thought of the past. Lastly, it will become plain

15
The content of a myth is distinct from its historical elaboration, and one of the challenges of this project
is that it is necessary to grasp both concurrently. This study narrows the scope of our investigation first to
Christianity, one among many resonant myths, and then again to the image of the angel, and then a third
time to the motif of angelic musicality.
47
that mankind will not begin any new work, but will consciously bring about the
completion of its old work. (Marx 1843b).

Benjamin was operating within a zeitgeist preoccupied with the insights of psychoanalysis. In his
elaboration of the wish image, Benjamin draws wholesale and in a cavalier way on Freud’s
theoretical armature, even as he declines to cite him. What is interesting, however, is that Freud
was always thinking in socio-historical terms, and this concrete orientation only became more
expansively so later in his life, with major works such as Moses and Monotheism, Civilization and
its Discontents, and Future of an Illusion revealing the movement in his thinking toward
concretion.
16
Dreams and wish images exist independent of their principal theorizers, but it is
useful to consider how Benjamin’s conception of the wish image completes Freudian dream
analysis—completion in Marx’s sense above, of immanent critique.
17

To draw out Benjamin and Freud’s common questions, it is useful to compare their
contributions more closely. In Freudian dream analysis, associated primarily with the contributions
of The Interpretation of Dreams, the subject under analysis is presumed to be the patient in a
clinical context, and therefore focused upon the psyches of individual dreamers. For Benjamin, in
contrast, and following Marx, the subject of analysis undergoing transformation is the socio-
political class. The promise of the wish image corresponds to a process of working through that
isn’t solely analytical, but also practical: these images aren’t psychic manifestations but are
concrete and found in material culture.

16
In The Arcades Project, Benjamin’s main citation of psychoanalysis in not Freud but Jung, whose
archetypes Benjamin criticized as a mythopoetic manifestation of the very intuitionist tendency that
activated fascism.
17
This is the logic by which Marx completed Hegel, with respect to dialectics.
48
For Freud, there was a direct correspondence between the content (both manifest and
latent) of the dream and material reality; however, the trace was registered in the individual psyche.
Benjamin sought to find the trace in material culture, and to attribute it to the collective. In the
process, he began to align himself with aspects of Jung’s thought; however, he tried to distinguish
himself from the latter by arguing that what was at stake were not mythical archetypes but concrete
recollections of a past promise passed down phylogenetically and impressed into (and thus
shaping) the elements of material culture.
The material tendency in Freud is to refer the dream content back to its reference in the
real world. Yet, his procedure deals with fantasies rather than artifacts. In Benjamin, the work also
begins (or can begin) with fantasies, but the point is to push the analysis toward a concrete
reckoning with the world. In the individual therapeutic clinical context, people can come to
interpret their dreams and come to a greater understanding of their desires, but this is different
from a process of working things through in a world that is tactile and plastic.
Through analysis, people can come to interpret and understand their desires, but
architecture doesn’t dissipate upon awakening. Dreams don’t only serve as an index of our
orientation to the material world and non-resolution in the face of it; for Benjamin they are also
one of the means by which the world comes into being and assumes the tangible material form that
it does in any given period.
18
In this investigation I have begun to tease out the relationship between
the role of individual dreams and the role of collective desire, and in doing so have sought to
establish the coherent analytic link between the psychoanalytic treatment of dreams and the
possibility of a communist operationalization of the wish image as such.

18
This conception corresponds to Marx’ discussion of imagination in the human labor process, and to the
historical development of human needs with which that process coincides.
49
Splitting the Atom
As a first step in this process, the interpretation of wish images can illuminate the social field by
drawing attention to the “classless society” already animating our collective imagination. Because
they alert us to this utopian promise, wish images also activate a desire to see that promise realized
(Benjamin 1999b; Buck-Morss 1991; A. Thompson 2020b). We might therefore parse the wish
from its inadequate object resolutions and redirect it toward the field of political struggle, an aim
Benjamin once characterized as equivalent to “splitting the atom” (1999, 463). In order to do so,
however, it is first necessary to analyze how each image is elaborated within the context of its
emergence, and what impasses it reveals. All wish images express the longing for absolution.
Nevertheless, each expression is contingent, and interpretation must address this variability.
To this end, I developed a tool with which to interpret any wish image as the crystallization
of three first-order dialectical abstractions to which any other normative or ontological
consideration (e.g. right/wrong, black/white) can be subordinated: sacred/profane, order/disorder,
universal/particular. I apprehend these dialectics as intersecting axes, with each pole denoting an
“extreme” coordinate (see Figure 1). This approach is borrowed from Benjamin, who “thought in
coordinates… He charts philosophical ideas visually within an unreconciled and transitory field of
oppositions that can perhaps best be pictured in terms of coordinates of contradictory terms, the
‘synthesis’ of which is not a movement toward resolution, but the point at which their axes
intersect” (Buck-Morss 1991, 210).
My axes are formally defined: sacred/profane designates the distinction between “things
set apart and forbidden” and everything else; order/disorder designates the logic of perception by
which matter is understood to be in or “out of place”; universal/particular designates the character
of the relation vis-a-vis the object, i.e., proclaiming Christ as Lord and Savior vs. pursuing
50
knowledge of the historical Christ (Durkheim 1965, 35; Douglas 2002, 44; Girard 1979). The
resulting three-dimensional schema represents the longing for absolution as such and reveals the
wish image in motion, as it is variably invoked as a compensation for this unrealized longing. Each
of its eight modes is animated by a thesis—the unconscious compensation associated with the
activated coordinates—and its antithesis. The coordinates sacred-order-universal, for instance,
correspond to the compensation of Orthodoxy: “There is a whole to which we are subordinated”
(thesis); “If this is complete, why do I feel lack?” (antithesis).
For this initial case study, each of my catalogued musician angels (~40) became a node
representing a distinct configuration of tensions within a given mode. Because each node is a static
expression of an ongoing historical-relational process, we confront a certain problem of
“incommensurability”: it is not possible to plot dialectics any more than one can plot an orb on
paper (Jameson 1992, 34). Nevertheless, by establishing a contingent nodal point through
interpretation, it becomes possible to discern both a wish image’s attributes and its likely
developmental trajectory. From here, rather than letting the wish image run its course until it is
supplanted by an alternate dream, we might use it to identify characteristics of our neoliberal
present and devise political strategies that push people toward emancipatory conclusions and keep
them from succumbing to the seductive “resolutions” of fascism.
51

Figure 8: Absolution

Although the eight modes in this schema are stable, the nodes are best understood as
relations, or as static expressions of a process still unfolding. As with a snapshot, the position of
each node is momentary and captures its prevailing tendencies. Representing the space in this
way—being mindful of the contradictory tendencies that create conflicts within each node and
push it toward some other position—allows us to grasp the movement of the angel as wish image.
I built this schematization based on the angel’s particular characteristics, but the model gradually
revealed its own logical coherence. [I will need to further justify this procedure, through reference
to both the validity of heuristics and to Benjamin’s method, as outlined in Convolute N and the
Theses, especially with respect to the constructive principle; see epigraph.] Because the
transhistorical wish for absolution is mediated through the historical specificity of social
organization and experience, both considerations determine a node’s placement.
52
Eventually it became evident that my three-dimensional space did not pertain exclusively
to angels. Instead, because all wish images are refracted expressions of the ur-historical longing
for absolution, as established above, the model inferred through my analysis of angels was in fact
a model for analyzing the longing for absolution itself. In their totality, the eight modes of this
schema represent absolution; the dialectics represented by its three axes are trans-historical. Any
wish image could therefore be subjected to analysis using this tool, and it is my aim to clarify how
one might proceed in further investigations through my consideration of the angel as case study.
If each angel node represents a moment on a trajectory, the course of that trajectory is
determined by the lack arising from the impossibility of resolving the angel’s animating paradox
within the constraints a discrete coordinate. Nodes are therefore always moving toward one or
another dialectical extreme. The resolution of this lack, meanwhile, can only be expressed as an
alternate node that is defined by an alternate lack. This method attests to what Fredric Jameson
once described as “incommensurability”: ultimately, it is not possible to plot dialectics, just as you
cannot plot an orb on paper (Jameson 1992, 34). Yet, by analyzing the attributes and likely
trajectory of any given node in my schema, it becomes possible to seize the angel in motion.
19

The dialectical concepts at the poles of each axis are formally defined. Before providing
these definitions, however, it is important to note that these axes are characterized by an important
homology: with each dialectic, the attribution of coherence (the sacred, order, and universal poles)
is the precondition for the vision of disarticulation (the profane, disorder, and particular poles),
and the disarticulation contains within it the premises for the production for a new coherence.

19
Notably Lacan refers centrally to the problem of lack. However, he approaches the problem more as a
logical than a historical one, and the implication is that there will always be lack. In contrast, Benjamin
had a vision for the resolution of lack that was historical, as when he refers to a “redeemed humanity”
receiving the “fullness of its past” in “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”
53
The sacred/profane dialectic is the most familiar of the three. On this basis I have used it
to organize the current study into two parts. Part One deals with angel invocations that fall within
the sacred half of my schema, while Part Two addresses those that fall into the profane half. To
make use of these concepts, however, we must first note the basic challenge they pose for historical
materialist analysis. That is, like the idea of God, the sacred both does and does not exist. Insofar
as the sacred has taken on a historical reality with concrete consequences for the material world,
it does exist. However, insofar as the sacred is not material but, instead, an idea formed at a
particular phase of human consciousness, it does not exist. It is therefore crucial to orient to these
concepts historically. When we do, we discover that the profane is meaningless without the sacred.
Historically, Rene Girard argues, the sacred predates the profane; the profane becomes
comprehensible only through reference to a sacred exteriority (Girard 1972). This exteriority
comes into being through fear of violence, which compelled the development of sacrificial rituals
through which to channel and manage this violence—rituals that functioned through the
production of scapegoats. They create a situation where the violence of “all against all” can be
contained by way of a violence of “all against one.” The scapegoat, in being marked for expulsion
and destruction, becomes sacred, and as such is both reviled and revered. The scapegoat is reviled
because it is held responsible for all social problems, and it is revered because through sacrifice it
binds together the social world—until the next episode of mimetic rivalry, which demands another
scapegoat. Sacrifice was necessary prior to the development of sovereign judicial power, which
put an end to mimetic rivalry. As a result, we became separated from the practice of sacrifice,
which today strikes us as odd. Yet, the concrete knowledge people gain through profanation is
impossible without sacralization: the first step of making the world intelligible.
54
Sacralization is a conceptual shortcut to absolution. It is to this end that people pluck things
out of the world and make them sacred: make it key to understanding the world and the will to
absolution. This process is not object dependent; the object is rather arbitrary. You can sacralize
anything. Here, the sacred is a mode. In this way, the sacred pole, and the concept of the sacred,
more precisely refers to the historical process of sacralization. The profane pole likewise refers to
the process of profanation. These processes denote either extreme of an ongoing historical struggle.
How do you set something apart in a way that allows you to see beyond the established frame for
your existence, and at the same time allows you to be grounded in it? This axis refers to an
approach rather than to content (i.e. the church). In other words, a foundational premise of this
study is that you don’t need to be a pious believer within an institutional religion in order to engage
in sacralization. More specifically, one need not be a Christian to have a sacred approach to
scripture or to the elaboration of the angel.
Following Emile Durkheim, sacred denotes “things set apart and forbidden” and profane
denotes everything else (Durkheim 1965, 35). Sacralization thus entails the process or condition
of being set apart as the extrinsic reference by which people make sense of the profane world, or
any enforcement of this boundary and distinction. This process is not object-dependent (object
and/or act are arbitrary); value corresponds largely to the condition of being hidden/held in
sanctum. Profanation consists of both a disavowal of the sacred (the set-aside, extrinsic reference)
and an effort to render it as a concrete feature of everyday life, which necessarily entails its
debasement; the sacred/profane boundary is pierced, either to bring the sacralized object back into
the world or to flood the sanctum with the world, a process closely related to revealing what is
hidden, or to entering what sociologist Erving Goffman famously referred to as the “backstage” of
human interaction (Goffman 1959).
55
The Order/Disorder axis designates the logic of perception by which matter is understood
to be in or out of place. Epistemologically, order predates disorder: the world is full of stuff, but
we don’t perceive that stuff as disordered (regardless of its state) until we devise a conception of
its ordering. When things don’t adhere to that conception, we become aware of “matter out of
place,” a state that for anthropologist Mary Douglas entails “a set of ordered relations and a
contravention of that order” (Douglas 2002, 44). Ordering corresponds to the degrees of precision
by which matter is perceived to be in its proper place; order tends toward stasis, or inertia.
Disordering corresponds to the degree of distance by which matter is perceived to be out of its
proper place. Disorder tends toward possibility—a correlation Nietzsche once observed when he
mused that: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star”
(Nietzsche 1995, 17).
Finally, the Universal/Particular axis designates the position of the relation vis-a-vis the
object. Epistemologically, universal predates particular. To take an illustration from within
religious practice (germane to this investigation): orientations to the figure of Jesus Christ are
instructively marked by both by universal conceptions (i.e., proclaiming Christ as Lord and Savior)
and particular ones (i.e., pursuing knowledge of the historical Christ). A position on the universal
half of the axis indicates that the relation is intrinsic to the object: through its universalization the
object grows toward the encapsulation of all other possible objects, and their relationships. A
position on the particular half of the axis indicates that the relation is extrinsic to the object: through
its particularization the object comes increasingly to be uniquely itself, and so put into relation
with a growing number of other unique selves.
The temporal orientation to each dichotomy corresponds to a principle of movement—i.e.
sacred predates the profane, and movement toward the profane consists of both a disavowal of the
56
sacred and an effort to render it more general and thus concrete as a feature of everyday life.
Because the same can also be said of the other axes and their poles (universal predates the
particular, order predates disorder) the movement within the wish of absolution as such then starts
at sacred-order-universal and moves toward its most communist point in the profane-disorder-
particular octant. This movement thus informs the organization of the current work, which follows
the angel through modes that correspond to distinct coordinates of the principal dialectical tensions
under consideration.

The Angel’s Coordinates
Using these axes as guides, I researched popular impressions and perceptions of the embodied
angels in my catalogue—that is, how other people relate to them—to determine the placement of
each node. Through textual analysis (of lyrics, album art, music videos, celebrity news, fan
literature, artist statements) and participant observation at concerts and services, I correlated
popular impressions of the pop-star angels with an analysis of the dynamics of race, ethnicity,
gender, sexuality, and class expressed in their respective elaborations. I analyze the biographies of
my pop-star angels to uncover the transhistorical tensions and historical particularities that animate
them. The longing for absolution has produced heightened moments both of identification with the
angel, and of its disavowal. As I grappled with the variations among these examples, it became
clear that each momentary invocation was the elaboration of a singular mode of the angel.
Embodied angels were already constellated with prior elaborations that were purposively similar.
I selected my cases on the basis of how well the inferred mode had been consciously articulated.
Through this process, it became clear that the modes are themselves characterized by
specific animating contradictions. By naming these contradictions I was able to clarify the logical
57
implications of what I had intuited. The result of this effort was: a) a name for each mode; b) a
clarifying description of its animating thesis and antithesis; and c) the principal affect arising from
the antithetical tension. By sharpening these abstractions, the internal logic of this closed system
gradually began to snap into place, solved in the manner of a Rubik’s cube. A complete summary
of the modes is as follows:

Orthodoxy (Sacred-Order-Universal)
Thesis: There is a whole to which we are subordinated.
Antithesis: If this is complete, why do I feel lack? DOUBT.

Antinomianism (Sacred-Disorder-Universal)
Thesis: The whole has been misconceived, so we must smash it to begin anew.
Antithesis: My rebellious negation adheres to its own rigid orthodoxy. TRAGEDY.

Deconstruction (Sacred-Disorder-Particular)
Thesis: There is no whole—and even if there was, I wouldn’t want to be part of it.
Antithesis: “There is no whole” is itself a totalizing claim; order reappears even amidst
fragments. FUTILITY

Egoism (Sacred-Order-Particular)
Thesis: There is a whole and everyone can contribute by pursuing their own course.
Antithesis: The whole is not necessary and I am autonomous, so there is no contribution
to make. NIHILISM.

Negation (Profane-Disorder-Universal)
Thesis: There is no whole, only I.
Antithesis: Nothingness remains a modality through which absolution is lived. HOPE.

58
Complementarianism (Profane-Order-Universal)
Thesis: There is a whole and each of us must do our part.
Antithesis: I am more of the whole than the part I have been given. RESENTMENT.

Inclusion (Profane-Order-Particular)
Thesis: There is a whole and it does not recognize me, but it should.
Antithesis: Recognition debases me, so I shouldn’t be part of this whole. REFUSAL.

Synecdoche (Profane-Disorder-Particular)
Thesis: The whole is contained in this part, and I can be like this part.
Antithesis: I want to be the whole. NARCISSISM.

In this dissertation, I begin with the wishful mode of Orthodoxy, addressed in Chapter 2. I begin
here because the other seven modes deviate from this one. Rather than present an historical
periodization of these deviations, my aim was to highlight historical invocations that best capture
the tensions under consideration within each field. This methodological distinction is important
and somewhat complicated; in Chapter Two, on the mode of Orthodoxy (sacred-order-universal),
I do refer to a concrete periodization, revisiting the Protestant Reformation as the force that gave
rise in the European context to the angels of the Antinomianism mode (sacred-disorder-universal),
the focus of Chapter Three. Even as such historicization comes into view, however, my focus is
on the textures of each mode, which attest to a general correlation between the mode and the social
conditions that activate them—i.e. there is a strong correlation between our current moment of
social development, that I call neoliberalism, and the modes now harboring the greatest number of
embodied angels. I draw out these textures by offering a historiographical sketch of their material
referents. If this rendering suggests the possibility of greater precision in the placement of the angel
invocations (specific nodes)—where each mode contains numerical values for the assigning of a
59
given node—I determined that this level of detail would primarily distract from the primary
objective of the current work. It seemed more generative to draw out their generality, to foreground
how each mode corresponds to an ideal type, or possible tendency, within the given mode.
By changing one coordinate at a time as I progress through the chapters, I show how
everything is shot through with everything else: the angel is in constant motion, animated at any
given moment by competing pulls on its elaboration toward one wishful mode or another. To be
sure, it is difficult to talk about something that happens all at once within a language that’s
necessarily successive. Indeed, this entire investigation might be avoided by simply concluding
that people’s identification with the angel is “overdetermined.” Against such impulses Benjamin
once described his method as nothing less than the effort “[t]o cultivate fields where, until now,
only madness has reigned” (Benjamin 1999b, 456). By following his lead, I offer this approach
not only to help us make sense of the angel, but to grapple with any other wish image.

Seizing the Angel in Motion
We look at wish images to become conscious of them. In this way we can transform them, so that
rather than being images of a future utopia they instead become outlines of prevalent
manifestations of desire under present conditions. Through these outlines we might then begin to
resolve the contradictions we inherit from the past. By constellating wish images, we can arrive at
a diagnosis of contemporary social problems. If, then, we can inspire resistance to letting the wish
image simply run its course until it must be supplanted with an alternate wishful identification, we
can instead use it to identify concrete characteristics of our neoliberal hellscape.
This procedure reverse engineers the one Benjamin describes, whereby developments in
the means of production propel the pervasiveness of particular wish images:
60

To the form of the new means of production, which to begin with is still dominated
by the old (Marx), there correspond images in the collective consciousness in which
the new and the old are intermingled. These images are ideals, and in them the
collective seeks not only to transfigure, but also to transcend, the immaturity of the
social product and the deficiencies of the social order of production.

The wish image always tells us something about transformations in the means of production. This
is what makes Benjamin’s analysis materialist. The pervasiveness of the angel reveals that we
know some kind of opportunity has arisen—but what will people be drawing upon within
neoliberalism to realize the dream of absolution?
The upshot of this question is not only that we might get people to contend with their
identification with the angel, but also to show that they already are, to varying degrees of
consciousness, alert to the opportunities and obstacles of the present moment. I tackle this upshot
in my Conclusion, drawing upon the insights of this case study of the angel, which in its variations
reveal elements of our material conditions that, if harnessed, might be brought to bear on
emancipatory transformation. The main contribution of this approach is that it helps us to see things
that would otherwise remain occluded—and, more specifically, to see how things might better fit
together if we can first allow their current relations to fall apart. Ultimately, this method is
successful if it is illuminating.

61
Chapter 2: Orthodoxy

Thesis: There is a whole to which we are subordinated.
Antithesis: If this is complete, why do I feel lack? DOUBT
Coordinates: Sacred-Order-Universal

“Singing with angels” is a recurrent motif in Christianity. Its scriptural basis is clearest in the Book
of Psalms, a book of the Hebrew Bible comprising 150 ancient religious verses that constitute “the
bedrock of Judeo-Christian hymnology” (Heskes 1994, 41). Here, not only do we find a meditation
on praise with an emphasis on song as its ideal form (the word psalm, “sacred poem or song,”
derives from the Greek psalmos, “song sung to a harp”), but, as the book ends, Psalm 148 enjoins
the angels to take part: “Praise ye the LORD. Praise ye the LORD from the heavens: praise him in
the heights.

Praise ye him, all his angels: praise ye him, all his hosts” (Oxford Dictionaries Online
n.d.). If in later scriptural depictions angels’ praise is temporally distant—as when the heavenly
host praises God at the birth of Jesus in the Christian Bible (Luke 2:13)—the immediacy of Psalm
148 establishes the possibility of a nearer proximity. This motif of “singing with angels” is thus
the historical and epistemological basis for today’s embodied angels.
In this chapter, I constellate a set of angel invocations that fall within the mode of
Orthodoxy, and that illustrate the lineage of this motif. This set shows the angel in its extrinsic
expression (the angels of heaven) but habits of citation and extrapolation have allowed for its
adaptation and modification (i.e., its metaphorical and embodied invocation). Above all, variability
within this mode reveals that people at radically different moments in history have wanted the
angel to sing, and that this specifical associational desire has animated their citations.
62
Music and Angels in Scripture
The angels of scripture are ambiguously proximate to earthly life, and this introduces a logical
conundrum: if we can praise alongside angels, this suggests that we can be among angels; if we
can be among angels, we are, to some extent, like angels; and if we are like angels, we might as
well be angels ourselves. These logical leaps might at first appear bold, until we recall that the
power of suggestion underlies much scriptural extrapolation, including the presumed association
of angels and music. It was not until the twelfth century that it became popular in the West to
visually render angels as musical, David Albert Jones recounts, and this was for lack of scriptural
reference (Jones 2011, 19). The angels of scripture certainly praise God, but it can only be inferred
that they do so with song. Not until the New Testament did scripture contain an angel playing a
musical instrument—and it is a trumpet heralding the last judgement, not a harp symbolizing
heavenly grace. Indeed, the stereotype of angels playing harps has no scriptural basis, Jones
explains (though the etymology of “psalm” indicates a preference for the instrument), and likely
derives from misreading of the Book of Revelation, in which saints, not angels, play harps (2011,
20). The idea of angelic musicality attests to the practical historic relationship between music and
human worship, and alerts us to the enduring desire for the angel to be musical.
Human desire for angelic song is in fact central to Christian conceptions of the angel’s
musicality. To grasp this dimension of the motif, consider Raphael Sanzio’s The Ecstasy of St.
Cecilia (1516-17), commissioned at the height of the Renaissance, by which time the visual trope
of musical angels was well established. In the painting, St. Cecilia, patron saint of musicians and
Church music, holds a portative pipe organ and stands surrounded by St. Paul, St. John the
Evangelist, St. Augustine, and Mary Magdalene. She is “dressed in golden yellow garments
symbolizing desire of God and lifts her face upwards to where the dark, cloud-ridden sky opens
63
above her showing a brightly lit glory of angels” (Mossakowski 1968, 2). We are meant to interpret
that through her pious devotion to God, St. Cecilia achieved ecstasy, earning a vision of angels
that Raphael portrayed as a choir singing from hymnals.

