eJournals

Contents Acknowledgements � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � VII W infried f luck , d onald e. P ease Preface � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � IX Contributors � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � XI I. State of (American) Exception(alism) k arin l oevy An Introduction to the Theory of Crisis Containment: The Problem of Emergency and its Paradigmatic Solutions� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3 W alter B enn M ichaels Homo Sacher-Masoch: Agamben’s American Dream� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 25 W infried f luck Are Multiple Identities the Answer, or, How Do We Actually Live “In-Between” Different Identities? � � � � � � � � � � � � � 37 B rian t. e dWards After the American Century � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 57 II. Liberal Democracy in Times of Crisis d onald e. P ease Black Orpheus: Barack Obama’s Governmentality � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 75 d onatella i zzo American 9/ 11 Culture and the Naturalizing of Italy’s Right-Wing Domestic Agenda� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 101 s iMon s chleusener Sovereignty at Sea: Moby Dick and the Politics of Desire� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 121 c hristoPh r aetzsch “All the News That’s Fit to Circulate” Reframing Journalistic Practices after Journalism � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 143 III. Precarious Others u lf s chulenBerg “This morning I read as angels read: ” Self-Creation, Aesthetics, and the Crisis of Black Politics in W�E�B� Du Bois’s Dark Princess � � � � � � � � � � � � � 167 J onathan g aBoury The Gothic Leadership of Martin Delany and Delany’s Blake � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 191 k iMBerly a lecia s ingletary Opposing Blackness: Black American Women and Questions of Citizenship in the U�S� Media � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 199 k atharina M otyl No Longer a Promised Land - The Arab and Muslim Experience in the U�S� after 9/ 11� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 217 IV. Violence and Conflict J an d. k ucharzeWski “Only after Disaster Can We Be Resurrected” The Crisis of Masculinity in David Fincher’s Fight Club � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 239 t heodora t siMPouki “A war after a war, a war before a war” Traumatic Testimonies in E� L� Doctorow’s The March � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 259 s oPhia f rese “Can’t you hear the shooting? ” Death and Violence in Palestinian-American Literature on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict � � � � � � � � 273 s onJa s chillings The Concept of Hostis Humani Generis in Cultural Translation: Somali Piracy, Discursive Containment, and the Creation of an Extralegal Space � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 295 V. 9/ 11 and its Aftershocks B oris v orMann Visibilizing Risk: Risk Perception and Maritime Infrastructure in the ‘War on Terror’� � � � � � � � 317 M arcel h artWig History in the Making: Lessons and Legacies of “Pearl Harbor” and “9/ 11”� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 337 s arah W asserMan No Place Like Home: 9/ 11 Nostalgia and Spike Lee’s 25th Hour � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 355 J aMes d orson “9/ 11” and the Rhetoric of Rupture� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 369 Acknowledgements Some contributions to this volume were first presented at the International Graduate Conference “States of Emergency: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Dynamics of Crisis,” held at the John F� Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies of Freie Universität Berlin in June 2010� The conference was funded by the Graduate School of the Kennedy-Institute and organized by the graduate student class of 2012� We gratefully acknowledge the commitment and support of Mahmoud Arghavan, Elisabeth Engel, Jan Hoffmeister, Ida Jahr, Hooshang Nayebi, Jane Preuß, Julia Püschel, Anne Scheer, Sonja Schillings, Tomasz Stompor, and Boris Vormann for making the conference a memorable experience� We owe special gratitude to Katharina Motyl and Christoph Raetzsch who were indefatigable in the pursuit of their editorial responsibilities� Without their strong engagement this volume would not have been possible� Winfried Fluck Don Pease W infried f luck , d onald e. P ease Preface Ever since its reorientation toward a stronger emphasis on literary and critical theory, REAL has provided a forum for discussions of new themes and developments in the field of American studies. This volume continues that tradition by focusing on the theoretical concept and the discourse that stand currently at the center of many debates in the field: what Walter Benjamin has called a state of emergency (and what other scholars call a state of exception) names the dominant theoretical perspective for analyses that are characterized by an ubiquitous crisis discourse of American society and culture at the present time� The discourse and the concept work interdependently� Dramatizations of states of emergency fuel a pervasive crisis discourse, just as, on the other hand, the anxiety and insecurity produced by crisis narratives provide the affective basis for an acceptance of the state of emergency� The attacks on the World Trade Center stand as images that mark the 21st century’s fall into a permanent state of emergency that is no longer the exception but the rule� The ensuing “war on terror” ushered in a suspension of civil liberties in the United States, and a disregard for international law and created serious doubts about the legitimacy of the Western world’s hegemonic order� However, it would seem too narrow a frame to subsume the last decade exclusively under the trauma-narrative of 9/ 11. Unregulated financial speculation and global climate change have precipitated crises of their own in the recent past� These tumultuous beginnings of the new century have heightened our sensitivity to exceptional states and growing instabilities that challenge prior narratives about American society and culture and undermine exceptionalist assumptions about the staying and shaping powers of American ideals� Trauma narratives concerned with the state of emergency and narratives of crisis show interesting points of convergence, but they also differ in important ways� Both claim to provide the key for an understanding of what is currently going on (and what is currently going wrong) in American society and culture; both have identified major problems that threaten to become permanent or chronic� However, the source of what is going wrong is a different one in the two narratives� In narratives of crisis, the major cause of recent problems lies in the shift to neo-liberalism that has produced, among other things, the global financial crisis of 2008 - with significant economic, social, and political consequences that have been in the making since the 1980s. In emergency state narratives, on the other hand, the main reason for a permanent state of exception lies in America’s response to the trauma of 9/ 11 and a self-declared “war on terror” that has been used as justification for the creation of a homeland security state and a shadow national security appa- X W infried f luck , d onald e. P ease ratus� In crisis narratives, this aspect is one of many, and as such part of a set of troubling developments that include growing inequality, a growing influence of money in American politics, and a beginning conservative onslaught on social policies created during the New Deal and in the 1960s� In contrast, emergency state narratives see the declaration of a state of exception as the founding act of present-day America, because it is the only way in which American hegemony can still be justified. By naming what the order must exclude to achieve unity and coherence, states of emergency allow American citizens to maintain an imaginary relationship to their society in which the realities of the system can be disavowed� In American studies, emergency state narratives explain how states of exception interpellate Americans into fictitious national identities. Narratives of crisis, on the other hand, are narratives about threats to identity� Rather than pushing the debate to a point where we would have to choose between one of the two narratives, it seems more productive to argue for the possibility of their co-existence and to offer this volume as a collection in which the two narratives can be studied, compared, and evaluated in terms of the productivity of their interpretive perspectives� The question that emerges at this point and forms the starting premise of this volume is: what if we use these concepts - states of emergency and states of crisis - as new paradigms for an analysis of American society and culture? What new approaches to American literature and culture are opened up? Do we need new modes of reading in view of theses themes and new frames of interpretation? What are the issues and authors that move to the center from the point of view of these new narratives? What texts and genres deserve special attention? What are the theoretical concepts that are most helpful? In short, what objects, methods, and theoretical commitments are required when we want to pursue these new directions in American studies? Volume 27 of REAL brings together a wide range of answers to these questions that are, in the best tradition of the field of American studies, interdisciplinary in approach and theoretically informed in their interpretive perspectives, including theoretical discussions of key problems of political legitimation. Contributions cover five major areas: 1) definitions of, and cultural responses to, concepts of states of emergency; 2) discussions of contemporary states of crisis, as well as responses to them, on the political, cultural, and literary level; 3) the role and fate of “precarious others” in narratives of emergency and narratives of crisis; 4) conflicts and violence as integral parts of states of emergency and crisis and their representation in film and literature; 5) cultural and literary responses to 9/ 11 as the exemplary trauma narrative� Taken together, the result is a comprehensive sample of current scholarship selected to take up the challenge that the concepts of emergency and crisis pose to American studies at the present time� Laguna Beach & Hanover, August 2011 Contributors d orson , J aMes . Wiener Strasse 42, 10999 Berlin, Germany� Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin� e dWards , B rian t. Department of English, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. f luck , W infried . John-F� Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstr� 7-9, 14195 Berlin, Germany� f rese , s oPhia . Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstr� 5, 14195 Berlin, Germany� g aBoury , J onathan . Queens University, 49 Bader Lane, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada� h artWig , M arcel . Fachbereich Sprach-, Literatur- und Medienwissenschaften, Universität Siegen, Adolf-Reichwein-Str� 2, 57076 Siegen, Germany i zzo , d onatella . Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale,” via Duomo 219, Napoli, Italy� k ucharzeWski , J an d. Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 6, 20146 Hamburg, Germany� l oevy , k arin . New York University School of Law, 40 Washington Sq� South, New York, NY 10012, USA� M ichaels , W alter B enn . Department of English, University of Illinois/ Chicago, 601 South Morgan Street (MC 162), Chicago, IL 60607, USA� M otyl , k atharina � Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstr� 5, 14195 Berlin, Germany� P ease , d onald e. English Department, Dartmouth College, 219 Sanborn House, Hanover, NH 03755, USA� r aetzsch , c hristoPh � Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstr� 5, 14195 Berlin, Germany� s chillings , s onJa . Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstr� 5, 14195 Berlin, Germany� XII c ontriButors s chleusener , s iMon � John-F� Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstr� 7-9, 14195 Berlin, Germany� s chulenBerg , u lf . Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät, Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Universitätsallee 1, 85071 Eichstätt, Germany. s ingletary , k iMBerley a lecia . Rhetoric and Public Culture Program, Communication Studies Department, Northwestern University, 1815 Chicago Ave., Evanston, IL 60201, USA. t siMPouki , t heodora . Faculty of English Studies, School of Philosophy, University of Athens, 157 84 Athens, Greece. v orMann , B oris . Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstr� 5, 14195 Berlin, Germany� W asserMan , s arah . Princeton University, 22 McCosh Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA� I� State of (American) Exception(alism) k arin l oevy An Introduction to the Theory of Crisis Containment: The Problem of Emergency and its Paradigmatic Solutions 1 1 The Background Theoretical Question: Can Law Constrain Emergency Measures? The background question that persistently underlies theoretical debates about emergency and legality - certainly in the post 9/ 11 context - is whether law can and whether it should constrain the conduct of government officials responding to crisis� The concerns are sometimes expressed as a tension “of tragic dimensions” between formal liberal and democratic values and a functional necessity to respond effectively to violent or otherwise disastrous events� 2 Many accounts express this tension at the level of an existential paradox - reminiscent of Carl Schmitt’s legal scepticism� Since emergency situations are unpredictable, Schmitt argued, no legal norm can foresee them or constrain in advance the measures that are needed to confront them (2005: 6f�)� Since the possibility of banishing emergency situations is not a legal concern (not a juristic question [7]), every political order ultimately presupposes the existence of an extralegal, absolutist, dictatorial power - embodied in the person of the sovereign - recognized by his ability to decide on the exception (ibid�)� Not surprisingly the recent history of the theory of emergency powers is influenced by these two formulations of the problem of emergencies. On the one hand the American constitutional tradition envisions a pragmatic 1 I thank Mattias Kumm for continuing support and guidance and for his helpful comments on a previous draft� I am also grateful to David Dyzenhaus, David Garland, Ron Harris, Stephan Holmes, Pasquale Pasquino, Victor Ramraj, Yoram Shachar and Marc de Wilde for fruitful discussions and useful comments on earlier versions of this work� Special thanks to the organizers of the Conference “States of Emergency: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Dynamics of Crisis” JFK Institute, Free University of Berlin , June 2010, especially to Sonja Schillings, Christoph Raetzsch and Katharina Motyl� 2 A metaphor often invoked to express the gravity of the tension is that of a “suicide pact” - a commitment to preserve and maintain rights, freedoms and liberties must be reconciled with the caution against turning the constitution into a suicide pact (Terminiello v Chicago 1947)� See also Gross & Ni Aolain Law in Times of Crisis (2006: 7) and as the underlying rational of Richard Posner’s Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in Times of Emergency (2006)� 4 k arin l oevy tension between constitutional norms and factual necessities� 3 On the other hand, the legal-sceptic philosophical tradition envisions an existential paradox underlying the possibility of legitimate rule� 4 The consequence of the two very different traditions is felt in the persistent unrest and often artificial air of many emergency powers debates� Both formulations seem to draw liberal thinkers to at least two existential difficulties in the jurisprudence of emergency powers. The first concerns law’s ability to effectively contain the crisis; the second concerns law’s ability to effectively contain power� Since both issues seemed especially pressing around the turn of the century (and more so under post 9/ 11 sensibilities) a wave of scholarly work focused on