Becoming Iconoclastic - A Review of Feral Iconoclasm
‘Oh the storm who rages day and night, destroying indiscriminately, indifferent to the desires of those who idolise the machinery of civilisation.’
The world is a weird place right now. Strange, scary even. People you thought you knew, people you thought of as friends, even family have revealed themselves to be the enemy. Since the George Floyd murder, people have awakened. The fires that have burned lowly as embers are now fully inflamed, their rage is palpable and rightly so. We should all be enraged. And it would seem we all are, but be careful for not all are on our side. I have lost friends and severed connections these last few weeks. People you thought you knew, people you once considered friends, family even have shown their true colours and that colour is hate. Mostly it’s insidious, the microaggressions and throw away comments but these in themselves hint at deeper feelings, hidden rivers of hatred of the other. So quick are they to use divisive language. Culture suddenly becomes theirs and not ours. In the UK, this conversation centres on the removal of statues of racists and colonialists who have built their vast fortunes on the rape and bondage of other nations. And the people who claim that they are defending our heritage, that these statues tell the story of our great and proud history, for the most part wouldn’t know who the majority of those statues show or represent. So much for their love of history. I mean, there were fucking football hooligans throwing nazi salutes in front of the Cenotaph they claimed to be protecting from BLM protesters. You couldn’t make that shit up.
This was going to be a review of the Feral books by Julian Langer, Feral Consciousness and Feral Iconoclasm but as I began rereading these books from my southern philosopher friend, the more the latter spoke to me, for surely if there was a book for this time it is Feral Iconoclasm. I’m sure most of you regular readers are already feral, that you have feral minds who long for the wild. Indeed, I want to retreat to the wilds where ‘the blackcap and blackbird, woodlark, skylark, and thrush, robin and wren, vibrate through the trees, riding the wave of the wind, in a symphony that knows no bounds’. And if not the realm of the mythic wild woods then perhaps the blasted heath, that space between the wild and the civilised, away from the grime and dust of civilisation, the hate and the divide, that no man's land that is still untamed. Away from the noise. To become feral. To realise that which is mind into matter. It is an alluring dream but that is really all it is. As Feral Iconoclasm tells us, the squeeze on these places doesn’t stop. Civilisation encroaches, bringing with it the toil, trouble and woe it is built upon for civilisation cannot be separated from its history. It is what makes it what it is.
‘Where there once was living communities of wild beings, now only exists the death that is domestication. We know this space well. Most, if not all of us, live here.’
This is the story that dominates the news, the relationship between history, civilisation and the present. Just look at the news, or better yet listen to the stories of those on the ground, better still, see it for yourself. The divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ grows and all the while they don’t realise there is no us and them, there are only the rich and the poor and nothing else in between. Poor white people pissed off at what has been sold to them as the destruction of their history, the toppling of statues of rich white men without realising we are all oppressed, held captive by the constraints of civilisation, one that’s built on Capitalism, built on the backs of us all. There is no us and them. We all bleed red and it is our blood that civilisation and thus Capitalism has grown strong on and still we bleed.
Rereading Feral Iconoclasm makes me think about the intersection we find ourselves at. The destruction of those wild spaces we have left and how they are ever diminishing; the protests and riots in the streets; environmental problems that seem lost amid the fury and panic of the pandemic. Surely now is indeed the time for us to embody the principles found within Feral Iconoclasm. To smash that which seeks to tame us all, that would make us meek and submissive. In this world where ‘nature exists to be brought into domestication and rendered civilised - or it cannot be allowed to exist’ we too are domesticated and if we refuse, if we cling to our wild natures then we too cannot be allowed to exist. We are rediscovering that we have always been wild, we are remembering the power we have. We are reforming and building bonds with those like us, who no longer wish to be tame, who no longer wish to accept the injustices of this world that favours money over all else. We are ‘agents against history’. We are ‘unbinding a supposedly bound totality’. We are becoming iconoclastic.
The book itself is a delight to read, and is no heavy tome. You do not need to be a philosopher to grasp the ideas contained within. This accessibility is part of the message, and is iconoclastic in itself, breaking with the constraints of the written word and the concept of the book. Dip in, read it back to front or a random chapter a day as Langer encourages. Let it spur you into action for it is not a book of theory and though the words in themselves are not actions, we can embody the message they carry and seek to become iconoclastic ourselves.
Those uncivilised beings dance beautiful dances, as they become rivers with banks overflowing from the waters of the storm, rushing towards the sea.’
EMMA KATHRYN
My name is Emma Kathryn, my path is a mixture of traditional European witchcraft, vodou and obeah, a mixture representing my heritage. I live in the sticks with my family where I read tarot, practice witchcraft and drink copious amounts of coffee.
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