Please Do Not Photograph the General’s Dentures

Fossilization

Prior to his death, George Washington willed that it was his "express desire" that his "corpse may be Interred in a private manner, without parade, or funeral Oration." He willed, moreover, that he be buried with his ancestors, though they were to be moved to a new burial vault elsewhere on the property. This insistence on a funeral and burial befitting of a private citizen, albeit a celebrated one, was characteristic of Washington and the nascent American State's efforts to emphasize a disjuncture with monarchy. Typical of this effort was a simple inversion of monarchical practices. For example, the advent of the American Revolution posed special difficulties for american Anglicans, insofar as The Book of Common Prayer included myriad prayers and invocations of the King. In response, the nascent Episcopal church simply substituted “Congress” or, more often, “The People” for “King” or “Queen.” In the Library of Congress contemporaneous prayer books can still be viewed, with references to the king simply pasted over with strips of paper onto which these substitutions are scrawled. The most symmetrical of these substitutions might be where the refrain, "God Save the Queen" is pasted-over with "God Save the People": a simple détournement that foregrounds the substitution of the singular "Queen" by a popular universitas. Similarly, the funeral and burial that George Washington willed for himself utilizes such a strategy of inversion or mirroring; whereas the monarch was entombed in a religious, public space, the General was to be entombed in a secular, private one.

The private, lineally held nature of Mount Vernon and George Washington's tomb was not to last, however. By the mid-19th century, Mount Vernon has ceased to be anywhere close to economically or agriculturally autarchic, to say nothing of profitability. Steamboats, moreover, had begun to ply the waters of the Potamac, bringing with them visitors whose presence conflicted with the estate’s status as a private residence. Worst of all, the manor was growing old and dilapidated. Appalled at the disrepair into which Mount Vernon had fallen, one Ann Pamela Cunningham founded the Mount Vernon’s Women’s Association, among the first organizations of its kind. After several years of raising funds and awareness, the Association purchased Mount Vernon from the General’s descendants when the state and federal government would not. Hence was born a new project and new mode of memorializing George Washington’s body (Mt Vernon Ladies Association 2012). Using George Washington’s will as a guide, the Association has since doggedly returned the estate to its appearance in 1799, the year of George Washington’s death. Whereas, at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s memorialization had been confined to the small vault where he was entombed with his wife, ancestors, and descendents, the entire estate was now to function as his tomb, a tomb which, ironically enough, centers around his former living space. The project began somewhat modestly: many of the General’s domestic artifacts were returned to the estate and placed where they would have stood in 1799, and the Association began to gather period furniture that would substitute and simulate for those that were missing. The subsequent superintendent, Harrison Dodge, then turned his attention to the grounds. By studying George Washington’s writings and those of other colonial era gardeners and visited a variety of English gardens that dated back to the Georgian period he endeavoured to simulate not only the furniture and architecture that would have been in place in 1799 but also the plant life and agricultural organization. Then, in 1978, the estate’s third superintendent, Charles Wall, successfully lobbied for the ecological and historical preservation the river and forest viewable from the estate – not only the General’s estate but everything that he would have surveyed from his colonial manor was to be held in stasis: the simulation was to be total and seamless (Thomas 1995).

We must observe that all these efforts at preservation and stasis are not necessary consequences of the estate’s dilapidation. Allowing the General’s estate and the grounds surrounding his tomb to fall into ruin, as a symbolic break with the monarchical order, would have equalled, perhaps even surpassed, the poignancy of turning the grounds into an exhibit. Indeed, the fact that both the federal and state governments declined to purchase the estate demonstrates that the veneration of George Washington’s deathplace was neither an inborn affect nor a widespread sentiment. Rather, we might view the emergence of the current mode of memorializing George Washington’s deathplace as a ritual which, like George Washington’s originary funeral, renews the apprehension of the empty place of power. What distinguishes these two modes of apprehending this emptiness is the temporal proximity of the ancien régime and concordant ability to serve as a cognitively available counterpoint or background. Writing of the generation of political philosophers and historians which followed in the wake of the French Revolution, Lefort writes that “they still lived in a gap between the world that was disappearing and a world which knew no limits… might we not ask ourselves whether these thinkers may, even if they were mistaken, have had a singular ability to grasp a symbolic dimension of the political, of something which was later to disappear, of something which bourgeois discourse was already burying beneath its supposed knowledge of the real order of society?” (Lefort 215) The posthumous withdrawal of George Washington’s body into the private, secular space of his estate affirmed the vacancy of his seat of power, but only in juxtaposition with the eternal body of the monarch and the consequent sarcophagus housed in a Cathedral. As the memory and ritual efficacy of the latter practices faded, however, the efficacy of the former practice began to erode, having lost the background onto which it was projected. In contrast, today’s Mount Vernon achieves the affirmation of the vacant seat of power immanently, without contrasting itself with an exterior in the form of antecedents or rivals. Yet unlike George Washington, who hid his corpse in the privacy of his estate as a conscious counterpoint to the exhibitionary fullness of the monarchical place of power, there is no controlling will that explicitly mobilizes the ritual absence of his body as a consciously articulated symbol. Rather, this is an unconsciously grasped symbolic dimension, already buried “beneath the supposed knowledge of the real order of society.”

