by and
Most of the young people currently demolishing America’s statues were born too late to have picked up the habit from watching the attacks on statues of Lenin in the early 1990s, or of Saddam Hussein in the early 2000s. Instead, they most likely learned about the revolutionary power of iconoclasm in college. It has become axiomatic among professors of the humanities that symbols do not simply refer anymore; they actually do. They are now invested with the power to achieve real effects in the physical world. In postmodernity, symbols are, to use the academic jargon, “performative.”
The concept of “performative representation” suggests that the words we use and the images we look at do not merely reflect, but actively intervene in and alter, what we perceive as reality. In accordance with that assumption, students throughout the humanities are encouraged to challenge the very concept of objective facts. As a consequence, rational debate has been incrementally, silently replaced by the mantra that reason is Eurocentric and patriarchal. There is a serious risk that education, even knowledge itself, may devolve into a competition between various interest groups, in which every side aims to topple the sacred cows of the others. As Tom Wolfe put in in the title of his final novel, we are going “back to blood.”
Post-structuralist philosophers like Jacques Derrida, whose ideas were politicized by theorists of performativity like Judith Butler, add fuel to the flames of iconoclasm. Butler and her myriad followers believe, for example, that gender is performative. It is not, that is to say, essential or natural. It is not something that one is, but something that one does, something that one performs. Along with many other aspects of human identity, including sexuality and race, gender is constructed out of performative signs. Hence the phenomenon of identity politics, forcing the political conversation away from large-scale issues like economics or foreign policy to the arena of group grievances.
There are certainly coherent philosophical arguments for such developments, and it is not our purpose here to mock them. On the contrary, we continue to write books and articles about them, and we encourage our students to consider them seriously, alongside a range of critical alternatives. But it is surely worth asking why so many of the young generation have become so dogmatically convinced, so abruptly, of what was until the late twentieth century a mode of thought largely eschewed by professional philosophers. Why are symbols now regarded as performative, rather than denotative—as doing rather than meaning? What has made images suddenly seem so potent?
The power of performative images is strongly confirmed by the experience of young people before entering and after leaving the ivory tower. By the time they start college, they are thoroughly accustomed to behavioral patterns characteristic of social media—their native habitat. The virtual environment promotes performative posing, overstatement, and bitter factionalism over rational debate, placing greater value on subjective experience than on objective reason. Online culture orients young people towards “my truth” as opposed to “the truth,” even before professors begin instructing them in the relativism of post-structuralist thought.
The very concept of having an opinion is premised on the notion that the way we experience the world through our senses is unreliable, that it calls for reflection and meditation. Today, however, it is widely assumed that an immediate, sense-based perception of one’s surroundings is objective—that is to say, “true”—simply because it is one’s own, personal viewpoint. If everything is an image, after all, nothing is an image. In order to exist, a sign needs to signify. It needs to refer to something beyond itself. In the absence of referents, the world would consist of an endless chain of empty images—signs without meaning, which are therefore not signs at all, but reality. We would inhabit a world devoid of truth, a world made up entirely of images.
And that is precisely where the postmodernists who populate today’s humanities departments believe we live. Their adjective for a world that consists only of images, a world without truth, is “hyper-real.” They have now convinced several generations of students that hyper-reality, this depthless plethora of insignificant representation, is the stuff of everyday experience. Until the recent flurry of iconoclasm, this philosophical position might not have seemed a matter of much public concern. But over recent months, it has become clear that the way people think about images also affects—some would say determines—the way they think about everything else.
That is why revolutionaries in every age have paid close attention to images. Professor Eric Kaufmann was not exaggerating when he recently wrote in Quillette, “The iconoclasts are changing minds, and could be in a position to enact a root-and-branch reconstruction of America into something completely unrecognizable to its present-day inhabitants.” But rioting mobs alone are unequal to such a task. Kaufmann forecasts the success of this “second American Revolution” because, as he claims, it is enthusiastically backed by the liberal, upper-middle class. Perhaps such people no longer have a choice. The American bourgeoisie is forced to endorse its rebellious children’s iconoclasm because it has given them the intellectual weapons to rationalize such activity. To be sure, parents have paid good money for these weapons.
