The first signifier was a corpse

On the destruction of symbols

Every now and then you’ll read or hear of the destruction of signs. Some mob will burn a flag, or a monument will be torn down; or some celebrity will announce that an old symbol should be done away with; or a well-worn definition of a word will simply, sometimes inexplicably and sometimes legally, be altered. In recent years, the woke in particular have taken it upon themselves to police language in so many Orwellian ways. And, commonly today, people themselves are treated as signs to be cancelled.

One way of understanding this is to speculate that the first signifier was really a corpse.

At least, this is what René Girard speculates in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, noting that “the signifier is the victim.” “The signified,” Girard continues, “constitutes all actual and potential meaning the community confers on the victim, and through its intermediacy, onto all things.” Note: the signifier’s meaning—that is, what is signified—is not the ‘actual’ meaning of the sign but rather what the sign means for the mob. In other words, the symbol obliterated or defaced doesn’t mean what you think it means; it means only what the mob thinks it means. It’s meaning is not explored or understood because the mob has no mind; it cannot understand anything.

Onlookers are often rightly perplexed by cancel culture or symbol-destruction because they see what is being canceled as having nuance and complexity. But the mob sees the signifier without the aid of reason. The thing represents a feeling more than a rationale. As far as the mob is concerned, then, the label is all that matters. It functions like a box, and there is, in a manner of speaking, nothing inside the box but what they want to be there. As Barthes said, the author is dead, so the reader has been born. In other words, what the author actually says is not the point—the reader gets to call dibs on all interpretations. Intention has been eradicated from the discussion, too, and so there is no discussion.

For the mob, the symbol typically represents the disavowed evil of the mob itself. In woke circles caught in the thrall of an anti-racist fashion they hardly understand, for example, there is no cure for real racism since it is built into the very structure of reality as they perceive it.

This makes no one responsible and everyone guilty. 

In other words, the prime sin cannot be forgiven. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, is it still racist? Of course it is—at least, according to the folk version adopted by the doctrinaire horde. So it is no surprise that the anti-racist mass, including its bureaucratic arm, wants to rid the world of monuments to politicians and authors from history who are deemed racist. The past is read only through the hermeneutic of the present, and more specifically through the guilt and rage of the alphabet police.

At this point, the mob has guilt that cannot be cured and rage that has no clear directive, so a target is picked. Symbols are particularly easy targets because they don’t fight back, but in history violence seldom stops at symbols.

So the mob chooses its victim, and projects all of its unforgivable sins onto it, and—if it is within its grasp and power—it tears it down. For those watching from the outside, those who can see that the symbol is not the source of evil and who know that merely destroying it means inheriting its sins tenfold, this is completely absurd. But the psychological function has been served for the rabble, although only for a short while. When one symbol has been obliterated, the next one must be found—or so the logic of sign-destruction goes.

The destruction of the signifier can be said to release the meaning of the signifier, which is the mob itself. If the signifier is the box, then the mob itself can be said to be what’s inside the box. This is supported in a very ancient conception of meaning: the sacrifice or obliteration of the victim brings blessings from the gods. Where there was violence before, peace is achieved. Since the violence was projected to begin with, it’s no surprise that the state of peace or self-assurance is typically assumed to come from elsewhere too.

The all-against-one structure of destroying the sign thus imitates the structure of mob violence. It is a stark reminder of the founding murder of archaic religions—of which identity politics is a parody. The victim is killed and so functions as a release-valve for the rage of the crowd. In the aftermath of the sacrifice, with the victim’s corpse lying still where it has been torn to pieces, the mob experiences the euphoria that comes after a job well done.

The symbol dies so that the crowd can be resurrected.

But euphoria doesn’t last. If the structure of the ideology beneath everything says that there is no real redemption, and that guilt remains, then no sacrifice can ever be good enough. So signs will continue to be destroyed and people will continue to be cancelled.

In archaic religions, and in modern parodies of religion too, this serves an important role. To destroy the sign is to leave no trace of the violence that founded the mob’s self-satisfied sense of coherence. To destroy the sign is to create a myth that says: “See, we exist peacefully all on our own, without the need for any violence and without the need of an enemy.”

The signifier has taken the blame so that the signified can be further freed from all responsibility. 

When does this end? Well, as long as the logic that dominates the current culture-war fashions remains sacrificial and thus devoid of forgiveness, it doesn’t end. Everyone will continue to point fingers and blame others, and the rivalry between opposing sides or political factions will grow and grow and grow, and mutual scapegoating will continue. And the violence exacted against symbols will transform, as it often has, into literal violence, and then that will escalate.

Without both responsibility and forgiveness, there can only be doom.