Figure 8: The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia, Raphael (1517)

The painting’s iconography emphasizes the opposition between religious music and secular music,
with angels solely associated with the former. Historically, music in Christianity gives primacy to the
voice, whereas instruments hold a diminished, secular status—a moral distinction that flourished in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the painting, the singing angels are not depicted with instruments,
art historian Stanislaw Mossakowski observes, “because the human voice, being a direct
expression of the soul and at the same time closely connected with words, which in religious songs
are often divine words, has, according to St. Augustine and other Fathers of the Church, the
character which is most suitable for the most important, that is the religious function of music”
(1968, 4). St. Cecilia’s piety is thus affirmed by the various instruments laying rejected on the
64
ground at her feet, and it is her adherence to this orthodox parsing that earns her an encounter with
“celestial music… accessible on earth only to people in a state of ecstasy.”

St. Cecilia standing over them and at the same time dominating the music which they
symbolise, lifted into ecstasy by the organ playing and listening to the angels singing, clad
in a quasi-ecclesiastical garment approaching a dalmatic becomes in this context a
personification of religious music. (Mossakowski 1968, 4; 6)

The mode of Orthodoxy (sacred-order-universal) designates the canonical orientation that
animates this painting (and much of Western art), whereby the promise of unmediated communion
with God inspires subordination to the formal strictures of religious institutional orthodoxy (i.e.,
the Church). Angel invocations that fall within this mode are characterized by the recognition of
the angel’s sacredness, which is in each case presupposed, but which varies based on the extent of
mediation required to achieve communion with God. In these invocations, the angel (like Christ
and like God’s love) is for everyone, and this universality is realized by the Church, which is itself
all encompassing: you are the church, and insofar as the church is an object, it exists on the basis
of its presupposed interpenetration with all objects around and within in, including the
congregants.
Variability within this mode, meanwhile, is most perceptible when read through the
order/disorder dialectic. To hear the angels sing requires that one abide by norms that are
institutionalized along narrow lines by the Church, and the precision of which can be measured in
word and deed: order. Logically, perfect adherence to institutional norms precludes theological
transformation and ultimately leads to stasis. So it is that in Raphael’s portrayal—an image of
ecstatic reverence according to the norms of sixteenth-century Roman Catholicism—St. Cecilia’s
body appears as though suspended. “After attaining the state of ecstasy, enabling her to hear the
65
angels singing,” Mossakowski interprets, “she lowered the now unnecessary organetto from which
some pipes started to fall out” (1968, 5).
To be sure, “singing with angels” is not an exclusively orthodox motif. Instead, it recurs at
different historical junctures in more- or less-orthodox expressions, and sometimes in other modes
entirely. It finds profaned expression, for instance, in colloquial descriptions of someone having
“the voice of an angel” or in references to the “angels singing” moment of epiphany. Following
the motif toward disorder one finds, for instance, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 description of
Raphael’s St. Cecilia, recounted in a letter:

There is an unity & perfection in it of an incommunicable kind. The central figure St.
Cæcilia seems rapt in such inspiration as produced her image in the painters mind… She
is listening to the music of heaven, & I imagine, has just ceased to sing, for the four figures
that surround her evidently point, by their attitudes, towards [her]; particularly St. John
who with a tender yet impassioned gesture bends his countenance towards her languid with
the depth of his emotion (Shelley 2015, 52).

Having gone searching for something, the English poet chose to write home about this painting,
which he visited at least twice during his time in Bologna. This alerts us to how orthodox angel
invocations are mobilized in the elaboration of unorthodox ones, and, in particular, to the
resonance of this motif within Romanticism. A secular rebellion against the supersession of
scientism over art and affect, the Romantics identified less with the realism of the Renaissance
than with the earlier Gothic art that Raphael and his contemporaries explicitly disparaged as
“disordered.”
20
Indeed, in contrast to Raphael’s orthodox portrayal of St. Cecilia’s ecstatic vision,
the abundant angel invocations in Romanticism were disordered, profaned, and particularized,

20
Raphael is credited with first disparaging this style as “gothic” in a letter to Pope Leo X (c. 1518)—a
qualifier then adopted by the Italian artist and writer Giorgio Vasari, who described Gothic art as
“monstrous and barbarous,” characterized by “disorder” (Homan 2006).

66
generally emphasizing the individual subject as the center of relational experience by recasting the
idea of God as nature and the sublime.
21
Shelley’s appreciation of Raphael’s painting arises
through this profanation, and one can even detect his desire to emancipate the angel from the
subject of Christianity, as when he describes the angels of Baroque painter Marcantonio
Franceschini as “the loveliest ideal beings ever created by the human mind. These are generally
(whether in the capacity of Cherubims or Cupids) accessories to the rest of his pictures which
are all on sacred subjects, & the under plot of their lovely and infantine play is something
almost pathetic from its excess of unpretending beauty.” This predisposition is clearer still in an
addition to the letter by Mary Shelley: “One of the best of his pieces is an ‘annunciation to the
Virgin.’ The angel is beaming in beauty—The Virgin soft retiring & simple” (Shelley 2015, 51).
Considered in this light, one can’t help but read Shelley’s description of the St. Cecilia for its
implicit critique. Perceiving her in the moment her singing ceases, he seems to call our attention
to orthodoxy’s limits: why has she stopped?
From the vantage of nineteenth-century England, after all, Renaissance art could only be
seen through the ascetic influence of Protestantism and its constitutive orthodoxies—with which

21
This orientation was indebted to the Protestant idea of the personal relationship with God, one form that
profanation took within Romanticism. However, although united in their identification with Enlightenment
humanism and their fascination with the body and the range of affect, the Romantics split in their
orientations to Christianity. Criticism of the modern era led some Romantics into nostalgia for the Medieval
period, whereby the Church came be understood as a lost cosmology, even compelling conversions to
Catholicism. Angels in Romanticism are perhaps most pronounced in the work of anti-orthodox Christian
William Blake, whose poem “I Heard and Angel” (1863) opens with the following verse:

I heard an Angel singing
When the day was springing
Mercy Pity Peace
Is the worlds release
Thus he sung all day
Over the new mown hay
Till the sun went down
And haycocks looked brown.
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the Romantics took grave exception, even as they identified with its humanism. Indeed, the very
year Raphael completed his painting of St. Cecilia, 1517, Martin Luther published his Ninety-five
Theses, disputing the Roman Catholic practice of indulgences and thereby launching the Protestant
Reformation. Rejecting Catholicism’s emphasis on “good works,” Luther and other Protestant
leaders instead conceived faith as an internal and spiritual matter. In contrast to Roman
Catholicism’s theories of sacraments, saints, miracles, and other mediating forces, the reformed
church gave rise to the idea of “a personal relationship with God”—a premise that gave way to
angel invocations that fall deeper still within the sacred-order-absolute mode.
Here a clarification about method is warranted, for in describing the character of this mode
I have already traversed many centuries, with several more to bring us up to the present day. The
aim of this provisional genealogy is to illuminate the extrapolative logic of citation by which
today’s embodied angels of popular music have emerged. As we have established, the axes in our
schema are homologous with respect to sequence: sacred precedes profane; order precedes
disorder; universal precedes particular (see “Introduction,” page 33). It is thus necessary to
demonstrate how all invocations of angelic musicality are citations of the scriptural extrapolations
that originate in this mode.
Furthermore, because the canonical musicality of the angel is historically inseparable from
scripture, its elaboration recurrently circles back to a puritan impulse; the compulsion to discover
a more ordered, pure, and unmediated communion with God has at many junctures led Christians
to revisit the angel. And for our purposes it is important to show that even in such puritanical
contexts—where angels have been downplayed on account of their intermediary status or because
they had been rendered as icons—the desire for angelic musicality has persisted.
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If we follow the “singing with angels” motif from the node of Raphael’s St. Cecilia along
in the direction of order, we eventually come to the Genevan Psalter of 1542. Composed under the
guidance and approval of second-generation Reformation leader John Calvin, it refers only once
to the “singing with angels” motif in a composition based on Psalm 148, “All Praise the Lord, O
Sons of Light!”

All Praise the Lord, O Sons of Light!
Extol Him in the highest height.
Praise Him, His angels; from your post
Praise God with all the heav’nly host.

This invocation is one of the most sacralized, ordered, and universalized invocations in this mode.
It reveals the influence of Calvin’s asceticism not only in his conception of angels, but also in his
conception of music—and in so doing alerts us to the dilemma posed by their association, and also
to the basis for its persistence.
Unlike the asceticism of Medieval monks—whose piety “served to drive him farther away
from everyday life, because the holiest task was definitely to surpass all worldly morality”—
Calvin’s puritanism emphasized “the necessity of proving one’s faith in worldly activity. Therein
it gave the broader groups of religiously inclined people a positive incentive to asceticism” (Weber
2013, 74). For Max Weber, Calvin’s asceticism and doctrine of predestination instilled among its
adherents a pressing anxiety about whether one was among the elect. This in turn inspired an ethic
of subordination to the rigid order of the reform church. And whereas Luther preserved in his break
with Catholicism some of its emphasis on emotion (of which the ecstasy of St. Cecilia represents
an ultimate form), for Calvin “[f]eeling and emotion, aesthetics and beauty, were all subordinated
to theological soundness” (Huh 2012, 17). Amid popular fascination with angels, Calvin therefore
warned against speculation as to their nature.
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In the Institutes [of the Christian Religion], in his biblical commentary and in his sermons,
Calvin seemed to be intent on peeling back layers of what he considered to be human
invention about angels that had accrued over the centuries at the hands of Catholic
theologians, who had utilized obscure references in scripture, in classical works and, some
would argue—Calvin among them—no small degree of imagination to construct an
elaborate angelology, including a hierarchy of angels. In response, the Reformer sought to
distinguish what little he thought could actually be known from scripture about the nature,
history, and roles of angels, and to leave the rest in the realm of mystery. He took pains to
remove powers long attributed to angels and to show their true source and dependence in
God. (Minkema 2021, 393)

Scriptural adherence and its corollary, religious aversion to that which ought to be left to mystery,
similarly informed Calvin’s orientation to music. In his prefatory “Epistle to the reader” in the
Genevan Psalter, La forme des prieres et chantz ecclesiastiques, he insisted upon suitable liturgical
music: “there is a great difference between the music that is made to entertain people at home and
at table, and the Psalms which are sung in church, in the presence of God and His angels.”

Therefore, if any wish rightly to judge the kind of music presented here, we hope he will
find it to be holy and pure… (Calvin 1998, 365)

Observing music’s “insidious and well-nigh incredible power to move us whither it will,” Calvin
implored Christians to “restrict the use of music to make it serve only what is respectable and never
use it for unbridled dissipations or for emasculating ourselves with immoderate pleasure” (Calvin
1998). In contrast to Lutheran services, which permitted choirs, instrumentation, non-scriptural
hymns, and clergy musical selections to correspond with sermons, “Calvinists in Geneva used the
psalter in a tightly circumscribed schedule which allowed for the singing of the full cycle of 150
psalms twice a year (a cycle lasted 25 weeks).” Joshua Busman recounts:

The emphasis was thus on the utilization of and familiarity with the entire corpus of psalms
rather than on the preferential use of particular favorites of the clergy or congregation. Use
was dictated by the value of the text––which was equal since all were biblical texts––rather
than its musical or thematic appropriateness. (Busman 2011, 32)

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Reflecting this utilitarianism, the music itself took the form of metrical homophonic compositions
for the unaccompanied voice. “Calvinist values of simplicity and austerity informed this aesthetic
preference as did the commitment to congregationalism,” Busman explains. “By eliminating the
professional choir and musicians and having all members sing in unison, new music needed to be
limited in range, eminently singable and rhythmically simple” (2011, 30). Indeed, Calvin viewed
liturgical music as crucial to the success of the reformed church. “[I]ntroducing the singing of
psalms into public worship,” Charles Garside notes in his study of Calvin’s theology of music,
was among Calvin’s four “first essentials” of reform, “without which the new church could be
neither ‘well ordered’ nor ‘regulated’” (Garside 1979, as cited in Huh 2012).
Calvin’s disavowal of Catholicism was not profanation. His reform church was a
sacralization, animated by the universal premise of predestination and God’s absolute sovereignty,
and characterized by highly ordered adherence to scripture. Under his influence the “singing with
angels” motif survived, but in the petrifying shadow of prohibition. This puritan impulse
instructively directs us toward the compatible mysteriousness of angels and music, and their
resulting common allure. To be sure, their mysteriousness is distinct. As we have established, the
angel is fraught because of its ontological ambivalence; angels manifest as bodies but are at the
same time ethereal. Music, meanwhile, is normatively fraught because of its inherent potential to
meet us without the mediation of language or signs. As Nietzsche (1872) suggested of orchestral
music, musical sounds evoke but do not represent. For this reason, it can be elating, but also, and
even at the same time, terrifying.
This similarity point to what in Lacanian psychoanalysis is understood as the Real: that
which falls outside of the symbolic order of language, a primordial something we desire and fear
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and cannot describe, for it lacks a proper object.
22
Extending Freud, Lacan understood the symbolic
order as central to the stages of psychosexual development. His “mirror stage” refers to the process
by which infants enter into language, which provides the basis for a conception of the self that
corresponds to the roles offered by the rules of grammar. Dependent and lacking motor skills, the
infant at a certain point glimpses itself in a mirror and in this moment the “I is precipitated in a
primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and
before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject” (Lacan 2006, 76). The I is
in the first instance bound to its implausibility; the mirror reveals the I as there and not there.
The “not-there” is the domain of the Real. While language provides structure for the
assertion of personhood, personhood itself propels us toward encounters with the Real, which
defies language. When we get close to it, we can only grasp at approximations, such as the
transcendent religious experience portrayed in Raphael’s Ecstasy of St. Cecilia. But the Real is at
once a stimulant and a problem: no sooner do we feel transcendent than the sensation overwhelms
us. We desire the Real, but when within our grasp it erupts as the lack that characterizes our
experience of subjectivity. Fear of the Real is the threshold beyond which absolution awaits.
Angels and music bring us into contact with the Real, and the longing and fearsomeness
that they inspire is intensified through their union—in the idea of angelic musicality, and
particularly in the motif of “singing with angels.” Indeed, philosopher Mladen Dolar interprets the
voice in particular as an exemplar of the Real, facilitating encounters with a “void,” a space in

22
I have previously argued that we can apprehend the power of music as “wish sounds: vocally produced
sonic encounters in which the Real becomes the substance—or non-substance—of longing” (O’Connor
2018). Here, music is reminiscent of Benjamin’s wish image in that it projects the promise of oneness, but
it refers to something that defies representation. In these sounds, we experience wishful identification with
the void in which identification itself dissolves. Although it arises sonically, the wish sound is at once
intrinsic to sound and not sound at all, recognizable by two cues: patterns of wishful identification in verbal
descriptions of the sounds, and our own feeling upon listening—you know it when you hear it.

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which “the voice comes to resonate” (Dolar 2006, 42). Considered this way, we can begin to
understand why the voice has been privileged in religious orientations to music. It is also no
wonder why puritanical thinkers have repeatedly sought to manage enthusiasm for music and
angels alike: both invite ecstasy, which animates peoples investment in religious institutions, but
so too can such religious experiences inspire people to doubt orthodox interpretations of the divine
and so to carve their own paths. Indeed, today, when religious institutions must market themselves
competitively and foster the creative inclinations of their congregations, this managerial impulse
among church leaders comes up against capitalism’s recuperation of the notion of “creativity.”

Angels of Neoliberal Evangelicalism
Contests over what constitutes suitable church music persist today in some corners of Christianity,
but were largely resolved with the proliferation of “praise and worship music”: massively popular,
genre-fluid music that is defined by its megachurch concert aesthetic and unapologetically
Christian lyrics.
23
Through the “worship wars” of the 1980s and 90s, which were animated
primarily by debates about “crossover” music (music ambiguous enough in its Christian message
that record labels could also market it to secular audiences), the Christian music recording industry
triumphed. The two most prominent recording labels of “praise and worship music” are Passion

23
Disputes over appropriate church music must be distinguished from Christian moral attacks on “secular”
popular music and artists (such as those examined in Chapter 3) although they arise from common sources.
Both reflect the complex interpenetration of something we call the “secular” and something we call the
“religious.” Indeed, as Steven Kettell (2019) explains, when we move beyond its normative usage in
designating the separation of church and state, “secular” is an unstable and highly contested concept.
Epistemologically entangled with its purported binary opposite, attempts to define the word lead to
questions of its material basis and conceptual validity, and to observations about the religiosity of so-called
“secular” phenomena.

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Conferences’ sixstepsrecords and Hillsong Music, from which we can draw a cluster of
contemporary angel invocations that hover in this mode near Raphael’s St. Cecilia.
Founded in 1997, Passion Conferences has grown from a small 1980s church (initially
called Choice Ministries) into one of the largest evangelical organizations in the United States. In
addition to hosting and touring stadium-concert nondenominational megachurch events tailored
for college students, it runs sixstepsrecords, which initially gained notoriety through the release of
live albums but now features its own roster of popular Christian artists. Australia’s Pentecostal
Hillsong Church, with its music production and publishing arm, Hillsong Music, rose to
prominence along a nearly identical trajectory, from a humble start in 1983 in suburban Sydney
into a multi-million-dollar global enterprise with more than thirty gold and platinum music sales
awards and an estimated 50 million people singing their songs every week, in sixty languages.
Today, both organizations’ respective aesthetics are largely indistinguishable: extremely high
production value, exceptional creative talent, and, as Joshua Bosman observed in his study of
Passion Conferences with insights about the broader milieu, “a relatively stable set of sonic
gestures through which [divine] encounters are most often negotiated.”

Specific levels of musical density, volume, and textual complexity give worshippers a
sense of which songs––and which parts of which songs––are most conducive to spiritual
experience. Often times, the most spiritually meaningful moments at Passion are those
which combine the highest levels of musical intensity with the lowest levels of textual
complexity, with some songs eschewing the use of any text at all in favor of singing on
vocables like “oh” or “whoa.” (2015, 124)

Hillsong similarly aspires toward production of transcendent experience. Their biggest act is
Hillsong United, which has racked up numerous international hits, but none is as popular as their
2013 song “Oceans (Where Feet May Fail),” which spent a record 61 weeks at No.1 on the
Billboard Hot Christian Songs charts and is the first song from this tally to ever crack into the
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Billboard Top 100. Taya Smith’s lead vocal performance on “Oceans” propelled her to Christian
stardom. “People have said ‘thank you,’” she recounts in one interview. “Some people thank me—
I know it sounds weird, but—for the high note because it’s that, it’s that moment when...” She
stops and her eyes glaze over. “I get emotional.”

That moment for them is, like, where they just don’t know words to cry to God, like words
to explain the situation. It just kind of, like, unlocks things. Some people have said that it’s
like giving expression to something that I didn’t know that I could say to God... that
moment of, like, this is so hard yet I trust you. (Warren 2016)

This “musically-constructed experience of emotion” is bound up with the enduring motif of
singing with angels (Busman 2015, 126). At Passion Conference 2022, lead ensemble Passion and
songwriter Sean Curran performed “Maranatha,” with its lyrics: “Hallelujah / Maranatha / Holy is
the Lord / With all the angels / And all of Heaven / Bowing down before You / Oh I lay it all
down.” The song “Jesus, Only Jesus,” also by Passion, contains a similar invocation: “Holy, King
almighty Lord / Saints and angels all adore/ I join with them and bow before / Jesus, only Jesus.”
During performances, these lyrics are projected so the congregation can share in this proximity
with the angels. One worship leader at Passion 2013, recounting his favorite song to Busman,
explained that its “chorus packed a lot of power and emotion without having actually said very
much… The ‘whoa’ part has so many layers to it as well. I feel it is more than simply a placeholder.
It is what I imagine an angelic choir might sound like when singing” (Busman 2015, 125).
Passion has embraced this motif, but through Hillsong, “the first player on a truly global
stage of praise and worship music,” we can see that it has been present since the earliest years of
this milieu’s cultural ascent (Busman 2015, 62). Featuring the voice of Darlene Zschech, “the
understated brain and voice behind Hillsong Music,” the refrain on the Hillsong track “Angels”
(2003), released on one of the Hillsong Live albums, Hope (2003), enjoins the congregation
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directly: “Sing with the angels / Sing with the angels / Singing the name of the Lord / Singing the
name of the Lord” (Cameron 2011). Zschech’s influence allowed Hillsong to place music at the
center of its evangelizing efforts, and the church now attracts a global network of young people
drawn specifically to its emphasis on “creativity.” Hillsong’s enterprise has grown to include a
record label, TV channel, accredited arts college, “Create” master class series, annual conference
dedicated to “worship and creativity,” all aimed at harnessing the creative economy to build the
church—in the process affirming that “Pentecostalism [is] a suitable theology for highly
deregulated, post-industrial, service-based economies.”