the question of the “state of exception” as the limit of law� 5 Critical theory authors embraced Schmitt’s analysis of emergency powers as a way of pursuing a radical critique of the oppressive histories, logical structures and epistemologies of modern liberal law� 6 Law, describes Giorgio Agamben, in a much cited work, neglects “living beings” by excluding them internally, confining them in zones of exception within but simultaneously expelled from the legal order� 7 In contrast, legal theorists in the post 9/ 11 debate were largely committed to preserving the rule of law and offered grounds to reconstruct emergency laws and policies� Oren Gross, for example, in his vast neo-realist study of the history and politics of emergency powers, accepted 3 The origin of this tradition can be traced to the Framers’ Lockian political theory� See Rossiter 1961: No� 23, 153 (Alexander Hamilton)� Also see Thomas Jefferson 1905: 146; Fatovic 2004a: 429-444; Vermuele 2008. Clinton Rossiter’s Constitutional Dictatorship (2002 [1948]) outlying guidelines for a “dictatorship” established to protect the Constitution can be seen as a culmination of this tradition and is until today the most important American analysis of emergency powers� 4 The legal skeptic tradition may be seen as rooted in nineteenth and early twentieth century legal and political debates about the concept of sovereignty� Carl Schmitt effectively tied his analysis of emergency powers to his position in these debates through an account of the conditions for ‘the Political’� Schmitt’s “emergency paradox” - as portrayed above - is only one aspect of his deliberation on the concept of the Political� In two key texts - The Concept of the Political (1932) and Political Theology (1922) - Schmitt deals with the ontological source (“the nature”) of every political order, that on which every aspect of political order - institutional, legal and cultural is based� This source or condition for all political relations is, according to Schmitt, embodied in the concept of sovereignty as the answer to the paradoxical relationship between law and force (or power)� Only a sovereign’s decision can rescue rule from its position as pure force and law from its hollow form� For English accounts of Schmitt’s thought in the context of his contemporaries’ debates, see for example McCormick 1997, Caldwell 1997, Dyzenhaus 1997� 5 The analysis here is informed by the lively and lengthy exchanges within mostly North American legal and political theory scholars in the post 9/ 11 era partly triggered by the Bush Administration’s position of unfettered discretion in the ‘war on terror’ For the “Schmittian” aspect of the post 9/ 11 debate see Scheuerman 2006� 6 See for example Agamben 1998 and 2005; Hussain 2003. 7 Agamben 1998. Historians contributed to this body of critical work especially by exposing the parallel colonial contexts in which rule by emergency decree was a central aspect of governing� For a discussion of the recent contributions, see review essays: Witt 2007, Benton 2006� An Introduction to the Theory of Crisis Containment 5 Schmitt’s proposition that law cannot accommodate emergency� 8 Confronted by extreme anxiety general norms will fail to respond effectively� The legal order will either try to accommodate the exception or act as if it doesn’t (legally) exist; both approaches risk seepage of the exceptional response into the normal order� In the name of securing a liberal democratic rule of law in view of this contamination, Gross denies the legal basis of emergency conduct and places it normatively in the extra-legal sphere� Provided that state officials will publicly and transparently admit their extralegal conduct and succumb to ex-post checks, Gross believes or hopes that their harmful effect will be restrained� Gross’ “extralegal model” for dealing with emergencies has been subject to considerable criticism, 9 the strongest of which turns practically and theoretically against Gross’ sharp distinction between extralegal emergency and legal normalcy� If indeed emergency cannot be legally contained, how can it be contained extra-legally? Not only that it is not realistic to expect that officials will admit the “extralegality” of their conduct, there is also no reason to believe that extralegal action will not “seep” into the legal order just as legal conduct does� Still, other theorists are attracted to Gross’ logic of the extra-legality of emergency response� Mark Tushnet, for example, agrees with Gross (and Schmitt) that emergency acts disguised as limited by the rule of law are often actually unlimited state power� But, he denies Gross’ restraining retrospective legal mechanisms� Only public action, through the institutions of “ordinary politics” and not legal responses, can prevent the abuse of emergency powers� Tushnet argues that a political constitution, one that is based on a mobilized citizenry, is the normatively correct response to law’s admitted inability to restrain the emergency (2005; 2008). While Tushnet’s proposal moves the debate further away from legality, toward a vision of democratic politics, David Dyzenhaus leads us back to it� Only the principle of legality, he argues, confronting Schmitt’s (and Gross’) legal skepticism, can (and must) constrain emergency� According to Dyzenhaus, moral resources and law’s authority can be maintained even under great stress by creative institutional experiments, provided that there is a willingness to loosen some formalistic doctrines such as the separation of powers� 10 Alongside these highly theoretical debates there are many accounts that go beyond the question of the limits of law and try to deal with the more practical questions at the legal foreground� Acting on the assumption that the rule of law must be preserved under extreme political peril, they ask: what kind of institutional structures might better preserve the rule of law in such conditions? Are ex-post measures like judicial review better than ex- 8 Gross 2003, Gross & Ni Aolain 2006, Gross 2008. 9 Dyzenhaus 2005 and 2006a; Posner & Vermeule 2005� 10 Dyzenhaus’ formulation of the legality model runs across a number of his recent texts� I will refer to: Dyzenhaus 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b, 2008. 6 k arin l oevy ante legislative (and specifically constitutional) address? What are the right balancing norms and mechanisms between security and human rights? Are there non-derogable rights even in emergency situations? 11 2 Extralegal, Legal and Exceptional Answers: The Paradigmatic Models of Normative Containment As the initial shock of the terrorist attacks on the United States waned and the Bush administration’s legal and political position became increasingly unpopular, the debates over emergency measures gradually moved away from the question of the possibility and the desirability of legal constraint of emergency powers� 12 The Obama administration has tied its position on security with a commitment to legality as a mirror image of its predecessor� 13 Still, it is hardly a baseless prediction that visions of emergency as the limit of law will resurface in the occasion of future national catastrophes� 14 The two distinct traditions that underlie intuitions about the limit of law in the context of emergencies will certainly not fade away� In view of this prediction it should be useful to reveal the rationales according to which the question of law’s role in crisis can be answered� There are three broad structures that attempt to explain and solve the emergency paradox: the extralegal, legal and exceptional models� 15 It is important to note 11 For this line of theorizing pragmatic answers to the exception, see for example Bruce Ackerman’s supermajoritarian constitutional procedures (2004), David Cole’s common law defense of judicial precedent (2003; 2004), Ferejohn and Pasquino’s (following Rossiter) relaxed legal freedoms (2004), Tribe and Gudridge’s anti-emergency constitution (2004) and David Dyzenhaus’ notion of deference as respect (2007a)� 12 While the discussions have moved on to various questions of design, it is fair to say that a general consensus has emerged (although not without contestation) according to which US emergency law is or should be structured according to a Neo-Roman model of constitutional dictatorship� For a call to establish the guidelines for such constitutional arrangement see Levinson & Balkin 2010� 13 See Obama 2009� 14 It is striking how many voices in the American debate rely on the assumption that exceptional powers in exceptional times are an inevitable reality that is here to stay� From Clinton Rossiter stating in 1948: “That constitutional dictatorship does have a future in the United States is hardly a matter for discussion” (2002: 306) to Samuel Issacharoff and Richard Pildes pointing to the historical inevitability of legal change towards less emphasis on individual rights in dangerous times (2005: 161)� 15 There are alternative mappings of existing legal and political theories for dealing with emergency� Scheuerman (2006) distinguishes between Schmittian and non-Schmittian theories and between democratic formalists’ procedural and liberal lawyers’ substantial answers� Ferejohn and Pasquino (2004) distinguish between monistic and dualistic models and within the dualistic model they distinguish between constitutional and legislative models� Gross (2003) distinguishes between models of accommodation, “business as usual” models and the extralegal model� Dyzenhaus (2006b) notes the models I propose here but his analysis of the different positions seems to suggest that he distinguishes only between two models - those who acknowledge an extralegal space and those who deny it� The map that I suggest below relies on distinguishing the An Introduction to the Theory of Crisis Containment 7 that these are very broad, archetypal analytical models that imply different ways of thinking the connection between the “core” meaning of liberal politics and liberal law, and the “marginal,” “contingent” need to overcome it� They all attempt to account not only to the technical problem of constraint, but also to its connection to the political stability of a modern collectivity� Eventually I hope to show that the three seemingly contrasting rationales are reflected in legal mechanisms crafted to contain irregular, unexpected, threatening events� To understand and evaluate such mechanisms, a theory of emergency powers must account for the dialectic of containment: the legal management of emergencies and the political possibilities that it produces� 2.1 The Extralegal Model: An Authority Residing Outside the Law Going completely outside the law in appropriate cases preserves, rather than undermines, the rule of law in a way that bending the law to accommodate for catastrophes does not (Gross 2004: 240)� The extralegal model is perhaps the most straightforward answer to the problem of containment� It holds, with Schmitt, that law cannot and should not account for all aspects of the social and political reality� 16 It also agrees with Schmitt that law is not a political concept� In contrast to Schmitt, it denies that this presents an existential problem for liberalism� Liberalism’s political theory has always had a political aspect and not only a rule-of-law aspect� Whenever legality is used as a criterion for the political decision, the effect is either seepage of arbitrariness into the normal system or a collapse in the security of the state or its subjects� 17 Legality must be understood as limited by necessity which is confined to the political aspect of any liberal state. A theory of emergency powers that acknowledges an external political power to decide on the exception and to deal with it is often theoretically based on Locke’s “Prerogative”� There are many things, Locke insisted, “which the law can by no means provide for” (1980: §159) 18 and which must necessarily be left to the discretionary power of the executive� Among these are not only emergencies, or in Locke’s terminology “accidents and necessities,” but also generally situations where the lawmaking is powerless or nonefficient, or where laws are inflexible and therefore harmful (§160). source of political power to deal with the exception� I propose it in order to search for possible structural and political answers to liberal concerns about the effective containment of crisis and power� 16 Among advocates of this model in the post 9/ 11 debates are Gross 2003 and 2008, Gross & Ni Aolain 2006, Tushnet 2005 and 2008, and to an extent Posner (2003: 292-321). 17 This is the two-fold danger that Oren Gross points to when he advocates his version of the extralegal model (2003: 1022-3)� 18 Recent discussions of Locke’s prerogative powers include Medina 2002, Fatovic 2004b, Casson 2008. 8 k arin l oevy Locke’s prerogative, wide and pragmatic, is not just a technical solution to the unexpected, but has a constitutional function within his political theory� 19 The prerogative is a power “in the hands of the Prince to provide for the public good” and later “to act according to discretion, for the public good, without the prescription of Law, and sometimes even against it” (§158; §160). It can therefore be seen either as a constitutional element that is a derivative part of the legal order 20 or an extra-constitutional power that stands alone with its own original source� 21 But Locke’s prerogative does not need any outside authorization� Unlike the Roman institution of dictatorship - which Schmitt favored over a constitutionally authorized sovereignty in Die Diktatur 22 - Locke’s King comes to the exception already holding the prerogative powers� It is not a question of the need to drop law’s constraints that is stressed here; it is that of an (almost) lawmaking power, 23 a moralized power to overcome the law� The constraint, the limitation, comes to the foreground only in the historical perspective of the unfortunate instances of misuse� Only then, ex-post the misuse, the prerogative was historically limited� Indeed, in Locke’s state theory - Parliament and the laws were established in order to limit the prerogative: “[I]n the Infancy of Governments (…) the government was almost all prerogative�” With governors as fathers to them “watching over them for their good” the limitations were put in place to get prerogative determined in cases “which they and their ancestors had left, in the utmost latitude, to the wisdom of those princes who made no other but a right use of it, that is, for the good of their people” (§162). In fact, historically Locke tells us, good princes were dangerous to people’s liberties� They established precedent in the use of the prerogative that was misused by their successors (§166). 19 See Pasquino (1998), who also refers to earlier definitions of the doctrine in English common law tradition. Specifically, he refers to John Cowell’s definition according to which prerogative “ is that especial power, preeminance, or priveledge that the King hath in any kinde, over and above other persons, and above the ordinarie course of the common lawe, in the right of the crowne. ” Pasquino also, in the same context, refers to Albericus Gentilis, Coke, Baron Fleming, Sir Mathew Hale and Henry Parker, who are all early seventeenth century, mostly English, jurists� Some of them were in one way or another involved in English constitutional disputes between Parliament and the Stuart kings over the extent of their claimed prerogative (199f�)� 20 For this interpretation positioned as a direct answer to Schmitt, see McCormick 1998: 238 and Medina 2002: 355. 