May 2009
30 posts
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“Hit happens. A rip, a quick cut by a razor. From the outside, something breaks...”
– Gene Ray, Terror and the Sublime in Critical Theory (2005)
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CONTENTS
Introduction (1.0, 1.1)
Interrogating the limitless threat (2.0, 2.1, 2.2)
A deferral of violence
(3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3)
Necropolitics and the fetishistic elevation of life
(4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3)
‘An event of surpassing disproportion’
(5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4)
Fall from grace (6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4)
‘Stuffing the djinn back in the bottle’ (7.0, 7.1)
Infinite...
INTRODUCTION
How can one hope to contain the uncontainable? In the context of the ‘global war on terror’, the detention centre and camps of Guantánamo Bay functioned as a vessel in which the coalition of the willing were able to detain the suspected terrorist.
However, while the rhetoric and practices of the Bush administration cast the supposed ‘war on terror’ as a force of...
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The structure of my argument divides into four main sections.
The first section attempts to situate the supposedly ‘limitless’ threat of global terrorism in a broader conceptual and historical context.
Next, I turn to the events of September 11; a potent and traumatising demonstration of the limitlessness of the terrorist threat.
From here, I turn my attentions to the geopolitical...
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INTERROGATING THE LIMITLESS THREAT
Posing as an (entirely fictitious) think-thank tasked with providing advice to Al-Qaeda’s strategic planning cell, Paul Rogers identifies the three primary goals of Al-Qaeda;
‘removal of foreign forces from the Islamic World’
‘termination of the House of Saud as … Keeper of the Two Holy Places’
‘establishment of an independent Palestine’ (link)
...
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Bin Laden's Fatwa (1996) →
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In mathematical terms, it would be impossible for any threat to be infinite in size. In this example, limitlessness should not be taken as a question of absolute scale. Instead, the threat’s limitlessness is implied by its unquantifiable character.
From an essentialist standpoint, the terrorist subject can only be defined by virtue of their participation in the act of terror. With the...
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With President Bush describing the perpetrators of September 11 as ‘people who know no borders’ (link), it should come as no surprise that the terrorist threat was portrayed as global in reach; geopolitically limitless.
This capacity to transgress borders allowed the terrorist subject to ‘activate a sense of the unknown and project an uncontrollable and overwhelming power which...
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A deferral of violence
Here, the ordering structure threatened by the possibility of transgression is that of the modern state system. At the level of the spectacle, the act of terror presents a highly visible threat to the precepts of international society, challenging the norms of state sovereignty, territorial inviolability, and bracketed warfare.
On the theoretical level, these norms and principles are read as...
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For Ashley, Westphalian sovereignty represented the formalisation and normalisation of a specific model of power, predicated on a ‘heroic practice’, in which the homogeneous and ordered ‘inside’ is constituted through its opposition to a exterior realm painted as dangerous and anarchic.
The narrative of the ‘heroic practice’, Ashley argues, allowed the former...
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In practice, the ‘territorial/juridicial logic of equality’ rubbed up against ‘the geopolitical/hegemonic logic of inequality.’ (link, p. 147) While Westphalia’s ideational rubric spoke of ‘a state-centric, sovereignty-oriented, territorially bounded global order’ (ibid), the reality was a ‘world order shaped and managed by dominant or hegemonic...
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To understand the subsequent redirection of political energies, we must trace the narrative back to the year 1492, and the moment in which ‘Spain bumps into, finds without looking, Amerindia’ (link).
In an attempt to exert control over the implications of this paradigm-shattering event with the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), religious authorities divided the rights to the newly...
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Necropolitics and the fetishistic elevation of...
As the colonial body was put to work for the global nomos, the European subject experienced Westphalia as a suspension of the threat of annihilation, affirming the primacy of the body. Under the Westphalian system, it was the maintenance of life which acted as ordering principle, with the modern state exercising power over ‘the population in a preventative fashion … optimising life...
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“necessity of nature [which] maketh men to will and desire … that which is...”
– Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore Politico, in English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Volume IV (1640)
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But where this logic had imbued the medieval monarch, or sovereign, with ‘the right to decide life and death’ (link, p. 135), for the biopolitical state, ‘death could [only] be directly or indirectly inflicted … to the extent that it promoted the life and interests of the social body’ (link, pp. 605-6).
Here, Hobbes’ notion of the state-as-Leviathan stood as a...
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In Westphalia, then, the pre-modern politics of death were made abject; cast from the ordered, European interior. Now – over 350 years later - the emergence of global terrorism and suicide bombing appear to represent a disturbing return of medieval notion of death-as-politics.
