Iconoclasm is Always a Prelude to a New Politics

In a time when Confederate monuments are being torn down, other colonial and imperial figures erased from university campuses, and now a mural in San Francisco being covered up, I pause only to note an invaluable book by James Noyes that many years ago laid out with pellucid cogency this rule: whenever iconoclasm breaks out, it is always a prelude to a new politics. 

Unlike many books treating iconoclasm, which often confine themselves to the so-called Byzantine outbreaks of the eighth-ninth centuries, Noyes' book, The Politics of Iconoclasm: Religion, Violence, and the Culture of Image Breaking in Christianity and Islam, takes a wide and fascinating approach, showing the outbreak of image smashing in a variety of Christian and Muslim contexts ancient and modern, and also in 20th-century politics in Germany and Russia, inter alia. These latter outbreaks were tied directly to the rise of revolutionary politics in and after 1917 in Russia, and the rise of Nazism after 1933 in Germany. Both destroyed old images and art and replaced it with that of their own devising for obviously political purposes.

The same is no less true today whenever the demand is made for historical memorials or other art forms to be effaced, erased, removed, or destroyed. For some people perhaps more than others, "we suffer from our reminiscences," as Freud famously said.