21 For this interpretation see Corbett 2006, Fatovic 2004b, Mattie 2005, Josephson 2002� 22 See McCormick (1998), who points to the gap between Schmitt’s articulation of the problem of sovereignty in Die Diktatur and in Political Theology � Within one year, Mc- Cormick argues, Schmitt had moved from rejecting a concept of sovereign dictatorship in favor of a commissarial dictatorship to an embrace of the former� 23 See Corbett (2006: 440), where he questions what seems to be a “legislative” power in the prerogative� An Introduction to the Theory of Crisis Containment 9 In view of this historical description, Pasquale Pasquino argues that Locke’s prerogative might be understood as a fourth power positioning itself in relation to the legislative, executive, and federative functions� 24 If understood within the constitutional organization of civil society, which represents the stabilization of the state of nature, prerogative is a naturally given authority (Pasquino 1998: 204). It is not a part of the divine theological creation but already refers to the historical beginnings of society� It is authority “rooted in history (which) must make a compromise with the power of law and with legal government in a modern society, such that the predictability and certainty of law appear as the very conditions of liberty and property; in Locke’s language, the latter being synonymous with human dignity” (205)� What is important to this positioning of source is that discretionary authority is not a legal power and therefore not one of subordination. It reflects the relationship between the people and the king as one of trust� If indeed Locke’s concept of the prerogative power is hooked to the assumption of people entering into the society as rational creatures, these people would never have left their protection to arbitrary power� That is also why they can, if the prerogative is misused by the prince “appeal to heaven” which is Locke’s code to the right to resist (§168). This might indeed be Locke’s answer to the emergency paradox� Protection is guaranteed by a relationship of civil authority between the king and the people� If this relation was bound by legality, it would be arbitrary and submissive� Since, historically and structurally, it is not bound by law, but based on trust, it might be wide and permissive enough to deal with necessities and overcome law’s limitations� This solution is both structural and political� As Pasquino puts it: For Locke, who is nonetheless among the first to theorize a modern concept of law, human beings certainly make history with laws, but the rule of law, cannot put their destiny entirely in their hands� Above, with prerogative, and below, with the right to resist, the political-constitutional system (…) remains open to the exceptional case; to be sure, it stands very far from any “absolutist/ decisionist” political theory, on one hand, and from any “rationalistic” hypothesis, on the other (205)� What the extralegal model reveals is that within the liberal tradition, deep in its foundational roots, there is a complex understanding of law and its exception� In fact, 17th century debates about law and political power were as much a part of the constitutional revolution taking place in England at this important birthplace of modern common law, as it was a part of Weimar’s democratic revolution� But as oppose to the Weimar historical arena, in Locke’s political reality exceptional powers were not understood as abnormal at all� On the contrary, they were understood as fundamental and at least as “normal” as society’s foundation may be� 24 See also Corbett’s argument that the prerogative is distinct from executive power (Corbett 2006: 445)� 10 k arin l oevy 2.2 The Legality Model: Law’s Authority Manifested Under Crisis We cannot understand law itself unless we see law as a project which aspires to realize the values of the rule of law (Dyzenhaus 2006a: 231)� The legality model - denying the existence of a legal category of exception and claiming that law’s resources can accommodate any kind of crisis - is usually described as a “monistic” legalistic stand in favor of pure containment through pure legality� It is often depicted as naïve at best and hypocritical at worst� 25 In view of Schmitt’s forceful criticism of law it was neglected and for many years, probably since Weimar, it was left under-theorized� It was David Dyzenhaus’ response to Oren Gross’ extra-legal measures model that served to highlight the appeal of this alternative model portraying it as legality’s political answer to the problem of containment� 26 Oren Gross has depicted the legality model in what he called the “business as usual” model: Under the Business as Usual model of emergency powers, a state of emergency does not justify a deviation from the “normal” legal system� No special “emergency” powers are introduced either on an ad hoc or a permanent basis� The ordinary legal system already provides the necessary answers to any crisis without the legislative or executive assertion of new or additional governmental powers (Gross & Ni Aolain 2006: 86). 27 Gross argued that this position is dangerously unrealistic� In the face of great calamities all governments will take what they see as necessary measures regardless of whether they ought to: “adopting a Business as Usual model means either being unaware of the reality of emergency management, or ignoring it and knowingly maintaining an illusory façade of normalcy” (ibid� 95)� This view of the legality model as being detrimental to the rule of law because it requires “governmental paralyses” in the name of legality and rights protection, 28 echoes Schmitt’s critic of the sovereignty of law� David Dyzenhaus has been one of Schmitt’s especially attentive readers long before he took part in the “post 9/ 11 emergency powers” debate� 29 He saw the need to deal with Schmitt’s legal and political thought within the Weimar discussions because of their reflection in contemporary legal theory debates about the concept of law (1998: 13). Contemporary legal philosophy, Dyzenhaus explains in the introduction to his edited book on Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, has two unstable options to choose from: a Dworkinian conception of an inherent legitimacy of law and a positivist conception of an 25 See for example Gross & Ni Aolain 2006: 94; Zuckerman 2006 . 26 Among other supporters of this model in the post 9/ 11 debate, see for example Cole 2004; Tribe & Gudridge 2004� 27 Later they claim this is a constitutional absolutist position joined by constitutional perfection argument� Gross rightly distinguishes this model from a model of accommodation which acknowledges the normative necessity of change in the constitution in view of crisis� 28 See also Ackerman 2004: 1030� 29 See for example Dyzenhaus 1997, 1998, 1999. An Introduction to the Theory of Crisis Containment 11 external power which utilizes law for good or bad reasons� These two options stem from Hobbes’ question, which is also Schmitt’s question: “How is order possible in the first place given the disintegration of the traditional justifications offered for the legitimacy of supreme power” (5). Hobbes’ answer is a deeply “emergency oriented” one� From the moment of crisis, which is a constitutive moment of political order, the only savior is the sovereign whose positive law - no matter what is its content - is the only rational way to overcome the misery of disorder� Liberals’ response to this tension is to deny that law is in itself legitimate, saying it is good or bad according to its internal (Dworkin) or external (positivists) morality� Meanwhile, and since neither option can provide a sufficient answer to the problem of indeterminacy, the legal norm remains neither positively known nor morally justified (7). 30 With this problem in mind Dyzenhaus is entering the post 9/ 11 emergency powers debates� His aim in portraying a legality model for dealing with crisis is to acknowledge legality as political in order to provide a vision not only of what it means for a constitutional regime to contain emergency, but of what authority means in a Rechtstaat � To answer Schmitt, Dyzenhaus argues, one must understand how law’s claim to authority - in normal times as well as in times of crisis - is both substantively normative and positively valid� Law is not a tool for political morality to use or abuse, it is a project of making real the idea of law - the idea that rule is politically justified only if it is governed by law� In this respect, the question of containment is not the question whether the rule of law can restrain politics, but the question of what is the politics of the rule of law� 31 The rule of law, explains Dyzenhaus, in times of peace as well as in times of crisis, is not a set of procedural, formal doctrines; it is a project of authority� The aim of the project is practical - to make law’s rule into reality� Each one of the participants in the project - the judiciary as well as the legislature and the executive - have an equally important role in the project, they don’t compete over power; they must all cooperate under a regulative assumption that each legal decision taken by another participant is in compliance with the project (2006: 147)� The rule of law therefore is not a theoretical concept to aspire to� It is both existentially constitutive, forming the conditions of “being an authority” (12) and regulative as it governs the interpretation of the decisions of all institutional actors (147)� What is most important in this description of law as a model for dealing with the emergency challenge is the underlying understanding of legal authority� Positive rule through positive law, Dyzenhaus claims, is only authoritative when it is a rule by law� This is the basis for law’s possibilities in emergencies and to its dangers� As the temptation to break the law (for a real or fabricated “necessity”) grows, so does the temptation to justify this conduct by adhering to a formal, hollow concept of legal- 30 For Dyzenhaus’ alternative response to Hobbes, see 2001, 2004, 2009� 31 In “The Politics of the Question of Constituent Power,” Dyzenhaus claims that the question of the inevitability of dualism is one which will be settled not by “legal science” but by “the politics of law” (145)� I suggest here that the legality model is Dyzenhaus’ attempt to show that an alternative politics exists within legal theory� 12 k arin l oevy ity� But this tendency is damaging to legal authority� In any real or alleged emergency, there is a genuine choice whether to respond to the emergency through the rule of law (66)� But because legality is regulative, when a court is called upon to interpret a legislative or an executive decision it ought to assume that the legislature intends to carry on with the project and uphold it rather than oppose it� Of course, the court will not always be able to disregard legislative decisions that defy legality� But even in these cases, when the legislator explicitly resists its role, it can expose such decisions for what they are� It will then, Dyzenhaus suggests, play a rather limited role, not of a Dworkinian Hercules but of a Hobbesian “weatherman”: “alerting the commonwealth to the storm clouds on the horizon when the rule of law which secures the fabric of civil society is put under strain” (12)� When the legality project is undermined - either by the legislature or the executive attempting to create “legal black holes,” with or without the judiciary’s complacency - an internal dualism takes place� In these situations the legal order is divided into two 32 - one that regulates the ordinary situation in accordance with the rule of law, another that gives officials unlimited discretion. Constitutional positivists will not see any legal problem with this internal distinction since as long as there is legislative authorization, officials are formally within the reach of the law� The legality model resists the dualism by requiring unity that challenges any formal separation of powers doctrine� 33 A crucial element in the legality model is the notion that the administrative state has a positive role to play in the rule of law project� It is not there to be limited but to create legal possibilities to deal with emergency situations, possibilities that cannot be achieved by the legislature or the judiciary alone (Dyzenhaus 2005: 73f�)� It is not only that no “branch” has a monopoly on the project or on a part of it, it is also that institutional imagination is in itself a necessity to resist emergencies’ harmful logic (2006a: 172)� For the rule of law to approach its ideals one needs what Dyzenhaus calls “rule of law furniture” in the image of SIAC or the Joint Committee on Human Rights that are concrete embodiments of the normative commitment of the legislature and the executive to the project (230)� Without such “furniture,” Dyzenhaus warns, the role of judges in upholding the rule of law in times of stress is confined to “weathermen.” They are limited to warning us that the executive and the legislative are signaling an “opt out�” 34 32 Referring to Ernst Fraenkel’s account of the Nazi legal order (101)� 33 It is interesting to note that in this sense there is no structural or inherent difference between rule in Nazi Germany and that in post 9/ 11 USA� Both are to some extent dualistic� Avoiding this dualism, moving away from it towards the aim of the project, is what the legality model is all about� 34 In contrast to many grim accounts of judicial automatic deference to the executive in emergency, Dyzenhaus is quite confident about the judiciary’s role in reviewing official conduct in crisis. But Positivist judges may experience the duty to uphold human rights as a crisis which they can finally overcome when exigencies require deference (2006a: 70)� An Introduction to the Theory of Crisis Containment 13 The legality model is meant to shutter the distinction between normal and exceptional by an inherent commitment to a broad legalism� This is an epistemic project of realizing law that creates its own ontology, its own exclusions� One can only know how to react legally in an emergency if one knows how to react legally� And one can only react legally if one reacts within a commitment to law. Under such commitment law can finally be both known and morally justified by an inherent restrictive discrimination. Without such commitment rule cannot be legal or decisive� That is why hesitant liberals in face of emergency will institutionalize extra-legality in the same way that Weimar constitutional scholars - through Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution - institutionalized the harmful determination that “Here is where public law stops” (Schmitt 2005: 4)� If Schmitt argued that the normal order has to be based on a fundamental radical political distinction the legality model assumes a project which creates this distinction upon legality� It forces normality by its valid laws, procedures and institutions� It forces validity by being “a project�” It’s a project of power - but a very specific one - that which relies on the distinction of legality� 2.3 The Exceptional Model: A Mixed Regime [N]o Republic will be perfect, unless it has provided for everything with laws, and provided a remedy for every incident, and fixed the method of governing it. And therefore concluding I say, that those Republics which in urgent perils do not have resort either to a Dictatorship or a similar authority, will always be ruined in grave incidents (Machiavelli 1984: 1.34.). In their contribution to the post-9/ 11 discussions of emergency powers, John Ferejohn and Pasquale Pasquino conclude that legal dualism is a universal feature of at least the non-absolute western tradition (239)� By legal dualism they mean a theory of government that ontologically assumes norm and exception as two different states of the world (226)� They distinguish between “realist dualists” who believe that the distinction between norm and exception is objective and therefore “a neutral, involuntary mechanism can be established in order to detect its appearing or disappearing as a state of the world” (ibid�) and the “skeptic dualists,” (or Schmittians) who deny the epistemological clarity of the distinction� These skeptics, they argue, will insist that some organ must be authorized to declare the exception� The model that they suggest as the basis of a constitutional theory of emergency powers is built on this dualist assumption� A declared existence of exception (as a special threat to a specific political order of a given political community) triggers and justifies exceptional government which is preservative or conservative in that it functions to reestablish the regular government (ibid�)� 14 k arin l oevy This model arguably follows the archetype of the Roman commissarial dictatorship which influenced - although through various anachronistic reinterpretations 35 - modern theory and modern emergency institutions� 36 Specifically, Republican political theory’s adherence to dualism was strongly shaped by Machiavelli who described this institution as a reason for Rome’s longevity: [A] Dictator was made for a (limited) time and not in perpetuity, and only to remove the cause for which he was created; and his authority extended only in being able to decide by himself the ways of meeting that urgent peril, (and) to do things without consultation, and to punish anyone without appeal; but he could do nothing to diminish (the power) of the State, such as would have been the taking away of authority from the Senate or the people, to destroy the ancient institutions of the City and the making of new ones� So that taking together the short time of the Dictatorship and the limited authority that he had, and the Roman People uncorrupted, it was impossible that he should exceed his limits and harm the City (1984: 1.34). This is Machiavelli’s heritage of the Roman model� His admiration of this safe and sound institution is echoed in Neo-Roman and early liberal conceptualization of exception as a functional, temporary and preservative ancient model� 37 What was the Roman institution really like is a very troubling historical question� For one, it was most probably not a legislatively devised institution but a customary one (cf. Manin 2008: 4). The traditional understanding of the model as a legal mechanism is probably not accurate� Machiavelli’s account of what seems to be a prescription for handling the exception within a constitutional order was criticized by Schmitt who argued in Die Diktatur that Machiavelli’s description of the commissarial institution had initiated the process of making dictatorship the very centre of politics, stressing the idea that a technical mechanism can be put in place, by law, to deal with the exceptional situation and leading the whole modern state 35 See in Manin 2008: 3-7. 