In its return, however, this politics of death is transformed, upended. Rather than representing the medieval...
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“the greatest and cruellest act of hostility in the world: when a man, who by...”
– John Sym, Life’s Preservative against Self-Killing (1637)
In their perpetration of acts described variously as monstrous or beyond the assumed limits of possibility, the suicide bomber’s belief in their cause outstrips ‘the natural human instinct for survival, or any desire to be remembered … It’s almost as though they could not scale down the enormity of their rage to anything smaller than their deeds.’ (link)
In a biopolitical...
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'An event of surpassing disproportion'
Here, the 9/11 Commission Report’s peculiar description of Al-Qaeda’s attacks as ‘an event of surpassing disproportion’ (link, p. 339) begins to make sense.
As a point of departure, the notion of the attacks as a subversion of proportionality indicates that perhaps some of the power of the terrorist act rests in its status as abject to the biopolitical governmentality of...
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Postliterature: 9/11 and the Graphic Novel →
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In an era of increasing global interdependence, in which ‘boundaries between direct witness and spectator are increasingly blurred’ (link, p. 715), an analysis of the limitless threat cannot be limited to questions of structure and topology, but must be prepared to engage with the aesthetics of the terrorist act. Hannah’s ‘expanding-point topology’ is ‘meant to...
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In stark contrast to the positive emotional reaction upon the subject’s apprehension of that which is described as beautiful, a manifestation of the ‘sublime provokes a negative pleasure, combining … fascination with a certain repulsion.’ (link, p. 37) Early writings approached the sublime as a result of the mind’s encounter ‘with momentous forces …...
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In our inability to reconcile representation and an incomprehensible reality, the apprehension of ‘the sublime shatters [our] misplaced belief in authentic representation.’ (link, p. 723) We are besieged in our minds; confronted with ‘the limits of our own capacity for understanding.’ (ibid, p. 720) Here, argues Žižek, the subject is reacting to representative failure of...
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Nevertheless, the conclusion must be that – on their own merit – theories of the sublime are an insufficient explanation for the grossly disproportionate importance placed on the containment of the limitless threat.
While said threat may have highlighted the subject’s inability to apprehend that which is without measure, the attacks of September 11 revealed Al-Qaeda as a ‘false...
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FALL FROM GRACE
The limitless monstrosity of the ‘false sublime’ was realised in the ‘morbid excess’ of 9/11. Morrione argues that, in an act of counter-intuitive productivity, the ‘destruction of the Twin Towers … left [a] semiotic black hole in the center of Manhattan’ (link, p. 158) - a phenomenon which, even in its seeming absence, is capable of exerting a gravitation...
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“nothing beyond the terrible images of the rising mushroom cloud and the...”
– Antoine Bousquet, ‘Time Zero: Hiroshima, September 11 and Apocalyptic Revelations in Historical Consciousness’. in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34(3), p. 745.
While the governing logic of the events remained at once ‘glaringly obvious and deeply ambiguous’ (link, p. 118), there was a willingness on the part of commentators and the mass media to afford 9/11 the status of a ‘significant event’.
Characterised variously as ‘an interruption of the deep rhythms of cultural time’ (link); ‘an unforeseen eruption across...
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April 2009
30 posts
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For Bousquiet, September 11 was a moment in which everything changed; an ‘omnipresent point of reference … marking [both the] culmination of History leading to it [and] the start of a period in which past assumptions [could] not hold’ (link, p. 757). But this may be an inadequately nuanced interpretation of events.
Basu, for example, argues that the nature of the sublime moment...
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“[t]ime stopped and space was suddenly infinite. Any certainty about the coming...”
– Neil Smith, The Endgame of Globalization (2005)
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A hole punched in the universe - implicitly Important, yet deprived of representation - the enduring aesthetic of terrorist-act-as-spectacle bounced from television set to television set.
As media image, decontextualised and diesmbedded, the implied “thingness” of the attacks was unshackled from geographical space, leaving ‘September 11’ to subsist as a signifier of pure time. A...
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For Derrida, the identification of 9/11 as pure time stripped away the possibility of resolution; ‘this weapon is terrifying because it comes from the to-come, from the future, a future so radically to come that is resists even the grammar of the future anterior.’ (link)
Less a tragedy than a shattering of innocence or fall-from-grace, the ensuing omnicrisis presented the United...