Rather than fostering the virtues of solidarity and community, advantageous in the village
or factory floor and beloved of social gospel and liberation theologies, Pentecostalism
stresses the individual virtues of initiative, aspiration, self-belief and self-motivation.
These analyses share with Marx and Weber an interest in how religion contributes to
people’s self-understanding and legitimating world views in relation to themselves as
workers or producers. (Maddox 2013, 109)

And singing with angels is hard work. Even frequent ecstatic encounters can’t resolve the
challenges of daily life in the creative gig economy. Hillsong adherents must navigate the
contradictory demands for, on one hand, artistic personal expression and self-realization (in music,
dance, film, photography, design, production) and, on the other hand, self-abnegation and sacrifice
in service of building the collective. For Hillsong Global Creative Pastor Cass Langton, “God is
calling on a generation of Levites” made up specifically of creatives (The Creative Leader 2017).
Leading one of the “Create” Master Classes during Hillsong Conference 2017 in Sydney—home
of Hillsong’s flagship campus—Langdon paraphrased Leviticus. The Levites, she explained, were
bestowed no land for their service; “God was their inheritance,” and they were totally dependent,
“a living sacrifice.” She offers this biblical antecedent with apprehension: “I wonder if we’re
prepared to let God be enough for us. Or whether we’re so concerned about our own lives and our
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own provision of ourselves that we fail to attend to Him properly because we’re consumed with
what we need. I hope the type of community that I pastor are Levites.”
Even as she means to emphasize the virtue of the Levites’ closeness to God (the 2017
conference theme was “Closer”), the concrete, material demands of livelihood are unavoidable—
so much so that even Langton must observe that the Levites had to “balance the tension between
worship and the world.” and these struggles are compounded by Hillsong’s understated but present
prosperity gospel. “Far from the sublimated election anxiety to which Weber attributed puritans’
worldly success,” Maddox explains, “prosperity gospel Pentecostals are convinced that wealth,
like salvation, is available to all who have faith enough to receive it” (Maddox 2013, 110).
If, as Weber deduced, Calvinism worried believers with the question How do I know that I
am among the elect?, Hillsong congregants must ask: How do I know whether I am being
authentic?
These anxieties arise from the same fundamental contradiction: both election and
authenticity refer to an individual assignment that can be neither envisioned nor completed
individually. Try as they might, evangelical creatives cannot resolve this contradiction
theologically. Instead, they come up against the Real; the longing for absolution, pursued through
orthodox means, eventually gives way to an acute experience of lack. In the first section of this
chapter, I have explored how the “singing with angels” motif has been mobilized in various
contexts to mediate this experience of lack. Now we must turn our attention to the lack itself, which
takes the form of doubt.
The praise and worship song “Maranatha” (2022), cited above for its “With all the angels
… Bowing down before” lyrics, opens with a familiar disclaimer: “This is not a performance / And
I’m not checking boxes / I’m here to worship / I’m here to worship You… And nothing else I’m
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here to worship You / And nothing else I’m here to worship You.” The song “Only Wanna Sing,”
a hit from the 2016 album Youth Revival by Hillsong Young & Free, strikes a similar chord: “I
can’t imagine why / I would do this all for hype / ‘Cause it’s all to lift You high.” Both songs
exemplify the self-consciousness and corrective impulse that drives the creative worship economy.
For Hillsong adherents, the spiritual search for transcendence officially supersedes concerns
about market forces, but the tension is acute. “This is not just clever marketing; we listen to what
God tells us,” declared Hillsong Senior Pastor Bobbie Houston at Hillsong Conference 2017 as
she introduced the video trailer for next year’s conference. But this “leadership conference” is
meant for the already converted, so what purpose do such disclaimers serve?
The primacy of creative labor in the church shapes its economic culture as a whole, placing
members at the fore of struggles against the contradiction inherent in neoliberalism whereby
“creativity”—that universal good, “the human spark”—is weaponized as a strategy of capital
accumulation. Hillsong leaders have responded by fostering a protective disposition against the
undesirable pressures of commercial competition and celebrity. Hillsong leaders strive to confront
these pressures by way of evolving managerial practices and institutional infrastructure. Because
the logic of production requires constant creativity and innovation, they must sponsor adherents’
autonomy to develop their own creative means, but not the autonomy to determine their own goals;
Hillsong leaders aim to manage creativity without killing it.
Hillsong’s allure thus comes into view, as does its appeal to artists: its neo-evangelical
experimentation is always already subordinate to the notion of the individual bid for authenticity—
which can only ever involve doing your best. This theme courses through the spaces of Hillsong
Creative. The promotional trailer for Worship and Creative Conference (WCC) 2017, for instance,
opens with Galatians 6:5: “Each of you must take responsibility for doing the creative best you
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can with your own life.” For Hillsong creatives, who aspire both to serve God and to explore their
own artistry, this message is at once indispensable and contradictory. Given that neither Hillsong
nor the church in general can provide sustainable employment opportunities for all of the creatives
in its networks, how does even the most resolute Christian artist avoid compromising her faith
while trying to make a living in a competitive mainstream media landscape that is (in its manifest
content if not in its latent content) decidedly secular? What if your “creative best” pulls you more
deeply into the profane world and away from divine encounter? Moreover, having been instructed
to “own the moment,” how can artists determine from one moment to the next whether their
creative impulses are oriented appropriately?
Hillsong’s economic culture is particularly alluring to young Christians who also identify
with the promise of creative autonomy and its fictive corollary of horizontalism. In a short piece
titled 10 Cultural Responsibilities of the Hillsong Leadership Team, he explains: “You cannot
build the culture unless you are prepared to BE the culture…”

We often think of empowerment ‘downwards’… Sometimes if you want to be empowered,
you need to learn how to empower upwards… Understand that empowerment starts with
you and do whatever you can to live with the kind of initiative that enables your leaders to
lift their head higher and get their eyes looking further down the road to set the pace and
vision. (Hillsong website 2017)

Such messaging aligns seamlessly with the “upbeat business-minded euphoria” that characterizes
today’s secular creative economies (McRobbie 2016, 27). Much like the unpaid interns who
populate today’s business world, Hillsong leaders and members alike are encouraged to address
conditions of systemic disadvantage through individual resolve. Item six of Houston’s 10 Cultural
Responsibilities is “I Am One of Them”: “I’m thinking about ‘them’ and ‘us’; them may be THE
bosses, us are the workers. Them are upstairs, us are downstairs… In the culture of our church, I
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want people to spiritually, emotionally and mentally see themselves to be on the same side. We
are all ‘us’ … part of the same team.”
For Sarah Banet-Wieser, this model, exacerbated by normalization of a deregulated
economy and the dismantling of the welfare state, has produced the formal interpenetration of
authenticity and the market—the zeitgeist of advanced capitalism (Banet-Weiser 2012). It is the
remainder of authenticity that cannot be captured by the market that makes possible and credible
everything accomplished within the market. As such, the notion of “selling out” has been
supplanted by a pervasive entrepreneurialism and with it, as Angela McRobbie has shown, a
perpetual drive toward self-realization through being creative: “a very swollen youthful middle
class bypasses mainstream employment with its trade unions and its tranches of welfare and
protection in favor of the challenge and excitement of being a creative entrepreneur” (McRobbie
2016, 11). Educated millennials are made to understand early on that they must reinvent
themselves readily in order to maintain their employability, for whatever project (that is, temporary
and precarious job) comes next. When asked how she became the staff manager of Hillsong New
York, Tolu Badders explains: “When the New York church was planted 6 years ago, I volunteered
to manage the sign-up sheet for a connect group… Since then it’s just been saying yes to whatever
I’ve been asked to do. I love filling the gaps” (“Colour Story” 2017).
The effect of this “mix of pleasure and discipline,” McRobbie highlights, is that precarious
work is institutionalized “by stealth and without even drawing attention to the old ways of
organized labor” (McRobbie 2016, 13). We self-exploit in pursuit of jobs we “love.” Positioned to
benefit tremendously by an influx of talent, Hillsong has placed strategic emphasis on the value of
creative labor at the level of the local church and at the level of its global operations. But it’s a tall
order. In one Hillsong Create master class titled “The Creative Leader,” a young Australian singer-
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songwriter named Michelle Cook shared a power ballad: “Tell me how to get back / Tell me how
to love you / When the world gives way / Tell me how to get through, to get back to you.” Where
the prevailing conception of faith pertains to a personal relationship with God, the sentiment of
searching is ubiquitous. The world distracts, disappoints, discourages; authentic worship therefore
requires the perpetual return to the project of one’s own connection. On a list of ten “Worship
Team Tips For Everyone,” Hillsong Global Creative Pastor Cass Langton thus writes, “6. Love
Jesus. As Christians, prioritise your relationship with the Lord! Be someone who brings depth and
authenticity to the platform.” Among creatives, this becomes a practical task. Musicians in
particular speak of the time they set aside each day to listen to God, of the specific places they
walk, the routines that facilitate this crucial relationship. Musical performance is often described
as the quickest way to establish this connection.
But no one can stay connected all the time, and so the theme of the search resurfaces. And
for artists professional demands often become a primary constraint—not just practically, but also
spiritually. Moderating the “Creative Leader” class, Langton asked Kirsty Trindade, Performing
Arts Director for Hillsong UK, if she feels “nervous sending people out into the world?” Trindade
doesn’t hesitate: “Yes.” Why? “Because it’s actually quite void of Christians …”

Not every artist will be on a church staff. I’m just being really real. And so we need to
equip the artists that are in our teams … to go out to their nine-to-five in the week and be
Christians in that world… I’ve found, unfortunately, a lot of artists I’ve encountered
experience some kind of separation… they feel like they can’t do both. So, they sign a
contract and … it means that they can’t contribute to church… And I’m constantly asking
the question: why? I’m constantly wrestling with it” (“Creative Leader” 2017).

Such individual laments are crucial to the preservation of this milieu. To attend to the experience
of lack that finds expression in the church’s ethos of self-correction, personal testimony is
indispensable, and can bring the believer more deeply into their faith. The Bible is full of accounts
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of doubt, and recovery from doubt. “I call to remembrance my song in the night: I commune with
mine own heart: and my spirit made diligent search.”

Will the Lord cast off for ever? and will he be favourable no more? Is his mercy clean
gone for ever? doth his promise fail for evermore? Hath God forgotten to be gracious?
hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies? Selah…

I will meditate also of all thy work,
and talk of thy doings. Thy way, O God, is in the sanctuary: who is so great a God as our
God? (Psalm 77:7-9, 12-13).

The power of religion, explains Peter Berger, is incomprehensible without “the problem of
theodicy… the religious legitimation of anomic phenomena.” Seeking to explain profane
suffering—inequality, injury, death, “evil”—people find comfort in ordering (or nomizing)
rationalizations of the cosmos: the prevailing nomos of a given society. For those who accept it,
“the sheltering canopy of the nomos extends to cover even those experiences that may reduce the
individual to howling animality” (Berger 1967, 55). This “sacred canopy” of religiosity mediates
the distance between the individual and the absolute.
But every nomos is vulnerable. “Anyone with any idea of what it means to live on spirit,”
wrote theologian and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, “knows also what the hunger of doubt
means, and that the doubter hungers just as much for the daily bread of life as for the sustenance
of spirit” (Kierkegaard 1985, 133). Theodicy must therefore be revised; the longing for absolution
cannot be resolved through any theory provided by religiosity. And while doubt can be used to
pull people more deeply into their compensatory investment in religious myth, so too can it direct
them to modify that investment. When doubt compels people to oppose the prevailing theodicy in
search of more convincing explanations, the result can lead to a break with orthodoxy altogether.
“In all cases,” Berger explains, “the disintegration of the plausibility of theodicies legitimating
social inequalities is potentially revolutionary in its consequences” (Berger 1967, 60). In the next
chapter, we will direct our attention to invocations of the angel that attest to this revolutionary
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potential of antinomian compulsion, keeping in mind that they are in each case contingent upon
the problem of proximity first introduced in the ancient poems of the Book of Psalms.

Coordinates of the Orthodoxy Mode
Through this extended analysis, I have shown how this mode is more defined by the sacred than
the profane, more by order than disorder, and more by the universal than by the particular. In the
mode of Orthodoxy, the angel’s sacredness is presupposed, and its sacred character is being
recognized through the subordination to orthodoxy (i.e., the Church). In this mode, the angel
reflects the order of the Church in the moment of law-making violence; the angel is an expression
of a theodicy embraced and abided by. Finally, in this mode, the angel, like Christ, is universally
for everyone, and this premise is realized by the Church, which is also all encompassing: you are
the church, but there is also the object of the church, which captures the relations with all the other
objects within in, including the other congregants.

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Chapter 3: Antinomianism

Thesis: The whole has been misconceived, so we must smash it to begin anew.
Antithesis: My rebellious negation adheres to its own rigid orthodoxy. TRAGEDY.
Coordinates: Sacred-Disorder-Universal

As with the preceding analysis of orthodoxy, this chapter constellates historical invocations of the
angel in the antinomian mode. By constellating these invocations, I draw out the thesis and
antithesis animating this mode while revealing its underlying logic. In the first section, I focus
primarily on seventeenth-century English antinomian movements, which developed hermeneutic
and theological approaches that marshaled Christian thought and social activity against the
constituted laws of church and state. I highlight these dissident movements not only to build upon
the historical discussion of the Protestant Reformation in the previous chapter, but also to reveal
the complex relation between orthodoxy and antinomianism as wishful modes. In so doing, I take
up the theme of the scapegoat to show how it serves as a medium of constellation.
In the second section, I present an extended case study of musician Ezra Furman’s album
Transangelic Exodus (2018). Foregrounding antinomianism’s characterological expression, I
marshal relevant details from Furman’s biography to analyze why she invoked the angel at
particular moments in the development of her thought. To do so, I bring her angel invocations into
constellation with the material cited in the first section before expanding the set by considering
how antinomianism today finds expression within the musical genre of punk rock. I conclude by
assessing the implicit risks of the antinomian mode and by clarifying the political upshot of this
analysis.
84

The World Turned Upside Down
In 1988, the English anarcho-punk band Chumbawamba released its third studio album, English
Rebel Songs 1381-1984.
24
“History is boring,” the liner notes read. “Loads of half-truths strung
together by academics.” Moved by the same impulse that led Benjamin to reject the myths of the
victor (1968, 262), the band sought instead to present “[t]he real history of England… full of riots,
revolutions, rebellions and insurrections.” By their account, this was “a history of perpetual class
war, waged by the poor, against the state, the clergy and the landlords.” Among the album’s
thirteen tracks is “The World Turned Upside Down,” a ballad the band dates to the early years of
organized English anarchism in the mid-1870s. The song’s title, however, remind us that this
secular political tradition is indebted to an earlier current of antinomian dissent. And in its lyrics,
the song recounts a dream of angels:

Through eating too much supper/Before I went to bed/Strange thoughts came o’er my
slumber/Strange thoughts came in my head/This world was topsy-turvy/And people of
renown/Were doing the most peculiar things/As they world turned upside down/I dreamt
all men were equal/And there were no starving poor/And nations never did quarrel/Nor
never went to war/I dreamt all men were angels/And women ne’er wore a frown/Old maids
they had large families/As the world turned upside down.

To appreciate this song’s antinomianism, it is useful to recall E.P. Thompson’s analysis of “the
ubiquity and centrality of antinomian tenets” in the work of English Romantic poet William Blake,
whose poetic influence spanned the century and can be readily detected in both the content as well
as the rhyme and scansion of “The World Turned Upside Down.” Thompson presents three
principal antinomian “positions” that emerged in the seventeenth century amid flourishing rebel

24
The original 1988 album was titled English Rebel Songs 1381-1914 and was released on CD in 1994.
The band re-recorded the album in 2003 and released it with the modified title and two additional tracks.
85
sects. In turn, these sects influenced England’s history from below, as Chumbwamba would later
attest. “The first,” Thompson describes, “is inseparable from Calvinist or determinist
presuppositions. If one knew, as a certainty, that one was elected to be saved … then it could
follow that one would be saved whatever one did: the ‘saints’ might live henceforth outside ‘the
moral law’”

… The second … [was] a position dreamed up by mainline Protestant orthodoxy…
On the Right there stood an excessive belief in justification by works, or forms; on
the Left there was Antinomianism, or an excessive belief in justification by faith,
or free grace or pureness of heart, which led to a carelessness towards all forms or
works or observances and even to a light-heartedness toward sin, supported by
overconfidence in the universality of divine mercy. (Thompson 1993, 12-13).

The third comes closest to Blake’s antinomianism, Thompson argues, and “consists in carrying to
an extreme the advocacy of grace, and bringing the gospel of Christ into direct antagonism to the
‘covenant of deeds’ or ‘the moral law’” (Thompson 1993, 14). As was previously the case with
Blake, this third orientation also corresponds most vividly to the song Chumbawamba revives. By
presenting the angel as a symbol of earthly equality, they enact a “radical dissociation and
opposition between the Moral Law and that gospel of Christ which is known—as often in the
antinomian tradition—as ‘the Everlasting Gospel’ (E. P. Thompson 1993, 19).
By opposing the Ten Commandments to the Gospel of Jesus (“the first is a code of
repression and prohibition, the second a gospel of forgiveness and love”) antinomianism unsettles
the entire vertical cosmology. In Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-3), for instance,
the angel manifests simultaneously as a devil “of antinomian wisdom” (Thompson, 1993, 207):
“This Angel, who is now become a Devil,” wrote Blake, “is my particular friend; we often read
the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave
well” [Plate 24].
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“The idea of turning the world upside-down is centuries old,” Chumbawamba noted, “its
origins rooted in customs and feasts. A dream of a new world where equality replaces division,
where shared wealth replaces starvation, and where Lady Thatcher meets the Royal Family every
week down at the dole office.” By making an oblique reference to the medieval carnival, the band
sidesteps the title’s religiosity to emphasize its more evident dissident political meaning.
Nevertheless, the two remain historically entangled. As Mikhail Bakhtin once observed, “the
carnival sense of the world” was predicated on religious motifs and often coincided with religious
festivals. Moreover, carnivals proved to be fertile ground for rebellion precisely because they were
organized around the temporary dissolution of theological-cosmological hierarchies. Indeed,
“carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with
the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid” (Bakhtin 1984, 108; 122).
Historically speaking, the idea of a world turned upside down corresponds to the antinomian reflex.
It gives form to a sacred compulsion to undo the categories through which order is maintained
(anti- “opposite, against” + nomos “rule, law”). Scholars of antinomianism point to the antecedent
of Saint Paul’s evangelizing in Thessalonika, where rioters unwilling to receive the Gospel truth
decried “[t]hese that have turned the world upside down are come hither also” (Acts 17:6).
The elemental imaginary can be found in the most revered freedom dreaming of the Latin
American Marxist canon, whence Eduardo Galeano’s tribute to worlds turned upside down was
translated as Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World. Yet, again, we need not even
leave the England to which the dominant heritage of the United States is most often traced. In his
celebrated history of seventeenth-century popular revolt aptly titled The World Turned Upside
Down, Christopher Hill recounts how sects like the Quakers, Baptists, Levellers, True Levellers,
Diggers, and Ranters created new habits of sociality through their disavowal of church orthodoxy.
87
And while they varied in purpose and ranged in their degrees of defiance,
25
during the climactic
period of the English Civil War, both the ideas and the memberships of antinomian groups
overlapped considerably. “From, say, 1645 to 1653,” Hill reports, “there was a great overturning…
Old institutions, old beliefs, old values came in question. Men moved easily from one critical group
to another” (1972, 14).
Amid the consolidation of the protestant ethic—the bourgeois establishment of “the sacred
right of property”—these loose antinomian formations mobilized Christian myth against the
Church, the state, and the aristocracy, Building upon protestant reform by pushing it to its logical
conclusion (Hill 1972, 15), Hill reminds us that John Calvin once went so far as to insist “‘[t]he
conscience of believers may rise above the Law, and may forget the whole righteousness of the
Law.’” And though he “hedged such phrases about with safeguards … we can see how easily his
doctrine toppled over into Antinomianism” (Hill 1972, 215). Yet whereas Luther and Calvin
invoked Christ to refute the Catholic hierarchy, and whereas Puritans sought to expunge the
remnants of Catholicism from the Church of England, antinomian theology broke with hierarchical
norms altogether. In this way, it invited the angel to come down to earth.
This break was made possible through an allegorical interpretation of scripture. By Hill’s
account, antinomian rebels would read the Bible, even the story of the Fall or of the resurrection,
as a book of allegories. Hill reminds us that this “mental habit was medieval.”

25
Hill’s general distinctions suffice for our purposes: “Groups like Levellers, Diggers and Fifth Monarchists
offered new political solutions (and in the case of the Diggers, new economic solutions too). The various
sects—Baptists, Quakers, Muggletonians—offered new religious solutions. Other groups asked skeptical
questions about all the institutions and beliefs of their society—Seekers, Ranters, the Diggers too. Indeed
it is perhaps misleading to differentiate too sharply between politics, religion and general skepticism. We
know, as a result of hindsight, that some groups—Baptists, Quakers—will survive as religious sects and
that most of the others will disappear,” but “a Quaker of the early 1650s had far more in common with a
Leveller, a Digger or a Ranter than with a modern member of the Society of Friends” (Hill 1972, 14).
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Calvin … taught that God spoke to the capacity of his audience. But it was one
thing for the clergy to allegorize a Latin text whose sacredness was accepted on all
sides; it was quite another for mechanic laymen to put their own allegorical
constructions on a vernacular text available for all to read, and to do this against the
background of a critical protestant Biblical scholarship, in conditions of free and
unfettered discussion which allowed popular attitudes free rein, and in an
atmosphere charged with millenarian expectations. (Hill 1972, 144).

Today, this allegorical orientation allows for non-believers like Chumbawamba to revive angel
dreams without concern that their mobilization of religious symbolism will be mistaken for piety.
For them, the angel is profane insofar as allegory facilitates a displacement: scripture refers to
some sacred thing, but it’s really about this other profane thing, and it’s the latter that’s of interest.
But antinomianism also reveals how allegorical transpositions of scriptural material need
not be profanations at all. On the contrary, the antinomian mode is principally concerned with a
more sacred communion with a reconceived God. To this end, antinomian thinkers came to view
angels, saints, even God and Christ, as either proximate to or even indistinguishable from ordinary
people. According to the preamble to the True Levellers’ Declaration to the Powers of England
(1649), “[t]he whole Creation are the Angells of the everlasting Spirit of Righteousnesse, they are
all ministering spirits, speaking every Creature in its kind the Will of the Father. The Chariots of
God are 20000 thousands of Angels, Psal. &c” (Winstanley 2009, 3). In this conception, the angel,
like Christ, is universally both in and for everyone and its sacredness is presupposed. This reality,
however, can only be recognized through a disavowal of the hierarchical orthodoxies of the church.
For the Ranters, “the extreme left wing of the sects,” according to historian A.L. Morton,
the idea that God was in all things “led them … to a pantheistic mysticism and a crudely plebian
materialism, often incongruously combined within the same person” (Morton 1970, 70). Some
Ranters concluded that “no act was sinful” and proceeded accordingly, earning them a reputation
for embracing disorderly behavior as an end in itself. Nevertheless, their ideas were fundamentally
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emancipatory and derived from a reading of scripture in which it was suggested that heaven and
earth might coincide. This suggestion was given full expression in The Light and Dark Sides of
God (1650), a book by shoemaker, soldier, and Ranter Jacob Bauthumley, who found that “man
lives in the Angelicall nature, and that the Angels are also Spirituall and in man… I looke upon
every glorious manifestation of the power and wisdom of God to be an Angell” (Bauthumley 2014,
25–26).
The theology of God’s absolute presence also found expression in antinomian programs
aimed at political and economic reorganization. Having concluded that they were obliged to build
heaven on earth, the True Levellers agitated against the authority of theocrats, Royalists, and
parliamentarians by occupying common land. Their mobilizations against enclosure earned them
the moniker Diggers (the main name by which they are remembered today). They also stand as
precursors to nineteenth-century utopian socialist communes like Robert Owen’s New Harmony,
Charles Fourier’s Phalanstere, and Etienne Cabet’s Icarians. And though the latter disavowed
religious institutions, they nevertheless made allegorical use of Christian mythology. Back in
Surrey, England, Gerrard Winstanley maintained that the aim of the Diggers’ mobilization was to
ensure “[t]hat the earth shall be made a common Treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without
respect of persons” (Winstanley 2009, 80) and to this end, it was crucial to understand that God
was Reason.

