London, London

There is a duty to speak precisely about such events, perhaps a need greater than ever before.  After the initial curses (or are they oaths?) have passed between lips, barely audible perhaps, whispered as they say beneath one's breath, uttered or sighed without illusion of speaking or performing homage with any adequacy or faux promises of finality (that can be known) to the loss that now marks what will remain. There is a duty to speak, after this breath maybe, but also before too much time has passed. This changes nothing?  On the contrary, I beg your pardon, but I think something has to change. 

Sad day.  Strange excitement with which my housemate debates "conspiracy theories" with her online friends.  Perverse the way we react with excitement, to the call of spectacle, compression of time, the joy of choosing sides(!), the pulse and chatter.  United we chatter.  See our teeth. 

There can be no adequate response to what was at once an irreducible moment and a myriad constellation of moments, inexplicable finalities, whose effects will linger on as ghostly reflections on memory somehow always wounded, incomplete.  The opposite of prayers, I think, this little shortness of breath.  No communion.  No adequate response, but a duty to resist all the same.  To resist allowing one's silence to be co-opted or merely drowned out.

Is it even possible to speak respectfully, right now, and of the dead?  When one's words are already framed before they leave the mouth?  When to express the simple necessary condolence is to hold hands, in some sense, still, with those all-too-pious political pronouncements of the day, scripted, crudely choreographed, pre-prepared and delivered for maximum effect?  Some silences are too loud to be ignored, perhaps, but "we" are not there yet.  Nowhere near, in fact. 

Something has to change.  But not in the way they will suggest.  And believe me, they will.  Maybe Blair won't, but Bush Inc. sure as hell will, and in Blair's name.

So what do we have, in the space of two days.  An enormous, manufactured non-event, made possible only by a hopeless compromise, functioning at best as hypocritical patronizing charity, at worst as epically cynical and false-hearted self-promotion.  We have a New York Times front page proclaiming the word, "London" with a color photo of balloons, confetti, ribbons and smiling faces.  What was it Bush said this morning, "the contrast couldn't be clearer"?  Non-event/Event, Jubilation/Fear.  No, something stronger than fear, Terror.  Because it is a part of this strange doublespeak logic of autoimmunity, where the origins are repeatedly sacrificed, and to condemn is to condone (but there is no choice but to condemn).

(I'm imagining a Jeb Bartlet-style showdown on prime time Fox News right now (only more sexy without all those clichéd moral and patriarchal overtones).  Some quick-tongued, unapologetic critic of Bush/Blair/Bin Laden/Bombs metonymicity up there putting all this reverse cause-effect political speech syndrome in its proper historical place...maybe examples from Stalin or Hitler using incidents of rebellion or dare we say it violent backlashes to further justify their manifest mission.  When the inevitable charges of lacking Patriotism are brought up, our critic responds with nothing short of the proper pathos of indignation; she is livid.  How dare you!?  They will sneer she is being insensitive, seeking to weave political capital out of unspeakable tragedy.  She will scream back:  "This event was already politicized, from the moment it arrived!  Since the beginning you, hairspray press car salesman crusaders, have treated tragedy as nothing but political fodder.  Banality is the very air you breath!  You're gaze is pornographic in the extreme.  You're a nauseating disgrace to your country, to the promise of democracy, and to the world, as everybody knows."

There she sits, her whatever face infinitely resistant, gaze stony and proud in the great American semi-golem tradition.)   

Anyway.  Today I re-read the following dialogue.  The book itself should probably be required "literary event" material for every... newly ordained Civics department.  As it was written by a philosopher, it may not lend itself to easy soundbites.  You may have to do some work.  But he's obviously making an effort to speak plainly, if conscious as well of sharing these particular pages with Habermas. 