Forfeiting the traditional view that it is better to defeat one’s opponent by reason than by violence may yet have dire consequences for such people. The most ruthless, radical fringes of all great revolutions have drawn much of their initial support from more peaceful, moderate parties. They have also been unvaryingly efficient at eliminating their erstwhile allies once their purpose has been served. The English Independents ditched the Presbyterians, the French Jacobins guillotined the Girondins, the Russian Bolsheviks sent the Mensheviks to the gulag. To the immediate right of the extreme Left is often the most dangerous place to be. There are many liberal members of the American upper-middle class who would do well to remember that today.
For the iconoclasts scarcely care, or even know, whose images they are destroying. Their victims range across from Lee to Grant, from Jackson to Lincoln, from Washington to Teddy Roosevelt. In England, it was recently proposed to demolish a statue of the Roman Emperor Constantine. The point is the act of image-breaking itself. The protestors know that images act, that they do things, that they perform. For them, a performative image is a dangerous image.
In contrast to more broadly aniconic faith traditions, Christianity has often been violently divided on the issue of images. Indeed, there have been several major periods in Christian history when long civil wars were fought over the status of icons. Two waves of iconoclasm took place in the Byzantine Empire during the eighth and ninth centuries. Byzantium was a profoundly iconophile culture, until, quite suddenly, much of this devotion was transformed into an equally passionate loathing. The empire tore itself apart for two centuries, as iconoclast rulers alternated with iconodules until the two sides battled themselves to exhaustion, the iconodules finally restoring status quo ante in the mid-ninth century.
Another period of iconoclastic conflict took place during the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant Reformation. Religious icons were not the only matter at issue, but they were a high priority for many. Mobs would frequently break into churches to smash the statues that adorned them: as in Byzantium, countless works of artistic genius were obliterated in a righteous, popular frenzy of destruction. It is tempting to conclude that we are living through a similar, albeit secularized, period of iconoclasm today.
If so, we should reflect on the responses of past thinkers to the destructive fury of the radicals. We know, for example, that Protestant leaders like Martin Luther despised the iconoclasm of those he called Schwärmer, or “fanatics.” When Luther emerged from hiding to find that a particularly violent mob of Schwärmer had torn down Wittenberg’s religious images in his absence, he was horrified. If we look at Luther’s Against the Heavenly Prophets (1525), we find that there was a time when the iconoclasts, not the idolaters, were his most reviled opponents. “This is to do away with the images in a Karlstadtian manner,” he thundered, “to make the masses mad and foolish, and secretly to accustom them to revolution.”
In fact, many Schwärmer believed in the performative power of icons even more strongly than those who worshipped them. There is, for all intents and purposes, no point in pulling down a statue unless one believes that it has real, practical power. Andreas Karlstadt, one of the most dedicated of the sixteenth-century Schwärmer in Wittenberg, admitted with shame that he feared the despised religious statues might begin to physically retaliate against their attackers: “I stand in fear that I might not be able to burn idols. I would fear that some devil’s block of wood would do me injury.” This was precisely the kind of superstitious faith in the performative power of images that many Reformation leaders were determined to stamp out.
This brings us to academia today. Over the past three or four decades, it has deliberately toppled many of its own metaphorical statues, purging aesthetic canons of many once-revered icons. In the process, it has openly and proudly abandoned the pursuit of objective truth and value, transforming intellectual disagreement into a cynical competition for dwindling power and resources. Younger academics take all this for granted. But even older generations feel they have no choice but to go along with the demands of the revolution. After all, they taught the revolutionaries how to think.