In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common
Treasury… but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of
mankind should rule over another. And the Reason is this, Every single man, Male
and Female, is a perfect Creature of himself; and the same Spirit that made the
Globe, dwels in man to govern the Globe. (Winstanley 2009, 4)

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In this vision of equality, God is found in the quotidian: God is Reason, but so too are Man and
Nature. And while each person is particular as an expression of the divine, God, Reason, Man, and
Nature are universally, substantially, one. Winstanley pushed this logic as far as possible, Hill
explains, until “[t]he philosophy which started with a vision seems to have ended as a kind of
materialist pantheism, in which God or abstract Reason can be known only in man or nature; and
man is more important than abstractions” (Hill 1972, 142). Proclaiming that Reason “dwells in
every creature, but supremely in man,” Hill found that he even “advanced psychological
explanations for belief in a personal God and angels” (Hill 1972, 139). Indeed, for Winstanley,
“Good Angels (which are divine discoveries or sparks of that glory),… And bad Angels (which
are the powers of the flesh let loose out of the bottomlesse pit selfishnesse, and so working its own
miserie) are to be seen within” (Winstanley 2009, 538). From the perspective of Christian
orthodoxy, this was blasphemous on its face. For Hill, “Winstanley’s rejection of the deity who
justifies the rule of men of property, in whose image he has been created, could hardly have been
more complete. To the accusation that his beliefs ‘will destroy all government and all our ministry
and religion,’ Winstanley replied coolly: ‘It is very true’” (Hill 1972, 142).
For daring to dream that all men were angels, Winstanley and other antinomians faced
harsh persecution. Landowners hired goons to beat the Diggers and destroy their commune.
Meanwhile, The Light and Dark Sides of God “was condemned as blasphemous,” Hill recounts,
“and Bauthumley was bored through the tongue” (Hill 1972, 219). To discourage the circulation
of antinomian ideas, rebels were arrested and prosecuted. How better to promote the fantasy of
God’s wrath than to condemn heretics? For their subversion of orthodoxy, antinomian movements
often find themselves scapegoated.
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Like scapegoats, antinomians are members of a community that are transformed into
outsiders through a process of sacred expulsion. The term “scapegoat” appears in the third book
of the Torah, and refers to the ritual involving two goats, one of which is sacrificed and the other
released into the wild and, with it, the sins of the community (Leviticus 16:21-22). According to
the structural anthropologist Rene Girard, prior to the advent of judicial power backed by a
sovereign, scapegoating was a widespread social strategy for channeling and thus managing the
contagion of mimetic rivalry and vengeance. Through the sacrifice of the scapegoat, society
deflects upon “a ‘sacrificeable’ victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own
members, the people it most desires to protect” (Girard 1979, 4). This ritual protects the community
from its own violence by choosing victims that are simultaneously of and apart from itself, victims
who can stand in for the legitimate target of reciprocal violence while having no champion who
will avenge them in turn. In the process, the war of all against all that initiates the sacrificial crisis
is transformed into a war of all against one through whom the community is reunited and
redeemed.
In the history of the United States, this operation has been wielded as a strategy for
undermining the fundamentally antinomian phenomenon colloquially known as the Black church.
And we can find no clearer illustration than in the contemporary revisionist, nationalist reverence
for Martin Luther King Jr., commemorated by the very state that villainized him during his life
and that now distorts his legacy in the name of a fictional racial unity.
26
Like King, Winstanley

26
For Girard, the sacrificial crisis corresponds to the violence of all against all, “mimetic rivalry.” In the
case of King, the social polarization produced through the civil rights struggle had already given way to
greater intra-group antagonisms and escalated deployment of violence by the state, organized para-state
white supremacists, and the forces of organized anti-racism. J. Edgar Hoover saw in this situation the
potential for social upheaval so great that he used the FBI to target King up until (and with suspicious
oversight around) his assassination, referring to him publicly as “the most notorious liar in the country.” In
this era, Hoover had greater popular support than did King. By calling for equality and making a claim for
inclusion in the paradigm of governance, King produced a sacrificial crisis that, although characterized by
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understood the danger of the scapegoating impulse. And just as King warned against the white
moderate in his Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963), Winstanley observed how fair-weather allies
ostracized the rebellion as soon as it became more convenient: “plentie of Petitions and promises
thereupon have been made for freedome, and now the common enemy is gone, you are all like
men in a mist, seeking for freedom, and know not where, nor what it is.”

[A]nd those of the richer sort of you that see it, are ashamed and afraid to owne it,
because it comes clothed in a clownish garment, and open to the best language that
scoffing Ishmael can afford, or that railing Rabsheka can speak, or furious Pharaoh
can act against him; for freedom is the man that will turn the world upside downe,
therefore no wonder he hath enemies. (Winstanley 2009, 81, italics added)

From the perspective of any prevailing orthodoxy, an upside-down world must be set right-side
up, and scapegoating is a strategy by which constituted power can reproduce its own legitimacy
and preserve its preferred order. All antinomian movements thus contend with ruthless repression.
Beyond repression, however, there are also intrinsic limits to the antinomian mode.
Building on Marx’s criticism of the Young Hegelians in The German Ideology (1845), Friedrich
Engels described these limitations clearly in his assessment of the utopian socialism of the early
nineteenth century—another antinomian flashpoint—when he noted how its proponents conceived
of socialism as “the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, [that] has only to be discovered
to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power” (Engels 2011). The antinomian impulse to
emphasize metaphysics, Engels observed, forecloses or undermines dialectical analysis and leads
to the misapprehension of material conditions. Deference to God (even God as Reason) can lead
to pulled punches. When Chumbawamba cites the Diggers in their liner notes, they do so with

the formation of rivaling political camps, held the potential in the eyes of his enemies, most of all Hoover,
for producing a war of all against all.

93
admiration. Still, they can’t help but observe parenthetically how The Diggers “also unwittingly
taught us the folly of accepting the violence and destruction of the state without fighting back.”
Antinomian thinkers sometimes discover these limitations on their own and even find
means to overcome them. This is because, historically speaking, the trajectory of antinomian
thought is characterized by a movement toward greater concretion. Winstanley’s direct actions
against enclosure attest to this potential, as did King’s reconsideration of the feasibility of non-
violence in the final years of his life. Even Chumbawamba’s invocation of the Diggers reminds us
that, wherever the promise of absolution has yet to be realized, it calls out for fulfillment by some
other means. This logic plays out repeatedly within the biographies of antinomian leaders. The
more careful the antinomian’s theological contestations, the more likely they are to find their way
to a dialectical view of their own religiosity (i.e., the more likely they are to reject the singular
mode of absolution in favor of the totalizing mode of absolution). The danger, it would seem, is
that the antinomian mode can lead to the production of new rules; it is a familiar trope that the
rejection of orthodoxy eventually gives way to the tragic forfeiture of the spirit of rebellion.
To consider this danger and how it might be subverted, it is best to grasp the antinomian
mode characterologically. To study it we must cite as its template Christ’s opposition to the
Church, how he destroyed the temple only to rebuild it, and how Christ’s anti-law became law.
For Girard, the Passion of Christ is captivating precisely because it tells the story of salvation from
the perspective of the scapegoat rather than from that of the mythically reconciled community—a
narrative model by which we learn today about such historically disparate figures as Winstanley
and King. Despite now being commonplace, this model remains effective at inspiring empathy
and, sometimes, collective action. Identification with the angel can be an instructive step on the
rebel path toward revolutionary consciousness. Through the constellation of multiple cases, we
94
have established the logic subtending the mode; but only through close analysis of a single case
can we observe how the mode functions in the volatile context of a life.

Ezra Furman’s Transangelic Exodus
When asked how she describes herself, indie rock musician Ezra Furman deflects: “I try to avoid
it.” When pressed, however, she emphasizes the interplay of her gender and Jewish identities. “I
would say I’m a transfeminine psalmist,” she told one interviewer (Rockart 2021). Scriptural
citations appear across her nine albums and three EPs in lyrics that express her struggles with
imposed gender norms and the social estrangement they yield. In spring of 2021, Furman came
out as a trans woman and mother. That autumn, she began Rabbinical school.
27
On the road to this
personal clarity, she produced Transangelic Exodus (2018), a “fictionalized memoir” about
Furman and her lover, a white-winged angel, on the run from the law in their red Camaro.
According to the backstory of this “queer outlaw saga,” the word “transangelic” refers to the
process by which people undergo an operation and grow wings. These angels are subsequently
ostracized on account of a reactionary panic about whether this angelic condition is contagious
(Norris 2018). Politically moving and anthemic, Transangelic Exodus is the first in a trilogy of
albums showcasing the development of Furman’s antinomian philosophy.
The album’s title phrase appears on its penultimate track, “Psalm 151.” When she wrote it,
Furman claims not to have known that Psalm 151 was also the established designation for a

27
Although prevailing conceptions of the angel derive from Christianity, the distinction between Judaism
and Christianity is mostly a formal one for our purposes. Both traditions are organized around messianic
anticipation (in Judaism the messiah hasn’t come; in Christianity the messiah has come but believers must
nevertheless live in joyful anticipation of his return) and both are dissenting traditions—more specifically,
a dissenting tradition within a dissenting tradition. As a result, we can read them not only for their
differences but also for their epistemological continuity, which is established within the closed system of
scriptural citation—i.e. through citation of wish images such as the angel.
95
supernumerary scriptural psalm that, although attributed to King David, does not appear in the
Masoretic text and is considered apocryphal by Western Christians and most Jews. Coincidentally,
this apocryphal psalm revisits the story of David and Goliath and takes up similar themes to those
Furman raises. For its symbolic significance, none other than Boots Riley invokes Psalm 151 in
his verse of “My Favorite Mutiny,” the same track cited in the Introduction:

Death to the pigs is my basic statement
I spit street stories ’til I taste the pavement
Tryin’ to stay out the pen where we face enslavement
Had a foolproof hustle ’til they traced the payments
I was grippin’ my palm around some shitty rum
Tryin’ to find psalm number 151
To forget what I’m owed, as I clutch the commode
I read “Put down the bottle and come get the gun”

Furman’s track similarly points to an underdog perseverance, although hers is unapologetically
rock and roll, with an opening track that borrows its bassline from The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.”
28

But this is not the story of a solitary hero. With her invocation of Exodus, Furman both names a
powerful enemy and conjures a collective first-person capable of facing the threat: “The
government went bad, we got a raw deal / A transangelic exodus on four wheels.”
Although the singer in this story is not the embodied angel, with the clarity of hindsight,
we can more accurately say: not yet. This is not solely because Furman herself has since come out
as trans, thus bringing her into metaphoric alignment with the album’s angelic figures. It is also
because the angelic is, in the context of this metaphor, symbolic of mutual care and guardianship.
By foregrounding the courage and beauty of queer intimacy under conditions of American proto-

28
For their part, The Who also invoke Exodus: “Don’t cry/Don’t raise your eye/It’s only teenage
wasteland/Sally, take my hand/We’ll travel south ‘cross land/Put out the fire and don’t look past my
shoulder/The exodus is here/The happy ones are near/Let’s get together before we get much older.”

96
fascism (the transphobes our protagonists must evade include vicious patriots, swastika-laden
gangs, flag-waving news anchors, and so on), Furman hints at a doubled use of the angel to denote
tender co-implication. “I’ve seen the broken halo/That she never wears/Hanging by the
stairs/Angel, I’ll be your guardian if you’ll be mine/Authorities are trailing right behind/I’m not
afraid, we read the Psalms at night/Clear through Nebraska with just one headlight.”
Attuned to the sacred but seeking a truer communion than dominant religious institutions
will afford—not least because they are themselves a source of rigid gender norms—Furman’s
vision of transangels not only deploys scriptural symbols but also gives expression to an alternate
theology based on a simple premise: although Judaism has become fixed, it’s true spirit is to move.
This premise becomes the foundation for Furman’s antinomian theology, replete with its own
organizing concepts, still in development on Transangelic Exodus. The album’s significance
comes more clearly into view when we consider it alongside a parallel project that Furman released
the same year: a 33
1/3
book about Lou Reed’s Transformer. In both, Furman elevates
Transformation to an antinomian principle of the first order. “[F]or folks like me and Lou,” she
summarizes, “the real meaning of queerness is defined by continual transformation, being
permanently on the run from the straight authorities (real, imagined or both) that would try to force
us to be something untrue.”

And then eventually, maybe, you grow older and stop worrying so much about it. I
don’t know yet; I’m only thirty. The same age, by the way, that Lou Reed was when
he recorded Transformer. (Furman 2018b, para 6)

Transformation’s antinomianism derives from its need to refute and transcend fixity. For Furman,
this fixity corresponds to the retreat in Jewish life from scriptural texts and from the sacred promise
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of exile, of exodus.
29
“[F]or most of the history of the Jews,” she tells Jewish Currents in an
interview focused on her 2022 album All Of Us Flames, “we’ve been a people hunted by empire.”

We’ve been, if not always an insurgent movement, then dissenting or just apart. That role,
that dissenting aspect of being a Jew, has been totally eclipsed because … we’re in a golden
age of Jewish safety. The state of Israel is a huge spiritual problem, I think, for the Jewish
people. Just the lived practice of doing Judaism and being in a Jewish community or
studying Jewish texts—those acts have historically been acts of nonparticipation [in the
state]. But what are the most prominent things about being Jewish now? Rich complacent
Americans and the violent and oppressive state of Israel. Those are the first things you see.
The last thing you see is the fuckin’ Talmud. (Goldfine 2022)

While orthodox institutions cast transformation as an objectionable characteristic, Furman
suggests, queer and trans people grasp that it defines life itself. Indeed, even scripture affirms that
the power of God manifests as transformation: whether by flattening mountains (CITE), turning
deserts to oceans (CITE), or blessing uncanny reconciliations, as when the wolf lays with the lamb
(Isaiah 11:6), God is above all a transformer. It’s a compelling concept; however, here we
encounter the antinomian reflex as refracted through neoliberalism. By constellating the shards of

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For me, Furman’s antinomianism recalls Bertell Ollman’s “Letter of Resignation from the Jewish
People,” which fittingly concludes with an invocation of Lenny Bruce: “What, if anything, has such
Zionism got to do with traditional Jewish values?”

As far as I’m concerned, the comedian, Lenny Bruce, provided the only good answer to
this question when he said, ‘Dig, I’m Jewish. Count Bassie’s Jewish. Ray Charles is
Jewish. Eddie Cantor is goyish… Marine Corps – heavy goyish… If you live in New
York or any other big city, you’re Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you’re going to
be goyish even if you’re Jewish… Kool-Aid is goyish. Evaporated milk is goyish even if
Jews invented it… Pumpernickel is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish.…
Negroes are all Jews… Irishmen who have rejected their religion are Jewish… Baton
twirling is very goyish’. To this I would only add, ‘Noam Chomsky, Mordechai Vanunu
and Edward Said are Jewish. Elie Wiesel is goyish. So, too, all ‘Jewish’ neo-cons.
Socialism and communism are Jewish. Sharon and Zionism are very goyish’. And, who
knows, if this reading of Judaism were to take hold, I may one day apply for readmission
to the Jewish people. (Ollman 2005)

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this refraction, we can better understand how the angel and its transformative promise feature in
the ongoing development of Furman’s thought.
When compared to Winstanely’s Reason, Furman’s equally antinomian Transformation
has different implications. Reason, by Winstanely’s account, refers to an unmediated process that
yields a totalizing ontological conception. Here, earthly hierarchies are illegitimate because we are
all already one (whole, complete, absolute). Epistemologically, this approach clarifies how, as
humans, we can both recognize and bring other beings into our being, thus expanding the scope of
our own being by pursuing a conscious, de-individuating coimplication. In contrast, Furman’s
Transformation pertains to being’s instability and emphasizes how one being passes into the other.
By this account, earthly hierarchies are illegitimate because none of us is one (never truly the same
as the manifestation of our fleeting fixity).
At this point, it becomes clear that Furman’s investment in transformation accords with
Fredric Jameson’s observation that postmodernism (the “cultural logic of late capitalism”) entails
“a fundamental mutation both in the object world … and in the disposition of the subject” that
amounts to a kind of schizophrenia (Jameson 1992, 60). “Meaning on the new view is generated
by the movement from Signifier to Signifier: what we generally call the Signified—the meaning
or conceptual content of an utterance—is now rather to be seen as a meaning-effect, as that
objective mirage of signification generated and projected by the relationship of Signifiers among
each other.”

When that relationship breaks down, when the links of the signifying chain snap, then we
have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers… With the
breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, the schizophrenic is reduced to an experience
of pure material Signifiers, or in other words of a series of pure and unrelated presents in
time. (Jameson 1992, 72)

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Furman’s transangel wish image emerges in reference to this post-structural emphasis on
signification (as opposed to objects themselves): the content of the signified is, but more signifiers
enables transformation by enabling a move from signifier to signifier without needing to attend to
the demands of a now-lost referent. This reorientation was at the heart of the art movements with
which Furman has constellated her project—namely, the surface-preoccupied Factory of Andy
Warhol that produced such “vicious” creatures as Lou Reed. Warhol famously declared: “If you
want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me,
and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” For Jameson, Warhol’s work epitomizes the
“depthlessness” and “waning of affect” that defines postmodernism, characterized by the
“gratuitous frivolity” of commodity fetishism (Jameson 1992, 60–61). Considered this way, it
makes sense that Furman’s book about Reed concedes the futility of discovering some mysterious
true nature of the proverbial “godfather of punk.”
What makes Reed’s mystery so compelling, Furman contends, is the idea that there is a
liberation to be found in evasion. She opens the book in this spirit: “Let me be clear from the
outset: I don’t think Transformer is the greatest record ever made.”

I don’t think it’s the greatest record of the seventies. I wouldn’t even pick it as the greatest
album of 1972… It is so uncategorizable in every aspect that even to call it uncategorizable
is to suggest a framework that reductively pigeonholes the record… It will inhabit a label
for a moment, long enough for you to think you can call it that, and then it will destabilize
that label and sneer at you for using it. It is so thoroughly non-committal, a work that, like
its author, is so concerned with becoming, transforming, that it does not have time to
actually fully be anything… And that’s why it’s the greatest record ever made. (Furman
2018a, 2–3)

In other words: Furman doesn’t think it is the greatest record ever made; it just is, because it is
nothing, or cannot be classified as anything. Furman is here tracing the connection between
transformation and the principle of evasion—in reference to which she titled her 2015
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breakthrough album, Perpetual Motion People. She kept up this theme for the opening track of her
2016 album Big Fugitive Life (2016), “Teddy, I’m Ready,” where first introduces us to the angel,
a figure of unmissable musicality: “Everybody talks sarcastic / Everybody’s in the know / I think
I might do something drastic / If they don’t let me go away from it all…”

And the truth is just a mole rat/Crawling underneath the earth/It is naked and it’s gnawing
away at the world/And it hurts so bad I could cry/But they don’t allow no crying/In the
cold straight world of men/So I build my little fortress/‘Til I can get even/Teddy, I’m ready
to rock and roll/I can see now, she’s an angel/Flying in my bedroom window/I’m ready to
rock and roll, ready to rock and roll.

Queer rock and roll angels getting even: this is Furman’s ultimate vision, at once personal and
political. It will find full expression on her Transangelic Exodus but, for now, Furman is still in
her bedroom. The angel finds her and draws her out of hiding, but cautiously, through the promise
of evasive transformation. This promise, for which Furman adeptly finds evidence in Reed’s
biography, is seductive precisely because, in theory, everyone can partake in it; the evasion implicit
in perpetual transformation suggests a kind of absolute fluidity, whereby every expression is
ephemeral before dissolving into something else.
With this redemption-via-evasion theme, Furman has landed upon a resonant theme within
the zeitgeist. And, given the ontological ambivalence and transformative dynamism inherent
within the figure of the angel, it is not surprising that it recurs in the work of various transgender
and gender-nonconforming artists. From Mykki Blanko’s mixtape Cosmic Angel (2012) to
Amaarae’s The Angel You Don’t Know (2020), from Angels in America (1991) to the drag queen
character named “Angel” in the hit in musical Rent (1994) and the trans character named “Angel”
in the television series Pose (notably, the character who most easily “passes” as cis-gender, i.e. the
one who best evades the most immediate forms of transphobic violence)—all attest to the
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epistemological stability of this association. By the time Furman is ready to foreground the angel,
she has elevated its promise of transformation through evasion to a key operating principle. And,
with Transangelic Exodus, she develops this principle in explicit reference and opposition to the
persecution of transgender people.
In the U.S., this persecution has taken the form not solely of street-level violence but also
of anti-transgender legislation, with each informing and perpetuating the other. Furman released
the album just three years into the targeted right-wing anti-trans backlash that can most directly be
traced to the 2015 Obergefell ruling that legalized marriage equality. “If we understand backlash
as a kind of force,” writes trans-studies scholar Loren Cannon, “then it was the passion, dedication
and concern held by anti-marriage equality activists that had to go somewhere and directing this
force against the transgender community was perhaps the most likely direction” (Cannon 2022,
30–31). 2017 alone witnessed the introduction of more than 300 pieces of anti-trans restrictive
legislation, a number that was topped in 2021. In response, Furman’s antinomianism disavows and
strives to evade the law as such: “Let the law pronounce its’ petty assertions/They’ve been
outsmarted by a couple of urchins/And they hurt you bad, man/They hurt me too/But I’m not about
to sit here and watch as they/Suck the blood from my wound.”
Anti-trans legislation and the everyday violence against transgender people it fosters attests
to an unmistakable moment of scapegoating. “Given the very small size of the transgender and
gender non-binary population, it really is astounding what we have been blamed for,” Cannon
writes (CITE). And here the dual character of the scapegoat comes into full view: anti-trans actors
revile transgender people for violating gender conventions (manifesting in baseless claims, such
as the manufactured social panic over “grooming”). At the same time, however, they revere them
for enabling a community to be forged in struggle against a common insidious force. Such
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consolidation first found expression in new coalitions of right-wing activists but has has already
begun to animate Republican platforms. The prospective presidential bid of Florida Governor Ron
DeSantis, an unapologetic anti-LGBTQ politician, has compelled twice-impeached former
President Donald Trump to break with his prior strategy of courting LGBTQ voters and instead
vie for the bigot vote by announcing his promise to gut gender-affirming care for minors (Seitz-
Wald and Yurcaba 2023). Watching this consolidation from the front lines of her own transition,
Furman’s portrayal of the angel becomes simultaneously the testimony of a scapegoat, a figure for
which, in Transangelic Exodus, she offers the cognate term “freak.”