36 Ferejohn and Pasquino (2004) refer to the modern institutions as the Neo-Roman model stating the difference in that the dictator in the Neo-Roman model enjoys a popular or democratic mandate (213)� Among followers of the Neo-Roman tradition in contemporary debates are for example Rossiter’s classic model for emergency powers in Constitutional Dictatorship (2002 [1948]) and more recently Arato 2002; Campbell 2003: 31-8. A contemporary model of emergency powers, inspired by the Roman model is Bruce Ackerman’s “Emergency Constitution” (2004)� In Before the Next Attack (2006), Ackerman grants the power of declaring a state of emergency to the President, who also wields emergency power� Ackerman follows this tradition in requiring legislative reauthorization of the emergency after a week or two and then re-authorization by ever-increasing legislative majorities� Otherwise, the state of emergency would expire� 37 See, for example, in Blackstone’s writing on the suspension of habeas corpus in English constitutional law: “As the senate of Rome was wont to have recourse to a dictator, a magistrate of absolute authority, when they judged the republic in any imminent danger…� In like manner this experiment ought only to be tried in cases of extreme emergency; and in these the nation parts with its liberty for a while in order to preserve it forever” (132)� An Introduction to the Theory of Crisis Containment 15 theory to be developed out of a theory of dictatorship� 38 Without laying out a modern state theory, Machiavelli is responsible, said Schmitt, for shifting the classical notion which was wholly commissarial to a modern expansionist dictatorship by a sovereign: [A]s the practical task of early modern state builders becomes the expansion of political power through the prosecution of boundary defining external war and the suppression of internal religious civil war, the normatively unencumbered and technically disposed executive becomes the model of political practice (Mc- Cormick 1998: 222). Civil war and foreign war which were traditionally understood as exceptional circumstances became something else, fundamental, constituting the normal situation and the normal government as legitimate� This normalized exception is ultimately theorized by Hobbes whose sovereign state is the dictatorship whose whole task is in guarding the ever present exception (Mc- Cormick 1998: 75). 39 This historical and theoretical process radicalized as sovereignty becomes popular sovereignty and therefore authority is derived not from a definite individual but a non-definite, inaccessible population. This development also causes emergency actions to be more extreme - as they are supposedly sanctioned by this popular sovereignty� There is now a historical justification for the violent destruction of an old order and the creation of a new one out of nothing: “Sovereign dictatorship becomes the power to perpetually suspend and change political order in the name of an inaccessible people and an eschatological notion of history” (ibid�)� 40 As noted above, in Die Diktatur, Schmitt saw in the Roman institution of commissarial dictatorship “a wise invention of the Roman Republic”: a temporarily bound, functional institution with the sole task of restoring the previously standing legal order (McCormick 1998: 222; 225). John McCormick had argued that Schmitt’s shift from this commissarial model to his more famous sovereign dictatorship model denouncing the possibility of a dual regime reflects a change in his attitude towards the normal order itself: “in the exception, the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition” (Schmitt 2005: 15)� It is so corrupt by its own mechanism that it is not anymore worth saving but replacing (Mc- Cormick 1998: 224f.). I am not sure that what is described by McCormick as a shift in Schmitt’s portrayal of sovereignty is indeed so dramatic� The problem of sovereignty is important for Schmitt as it is the problem of political authority� In Political Theology he criticizes the liberal denial of this problem which in Die Dikta- 38 McCormick (1998: 221-223) describes this argument referring to Die Diktatur , 6-13� The Communist dictatorship represents for Schmitt the culmination of this modern type of totally unrestrained political action generated by the “merging of a wholly technical activity of dictatorial action with a politics of normalcy in modern political theory and practice” (ibid� 221)� 39 Referring to Schmitt , Die Diktatur, 22-25� 40 Schmitt’s examples are mainly from French revolution and Bolshevik theorists ( Die Diktatur 15-16; 143-45)� 16 k arin l oevy tur he related to modern state building� The move from a clear concept of political authority (Classical or Monarchical) to a vague one is exemplified by the move from commissarial dictatorship to exceptionalism� It is not that he now prefers a sovereign exception to the commissarial one� Instead, he now exposes the impossibility of a commissarial solution within the modern concept of political power� But the search for political authority and the possibility of its stability was not only an aspect of Schmitt’s criticism of liberal constitutionalism but also his main aim as a political thinker� In Constitutional Theory (2007), 41 Schmitt re-introduces the sovereign in the legal and political notion of “constituent powers” which is manifested in the political generation of a constitution and in its destruction� This concept is for Schmitt essential to solving the problem of the exception and achieving a modern political order: The political greatness of the French revolution lies in the fact that despite all its liberal and Rechtstaat principles, the thought of the French people’s political unity did not cease to be the deciding directive even for a moment� It remains indubitable that all separations, divisions, limitations, and means of controlling state power operate only inside the framework of political unity� With this unity, however, even the relative character of all constitutional laws is still indisputable� The constitution was not a contract between the prince and the people or, indeed, between some estate organizations, but rather a political decision affecting the one and indivisible nation determining its own destiny� Every constitution presupposes this unity (2007: 102f� [50 in German ed�])� This presupposed unity of the constitutionalized political order is also the presupposition of the existence of a sovereign� In the case of the Weimar Republic, a liberal constitution presupposed a political decision in its favor� Weimar’s concrete historical circumstances of its constitutional moment - the democratic revolution and specifically the juristic transfer from a monarchical constitution abolished by the elected constituent assembly functioning as a sovereign dictatorship from its first meeting in February 1919 until the promulgation of the Weimar Constitution in August 1919 - was the first time that Germany adopted the democratic doctrine of the constituent power of the people (109 [59)]� But pre-war liberal constitutionalism “which had proved itself a method of formalistic evasion” of the constituent power of the monarch was incapable of registering that fact (107f� [57])� 42 This is the place where Schmitt can help in understanding the political strength of the exceptional model� For Schmitt, in the transition from monarchical to democratic legitimacy, the fundamental event of constitution making is where the political unity is manifested� Moments of exception - constitutional emergencies, force the recognition of the real subject of state power, the real representation of political unity� The political is back in place within the constitutional scheme by the introduction of a duality in the mechanisms of the state� 41 Verfassungslehre , 1928. 42 See also the analyses of Cristi 1998: 188. An Introduction to the Theory of Crisis Containment 17 The political unity is an internal feature of the constitution introducing the sovereign as a legitimate theme for constitutional discussion: The sovereign actions which set in motion the activity of constituent power are constitutional norm violations� They don’t imply the destruction or suppression of the constitution of the whole - on the contrary - such cases confirm constitutional validity - they are justified by particular exceptional and abnormal transitory situations which demonstrate the superiority of the existential over the normative, they force the recognition of sovereignty (Schmitt 2007: 191)� It is now possible to re-read the exceptional model for emergency powers with respect to the question of political power and stability� As in the Roman dictatorship, what is preserved by the dictatorial institutions is not the normal legal order but the normal political order � This doesn’t mean law is exempt from this process. On the contrary, the specific ways by which these institutions are crafted - the specific legal authorizations and limitations - may reflect that which is to be preserved because the authority of the state cannot be separated from its value� For Schmitt, this is exactly how sovereignty rescues the legal thought of the political and the political thought of law from their vicious circles: by creating concrete legal government as political� 43 In “constituent power” he sees “the political will whose power or authority is capable of making the concrete comprehensive decision over the type and form of its own political existence” (2007: 125 [75]) 44 There is always a connection, therefore, between power and norm� Dualism is not inevitable because the fact is separated from the legal norm; it is inevitable because the dialectical relationship between the exceptional situation and the normal one is essential to the political order� What is left unexplained under the exceptional model is how exactly this dialectical relationship works� Schmitt’s answer is unhelpful here because he believes the price to be paid for political order to be possible in a Rechtstaat is that it must fundamentally remain authoritative� In that he undermines the possibilities of the dialectics between norm and exception to produce varied types and forms� For Schmitt, democracy is possible only because it expresses, like monarchy, political absolutism� I believe that this view too easily undermines the creative political work a liberal rule of law has historically done and is still doing in view of its exception� 45 43 See supra note 4� 44 The constitution-making power is based on a concrete political being: “It is based on the political decision concerning the type and form of its own being, which stems from its political being ” (125)� 45 I believe that Schmitt’s analysis in Constitutional Theory does not contradict this suggestion� That the people remain the origin of the political action “the source of all power” does not make constitutionalism static (nor is it part of a theory of political theology)� Constitution making power “expresses itself in continually new forms, producing from itself these ever renewing forms and organizations” (2007: 28 [79]). But what accounts for this “renewal”? Where does it happen and how? Historically, I believe it is the specific institutions in which these processes happen and the mechanisms through which they normalize� Just as a revolutionary mechanism such as “we the people” has 18 k arin l oevy I would suggest that the strength of this model lies not in a direct normative answer to the question of legal constraint but in its ability to historicize the place of emergency powers in public law� Machiavelli’s description of the commissarial model which had indeed influenced the evolution of the modern arrangements was by no means a part of a comprehensive modern state theory� He admired the commissarial model not as a “constitutional arrangement” but as a useful mechanism for the purpose of political longevity� His political thought developed a notion of accidental events as opportunities to make good or bad use of by a ruler whose aim is the longevity of a city� Accordingly he saw in the commissarial arrangement a clever and historically proven tool for governance� In this reading, the exceptional model for emergency powers must be understood as a governmental tool engineered with the sole purpose of the preservation of a given political order� It is not intended to overcome law’s harmful inflexibility; it is not intended to affirm law’s political identity. What was preserved by the Roman dictatorial institutions is not the legal order but the political order� But this doesn’t mean law is exempt from this process� On the contrary, it is strictly a legal process of political preservation� “In a Republic,” Machiavelli asserted, “it should never happen that it is governed by extraordinary methods” (1984: 1.34). The exceptional model takes this recommendation seriously� In a close similarity to the legality model, here too, the normal order is essential to the creation of mechanisms to regularly respond to the extraordinary� The difference is that under the exceptional model the normal order itself is contingent and does not amount to a political project of broad legality� In this respect, the exceptional model provides a thin and unstable answer to the emergency paradox� The mechanisms established for exceptional government are contingent on the specific normal political order and law is a tool of preservation - indeed, an easily breakable tool� The exceptional model condemns us to look at the legal field of emergency management as an arena for an ongoing dialectical interaction between law and politics� The good news is that in this dialectics, the place of law is not strictly marginalized by “politics”� Thus, the interaction itself and not the question which prevails may come to the center of study� been normalized in debates and practices of judicial review (although of course, never fully normalized), so was the conservative mechanism of emergency powers normalized through processes of positivization� Theoretically, though, this latter move is not yet fully accounted for� An Introduction to the Theory of Crisis Containment 19 3 The Dialectic of Containment: Emergency, Legality and Political Possibilities For the moment, we should resist the illegitimate and dangerous expansion of emergency government with whatever