Transformation of agency into its reified or fetishised form as structure and the creation of new value forms are partly represented by how defacement, which I described in relation to Iron Man 3, finds its radical potential in the form of iconoclasm. In IM3, defacement was utilised as a means of catharsis, where the value form and symbol of the status quo (Iron Man) was defaced, but only in order to reveal (or more accurately impute or create the effect of) the existence of the indomitable, natural and true essence of what it represented beneath (the individual genius of Tony Stark, the American way of life, and so on—the agency and creative effortthat is concretised in the form of Iron Man). Iconoclasm, on the other hand, can be understood as an occasion where the same energies are released through defacement, but not to impute what was defaced as essence, but rather to destroy the suggestion of that essence, and symbolise a different, alternative agency, desire and value, antithetical to that status quo. It marks the transformative power of communal agency, and a material frontline in the struggle between different patterns of action and value systems.
Iconoclasm has—perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not—been relatively understudied by art historians and theorists, but there has been a wave of fresh interest in it since the turn of the millennium (again, perhaps unsurprising, and in tandem with the revival of political and social unrest across the globe). In a 2013 collection that marks this new interest, Striking Images, Iconoclasms Past and Present, Stacy Boldrick defines iconoclasm as the act of transforming an object “‘through a deliberate act of breakage’ into something with new symbolic meaning” (5), while Leslie Brubaker elaborates that
To destroy an image is an act of human power directed at an object of potential or actual power […] the destructive act is in a very real sense a power play directed against the past and its baggage […] a creative force directed against the past, in order to create a new future. (13)
The more the symbol defaced is taken to represent the social order being attacked, connected to how prestigious or public or recognisable the symbol, the more powerful the act of iconoclasm. Miéville’s fiction has plenty of examples as you might expect (even his invention of the khepri might be understood as iconoclasm directed against the privileged symbol of the ‘human’ body), but I will focus here on two that I think are especially interesting, both from that tale of revolution, Iron Council.
My first example comes close to the very end of the novel. Judah is dead, the Iron Council frozen in time, and Cutter returns to a New Crobuzon scarred by the failed uprising. He goes often to “the slow-sculpture garden in Ludmead” (609):
The gardens were ruined. The sculpted lawns and thickets were interrupted by huge sedimentary stones, each of them veined with layers and cracks, each carefully prepared:
shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last taking their long-planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths. He had always hated the sedateness of these gardens, but now that they were ruined he found them a comfort. Some Collectivist or sympathiser punks had climbed the wall weeks ago, before Dog Fenn had fallen, and taken chisels to several of the larger stones. With cheerful imprecision and disrespect they had made crude and quick and vulgar figures, lively and ugly, ground filthy and dissident slogans into their skins. They had ruined the meticulous boring and acid-work of the artists, preempting the erosion- sculptures with pornographic clowns. Cutter sat and leaned against a new stone figure stroking an oversized cock, carved out of what might have been intended as a swan or a boat or a flower or anything at all. (609)
This moment captures the subtleties and complications that inhere when politics and aesthetics and culture intertwine. Aesthetically, it seems easy to decry this as vandalism. The values of time, skill, patience, subtlety, labour and so on, all suggest that something of great worth has clearly been destroyed for the sake of something of little or no worth. Yet before, Cutter was uncomfortable there, where now he feels at home. That word, ‘home’, is useful here as always. Whereas before Cutter felt that the gardens did not reflect him, oppressed him in its representation of an alien and oppressive value system that did not value him, now he feels reassured, that the gardens are the work of an agency that resonates with his, a desire that desires alongside his. Notice the typical divisions between status-quo, pure/radicals, impure: the eternity of the slow statues, the conceptual longevity and reality they grant the society from which they emerge, the mimicking of the emergence of an ‘essence’ already there from within the rock. On
the other side there is the profanity of the vandals, the irreverence, the quick and easy creativity that disregards tradition, and which suggests a different value-system, one that, like joking relations, pierces the self-importance and hierarchy of values of the regime. Here there is defacement, but an essence is not imputed, rather what is revealed is that the symbol creates the effect of essence, and that a different desire can be imputed through the creation of a different, appropriate symbol. This image figures well how political struggles manifest in the aesthetic realm, and argues the rich meaning of an act that is usually disdained as meaningless and mindless. Further, this scene at the very end of the novel is somewhat elegiac, figuring the mark left by a failed revolution. Like a rock star that dies young, the revolution will forever remain as a memory of rebellious energy, never having to face the contradictions to that origin that come with age, and occluding by their absence a question: would a successful revolution put down roots? Is it possible (or desirable, or, more pertinently, sincere) to maintain an aesthetics and politics of spontaneity and rebellion in power? Are these aesthetics irretrievably tied to resistance?