Edward Colston was obviously an awful man: no one whose actions lead to the deaths of 19,000 people, actions motivated by (at best) a desire for profit, can be called anything except evil. At least, if evil is here understood as being broadly understood, as “deserving of widespread moral condemnation”. The same goes for Cecil Rhodes, as I think the evidence is fairly clear that he was a white supremacist:
“I contend that we [Anglo-Saxons] are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. I contend that every acre added to our territory means the birth of more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence.”
On top of this quotation, handily avoided by his defenders, Rhodes’ colonial legacy is undeniable. I don’t think colonialism is defensible, and it’s not my concern to add to the literature that indicts it. The point here is to try and clarify the approach to the evaluation of the meaning of statues. This clarification, I hope, will aid our understanding of exactly what it is that makes particular statues worthy (or not) of removal.
There are two key objections to the removal of these statues of colonialists. The first is that there is no plausible non-arbitrary standard by which we can evaluate whether a statue should remain or be removed. For example, it might be charged that an individuals’ being racist is not sufficient for their statue to be worthy of removal. I think it is clear, though some of my leftist comrades would disagree, that Marx was an anti-Semite, as evidenced by remarks in On the Jewish Question:
“What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, selfishness. // What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his secular god? Money.” (1843).
Highgate Cemetery is no longer where Marx’s body resides, contrary to popular belief, so it seems that if the standard we adopt is “take down all statues of racists”, we must take down this monument to Marx, whose work continues to inspire anti-racist politics. I use this example to show that, plausibly, there are some statues of people who plainly held racist views that we do not want to remove; perhaps one really thinks Marx’s statue should be removed (and I remain ambivalent on that question here) but I take it that any reader who thinks this will be able to imagine an example which would illustrate my point. That point is simply that the standard “take down all statues of racists” seems unsatisfactory: we need something more.
Note that the force of this claim does not come from the idea that if Rhodes must fall, then these other figures must too, and since these other figures must not fall, then Rhodes must not fall. The force comes, rather, from a legitimate demand for some kind of non-arbitrary standard by which to evaluate the removal of statues.
The first problem with this line of argument, on behalf of those who think we should have kept these statues, is that it does not strictly support their argument. Unless one thinks statues should never be removed, and Prague should still be littered with monuments to Josef Stalin, then a line should be drawn somewhere. The demand for a standard by those on the right as something which they are not liable to produce themselves is really an ideological move that privileges the status quo. It must be incumbent on the defenders of the status quo to justify its continuation, just as much as it is incumbent on those that seek to change it to justify that change. This “objection” is not so much an objection to a particular position, but rather a problem that must be resolved for all those that seek to adopt a position on the matter.
Ultimately, I think I can provide a preliminary answer to the problem, and much of this article will be spent sketching it. But it is worth noting the second objection to the removal of these statues, namely that we would be too readily applying the moral standards of the 21st century to individuals of the 18th century (in Colston’s case), 19th century (in Rhodes’) and the 20th century (in Gandhi’s or Churchill’s).
For this objection not to collapse into a post hoc application of cultural relativism, one has to claim not that these individuals were justified in what they did, but rather that those actions were excused by the fact that they occurred at a time where they could not have known better. For example, suppose my friend calls my name, and I turn around so quickly, excited to see them, that I accidentally hit them in the face while greeting them. In this case, I’m not worthy of blame for hitting my friend, but that is not because I am justified in hitting them (surely not!), but rather because I am excused of it (J.L. Austin 1957).
So, perhaps Rhodes was excused of his action since colonialism and slavery were (relatively) unchallenged norms at the time. Personally, I think this is unlikely. After all, the Haitian revolution, which abolished slavery and revolted against colonialism, occurred over 50 years before Rhodes was even born. I will leave it to the reader to decide whether this is an at all plausible line of argument, since my argument does not rest on whether or not the actions of the individuals depicted by the statues were morally excusable.
Meaning and speech-acts
J.L. Austin, in addition to providing a useful analysis of excuses, delineates three sorts of “speech-acts” (1962). Speech-acts are actions that we perform when we speak, but the analysis, I take it, can be extended to other forms of communication. The locutionary speech-act I perform when I speak might involve the “descriptive content” of my speech (that is, the facts that I seek to describe), the syntax of my speech, et cetera. Broadly, my locutionary act has only to do with the words as I speak them. Tracking this analysis to the meaning of a statue is fairly easy. The locutionary act of putting up a statue includes the descriptive content of that statue (what, if anything, it depicts), and the artistry that goes into making the statue.
