On Having Nothing to Say
I'm not claiming any scientific survey size, but I noticed that folks - various cultural critics - opted out of any commentary on the London Bombing of the 7th. The news struck me with similar pangs. Douglas Rushkoff, for example, writes: "I'm supposed to have something intelligent to say about this morning's blasts in London. It's become one of those obligatory blog things - so much so, that people are emailing me today asking why I haven't said anything about it." Ken Rufo and the folks at Progressive Commons write: "For those wondering why it is we haven't commented on the terrorist attacks on London, it's because we, or at least I, have nothing profound to say."
This got me thinking about the politics of withdrawal. We have clearly entered a period of popular calls for full or partial withdrawal from Iraq. On its heels is a strategy of resistance to the neo-con rhetoric of the War on Terror that is a certain withdrawal of communication. The very profitable WOT paradoxically needs a continual feed of explosions to survive. Moreover, the explosions need a complicit media - and vice versa. The entire thing is, as scholars of terrorism have long maintained, a macabre ratcheting assemblage of the two. At one point we might have said tongue in cheek that car accidents need gawkers. The WOT intensifies this marriage, feeding the gawkers back into the steam and twisted metal of the accident - as if every accident calls for its future perfection, and we are caught out-imagining one another. The London Bombings perhaps occur at a moment of realization, not just burnout and acceptance of a certain kind of fate of the industrialized West. The realization is one of tactics: we understand what terrorism is now, and we don't want to be a part of it.
In Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut constructs an island on which everyone practices a forbidden religion called Bokonon. (I always wondered if this was a reference to Bakunin...). Those who are caught by the governor of practicing the black art of Bokonon, recognizable by the practice of two people putting the soles of their feet together, would be ceremonially punished by public hanging on "the hook." What's more, the government was on the constant hunt for the hirsute underground spiritual leader of the Bokonon movement, who always managed to escape by the skin of his teeth. He could do this because he had a secret agreement with the government to do so. That is, he was purposefully designed by the government to be uncatchable. The drama of the practice, the punishments, and the spectacle of the heroic, uncatchable leader kept the people from revolting. A beautiful circular drama.
A pretty good allegory, except that it's hard to argue that everyone secretly wishes to be part of an terrorist cell and is rooting for Bin Laden. But perhaps it's easier than we think. Jean Baudrillard claims that terrorism works because we secretly wanted the towers to fall - and the evidence for this is in film, where we imagined the destruction, a la Independence Day, of all our monuments to modernity. The Onion cleverly exploited this theme with a headline entitled "Where's Bin Laden? There's a little Bin Laden in each of us, FBI concludes." We might alter this slightly to say that there is a little War on Terror in each of us.
So perhaps we have come to the conclusion that the WOT is a feedback loop that demands our participation to sustain itself. More specifically, it demands attention - our eyeballs - to function. Every word about it nudges the momentum of the big flywheel. We are all complicit, because we all are gawkers in one way or another. The incredible flury of Flickr and cell phone activity around the London Bombings is ringed by the secondary shockwave of television news, then the cottage industries of terrorism scholarship and political opportunism, and then perhaps that final distanct ripple of media critics. But we have figured out the game and how it is rigged. We don't want to play anymore. We look away. We choose instead to mourn the loss like we would an act of nature or a traffic pile-up on a winter day. And we try not to play favorites over suffering elsewhere in the world. We unplug, we depoliticize. Gille Deleuze argued that resistance in the pomo control society resembles a circuit breaker. We used to say "What if they held a war and no one showed up?" Now we say, "What if there was a terrorist attack and no one Flickr-ed?"
This got me thinking about the politics of withdrawal. We have clearly entered a period of popular calls for full or partial withdrawal from Iraq. On its heels is a strategy of resistance to the neo-con rhetoric of the War on Terror that is a certain withdrawal of communication. The very profitable WOT paradoxically needs a continual feed of explosions to survive. Moreover, the explosions need a complicit media - and vice versa. The entire thing is, as scholars of terrorism have long maintained, a macabre ratcheting assemblage of the two. At one point we might have said tongue in cheek that car accidents need gawkers. The WOT intensifies this marriage, feeding the gawkers back into the steam and twisted metal of the accident - as if every accident calls for its future perfection, and we are caught out-imagining one another. The London Bombings perhaps occur at a moment of realization, not just burnout and acceptance of a certain kind of fate of the industrialized West. The realization is one of tactics: we understand what terrorism is now, and we don't want to be a part of it.
In Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut constructs an island on which everyone practices a forbidden religion called Bokonon. (I always wondered if this was a reference to Bakunin...). Those who are caught by the governor of practicing the black art of Bokonon, recognizable by the practice of two people putting the soles of their feet together, would be ceremonially punished by public hanging on "the hook." What's more, the government was on the constant hunt for the hirsute underground spiritual leader of the Bokonon movement, who always managed to escape by the skin of his teeth. He could do this because he had a secret agreement with the government to do so. That is, he was purposefully designed by the government to be uncatchable. The drama of the practice, the punishments, and the spectacle of the heroic, uncatchable leader kept the people from revolting. A beautiful circular drama.
A pretty good allegory, except that it's hard to argue that everyone secretly wishes to be part of an terrorist cell and is rooting for Bin Laden. But perhaps it's easier than we think. Jean Baudrillard claims that terrorism works because we secretly wanted the towers to fall - and the evidence for this is in film, where we imagined the destruction, a la Independence Day, of all our monuments to modernity. The Onion cleverly exploited this theme with a headline entitled "Where's Bin Laden? There's a little Bin Laden in each of us, FBI concludes." We might alter this slightly to say that there is a little War on Terror in each of us.
So perhaps we have come to the conclusion that the WOT is a feedback loop that demands our participation to sustain itself. More specifically, it demands attention - our eyeballs - to function. Every word about it nudges the momentum of the big flywheel. We are all complicit, because we all are gawkers in one way or another. The incredible flury of Flickr and cell phone activity around the London Bombings is ringed by the secondary shockwave of television news, then the cottage industries of terrorism scholarship and political opportunism, and then perhaps that final distanct ripple of media critics. But we have figured out the game and how it is rigged. We don't want to play anymore. We look away. We choose instead to mourn the loss like we would an act of nature or a traffic pile-up on a winter day. And we try not to play favorites over suffering elsewhere in the world. We unplug, we depoliticize. Gille Deleuze argued that resistance in the pomo control society resembles a circuit breaker. We used to say "What if they held a war and no one showed up?" Now we say, "What if there was a terrorist attack and no one Flickr-ed?"
posted by thebaffler at 2:49 PM
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