Nor is iconoclasm irrational under postmodern conditions. If signs and their referents have truly merged into a depthless “hyper-reality,” then a statue is not merely a symbol of a tyrant, but actually identical with tyranny. In that case, the pulling down of statues really is an act of revolutionary heroism. The young iconoclasts at work today are obviously convinced of that. They were convinced of it by those who educated them, and many professors continue to applaud the behavior of their protégés. Should history repeat itself, however, and should the woke wake one day to find that it is not statues of long-dead Confederates rolling along in the tumbrils but themselves, they should at least possess enough historical awareness to recall what the sans-culottes yelled at the dying Robespierre: “It is Danton’s blood that chokes you!”
This article was originally published at The New Criterion.
15 comments
I never thought that’s what “performative” meant. I’d always thought it was meant to signify that something was “merely a performance,” in other words, “not real” or “bullshit” or “putting on an act.”
“The very concept of having an opinion is premised on the notion that the way we experience the world through our senses is unreliable, that it calls for reflection and meditation. Today, however, it is widely assumed that an immediate, sense-based perception of one’s surroundings is objective—that is to say, “true”—simply because it is one’s own, personal viewpoint. If everything is an image, after all, nothing is an image. In order to exist, a sign needs to signify. It needs to refer to something beyond itself. In the absence of referents, the world would consist of an endless chain of empty images—signs without meaning, which are therefore not signs at all, but reality. We would inhabit a world devoid of truth, a world made up entirely of images.” And herein lies the fundamental problem of the social justice movement. It all seems to be standing squarely upon the shoulders Kant’s epistemological skepticism. The egocentric predicament has it vengeance. Ironic how all of this philosophy which spits upon everything that is European itself stands upon German Idealism. So what epistemology will then rescue us from this self stultifying swamp of epistemological relativism? That is perhaps the question we should be asking ourselves….well at least those of us in Africa who are being told to decolonize, and to make sure that when we do so, we ignore those contributions of Marx, Adorno, Horkheimer, Sartre, Marcuse, Foucalt, Lyotard [All very European and all very white] to this new linguistic witchcraft. Oh and thanks so much to Helen and James and Peter and others who I am learning from on this site for helping me to better understand this toxic mess. Would love to have some of you visit our South African Universities where the social justice scholars like Alison Bailey and Robin DeAngelo are treated like celebrities.
What amazes me so profoundly, is the ability for people to revise or extinguish history. As if it would be possible to ‘rip up’ all experience and knowledge, and start all over, which is somehow more desirable than attempting to improve, what we already have.
The fundamental problem is within the eduction. Churning out year upon year, useless degrees, where students have nowhere to go except the public sector. The public sector that runs our countries. The leavers of power. People who are indoctrinated in CRT. People who cannot produce anything beyond being part of the burocratic system. This is why there is no movement nor hireachy in CRT, of a traditional sense . The question is, whether this ideaoligy is organic or, or simply the product of a policy, that for a kid to do well, they must go to university.
You answered your own question. The purpose of these useless degrees for 20 years has been to recruit , prescreen, indoctrinate, acculturate and secure a life-time commitment (eager servitude for status and security) of apparatchiks who form the lackey apparatus of THE STATE. I used to shake my head when conservative web commenters would mock over and over the green haired queer/race studies losers who the commenters loved saying would end up working at mcdonalds. I thought, oh how dangerously naive is your unknowing mockery. I worked in government funded and controlled NGOs for 35 years and saw since the ’90s up close exactly what CRT PC Woke and the “Studies” useless degrees were for. Not for the $50K student loan debt loserdom of mcdonalds or mommy’s basement online anarchism porn. But to create and army of lifetime quislings who form the Bureaucracy of the Ruling Class. A public union voting block that ensures “Totalitarian Democracy” (JL Talmon 1919) becomes a All Powerful Big Brother Uni-Party. A “moral” police force who monitors and controls the mores, values and culture of their families and communities to shame and ruin a population kept in constant fear — a way cheaper and more effective control mechanism than any guns or violence! And this assembly line of Kapo drones has worked perfectly and achieved its goal: Total Permanent Control of Everyone Forever. And now those who underestimated all of this by refusing to really see what was being done for 20 years are gaga and incredulous that’s it’s happened! I used to scream online at them to Awaken! Not Woke past tense but Wake present tense. But I gave up and now just hide and live on my memories of decades of freedom before the Gulag Curtain fell in 2005 (invention of social media — the virtual SS). “Freedom is a myth.” Number 6.
