I gave a presentation at the University of Virginia about a year ago on the ontology of iconoclasm, called "Tracing the Riverbeds of Iconoclasm." It is a very interesting and important topic, I must say. My rationale for including this in a blog on the concept of Time in South Asian thought has much to do with the fact that Time is a problem for phenomenology in that it doesn't have the phenomenality so readily ascribable to Being. Thus, represented as a "wheel," it is at once iconic and aniconic, for it is not an "idol", a personal substitution, a symbolic deity, but is a technology, a "device." But if "putting an image to something non-imagistic" constitutes a kind of iconoplasty, the creation of an icon, then what might we call an iconoclasm of Time?
Time is probably the first iconoclast. And I don't mean this is a merely mythical way. I mean that Time is likely to be that root from which iconoclasm first arose. It is a "first cause" of sorts, a significand that one cannot point to, because it is everywhere else, always already there on the scene, working behind the scenes, exposing us to its dynamics, setting us up to see it but in the mode of erasing whatever is seen. Time erodes the image, shows us that the image can be broken, that it lacks "magic." It does not defend itself, but must be defended by devotees.
Yet one would think that Time needs no defense, that its facticity could scarcely be denied. One would be wrong. Consider J. M. McTaggart's "The Unreality of Time." McTaggart's rigorous and unreflective application of the exclusion of the middle term to all things temporal would be negligible if his influence had not impressed itself so thoroughly upon the analytic tradition (computer programmers, lawyers, and arm-chair philosophers all). As such, it seems necessary at this stage in history to press back against the absurdities of such claims.
But how does this relate to the Euro-American history of Time and Iconoclasm?
It turns out that some of the greek myths seems to figure iconoclasm as part of their culture of philosophy. Take Zeus's substitute for example, a stone swaddled in cloth, given by Rhea to Chronos (Time personified), who consumes it. Or else, Chronos himself, turning his father, Ouranos (Aeon personified), into a eunuch with an adamantine scythe, or the brothers of Chronos, Titans (the strainers), hated by their father, and thus immobilized in the Earth (Gaia). All of these narrative tropes suggest a negating valence, a trickery visited upon the association of stone with life, a rigor mortis that prevents the animus from acting, an insult to the spirit visited with destruction, or else, breaking off the power of animus, to create, to self-perpetuate.
Iconoclasm erodes history. This could also be called "the recursiveness of historical reflection." Brainwashing is not too far from iconoclasm at its root, since it tries to "erase memory." Nowadays, it has become fashionable to engage in sous rature, linguistic iconoclasm. One does not write, "God," but "
But at the same time, this practice of writing under erasure, "clears" in the selfsame mode of a lumber company. Such a company, in entering an old growth forest, marks trees deemed fit for lumber with spraypaint, much in the same fashion of "strikethrough".
Yet what remains unclear to me is not whether these old-growth trees are worthy of preserving in virtue of the fact that they are living entities, albeit vegetative, but rather whether the corporate entity under whose governance such erasure today proceeds to mark terms for future deconstruction understands the true value of the wood and the value of the life that has given it its structure. "God" is a name so old that we have almost entirely forgotten its meaning; nothing like "Flying Spagetti Monster," which as yet can claim hardly an iota of heritage for itself. This word in particular is marked for deconstruction because one does not yet recognize the blossoms and young shoots jutting out here and there. Much of the tree is covered in a thick bark that would feign rot and death to the undiscerning eye. But this is the manner of all cirañjīvas, those that live long enough that their beginnings are forgotten by history.
Iconoclasm, like progressivism, looks only to the future, calculates, anticipates, or strives to anticipate, wants to get the future wholly in its sights, wants to overtake the visible, the imagistic, stone, paint, wood, and metal by the invisible, the clandestine, the occluded, shrouded in darkness and secrecy. Iconoclasm, like erasure, forbids the significance of itself from coming to light; it does not want exposure, nor identification, but moves as thieves and vandals do, the faceless mob.
But we can name iconoclasm even without effort: kāma eśo krodha eśa | This one is lust, this one is wrath, the eternal enemy who is like fire, all-consuming.
Yet today, lust and wrath predominate in media, as if exposed, 𝑎𝑠 𝑖𝑓 even wanting to be exposed. Our times are so very strange in this respect, that lust and wrath are in some ways considered to be the vanguard of respectability. And memory falls all the time further from the public space.