Even the deepest wounds will heal over time/I’ll run my fingers over your scars
and yours over mine/They’ll never find us if we turn off our phones/We’re off the
grid, we’re off our meds/We’re finally out on our own/Now I see color coming back
in your cheeks/Angel, don’t fight it/To them you know we’ll always be freaks/To
them we’ll always be freaks.

Furman’s invocation of the angel as scapegoat locates spiritual purity in marginal status. She leans
into this idea with the aim of rehabilitating Judaism as a dissenting tradition. Indeed, these lyrics
seem to outline the various phases in Furman’s theory of antinomian redemption: evasion >>
transformation >> scapegoat >> redemption. She chooses rather than fights expulsion because it
is the means by which transformation can happen. At this point, the new positive content begins
to develop, revealing that Transangelic Exodus was an important stage in the development of
Furman’s antinomian thinking, for which All Of Us Flames reflects its sharper elaboration.
Indeed, Furman has embraced this process of working through, emphasizing the political
importance of messianism for its emboldening influence on “what we can imagine.” Speaking in
the name of “a world where evil holds no currency and is laughed at,” she becomes unequivocal:
“it matters to me to insist that the world could be perfected” (Goldfine 2022). And if messianic
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thinking orients us to a developmental trajectory toward the conscious realization of the longing
for absolution that animates the wish image, then any invocation of the angel will necessarily
express a moment on that trajectory that will ideally be surpassed. Furman’s angel invocations for
Transangelic Exodus correspond to the moment in which she is focused on the principle of
perpetual motion and evasive transformation. By the time she closes the trilogy with All of Us
Flames, however, her thinking has evolved to find promise in “community” instead. She updates
her conception of the angel accordingly, and in a manner reminiscent of Winstanley: “There’s still
some flight here but I think the earlier writing about escape and the ‘we gotta get the hell out of
here’ kind of feeling was always pointing toward community and interdependence.”

The Transangelic Exodus record, none of those escape stories made sense without the other
person – they always involved the angel. I think, unconsciously, it had something to do
with needing a guardian angel. I guess once you’ve had a guardian angel, you want to be
one for someone else, and you want a network of angels protecting each other. (Baines
2022).

At this point, Furman’s antinomianism becomes more formal. “This city is the bearer of an old
and secret curse,” she sings on “Train Comes Through”: “It’s not written in your bibles, it’s a verse
behind a verse/Only visible to an obsessive detail-oriented heathen Jew/But it’s the hidden and
unspoken that will thunder when the train comes through.” She has discovered in her queer, trans,
and Jewish identity a hermeneutic resource, a key to a history from below (histories will name us
as the people underneath”) that unites by means of specificity. When asked if she is concerned
about alienating those in her audience who do not share her identities, Furman responds with
dialectical precision: “I have widened my scope by narrowing it” (Goldfine 2022).
Yet, just as these themes find more pointed expression, she falls back on a kind of
normative thinking, particularly in her turn to the romance of community. To be sure, the
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community (the network of angels) that she envisions is attuned to the messianic principle. And
the promise of her vision lies somewhere in the combined use of the terms: “There’s something
about messianic yearning that is a tool of a community in mourning,” she remarks (Goldfine 2022).
Still, she must wrestle with community’s paradoxical character. Her dilemma principally concerns
assimilation, and the irreconcilable strategies of “let us in” (into the legal category of equal
citizenship, into Rabbinical school) and informed assessments that, as a strategy of social
regulation, “community is the enemy” (our real enemies are the law and the religious institution
as such). To be sure, Furman understands that her messianism demands more than the romance of
community, more than the law, more than religion. Indeed, it requires war: “So now we’re into
territory we’ve been in before/End the preparations and begin the war/The streets of the city’s what
we’re asking for/And we’ll take ‘em if they’re not given.” But if this language is unapologetically
militant, the “wrath” of Furman’s “queer girl gangs” is, in concrete terms, characterized less by
decisive offensive strategy than by the evasive transformative impulse already identified and that
she derives from Reed: “death stares to ward off enemies, amulets to ward off fear.”
From within these tensions, Furman aspires to devise a concrete messianic politics aimed
at healing the world—i.e., an antinomian process of working through that is not bound to its logical
contradiction because it leads toward a concrete reckoning that can ultimately supersede its logical
limits. In seeking to rehabilitate a dissident Judaism and overcome the profound spiritual (and
general) compromises of Zionism and the induction of Jews into whiteness, however, she has
risked limiting herself by deriving her vision from scripture. Attuned though she may be to “the
verse behind the verse,” scripture remains dependent on rules. Ethics and morality figure centrally
in Judaism, and religious leaders place hermeneutic emphasis on parsing right from wrong. Jewish
law (halakha, from the root word “to behave”) derives from various texts and customs, but
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principally concerns the 613 commandments found in the Torah, collectively referred to as the
mitzvot. And while the practical work of this parsing is contested—with some Talmudic scholars
insisting upon adherence to the letter and others convinced of the need to deduce the general
purpose of each mitzvah—its interpretive structure produces a closed system. Although Furman
seems inclined to the latter, more “progressive” approach, she is also a touring musician who
neither travels nor performs on Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, also known as Saturday (Rockart
2021).
Here we arrive at the antithetical tension within the antinomian mode. Insofar as dissent
becomes contained within the closed system of scriptural premises, it will gradually become
disconnected from the animating impulse that put the dissenter on their course in the first place.
30

Granted, Furman’s thinking continues to evolve, and rabbinical school has surely seen some
dropouts. Still, the formal properties of her antinomianism run the risk of extinguishing her initial
animating impulse—a possibility for which another word is tragedy.
Tragedy is a risk intrinsic to any social effort legitimated from a first premise that is
prompted in text. This is a problem of form. Lukacs described something like this, for instance, in
in his critique of orthodox Marxism, which had fallen victim to a catechistic implosion; a body of
literature generated with an aim of demonstrating an approach to the world had inspired acolytes
who then, in confusion, began using the text as its own reference. But the text was never meant to
be used as justification for the profanation. Instead, its function is much more simple: use the text
to anticipate how things might unfold, and don’t assert that which has not been demonstrated.
Tragedy is thus as inevitable as it is not final. Instead, tragedy corresponds to the experiential
fullness of dialectical thought. One cannot be absolved without knowing both being and

30
This dilemma has a notable antecedent in the Romantic movement.
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nothingness. Tragedy, when grasped as momentary, as Reason instructs, is the lesson of historical
materialism.
This antithetical tendency is codified within the broad musical genre with which Furman,
Lou Reed, and Chumbawamba principally identify: punk rock.
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The story of punk is one of
antinomian rebellion, and the angel of this mode recurs throughout the oeuvres of its innovators.
This invocational pattern attests to the resonant messianic thinking that Furman makes explicit,
whereby the Final Judgement becomes homologous with a revolutionary interruption of history.
this comes across in the punk anthem “Carbonated Heat” by early-‘90s Bay Area stalwarts
Strawman: “I saw my community, half scared half ready to fight/Fifteen thousand angels ready to
fly, Mission style/Meanwhile it’s riot time, don’t come every week.” So too is it apparent in the
Buzzcocks lyrics of “Libertine Angel” (1993):

There’s no turning back now/It’s out of control/Take away history/You’re left with a
mystery/Life sentence no chance of parole/And all my ancestors/Were primitive man/Just
look what you’ve got/Admit you’ve lost the plot/It’s like something we could all
understand/See the sword of the people/A libertine angel/The sword of the people/A
libertine angel/Be an angel.
32

31
As I noted in the Introduction, although all the modes explored in this study will be represented by multiple
genres, and while genres themselves are sometimes sites of modal contestation, it is often the case that,
within a given genre, one mode predominates. We can observe a parallel phenomenon within a genre’s
corresponding “subculture,” a concept that has arguably been overtaken by neoliberalism’s dominant
paradigm of niche marketing. In the next chapter I offer an extended analysis of the transition from contested
to triumphant neoliberalism, and hypothesize why the former is associated with suggestive invocations of
the embodied angel and the latter has inspired overt expressions of the embodied angel.

32
Etymologically, “libertine” means “freedman XIV (Wycl. Bible; thereafter from XVI); antinomian, free-
thinker; licentious man XVI” (Friedrichsen and Burchfield 1966, 526).

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Some invocations, meanwhile, more closely resemble Furman’s, where the antinomian impetus is
to envision the collective force that might one day do the real avenging—a collective that is
necessarily opaque. “People rising from the highway /And war war is the battle cry,” sings Patti
Smith, the proverbial godmother of punk, on “Ask the Angels” (1976), describing yet another
exodus: “Armageddon, it’s gotten/No savior jailer can take it from me/World ending, it’s just
beginning/And rock and roll is what I’m born to be ... Ask the angels if they’re startin’ to
move/Comin’ in droves in from L.A./Ask the angels if they’re starting to groove/Lightning as
armor and it’s today.”
Equally opaque is the community forged by Bad Brains, whose injunction to “Let there be
angels just like me/Let there be angels just like you” (2007) affirms Greg Tate’s admiration of the
fact that the band “don’t shit on their audience… but instead reason with them in hardcore dialect,
a messianic message” born of their “extraordinary synthesis” of punk and reggae, which is “of
course made possible by the fact that they’re black” (Tate 1992, 22). But so too did Bad Brains’
antinomianism leave Tate “worried for their souls,” owing to “how far down river the Brain’s
missionary work has taken them from the wellspring of most black music’s spirituality—namely,
the black community” (Tate 1992, 23).
If messianism promises anything, it is that we can be radically transformed. For Marx,
communist revolution necessarily displaces the categories of the very class system that inspired it.
In the absence of a revolutionary cessation of time, however, transformation, whether evasive or
otherwise, will remain politically ambivalent. Furman all but points this out when, in her analysis
of Reed’s song “Hangin’ Round” (the track on Transformer where he invokes the angel) she admits
that she’s aware of “how his need to seem cooler than everyone else pushes him toward a kind of
conservatism.”
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We remember him on the third Velvets record singing softly, ‘Jesus, help me find my
proper place.’ Not at all the cool thing to do in 1969, but that’s just it: no one expected it.
On ‘Hangin’ Round,’ he quotes ‘Hark, the Herald Angels Sing’ with a wink; later, on the
second side of the record, he’ll more solemnly intone ‘Heavenly Father, I know I have
sinned.’ This is how committed Reed is to defying your expectations. Just when you think
you know him, he’ll turn Christian. (Furman 2018a, 77)

Considered in this light, scholarly controversies over Gerrard Winstanley’s later life take on new
significance. J.D. Alsop insists that, after the Diggers’ “failed revolution,” Winstanley not only
joined the Quaker movement but “served as waywarden of Cobham parish in I659 and I666,
overseer of the poor in 1660, and churchwarden in I667 and 1668.”

Furthermore, the Surrey quarter sessions order book demonstrates that Gerrard Winstanley
was appointed one of the two chief constables of Elmbridge hundred on 3 October 1671
… and served in this office for one year… It is difficult enough to credit that the millenarian
who denounced trade in the 1640s as unjust and often dishonest eventually re-entered
London commerce as a Quaker. It would appear incredible that the outspoken heretical
critic of established religion became a churchwarden, and the Digger agitator who
disrupted society held office as a chief constable—particularly when these activities took
place at Cobham, the scene of his radicalism. Yet the evidence is straightforward” (Alsop
1985, 706).

Christopher Hill rejected this interpretation of the historical record, insisting that it is built upon
the integrated biographies of two separate men with the same name. But with no alternate
explanation of the famous rebel’s trajectory, we’re left to shrug and mutter: what a punk.
How, then, might the antinomian dissident subvert her seeming fate? In this chapter we
have constellated multiple examples from radically disparate contexts to reveal the characteristics
of the antinomian mode and think through their contemporary expression. Taken together, the
cases suggest that the antinomian is vulnerable not only to social panic and scapegoating, but also
to a developmental trajectory that leads to and past the angel. That is, while antinomianism can’t
produce the outcome it desires on its own terms, it nevertheless remains the case that
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antinomianism itself leads toward greater concretion. Presumably there is a threshold after which
the initial frame is overcome by the development that has taken place within it (as when, because
he’s a Jew, Ollman can’t be a Jew). And although a program that leads in the direction of
concretion and working through so predictably leads to tragedy in a world where such things are
scorned, this mode is the most promising form of wishing.

Coordinates of the Antinomian Mode
Through this extended analysis, I have shown how the Antinomian mode is defined more by the
sacred than the profane, more by disorder than order, and more by the universal than by the
particular. In the Antinomian mode, the angel’s sacredness is presupposed. Its sacred character is
being recognized through the disavowal of church orthodoxy. Principally characterized by the
desire for a more sacred communion with God, antinomic figures are closely related to the
scapegoat: the individual ostracized in the service of sacralization, whose sacredness is designed
to unite people in faith.
In this mode, the angel reflects the disorder of the religious community/society in the
moment of law-breaking violence; the angel is an expression of a theodicy doubted (the affective
outcome of the antithetical tendency in the preceding octant) and rejected. Finally, in this mode,
the angel, like Christ, is universally for everyone, and this premise must be rescued from the
constraints imposed by orthodoxy, even in the face of persecution. The particularity of the
scapegoat’s outsider condition is subordinate to its purpose as the strategy for containing and
managing violence for the whole population; all against one instead of all against all.

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Chapter 4: Deconstruction

Thesis: There is no whole—and even if there was, I wouldn’t want to be part of it.
Antithesis: “There is no whole” is itself a totalizing claim; order reappears even amidst
fragments and negation. FUTILITY
Coordinates: Sacred-Disorder-Particular

In the music video for “Lucy,” off the album color theory (2020), indie singer-songwriter Sophia
Regina Allison’s lyrics appear on the screen as if deciphered from within a falling digital rain,
letters solidifying momentarily before melting back into the stream. Allison, who performs under
the name Soccer Mommy, recounts a personal encounter with Lucifer. Sparks rise from a growing
blaze just below the screen as she introduces the song’s animating opposition: “You cannot resist
him/When you look in his shiny eyes/The face of an angel/With the heart of something less nice.”
If the antinomian angel is defined by dialectical synthesis, so that we discover how it is also what
it isn’t (that angel and devil are one, as in the poetry of William Blake noted in the previous
chapter), the angel of deconstruction is defined by a more ambiguous relation of the dual character
of the sacred. “Religious forces are of two sorts,” Durkheim explains.

Some are beneficent, guardians of the physical and moral order, dispensers of life
and health and all the qualities to which men esteem… On the other hand, there are
evil and impure powers, productive of disorders, causes of death and sickness,
instigators of sacrilege” (Durkheim 1965, 455).

The contrast is acute and “even goes into the most radical antagonism,” but these opposing poles
share “a close kinship” (Durkheim 1965, 456). In this chapter I aim to demonstrate that, as in
antinomianism, angels in the mode of deconstruction are invoked to direct our attention from the
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thing itself to its constitutive outside, but that the relationship between these elements is radically
distinct in each respective mode; that is, invocations in the deconstruction mode emphasize formal
scriptural dualisms (angel vs. fallen angel) but with no view toward synthesis. Instead, we find
ourselves at a crossroads, where the operating premise is simply that nothing ever is what it is.
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The Dual Character of the Sacred
Lucifer is an angel, and even in its “dark” form abides by the logic of wish fulfillment. In this
chapter I show how the character of Lucifer is deconstructive, and that this pattern finds more
general expression within the logic of Christianity itself. To grasp the mode of deconstruction as
it finds expression within Christianity, we can turn confidently to the gospels and the Temptation
of Christ. But first we must revisit the significance of the fallen angel motif, which underscores
how Christianity is derivative and responsive to a broader established pattern of with fulfillment.
Through its association with the planet Venus, the “first light” of dawn, this motif refers in general
terms to a divine being who pursues the highest seat among the gods and for this is cast out of
heaven—a mythological image that has found expression in the folklore of ancient Rome (Lucifer
means “light-bringer” in Latin), Sumeria (in the figure of Inanna), Babylonia (in Ishtar), Canaanite
religion (in Attar). There are additional historical variations of this motif, but for our purposes it
is simply necessary to note the pattern, and how it corresponds to the ubiquitous imagery we
encounter today in American popular culture. In that popular imagery the Christian myth remains
dominant, and the depicted fallen angel figure goes by several names that are used interchangeably
as corresponding wish images: Lucifer, Devil, Satan.

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Every categorical proposition undoes itself by generating and incorporating its antithetical term as a
remainder (i.e. “both/and” is not the antithesis of “either/or” since, at its logical conclusion, “both/and”
must also include both “both/and” and “either/or.”
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Church orthodoxy posits this figure as the personification of evil. In scripture, as in popular
culture today, its role accords more specifically with that of a trickster. The gospels recount how
Jesus, newly baptized by John the Baptist, fasted for forty days and nights in the Judean desert and
was then thrice tempted by the Devil. With each temptation, the Devil intervened in the
deconstructive mode, identifying hierarchical oppositions in an attempt to overturn them. Finding
Jesus hungry, the devil prods: “If thou be the Son of God, command these stones be made bread.”
But Jesus defends the hierarchy, refusing to elevate his will above the will of God: “It is written,
Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”
So, the devil takes Jesus atop the temple and tempts him once more: “If thou be the Son of God,
cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their
hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.” Again, Jesus
refuses the bait, replying: “It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” Finally, the
devil takes Jesus to a mountaintop and offers him the glory of the world’s kingdoms, on one
condition: “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.” Jesus declines,
reiterating his sole worship of God, and angels arrive to minister unto him as the devil finally
retreats.
In this parable, the devil relies upon the analytic tools of deconstruction. Specifically, the
Devil attempts to force a break with what Christian mythology presents as “natural,” i.e. God’s
law. And while the Devil doesn’t succeed in tempting Christ, the temptations do call attention to
an important deconstructive principle: that what we learn to see as “natural” in truth emerges
through a process of mediation that is constituted by rules that are not natural at all. Succumbing
to temptation thus corresponds to lawlessness. On this basis, institutions of religious orthodoxy
that posit the devil as the personification of evil have in the name of warding off the threat of
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lawlessness stigmatized many a benign social phenomenon—not least of all “devil music.”
Historically, this phrase has been used to criminalize whole genres of music along with the people
who invent and innovate those genres. And while legalistic attacks on “devil music” are
fundamentally authoritarian, they are predicated on the accurate assumption that music is often a
conduit of religious experience (refer to this discussion in chapter two, The Angels of Orthodoxy).
If music is one way the devil plays his tricks, specifically by compelling listeners to give
primacy to earthly pleasures, then at its ultimate point, and as a point of correspondence to the
antinomian ontology, this lawlessness undermines categorical distinctions until people encounter
Lucifer within themselves—an embodiment motif that appears logically in the final verse of
Allison’s “Lucy” in which she reveals the process (sacred to profane to sacred): “Succumbing to
evil/I thought I could never be/I look in the mirror/And the darkness looks back at me/I can’t help
the feeling/That irks me/ That I’m falling down/From heaven through the earth/To hellfire to wear
his crown.” Reasonable people react to these lyrics with a measure of skepticism: she doesn’t mean
she has become an antisocial threat. Especially when we concede the link between music and
spiritual experience, it becomes obvious that most devil symbolism in popular culture bears little
relation to what might earnestly be deemed “Satan worship.”
The political theatre of “devil music” fearmongering has found traction targeting heavy
metal. For my generation, Michael Moore’s interview with alt metal musician Marilyn Manson in
the film Bowling for Columbine, about the 1999 Columbine high school shooting, was a high-
profile rebuke of literalist interpretations of pop music satanism. When, in the tragedy’s aftermath,
reporters revealed that the young shooters listened to Manson’s music, social conservatives
doubled down on their culture war attack of the musician. Manson was by then very famous,
especially for his album Antichrist Superstar (1997), and indeed leaned into this imagery; one
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conservative senator memorably objected to the singer’s “satanic wings.” Yet in Moore’s film
Manson spoke compassionately about the young shooters and their certain pain, making the case
that anyone capable of inflicting such horror must be suffering deeply. In response to Moore’s
question of what he would say to the shooters, Manson replied, “I would listen,” thereby rebutting
reactionary efforts to scapegoat him and redirecting the blame on those who defend a way of life
that compounds atomistic despair and leads one white man after another into fantasies of massacre.
But it is also inadequate to interpret such symbolism as superficial. Indeed, the designation
“devil music” seems logical in rather banal way when we understand the devil as trickster. This
mode has shaped metal as a genre since its earliest innovators, for whom devil imagery figured
centrally. Black Sabbath, widely viewed as the first metal band, took as its emblem a winged devil,
and eventually popularized the devil horns hand gesture that has become iconic within metal
culture (credited to Ronnie James Dio, the front man who replaced Ozzy Osbourne in 1979). For
these invocations, the genre as a whole became a target for reactionaries.

Rarely have lyrics come under such close scrutiny as they have with heavy metal.
The supernatural themes elaborated within the genre have attracted considerable
media attention with several court cases proceeding against record companies and
bands whose music allegedly caused young people to commit suicide in response
to the dark lyrical messages. Further, youth rebellion, graveyard desecration,
animal sacrifice and other antisocial and offensive behaviours have been linked to
heavy metal by sensationalist media, conservative politicians and parent groups
often with little or no supporting evidence. (Farley 2009, 73–74).

