Angelology

The baroque construction of angels in Operación Bolívar plays a key role in the process of media (an)archaeology carried out by the book. Clement uses the figure of the angel as a tool for intervening into the increasingly dynamic interplay between materiality and abstraction in digital culture. Many of the critical analyses of Clement’s work published to date centre on his depiction of angels. Héctor D. Fernández L’Hoeste argues that the use of angelic figures in Operación Bolívar demonstrates the extent to which the book remains caught within a national imaginary. Despite Clement’s satirical tone, his work ‘encaja bien dentro de las matrices historiográficas del acontecer nacional’ (fits neatly into the official historiographical mould of national events).²² In particular, the figure of the angel in Operación Bolívar reproduces the interconnections between Church and State produced by ‘nuestra tradición estética y el relato national’ (our aesthetic tradition and the national narrative).²³ As proof of this, L’Hoeste cites the depiction of a bare-breasted angel in the first part of the book, which he compares to the Ángel de Independencia statue, the national icon built in 1910 to commemorate a century since national independence. The misogynistic detailing of her body, together with the fact that no sooner does she appear in the book than she is brutally dismembered by the two cazadores Leonel and Román, underscore L’Hoeste’s thesis that Clement’s angelic depictions reinforce dominant patriarchal discourses about nationhood.²⁴

However, Operación Bolívar taps into a more complex and transnational tradition of angelic representations than Fernández L’Hoeste suggests, and specifically one that uses the figure of the angel to probe the nature of postmodern media culture. In this way, the angel becomes central to Clement’s baroque exploration of the complex interactions between materiality and abstraction in digital culture. Brian McHale uses the term ‘postmodern angelology’ to refer to the use in the postmodern North American fiction of Thomas Pynchon and William T. Vollmann of the figure of the angel ‘as a realized metaphor of the violation of ontological boundaries’.²⁵ The angel shares its condition of liminality and its status as a conduit between adjoining ontological worlds with the cyborg. Both the angel and the cyborg ‘symbolise the human aspiration to achieve a state beyond the human’.²⁶ In recognition of the fact that, in McHale’s words, the ‘angel-function’ has been largely ‘science-fictionalised’, cyberpunk novels such as Schismatrix (1985) by Bruce Sterling and Wetware (1988) by Rudy Rucker have used angelic imagery in their fictional constructions of cyborgs. One of the main sources of humour in Operación Bolívar is the trope of the ‘hollow’ postmodern angel: the angel ‘emptied of its otherworldliness and brought ingloriously down to earth’.²⁷ The epilogue section at the end of the book contains a ‘dramatis personae’ that doubles up as a typology of the angels and cazadores that populate Angelópolis. The entry for El Protector, the fallen angel who helps the CIA to effect their plan, tells us that he became a mercenary ‘quando se privatizó El Cielo’ (when Heaven was privatized; see Fig. 3.2). The fate of the angels also parodies the complex interconnections that characterize late-capitalist financial structures. Subsequent to being hired by the CIA, El Protector is trained to destroy the Vatican with weapons that were manufactured by a corporation in which the Catholic Church itself is an important shareholder.²⁸

Contemporary media theory has also revisited the figure of the angel to explore how the communications technologies of the information age are reworking the boundaries between the human and non-human. In Transmitting Culture, Régis Debray draws an elaborate comparison between the study of angels in Early Christian theology and the study of contemporary media, which he terms ‘mediology’. The angelology of Pseudo-Dionysius, the Christian theologian of the late fifth and early sixth century, Debray argues, ‘should be read as mediology in a mystic or nebulous state’.²⁹ The figure of the angel in medieval angelology mediates between God and man. The intricate taxonomies of angels constructed by early Christian theologians demonstrate the fact that these celestial hybrids were intended to regulate the transit between man and God and in the process police the boundaries between the human and the divine. The development of ‘celestial hierarchies’ by Pseudo-Dionysius, in which the angelic hosts were divided into a number of hierarchically ordered sub-categories, ranging from seraphim to angels, took place alongside and served to reinforce the institutional normalization of Christianity. However, whereas the figure of the angel often functions in this official capacity as an institutionalized conduit between man and the divine, Debray points out that it can also function as a ‘counterpower’ that ‘fluctuates unpredictably’ and ‘insolently’ with respect to the established powers and is capable of ‘short circuiting’ the official hierarchies of transmission between man and God.³⁰