Several of the mechanisms by which this immanent affirmation of the presence of vacancy are evident in the daily tours of the General’s manor house. These tours are highly structured; one is linearly ushered into one room after another, each of which contains one guide who sets the scene and narrates the history of the room’s objects. There is a very clear logic to the order in which one is moved through these rooms: one moves from the most public to the most private of chambers. The tour begins on the ground floor of the northern wing, in the dining room, the only room made to hold the myriad guests that, the tour emphasizes, were constantly being entertained by the Washington family’s hospitality. The tour then proceeds into the parlours, where the guests would segregate themselves by temperament and gender. Subsequently, one is urgently ushered past the second floor and straight on to the cupola on the third floor, where guests lacking close ties to the General and his family were housed. One then descends back to the north wing of the second floor, where the bedrooms for the General’s intimates are located. The guides have dubbed these rooms the “Lafayette Room” and the “Nelly Custis Room” after the French general, so dear to Washington that he named his first son in his honor, and his beloved granddaughter. Finally, one moves into the southern wing, passing through the master bedroom, where Martha and George Washington must have been at their most intimate, and then descending into the General’s private study, accessible from the master bedroom through a private, back stairwell. This study, the last room one passes through before exiting via a side door, was, the guides emphasize, the General’s private sanctuary, where he could escape not only from the manor’s interminable litany of guests and his numerous familial intimates.

Not only is the tour of the manor structured so that one feels as if one is being granted an increasingly personal and introspective view of the General’s life, the way in which the objects are arranged in the succession of rooms presences his body’s invisibility. An air of hauntedness is cultivated, one only accentuated by the fact that the manor endeavors to simulate its appearance in the year of the General’s death: “the General has just passed” takes on a double meaning. In the dining room the table is set, and one enters as one invited to dinner. In the more impersonal rooms, the beds are made and the objects put away immaculately, so that one arrives as if the room had just been made up for a night’s stay. Yet as one moves into the more intimate chambers, a slight wind of entropy can be felt. In the Lafayette room, the washbin appears to have just been used, while in the master bedroom, a pair of shoes have been left on the floor and the sheets rumpled, as if someone had just come in and changed, or woken up and exited. Finally, in the General’s library, a few books have been left out, as if, inspired by some passage, he had stepped out onto the veranda to look over the lazy river and the thick mid-atlantic woods, a view coterminous with our own thanks to the estate’s ecological preservation efforts.

The vacancy of the seat of power, that is, the absence of the General’s body, then, is foregrounded and dramatically heightened by traces of his passing. One has “just missed him” both because one is transported to the moment after his death and because one moves through his manor as if one were searching for him, arriving in each successive room just after he has passed into the next. In other words, one is allowed to approach as spatially and temporally close to his body as possible without actually touching it. His body is placed just out of reach, just out of sight, so as to foreground his absence, so as to make sensible the emptiness in the place of power, so as to make visible his invisibility. Moreover, the General’s personal objects, the furniture that couched his bulk and the tools that once served his prehensile extensions, press in around him like a deathmask: the features around which this mask’s contours were molded are always already gone. Indeed, this is exemplified by the most treasured of the General’s possessions: the first president’s famous false teeth. Mount Vernon’s attached museum, like the tour of the manor, moves the viewer along a linear series of exhibits. The General’s false teeth, housed in an inwardly lit, transparent cylinder in a cylindrical room, are housed at the exhibit’s end and culmination, surrounded by signs forbidding visitors to photograph them. Here, the president’s greater tomb brings us to the very threshold of his deceased body; the prosthesis which once served to complete the General’s body now serves to complete the General’s lack of a body. We might also point to the great value attributed to another object that exists at the margins of the living body, though in the context of collectors and auction houses rather than the museum: the president’s hair. A locket containing intertwined strands from George and Martha Washington recently sold for almost $10,000. What binds these quasi-relics is that they exist right at the threshold of the body as popularly understood. The General’s dentures and hair, as interoceptively felt prosthesis and dead secretion respectively, are venerated not as bodily remains, but as objects which asymptotically approach the body, that which rubs against the its absence.