means we have at our disposal, constituent power not being among them� But if we succeed, which we probably will because of the weakness and confusion (and obvious economic mismanagement! ) of the executive, if the republic is saved this time around, we should remember that we will never know how close we came to losing it if the external or internal forces opposed to our freedom, al Qaeda or Ashcroft’s disloyal minions, had been stronger (Arato 2002: 476)� In a study of Machiavelli’s use of the term “ accidenti, ” John McCormick argues that “accidents” - not necessarily as disasters but as historically specific occurrences that are hard or impossible to foresee and should be treated depending on their danger or profit and always in time - were the central focus of Machiavelli’s political thought (1993: 889). In this, he claims, and not in contrasting virtue to fortune, Machiavelli was quite radical: He speaks of politics extensively - almost exclusively - in terms of that which is conventionally considered remote� And he speaks of preventing, forestalling, or putting to good use that which is normally thought to be unpredictable or uncontrollable (891). But this obsession with the exceptional - Machiavelli’s awe towards the place of accidents in political life and death - does not end in prescribing an extralegal solution by a “prudent man”� On the contrary, Machiavelli’s primary use of the term “accident” stays within the context of foresight: a strict causal relation which foresight would have prevented or made use of� As he describes the variability of unexpected events in a republic’s life, Machiavelli suggests a variety of ways, mostly mundane and legal ways, to foresee, prevent and deal with them (898). What this insight suggests is that the modern roots of “exception” as a core notion in political thought, does not match well with strict either/ or distinctions� In this early modern context where the exception was introduced to the heart of political thought it was not centered on the argument that the unrestricted nature of political phenomena necessitates an unrestricted political actor� Rather, what exception necessitates is a flexible and functional social and political engineering of foresight and management� This insight is also the conclusion in the above discussion of the different models of answers to the emergency paradox: It is the need for flexibility and management of the extraordinary that is the rational for prerogative power in Locke’s extralegal model� That is why it is broad and limited by law only retrospectively� It is the resources of legality, imaginative and normative, that are to be used in constructing the institutional “furniture,” that Dyzenhaus believes necessary to confront exceptional situations. And finally - it is the regularized manufacturing of “exceptional government” for the sake of securing “normal government” that is the basic feature of an exceptional model� These resourceful efforts to deal with the extraordinary by “managing” 20 k arin l oevy and “containing” it are strongly connected to political order in constitutional states� Whenever modern constitutional states are involved in containing crisis they are also involved in generating distinctions and therefore political promise of identity and stability� In this respect, Schmitt was right that the reality of political life in a modern Rechtstaat is inseparably connected to the possibility of irregularity� But the implication of this connection cannot be grasped under a paradigmatic model of rigid oppositions� Instead, it is the complex solutions that are doing the work here: foreseeing, regulating and engineering solutions to irregularity, imagining crisis and managing it, are to be seen as road maps to the construction and reconstruction of modern political stability� The management of crisis is not “a hole” in the systematic logical mechanism of modern political units such as states� It is a part, quite central part of this mechanism� How should we understand crisis management as an aspect of government in modern states? Is it a conservative aspect, as the Neo- Roman model implies? Is it a revolutionary aspect, as both the legality and the extra-legal model imply? I suggest that these questions may be addressed by a conceptual framework that reads through the fixed oppositions in order to explore the connections between legalized practices of crisis management and processes of political stabilization� It is what happens between the historical prerogative of “good princes” and the people’s “appeal to heaven; ” it is what happens when “rule of law furniture” interact; and it is the connections between governing choices and the longevity of “the City” - that should more clearly and pragmatically be traced� The challenge for a legal and political theory of crisis management is to expose the dialectic of law and crisis in view of the political possibilities that it produces� An Introduction to the Theory of Crisis Containment 21 Works Cited Ackerman, Bruce� “The Emergency Constitution�” Yale Law Journal 113�5 (2004): 1029- 1091� ---. Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism. 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Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005 ---� “The Political Constitution of Emergency Powers: Some Conceptual Issues�” Emergencies and the Limits of Legality. Ed� Victor V� Ramraj� New York: Cambridge UP, 2008. 145-155. Vermuele, Adrian� “Holmes on Emergencies�” Stanford Law Review 61.1 (2008): 163-201. Witt, John F�� “Review: Anglo-American Empire and the Crisis of the Legal Frame (Will the Real British Empire Please Stand Up? )”� Harvard Law Review 120�3 (2007): 754-97� Zuckerman, Ian� “One Law for War and Peace? Judicial Review and Emergency Powers Between the Norm and the Exception�” Constellations 13�4 (2006): 522-545� W alter B enn M ichaels Homo Sacher-Masoch: Agamben’s American Dream “There is no man who does not want to be a despot when he has an erection,” says Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer (134f�)� He is, of course, quoting the Marquis de Sade, and his point in doing so is to suggest the ways in which the “biopolitical” “meaning of sexuality and physiological life itself” is anticipated in what he calls ‘sadomasochism�’” The sadist, he thinks, confronts the masochist as “bare life,” and it is the essence of his sadism that he can do with her (or him) anything he likes, unconstrained by law� Sade’s Chateau de Silling is, on this reading, an early incarnation of the Nazi lager , where “power confronts nothing but bare life,” where “human beings” were “so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime” (171)� And the Nazis themselves are early examples of that “modern totalitarianism” made possible by the “worldwide deployment” of the state of exception (Agamben 2005: 87). Thus what Agamben characterizes as “the growing importance of sadomasochism in modernity” (1988: 134) is due to the way in which “the totalitarian character of the organization of life in Silling’s castle” has turned out to model the growing threat - from Auschwitz to Guantánamo - of totalitarianism itself� And the moment of sadomasochism is the moment in which the state of exception proves the rule, the moment of “emergency” declared by the sovereign in which the sovereign’s suspension of the laws (now, as in the Chateau de Silling, “anything is possible”) reveals the way in which the law is itself founded on a power that it cannot itself authorize� This is the moment in which the liberal state (and its characteristic appeal to the law) is revealed not as the alternative to totalitarianism but as its condition of possibility� There is, however, another possible reading of what Agamben perhaps wrongly calls sadomasochism but of what he rightly calls its modernity� If the sadism in sadomasochism comes from Sade, the masochism comes from the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose masterpiece, Venus in Furs , was published in 1869, almost a century after de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom was written (and almost a half century before it was published)� In Venus in Furs , naturally, power matters as much as it does in Sade but it matters differently� And if in one sense this difference is just the reverse face of sadism - what the sadist wants is to be a despot, what the masochist wants is to be, as the hero of Venus in Furs declares, a “slave” - in another sense, it undoes rather than fulfills the complementarity of the despot-slave relation. For Sacher-Masoch’s masochist does not just want to be a slave, he wants to be a slave by “contract,” like the contract in which he agrees to become the “property” of his cruel mistress while she, “in exchange,” agrees to “wear fur 26 W alter B enn M ichaels as often as practical and especially when she’s being cruel to her slave” (195)� And like the several contracts Sacher-Masoch actually entered into with his mistresses� Masochism (as opposed to what Agamben calls sadomasochism) is thus linked from the start not only to compulsion but to choice, and the “cruel mistress” of choice has remained central to its libidinal economy, which identifies freedom with the right to sell not only one’s labor but also, if one chooses, one’s person and which insists on the pleasure associated with the exercise of that right. If, in other words, the appeal of sadism is identified with the deprivation of a right (slavery), the attraction of masochism is as the assertion of a right (volunteer slavery)� Furthermore, inasmuch as the right asserted is the right to contract, to buy and sell, it’s a right that is available only in a market economy and is as alien to the Chateau de Silling as it was to Auschwitz which, like all the death camps, as Agamben points out, sacrificed all “economic considerations” to the assertion of the “sovereign power” over “bare life” (1988: 141f.). The camps, in other words, may represent the utopia of the sadist but - unlinked to economic considerations, indeed “put into effect at all costs” when, as Agamben suggests, by any economic logic, the war effort should have made those costs unacceptable - they are the masochist’s nightmare� Or to put the point more positively, the economistic logic of masochism represents and has since their inception represented not just an alternative to but also a critique of the sadism of the camps� Thus, something like Agamben’s remark about the irrelevance of economic considerations to the lager has been canonical in discussions of the Nazis’ exterminationist racism at least since the trials at Nuremberg when Albert Speer eagerly agreed with the prosecutor, Mr� Justice Jackson, that the “problem of creating armaments to win the war for Germany was made much more difficult” by the “anti-Jewish campaign” being “waged” by Speer’s co-defendants� If the Jews “who were evacuated” to death camps “had been allowed to work for me,” Speer testified in 1946, “it would have been a considerable advantage” for the war effort� But neither masochism nor neoliberalism can be understood merely as a commitment to the primacy of economic considerations� Rather, they both require a commitment to a specific economic form: for the masochist, to freedom of contract (the cruel mistress of Venus in Furs says that in the ancient world “liberty and slavery went hand in hand” but the idea that choice turns slavery into freedom is oriented more to the future of von Mises and Hayek than to the past); for the Ordo-Liberals (seeking in Foucault’s words, a “fondation légitimante” [2004: 85] for the state that would replace the will of the race-based volk ), to the preservation of “economic liberty” and thus to the desirability of protecting competitive markets� So where for Speer the problem with racism was that it was bad for production, for the earliest neoliberals, the problem was that it was bad for capitalism� Thus the critique of racism appears in its decisive neoliberal form not in Speer but in Gary Becker’s The Economics of Discrimination (1957), which argues that racism is harmful not so much to workers as to capitalists� Why? Because the capitalist who will only employ, say, whites, arbitrarily limits the labor force available to him and thus Homo Sacher-Masoch: Agamben’s American Dream 27 drives up his labor costs� “There is a remarkable agreement in the literature,” Becker wrote, “on the proposition that capitalists from the dominant group are the major beneficiaries of prejudice and discrimination in a competitive capitalistic economic system�” But, he goes on to say, “If W is considered to represent whites or some other dominant group, the fallacious nature of this proposition becomes clear, since discrimination harms W capitalists and benefits W workers (1971: 21-2)� And if this conclusion seemed surprising when it was first announced, today, as the website of the Library of Economics and History puts it, the “idea that discrimination is costly to the discriminator is common sense among economists�” Thus, for free market economists (for whom all relations are essentially economic), the history of the last half century has represented a repudiation of the camps (where no relations were economic) and, in particular, a repudiation of the racism in which both the inefficient and immoral refusal of the market is embodied� For Agamben, however, the threat of the camps and of racism’s power to, in Judith Butler’s words, make some lives “grievable” and others “ungrievable” (2009: 24) remains central� Indeed, as the state of emergency declared after September 11 ceases to be the “exception” and becomes “the rule” (2005: 22), the Patriot Act, Agamben says, produces “a legally unnameable and unclassifiable being” whose status “can only be compared,” he insists, “to the legal situation of the Jews in the Nazi lager ” (4)� And no more in Washington than in Weimar does this normalization of the state of exception - the sovereign’s suspension of the law in order to save the state - defend democracy� Rather it “leads inevitably to the establishment of a totalitarian regime” (15)� For Agamben, then, just as the sadism at the Chateau de Silling anticipates that of the camps, the “totalitarian character of the organization of life” (1988: 135) in the chateau prefigures “modern totalitarianism” (2). And although this account of modernity is in certain respects very different from that of the neoliberals - what they see as the alternative to totalitarianism he sees as the gateway to totalitarianism - it is in certain respects very similar - above all, of course, in its sense that the great danger is precisely the danger of the totalitarian� Hence Agamben’s and Butler’s fear of the camps is characteristically shared by people with theoretical positions very different from theirs and with very different politics as well� For example, where Agamben criticizes George W� Bush for paving the way to totalitarianism, the American writer Paul Berman (in his book Terror and Liberalism) praises Bush for responding “to 9/ 11” by recognizing that the attack on the World Trade Center was “not just about terror” but was more fundamentally the expression of “a new kind of totalitarianism” (191)� From this perspective, the war in Iraq counts as a continuation of the struggle against the fascists, the Nazis and the Communists, “totalitarian movements, each and all” (xiii), as Berman puts it� And for Berman (as for Agamben), Hitler and the death camps are the gold standard of totalitarianism� Hence the threat of a new Hitler looms as large in Terror and Liberalism as in State of Exception, with the difference, of course, 28 W alter B enn M ichaels that where in Berman (as in Bush’s own rhetoric), it was Saddam Hussein who posed that threat, in Agamben, it was Bush himself� That’s the point of identifying Guantánamo with Auschwitz� Of course, during the Bush years, quarrels and comparisons like this were frequent� Joseph O’Neill’s recent and widely praised (not just by professional literary critics but by President Obama, who, in an interview with the New York Times , called it “fascinating ��� A wonderful book”) Netherland captures their tone perfectly in an argument between a couple living in Manhattan whose marriage falls apart