Derrida:  ...Though I am incapable of knowing who today deserves the name philosopher (I would not simply accept certain professional or organizational criteria), I would be tempted to call philosophers those who, in the future, reflect in a responsible fashion on these questions [regarding international law and territory] and demands accountability from those in charge of public discourse, those responsible for the language and institutions of international law.  A "philosopher" (actually I would prefer to say "philosopher-deconstructor") would be someone who analyzes and then draws the practical and effective consequences of the relationship between our philosophical heritage and the structure of the still dominant juridico-political system that is so clearly undergoing mutation.  A "philosopher" would be one who seeks a new criteriology to distinguish between "comprehending" and "justifying." For one can describe, comprehend, and explain a certain chain of events or series of associations that lead to "war" or to "terrorism" without justifying them in the least, while in fact condemning them and attempting to invent other associations.  One can condemn unconditionally certain acts of terrorism (whether or the state or not) without having to ignore the situation that might have brought them about or even legitimized them...

Borradori:  If the distinction between war and terrorism is problematic and we accept the notion of state terrorism, then the question still remains:  who is the most terrorist?

Derrida:  The most terrorist?  This question is at once necessary and destined to remain without any answer.  Necessary because it takes into account an essential fact:  all terrorism presents itself as a response in a situation that continues to escalate.  It ammounts to saying, "I am resorting to terrorism as a last resort, because the other is more terrorist than I am; I am defending myself, counterattacking; the real terrorist, the worst, is the one who will have deprived me of every other means of responding before presenting himself, the first aggressor, as a victim."  It is in this way that the United States, Israel, wealthy nations, and colonial or imperialistic powers are accused of practicing state terrorism and thus of being "more terrorist" than the terrorists of whom they say they are the victims.  The pattern is well known, so I won't belabor it.  But it is difficult to write it off purely and simply, even if it is sometimes applied in a simplistic and abusive fashion.  Yet the question you are asking, that of a "more or less" in terrorism, should also not be settled through a purely and objectively quantitative logic.  For this question can give rise to no such formal evaluation.  "Terrorist" acts try to produce psychic effects (conscious and unconscious) and symbolic or symptomatic reactions that might take numerous detours, an incalculable number of them, in truth.  The quality or intensity of the emotions provoked (whether conscious or unconscious) is not always proportionate to the number of victims or the amount of damage.  In situations and cultures where the media do not spectacularize the event, the killing of thousands of people in a very short period of time might provoke fewer psychic and political effects than the assasination of a single individual in another country, culture or nation-state with highly developed media resources.  And does terrorism have to work only through death?  Can't one terrorize without killing?  And does killing necessarily mean putting to death?  Isn't it also "letting die"?  Can't "letting die," "not wanting to know that one is letting others die"--hundreds of millions of human beings, from hunger, AIDS, lack of medical treatment, and so on--also be part of a "more or less" conscious and deliberate terrorist strategy?  We are perhaps wrong to assume so quickly that all terrorism is voluntary, conscious, organized, deliberate, intentionally calculated:  there are historical and political "situations" where terror operates, so to speak, as if by itself, as the simple result of some apparatus, because of the relations of force in place, without anyone, any conscious subject, any person, any "I," being really conscious of it or feeling itself responsible for it.  All situations of social or national structural oppression produce a terror that is not natural (insofar as it is organized, institutiona.), and all these situations depend on this terror without those who benefit from them ever organizing terrorist acts or ever being treated as terrorists.  The narrow, too narrow meaning commonly given today to the word, "terrorism" gets circulated in various ways in the discourse that dominates the public space, and first of all through the technoeconomic power of the media.  What would "September 11" have been without television?  This question has already been asked and explored, so I will not insist on it here.  But we must recall that maximum media coverage was in the common interest of the perpetrators of "September 11," the terrorists, and those who, in the name of the victims, wanted to declare "war on terrorism."  Between these two parties, such media coverage was, like the good sense of which Descartes speaks, the most widely shared thing in the world.  More than the destruction of the Twin Towers or the attack on the Pentagon, more than the killing of thousands of people, the real "terror" consisted of and, in fact, began by exposing and exploiting, having exposed and exploited, the image of this terror by the target itself.  This target (the United States, let's say, and anyone who supports or is allied with them in the world, and this knows almost no limits today) had it in its own interest (the same interest it shares with its sworn enemies) to expose its vulnerability, to give the greatest possible coverage to the aggression against which it wishes to protect itself. This is again the same autoimmunitary perversion.  Or perhaps it would be better to say "pervertibility," so as to name a possibility, a risk, or a threat whose virtuality does not take the form of an evil intention, an evil spirit, or a will to do harm.  But this virtuality alone is enough to frighten, even terrify.  It is the ineradicable root of terror and thus of a terrorism that announces itself even before organizing itself into terrorism.  Implacably.  Endlessly.  (Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 106-109)