Speaking as an older man and looking back, whenever I have seen a statue or photo or painting, I have always just thought it was a representation — a memory — of a man who did great things in the early beginnings of a great country. And therefore, we honor him. That’s it. No great, deep mind bender to it.
A reliance on symbols for generating meaning and storing knowledge informs both why the statues were erected and why some were pushed down. Our basic frailties really haven’t changed that much; probably one of the situations that troubles the young.
From a strictly spiritual point of view, symbols are unecessary and serve as little more than crutches for those who have fallen away from the higher truths of life.
From a more balanced point of view, symbols act as a way to define groups and cultures. These symbols include not only icons, but also the written language, and any object capable of conveying meaning on the basis of some agreement. This includes, then, even things like our own bodies.
In these contexts the idea that symbols have lives of their own (or some similar idea) is considered delusional, or a mental failure. Many of us see this infatuation with symbols, and the belief that damaging one somehow makes a huge difference in our subjective reality, as a kind of psychosis. I only invite all involved to realize that the rest of us aren’t that far behind in the process of becoming totally irrational. Didn’t those who erected the statues have some belief that they would exert some sort of supernatural power on the minds of those who beheld them?
What I see going on is that certain persons who have slipped well beyond the limit of sanity are using the ideas and writings of others who likewise have slipped over that line to invite their young students to follow them across that line. We have the responsibility of giving these young people a better reason for refusing to “cross over” than those we have managed to come up with so far.
My name and my ancestral home suggest my father’s ancestors were Danish invaders of England. We hail from the Danelaw side of Watling Street. I Winchester town centre (the capital of Alfred’s Wessex) there stands a military statue of Alfred the Great.
As a Danish descendant does that give me the right to raise a mob and pull down that statue deep in ‘enemy territory’ since he was our ancestors’ enemy? His grandson Aelfred after all conquered all of England (the Kingdom of Alba here in Scotland was long established by then. We are the senior country which is often forgot).
I strongly suspect I would find it hard to find a suitable mob to do so. I am also not an iconoclast, at least not of that nature. I’m an atheist who is interested in high ecclesiastical architecture for its aesthetic effect and the human art and ingenuity which went into its design and manufacture. From York Minster to the Florence Duomo but honorary mention to various Reformation ruins including just over the water in St Andrews. In many of our cathedrals you can still see the niches on the outside which once held statues smashed by the reformation iconoclasts. I’m no fan of the morbid fascination with the relics of saints but if we had more of them, a lot were lost in the reformation we could with modern science learn a lot from them.
It can be interesting to go to Catholic Europe and see the Cathedrals still with their statues.
If tearing down a monument is a political statement, then erecting one or keeping it around is, as well. Alternatively, if a monument is just a hunk of bronze with no meaning or power, then removing or replacing it needs no more justification than any other change in public decoration.
I am from one of those countries that took down statues of Lenin, and I fully believe it was the right thing to do. The Lenin statue in my town was not toppled by some crazed iconoclastic mob – a local crane operator with a few helpers hauled it away in the middle of the night in 1990, and now it’s in a museum. And the city looks better for it.
I think your point that the statue of Lenin is in a museum is important. The statue was taken down to demonstrate that the ideology Lenin represented no longer was the dominant ideology in the town–a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But rather than destroy the statue, it was put somewhere people can go and see it and reflect on its meaning. It seems that the current crop of iconoclasts are not interested in preserving the history; they seem to want to do away with the history altogether, which is so Orwellian it makes me apprehensive for what is likely to follow: a world where history is written by those in power (as I suppose it always is) and the power would be in the hands of the new oppressors: the faithful adherents of Social Justice.