in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the beginning of the war in Iraq� Saddam is “horrible,” the wife acknowledges, but the U�S� “has no moral or legal authority” to wage war against him; after all, we do not think that just because Stalin was a “monster” “we should have supported Hitler in his invasion of Russia” (97)� To which the husband responds, “You’re saying Bush is like Hitler�” To which the wife replies, “I’m not comparing Bush to Hitler ��� Hitler is just an extreme example” (98). There obviously can be no winner in debates like this and, in fact, their real function has nothing to do with producing a winner� That is, the relevant question is not whether Saddam or Bush is more like Hitler; it’s not about where the true totalitarian threat is coming from; it is instead about what it means to insist - with Agamben and Butler and Bush and Berman - that totalitarianism is the threat� And in Netherland, the identities - or rather, the job descriptions - of the arguers begin to suggest an answer to this question� The supposedly “conservative” husband, Hans, is an equities analyst, specializing in “large cap oil and gas stocks,” originally from Holland but now working for a bank in New York; the supposedly liberal wife is a “corporate litigator,” “radicalized,” hitherto, “only in the service of her client,” and “with not the slightest bone to pick about money and its doings” (96)� When they begin a trial separation (in December 2001), they put the million dollars they make from the sale of their Tribeca loft into “government bonds, a cautious spread of stocks,” and, “operating on a tip” from an economist they trust, into gold� But they put most of their money - another two million dollars - into a joint savings account (“the market was making me nervous,” the narrator husband says) and leave a couple of hundred thousand in “various checking accounts” (30-1). The price of gold went from $280 an ounce in January 2002 to $350 an ounce in December of the same year, so they were right to trust that economist� And the husband was right to be nervous about the market; although at the end of 2001, the Dow recovered briefly from its post-9/ 11-crash, it was not until 2003 that it began seriously to rise and it was not until 2006 that it exceeded its Clinton-era high of 11,723� And it was not until October 2007 (about six months before Netherland was published) that it reached its alltime high, 14,164� So our equities analyst and corporate litigator did exactly the right thing during the down years and, whatever they ended up feeling about the relative merits of Bush and Saddam, they ended up feeling it in a much higher tax bracket� Homo Sacher-Masoch: Agamben’s American Dream 29 Or at least they would have if, at the end of the Bush years, there had still been such a thing as a very high tax bracket� But, as you can see, income tax rates have been in a general decline since the end of the 1970s, and tax cuts are, of course, only one aspect of the neoliberal agenda that has dominated American politics, in Democratic administrations as in Republican ones, over the last fifty years. Indeed, Netherland , as much as it’s a novel of September 11, is also a novel of the economic policies - the commitment to free trade and to the mobility of both capital and labor - that helped make the World Trade Center a target for the attacks in the first place. The mobility of capital part is, of course, suggested by its hero’s job but the mobility of labor - the obsession with immigration - is actually much more central to the novel, insisted upon both by its parallels with and differences from the novel on which it’s modeled, The Great Gatsby � Thus in Netherland , Gatsby ’s Dutch sailors become the Dutch equities analyst and the ethnically and professionally vague Jimmy Gatz becomes a Trinidadian entrepreneur with Indian roots, Chuck Ramkisson� And Fitzgerald’s famous list of Gatsby’s guests - “From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers” and “from farther out on the Island the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia” and “from West Egg came the Poles and ��� Don C� Schwartze ���” - gets reincarnated in a description of the people Chuck talks to on the phone: “From Bangalore, there came calls from a man named Nandavanam ��� From Hillside, Queens, there was George el Faizy, ��� and, from a private jet to-ing and fro-ing between Los Angeles and London, there was Faruk Patel ���” (O’Neill 161)� But where Gatsby was, to say the least, nervous about the multi-racial American that the immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had produced - the descendants of the Dutch sailors were not expected to be happy about the arrival of the “Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia” on what was once their Long Island - Netherland is, also to say the least, enthusiastically celebratory: its Dutch narrator is never happier than Fig� 1: Historical Tax Rates for the Lowest and Highest Income Earners� 2 August 2011 <http: / / en�wikipedia�org/ wiki/ File: Chart_1�png>� 30 W alter B enn M ichaels when he’s finding himself “the only white man” in the room or, more frequently, on the cricket field. (Indeed, the repeated appearances of ethnic catalogues like the one cited above are Netherland ’s outstanding formal feature�) A straightforward way to put the difference between the two texts would be just to note that Gatsby was published in 1925, in the wake of the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 - the so-called National Origins Act, which if it closed the barn door a little too late on all the Abrams’s and Schwartzes who had already arrived, could at least (basing its quotas on the 1890 census, when many of them had not yet shown up) keep their numbers from growing, and could guarantee that there would be no dark-skinned people of Asian origin looking to play cricket� The immigration quota from India in 1925 was one hundred� In 2002, by contrast (when most of Netherland takes place), there were 66,644 Indian immigrants� Which is just to say that Netherland is set not in what O’Neill describes as the “autonomous” America of Gatsby - the America the Immigration Act of 1924 sought to preserve - but in what he calls the “post-nationalist” America produced, he says, by “9/ 11 and the globalization of the economy�” And if we take the globalization of the economy part seriously, we can see that it dates back long before 2001 to the Immigration Act of 1965, which got rid of the racial quotas established in 1924 and (in line with the economic critique of discrimination launched by neoliberals like Becker) explicitly repudiated race as a criterion for admission� The new criteria were primarily economic and they produced a massive increase in immigration, especially from previously restricted areas� In 1970, for example, there were only 51,000 foreign born Americans from India; by 2006, that number was 1�5 million� Thus Netherland ’s version of the American dream - featuring “black and brown and��� a few white faces” is no longer as white as Gatsby’s (“’We’re all white here,’” [137], you will remember Jordan Baker reminding Tom Buchanan)� And, perhaps more to the point, it’s no longer as American either� For one thing, other countries have had the dream too� In the last half century, immigration world-wide has almost doubled (Shah 2008). More crucially, it’s not quite as American because it’s not essentially national� Indeed, if what you want is to maximize the efficiency of labor markets, the insistence on the integrity of the nation and even of the state looks and is essentially reactionary� That’s why the current resistance to immigration in the U�S�, even if it has economic motives, can only appeal either to a kind of shame-faced racism or to legality, which is to say, the state itself� We have nothing against immigration, the anti-immigration and anti-neoliberal argument goes, we just believe everyone should follow the law� And, of course, neoliberal purists reject this, arguing that illegal immigration is actually preferable to legal immigration because it “responds to market forces in ways that legal immigration does not” (Hanson 5)� In fact, insofar as neoliberal economists express reservations about open immigration, it’s only in the terms derived from Milton Friedman’s famous remark that “It’s just obvious you cannot have free immigration and a welfare state” (Brimelow 1997)� His point, of course, was that poor immigrants Homo Sacher-Masoch: Agamben’s American Dream 31 are encouraged to come for the welfare rather than the jobs� But inasmuch as the target of the neoliberal critique is really the welfare state, the goal was always to maximize immigration and minimize welfare� And, in fact, since the Clinton welfare reform of the 90s, that’s exactly what has happened� Thus the neoliberal left - its arguments couched in the terms of anti-racism and the benefit to the economy - and the neoliberal right - its arguments couched in terms of respect for individual choice and the benefit to the economy - both fight against closing the borders. And the nativist fantasy of ending immigration serves only as a symptom of the economic reality - the increasing gap between the rich and the poor - that the economic system embodied by the immigrant has produced� For if increased immigration is a technology for fulfilling the commitment to competitive markets, increased income inequality is a characteristic outcome of that commitment. In 1982, the top 20% of the American population made about 51% of all the money earned in the U.S.; in 2007, the top 20% made a little over 61% of all the money earned. But this kind of inequality represents an opportunity not a problem for a novel like Netherland , which enthusiastically registers the cultural differences neoliberalism makes available - that’s the meaning of all its ethnic catalogs; that’s the meaning, more generally, of the celebrations of diversity that characterize almost every institution of the American upper class - while at the same time it redescribes neoliberalism’s inequalities as opportunities for friendship - not just between the one white and the many black and brown faces but between the multi-millionaire equities analyst and the fellow cricketer near the very bottom of the service sector� Thus the “awkwardness” (O’Neill 173) “beneath the slapping of the hands” that Hans experiences when he runs into one of his team-mates working as a gas station attendant on 14 th Street is attributed to the fact that they all respected each other’s privacy off the field not to the fact that one of them is a multimillionaire and the other is behind a cash register� What the equities analyst wants above all from his black, brown and broke teammates is their “respect,” and although he wonders why it “matter[s] so much to him,” anyone who’s read Richard Sennett’s encomiastic Respect in a World of Inequality or the political theorist William Connolly’s paeans to what he calls “deep pluralism” and to transmuting “cultural antagonisms” into “debates marked by agonistic respect between the partisans” (Connolly 47) could give him the answer� For Connolly, deep pluralism is not just a political but also an epistemological position - an effort to avoid both relativism and universalism - and what’s supposed to be distinctive about it - what makes it deep - is its critique of the idea that the significant differences between, say, religions, should be understood as differences in what he calls “abstract beliefs�” Beliefs should instead be understood as “embedded” - as inseparable “from disciplinary practices, cultural routines, and the education of sensory experience” (58). They should, in effect, be understood as aspects of identity - “faith,” he says, goes along with “sexuality, language, cooking habits and temperament” - and we should thus cultivate an “appreciation of diversity” (168) that goes be- 32 W alter B enn M ichaels yond the liberal tolerance of what other people think (their “abstract beliefs”) to a recognition that “thinking mixes affect, feeling, memories and ideas into a qualitative ensemble indissoluble into separate ‘parts’” (165)� And once we’ve recognized that, we can commit ourselves to an “ethos of pluralism” that respects not just different ways of believing but different ways of being� As an epistemology, the weakness of this position is perhaps obvious� It may well be the case that our ideas are inextricably bound up with, say, our affective responses, but they are nonetheless entirely separable with respect to their epistemic claims� My language, my sexuality and my cooking habits make no claim to truth - my ideas do� And when we are confronted not with other people’s sexual desires and food preferences but with their claims to truth, claims that run counter to ours, Connolly’s deep pluralist epistemology just turns into the usual liberal psychology: a “call to tolerance” (33), an exhortation not to have too much “self-confidence” (43). But this utterly anodyne set of recommendations about how to manage difference begins to look both a little more pointed and a little more problematic when the difference in question is economic� The problem is that it’s hard to see (at least from the left) why economic differences - which are just another name for inequality - should call for tolerance rather than intolerance� In this sense, then, there are, as Connolly himself puts it, “tensions between deep pluralism and the reduction of economic inequality�” But, Connolly argues, the tension between pluralism and economic egalitarianism is less important than the connection between them, a connection that is both “definitional” - “an ethos of pluralism,” he says, “extends the issue of economic equality from economic culture to other cultural identities” - and “causal,” since “to make progress in either reducing economic inequality or extending diversity is to improve the prospects for progress on the other front as well�” Thus diversity is “a condition of possibility” (8) for economic equality, and vice versa. The second of these claims - for the “causal” connection between cultural and economic equality - is remarkable just because it is so obviously contradicted by the evidence of the last thirty years, a period during which, as we have already noted, the progress made in “extending diversity” has not only not been accompanied by progress in reducing economic inequality but, just the opposite, has been accompanied by an extraordinary increase in economic inequality� And this is not only a fact about the actual numbers, it’s also a fact about the theory that has helped to produce those numbers� Pluralists, Connolly thinks, “won’t willingly ��� allow” “the gap between the real cost of living in a system and the income-earning ability of most citizens to become large” or “the income hierarchy to become too extreme” (43)� But why shouldn’t they? There’s nothing in the commitment to diversity that requires more equal incomes and, in fact, the most characteristic forms of that commitment in American life are explicitly anti-egalitarian� It’s possible, for example, for a feminist to want equality between men and women and also between management and labor but, as the example of everyone who’s ever complained about the glass ceiling shows, it is not necessary or even likely� After all, it’s one thing to worry about the fact that the average CEO Homo Sacher-Masoch: Agamben’s American Dream 33 now makes in one day what the average worker makes in one year; it’s a completely different thing to worry about the fact that there are not enough women CEOs� But pluralism’s most striking contribution to neoliberalism is not its misrecognition of the causal link between diversity and equality; it is instead what Connolly calls its “definitional” extension of “the issue of economic equality from economic culture to other cultural identities” (8). For here, in the notion that one belongs to an “economic culture,” we see an expansion in the range of cultural identity and, in the suggestion that one’s economic status is an identity like “other cultural identities,” we see a transformation in the very idea of economic status� Once, in other words, that people from different classes are regarded as people with different cultural identities, recognition