Idiosyncrasy

It must be noted, however, that the mode in which the resting place of George Washington’s body is marked and memorialized does not constitute a singular tradition of presidential burial and memorialization. In stark contrast to, for example, the French Monarchy, where the sarcophagi of kings reaching back to 10th century are laid side by side in the Basilica of St Denis, the burial of american presidents is marked by remarkable eclecticism, even eccentricity. Simulating the burial of a European monarch, Woodrow Wilson is entombed in a sarcophagus at the neo-gothic National Cathedral. Ulysses Grant is entombed in the national, military cemetery in Arlington, Virginia; his tomb’s exterior is modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, an hellenistic structure constructed for a deceased Persian satrap, whereas its interior imitates Napoleon’s burial chamber at Les Invalides. Indeed, the only consistency in the funereal practices of the US federal government concerns those of presidents deceased while in office. All these funerals have been modelled after that of Abraham Lincoln, with John F. Kennedy’s being particularly scrupulous in following Lincoln’s precedent. In these cases, the president’s body receives a private funeral and lies in repose in the White Houses’ east wing, then is removed to the Capitol rotunda to lie in state and receive a state funeral. Herein lies the crux of the variable diversity of presidential burial practices in the United States. The contrast between the homogeneity of the funeral practices of presidents who died in office and the heterogeneity of those of presidents who died after relinquishing office foregrounds the impermanence of a given president’s fusion with the machinery of state. The contrast illustrates that the president who dies as a private citizen is buried according to his private will, which may deviate according to his personal idiosyncrasies, whereas the president who dies while still vested with the mantle of the state is buried according to the public will, the uniform and mechanistic workings of the state.

We might observe, however, that of the United State’s first four presidents, three were Virginian plantation owners committed to enlightenment ideals and all three of these elected to be buried at their own estates. Each of these estates, moreover, has since been converted into a museological, “living history” exhibit in the vein of Mount Vernon: Jefferson’s Monticello in 1923 and Madison’s Montpelier estate in 1984 . Though the preservation of the latter two estates was certainly carried out in imitation of Mount Vernon, this imitation is not a mere case of contagion but rather the pragmatic deployment of a practice that has proven efficacious. Returning and freezing these estates to the moment of a former president’s death, as we have argued, is a way of renewing the the public prehension of the vacancy of the seat of power. It appears that the latitude afforded to the final wishes of former presidents has its limits. One may withdraw one’s body into a hidden, private sphere, but that withdrawal must be perpetual and public.

We might also observe a remarkable convergence of late 20th- and early 21st-century presidential burial practices with the museological alterations of presidential tombs which began in the mid 1800s. Namely, the majority of presidents since Herbert Hoover in the mid-1960s have been entombed in presidential libraries, great repositories of documents pertaining to former presidents administered by the National Archives. Like Mount Vernon or Monticello, these libraries immerse the entombed body with a great proliferation of objects, albeit textual ones, that evidence its former life. Not that these libraries limit themselves to texts: Ronald Reagan’s presidential library, for example, contains many everyday artifacts from his upbringing, governorship, presidency, and withdrawal to his ranch. More famously, the library also includes a sprawling hangar that houses, among other vehicles, his presidential motorcade, helicopter, and Boeing 707.

Exibitionisms

Mt Vernon, as a mode of memorialization which was initiated in the mid-19th century and has continued into the present, did not evolve in isolation but rather shares traits with a number of other exhibitory institutions which came to the fore during the same period. Like the museum, the zoological park, the department store, and the world fair, Mount Vernon’s exhibitions rely upon a sort of ambulatory voyeurism. Of these, the museum is clearly Mount Vernon’s closest cognate, both temporally and conceptually. Both Mount Vernon and the museum use various rooms and the viewer’s movement from one to the other as a narratological device. Yet significant and telling differences hold: the museum’s narrative is one of evolution and progress told through a logic of containment, whereas as Mt Vernon’s is one of foundationalism and sempiternity told through a logic of immersive simulation.

The narratology of the modern museum is perhaps first observable in the post-revolutionary art museum at the Louvre. Here, the deposed royal dynasty’s collection of artworks were organized by school and placed of origin, as they had been when they were still considered royal property, but also organized epochally so that they culminated with the works of the French nation and revolution. Napoleon’s imperial ventures into Italy and Egypt added a trove of classical and ancient Egyptian pieces to the collection, providing it with a deepening temporal breath that accentuated this narrative, with the imperial power appearing as the inheritor and culmination of the great occidental civilizations This narrative, moreover, was sharpened by the dawn of global European, and especially British imperialism, and the concordant appearance of museums representing the nascent disciplines of paleontology and anthropology. In the case of the former, material remains of various species were grouped and sequenced stratigraphically. As for the latter, peoples deemed “primitive” or “savage” were placed at either the end of a biological sequence or at the outset of a cultural one, as a sort of medium between natural and civilizational. Indeed, such exhibits sometimes went to grotesque lengths to locate those designated as “primitive” as such evolutionary intermediaries. During the heyday of the polygenetic hypothesis, the late 18th- and early 19th-century theory that various “races” were descended from evolutionarily distinct ancestors, the elongated genitals of a Khokoi woman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus,” were mounted onto the wall of Paris’ Musée de l’Homme along with her brain and skeleton (and only removed in 1974, then buried in 2002). The debunking of this hypothesis did little to mitigate such outrages: we might recall Ota Benga, the captured Baschilele man, a “pygmy,” who was caged in the Bronx’s zoological park alongside an Orangutan and labeled as an evolutionary stage between ape and civilized human. More widespread were ethnological dioramas, among the 19th century’s preeminent spectacles, which were popularized during the World Fairs and populated with “real” natives shipped in from distant, imperial holdings. And one need only visit New York’s renowned Natural History Museum and particularly its “Hall of Peoples” to confirm the continuity of these cultural evolutionist preoccupations into the present. The outcome of the new disciplines - art history, anthropology, paleontology, etc. - and their crystallization in the modern museum, then, came to be interwoven into a narrative of accelerating progress beginning with the architectonic sluggishness of geologic time, proceeding through the meandering progression of “primitive” time, and coming to a crescendo with the blistering pace and bright future of national time.