I don't know, maybe Derrida is making too much of this "perversion."  It's probably important to remember that he describes it as a certain "logic" more than anything else.  What do you think?

Update:  I must say that in addition to this, I like Lenin's Take Shit From Nobody stance very much.

Comments

[Adam Kotsko]

The hypothetical anger to the barely-hypothetical charges of "politicization" is something I've been feeling more and more deeply of late. It's as though they are eleven year-olds who have "called" the front seat in the car, only this time they've "called" the right to deploy the terrorist attacks toward their political ends, and any attempt to deploy them for other ends or even to call into question the motives of those who "called" the terrorist attacks is dismissed as "political." As Schmitt says, claiming to be above politics is only an especially powerful way of being political -- but it's already an uphill battle on that front as well, because they've been able to "call" being the ones who are not political, precisely by virtue of their position of political power.

Oh, do I ever mean to use "us" and "them" language today! Norm Geras claims, in some sense rightly, that terrorists are "enemies of humanity" -- but surely those who cynically exploit such events for their own political gain are enemies of humanity as well! But again, Schmitt: "Humanity does not have any enemies, at least not on this planet." Perhaps The Simpsons was being more subversive than usual with the Halloween episode in which the presidential candidates (then Clinton and Dole) were replaced by aliens.

Norm Geras claims, in some sense rightly, that terrorists are
"enemies of humanity"

In what sense exactly is this anything other than the usual right-wing
hogwash?

Do not blame me, I voted for for Kodos.

Matt

Thanks for posting this. I think Derrida is right that the governments that are the "object" of the attacks do exploit terrorism for their own purposes. But the question still remains: how to respond? My feeling is to reject all violence, state sponsored or otherwise. Certainly one wants to also capture the perpetrators (if they are still alive) and those who sponsor them. But what if those who sponsor them are inevitably tied up with those our governments have supported in the past (see Alphonse's post today)or maybe even in the present? It would seem the paradoxes are endless.

The thing not to do is to justify unjust policies (Iraq, IMF, War on terror)by using the victims. One must be against terrorism and oppose those who kill in the name of defending against it.

[another]

Adam Kotsko: But again, Schmitt: "Humanity does not have any enemies, at least not on this planet."
Quite. I suppose the rather long history of "crimes against humanity" is the work of undercover martians?

[Matt]

I think it's safe to say that Adam is aware of Schmitt's numerous shortcomings.

[Jodi]

Thanks, Matt.

[Name]

Just as a side note, how long do people think it will be before "we" start referring to "7/7".

As in blindly citing, rather.

Nevermind, I see it's already happening.

[Adam Kotsko]

I'm glad to see that it's right wing hogwash to say the equivalent of "terrorists are bad," even if such a statement is embedded in a larger sentence, the main thrust of which is to say that "our rulers are bad."

[William S]

Not the same purposes, or complementary purposes, nor desires, but interests. That it is in the common interest of two groups with widely divergent values and ambitions to operate in an environment of terror is frightening, is it not? People gain and people lose, but I suppose the point here is that this is not ultimately the point.

And I would say that Schmitt is right in the sense that no one can be an enemy of what Humanity is, being themselves human, and not even of what it could be, themselves also failing to be so. One (and many) can fail morally, but this too is a human failure.

[Matt]

Forgive me if I'm screening repeats here.

William,

to say that Bush and some individual or even wolfish group with a bomb share the absolute same purposes would be silly, for obvious reasons. For one, they operate in vastly different planes of power and influence.