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‘STUFFING THE DJINN BACK IN THE BOTTLE’
The monstrous sublime of 9/11 was met with overwhelmingly ‘masculine understandings of the political, which [sought] to mobilise the unleashed energy for projects of mastery and control.’ (link, p. 714) Domestic and foreign policy converged, as the Bush administration sought ‘symbolic reparation: a shift of affect from the vulnerability of victimization to the powerful confidence...
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In what Comaroff took as ‘an almost occult attempt to stuff the djinn of radical Islam back into the bottle’ (link, p. 387), the various fronts on which the Bush administration sought to meet the limitless threat with an equally limitless retaliation were collapsed into a single narrative; that of the so-called ‘global war on terror’.
As the United Status extended...
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Infinite Justice and Enduring Freedom
On October 7th 2001, American and British forces initiated an aerial assault against suspected Al-Qaeda and Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan. Initially known as ‘Operation Infinite Justice’, it was rapidly pointed out that the choice of name could be construed as ‘offensive to Muslims (for whom, we were told, only Allah can administer infinite justice).’ (link, p. 118)
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Rather than reading the name as a question of military convention or a genuine indicator of the American desire for justice, Bousquiet suggests that the “infinite” qualifier hints at the Bush administration’s ‘search for a transcendent response to 9/11’s sublimity’ (link, p. 756). The “infinite” of ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ is a mirror for the “limitless” of the...
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In the absence of substantive distinctions between the ‘coalition of the willing’ and an ‘axis of evil’ tainted by their association with enemy, the latter have been constructed as ‘rogue states’.
Ultimately though, the roguishness of these ‘rogue states’ functions as a floating signifier. Empty of meaning, it provides an easy way to...
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In Derrida’s reading, then, ‘the most roguish of rogue states are those that circulate and make use of a concept like “rogue state” [through] language, rhetoric, [and] juridical discourse’ (link, p. 96).
While the Bush administration posits the states of the ‘axis of evil’ as having sacrificed their claims to subjectivity, Derrida maintains that the ‘most...
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For Ling, the prominent positioning of the ‘rogue state’ in the discourse of the Bush administration is indicative of a logic of necessity, by which the United States was ‘compelled to war against small, impoverished, and isolated nations with the full might of a global superpower for fear of being perceived as weak.’ (link, p. 379)
When Osama the Terrorist hides as a...
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Having characterising both terrorist subject and rogue state as representative of some overarching menace, Devetak posits a reading of the ‘global war on terror’ which seeks to transcend popular conceptions in which the war is limited to the coalition’s military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Instead, Devetak argues that the narrative of the ‘war on terror’ is...
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The Uncanny Homeland
In comparison to the the explicit – if decidedly ill-judged – initial choice of ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ for the American engagement in Afghanistan, and its subsequent renaming as ‘Enduring Freedom’, Morrione reflects on the logic of naming at play in the domestic realm. He notes the significance of the fact that counterterrorism has fallen under the remit of the newly...
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The naming of the American ‘homeland’ was supposedly a re-articulation of the tellurian closure, ‘in which the earth’s surface is perfectly divided among compartmentalised peoples, mapped by geopolitical ‘lines in the sand’.’ (link, p. 99)
Certainly, commentators were quick to seize on Al-Qaeda’s exposure of ‘the permeability of … national borders eroded...
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In linguistic terms, there is substantive precedent for the anthropomorphizing of the Russian motherland and German fatherland, and it is relatively normal (if politically loaded) to speak of a Jewish homeland.
Prior to 9/11, however, the only recognition of an ‘American homeland’ comes in a 1977 defence review panel, which recommended an ‘increased emphasis on homeland...
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While the ‘American homeland’ may a notion devoid of history, entirely at odds with the American imagining of the nation, nobody seems to have noticed. A false memory born in the trauma of 9/11, the ‘American homeland’ has not just been projected forward from the moment of trauma, but backwards, into the depths of history
Here, the ‘American Homeland’ erases...
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THE POST-MODERN KAT'ECHON
In this final section, I draw together the preceding analyses of the limitless threat, its realisation, and the subsequent attempts of the United States (and its allies) to contain and limit its sublime danger.
My core thesis is that it was in Guantánamo Bay that these strategies of containment reached their apogee.
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Now, much of the existing body of literature tended towards an interpretation of this limitless, ungoverned logic of containment as a concrete manifestation of Agamben’s ‘state of emergency’, approaching GITMO as ‘a ‘lawless place’ that is ‘beyond the reach of national and international law’ … where sovereign power was extended ‘in excess...