Op-ed
ISIS And Iconoclasm: De-facement As A Failed Politic by Jack
Vates
It was hard to miss. Last week the ISIS idolaters once again
showed the entire world their propensity for awfully stupid actions by looting
the Mosul museum in Iraq and demolishing the precious relics stewarded inside. In
their mind, this kind of evocation is a high virtue. Something to absolutely
aspire to while securing their bid for ‘statehood’ in the world theatre. This is
nothing new. Iconoclasm has been practiced all the way back to Akhenaton and
surely before that. As Latour remarked, “Iconoclasm is an absolute – not a
relative – distinction between truth and falsity, between a pure world,
absolutely emptied of human-made intermediaries, and a disgusting world
composed of impure but fascinating human-made mediators”.[1]
In a desperate attempt to instill secular legitimacy, ISIS chose
de-facement as a means to re-face Mosul under the shroud of the IS flag. As if
defacing the artifacts would inevitably create new faces, as if defacement and ‘re-facement’
were necessarily coeval.[2]
When ISIS took sledgehammers to the museum they did it under the rationale that
the icons were counterfeit. That the more they are constructed by the human
hand, the less truth they embody. But what if truth is increased by being
human-made. Perhaps interaction with the
Other is increased through the construction of sacred images. As Ramon Sarro
eloquently suggests, “Far from despoiling access to transcendent beings, the revelation
of human toil, of the tricks, reinforce the quality of this access.”[3]
ISIS would clearly gnash their teeth at the thought and in
doing so, fall into the ultimate conundrum involving iconoclasm. What Bruno
Latour calls “The Double-Bind”. Are the relics human-made or transcendent? There
is a concept called acheiropoite that
suggests sacred icons are not made by the
human hand. They are constructed by the Other as representations of the
numinous and thus real purveyors of
religious power. So ISIS must make a choice. Either the relics are human-made
or literally transcendent. Either it is made or it is real.
The ultimate idolatry of ISIS comes in their denial of the
objects being transcendent. By destroying the religious icons they have made it
impossible to produce objects of sanctity. As Latour remarks, “the idol-smasher
is doubly mad: not only has he deprived himself of the secret to produce
transcendent objects, but he continues producing them even though this
production has become absolutely forbidden, with no way to be registered.”[4]
And herein lays the stupidity of ISIS. They have inadvertently made their own
icons religiously irrelevant. They have corrupted the power and legitimacy of
IS re-presentation. And they can’t even identify what form their icons come in.
Although it’s obvious to anybody who can think critically that the IS icon is
video production. The videos are their
mediators. In the highly ritualized productions complete with voice-overs
and special effects, ISIS has created an idol that they then made illegitimate
and devoid of power by making themselves unable to assemble or gather
divinities. Destroying the museum destroyed any chance of the IS to create
religious power.
On the other hand, if ISIS clumsily tries to say the icons
were indeed transcendent and not made by human hands then again they show their
idolatry. After all, if the smashed objects have real religious power, ISIS is
giving legitimacy to these ancient religions and renewing them in modernity. How
would Muhammad react to giving real religious power to other spiritual paradigms?
He’d be disgusted with ISIS. Not to mention a true Jihad comes as a war between
peoples of differing religious systems and
their gods. And the first foray of Jihad comes in making the opposing
religion’s gods illegitimate. By giving the smashed icons religious reality,
they’ve already lost the Jihad. They’ve made it impossible for themselves to produce
religious icons while at the same time making other’s icons transcendent.
Perhaps the most important point to take away from all this
is that iconoclasm destroys something in the idol-smasher that must be atoned
for. It goes beyond making one’s own spiritual predilections devoid of any real
power. The iconoclast offends every god
and goddess by the sheer audacity of their actions. The deities become
appalled at this perversion of inter-action. IS are not only idolaters to their
own cause but bereft of religious power and offensive to the gods that Be. And in their stupidity, they will
continue to be a nuisance to the rest of the world. Perhaps if they had the
foresight to divorce themselves from any religious paradigm and admit that the
real goal is secular statehood, they wouldn’t be seen as idolaters but they had
to win the hearts of minds of the populace somehow. And now even Iran is
leering at them and ready to lash out. It won’t be long now. The ISIS bid for
relevance has been denied on every level- both secular and spiritual.
[1] Bruno
Latour. On The Cult Of The Factish Gods. Duke University Press. Durham &
London. 2010. Pp. 68.
[2]
See Han Belting, “Beyond Iconoclasm. Nam June Paik, the Zen Gaze and Escape
From Representation.” In Iconoclash: Beyond the Image-Wars in Science,
Religion, and Art. Ed. Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour. 390-411. Cambridge, Mass.
MIT Press. 2002.
[3]
See Ramon Sarro, “The Iconoclastic Meal: Destroying Objects and Eating Secrets
Among the Baga of Guinea. In Iconoclash Pp. 227-230.
[4] On
The Cult Of The Factish Gods. Pp. 80.
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