Black Sabbath’s self-titled 1970 debut album featured the song “N.I.B.” (which some take as an
acronym for “nativity in black”), which is sung suggestively (prior to the formal embodiment
motif, a point to which I will return) in the first person from the point of view of Lucifer: “Look
into my eyes, you will see who I am/My name is Lucifer, please take my hand/Oh yeah!/Follow
me now and you will not regret/Leaving the life you led before we met/You are the first to have
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this love of mine/Forever with me ‘till the end of time/Your love for me has just got to be
real/Before you know the way I’m going to feel.” Even as the content refers to “evil,” the dual
character of the sacred is in full view as the enunciations turn to worship and eternal devotion.
To understand this thematic emphasis, it is necessary to recall the material conditions of
deindustrialization under which the genre took shape. According to Ryan Moore, the best way to
understand metal is by extending E.P. Thompson’s observation in The Making of the English
Working Class that “the Industrial Revolution was ‘a time when men’s psychic world was filled
with violent images from hell-fire and Revelation, and their real world was filled with poverty and
oppression’. However, Moore argues, Thompson “might just as easily have been referring to the
emergence of heavy metal in a time when deindustrialization was decimating many of these same
factory towns in the late twentieth century.”

Some of the self-anointed mystics Thompson described bear a striking resemblance
to the heavy metal doomsayers who surfaced from declining industrial cities like
Birmingham and Sheffield… heavy metal found its audience among the first
generation of working-class youth and masculinist rebels who did not have a
factory job waiting for them when they left school, and who would therefore
constitute a surplus population subject to intensified processes of social control
(Moore 2009, 143-46).

Both metal and punk emerged in critical response to the era of hippie utopianism (in the punk
anthem “London Calling” The Clash declare that “phony Beatle-mania has bitten the dust”) and
the genres shared an important rebelliousness. But if punk rebelliousness was characterized in its
essence by an antinomian lawlessness that, in the hands of its wisest makers, took direct aim at the
material forces and figureheads of neoliberal austerity (i.e. bringing the angel to earth), heavy
metal tried to reconnect with the sacred by encouraging adherents to join the devil in hell. This
this corresponded to efforts to elaborate and entrench forms of symbolic power, and entailed
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leaning into working-class cultural conventions “like the rockers in England and Hell’s Angels in
the USA, who were also rebellious yet characterized by hyper-masculinity and patriarchal gender
roles, militarism and xenophobia, and fear of racial and sexual difference… threats to working-
class masculinity further intensified the search for symbolic forms of compensatory power”
(Moore 2009, 146). In the face of deindustrialization and their devaluing, those drawn to heavy
metal subculture disavowed the collective in favor of atomistic hedonism: There is no whole—and
even if there was, I wouldn’t want to be part of it.
Yet, in their compensatory pursuit, heavy metal musicians influenced by the 1960s British
Blues revival seized upon a famous myth in the tradition of the Delta Blues: the legend of Robert
Johnson selling his soul to the devil at a local crossroads in exchange for extraordinary musical
prowess and fame. This conception of the devil in the blues, George Lipsitz explains, derives from
West African folklore, and is a trickster figure. “The trickster figure at the crossroads – often
interpreted in the romantic tradition as the devil – is really Eshu-Elegbara (Legba, Elebgba, Esu),
not the incarnation of evil, but an unpredictable deity with the power to make things happen, a god
described ... as ‘the ultimate master of potentiality’” (Lipsitz 2006, 120). Heavy metal sold its soul
to the devil—or, as Moore argues in Marxist terms, “working-class consciousness in the context
of deindustrialization [was] mediated by reification,” a concept Georg Lukács used to describe
how “‘a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a “phantom
objectivity.’”

Under the capitalist mode of production, society’s creations appear to have a life of
their own independent of human control, as if they are forces of nature and are
therefore timeless and immutable. Lukács traced reification back to Marx’s notion
of commodity fetishism, in which exchange value reshapes social relations among
people such that they ‘assume, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between
things.’ Reification is therefore a consequence of capitalist societies in which
people lose control over the production process and social relations are determined
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by economic forces that operate with mysterious objectivity, as suggested by the
common metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market... Reification expresses the
sense of being at the mercy of processes that are absolute and overwhelming in their
consequences, yet invisible and impersonal in their origins… In heavy metal,
reification is evident in the way that social forces of power and destruction are
envisioned as inhuman or supernatural beings that cannot be comprehended, much
less resisted, by ordinary human beings. It is an expression of the powerlessness of
people in the face of socio-economic forces, ‘like the sorcerer, who is no longer
able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells,’
in the words of Marx and Engels (alluding to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem
‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’) that also resemble the lyrics of many heavy metal
songs. (Moore 2009, 147-48)

Fans of heavy metal, whose loyalty and intensity has found expression in the self-description
“proud pariahs,” subordinated themselves to a project in which meaning was contingent on this
invisible force. “In heavy metal,” Moore explains, “it becomes very difficult to separate text from
audience; instead, meaning is created in the reciprocal flows of social interaction between the two”
(Moore 2009, 147). Heavy metal fans become central to the elaboration of occult themes, with live
albums and concert audience engagement figuring centrally in the development of the genre. And
this logic of subordination to “natural” forces (reification) also shapes those “instances where it
tries to harness supernatural forces as sources of resistance and empowerment… some young metal
fans have indeed experimented with the occult in an attempt to gain magical powers or get revenge
on authorities or peers.”

Likewise, while the music of Black Sabbath usually portrays Satan and the
supernatural as forces of destruction, in ‘The Wizard’ (1970) they contrastingly
fantasize about magical forms of resistance against demonic evil. The wizard
causes the ‘demons’ to ‘worry’ and thus brings forth ‘joy’, even making people
‘happy’.

But here the futility of this mode is laid bare: resistance itself is conceived in subordination to the
genre’s wishful mode, in which meaning is not only contingent but also perpetually deferred. This
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animating logic resembles the deconstructive principle that Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and
other philosophers of deconstruction defend: the final objective cannot be to undo hierarchies,
because the animating insight of deconstruction is that a hierarchy of dual oppositions always
reestablishes itself. (Derrida’s concept of differance invokes this dual operation of meaning.) There
is a necessity of unending analysis that can make explicit the inevitable hierarchies. After we
make sense of the contingencies of a given image, sound, or text, the experience of joyful affect
quickly gives way to the recognition that this unpacked meaning is itself destabilizing. The
deconstructive mode is thus defined by an endless destabilization that eventually makes it
impossible to imagine a place to stand.
This impossibility, the terror of perpetually displaced meaning, finds expression in metal’s
general lack of a coherent political claim-staking: “the most noticeable thing about the extent of
class politics in heavy metal,” Moore writes, “is its absence…”

Along with punk, heavy metal came of age in a historical moment of social crisis
catalysed by economic restructuring, but unlike punk it only rarely confronted those
social conditions directly… When reified, socially constructed forms of
exploitation and power are represented as otherworldly in their origins and
overwhelming in their effects, while on the other hand resistance can only be
imagined in mystical or fantastic terms… On the concrete terrain of everyday life,
the reified iconography of heavy metal in 1970s and 1980s Britain corresponded to
working-class youth’s socio-political experience – they knew they were screwed,
but it was hard to articulate why. Alienated youth might admonish power when it
is exercised directly, like when schools discipline them, parents abuse them, police
bust them or the government tries to censor their music. But deindustrialization,
globalization, outsourcing and automation are not so easily represented or resisted;
they just seem to happen. (Moore 2009, 155-56)

In this period of contested neoliberalism, invocations were primarily suggestive of the embodied
angel, and this was true across genres. We see this trend persist in Soccer Mommy’s pop-inflected
indie rock, where the dissociative impulse that festers under triumphant neoliberalism reveals its
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own debt to the blues: “color theory pitches headlong into the anomie of early-20s depression—
the moment in adulthood when the bright colors of adolescence start to dim for the first time and
it occurs to you, with dull alarm, that the rest of it might be like this…”

In deliberate contrast to the bright sound, the mood is grimmer, the emotional truths
darker. Allison has said the album depicts three states of being, represented by three
colors: blue for depression, yellow for mental and physical illness, gray for
mortality.

Why, we must ask, have other invocations under triumphant neoliberalism broken with the most
recent past and embraced the trend of embodiment? One explanation might that be that people
grasp that to break out of the futility of deconstructive thought, of the perpetual contemplation of
absolute truth, our only recourse is to more concretely find the fallen angel inside us—i.e. Lucifer
is just another idea, an absolutizing wish, fantasy via Thanatos.

Coordinates of the Deconstruction Mode
Through this extended analysis, I have shown how the Deconstruction mode is defined more by
the sacred than the profane, more by disorder than order, and more by the particular than by the
universal. In this mode, the angel’s sacredness is presupposed and attests to the dual character of
the sacred, colloquially characterized in the dichotomy of virtue and evil. This disordering effect
animates the deconstructive mode, wherein a trickster figure accepts the first premise in order to
challenge its internal premises and to thereby undermine it (like Lucifer with the Temptation of
Christ). This is the disorder of the simultaneous reality and unreality of myth. That is to say, even
if you believed in the devil you would never sell your soul, and even people who don’t believe in
the devil remain somehow open to the myth of Robert Johnson. Finally, the angel in this mode is
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particular in that it is solitary as it succumbs to temptation and falls from grace, and as it proceeds
in the perpetuity that characterizes deconstructive analysis.

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Chapter 5: Waking Up is Hard to Do

In the dialectical image, what has been within a particular epoch is always,
simultaneously, “what has been from time immemorial.” As such, however, it is
manifest, on each occasion, only to a quite specific epoch—namely, the one in
which humanity, rubbing its eyes, recognizes just this particular dream image as
such. It is at this moment that the historian takes up, with regard to that image, the
task of dream interpretation. (Benjamin, The Arcades Project [N4,1])

Wish images, Benjamin tells us, are important because they alert us to an emancipatory promise:
identification with the image is actually an identification with a subtending desire, and so reveals
the possibility that through thinking we might fulfill that desire concretely. Having leaned into this
promise with the angel image, then through it theorized eight modes of wishful thinking, I
ambitiously set out to show how the modes worked by unpacking the biographies of musicians
whose angel invocations spoke to them powerfully. My aim was to present these biographies as
extended case studies for each mode, developing them through constellation with similar historical
invocations, as I did for Orthodoxy, Antinomianism, and Deconstruction in the preceding chapters.
But as I entered the final months of writing, I realized that my circumstances prevented me from
completing the work as it was first envisioned. I was dispirited, having come to understand the
project as a kind of machine that needed all of its parts. But then something else happened.

The breath I drew to confess that it was all too much brought in a rapture.
Caught up, I was forced to survive my wishful modes, one by one, as Dante
descended the levels of hell or Alice staggered through Lewis Carroll’s torments.
What am I saying?
Explanatory fragments gather like birds. Whatever found me also once led
Benjamin to call thinking “eminently narcotic.” It’s what sent the Romantics into
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nature and the Surrealists to pluck from the refuse. Federico Garcia Lorca called it
duende. Aime Cesaire told it as “the madness that sees.” James Baldwin found it
just beyond “the unusual door.” On and on. Call it Eros, or intoxication, or God;
names diminish it. What matters is that if I had up to that point apprehended the
angel intellectually, an unnamable torrent now broke open my sensibility and
shattered any distinction between “the project” and my life.
My disavowals of the angel finally rang hollow. Through vertigo and nausea
I conceded that this saccharine phantom might as well have been my wish image,
too, all along, even if I had refused its precise form.
Now, a dissertation is no place to tell of how my would-be angel dream got
built, over decades, from a scaffold of self-doubt and side-eye, thievery and small
cuts. It’s a common story of too good, and besides the point is this: if I had bent
space and time to honor the lines of Walter Benjamin, space and time bent me back.
So sure of my handle on the power of myth, myth saw its chance to play me
inside-out. A horror ensued. My life was on the radio; my unconscious sounded out
in the voices of my children. Every book became a code and every code a course to
hell. Days of bad poetry and photographing every flower gave way to nights of cool
anger or panic or plain evil. If “much madness is divinest sense,” as Emily
Dickenson wrote, was this my revelation? For there was reason in it—once I bested
the monster of flimsy associations! After that battle (fascist cognition, we called it)
the river stayed within its muddy banks, still a steady violent roil of organic debris,
the awkward tilting drift of a fallen branch, a knot of trampled reeds waving in the
current, still holding at the root.
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Did that river drown the angel? An accident of history left me flailing in the
dreamscape of Christian mythology. Was it an accident, too, that someone noticed
me pointing beyond it? Who traced a line in the air from my fingertip and saw,
despite the creep of psychic death, that my gaze was still fixed on the practical
horizon of some we called freedom?
“Are you inside or outside of it? Are you for or against it?” A guide pushes
me to consider religion on these terms, from yet another book opened at random to
the necessary page. “Standing on the fulcrum of such dichotomies is the work of
the scholar” (Lofton 2017, 2). This is a memoir, you see, of one more self undone,
split like an atom, now recohering and turning to face the world.

And if at this stage it still moves disjointedly between writerly tones—trawling the river for winged
singers, misread theories, and idiosyncratic histories, playing with literary montage and surrealist
erotic confession—that’s just the experimentation of a work in process. I don’t know yet how these
moving parts fit together, only that they can. It remains to be seen whether my conditions can be
made to accommodate this work of synthesis, of translation, but the hard-earned insight of its basic
feasibility now relieves me of my last apprehensions. I know now by means of reason and intuition
that the analysis makes sense; its presentation, made organic from that fulcrum, is the priority to
which I turn my attention in the Conclusion.
But first, I will attempt to show a little more of the original vision.
The methodological benefit of the extended case studies in the preceding chapters is that
they show the internal operations of each wishful mode in detail, while also hinting at how the
modes are all contingent upon and shot through with one another. This form of presentation can
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therefore guide the analysis with greater precision toward that fulcrum, via opportunities intrinsic
to wishful thinking that correspond to a potential dialectical break, i.e., that reveal how to make
the angel dialectical.
Revisiting Benjamin’s essay on Surrealism, AK Thompson seizes upon his language of the
“trick” to develop the following “schematization of Benjamin’s observations regarding images”:

Figure 9: “Schemetization of Benjamin’s observations regarding
images,” AK Thompson (2020)

Building upon Susan Buck-Morss’ deduction that, for Benjamin, we discover dialectical images
through an intuitive “quasi-mystical apprehension” (Buck-Morss 1991, 220), Thompson suggests
that if we are to devise strategies for the communist operationalization of image based on
Benjamin’s insights, “we must keep Dreams from finding their resolution in Propaganda by
pushing them instead toward Awakening. Only from there might they finally ascend to the field
of Production” (A. Thompson 2020a, 16). Through this investigation I have attempted to show
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how the wish image of the angel might be pulled in the direction of awakening, an effort of
production unto itself that is based in the work of constellation:

When considered from the standpoint of its recognition… the dialectical image
appears to confront the viewer as an immediate and absolute presence (and it is for
this reason that Benjamin so frequently invokes shock as an analytic category).
When considered from the standpoint of its production, however, the shock of
recognition begins to seem epiphenomenal, a byproduct of the highly mediated
work of constellation” (A. Thompson 2020a, 13).

Because I developed this tool by way of logical “thinking” rather than through analysis of specific
case studies of the angel, I tentatively propose that it can be used to study any wish image. The
potential value of such replication will necessarily correspond to the selection of a wish image that
is, like the angel, in wide circulation; this is important not only for reasons of relevance and impact,
but also because the method itself involves the constellation of variable invocations of the same
image. This work of constellation involves the careful placement of variations of a single wish
image within the compensatory modes illuminated by the tool. Approached this way, wish images
as disparate as the protest action or the automobile, the collective dining table or the crucifix, the
ice queen (the Frozen franchise builds upon a long tradition) or the herd of wild horses (as does
the Spirit franchise), might be shown, through historical constellation, to confirm the consistency
of these modes, and so also reveal the promise of escape hatches toward awakening.
Because the aim of this study is to establish the validity of the method itself and to
demonstrate how it can be brought to bear on any wish image, I would be remiss not to engage
also with the remaining five modes—Egoism, Negation, Complementarianism, Inclusion, and
Synecdoche—even if in a truncated form. In this chapter, I address these remaining modes very
briefly, sketching out a single contemporary illustration that seems a likely key. With these
sketches, my main aim is to illuminate more clearly how all of the modes operate together. We
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have established that the wish image operates within a shell game of deferral, and only by
fashioning an escape hatch can we break free from the wish image’s grasp.
To break free in this way, however, entails a reckoning with non-resolution.
The limitations intrinsic to each wishful mode stimulate constant movement, as the dreamer
switches things up in pursuit of oneness. The doubt fostered by Orthodoxy has compelled people
toward Antinomianism, as it did in the context of seventeenth-century popular revolt in England.
Antinomianism, meanwhile, entails its own limitations that can drive people toward alternate
compensations like Deconstruction. It is beyond the scope of this dissertation to demonstrate
historically the varied compensatory shifts that people can make as their wishful identifications
lose their luster; after all, there is no formula to this movement. Yet, by analyzing the modes, we
can begin to infer social tendencies that give them their allure in a given context. And we can train
ourselves to anticipate how and why people might shift their attachments and identifications. This
movement, to clarify, happens in two ways:
1. The selection of substitute mythic objects within a given mode: In dreaming for a way out
of the status quo, and as part of the search for oneness, the dreamer will over time replace
one wish image with another—i.e., will trade in the angel for an alternate wish image that
better corresponds to the evolving character of their manifest desires and the
possibilities/inadequacies of material conditions. Such substitutions can take place without
a change to the principal mode of wishful thinking.
2. The transposition to alternate modes: To compensate for the lack inherent in any given
mode—i.e. the futility of Deconstruction’s “prison house of language” (Jameson 1972)—
the dreamer can switch modes altogether without altering the manifest form of their object
of wishful identification.
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Both of these transformations—trading in one wish image for another and/or switching from one
mode of wishful thinking to another—defer the moment of political awakening. This is lived as an
intense struggle: the panic of non-resolution propels the action.
This movement, meanwhile, corresponds instructively to what Antonio Gramsci called
“passive revolution”: the gradual and constant socio-political processes by which revolutionary
tendencies are displaced but also partially fulfilled through the reorganization of the economy and
the state. Compensatory shifts at the register of wishful thinking coincide with what Gramsci
described as the “molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the pre-existing
composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes” (Gramsci 1971, 109
Q15§11). Gramsci wanted to demonstrate the inadequacy of the resolutions to which people
turned, and to do so in a public process, so that ill-advised paths could be closed before they were
actively pursued. By cutting off options in this way, he aimed to bring people to the point of
recognizing both the inevitability of and need for a war of maneuver. Passive revolution thus calls
attention to an urgent political imperative: those “molecular shifts” are the expression of people’s
search for a way to harness their wishful thinking with the wisdom of critical distance.
Gramsci’s proposal is that people ought not to be left to search on their own, and the aim
of communism is to guide this frenetic activity by intervening in the field. In contemplating this
interventionism at the register of wishful thinking and resonant myth—in keeping with Benjamin’s
assessment that the non-resolution of the base finds expression in the wish image (superstructure),
not only through the stimulation of desire but also through the finitude of its possible expression—
we can see how Gramsci complements Benjamin. That is, by apprehending the wish image in
motion, as it moves from one wishful mode to another, it becomes possible to devise means of
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more effectively intervening to stimulate a process of working through that can lead the dreamer
to that fulcrum of thinking.
This process is extremely messy. After all, mythic identification and wishful thinking are
not modalities through which problems are resolved; they are the modalities through which people
discover the problems that they must in reality confront. The lexicon of modern psychology reveals
a general awareness of this problem, which it refers to as motivated reasoning and attributes to the
individual’s desire to overcome cognitive dissonance. Unlike the psychological approach, the aim
of this study is not to resolve but to instead amplify that dissonance by foregrounding the
inadequacy of all possible objects of mythic identification, whereby one becomes conscious of
their dreams as dreams even as they remain attached to their content.
The clearest description of such amplification appears in my account of Antinomianism,
because of the implicit formal reliance on dialectical reason within the mode. Yet, in the process
of working through the other modes in my own thinking—and especially in reflecting upon how
they have found expression in my own visceral, embodied experiences while finalizing this
work—I am convinced that they exist within every mode. By pressing on contradictions in lived
experience as they arise, it is possible to peel away manifest desires to reveal the persistent latent
longing for oneness, and then, with great effort of mind and of body, to turn our knowledge of the
absolute back out onto the world and begin reckoning with the true tasks of emancipation.

Sketches: Modes of Wishful Thinking
My political aim is to stimulate such a reckoning through engagement with the wish image. To
that end, I offer these sketches of the wishful modes of Egoism, Negation, Complementarianism,
Inclusion, and Synecdoche. I present them as a kind of map, within which my method abides by
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Benjamin’s principle of “literary montage”: “I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin
no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not
inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them”
(Benjamin 1999b, 460 [N1a,8]).
Readers are likely to be familiar with some of the figures cited in these sketches—the
power of celebrity, after all, means that we often know “the dirt” on musical artists without having
even wanted to know it. Given that each of these sketches is plainly marked by the fact of a writing
deadline, I invite the reader to call to mind all that they have learned and thought of the figures
cited herein, and to test the suitability of their placement. Do the theses/antitheses of the mode
coincide with what you know of the artist?

EGOISM
Thesis: There is a whole and everyone can contribute by pursuing their own course.
Antithesis: The whole is not necessary and I am autonomous, so there is no contribution to make.
NIHILISM
Coordinates: Sacred-Order-Particular

Kanye West is one of the earliest embodied angels in my catalogue. He wore angel wings on stage
at the Grammys in February 2005 while performing “Jesus Walks.” If the song and performance
attest to his identification with Christian motifs, the theme has only become more pronounced as
his oeuvre expands. In 2015, a raw track called “New Angels” was leaked online before the release
of The Life of Pablo (2015) that built out his mobilization of the motif: “The new angel/Still
learning how to fly/And lay your love on the line/New angel/Who will make the sacrifice?” In
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having invited public ire by making confused remarks about slavery, he got saved. He also wrote
He returned to the angel in the lyrics for “Jesus is Lord,” from Jesus is King (2019): “Sittin’ by
myself, I'm just thinkin’/About all I’ve been through, I wish I was dreamin’/ Man, it’s hard to be
an angel when you surrounded by demons (Jesus, Lord).”
In these iterations, Kanye’s angel invocations are bound up with his references to royalty,
which are pervasive in hip hop, and particularly to the figure of the king. Read closely together,
his angel invocations are sacred in the manner of the king: the outsider who exits through the
ceiling (Girard). There is a pretense of life apart from the profanations of this world, also implied
in Kanye’s self-description as a “genius” (see jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, 2022), from Latin
gignere, (“beget”): “attendant spirit present from one’s birth, innate ability or inclination.” His
angel invocations attest to order: he has a plan (“I’m a visionary,” he says of himself), and that
plan is only superficially at odds with the ordered norms of the society from which he ostensibly
tries to distinguish himself. Finally, his angels are particular: if Kanye is the solitary outsider who
exits through the ceiling, like the King, and so is encumbered by the ideal of sovereignty itself—
rendered iconically in the frontispiece for Hobbes’ Leviathan, the famous depiction of the
sovereign whose body contains silhouettes of all the people, but whose position doesn’t live up to
the ideal of sovereignty itself, which can only be manifest in the collective (universal).
If Jesus if King signalled Kanye’s revivalism, on Donda (2021) he doubles down, invoking
the angel in a manner closer to Orthodoxy, although his celebrity precludes a full slip into that
mode. With his ranch in Wyoming, for instance, he is trying to build Eden on a territory that he
owns, but not trying to change the conditions so that this might be done more generally. Instead,
he is engaged in fashion interventions such as his controversial selling of hoodies in construction
bags, a purported interruption of boutique consumption, but that merely creating a boutique
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aesthetic experience of consuming “egalitarianism.” Kanye’s angel trajectory illuminates the shift
from contested neoliberalism (when he famously said “George Bush doesn’t care about Black
people” after Hurricane Katrina in 2005) to triumphant neoliberalism (backing Donald Trump).