So, when we enter into debates over whether or not the figures depicted by statues were really racists or really misogynists, or really homophobes, and whether they were excused in being so, we are entering into discussions about what the descriptive content of that statue really is: we are referring exclusively to a part of the locutionary act of the statue continuing to be on its pedestal.
And this is the ambiguity that I think has stultified many of the arguments in favour of the removal of these statues, since many of those on the left do not just want to ask whether Rhodes was a good man, but seek to make Rhodes fall by virtue of the statue’s placement within the role of white supremacist discourses that exist today. So, I turn to the other two of Austin’s speech-acts.
My “perlocutionary speech-act” is the determined by what effect I bring about by saying something. In the case of a statue, the perlocutionary speech-act is determined by the effect that it has on, for example, the mental well-being of those who walk past it each day, the racist institutions it does or does not support by its maintenance, and so on.
There is clearly some argument to be made here, that, for example, walking past Rhodes’ statue each day is not just troubling but genuinely damaging to the mental health of BME members of the university and residents of Oxford. Similarly, some (however weak) causal link can plausibly be drawn between the statue of Rhodes and the persistence of white supremacist institutions at Oxford. So, plausibly, our non-arbitrary standard will be one that appeals to the goodness or badness of the consequences that the statue brings about: a statue should be removed if (and only if) its net benefit is negative, it brings about more good than bad.
But I worry that such a standard would still not quite hit the mark. What seems wrong with these statues is not only that they serve to uphold white supremacy. Even if they did not, I think there would still be a problem with them, as a consequence of their placement within particular power structures. Injustice, Young (1990) teaches us, is not just about benefits and distributions, it extends to power structures that value, for example, images of “whiteness” over images of “blackness”, value “masculine” over “feminine”, “straight” over “queer”, et cetera. For example, Patricia Hill Collins (1990/2014) describes the “controlling images” of black femininity, such as the stereotype that black mothers are irresponsible, propagated by the US government during the 20th century to explain high crime rates in black segregated communities. These images are unjust not just in virtue of their effects, but in virtue of their role in the power structure of white supremacist patriarchy, which functions through this ascription of normative significance to racialised and gendered characteristics.
At last, we can turn to the third aspect of Austin’s typology, the illocutionary speech-act. This act is that which is performed in saying something. For example, in saying “Guilty!”, the judge sentences the defendant, and makes her into a criminal. In raising her finger, the umpire in a cricket match gives her verdict on the appeal. Similarly, MacKinnon (1987) argues that in depicting women as it does, pornography subordinates women: it marks them out as subordinate to male desire and male power. But what is important here is that the illocutionary force is determined by the power structure in which the locutionary act takes place.
The illocutionary force of a statue, I submit, will be determined by its placement within particular power structures. Statues of Stalin not only depicted the Iron Man, but they subordinated citizens in the Soviet Union. In a parallel fashion, by virtue of their placement within racist power structures, statues to Colston and Rhodes mark out norms of colonialism, enslavement, and white supremacy (that whiteness is good, and non-whiteness is bad), and in so doing subordinate BME people, particularly, in this case, black people.
So, we are presented with a new and powerful way of understanding the meaning of statues, namely, what is the illocutionary force of having that statue on a pedestal? If the force is one of oppression, as I think it clearly is in the case of Rhodes and Colston, then those statues should be taken down. It is now incumbent on those who defend them to claim that this force is not what I understand it to be, but unless one wishes to deny the claim that Rhodes or Colston were really colonialists, or that we continue to live in a white supremacist society, I do not see how the illocutionary force of these statues could ever be otherwise. My proposed non-arbitrary standard, then, is that if the illocutionary act is one of oppression (e.g. in existing, the statue of Rhodes on Oriel College subordinates black passers-by), that statue deserves to be removed.
Notice how far away this is from discussions of the specifics of the actions of these historical figures. Whether their actions or beliefs were excusable is now only a portion of the matter, and what seems to matter more are the effects that it produces and the power structures that it exists in.