Operación Bolívar’s angels hesitate between reinforcing barriers and divisions and acting as ‘counterpowers’ that facilitate the breaching of ontological boundaries. On one hand, as Fernández L’Hoeste argues, the angel is employed as an icon of Mexican identity and as such functions to preserve the coherence of a national imaginary. However, it is a much more unstable figure than he suggests. The treatment of angels in the novel is part of Clement’s wider strategy of rendering minor the dominant baroque aesthetic. The frame narrative in the comic emphasizes the role of angels in the Conquest of New Spain. The allegory of the Conquest developed in the introduction – according to which an army of angels does battle with the Mesoamerican shamanic nahuales for the possession of New Spain – makes literal the use of angelic iconography in the process of cultural colonization. Here Clement draws on works such as Imagen de la Virgen María, Madre de Dios de Guadalupe (1648), in which Miguel Sánchez offers an image of Hernán Cortés and his troops as an ‘army of angels’.³¹ According to the introduction of Operación Bolívar, for the indigenous warriors the angels were ‘los emisarios de la destrucción’ (harbingers of destruction). Clement’s text teems with images of heavily armed angels. El Protector is depicted wearing full body armour, complete with easy-to-reach daggers strapped to his legs, and clutching a submachine gun drawn with fetishistic photorealist detail (see Fig. 3.3). Fernando Cervantes emphasizes the key role angels play in the evangelizing strategies employed by the Mendicant orders in New Spain. Mendicant chapels were ‘often presided over by large angels placed symmetrically around a crest with a Christological or a Marian theme’.³² However, this angelic tradition was also a moment of medial instability in which indigenous understandings of the porosity between the material and spiritual worlds were inserted into Catholic practices. Angels constituted a ‘fulcrum point’ between visible and invisible worlds and were used to introduce neophytes to the ‘intrinsic relationship’ between the natural and supernatural, the spiritual and the embodied in Mendicant spirituality.³³ These Mendicant practices were clamped down upon by subsequent Reformist tendencies that were suspicious of the potential for idolatry in the use of angelic iconography and sought to reinforce the dividing line between the natural and supernatural. However, Cervantes argues that these angelic traditions endured and were assimilated into the baroque. Operación Bolívar uses the figure of the angel to effect a series of transhistorical leaps between early modern angelology, the historical baroque and the baroque logic of contemporary media culture.

In a way that echoes Debray’s analysis of the relationship between angelology and contemporary media theory, the Mexican angelology carried out in Operación Bolívar functions as a mediology of the present. The angelic tradition in Mexican culture is revived to connect contemporary digital culture to the blurring of the boundaries between the visible and invisible, material and immaterial in the baroque. The ‘Introducción al Profano Lector’ that precedes the narrative is framed with decorative baroque borders with a conquistador’s crest on the top left corner and a grimacing cherub holding a pump-action shotgun at the bottom. The placement of the angel at the border of the page draws attention to how it inhabits – at a more figurative level – a liminal zone between the written words addressed to the secular reader and the ineffability of the divine. The angels’ position in the paratextual apparatus of the book (both in the introduction and the dramatis personae) presages their role as key liminal figures within the body of the narrative itself. The depiction of Angelópolis in the graphic novel evokes Michel Serres’ description of the city of angels as a metaphor for the increasing interpenetration of the material and virtual in the global city of late modernity.³⁴Operación Bolívar constructs this connection by presenting the angel as a commodity caught up in global circuits of exchange, killed by the ‘cazadores de ángeles’ and converted into a narcotic cocaine-like powder. The angels thus represent the point of contact between the city and the global circuits of exchange brought into being by the drugs trade. This process of converting the angel bones into ‘angel dust’ is depicted using typological illustrations that recall early modern scientific publications. One diagram of an angel is presented as a butcher’s chart: ‘ANGELUS CORPORIS: Corte estilo kosher’ (Kosher-cut style; see Fig. 3.4). In a reductio ad absurdum of the typological enterprise of angelology, the angels are reduced to material specimens and varieties. The reader is shown cross-sections of angel eyes and different types of angel hair, each of which fetch a different price on the market. Angelology employs the same epistemological strategies in the spiritual realm as scientific practices used in the dissection of bodies. The parallel between angelology and the taxonomic passion of early modern science, embodied here in these diagrams, draws attention to how the angel in Christian theology functions as a point of contact between the brute materiality of the world and the immateriality of the divine. Throughout the book, angels are presented as being ambiguously positioned at a border zone between the material and immaterial, remaining beyond the material realm until they are touched by a cazador. A panel presenting a scene in which Leonel and Ramón torture one of the angels they catch informs the reader that ‘Un ángel sólo siente dolor hasta que un cazador le toca. De otro modo permanece como materia divina, inconsciente et insensible’ (an angel only feels pain when it is touched by a cazador. Otherwise it remains divine material, unconscious and insensible).

This ambiguous ontology establishes a parallel linking the interplay between materiality and immateriality in early modern angelology with the increasingly complex relationship between materiality and abstraction in the digital technologies that underpin late capitalism, for which the commodity form provides the ‘fulcrum point’, represented by angels for Cervantes in earlier centuries.³⁵ The increasing domination of angelic products within the market in Operación Bolívar and the need for manufacturers of these products to become cyborg entities, using the hands of the cazadores as intermediaries, draws attention to what Slavoj Žižek describes as the ‘spectralization of the fetish’ in digital culture.³⁶ Paradoxically, the more immaterial the commodity becomes in a digital economy driven by acts of creative consumption in which the attention of users becomes the most valuable commodity of all, the more effectively it functions to conceal the determining network of social relations undergirding its value. By presenting the baroque angel as a metaphor for the commodity in a digital economy, Clement is returning to Karl Marx’s appeal to ‘the misty realm of religion’ as an analogy for commodity fetishism in Capital.³⁷ Like Marx’s commodity, the angels in Operación Bolívar are irreducible to their material reality and disclose the fantastic nature and the seductive power of the commodity. Their spectral character is visually referenced by their frequent appearance as ephemeral flashes of light or trails of stardust against a black background, as if they were overexposed figures or spectral traces revealed in a photograph. Out of this context of phantasmagoric angel-commodities emerges a complex posthuman scenario in which the material and immaterial are continually folded into one another. The seemingly virtual and abstract are thoroughly embedded in physical violence and repression, in a damning portrayal of the material consequences of contemporary digital capitalism in a neocolonial context.