rather than redistribution (to use Nancy Fraser’s terms) becomes - what it in fact has been - the lodestone of justice in neoliberalism� Indeed, what Fraser has thought of as the necessity to balance recognition and redistribution (to do both) is rendered both unnecessary and undesirable in the complete subsumption of the one by the other� For if we start thinking of ourselves as having economic identities and if we remember that the point of pluralism is to encourage a diversity of identities, a more equal distribution of wealth (everybody having roughly the same) represents a problem not a solution� Which is just to say, if we take the pluralist commitment to diversity seriously and if we take the pluralist account of economic status as economic identity seriously, pluralism requires us to have the same relation to other classes that we have to other cultures, the same relation to differences in wealth that we have to differences in belief� And, if this seems far-fetched, we have only to remember the popularity of the neologism “classism”; every time someone worries about classism, he or she is worrying about the failure to respect the cultural identity of poor people� Or, to return to Netherland , we have only to remember the narrator’s asking himself “why the respect” of immigrant laborers (like the cashier at the gas station) matters “so much” to him� One answer might be that when we focus on identity rather than economic status (when we choose culture over class) we can recognize that money or the lack of it is not what matters� Another answer, more profoundly pluralist, would be that if we think of economic status as an element of identity (not choosing class over culture but turning class into culture), then poverty and wealth become equally respectable� Either way, redistribution is rendered irrelevant; either way, the equities analyst wants the respect of the gas station cashier so we can imagine that what the gas station cashier wants is the respect - as opposed to the money - of the equities analyst� In Netherland , the moment in which Hans begins to feel he’s earned that respect is on an “impossible grass field in America,” a moment in which he describes himself as feeling “naturalized” (176)� From the standpoint of the novel, this is a kind of nostalgia. The point of its identification of September 11 with the globalization of the economy is to identify it also as the moment in which the national became the “post-national�” America now is just, 34 W alter B enn M ichaels O’Neill says, “a geographic spot like any other for the global economy�” And as the American Dream turns into the neoliberal dream, the fear of (or the hopes for) American exceptionalism - like worries about the state of exception as such - can now also be seen as a kind of nostalgia - like the battle over whether it’s Bush or Saddam who’s most like Hitler� The deepening inequalities of neoliberal life have not been produced by new Hitlers and they are enabled rather than opposed by the feelings of fellowship between white equities analysts and black gas station attendants, and especially by the pluralist redescription of class conflict as “agonistic respect.” Indeed, Netherland gives us a brilliant emblem of the transformations made available by the ambition to universalize the market in its brief image of the one sexual encounter Hans has in the months after the break-up of his marriage� The event has nothing to do with the plot, and can hardly be said to illuminate much about Hans’s character� Indeed, it’s its sheer formal gratuitousness that is part of its interest, and that highlights the way in which it’s made thematically relevant (indeed, almost indispensable) by the fact that the woman Hans sleeps with is of “Anglo-Jamaican” descent “with pale brown skin” (107) and that what she wants is for him to spank her with his belt� Racism and sadism have no place in a world imagined under the sign of the market but anti-racism and masochism are absolutely central to it� Thus, while the image of a “pale white” man whipping a “pale black” (115) woman might plausibly have come out of an earlier moment in the history of the neoliberal novel (say, the moment of Toni Morrison’s Beloved ), here, as in Venus in Furs , that image is transformed by the fact that the slave is a volunteer, and the sex entirely conforms to the consensual erotic logic of anti-racist neoliberalism� Indeed, in a kind of echo of the “word of honor” invoked in Sacher-Masoch’s contracts, Danielle appeals to the fact that Hans is a “gentleman” and therefore she can “trust” him� Contracts outside the law cannot be enforced by the state but, like illegal as opposed to legal immigration, they are that much more responsive to the desires of the market� Of course, this sexual encounter would be even more gratifying if instead of being a “visual creative” in an advertising agency, Danielle were, say, a cleaning lady in Hans’s office. That would make the assertion of her agency (the primacy of her desire) a perfect storm of race, gender and class, more than a match even for the gas station attendant’s homosocial tribute to choice (which is itself, like all economic immigration, a tribute to the market)� Despite this shortcoming, however, it’s fair to say that in the sexual adventure of the equities analyst, Netherland produces a more plausible image both of the self-understanding of neoliberalism and of the reality that self-understanding misunderstands than does Agamben’s fear of liberalism as the way to totalitarianism or Berman’s allegiance to it as the alternative to (Muslim) totalitarianism� And if, in the end, the novel’s own allegiance is to a slightly less earnest version of Connolly’s pluralism, at least, the millionaire’s belt puts some of the agony back into agonistic respect� Homo Sacher-Masoch: Agamben’s American Dream 35 More to our point, however, taken together, these texts provide us with an inventory of the technologies deployed today in defense of the neoliberal dream: the critique of discrimination, the critique of the exception, the embrace of immigration, the appeal to a utopia of the plural and to a dystopia of the total� Some of these strategies are, of course, more attractive than others, and some (e�g� the critique of discrimination) represent a positive good while others (the appeal to pluralism) do not� But my goal has not been to assign them grades� It has been instead to suggest the ways in which the currently dominant modes of critical writing constitute what amounts to a left neoliberalism, sometimes as an extension of the ideals demanded by competitive markets, sometimes as an apocalyptic invocation of a world - the lager of Nazism, the umma of Islam - in which there are imagined to be no markets (or, at least, no capitalism) at all. The events of September 11 have only intensified this process; even Connolly begins the first chapter of his Pluralism with an account of where he was when the planes hit, and within a paragraph he’s talking about holocausts and within a page about Guantánamo and “bare life�” But these concepts do not represent an alternative to the discourse of neoliberalism, they are its building blocks� They are the terms in which intellectuals today imagine that we are producing a critique of neoliberal theory while in fact we are reciting its catechism� 36 W alter B enn M ichaels Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio� Homo Sacer : Sovereign Power and Bare Life � Trans� Daniel Heller- Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. ---� State of Exception � Trans� Kevin Attell� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005� Bacon, Katie� “The Great Irish-Dutch-American Novel�” The Atlantic Online. May 6, 2008. Access 06 August 2011. <http: / / www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/ archive/ 2008/ 05/ the-great-irishdutch-american-novel/ 6788/ >. Becker, Gary� The Economics of Discrimination � Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971� Berman, Paul� Terror and Liberalism � New York: W�W� Norton and Co�, 2004� Brimelow, Peter. “Milton Friedman at 85.” December 29, 1997. Forbes Magazine � Access 28 June 2011. <http: / / www.forbes.com/ forbes/ 1997/ 1229/ 6014052a.html>. Butler, Judith� Frames of War � London: Verso, 2009� Concise Encyclopedia of Economics � “Gary Stanley Becker�” Access 06 August 2011� <http: / / www�econlib�org/ library/ Enc/ bios/ Becker�html>� Connolly, William E� Pluralism � New York: Duke UP, 2005� Fitzgerald, F� Scott� The Great Gatsby � New York: Scribner’s, 1995� Foucault, Michel� Naissance de la Biopolitique � Paris: Gallimard, 2004� Hanson, Gordon H� The Economic Logic of Illegal Immigration. Council on Foreign Relations, April 2007� Leonhardt, David . “After the Great Recession�” New York Times. April 28, 2009. O’Neill, Joseph� Netherland � New York: Vintage, 2009� Rector, Robert� “Look to Milton�” National Review Online. June 20, 2007. Access 28 June 2011� <http: / / www�nationalreview�com/ articles/ 221330/ look-milton/ robertrector>� Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, “La Vénus à la fourrure�” Présentation de Sacher-Masoch � Ed� Gilles Deleuze� Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1967� Shah, Anup.“Immigration.” May 26, 2008. Access 28 June 2011. <http: / / www. globalissues�org/ article/ 537/ immigration>� Speer, Albert� Nuremberg Trial Proceedings. Vol. 16 � June 21, 1946� Access 06 August 2011� <http: / / avalon�law�yale�edu/ imt/ 06-21-46�asp>� W infried f luck Are Multiple Identities the Answer, or, How Do We Actually Live “In-Between” Different Identities? 1 I. One of the distinguishing marks of work in the humanities is that it often contains a strong utopian dimension� One may claim, in effect - as many critical theorists, for example of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, have done - that this is the actual promise and raison d’être of literary and cultural studies� Critics in search of blueprints for agency and political practice usually dismiss this utopianism as, at best, unrealistic and, at worst, escapist� However, this is a short-sighted view� We are all aware of the fact that what may still look utopian at its first formulation may ultimately have important and valuable consequences in the real world. When the first feminists in the late 1960s formulated feminist claims they still had the status of almost a sectarian group and were often made fun of by the general public� Nowadays, a whole generation is profiting from their pioneering work without always realizing to whom they owe the possibilities that have been opened up for them. The same could be said about groups that profited from the new social movements� 2 If utopias are an integral part of work in the humanities, then this must also apply to the field of American studies. Indeed, it is interesting to consider for a moment what the dominant utopias of the field have been in the past and what they may be at the present time� For this purpose, Leo Marx has come up with a useful distinction between American studies B�D� and American studies A�D�, that is, “before the divide” and “after the divide�” The divide he refers to is that between the founding phase of the field, most 1 This essay extends an argument first presented in “Multiple Identities? Figurational Sociology and American Studies,“ Civilizing and Decivilizing Processes: Figurational Approaches to American Culture , eds� Christa Buschendorf, Astrid Franke, and Johannes Voelz� Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010� Parts of this essay have been incorporated into the present version which was first presented at the “Futures of American Studies Institute” at Dartmouth College in the summer of 2011� 2 In his discussion of Aztlan as a utopia, Bill Ashcroft reminds us to what extent ethnic studies have been centered around such utopias especially in their beginnings: “Examples of these utopian formations include Oceania in the Pacific, Rastafarianism in the Caribbean, Pharaonic Africa, the religious profusion of the Indian past, and various forms of possibility thinking from other regions” (16)� 38 W infried f luck prominently represented by the myth and symbol school, and the various kinds of revisionism that have emerged after the 1960s� Looking for the utopian dimension of these different stages, one may claim that the main utopia of American studies B�D� was the idea of America itself, or, as I have called it in a different context, the romance with America 3 - an imaginary America that was purified of its imperialistic, racist, and other oppressive dimensions, or, as the New Americanists would put it, of its many states of exception� After the divide, on the other hand, basically two utopias emerge� One is the transnational utopia of international solidarity that is opened up by going beyond the borders of the nation-state and joining forces with the African diaspora of the Black Atlantic, or the subaltern peasants of the Southern hemisphere, or institutions of transnational indigeneity� 4 I consider this an attempt to regain the revolutionary subject that has been lost in the U�S� itself� The other utopia is the one on which I want to focus in this essay: I am referring to the concept of multiple identities, or of an identity in-between fixed national or cultural identities - terms that I will use here as a shorthand for a number of similar concepts such as heterogeneous, fragmented, or flexible identities, all designed to negate the idea of a self-conscious subject and a stable unified identity. 5 It is not an exaggeration to say that this utopia currently stands at the center of American studies as well as cultural studies� One may claim, in fact, that it has become something like a magic formula in these fields to solve an impasse created by a certain, by now well-established and widely accepted power analysis� In that analysis, the ultimate power effect of the modern nation-state lies in the creation of subject-positions that keep the individual trapped in the imaginary hold of a national or cultural identity� This, in fact, is the explanation why the oppressed do not rebel against their oppression and often vote for their oppressors� As I have argued in a different context, cultural radicalism distinguishes itself from prior forms of political radicalism such as orthodox Marxism by the claim that it no longer sees economic structures or institutions of the state as the primary source of power effects in Western societies but culture (Fluck 2002)� From the perspective of cultural radicalism, it is culture which determines the perception of reality before the individual is even aware of it by constituting the linguistic and cultural patterns through which the individual makes sense of the world� Consent is thus produced not through repression by the state and its institutions but by the system’s cunning ways of constituting “subjects” or ascribing “identities” through cultural forms� Thus, the critique of the philosophical concept of the subject, understood as a self-conscious individual, be- 3 See my essays “The Romance with America: Approaching America through Its Ideals,” and “American Literary History and the Romance with America�” 4 For an analysis of this transnational utopia see my essay on “Transnationalisms,” forthcoming in New Literary History. 5 At one point, these utopias are linked, namely in the assumption that transnationalism produces “subjectivities in-between” that can resist the interpellative power of national ideologies such as that of American exceptionalism� Are Multiple Identities the Answer? 