Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition by James Simpson (review)

A central claim of Under the Hammer is that the work of iconoclasm is never complete. Once set in motion, the act of breaking images has far-reaching and frequently unsettling consequences. This book shares in that quality; once the reader notices that Under the Hammer breaks familiar descriptions and well-protected disciplinary formulations, new sorts of questions about the politics of visual representation are bound to be asked.

Under the Hammer opens with the conceit of the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001. That the Taliban’s actions were widely condemned as “barbaric” and “medieval” indicates for Simpson just how persistently iconoclasm is seen as outside of modernity. Accordingly, Simpson’s avowed intent for Under the Hammer is to show how a Western modernity was inextricably formed through acts of iconoclasm. It should be noted that Simpson’s quick rehearsal of the Bamiyan episode lacks the equivalent ambition to locate the modernity of the Taliban’s iconoclasm. Despite passing references in Under the Hammer to Hebrew scriptural and Midrashic descriptions of Abraham destroying his father’s idols, there is no corresponding gloss on Quranic passages describing Abraham’s condemnation of his father’s idols. That the Taliban’s Commander Mullah Omar asked Afghans “if they prefer to be breakers of idols or sellers of idols,” that the timing of the Taliban’s actions immediately preceded the commemoration of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, and that Mullah Omar explicitly compared the plight of Afghan children under international sanctions to the willingness of Abraham’s son Ismail to be martyred, remains entirely unnoticed by Simpson.¹ His only interest is in showing that it is terminologically incorrect to label iconoclasm as “medieval,” and from this point he proceeds to argue for iconoclasm as a historiographical frame that makes modernity visible as such. In order to situate iconoclasm as constitutive of conceptions of modernity in England and the United States, Under the Hammer examines a wide range of texts: late medieval and sixteenth-century English theories of the image, the poetry of Spenser and Milton, the reformation of church interiors in Puritan England and Puritan New England, the eighteenth-century museum, and the CIA’s use of Abstract Expressionism in its Cold War propaganda. Thus, the reader is persuaded to recognize that the new relations of power produced within the pictorial space of painterly abstraction and within the institutional space of the museum were derived, in part, from a much older fear that iconophilia, or the love of images, might easily turn into idolatry, or the worshipping of false gods.

Under the Hammer originated at the 2009 Clarendon Lectures at Oxford, and as such carries the risks associated with preserving the direct address format of a lecture. Two gaps are evident in the book, one theoretical and the other bibliographical. Simpson characterizes iconoclasm as the supplanting of heterogeneous jurisdictions with an increasingly centralized jurisdiction, a characterization he borrows from Talcott Parson’s translation of Max Weber.² However, it may not be sufficient to rest with subsuming iconoclasm under the banner of “rationalization.” Iconoclasm may have played a structuring role in early modern theoretical debates on scientific rationality and in the very processes that Weber described as die Entzauberung der Welt or the decline of magic from the world (more commonly, if misleadingly, translated as the disenchantment of the world).³ Under the Hammer does not investigate this possibility in any sustained way, which is unfortunate because the book does attempt to show how empiricist science and philosophy of the seventeenth century is heir to the juridical violence enacted by earlier iconoclasts. Still, the book offers many hints on the fate of “magic,” or what Simpson repeatedly calls “spiritual charisma.” For example, at numerous points in the book the reader is informed that the English Puritan and his (American) descendents rejected the idea that God resided in a specific place. The removal of chancel steps and changes to the location...