As we have observed, however, the narrative that unfolds in the tour of George Washington’s manor produces a sort of asymptotic approchement to the General’s body. What, on the other hand, distinguishes the modern, public museum from its premodern antecedents, was and is, as we have observed, the production of a lineal, historical, evolutionary progression. The museum’s narrative and efficacy depends upon the boundedness of various displays: one makes imaginative leaps through history by moving from one display or room to another. In contrast, Mount Vernon’s efficacy relies upon seamlessness, a simulation which reaches out unto the horizon. We would find it absurd to question the authenticity or efficacy of a museum on the absolute elimination of visual anachronism – on the basis of the fact that automobiles are visible through an open window, for example – and yet the preservation of Mount Vernon mobilizes just such a mode of authenticity. Again, not only is the material culture of George Washington’s final year preserved, but even the agriculture, ecology, and vistas of this time and place are simulated to the best of the estate’s caretakers’ ability. Rather than lead the viewer through time, Mount Vernon transports the viewer to a particular moment. Mount Vernon does not, like the Modern museum, locate the Nation within a continuity where it occupies the place of a triumphant crescendo, but rather allows for an experience, in isolation, of the Nation’s founding moment and claims to sempiternity.

Mount Vernon, moreover, also differs from the modern museum insofar as it does not divide its objects taxonomically: all its objects belong to a single category, that of George Washington’s final days. To make sense of this further contrast, however, we must move backwards through history like archaeologists or certain intellectual historians such as Karl Lowith. We might observe, for example, that the old royal and papal collections were already quite taxonomically laid out. Indeed, the taxonomical organization of exhibited objects was already so firmly ensconced by the advent of the French Revolution that Tony Bennet, in The Birth of the Museum, can assure us that “the administration of the Louvre during the French Revolution required no fundamental change in its iconographic programme (Bennett 1995: 36)” The decapitation, both literal and symbolic, of the state merely rerouted the signification of the gallery’s artwork: signs were simply made to bypass the mediation of the king’s body, referring directly to the nation-state.

Pre-revolutionary natural and ethnological collections were equally taxonomic in outlay. Indeed in The Spirit of the Matter, Anthropologist Peter Pels argues that the bizarre objects displayed in proto-museological collections had a large part in catalyzing the taxonomical craze characteristic of the age of Linneas and Buffon. Prior to this turn to taxonomy such collections were organized accordingly to an entirely different logic. The 16th century studioli, for example, consisted of hidden rooms in the palaces of Italian princes. Here, a series of cabinets were arranged around a central viewing point that was to be occupied only by the prince himself. Ranged in these cabinets, a series of biological, mineral, and art objects represented interlocking facets of the cosmos, though they were concealed by small hatches onto which arcane symbols were painted for only the prince was to see and know what each cabinet actually contained. When these objects were surveyed from this central point, the intended effect was to “reassemble all reality in miniature, to constitute a place from the centre of which the prince could symbolically reclaim dominion over the entire natural and artificial world.” (Omni in Bennet 1995: 36)