NEGATION
Thesis: There is no whole, only I.
Antithesis: Nothingness remains a modality through which absolution is lived. HOPE.
Coordinates: Profane-Disorder-Universal

I had begun developing the account of this mode in reference to the music video for Grace Ives’
“Angel of Business” (2022), in which the singer wears white angel wings over a business suit and
trudges through her workday, estranged from the social world in which she is emersed. A 26-
second montage shows her alone on a busy train, grimacing as she adjusts her tie, disoriented on
the sidewalk, talking into cell phone on a flight of stone steps, hunched over her lap eating lunch
on a city park bench, and eventually back on the subway platform. Like a seven-day work week,
the looped montage repeats six more times. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank
you, thank you, for making time,” she croons passive aggressively.
The logic of this mode accords with Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that “there is no such
thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” In her account of
“Angel of Business,” Ives refers to its affective register as corresponding to her trepidation within
the music industry and to her struggles with anxiety, and on individualistic terms cites the song as
an expression of the courage to persevere, an exercise in her cultivation of hope. Here we can see
how “hope” operates as an ambiguous concept. If a wise conception of hope is analytic and allows
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us to orient to the immediate tasks at hand for bettering our own conditions—where analysis might
lead to a dialectical break, the desired bifurcations of consciousness—its normative conception is
wishful, where the hope is placed in some external force (i.e., the market) to resolve our problems.
This mode is primarily profane: even the things we think of as sacred are subject to the
banalities and brutalities of the profane world. Profanation entails the disavowal of the sacred. And
disavowing the presumption of an outside/extrinsic reference point (the sacred) collapses the angel
into everyday life. This corresponds to a state of disorder, because there is no way to make sense
of the profane world in the absence of a sacred outside. Meanwhile, it is also universal, because
nothing is sacred. All is interior and must abide by the logic of the profane world.

COMPLEMENTARIANISM
Thesis: There is a whole and each of us must do our part.
Antithesis: I am more of the whole than the part I have been given. RESENTMENT.
Coordinates: Profane-Order-Universal

To explicate this mode, I focused on the logic of heteropatriarchal complementarianism through
the prism of today’s popular feminism. Here we start with a familiar analysis of sexism—wherein
it is a constitutive feature of subjective make-up that men perceive and women are aware of being
perceived, and this forms the foundation of a gendered distribution of labor—but must make sense
of it under conditions where revealing the backstage is a self-authenticating practice that is
assumed to be a self-evident good thing.
Today, because the production of “woman” is organized through the completion of tasks
related to performance and the accomplishment of social reproduction, the revelation that “this
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takes work” can appear subversive. But the commodification of “authenticity” means that the
purported revelation of the backstage more often entails and fosters an ever-deeper displacement
from one’s most organic expressions of selfhood.
To unpack this mode I intended to foreground the multiple angel invocations of 2017
Billboard Woman of the Year, Selena Gomez. Gomez wore angel wings in an early-career 2008
photoshoot; was the model for a “guardian angel” tattoo on the wrist of then-boyfriend Justin
Bieber (2013); danced in the angel wings showroom in a Victoria’s Secret music video for “Hands
to Myself” to promote the annual fashion show for which she was musical guest (2016); and, most
poignantly, appeared with angel wings at the 2019 AMAs, where they unfurled on screen behind
her as she sang the following lyrics, dripping with pious complementarian deference: “This is a
modern fairytale/No happy endings/ No wind in our sails/But I can’t imagine a life without/
Breathless moments breaking me down/The bed’s getting cold but you’re not here/The future that
we hold is so unclear/But I’m not alive until you call/And I’ll be the odds against it all.”
In this context, Gomez, turns to angelic embodiment is about revealing how the image is
put together, all the practical work that goes into the production and preservation of the
mythologized self. The video of Gomez walking among the Victoria’s Secret wings provides a
literal representation of her movement around the backstage of the 2016 fashion show. In the video,
Victoria’s Secret models (“angels”) are lip syncing, with the appearance of vulnerability associated
with the obviousness of the performance (yet another backstage). The show, which was cancelled
in 2018 for its objectionable “beauty” standards amid the surge in popular feminism during the
Trump years and in connection with the #metoo movement, is being revived after a four-year
hiatus—a testament to the endurance of the complementarian wish.
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Without surprise, then, we find that resentment of complementarianism and its attending
violence has also historically found expression in reference to the angel. Virginia Woolf’s criticism
of Coventry Patmore’s 1854 poem to his wife, “The Angel in the House,” a depiction of domestic
sacrifice in service of complementarian myth, is the iconic literary illustration. Woolf describes
Patmore’s angel as “intensely sympathetic… immensely charming… utterly unselfish. She
excelled in the difficult arts of family like.”

She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a
draft she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a
wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of
others. Above all—I need not say it— she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be
her chief beauty—her blushes, her great grace. In those days—the last of Queen
Victoria—every house had its Angel. (cited in Olsen 2003)

For Woolf, this imposing phantom meant the suffocation of creative energy, and thus a power
struggle ensued. “Killing the Angel of the house,” Woolf declared, “was part of the occupation of
the woman writer.” But this injunction plays on a loop of cruel optimism, alongside the confession
that her own angel is “always creeping back in when I thought I had dispatched her.” In 1978,
Tillie Olsen revisited this angel for the second wave, an inflected it with working-class insight:

There is another angel, so lowly as to be invisible, although without her no art, or
any human endeavor, could be carried on for even one day—the essential
angel, with whom Virginia Woolf (and most women writers, still in the privileged
class) did not have to contend—the angel who must assume the physical
responsibilities for daily living, for the maintenance of life. (Olsen 2003, 34).

This mode is profane, because the sacred is not disavowed but it is reduced to a task; profanation
entails starting with an absolute conception but then resolving it into tasks. It is ordered in the
sense that the ordering of tasks corresponds with the revelation of the backstage—but here the
backstage is nothing but tasks. It is characterized by an emphasis on the universal in so far as the
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path to the absolute is conceived of as the complete revelation of the purported backstage; this is
understood as the way to affirm that the logic of gender complementarianism is sound/natural,
(understood as favorable to exploding the performance itself, which would be the dialectical
operation).

INCLUSION
Thesis: There is a whole and it does not recognize me, but it should.
Antithesis: Recognition debases me, so I shouldn’t be part of this whole. REFUSAL.
Coordinates: Profane-Order-Particular

To place Beyoncé in a lightening round is a sin for which I can only beg for forgiveness. In this
obscenely short rehearsal I focus on her multiple angel invocations, which include: her song
“Halo” (2008), on which she sings “Standin’ in the light of your halo / I got my angel now”; the
song “No Angel” (2013), for which the video showed her walking a pit bull wearing all white; her
angel costume for Halloween the same year, 2013; and her couture angel wings at the 2016 VMAs,
which she attended accompanied by the mothers of Black men who had been murdered by police.
Taken together, these invocations tell an important story about the limits of a strategy that involves
any bid for inclusion in the dominant order, and the way even explicit refusals of the desire to be
included can be recuperated through the politics of recognition in the service of constituted power.
They also, however, point toward the possibility of a dialectical break that makes the refusal real.
The story of Beyoncé’s angel negotiation starts back in 2003, however, the year she
released her debut solo album Dangerously in Love, when she painted an image of an angel in
prayer and had it tattooed on her left hip. “It was very, very beautiful,” she recounted in 2010. “But
the next day I woke up, and I was like, ‘Oh my God! What did I do?’ So literally the next week, I
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started getting it removed. It’s gone now.” There are no clear photographs of the tattoo and she
has never commented on its symbolic significance. Of her change of mind, she stated simply: “I’m
a person who is constantly evolving. So now that I’ve learned that about myself, it doesn’t make
sense for me to get a tattoo. When I’m older, or have children, or something more permanent—
something that’s going to be forever—then maybe” (Zuckerman 2010).
This explanation suggests that the tattoo’s permanence (unlike her ephemeral angel
invocations in fashion, song titles, lyrics) would have constrained her self-making and
transfigurative potential. It also corresponds ten years later led to her explicit “No Angel”
declaration, which itself falls within an invocational pattern among African American women
musicians including Whitney Houston On “Queen of the Night” in 1993 (“Well, I ain't nobody’s
angel/What can I say?/Well I’m just that way”), Nina Simone “Please don’t let me be
misunderstood” in 1964 (“Don’t you know no one alive can always be an angel/When everything
goes wrong you see some bad”), Ida Cox in 1924 (“You never get nothing by being an angel
child/You better change your ways and get real wild”), and surely others. More recently, this trope
has found expression in such moments as Megan Thee Stallion’s performance of “Savage” dressed
as an “avenging angel” (2020), Yaya Bey’s “angelic bitches” in the music video for “Fxch it, then”
(2022), and similar sexualized disavowals of the angel’s innocence.
Her deployments of the angel are richly complex as a result of her open references to her
own evolving sexuality, and because the Christian angel is cosmologically white, and so is in these
instances made a site of contestation in the struggle for Black liberation. Beyoncé’s decision to
protect her own imagination therefore affirms the central importance of a speculative blackness
and feminism that can be traced throughout her oeuvre. As Daphne Brooks observes, this
speculative project is crucially and bound to the subterranean; in matters geographic and spatial,
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sonic, historical, psychological, she pursues “the sedimentary layers of traumas submerged”
(Brooks 2021, 438). This matters for Beyoncé’s invocations of the angel, which, when considered
through her archivist, excavator storytelling speaks to a familiar movement between an angelic
“perfect girl” of self-denial and the avenging angel of feminist dissent, and the angel’s
decorporealized whiteness and the anti-racist effort to make the angel “bodied” (a crucial question
to which I dedicate my Conclusion). After all, you can’t dig without using your hands.
The coordinates of this mode emphasize the profane, where the angel is profaned by being
corporealized: here the ethereal associations of the sacred are grounded in the laboring, fleshy,
flexing, sweating, sexual body. The act of laboring is itself a profanation; it is against the
ideological assertion of “man” that Marx refers to “real, active men” and “their actual life-process”
(Marx and Engels 1998). It is characterized by order, because the disclosure of the backstage is
always subordinated to the primacy of the performance; the pursuit of inclusion requires that the
backstage remain part of the curation. And it is particular, in that particularity corresponds to the
problem of perceived exclusion, to the category of persons excluded, and to the person seeking
inclusion who enjoins their audience to look at my body.

SYNECDOCHE
Thesis: The whole is contained in this part, and I can be like this part.
Antithesis: I want to be the whole. NARCISSISM.
Coordinates: Profane-Disorder-Particular

For this mode I focused on the figure of Justin Bieber, through whom I first became interested in
the angel in popular music and about whom I published an article that informed the early stages of
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this project (O’Connor 2021). In it, I analyzed the recurrence of the embodied angel motif in
Bieber’s dreamscape: first as the central motif of his 2012 Believe tour, soon afterward with the
angelic inflection in his famous Calvin Klien ads in 2015, then most dramatically angel wings
tattooed on the back of his neck in 2016, and most recently when he became the angel in the
animation for his “Habitual” music video in 2020. Although I had not yet developed the analytic
framework of this project, Bieber’s case helped me grasp the importance of the motif itself.
In particular, I was able to read through Bieber why the angel has become a useful symbol
for those contending with the lived contradictions of creativity, faith, and the pathology of
Whiteness. It was there that I first argues that “the wish image of the angel not only gives
symptomatic expression to the latent longing for absolution, but also suggests that this longing is
exacerbated by the authenticity anxiety that characterizes the neoliberal cult of the creative”
(O’Connor 2021, 475). Tracing the elaboration of Bieber’s authenticity anxiety, I landed
unsurprisingly at “the pole of racist consciousness that leads white people to induct as
compensation the artifacts and practices of a racialized Other.”

Longing for absolution under conditions defined by his own finitude, Bieber
initially tried to overcome his disappointment by identifying with the promise of
the divine. When his disappointment persisted, however, he hedged his bets and
resorted to a strategy common among white pop stars: he established a calculated
proximity to Blackness, drawing especially on the aesthetic conventions of hip hop,
R&B, and reggaeton. This opportunistic and parasitic dynamic has always been an
engine of the American popular music industry, which itself emerged amidst the
systemic exclusion of Black artists and racist derision of Black people that
crystalized in the mid-19th-century practice of Blackface minstrelsy.

I revisited analyses of minstrelsy (Lott 1993), the politics “eating the Other” (hooks 1992, 21), and
of white people’s historic disconnect from corporeality, focusing especially on how this disconnect
is predicated on the epistemological identification between Whiteness and spirit, and a
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corresponding disconnect from life itself, or “the desolate suspicion of non-existence” (Dyer 1997,
45). Through Bieber, I arrived at the central question of the body in the politics of racism:

After all, Whiteness is meaningless outside of the political process whereby a
particular people amassed power on the presumption that they were, or could be,
God. In this way, the will to absolution (oneness with God) is inherent to the logic
of Whiteness, but Whiteness offers inadequate strategies by which to pursue this
longing: transcend the body or objectify and cathect to the racialized Other. Unable
to transcend corporeal being (by becoming the angel), Bieber’s Whiteness directs
him to racist compensation. Reluctant to embrace this strategy wholeheartedly,
however, Bieber has tried to reconcile it with his enduring angel dream. If he must
rely on Black people, it will be through their Christianity.

It is in this context that Bieber has suggested that he wants to “be like Jesus,” just as his visual
gestures signal his desire to be the angel, alerting us to the link between synecdochic thinking and
narcissistic compulsion. In this mode, the angel is profaned through rendering it as proximate in
the profane world; Bieber’s whiteness compels him to attempt to supersede the body with the
divine, but this fails. In his story, the impulse to reveal the backstage has the disordering effect of
a rupture, as when Dorothy pulls back the curtain to discover the Wizard of Oz is just an old man
with a machine. It is also a story of particularity insofar as the desire for authenticity—the
organizing concept of Bieber’s public image—abides by the logic of the individual and their sense
of “being authentic,” which is also indexed to the inauthenticity of the world and other people
around them.

After Surrealism
Having identified and begun to unpack these modes of wishful thinking using the resonant image
of the angel, the next analytic task, following Benjamin, is a daunting one: to figure out how the
longing for oneness that finds expression in the angel arises from contradictory possibilities that
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are inherent to today’s means of production, specifically. That is, to operationalize Benjamin’s
procedure it is necessary to ground our analysis in an understanding of today’s productive forces—
to grasp culture as an expression of the economy. “Marx lays bare the causal connection between
economy and culture,” he writes.

For us, what matters is the thread of expression. It is not the economic origins of
culture that will be presented, but the expression of the economy in its culture. At
issue, in other words, is the attempt to grasp an economic process as perceptible
Ur-phenomenon from out of which proceed all manifestations of life in the arcades
(and, accordingly, in the nineteenth-century). [N1a,6] (1999, 460).

Yet, while this step can provide us with a clearer sense of our immediate conditions and thus bring
the strategic upshot of this analytic procedure more fully into view, it also stimulates more
questions than answers. Not only are the forces of production and the social relations of production
complex to unpack even for scholars trained specifically in political economy, which I am not, but
here the ambitiousness of reverse-engineering Benjamin’s analysis—that is, looking for evidence
in real time of dynamics that he himself perceived only through historical cases—becomes
especially acute.
I can, however, offer provisional ideas for further investigation. I argue in this dissertation
that the angel wish image gives expression to the latent longing for absolution, and that this longing
is intensified under the conditions of neoliberalism, which have compounded the social dissolution
and self-fragmentation that characterize modernity (Hall et al. 1996; Harvey 2007). This
intensification of social dissolution corresponds historically to twentieth-century
deindustrialization, which in the U.S. entailed the near-elimination of the shop floor and the
proliferation of a service-based economy designed around short-term and precarious gig
employment. These transformations took place in step with the deterioration of trade unions, which
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were built through a contest of sovereignties (through a rejection of the state’s monopoly on the
legitimate use of violence) but have been largely busted and regulated into subordination to the
representational logic of state power. Neoliberalism’s insidious “political rationality,” in this
context, supplanted the citizen with the entrepreneur (Brown 2015), and gave rise to a new business
model based on illusory horizontalism—originally in Silicon Valley, but now adopted across
various industries. This business model, as I note in Chapter 2 in the case material on Hillsong
Church, is organized in particular around the weaponization of entrepreneurial creativity as a
strategy of capital accumulation (McRobbie 2016).
Meanwhile, neoliberal deregulatory policies have rendered today’s politicians unable to
respond to crises that are global in scope, gradually diminishing people’s confidence in
representational politics and producing what Manuel Castells has recently described as “the mother
of all crises: the crisis of liberal democracy” (2019, 5). In the U.S., this crisis entails nothing less
than a prospective end of empire. Under these conditions, ascendant political movements, many
of them reactionary, herald “a post-liberal order—or chaos” (2019, 4) characterized by an identity
crisis at the level of the individual: “The less control people have over the market and their state,
the more they retreat into a personal sense of identity which cannot be dissolved by the pace of
global flows” (2019, 14). Anxiety about this general lack of control and the corresponding turn
inward to the idea of individuated selfhood, finds expression in all manner of cultural forms and
practices. It is in this era that “anxiety” has been elevated to the status of a medical diagnosis and
has become as commonplace as the pharmaceuticals purported to treat it. And just as people today
turn to illicit drugs and prescription opioids to manage anomie, so too do they turn to metaphysical
compensation.
34

34
This association recalls Marx’s metaphorical diagnosis of religion as “the opiate of the masses.”

Contrary
to caricatures that fail to dialectically interpret this metaphor, its salience becomes clear if we consider that
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Today, metaphysical compensation is to be found not only in religion and new-age
spirituality, but also in the market, which in the U.S. is so principally organized around
consumption that, for Kathryn Lofton, consuming is our religion (Lofton 2017). Indeed, because
religion and the market exist on the same plane and are both inadequate to the task of realizing the
dream of absolution, it makes sense that they would eventually find reflection in one another and,
on this basis, try to achieve completion through one another. Within this interpenetration of faith
and the commodity form (Banet-Weiser 2012; Lofton 2017; Moreton 2010), both operate
according to brand logic and shared mobilizing concepts, perhaps none more important than
“authenticity.”
35

As a secular expression of the ur-historical myth of absolution, authenticity generally
promises to reconcile the self, to facilitate the relaxed confidence necessary for social bonding,
and on this basis to restore social identity and community. Meanwhile, entrepreneurial economic
culture has commodified this pragmatic conception of authenticity (i.e. “wellness”) and formally
integrated it as indispensable to career development and corporate success. Between 2007 and
2017, mention of “authenticity” tripled in the business press, so that by 2018 people were declaring
that “we have reached peak authenticity” (TEDx Talks 2018). Correlating this “authenticity” trend
and widespread diminishing trust in business leaders, Herminia Ibarra, Professor of Organizational
Behavior at London Business School, had by that time taken to warning managers and

people have historically turned to drugs not only to escape but also to more deeply explore and validate
parts of themselves and their relationships that social convention proscribes. We can thus better comprehend
Marx’s preceding sentence: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world,
and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate of the masses.” With this metaphor, Marx signaled that
religion and drug use similarly reveal an indispensable longing for a different world. (Marx 1843a)

35
Notably, for Theodor Adorno, the “jargon” of authenticity resembles Christianity in form, but stripped
of any specific authority capable of granting absolution: “one needs only to be a believer—no matter what
he believes in” (1973, 21).
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entrepreneurs about the concept’s paradoxical danger. Yet, it is because of this paradox, not in
spite of it, that authenticity—an idea once associated with a transgressive critique of
commercialization—has been successfully subordinated to the logic of the market. So, Ibarra does
not advise her audiences to do away with the ideal of authenticity but, rather, to become
“adaptively authentic.” With this qualifier, she concedes to the concept’s metaphysical remainder
and is able to salvage its mythic promise in the interest of good business—and to entrepreneurially
fashion herself as an authenticity expert along the way.
We can detect the push and pull of this lived paradoxical dilemma—between the despair
of atomization and the desperate human drive to restore an affective and physiological encounter
with the interconnection that just is—in all social fields. To devise political strategies that confront
this common dilemma, we can position ourselves to fight on the established terms of any context.
The ascent of digital technology, for instance, has reconfigured human sociality and everyday life
in ways that exacerbate experiences of individual isolation, even as the internet promises, and in
some ways does, bring people into new and greater connection—although most effectively for
purposes of military domination and surveillance. Climate catastrophe, to cite another urgent site
of contention, has alerted us to our interconnection with nature and inspired a cascade of well-
intentioned corrective efforts, but these primarily cast in gruesome relief our collective paralysis
when confronted with the actual demands of political warfare, reflected in the oft-cited line that
“it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”
We can start anywhere. But, crucially, we cannot in simply appropriate the productive
forces; we must transform and emancipate them from the mode of production from which they
emerged and with which they remain entangled. The wish image can bring us closer to devising
more specific understanding of the demands of such strategic efforts, but I graciously concede that
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this operational step in transposing Benjamin’s theory to action remains unresolved in my own
work, as it does in the work of those scholars upon whom I rely, above all Buck-Morss and
Thompson, who have brilliantly grappled with Benjamin’s slippery categories. This partial
investigation has left me with exciting questions about how to complete this work, many of which
have not yet made it onto the page and instead rattle in my body and in my imagination. Indeed,
the challenges of deducing and describing such a process corresponds to the limits implicit in the
“quasi-mystical” character of the dialectical image; the transposition from theory to action
necessarily unfolds at the register of human interaction and psychology, and even when we can
grasp the patterns shaping a given process of psychoanalytic working through—a process of
thinking that entails mind and body, reason and intuition—we are bound to stumble on details.
The principal contribution of this study is to show how the wish image can be made the
site for a collective working through. Specifically, through the dissection of the wish image’s
primary modes we might identify those escape hatches by which the process of awakening might
be pushed toward the moment of decision, to the threshold of political production. If the dialectical
image awakens us to what Benjamin called “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed
past,” how we proceed in the face of this awakening is the moment of decision, which is viscerally
as he described: a gradual coming to consciousness about the mystery of what created the impasse
we confront, and the inauguration of a new process of working through that might reveal how to
overcome that impasse. Perhaps no one in the American context has described this tension more
succinctly than Malcolm X, when he remarked: “I don’t see any American dream; I see an
American nightmare.”
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With what language should we struggle toward emancipation from the nightmare of
reality? No doubt, it is easier to envision what emancipation would have to look like than to
envision the means by which to produce it.
The what of emancipation entails nothing less than the reconciliation of human history and
natural history. For Marx, the initial rupture between the two arises with the first human need,
through the labor process. “In his developed political economy, presented in Capital,” recounts
John Bellamy Foster in Marx’s Ecology (2000), “Marx employed the concept of ‘metabolism’
(Stoffwechsel) to define the labor process as ‘a process between man and nature, a process by
which man, through his own action, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between
himself and nature.’”