Brilliant. Academia has become a realm of soft sciences; horrifyingly, the brass-tacks ideology behind this global destruction is beginning to invade hard sciences, which is a futile errand. Yet, until enough counter-offense is mounted, hard science will backpedal in face of the volume and violence.
The judeo-christian understanding of the “righteous suffering for the unrighteous” again takes center stage, because those on the side of truth will take abuses in excess rather than turning to injustice.
Thx.
One need not resort to postmodern notions of hyper-reality to understand the very real social forces at work here. If we’re truly concerned about those revolutionary forces, it behooves us to put the statue back up. Because it’s not the statue that has the power, but rather the people acting within the ritual system that erected the statue who have power; there is a real relationship here, not a fantasy.
A statue of George Washington is an “index” (to use the semiotic theory of signs developed by CS Peirce) of the currently prevailing system of power in the United States. It isn’t just an icon of the country’s first president. It is a sign that a particular social contract is currently operating. Toppling the statue is a way that revolutionaries ritually signal their challenge to the prevailing system of power. If the statue remains toppled, they have demonstrated that the prevailing system of power isn’t as powerful as it used to be, thus emboldening them to more potent acts.
Every sign has three subjects — the sign itself (statue of George Washington); what it points to (not just the historical figure, but still-operating governmental system he helped to bring into being); and the interpretants of that sign — people like you and me, who see the sign and are affected by it. If we see the statue toppled, and it remains toppled, we have some very real information about the current social climate.
Interesting comment. I wasn’t familiar with any of those things.
It struck as I read the article that if the act of pulled a statue down has meaning, then surely the act of erecting a statue has meaning. ‘Performative’ is a new term to me so I wasn’t always sure what the authors were getting at. But that’s okay; I like this site because it brings in experts who discuss things on expert levels, and I can level up.
The act of destroying statues, churches, government buildings, etc is, in fact, ancient. For example, in ancient Egypt Akenaten eradicated all the symbols of traditional Egyptian religion. Jewish religion, Byzantine Christians, Protestant Christians, Ottomans and more did the same. Also, new houses of worship are built atop the toppled and therefore less powerful ones. This is, indeed, symbolic or performative. It says, “I beat you”.
I agree with Jane’s opinion statues representing Enlightenment ideals and Western civilization need to be restored! If this doesn’t happen, humans will only continue to repeat the harmful action of those before them.
I disagree. By erecting the torn-down monument you are participating in the same “hyper-real” bs world as the communist agitators who tore it down. Then you pick up the symbolic glove, inviting them to a fight on their ground.
The correct course of action is to completely and utterly reject the Marxist world-view and everything that came after it within the social sciences: History is not in any way about class warfare; capitalism is what liberated the working masses not socialism; there is a truth to be found; de-constructing a word or concept does not change or “destroy” that word’s or concept’s meaning at all; sex is biological and if there are limitless numbers of gender the term no longer has a meaning; race isn’t a thing and certainly not a social class…. and so on and so on. Absolutely every facet of that ideology shall be met with a no. I’m not moving an inch.
This is the only way to engage with them; do not. They aren’t either, really. As has been pointed out in an excellent article on this site earlier, they have no interest in engaging in a debate on policy or philosophy at all, since the goal is to destabilize, demoralize and demolish the Liberal Democratic World Order and replace it with an utopian anarchy that will plunge the world into a thousand years of darkness.
@Protectron
Societies are constructed by ritual. Not necessarily religious ritual — an election, for example, is a ritual for determining who will govern us. Participation in the ritual indicates acceptance, perhaps necessarily, of the liturgical canon behind the ritual. Some rituals produce artifacts — like money, government buildings, and statues. And this has been going on long before postmodern deconstruction.
No, the Woke don’t want to engage in debate. But they do want to engage — they have to, to take power. They are, in fact, engaging — and one way they engage is through iconclasm. All that’s being debated is who has power, and who is claiming it. Bringing down a statue is a statement. It says, “We disagree with the current system, and we will destroy it.” Like you say.
If we fail to put the statue back up, we are conceding the debate.