Taxonomy begins takes hold over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, when we witness the rise of studioli, cabinets des curieux and Wunderkammern/Kunstkammem, eclectic collections that included magical, curative, or preternatural substances such as the famous “unicorn horn” (a narwhal tusk) now displayed at The Musée national du Moyen Âge in the Hôtel de Cluny, antiquities, Dutch still-lifes, religious icons and relics, technological marvels such as the automatons of Inigo Jones and Solamon de Caus, natural and mineral specimens such as fossils and shells, and especially exotic objects from Europe’s ever expanding mercantile networks (Pels 1997: 105, 110). While the primary principle undergirding the assembly of these objects was precisely their defiance of and resistance to categorization, they were also thought of as private theatrum naturae, that is, as hypostatizations of the rhetorical practice of navigating through a “memory place” in order to recall a long oration. Like the studioli but to a less megalomaniacal extent, this practice was understood as having the potential to convey a “knowledge of the world” that could manifest as miraculous or demonic spectacles. Indeed we might understand this link between the theatrum naturae and oration the first buds of such a collection’s narratological potential. Such collections were most characteristic of the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, the esoteric powers claimed by alchemists, and hermetic philosophy, but were also gathered by monarchs, as markers and instruments of power and prestige, Protestant pietists, who thought of them as modes of reflecting upon God’s creation as moralistic allegories, and the emerging cohort of “natural philosophers” or scientists, whose ambivalence towards their collections highlights the age’s rising tide of taxonomic preoccupation (1997: 106-107). Déscarte, for example, voiced skepticism regarding the “excess of wonder” that such a collection could produce and the resulting, intellectually debilitating “paralysis,” while regarding wonder as the driving force of a will to science. Francis Bacon, too, voiced such doubts but regarded the posession of rarities as crucial to the philosopher (1997: 108).

As Pels notes, the mode of collection characteristic of the curiosity cabinets did not so much disappear with the advent of the museum as fade in importance and become feminized. This is evident, he argues, in semantic changes during the victorian period; whereas “wonder” had once been attributed to such collections, they were now increasingly referred to as a function of “fancy,” as “bric-a-brac,” terms associated with the feminized clutter of the domestic interior. Indeed, it is interesting that, in the 18th century, exhibitionary institutions not only proliferated but took on strongly gendered roles. Bennet tells us, for example, the designers of department stores and the museums all dreamed of reforming the working class through such institutions, but the former was aimed at working class women whereas the latter was aimed at working class men (Bennet 1995: 31). In the United States, the library also became gendered as female and, to this day, the word “librarian” still evokes some bespectacled lady. It comes as no surprise, then, that the eminently masculine Smithsonian Institution would find its feminized mirror image in the Mount Vernon’s Women’s Association.

The museum and Mt Vernon are masculine and feminine ramifications respectively of the genealogy running through royal collections, studioli, and Wunderkammern. They mirror one another insofar as they imported and discarded opposite characteristics from their antecedents. In the case of the Museum, the taxonomical segmentation of exhibitions was preserved, whereas the biographical function of the collection as a reflection of the status and mana of the collector was discarded. In the case of Mt Vernon, the taxonomical imperative is discarded whereas the biographical function is carried over and made emphatic. Just as the royal gallery consisted of a collection of objects which were considered the king’s personal property and as such reflected upon his august majesty, Mount Vernon uses George Washington’s objects to display him as a man of eminently presidential and liberal-republican tastes. In both cases, the collection both participates in the production of tastes suitable to a particular political office and shows that the holder of that office displays such taste. During the tour of the General’s manor, for example, objects are regularly upheld as examples of how George Washington endeavored to do away with the surfeit of luxury that was seen as the hallmark of Monarchy without sacrificing material quality, so that his position in and as the Nation could not be denigrated by foreign dignitaries. In a move that perhaps prefigures the folk american notion of a middle class to which all of society belongs, George Washington is thusly forward as a first among equals. Specifically, the guides point to both the relative lack of ornament on his objects and the excellent, functional craftsmanship and material with which they are constructed.

Yet the museum and Mt Vernon reach back even farther into the historical unconscious of political-theological exhibition. Studioli, cabinets des curieux and Wunderkammern/Kunstkammem, Bennet notes, can be understood as secularizations or quasi-secularizations of the reliquary. Not only did such exhibitions often include relics and icons, many of the other eclectic objects were thought of as capable of carrying out similar sorts of miraculous or magical interventions, though often they were effects of distinct inversions of Christianity in the shape of “natural magic” or even satanism. But some facets of the museum and Mount Vernon bypass this proto-museological era of exhibitionism entirely and loop back to the reliquary itself. Again, here, the museum and Mt Vernon differentiate themselves by adopting and suppressing opposing facets. Specifically, the first perpetuates the use of glass cases as a sort of spatial enchantment while doing away with the relic, whereas the latter eschews such cases while transposing the enchanted relic itself.

The glass casing in which museum artifacts, especially in the mid- to late-19th century, were displayed was a late medieval innovation. The monstrace, a crystal chamber out to which a gold halo is wedded, is now used exclusively for the display of eucharistic hosts, the transubstantiated flesh and blood of Christ, but this device originated in the medieval era, where it was used to display saintly relics to the public. Later, during the counter-reformation, where the burden of proof concerning the existence, incorruptibility, and authenticity of relics began increasingly heavy, monstraces evolved into glass sided boxes and caskets. This use of glass containers as both exhibition and proof was dropped in the studioli and Wunderkammern, perhaps because the more private nature of such displays reduced the threat of damage from mass adoration, but in the museum and, indeed, the department store, we observe their meteoric resurgence. Inversely, Mount Vernon does away with these sort of glass cases, preferring the strict monitoring of room-by-room guides, a way of regulating visitors that was done away with very early in the history of the modern museum. Regarding this difference, Tony Bennett extensively cites an 1841 report on the making public of the British Museum:

...at that time it appeared to me to be very defective; the people were hurried through in gangs of from 20 to 30, and there was no time allowed for the investigation of any thing whatever; in fact, they were obliged to attend to the warder, and if the people had catalogues they might as well have kept them in their pockets; when they wanted to read them in conjunction with the object they saw, of course they lagged behind, and then the warder would say, 'You must not do that; the catalogues are to be read at home; you must follow me, or you will lose a great deal;' and I was peculiarly struck by that, for I thought it a very odd mode of exhibiting national property… (Report, 1841, minute 2805)

If a small number of persons are distributed through the whole house there is a great chance that you may some day or other be robbed; our servants cannot watch them so well when a few persons are distributed over a large space; when there are many, one visitor, to a certain extent, may be said to watch another' (Report, 1841, Minute 2944)

(Bennett 1995: 53. 55)

At Mount Vernon, we see a mode of venerating George Washington that, while doing away with the monstrace or showcase, is unavoidably reminiscent of the way in which saints were adored long after their death. Namely, the objects are understood as consecrated by the touch of the leader’s body, as conduits of his mana. Though the adoration of George Washington’s biological body is rendered quite impossible and, indeed, would offend liberal-republican sensibilities, we must recall that saintly relics consisted not only of bodily remains but also of scraps of clothing and other objects that had come into contact with the saintly body.

The Egocrat

Speaking of George Washington’s objects at Mt Vernon as quasi-relics brings to mind an analogue: the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin in Moscow’s Red Square. In the case of this Mausoleum, the inheritance of the reliquary and the notion of the imperishable body as a sign of a Saint’s divinity is obvious. Indeed, when Stalin, shortly before Lenin’s death, first proposed that he be embalmed according to the wishes of some anonymous “comrades in the provinces” who were “exercised about this matter,” his rival, Leon Trotsky, is said to have angrily responded, exclaiming, “If I understand Comrade Stalin correctly, he proposes to replace the relics of Saint Sergei Radonezhsky and Saint Serafim Sarvsky,” two of the most venerated, incorruptible Russian Orthodox saints, “with the remains of Vladimir Ilich” (Zbarsky & Hutchinson 1998: 11).

What is less obvious, however, is the liberal-democratic instinct to recoil from and decry such a presentation of a leader’s corpse. Why this revulsion, when the profusion of haunted objects organized into a simulated living space raises no eyebrows and, indeed, is considered a wholesome activity, the provenance of boy scouts and elementary school field trips? Herein lies the value of our anthropological examination into Mt Vernon as a political-theological ritual: here is an interface between affective, bodily knowledge enacted in liberal-democratic subjectivity and the meta-narratives and discourse of liberal-democratic ideology. It seems unlikely that the preservation of Mt Vernon was undertaken by cynical manipulators with the goal of cultivating such bodily knowledge. Rather, we find this interface where ideological and affective modes of belonging to the liberal-democratic order feed back into one another. The absence of the General’s body is felt as a matter of taste and sensibility. In turn, the communist-totalitarian offense against this sensibility provides raw material for ideological intervention into the liberal-democratic subject’s feelings towards the Enemy. In Lenin’s Enbalmers, Illya Sbarsky, the book’s author and a second-generation member of the Lenin Lab, the lab charged with the ongoing preservation of Lenin’s body as well as embalming other leaders at the request of sympathetic nations and the furtherance of related scientific fields, relates an interesting passage where this complex of sensibility and ideology irrupts into international diplomacy. Specifically, he relates how, when the Coorperated Republic of Guyana decided to embalm their president, Lindon Forbes Burnman, the US State Department threatened to cut off all economic aid. According to Sbarsky, they “could not tolerate that a rite initiated and perfected in the USSR should be observed in Latin America, which America regarded as her own preserve” (Zbarsky and Hutchinson 1998: 189). Is it not striking how a funereal practice, relayed down through the individual body as a sort of nausea, explodes back out through myriad levels of ideological articulation and common feeling into an action undertaken in the name of entire nations?

Furthermore, the felt absence of George Washington’s body presents us here with yet another mirror image, in the form of the felt-presence of Lenin engendered by his embalmed body and mausoleum, one so acutely felt that assassinations have been attempted against his presumably still dead, corpse. Whereas Mount Vernon does away with the monstrace, indicating the exact contours of the General’s absence through a superabundance of context, in the case of Lenin we find a body stripped of all context. Indeed, this very point is emphasized by Alexei Yurchak, a Berkeley anthropologist currently engaged in fieldwork with the still-extant Lenin Lab. Yurchak emphasizes, in his 2012 lecture, “The Incorruptible Body of Communism,” that because “authenticity is understood in terms of the original form, shape, feel, flexibility, look, color, and weight of the body” rather than as the preservation of its internal materiality, as it was for the saints, the internal composition of Lenin’s body is subject to constant technological alterations and material infusions. This privileging of form over matter is symptomatic of the regime’s use of Lenin as a symbolically rather than biographically exemplary figure: Lenin the man is occluded by Lenin as “the enunciated unquestionable foundational truth of the Soviet project.”

