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

The introduction and four brief chapters of this book (delivered as Oxford University’s Clarendon Lectures of 2009) form a companion piece to Simpson’s Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (2007), and both in turn extend some of his arguments regarding the relation between periodization and political force in Reform and Cultural Revolution (2002). The connection to Burning to Read is made explicit: England’s century of “legislated iconoclasm” (1538–1643) was “partner” to the Reformation’s biblical literalism as a “weapon of a radical yet non-progressive modernity” (5). Like that book, too, Under the Hammer is unabashed polemic, aiming to prove that violent fundamentalist iconoclasm is not regressive or “medieval,” but is rather at the core of western modernity, especially the Anglo-American tradition. In order to press this claim, Simpson moves well beyond his usual focus on late medieval and early modern events, extending his analysis to twentieth-century abstract painting, seventeenth-century English poetry, and especially the Enlightenment, which, he suggests, is “correlative” to the Reformation: “both activate iconoclasm” (10).

Opening with the Taliban’s destruction of two monumental Buddha statues (dating from the second century ce) in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 2001, Simpson contends that this act, far from being “a regression into medieval barbarism” (3), actually accords precisely with the program of early modern iconoclasm, with parallel movements by revolutionary clerical elites “prepared to wield the hammer, in the name of liberty” (4). Indeed, Simpson finds that it is consistently in the name of liberty—of people and nations—that image-breaking occurs, and it is this freedom from enthrallment that links to the Enlightenment’s repudiation of idols and ideologies, a “philosophical iconoclasm” that turns the past into a “museum of error” (11). Iconoclasm is, then, quintessentially modern, an argument that Simpson grounds theoretically upon the politics of representation. Any reconfiguration of jurisdiction, such as the centralization of power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, requires a shift in who is allowed to “re-present” us, which in turn determines “how we allow the past to be made present again” (6). Simpson does not at all engage the long theoretical history of the politics of representation, which to a degree limits the potential of his aspiration that this be “a small book capable of activating a large theme” (17). Nonetheless, his insistence that we pay attention to the connections between iconoclasm and the politics of representation from the Reformation to the present day invigorates our understanding of the processes of periodization, one of his central concerns. Simpson contends that “iconoclasts wish to separate one historical period from another absolutely” by breaking with the previous semiotic system and instituting their own (12–13); he finds, however, that iconoclasm is by nature an unfinishable, recursive process. Periodization, therefore, can never fully succeed.

Chapter 1 focuses on twentieth-century American abstract art, which Simpson reads as antirhetorical, vertical, and exclusive, despite its claim to ahistorical universalism. He first traces abstract art to the Enlightenment, which “must produce an iconoclastic art, purified of all but the rational order.” Conversely, it redefines “all cultural and historical particularities as enemies of the rational order and liberty” (26). This interpretation runs contrary to the reception of abstract art as a response to the Holocaust, and Simpson resolves these competing interpretations by suggesting a much deeper source for abstract art (and thus for important aspects of the Enlightenment and modernity): Puritan iconoclasm. Not democratic, but rather the “sign of equality before the absolute,” flat abstract art is “painting of non-representation, in all three senses: no representing the past, no intercession, no images” (34). So, too, for post-Reformation Protestant architecture, Simpson claims, particularly the flat, symmetrical, colorless interiors of New England churches. Thus Simpson suggests that not only do images move from church to museum with the “age of Art” and the Enlightenment, but the modern museum (especially MoMA), with “vast white walls and transparent...