Where does this leave us with, say, the statues of Churchill and Gandhi? I don’t really feel qualified on the significance of these two statues within systems of white supremacy (or, indeed, on the first-hand experience of structural racism) to come to a judgment here, but we might, not unreasonably, suppose that the illocutionary force of a statue of Gandhi does not subordinate in the same way as a statue of Colston does, by virtue of Gandhi’s not being a symbol of whiteness. On the other hand, the case for Churchill’s statue is not nearly as strong on this front, since the popular image of Churchill remains one that privileges the role of one, colonialist man in the war effort over the actions of the working-class soldiers and citizens that made the almost all of the contribution. What is more, his image is, I think, inseparable from the colonial legacy that he supported. But this is not my area, and so I will leave it to people who know more than me to analyse how Churchill’s image fits in with discourses of white supremacy in 21st century Britain. All I have attempted to show, here, is that there is a clear, though intuitive case that Rhodes must fall, and that whether or not these figures were great or not is, to an extent, besides the point: we must understand the effects of these statues, and how they continue to subordinate and oppress individuals and groups by virtue of their position within particular power structures.
Now, there is an objection from lack of epistemic authority here: one might think that by proposing some non-arbitrary standard, I would be begging the question that it is my (or anyone’s) place to judge what these statues mean. Though this objection appears to have force, I think it either proves too much or too little. If the claim is the globally-sceptic one that we can never know for certain whether we are acting rightly, then it is equally uncertain whether we should maintain the statues as it is that we should remove them – the argument would be self-defeating. If the claim is the weaker one, that I need to provide good reason to set a non-arbitrary standard for the removal of statues, then I am in agreement, and I would not have written a long essay attempting to argue just that. Moreover, my standard is, while non-arbitrary, not a hard line in the sand. The application of my proposed standard requires careful engagement with the role of statues in oppressive power structures, and evaluating their effects, in order to ascertain whether or not they should be removed or maintained. The purpose of the latter part of this essay is to explain how statues can play a role in upholding oppressive power structures, and therefore to attempt to give good reason to think that my standard is correct, thereby responding to the weaker form of this argument from lack of epistemic authority.
Culture and History: Revolutionising the Past
All we have established so far is that we can provide a non-arbitrary standard for the removal of statues, but it has yet to be seen how statues really function in existing power structures, and how these objects can be utilised for emancipatory ends. In more general terms, we must establish in more precise terms why certain statues are worthy of removal.
It is often remarked that removal of these statues amounts to an “erasing of history”. What does this mean? Surely, it turns on what one means by “history”. So, understanding what “history” means here, and the role of statues in that history, is key to understanding the force of this charge – in turn, answering this question will provide us with an understanding of the place of these statues in structural injustice.
In the first chapter of Capital Volume 1, Marx analyses the “fetishism of commodities”, that is, the view that the exchange-value of commodities is a natural feature of that thing, when really it is a function of capitalist social relations. The value of a piece of gold is, plainly, not determined by anything “natural” in that object, but rather the fact that the mechanisms of the market give it an exchange-value. But, in fetishism, the value is taken as outside of human social relations, it is reified.
György Lukács similarly argues that “history” is taken as a fetishized object. For this Hungarian Marxist, “the petrified life of nature is a mere product of historical development” (Adorno 1932/2006, 262). “Nature” here, is understood as something like the immutable facts of our existence, of which “history” is a part. As with all objects of our inquiry, our understanding of history is not an immediate recognition of facts that are “out there” to be discovered; rather, the understanding of history is always mediated by the current consciousness. On Lukács’ understanding, there is a meaningful world of material reality, of class struggle, and an alienated world that is constructed by social relations. This includes the world of fetishized commodities, and on our understanding would extend to history: this object we call “history” is not the immutable, asocial object we take it to be, it is, rather, a product of social relations.