Again, we find that this presence and absence maps onto Lefort’s concepts of the totalitarian and democratic place of power respectively. In the case of the embalmed Lenin, we see can see a phantastic sculpture of what Lefort calls the totalitarian Egocrat:

This other offers his own body – individual, mortal, endowed with all the virtues – whether he is called Stalin or Mao or Fidel. A mortal body which is perceived as invulnerable, which condenses in itself all the strengths, all the talents, and defies the laws of nature by his super-male energy. (1986: 300)

This body metonymically envelopes the social whole in a vast “identification of the people with the proletariat, of the proletariat with the party, of the party with the leadership, of the leadership with the Egocrat (1986: 299).” What is more, Lefort emphasizes that this Egocrat ergo People constitutes a sort of fixation with surface, with skin as the membrane that separates the undifferentiated body from the outside, the Enemy: “there can be no other division than that between the people and its enemies, a division between inside and outside, no internal division (1986: 297)”. This ideological dream is, at the Red Square Mausoleum, given shape and substance: as Yurchak reminds us, it is precisely through the fluid homogenization of Lenin’s internal organs that the imperative to maintain his surface into sempiternity is achieved.

Importantly, this digression into a consideration of Lenin’s embalming is not an idle one; it is not meant simply to exoticize a communist Other. Rather, in putting forward this analogue, I mean to emphasize once again that the mode of memorializing George Washington is not a mutant strain or mechanistic, genealogical outcome of political-theological precedents. If we are to avoid Laclau’s aforementioned “taxonomical labyrinth,” we should hold in mind that strongly opposed political movements and regimes can deploy elements drawn from similar milieus in order to construct radically different practices with equally different objectives and effects. It is in this sense that we might use this illustration of two secularizations of the reliquary, Lenin’s Mausoleum and George Washington’s Mt Vernon, as a sort of mnemonic or talisman against the metaphysical assignment of ideological elements, which seems almost to adhere in political philosophy as an inbuilt reflex.

Phantasma Geminata

Kantorowicz, in The King’s Two Bodies, discusses towards the end of the work the royal funeral practices that held, in one form or another, for late medieval kings up until the revolutions of the eighteenth century. First, he distinguishes between the heralding of succession (“Le roi est mort! Vive le roi!”) and the assertion of sempiternity, (“Le roi ne meurt jamais.”). The former, he argues, arose as a gradual condensation of the passing-on of the crown, one which was to makes claims to the throne immediate in an effort to preclude competing claims by eliminating any space for contestation. A startling ritual and material manifestation of the exigencies presented by these liminal moments of succession, one that dovetails with our own consideration of George Washington’s centennial funerals, regards the use of effigies in French royal funerals beginning in the latter half of the fourteenth century and in English ones half a century later. In effect, two funeral corteges were used: one carried the embalmed, disemboweled, biological body of the King, hidden in a double casket of lead and wood, and the other displayed a persona ficta, an effigy in royal regalia that was to be exhibited to the public. This duplication also found its way into sepulchral monuments, which contrasted the misery of decaying flesh in the form of danse macabre with a seated, god-like gsiant. The French Jurist, Charles Grassaille put it thusly in 1538: “the King of France has two good angels as guardians: one in reason of his private person, and the other in reason of his royal Dignity” (Kantorowicz 1957: 409-438).

The doubling of the King’s funeral corteges and sepulchral monuments, Kantorowicz argues, reflected an emergent bifocality in the funereal practices of the English and French monarchies: “one ritual of the Church, observed by the clergy for the misery of the naked or half-naked man in the coffin (‘internally there remains what is human’), and another ritual of the state, celebrating through the effigy the immortal and regal Dignity exposed on the coffin (‘externally there appears the Majesty of God’).” It is tempting to argue that the revolutions of the 18th century simply did a way with the lugubrious flesh of the deceased king, that they represent the moment at which the effigy gains complete autonomy. In Victor Hugo’s account of the Retour des Cendres, the return of Napoleon’s ashes to France, it is easy to see just such an occlusion. Here, the funeral procession was reduced to a single cortege. The funereal chariot “is an enormous mass, gilded all over,” Hugo writes, “whose stages rise in a pyramid atop the four huge gilded wheels that bear it.”

All this ceremony had a curious mark of evasion. The government seemed to fear the phantom they were summoning up. They looked like they were both displaying Napoleon and at the same time hiding him. Everything that would have been too great or too touching was left in shadow. Whatever was real or grand was hidden away beneath more or less splendid shrouds; the imperial cortège was hidden within the military cortège, the army within the National Guard, the parliamentary chambers within the Invalides and the coffin within the cenotaph (Hugo 1987).