(As a side not, recall how our White House held screenings of "The Battle of Algiers" not so long ago...maybe this film should be the subject of a future post?)

You also raise the question of desire. What was it Baudrillard said about the Saudi terrorist attack? That it was a scenario we had all fantasized about a million times already, in a million different movies? And who could not? Well I'm not sure I'm ready to go there myself, but he raises an interesting point.

But in a less obvious sense, to say that the Saudi hijackers or US trained allegedly anti-communist Taliban or "Al Queda" and Bush Inc. can be neatly divided on the plane of ideology is also problematic (not least of all because it serves those in power who are most responsible for creating such conditions, and who profit most from such lowering of public discourse.)

As per the passage above, thinking critically about this "environment of terror" (in an age of profoundly unbalanced and indeed prejudiced media chatter and bombardment) has never been more necessary. The last thing a responsible person ought to do is give lip service to the "with us or against us" slogans that are a dirty politician's best friend. There will be no "taking back" the moral highground from an administration that has no need for it in the first place, in my view.

Just what are the values and ambitions of the Bush junta, in your view, William?

Adam,

I confess to not seeing anything useful in the original Derbyshire post (now disappeared?) one wonders if he is purporting to speak for the "powerless"? To bravely combat the most glaringly obvious fallacy of political speech?

What's up there now reads: "This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful..."

Well no, because then it wouldn't be a terrorist attack.

What is terrorism? In a sense, it's a very simple definition: the targetting of civilians (usually for political aims). We'll know terrorism is "on the run" when civilians are no longer being targetted. Need it be said that we're still bombing Iraqi hospitals and mowing down anyone who dares drive a car? Not to mention the ongoing material complicity with death squads, etc. So the situation is a bit more complicated.

There are many who would argue the U.S. is the real "lone wolf" terrorist, having long since become, in a sense, the one it has murdered, or its own best enemy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism

[Adam Kotsko]

I'll renounce my reference to the Norm Geras post if necessary. I don't know how I even came across it, now that I think of it. And his argument -- that this is an attack against just normal people going about their business -- is dangerous insofar as it is deployed in order to get us to rally around the rulers who can protect us from those terrible people (by doing similar things to other innocent people, thus dividing the "us/them" along the always insidious lines of nationalism, "ethnicity"/race, etc.).

So yes, the reference to Norm Geras was pretty distracting. Read the sentence in effect as "the terrorists are terrible people who do terrible things, but it's even more horrifying that our leaders use those incidents as a way to build up their power and an excuse to perpetrate similar acts on others."

But I am trying to be on blogging hiatus, so I don't think I'll be able to follow up on this conversation any further.

[Matt]

Sorry, Norman NOT Derbyshire. Don't know how I ever confused the two.

[yh]

Adam,
Hiatuses tend to get invaded (or is that Haiti?)

Matt, can you recall the gist of the original post?

I see Norm, the apostate Marxist (my apologies for using that verboten word 'apostate') is quoting Hitchens (as is the Times reader's wont) saying "it is ludicrous to reduce this to Iraq".

I don't know who is "reducing" it to Iraq, but (pardon the off-message-ism) if Iraq is left out of the equation (and this sentence seems designed to do so) one will hardly get the whole picture.

Thought for the day: it's easy to be mawkish during an atrocity, to "count the ways", this intellectual equivalent of the tabloid headline today, "Go to Hell". It's far harder to take stock during an event like this and start to analyse.

"Sorry, Norman NOT Derbyshire. Don't know how I ever confused the two."

Seems a pretty easy mistake to make...

Adam, you say:

`I'm glad to see that it's right wing hogwash to say the
equivalent of "terrorists are bad," even if such a statement
is embedded in a larger sentence, the main thrust of which is
to say that "our rulers are bad."'

