Is a new form of iconoclasm emerging?
In a popular video circulating amidst the national debate over Confederate monuments, protesters chanting, “No KKK, no fascist USA,” throw a yellow rope around a statue of a Confederate soldier in Durham, North Carolina and wrench it from a pedestal. The statue twists and crumples as it hits the ground. The crowd cheers. Some come forward to take pictures with the toppled statue, which lay in its position of vanquish until hauled away the next morning.
The revolutionaries break images to repudiate the presence to which the images attest, and yet they break to proclaim—to prove—a new presence and power.
The iconoclasm in Durham is both new—it speaks to the particular racial anxieties of our present moment—and also familiar. It echoes the French revolutionaries smashing signs of the old regime in their efforts to establish a political order of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It echoes, too, the early Protestants breaking, burning, and mocking the images in the Catholic Church that they had renounced. The images that worried early Protestants most were those depicting the divine, for such images, according to their detractors, falsely pretend to bear God’s presence. The Protestants defaced images of Christ to say—to prove—that God is not present in them. God, they insisted, is present everywhere, unbounded by materiality. These iconoclasts, then, broke images both to deny God’s presence and affirm it. A similar dynamic characterizes the iconoclasm of political revolutions. The revolutionaries break images to repudiate the presence to which the images attest, and yet they break to proclaim—to prove—a new presence and power.
Iconoclasm responds to the way images release presences into the world, the way images are more than their literal existence, the way, that is, they mediate something beyond their mere materiality. Describing the potency of images through their power to make something present is one way to articulate how public monuments differ from museum sculptures. The statue that acts as a monument makes present a political regime to us, summoning the figures of a past that we memorialize in our public spaces to tell us who we are, who we ought to be, or who we want to be. A sculpture in a museum gives a politically neutralized presence that is more ghostly, like a dream or distant relative living in a far-off land. Depending on the sculpture, context, and our mood, such ghostly presence may haunt us or leave us alone. The presence of the monument is exhortative; that of the sculpture, interrogative.
The statue’s presence can be so different because monuments and museums have different histories. The public monument had a definitive moment in Byzantium, where the ubiquitous images of the emperor witnessed the extent of his political power. Thanks to images, the emperor could be present even where he was absent. So closely was the presence of the emperor identified with his image that to honor the image was to honor the emperor himself. Early Christians like fourth-century bishop Basil of Caesarea used this image logic to explain Christ’s relationship to the Father. Christ is the image of the invisible God, he wrote, such that honoring Christ is honoring the Father; for him, Christ bears divine presence into the world. Later, this same structure of image/emperor and Christ/Father was invoked by Byzantine image-defender Theodore of Stoudios. He wrote that the honor given to icons of Christ passes through to Christ himself; Christ, for him, is present to his image. In all three cases, these images point beyond themselves, negating their literal existence to open up to an excess beyond themselves. Making present what is absent, images give what they are not.
The statue that acts as a monument makes present a political regime to us, summoning the figures of a past that we memorialize in our public spaces to tell us who we are, who we ought to be, or who we want to be.
The museum has a different history. Its definitive moment comes in an attempt to rein in or redirect the excess given by a particular image. The moment came at the hands of iconoclasts, when French revolutionaries stopped defacing images and instead put them in the Louvre, which became a museum. There, images were denuded of their political power and reinterpreted as objects of historical, aesthetic, or formal value. With the museum, revolutionaries could break the political power of images without destroying any objects.
There is an irony here. The power of images to mediate presence comes in their self-negation, by which they present more than they are—yet iconoclasm negates the image in order to deny (or reject) that very presence and affirm a new one. Is it any wonder that iconoclasm also creates images, as the selfies with the vanquished Durham statue demonstrate? In attempting to destroy the image or the presence an image gives, the negations of iconoclasm end up creating new sites of excess, new images.
The iconoclasms of toppling statues or relocating them to museums are powerful, but they are not the only forms of iconoclasm. A new form of iconoclasm seems to be emerging that plays with the irony of iconoclasm’s capacity to generate images. This new iconoclasm is self-consciously creative and additive, what I describe in my book as a Wittgensteinian iconoclasm, in contrast to a Baconian iconoclasm of unmasking. One recent example of additive iconoclasm was the unanimous August 22nd decision of the Charlottesville City Council to cloak the Confederate monuments in black tarps to mark a city grieving. These cloaked statues mourn that racism has not yet been upended, is not yet vanquished, and express desire that it will be. Another example of additive iconoclasm came in a suggestion by civil rights activist Andrew Young, who said he did not want to destroy Stone Mountain—a Mount Rushmore of Confederate leaders—but to add a Liberty Bell to it in homage to Martin Luther King’s exhortation, “Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.” With the bell, the mountain would no longer extol white supremacy; it would embody the hope that the freedom of racial equality might reach even the most racist and unfree parts of our nation.
These ideas for additive iconoclasms resonate with the actions of one German town in 2014. Overwhelmed with neo-Nazis marching in support of white supremacy, the people of the town found sponsors to donate money to an organization that helps neo-Nazis leave the movement. The more steps the neo-Nazis took, the more money the sponsors would donate, and so the town came out to cheer on the white supremacists to walk farther. They set up milestones marking how much money the marchers had raised at each point (ultimately, $12,000) and hung banners for the walk they called “Nazis against Nazis.”
If the museum emerged as one new form of iconoclasm in a revolutionary era, could our own period of tension energize another new iconoclasm? Perhaps. Perhaps today’s iconoclasm, too, is both new and not new. For this generative iconoclasm seems reminiscent of another, very old iconoclasm, deep in Christian history and theology, centered on the cross of Christ. The attempt destroy the one called the Image of the invisible God on the cross became for Christians the perfect revelation of that God. That scene of death became a scene of eternal life; the evidence of hate became instead a picture of love; and the moment of utter despair became an image of new hope. The human attempt to break God becomes for Christians divine victory in defeating death. There are similarities here to the generative iconoclasms of Charlottesville, Stone Mountain, and beyond, as people take captive the statues that release death-dealing presences into the world, reframing their proclamations of white supremacy through the lament, hope, and humor critical to birthing a new age.
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