But to say that it is only this relation of the subject (us, now) to the object (history, back then) is all that is mediated would posit the meaningful world of material reality as a transcendent object of experience, and social mediation would mean nothing more than the epistemic claim that our understanding is mediated by social circumstance; mediation would mean nothing more than a cloak over a transcendent object that prevents our immediate experience of this historical object. This understanding of the fetishism, the reification of history is a faulty tendency of more traditional Marxist attempts to criticise history. In understanding a reified history as somehow alienated from a real history, we thereby end up reifying material reality, and committing the same mistake as those who take history as an immediate and immutable object of our understanding. What is even worse, material reality, on this view, is always beyond us, always indescribable since it is defined as that which is outside social relations. The intellectuals of the right can claim that history just is how we perceive us, while the left is forced to claim that history is always out of reach – hardly a persuasive or rhetorically powerful position.
Theodor Adorno’s concept of “natural-history”, as I understand it, is a way of attempting to perform something like Lukács’ criticism of the idea of history as an immutable object, while not simultaneously reifying a “material reality”. Lukács’ philosophy is one of transcendent critique, which “assumes an as it were Archimedean position above culture and the blindness of society, from which consciousness can bring the totality, no matter how massive, into flux” (Adorno 1951/1997, 30). In contrast, Adorno takes the reified objects of culture, of history, not as illusory mediations of material reality, but of a contradictory material reality in which class struggle is borne out. The criticism of these objects is therefore immanent critique of the reified forms of social phenomena. Natural-history, then, is the history of nature as a set of immanent social phenomena. In order to understand the role of history under capitalism, our job must to be “to understand the way in which its laws stand over us with natural necessity, have developed into something that is for all intents and purposes ‘natural” (Whyman 2016, 467). This reification is therefore a subjectification, they are sets of social phenomena that make us into the subjects that white supremacist capitalism requires to sustain itself.
This, I submit, is how the illocutionary force of statues should be understood. They function to reify a particular view of history, in which great men sailed the seas, “discovering” the world and bringing civilisation to the uncivilised. Rather than commemorating the soldiers who built India’s railways, or the workers who mined the diamonds that made Rhodes rich, this bourgeois, white-supremacist view of history is posited as the natural object of real history. The point, therefore, must be to emancipate counter-histories, the histories of workers, of the colonised, that run contrary to the narratives of the colonial histories that are constantly remade in popular consciousness by the existence of these statues.
These statues do not, of course, only derive their illocutionary force from the positing of a particular history as true, but also as establishing those colonial norms of conquering the uncivilised as natural norms, as things to be desired. They function to reify a particular view of history, but also posit the significant actors (the colonialists, in this case) in that history as ideal-subjects to whom we should strive to be alike. This is how, I take it, these statues continue to encourage white-supremacy, by helping to construct the history I have outlined, and then to posit certain objects that constitute that history as desirable.
Malcolm X, in a 1963 interview with British Television, claims that, as a consequence of white supremacy in education, media, and culture in America, the response of those who seek black emancipation must be to “rewrite history, retell history”. History is not a monolithic entity of enquiry, but rather must be viewed as the objects that we construct, for whatever ends; constructing new historical objects is key to any emancipatory movement, since it is only by challenging this reified history that we can effectively describe the past struggles of the oppressed against their oppressors. We must challenge the mechanisms by which “our sense of reality is produced” (Fisher 2015, 587), and “produce [our] own machineries of desire” (ibid.). Statues rise and fall, then, according to which histories we wish to tell, and in order to tell new histories some statues must fall, and Rhodes must be one of them. For to destabilise white-supremacy today we must radically alter the discourse and practices which constitute that system, and we can do this by constructing histories of the oppressed, which, in their very telling, undermine the reality and naturalised desire that these statues constantly reproduce.
There is something about the enduring qualities of statues, as figures quite literally set in stone, that gives them great power as centres of naturalised desire and reified reality-production: “the statue has always been there and will always be there”. The rabid response of conservatives in response to this is testament to that fact. But this does not mean that the left should shy away from the issue, or deem it a distraction from matters of greater importance, since they play a significant role in the (re)production of white-supremacist capitalism today. Statues do not just describe reality, but through their illocutionary force, constantly remake that history. Rhodes must fall, and this colonised history with him.
Bilbiography
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—. 1951/1997. “Cultural Criticsm and Society.” In Prisms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Malcolm-X. 1963/2016. “Malcolm X first interview for British TV” https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=28&v=i2voz15am5g&feature=emb_logo.
Marx, Karl. 1843. “On the Jewish Question.” In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—. 1977. Selected writings. edited by David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.