It is equally, but deceptively, easy to see in George Washington’s funeral an opposite move towards monism. Whereas the reactionary forces of the Restoration in France attempted to do away with Napoleon the man, the triumphant American revolutionary opted to do away with himself as an effigy. His funeral was to be a private one, he was to die as a man, though, of course, without the gory Gothic trappings that this once would have entailed.

We run into immediate difficulties when we consider this move more deeply. First, we must remember that what we are after is not the rationale behind George Washington’s originary funeral but rather how his ongoing memorialization and, in particular, the centennial recurrence of his funeral forms and is formed by an implicit, felt political theology. Second, we must note that many of the facets of these latter day funerals resonate more with the triumphal cortege of the persona ficta. Recall the effigy of George Washington that was ministered to just prior to his third funeral before being disappeared. This ministration strongly recalls the funereal censing, aspering, and laving of the king’s effigy, and in particular the entertainment of this effigy at a last feast. Even more striking, Kantorowicz argues that these particular practices “though trimmed with some ecclesiastical exterior, were not of ecclesiastical origin.” Specifically, he points to the Roman Histories, where Herodian describes how an effigy of the emperor, as part of his last rites, is “treated like a sick man, lies on a bed; senators and matrons are lined up on either side; physicians pretend to feel the pulse of the image and give it their medical aid until, after seven days, the effigy ‘dies’” (Kantorowicz 1957: 427). The parallels with the treatment of George Washington’s effigy are most uncanny. What might this mean? Have the King’s two funerals been reintegrated into George Washington’s singular, recurring funeral?

Strictly speaking, however, Mt Vernon is not the only sepulchral monument, so to speak, devoted to memorializing George Washington. Specifically, we must consider George Washington’s other tomb: the empty sarcophagus that lies in a circular room underneath the central point of the Capitol building’s central cupola. This chamber was originally intended to house the General’s body, which was to be reinterred here, and Martha Washington’s permission for such a reinterment was even obtained. Moreover, this empty sarcophagus marks Washington DC’s central point, where the city’s four quadrants divide and from which its numbered streets radiate. The tomb was to constitute the center of both the Capitol building and nation’s capital, whose name was not only coterminous with the General’s but whose very material being was to radiate from his body: an organology no less striking than that of Medieval and Absolutist kings. In time, however, the war of 1812 followed by the intransigence of Mount Vernon’s new owners and the difficulties posed by the express desire for a private interment in George Washington’s will thwarted this plan (Architect of the Capitol 2012).

In effect, we might see, in the General’s two monuments, a shift of both the King’s Bodies towards absence. Just as the King’s public funeral came to be that of his persona ficta, a double that did away with his biological body, George Washington’s tomb at the Capitol building is the trace of his public funeral, which does away with the body of the effigy. In parallel, the biological body of the King that was the subject of his private funeral as a man shifts towards an absent body that can only be material as an effigy and even then only briefly. While this is, in fact, a double absence, the phantasmic George Washington at Mt Vernon is an absence of one who has “just passed” in the phrase’s doubled sense. George Washington’s cenotaph, as the central point of Washington DC, on the other hand, is utter formlessness, a complete vacuum in Lefort’s sense: here his body is no longer, he has become coterminous with the Capital which bears his name and, by analogy, the nation he fathered and principle of sempiternity. In contrast, at Mt Vernon, insofar as his objects crowd around the space his body has vacated, he can still be delineated, he still has form. Moreover, this continues the function of the funeral of king-as-man as a principle of succession, or rather, in the case of the American republic, the perpetual return to that liminal space-time during which succession is question. Indeed, there is some precedent for this in royal ritual. Kantorowicz writes that, in the fleeting moment between mortal kings, four “Presidents of Parliament,” that is, the four highest judges of the land, were for a moment vested with the power of the king. Reflecting this, their vestments and decorations were for this instant interregnum those of kingship (1957: 416). Thus, by maintaining a space-time in which the national father has always “just-passed,” the chain of succession is suspended because the instant at which the throne is vacated is frozen.

Last Words

Mt Vernon, then, is a deep freeze. As a sort of vacuum-pump serving the emptiness of the place of power, it is an interface between bodily, affective knowledge and mythic, ideological apparatuses of liberal-democratic subjectivity. The efficacity of its particular exibitionism, moreover, is neither anachronistic nor a function of postmodern simulation and nostalgia. Rather, Mt Vernon is a place where the punctuated equilibrium of monarchical succession is imprisoned in an endless loop, like the spirit of a bygone age captured by a sorcerer’s stone. This is one of the sites at which the temporality of the ancien régime is made to fold back on itself to form a single point, a starting point from which the entirely other temporality of liberal-democratic phantasies of sempiternity can emanate.