Well, I was taking issue with your exact words, which were that
"the terrorists" are "in a sense", "enemies of humanity" (yes,
I accept that you were quoting the hard-line imperialist Norm
Geras, but you gave credence to his words -- "in a sense"). No,
they are not "enemies of humanity"; they are just as much a part of
humanity as you and I are. Nor are they "bad men". They are men
reacting against a situation they find intolerable -- and rightly
so, in my view. Since they are weak, they use the methods of the
weak: the sneak, surprise attack; the strike against soft targets.
But what else would you have them do? Charge with fixed bayonets
against a Marine position? That might be cricket, but it isn't war.
You Anglos wanted your "war on terror": now you have it.

Another thought. Anglo-Saxons have been murdering men, women and
children in Iraq since the '20s (Bomber Harris first made a name
for himself there, bombing villages); 85 years later, London finally
gets payback. Well, there it is: "what goes around, comes around".

[Matt]

YH,

I think the 'count the ways' post in question may have been this:

http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/07/let_me_count_th.html

That my comments regarding Derby seemed to end up applying just as well to Norm was not, I suppose, particularly surprising (though in all honesty I don't read either of them regularly).

Lest there be any confusion(??), in no way do I support the bombing of innocent people (however comfortable _____ may be in not discouraging that impression with regard to hirself).

Matt, no-one is innocent.

The UK claims to be a secular democracy (in contradistinction, one
supposes, to "theocratic fascism" or whatever bizarre political
forms the Untermenschen are supposed to indulge in); and, more
particularly, the UK electors recently re-elected Mr. Blair, did
they not? Looks like a vote for war to me. Well, what do you know?
You wanted war (or, you voted for it, which to me looks like the
same thing): and you got it.

If the British people want to prevent more bombings, it's easy
enough: they have merely to force a British withdrawal from the war.
Now, the British army is already over-stretched; all that's needed
is enough civil disobedience to require army intervention, and the
British military's ability to commit troops to Iraq is in question.
If that sounds like too much bother, remember this: dozens of Iraqis
are being killed *every day*; as far as I can work out, the London
death toll represents about 2.5 days of an average Iraqi body-count.
If you can't be bothered to stop your government perpetrating this,
then be prepared to take the consequences.

And at present, it seems that indeed you can't be bothered.
Your concrete opposition to the war (as opposed to all the hot air),
doesn't amount even to a fraction of what the Greenham Common women
did against NATO 20 years ago. Shame.

[Matt]

,

This will most likely be my final response to you. Are you personally proposing to blackmail, en masse, the British people?

Well I'm in the US and I'd lob a lobster across the pond if I thought it'd do any good. No bombs though. While hypothetically I may recognize the right of Iraqis to defend themselves, this is far from a black and white situation. In fact I'm not even sure what such a self-defense would entail, responsibility-wise, in such a climate.

Speaking out against this war, in a responsible manner (and again, maintaining the right to condemn unconditionally while at the same time looking beneath the surface of things)--is one of the most important duties of our time, and itself a political act.

"You wanted war (or, you voted for it, which to me looks like the same thing): and you got it."

That's funny, I thought nearly half of them voted against it.

[YH]

The clampdown seems to have begun already: http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1525382,00.html

Matt, I note you don't respond to any of my points in a substantive
way. That in itself speaks volumes about your political position.
In what you do say, you are merely being juvenile. Your rhetoric
is worthy of Oliver Kampf.

To reiterate one simple point: you've got your war. If you are
really against it, find some way to stop it. (Hot air won't).

Condemning "the terrorists" serves only to align you with those
you claim to oppose, the imperialist war-mongers. "The terrorists"
are not the problem; your servility and lack of effective opposition
to imperialism is.

[Matt]

yh, scary.

Anonymous,

Of course you've already aligned me with them by calling this "my" war, but I suppose that's just splitting hairs to you, whoever you are, if you are indeed even being serious.

Matt, whatever. I hope you're enjoying your litle hissy fit. Adios.

[Matt]

Good riddance.

Way to go there, Mr. Anglo! Keep winning friends and influencing
people! (You folks REALLY don't like it when the "lesser breeds
without the law" answer back, do you?)