Yet an ‘irreparable rift had emerged in this metabolism as a result of capitalism
relations of production and the antagonistic separation of town and country. Hence
under the society of associated producers it would be necessary to ‘govern the
human metabolism with nature in a rational way,’ completely beyond the
capabilities of bourgeois society. (Foster 2000, 217).

Our goal, in other words, cannot be the return to an unmediated relationship with nature—but still
we must strive to overcome the severance of human history and natural history but focusing on the
metabolic relation between the two. And in this striving, in this effort to find that elusive means
by which to overcome our metabolic rift with nature, we find great use for myth.
Consider, for instance, how the Bible provides the memory of Eden: a nostalgic vision of
emersion in nature, prior even to human consciousness. With the development of knowledge, the
plane of God is ruptured, and then follows chapter after chapter about the struggle to get back to
the garden. But consciousness initiates a process of working through that eventually leads to a new
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synthesis in John’s vision of The New Jerusalem. It is not in the garden but in the city where
heaven and earth are reconciled, with consciousness intact.
This mythic rendering thus speaks to the reality: our vision of emancipation is a synthesis
we cannot see but can only pursue by constantly working through conditions that are not of our
choosing and are always changing, where we don’t blink eating fruit out of season. No wonder
why Benjamin’s efforts to describe this synthesis fell back on myth: “To be sure, only a redeemed
mankind receives the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its
past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l’ordre du
jour—and that day is Judgment Day.”
The means of emancipation will thus abide by the principle that everything is everything.
As was palpably the case from within my surreal reverie, emancipation entails the breakdown of
divisions of all kinds, not only between self and other, but also between person and tool, plant and
animal: everything becomes present, and consciously so. Awareness of our own physiological
processes integrates the entirely of nature into our own body, not as an individual thought
experiment but as a state of embodiment—i.e., the reconciliation of being and doing, absolution.
Subsumption within such a state of embodiment is the defining experience of surrealism.
Far and beyond the claims to transcendence that spill out of the organized rituals of religious
institutions, including the various orthodoxies of the Christian church, surrealism imbues this
experience with what Benjamin deemed “a radical concept of freedom.” Surrealism’s “particular
task,” he explained, was admirably “[t]o win the energies of intoxication for the revolution”
(Benjamin 1986, 189).
Intoxication corresponds not only to thinking itself (again, “eminently narcotic”), but more
specifically to cathexis with an artifact from the past that, through our awareness of its absence,
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can be made the starting point of analysis that can lead to decisive action (Benjamin 1986, 190).
Benjamin concurred that something of this sort had happened when the surrealists seized upon the
resonant objects of everyday life, in how they found magic in the refuse—a magic defined by a
subtle but powerful force: “As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the
past strives to turn toward that sun rising in the sky of history.”
Yet, in his estimation, the Surrealist Movement fell short, too often stuck in the anarchic,
contemplative moment that precedes profane illumination, that elusive goal achieved by means of
a dialectical trick: “the substitution of a political for a historical view of the past” (182). The
bourgeoisie, Benjamin explained, “sees that ‘finer future of our children and grandchildren’ in a
condition in which all act ‘as if they were angels,’ and everyone lives ‘as if he were free.’”

Of angels, wealth, freedom, not a trace. These are mere images… For to organize
pessimism means nothing other than to expel moral metaphor from politics and to
discover in political action a sphere reserved one hundred percent for images. This
image sphere, however, can no longer be measured out by contemplation. (190-91).

This emphasis on image, on what it reveals and conceals about history as such, would eventually
find expression in The Arcades Project, in Benjamin’s analysis of wish image and dialectical
image. His invocation of the angel here thus reveals this analysis in its earliest stages. He does not
yet describe the angel as a wish image but is yet developing the concept: drawn from the wishful
dreamscape of the bourgeoisie, this angel of the future does not reveal profane tasks. Benjamin
himself did not manage to operationalize this insight himself, but his insights should compel us to
give this completion our best shot—about the importance of salvage, the rejection of narrative in
favor of montage, the revolutionary virtue of living in glass houses, and the concrete work of
organizing pessimism rather than succumbing to the bourgeois optimism that leads over and over
again to “a bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.”
148

149
Conclusion
Like all great thinkers, Walter Benjamin is at his most generative when what he helps us to see
ceases to hinge on anything that he wrote—when it becomes less bibliographical than concrete,
less historical than experiential. The image of the angel is indeed most revealing when we look
past its manifest form to apprehend its latent promise of the absolute. To the extent, after all, that
we understand reality as an interwoven whole— “a single garment of destiny,” as Martin Luther
King, Jr. phrased it—the question of which thread we start with becomes a mere question of
starting points. In one dialectical image, said Benjamin, we might apprehend “the entire course of
history”; but that is not to say that the entire course of history can be reduced to that image.
Windows or doors into the whole are never the whole itself but points of entry for reaching towards
it and, in the process, discovering that very effort in its richness.
The effort is constantly underway. This year the Wall Street Journal regaled its readers
with “the mind-bending conclusions of modern physics and the long history of the beguiling notion
of a unifying, universal fabric” (Crumey 2023), just as last year traditional American Marxists laid
claim to the same concept, insisting that “there are no permanently discrete parts” in a reality that
extends monistically from the “modification of Nature. As such, each individual thing—and each
individual person—can only be understood through this substantial unity” (Fluss and Frim 2022).
The resonance of this idea, across societies and political divides, is not evidence of its final truth.
At a bare minimum, however, we can “safely conclude from the global presence of monistic
philosophies that an all-encompassing ‘One’ exerts a universal fascination” (Päs 2023, 52), and
that no ideology of atomized individualism can ever break it.
On the contrary, material conditions that wrench people from our attachment to the natural
world and to one another confront us with an old concept at the heart of all dialectics: the unity of
150
opposites. The deeper the crisis of neoliberal atomism, the more pervasive the wishes for felt
interconnection. Fakeness and cults of the authentic can be seen in this light in their intimate
dialectical union. That which tears us apart must promise to bring us together, like the stereotypical
Hollywood villain whose poison comes with a well-priced antidote.
The crisis of atomistic alienation is now layered upon layers. The alienation intrinsic to
capitalism is exacerbated by neoliberalism, which is exacerbated by the replacement of real with
digitally mediated interactions, which has been exacerbated by the material and cultural
reconfigurations of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than resistance to this, however, our instinctive
yearning for restored interconnections may also be animated by an instinct for truth. No less a
scientific authority than Albert Einstein entices American readers with this prospect from the pages
of a New York Times bestseller. “A human being is part of the whole called by us ‘Universe,’”
Einstein is quoted as saying, and only in a superficial and illusory sense “experiences himself, his
thoughts and feelings as something different from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his
consciousness” (Pollan 2018, 367). For our purposes, whether this is strictly accurate as physics is
a secondary point. The allure of interconnection is extraordinarily resonant.
Still, within the Germany that produced Benjamin, the truth as well as the allure of
universal interconnection seemed plain on the left as on the right. From the left, the Marx of the
1844 Manuscripts took it as the starting point of all dialectical thought. “That man’s physical and
spiritual life is linked to nature,” he wrote, “means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is
a part of nature” (Marx 1988, 76). From the right, the Nietzsche of Birth of Tragedy found in the
music of Richard Wagner another means of accessing what he prized as this “mysterious
primordial unity” (Nietzsche 1967, 37). In science as in mythology, in other words, the force of
interconnection imposes itself on us, the more so when an atomistic social order aims to deny it.
151
That I have focused here on the allure of oneness does not diminish its importance as a potential
reality, in which sense the human drive to reconnect with that which is may be a testament to
human wisdom: “you can’t fool all the people all of the time,” and so we come together.
This can be framed in various ways. Within a Biblical frame, Erich Fromm emerged from
much the same context that produced Benjamin to tell a story of a Fall from Grace that alienated
man from nature and man from man, taking Carl Jung’s aristocratic “archetype of wholeness” and
pulling it to the left. From Martinique, meanwhile, Aimé Césaire worked a radically anti-
aristocratic version of the same archetype into an anticolonial Marxist frame, giving expression to
its human substance in a more generative form. The significance of all of these efforts lies as much
in what connects them as in what sets them apart. To make wish images dialectical is to attune our
analysis to a sense of these historical interconnections.
In this light, thinking and feeling our way through our own context, we can circle back to
the questions with which this project began. Why the angel? Why now?
We do not dream of restored interconnection in circumstances of our own choosing. The
connections we forge with a real and imagined past are made with the materials available to us: it
could not be otherwise. The outstanding prophet of New England holism, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
said as much within a familiar frame. It is across time as well as across space that we look to
overcome our isolation and connect with others. Emerson proposed that to interweave our lives
with those of past generations is to feel ourselves “attended by a visible escort of angels”—a
cumulative power that alone “throws thunder into Chatham’s voice, and dignity into Washington’s
port, and America into Adams’s eye.” Generational isolation in matters of social struggle is no
choice at all: “The force of character is always cumulative” (Emerson 1854, 71). Be this as it may,
no heritage is static. To condense our wishes and dreams into the image of the angel can itself be
152
one transformative means of influencing our “escort of angels,” that it may no longer form part, in
Benjamin’s words, of that “triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who
are lying prostrate” (Benjamin 1968, 256). And yet the tensions in this act of transformation are
revealed in the popular references I have catalogued.
In concluding this project, it is well to repeat that this catalogue is no island unto itself.
Decisive struggles for freedom have been shot through with the same tensions throughout the
history of the United States. It is hard to identify a more iconic gesture of absolution than the
Harpers Ferry Raid, in which John Brown deployed the image of the angel in one of the most
spectacular acts of immanent critique in the history of Euro-American Protestantism. Much the
same transformative imagination can be found in the iconography of slave-based abolitionism.
Spiritually speaking, the primacy of the human impulse towards freedom in, say, the Virginia of
Nat Turner or the Jamaica of Sam Sharp could be Baptist in form and universally human in its
substantive significance. Wish images, in their dialectical transformation, can in form become
secondary to the substance of the fervent dreams which they serve to express.
Sometimes, however, the dialectical tensions within the wish image find their fullest
expression when they burst out from the image entirely. To say so is tenable even at the core of
the Christian tradition of faith. As Simone Weil wrote, it is from a Christian perspective not only
that true Christ cannot possibly be found endorsing the use of colonial gunboats to spread a coerced
faith; more than that, if it is the substance of the thing that counts, then Christians of faith need to
recognize that those whom Europe called “pagans,” or those of other faiths, can have their own
substantive alternatives to the “path to spirituality proposed to them by the Christian churches”
(Weil 2018, 88.). Aimé Césaire’s work is an outstanding example of how an anticolonial encounter
with Christianity can make the angel kaleidoscopically explode.
153
The result pushes the transformation a step further even than the Baptist liberation theology
of a Nat Turner or Sam Sharp, or the angelic vengeance of a John Brown. In Césaire’s Journal of
a Homecoming (1939), the task is not to divert the European canon’s “invisible escort of angels”
to better works but more comprehensively to resist that escort. Here the angel is transformed from
pure spirit, embodied to spiritual capture, embodied—an emblem of dreams that were never meant
to be realized. In creative subversion of the established imagery, Césaire’s dialectics place the
angels among the ranks of colonial officers:

angels on border duty who at the gates of foam mount guard over
interdictions

I confess my crimes and declare there is nothing I can plead in my defense.
Dances. Idols. Relapses. I also:
I have done in God with my laziness with my words with my gestures
with my obscene songs (Césaire 2017, 103)

Thus the line is drawn. Finding the root of colonial rot in “the dishonest equations Christianity =
civilization, paganism = savagery, from which there could not but ensue abominable colonialist
and racist consequences” (Césaire 2000, 33), Césaire embraced the paganistic with both arms.
Against heavenly hatreds, Césaire countered with grounded resistance:

Tell me: am I humble enough? Do I have enough calluses on my knees? Muscles in my
loins?
To grovel in the mud? To bear up in the thick of the mud? To bear the load.
Mud ground. Mud horizon. Mud sky. (Césaire 2017, 135)

Against a theology that cast people like him as “servants of the mud-gods,” suited only to perpetual
enslavement (Carlyle 1867, 26), Césaire countered on his own terms—“ENOUGH OF THIS
SCANDAL . . . Adjust yourself to me. I refuse to adjust myself to you!” (Césaire 2017, 109)—
154
“paganistically” embracing the darkness of the earth against all things angelic, that lily-white
spiritualisms might find their own way to hell.
This conversion, of wish image to dialectical image, raises complex questions specific to
the historical moment of Journal of a Homecoming and Césaire’s whole oeuvre. The questions
burn with the paradox of how Césaire, a former lycée instructor (not least of Frantz Fanon), twisted
the language of the colonizer into a defense of the culture of the colonized. They also confront us
with the delicate distinction between anti-colonial articulations of embodiment—attesting to the
close proximity to nature that figures within the vast diversity of Indigenous and African
cosmologies—and the pervasiveness of racist essentialism. Such topics have mostly been beyond
the scope of this investigation. But they cannot go unmentioned, since this is the principal insight
of the dialectical image: severed from myth, the angel is laid bare as a transient placeholder for
what gives way to the sudden arrest of historical tensions, to an encounter with the whole of all
compressed fragments that constitute the profane world.
36

For Césaire, the angel’s mythic symbolism is the catastrophe of colonial pillage and white
supremacy. As a wish image, the angel symbolizes the reconciliation of being and doing; but its
implicit promise of absolution is in conflict with the ruse of assimilation that it dangles (as a false
condescension) before colonized subjects. As a result, where the fantasy of the angel has served
as handmaiden to the plunder of nature and man, its redemption and its disavowal become two
sides of the same thing. With recourse to a surrealistic anticolonialism, Césaire expresses a natural
feature of anticolonial struggle: when colonized people defend their own cultural integrity it is
internally destabilizing for the colonizer, whose consciousness is transformed by the superior

36
This study focuses on angel invocation within U.S. popular culture. Antiracist and anticolonial
engagements with the angel’s whiteness affirm that a global analysis of the angel image would reveal great
variability in its resonance.
155
wisdom of those he seeks to dominate. Césaire’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest
underlines this by having Prospero, as an icon of imperial reason, reproach the subject who dares
resist him for breaking his thought from the inside out: “it is you,” says Césaire’s Prospero, “who
have made me doubt myself for the first time” (Césaire 2002, 63).
This is not just poetry; scientific power confers upon Césaire’s poetry much of its force. In
this way, Césaire’s Journal of a Homecoming, with its rejection of the colonial science that
alienates man from nature and man from man powerfully connects with his resolute invocation of
Cartesian reason in Discourse on Colonialism:

Reason, I anoint you ‘wind of evening.’ . . . For me you are ‘corolla of the lash.’ . .
. Because we detest you, yes you and your reason … we repossess ourselves in the
name of . . . the madness that sees . . . And you know the rest: That 2 plus 2 equals
5 (2007, 101).

One needs to defy false science in order to embrace the real thing. Maybe it is only in defiance of
the “escort of angels,” and in embrace of all they call erroneous, that a true and natural reason built
on emancipatory grounds can be fully developed.
We reach here the core, I think, of what C.L.R. James (C. L. R. James 1989, 282) describes
as “the scientific study of revolution” in its mythological aspects. James’s study of the Haitian
Revolution concludes with a celebration of Césaire’s Journal of a Homecoming, highlighting a
passage in which Césaire asserts the superior wisdom of colonial subjects described (half tongue-
in-cheek) as “ignorant of the coverings but possessed by the pulse of things” (2017, 400). We are
face to face with the densest tensions. On the one hand, Césaire insisted “that 2 plus 2 equals 5”
as a precondition for singing “obscene songs” in defiance of “angels on border duty.” On the other
hand, this defiance was ultimately a means not of falsifying but of accessing what is real, as I have
written elsewhere of the music, in particular the voice, of Tanqa Tagaq (O’Connor 2018).
156
Significantly, where Césaire related an alienated European science with the colonial force
of angelic supervision, we can also cite a very different invocation of the angel. Benjamin Disraeli,
one of the most aggressively imperial prime ministers in British history, famously invoked the
image of the angel against the rise of natural science. With reference to the debate on the science
of evolution, Disraeli said that “the question now placed before society” was not whether science
would triumph over barbarism but whether the barbarism of natural science could be defeated by
the empires of heaven. “The question,” he continued, “is this: Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord,
I am on the side of the angels” (see Irvine 1956). We once more ask ourselves: are we?
In answering this question, I have come to conclude that Walter Benjamin can only take us
so far. Benjamin set out the task, including in his analysis of the wish image and the dialectical
image in The Arcades Project:

To cultivate fields where, until now, only madness has reigned. Forge ahead with
the whetted axe of reason, looking neither right nor left so as not to succumb to the
horror that beckons from deep in the primeval forest. Every ground must at some
point have been made arable by reason, must have been cleared of the undergrowth
of delusion and myth. (Benjamin 1999b, 456)

In this light, we can recognize the opposing tendencies condensed into images of the angel and not
be constrained by it, just as I can recognize in Benjamin’s writing a scaffolding for analysis that
necessarily pushes in certain directions beyond its frame.
Where the angel itself is concerned, it is in the American context difficult to deny that there
are some constraints on the image at the sheer level of color. I have explored this elsewhere in
work on the angel in American popular music (O’Connor 2021). It would be difficult for anyone
to speak with finality about efforts to render the angel Black, and it is as a matter of lived identity
quite impossible for me. But there is room for ambivalence about whether such a recuperation is
157
possible. In a rejoinder to Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes wrote that “I, too, sing America” (Kun
2005, 143), and in his transformed American lyricism, Hughes felt impelled to face down the
“escort of angels” in terms not so different than those of Césaire:

The angels wings is white as snow,
O, white as snow,
White
as
snow.
The angels wings is white as snow,
But I drug ma wings
In the dirty mire.
O, I drug ma wings
All through the fire.
But the angels wings is white as snow,
White
as
(“Angel Wings,” n.d.)

Hughes is pointing toward the horizon where Césaire is standing: the angel’s manifest mythic
content can be made dialectical only through sublation. The wish image itself, after all, is not the
object of reckoning but a prelude to reckoning. The substance of the wish for absolution may in
dialectical engagement with the angel end up pushing through it.
Supposing that the allure of oneness is universally human, one way to conceive of the
possible constraints of the wish image of the angel is in the difference of nuance between
transcendence on the one hand and immanence on the other. In these days of despondent atomism,
the wish image of the angel promises a fuller experience of the flesh. Yet, the cheque it writes
bounces, as its currency is of spirit rather than flesh, of clouds rather than earth. I am increasingly
convinced that freedom lies with organic reason against all ascetic spiritualism. Hence the logical
force of, say, a Tanga Tagaq, whose music transforms the language of spiritualism into a language
of animism, a word corresponding in its Latin etymology to “the universal animation of nature”
158
and used by Tagaq to celebrate people as animals, on the plane of experience as on the plane of
scientific truth (O’Connor 2018). The fact that humanity is realized in its animal functions rather
than debased by them underscores the need for grounded immanence against escapist
transcendence even as it facilitates the surgical removal of this critique from the toxic colonial
essentialism into which it has often been pressed.
Like life itself, the means of emancipation will abide by the principle that, as in that
America that Lauryn Hill helped to sing, everything is everything. That is, emancipation entails
the breakdown of divisions of all kinds, not only between self and other, but also between person
and tool, plant and animal: everything becomes present, and consciously so. Awareness of our own
physiological processes integrates the entirely of nature into our own body, not as an individual
thought experiment but as a state of embodiment—i.e., the reconciliation of being and doing. The
feeling itself can be understood as that spatial awareness by which, to use an illustration of
Benjamin’s, one fills a glass just up to the rim without thinking about it.
This work is never finished. In a story that recalls Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Césaire
revised Journal of a Homecoming so many times after its initial publication that as his influence
grew the revisions themselves became objects of study. “Nothing symbolizes the poem’s
foundational status more strikingly,” writes Gregson Davies of Césaire’s Journal, “than the story
of its many metamorphoses in print.”

… the poem existed in a virtually plastic state until it achieved a form of textual
consummation over twenty years after its initial debut in print… the poem describes
not a single return, but a series of abortive returns that are superimposed on each
other. Like a musical rondo that returns repeatedly to its theme, Cahier portrays the
homecoming of the poet as a recurrent event that is continually in the process of
rehearsal. (Davies 1997, 21–22)

159
In a related spirit, Benjamin reminds us that materialist analyses ought to have truncated endings.
Or, “[a]s Adorno was later to comment in his Minima Moralia (whose style mimed Benjamin’s
own approach to truth), ‘all propositions ought to be equally close to the center,’” and never
squeezed into a false crescendo (McBride 1989, 248).
Beyond the angel, I for now conclude this project with an anticipatory glance at American
contestation over the specifically organic critique of alienation. Where John Trudell, as I wrote in
my work on Tagaq, found natural language for his own dreams of human interconnection—“Our
DNA is of Earth and Sky” (see O’Connor 2018)—I am for my part now struck by the incorporation
of elements of Indigenous critique into the musicality of American social formation. As he worked
to sing U.S. society into this land, the Walt Whitman of Leaves of Grass made a point of insisting
that “every atom of my blood [is] form’d from this soil, this air” (Whitman 2012, 28). The future
directions for my research have, so to speak, therefore naturally imposed themselves at this stage
of the work. So, with a humble sense of the ephemeral, I offer thanks to the collaborators whose
notes will be in the mix for as long as this thing sings.

160
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Creator O'Connor, Clare (author)

Core Title Angel dreams: collective desire, resonant myth, and political possibility today

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Degree Conferral Date 2023-08

Publication Date 06/30/2023

Defense Date 06/07/2023

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Tag dialectical image,myth,OAI-PMH Harvest,politics,popular culture,psychoanalysis,Walter Benjamin,wish image

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