Coda

In the weeks leading up to his mental collapse in 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche composed Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer. “Posing questions with a hammer and, perhaps, hearing in reply that famous hollow sound,” Nietzsche writes, “what a pleasure for me, an old psychologist and pied piper; in my presence, the very things that want to keep quiet are made to speak out.”1 Nietzsche neither venerates idols nor smashes them; instead, he taps them “as with a tuning fork.”

The idols that concern Nietzsche are those of Western philosophy: “the oldest, most convinced, puffed-up, and fat-headed idols you will ever find.” But the figure of the idol-tapper suggests an attitude that can be extended to all of the images that orient us. As Ibrahim knew, all images are incomplete. But he was too impatient to tap Nimrud’s idols. Hammer in hand, he never gave them a chance to speak. Had Ibrahim grasped that images are coy, not dumb, he might have used his hammer to sound them out instead of destroying them. Had he tapped them lightly as with a tuning fork, they might have divulged something to Ibrahim and his neighbors about the regime they were living under and its possible alternatives.

We will neither live in a regime without images nor find images that aren’t the work of human hands. The best we can do is embrace the ongoing task of deciding which imperfect images to live with. Unlike Ibrahim’s neighbors, we don’t have to serve unthinkingly the images we’ve inherited; we can take a step back to ask whether those images suit our needs. We can become our own prophets not by incessantly posting photos to the Web but by taking collective responsibility for the images with which we surround ourselves.

In order to evaluate our images, we must discover what they conceal. We must sound out what they (and we) would prefer to keep silent. How do we determine where to tap? How do we break through the “second nature” that images induce and open up a space for thinking? One way is to tap images against one another—a technique I’ve used throughout this book.

Both the Islamic State’s Mosul Museum video, from 2015, and the Illustrated London News engraving of the British Museum’s Nineveh Room, from 1853 (figure 9), depict ways of comporting oneself in a museum. As models of behavior embedded within broader social forms, each conceals as well as reveals. The English engraving evokes respectability and sophistication. Seen on its own, it might not call up the imperialism that often attends museumgoing as a cosmopolitan ideal. Tap it against the ISIS video, however, and hidden aspects of the engraving start to come into view. That doesn’t make the two images equally beneficial for communal life. Judgment may rightly incline us to choose one over the other. But judgment (as opposed to knee-jerk chauvinism) requires that we discern and assess the unsavory elements of our chosen images and recognize how other images promote goods that ours cannot. Tapping images can make us keener critics of ourselves as well as of others.

If all images are incomplete, not all are incomplete in the same way. Some, like the Mosul Museum video and the Illustrated London News engraving, hide their incompleteness by presenting matters as settled. Other images are overtly incomplete and pose questions more than they provide answers.

German photographer Thomas Struth (b. 1954) has been making images of visitors at some of the world’s finest museums since 1989. By focusing on museumgoers, he challenges viewers of his photographs to reflect on the activity of looking at art. Struth’s images draw our attention to the reverence, contemplation, and sometimes boredom people experience when visiting museums. “The photos should lead viewers away from regarding the works as mere fetish-objects and initiate their own understanding,” Struth said in an interview. “Therein lies the moment of pause or questioning. Because the viewers are reflected in their activity, they have to wonder what they themselves are doing at the moment.”2

Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (figure 35), for instance, depicts small groups and lone museumgoers in a brightly lit room filled with fragments of ancient Greek sculpture. While the composition recalls the engraving in the Illustrated London News, it doesn’t advertise the importance of museumgoing so much as ask us to consider why we take museumgoing so seriously. Encountered on a museum wall, Struth’s large print (which measures five by seven and a half feet) confronts us with an image of people doing what we ourselves are doing—but the activity appears strange. We see that there are museumgoers in the picture, but we’re not quite sure why they are there. (In the Pergamon Museum photographs, Struth intensifies this estrangement by deliberately posing the museumgoers.) Struth’s photograph unsettles what we have taken for granted by introducing ambiguity. His image makes us wonder about ourselves.

“This wondering of yours is very much the mark of a philosopher,” Socrates reportedly told the mathematician Theaetetus. “Philosophy starts nowhere else but with wondering.”3 Like Socrates, who provoked people in the agora, images can make us wonder about matters we ordinarily take for granted. Might one build a regime entirely of such wonder-inducing images? The idea may sound appealing, but the never-ending uncertainty such a regime would elicit would make life unbearable. Images that take a stand are necessary. Besides, unsettling images tend over time to become domesticated. It’s easy to say that one should always be critical. The practice of self-criticism is more difficult.

As Socrates knew, a stimulus that awakens wonder can also trigger rage. Many in the agora were perfectly content with their unexamined opinions and the civic gods that grounded them. They weren’t interested in tapping their city’s images. Socrates’s incessant questions were an unwelcome irritation. “Indeed, some say that Socrates was a troll,” writes Rachel Barney in her mock-Aristotelean treatise On Trolling.4 No wonder his fellow citizens put him to death.

When I first saw the Mosul Museum video, I reacted with rage, just as ISIS wanted. Their tyrannical theatrics were intended not to make me reevaluate my opinions but to entrench me in my prejudices. I was being provoked to smash back—the more outraged, the less free to exercise judgment. On rewatching the video, I recalled the Assyrian relief from Khorsabad. The uncanny resemblance called out for comparison. Curiosity pulled me out from my apolitical stupor and inarticulate rage. Suddenly, the hollowness of my own political images began to tap against the ISIS video, and to reverberate. I began to wonder, and that wonder led to this book.

Political life vitally depends on shared images that allow us to envision how we want to live together. We will live with images for as long as we remain political beings. To be free citizens, we need to think about how our political images arose, why they were chosen, and what they leave out. In that way, we become aware of our images’ incompleteness without denying our need for them or pretending we didn’t make them. We don’t have to smash them or submit to them. We can tap them instead.