39 came a major project of cultural radicalism� Displacing narratives of growth, maturing, and increased self-awareness, subject-formation was redefined by Lacanian misrecognition, Althusserian interpellation or Foucauldian subjection by regimes of knowledge� These theories of subject-formation departed radically from earlier sociological, psychological, or classical psychoanalytical versions in that they saw identity not as the end result of a process of socialization or of the talking cure but as the direct result of the hailing power of cultural representation� It has been pointed out repeatedly in recent years that this theory of subject-formation has created a frustrating impasse for oppositional perspectives - and has thus undermined the original project of cultural studies to provide resistance to the encroaching forces of instrumental rationality� 6 Cultural radicalism’s theory of subject-formation defined power in such an all-pervasive, monolithic way that resistance appeared impossible and even opposition could be seen as only another script of the system� In the long run, this could hardly be in the interest of the new social movements that provided the political base for cultural radicalism� It was at this point that the concept of multiple identities came to the rescue� In effect, it is hard to imagine how the impasse in the power analysis I have described could have been solved in any other way� One key move was to replace the term subject by the term identity� Although both can be considered cultural constructs by means of discourse, the term identity nevertheless opens up a greater range of options: an individual can be only one subject but she can have various, changing identities� However, as long as identity is still conceived as “coherent” and unified, it is in danger of exerting the same tyranny of homogenization and subjection like the idea of the subject attacked by Althusser, Lacan, or Foucault� For cultural radicalism, a “unified identity” - such as, for example, American national identity - almost equals the idea of the subject, because it provides a false, illusory sense of unity and autonomous agency. A unified identity thus imprisons the individual and subjects her to a cultural script� Formerly a sign of hard-won maturity, it is now seen as a trap� The concept of multiple identities was created to escape this prison-house of a unified, fixed identity. If the actual power effect of modern societies lies in the interpellation of individuals into certain subject positions and identities, then the only way to regain a certain measure of agency must focus on the ways in which we can escape from this prison-house� This is where the idea of multiple identities that allow the individual to move between fixed identities or to live in-between them takes on central importance� Multiple identities point the way to a state of in-betweenness that can help to evade the effects of interpellation or may even become a source of dis-interpellation� In consequence, much of the work 6 On the key role of the idea of resistance in the formation of cultural studies and of American studies, see my essay “Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies)” (2007)� 40 W infried f luck that is currently done in American studies and cultural studies focuses on discussions of how a state of in-betweenness can be conceptualized in theory and envisioned in practice� The perspective from which I want to analyze and discuss this current utopia may seem somewhat surprising at first sight. It is that of figurational sociology, a term most often used in reference to the works of Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu. The common link between them is the idea that specific character structures are the result of chains of social interdependencies that create a characteristic habitus within a group� In his magisterial two-volume study Über den Prozess der Zivilisation ( The Civilizing Process ) , Elias traces the way in which growing interdependence, for instance at the court of French Absolutist regimes, increased the need for self-constraint and self-discipline on the side of the individual� In Bourdieu’s work, the key concept for the description of character structures that are the result of interdependencies in certain class formations is that of the habitus , which one may define as an internalized social norm of which the individual may not even be aware, because it has become her second nature� We encounter here, by the way, already an interesting clash of positions, because concepts like multiple identities or in-betweenness must, of course, see the habitus as only another, in fact, the supreme prison-house of the self, because it is based on internationalization and can be effective as a habit precisely because it remains largely “invisible�” In response to such ideological effects of identity-formation, a critic like Fredric Jameson can welcome the idea of a multiplication of subject-positions with the following words: “What was very useful in France in the structural-psychoanalytic period was that they began to speak of subject-positions� Then suddenly people realized that we all occupy innumerable subject-positions� That for example to talk in politics: a black person in the United States is not just a black, but also a woman and maybe there are sexual things, gender things and so on. We all occupy multiple subject-positions. I find that a very useful description as well�” 7 Complementing Jameson’s point, Bill Ashcroft focuses on subjects who live in-between the borders of the nation-state by which subjectivity is normally constituted� For Ashcroft, globalization reveals “something that is true for all nations: that the nation - held captive by the state as a homogeneous focus of identity, a bordered entity with its own integral relationship with other similarly constituted nation-states - is in fact a transitional, fluid interaction of nations and identities. In short, the nation is a transnation” (13)� Thus, Ashcroft’s term transnation is designed to capture “the fluidity of national subjects moving within and between the borders of the state” (14)� 7 Jameson’s description is well suited to highlight the difference between the current cultural studies concept of in-betweenness (which is also that of current American studies) and the use of the concept of in-betweenness in reception aesthetics where it is used by Wolfgang Iser to describe aesthetic experience� In Iser’s description, a state of in-betweenness created by aesthetic experience is seen as an extension of identity, whereas it functions as an evasion of identity ascription in cultural radicalism� Are Multiple Identities the Answer? 41 II. A telling example of the logic at work in the move to the concept of multiple identities and multiple subject positions - and some of the problems created by it - is provided by the influential British cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall� Hall started out as a New Left intellectual in the post-War years in Britain, before he discovered that class was not the only form of being disenfranchised. As a result, he was one of the first scholars in British and European cultural studies who introduced the concept of race as an analytical concept and then became a major theorist of the so-called new cultural politics of difference in race and gender studies� In his by now classical essays “New Ethnicities” and “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture? ” Hall argues against the essentialization of the black subject and emphasizes “the extraordinary diversity of subject positions, social experiences and cultural identities which compose the category black” ( New Ethnicities 443)� As a category for the description of identity, the term race is thus not sufficient. In effect, the major point of Hall’s essay on the new ethnicities is to criticize this type of identity politics� In order to work against identity politics, identity has to be redefined as positionality, and difference has to be reconceptualized, not as unbridgeable racial otherness, but as positional, conditional and conjectural construct� This, in turn, leads to a proliferation of identities, as Hall points out in the essay “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture? ”: The point is not simply that, since our racial differences do not constitute all of us, we are always different, negotiating different kinds of differences - of gender, of sexuality, of class� It is also that these antagonisms refuse to be neatly aligned; they are simply not reducible to one another; they refuse to coalesce around a single axis of differentiation� We are always in negotiation, not with a single set of oppositions that place us always in the same relation to others, but with a series of different positionalities� Each has for us its point of profound subjective identification. And that is the most difficult thing about this proliferation of the field of identities and antagonisms: they are often dislocating in relation to one another (473)� Precisely because “they are dislocating in relation to one another,” the multiplication of identities can serve as an antidote to the danger of being entrapped in one unified identity. In his programmatic essay “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference,” Stuart Hall explains the concept of multiple subject-positions and identities by drawing on his own experience as a Jamaican citizen who went to England in the 1950s as an immigrant and then, after the politicization of the 1960s, re-discovered his own blackness� 8 In the course of these different periods of his life, he thus changed his identity, his own sense of self, several times, first from a respectable middle-class member in Jamaica to immigrant and then to 8 For a more comprehensive and detailed analysis of the development of Hall’s work and his gradual move from class analysis to the so-called new politics of difference with its strong focus on the question of identity, see my essay “Stuart Hall: From New Left Politics to the New Cultural Politics of Difference” (2002)� 42 W infried f luck black diaspora intellectual, so that he can say in retrospect: “If I think about who I am, I have been - in my own much too long experience - several identities” (15). The example seems convincing at first sight, but at a closer look it draws attention to an important aspect of identity-formation that is usually left out of debates about multiple identities and states of in-betweenness� What representatives of the new cultural politics of difference like Hall may mean when they associate traditional concepts of identity with terms like “stable” or “unified” or “fixed” is the claim of sociological and psychological identity-theories that an identity depends on the ability of an individual to provide a continuous flow of experiences and memories with a sense of coherence and continuity� From this perspective, it is not the changing social roles per se which constitute Hall’s identity but what he, an individual by the name of Stuart Hall, has made of them, how he has integrated them by revising and extending his former identity - in contrast, for example, to other Jamaican immigrants to England who may have undergone similar changes in identity but who have nevertheless not become Stuart Hall� To be sure, because Hall’s identity is always in development, it is open and never fixed, but only within the context of Hall’s specific way of linking a continuum of experiences� Ironically enough, Hall himself illustrates this elementary fact involuntarily when he introduces his case for having been “several identities” by positing an “I” who makes this claim: “If I think about who I am, I have been - in my own much too long experience - several identities�” The heterogeneous, multiple identity Hall is talking about here is really the multi-faceted dimension of the life of a single individual who is able (as almost all human beings are in one way or another) to integrate different roles and experiences into a script of his own life� 9 Hall never indicates any awareness of the fact that the self is not constituted merely by a sequence of “subject-positions” but that identity is constituted by relating past and present experiences through narrative - which, again ironically, he employs himself when he provides us with a short history of his life� 10 III. Hall’s use of the term identity and of the counter-term multiple identities remains confused and confusing. Specifically, he seems unable and unwilling to make a distinction between subject position and identity� However, it seems necessary to keep the two concepts apart, for not every subject position created by cultural representations can already be equated with an identity, 9 To be sure, the ‘I’ consists of various aspects such as body-consciousness, the emotional household, affects etc�, but these aspects do not simply exist separately from each other but have to be related by some form of coordination� 10 The prevalent view in cultural radicalism that the illusion of a coherent identity is created by repetition is therefore unconvincing, as the example of Hall shows� The coherence-effect is provided by narrative, and narrative consists of more than mere repetition� Are Multiple Identities the Answer? 43 since an identity can only be formed by an attachment to a subject position - or the refusal to do so� Clearly, not every subject position we encounter in and through cultural representations has equal effects on us and our identity� A cultural representation can only be effective as a form of interpellation, when we attach our desire to it or “identify” with it� And, an important part in this process will be the question of whether and how this subject position fits into the narrative of our own identity� Hall is unable to acknowledge this, because he fully subscribes to a theory of identity formation as subject positioning by interpellation� 11 A telling example is provided in his essay “Who Needs Identity? ” where he has given the following definition of identity: “Identities are thus points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us” (6)� The equation of discursive subject-positions with identity has resulted in (explicit or implicit) claims that mobility, such as, for example, migration, is, by definition, anti-essentialist and counter-hegemonial, because it increases the frequency and variety of encounters with discursive subject positions and thereby undermines the interpellative hold of any single subject position� This explains the current vogue of conceptualizations of mobility and “in-betweenness” in cultural studies, from borderlands, diaspora and cosmopolitanism to the third space as sites outside of the interpellative power of the nation-state that open up new possibilities for the construction of heterogeneous identities, proposing for readers an understanding of identity as processual rather than fixed and constructed within but also against official representation� These “mobility”-concepts refer to positions in-between two or more cultures or within racial or gender ascriptions in order to reclaim a counter-hegemonic potential by undermining identities that are grounded in a single subject position� If identities would be created solely by interpellation into discursive subject positions, then the individual would be more or less “defenseless,” because she needs these subject positions in order to be able to gain any identity at all� But this individual can be rescued by the movement between cultures and the multiplication of subject positions linked with it, because this movement can function as a potential source of dis-interpellation� Ashcroft even goes so far as to say: “The borders from which we might be free are therefore not simply the boundaries of the nation but those of nation-ness, and ultimately of identity itself” (16)� Altogether, then, the concept of multiple identities holds three major (cultural and political) promises: 1) it promises an escape from the prison-house of a unified identity. In this sense, it is also a counter-term to the figurational concept of the habitus , in its versions both by Elias and Bourdieu; 2) it promises at least a certain degree of liberation and freedom from the subjectifying and subjecting power effects of the modern nation-state; 3) it promises 11 Thus, Hall’s use of the term identity in his own example is surprisingly reductionist� His existence in Jamaica or his immigrant status in Britain are not described as containing multiple identities in themselves� Clearly, for Hall, the idea of multiple identities refers to sequential movements between different identities, and not yet to a multiplication of identity options for an individual at any given time� 44 W infried f luck - again within limits, to be sure - an escape from the chain of dependencies in which the individual is always already embedded, no matter whether we think of cultural radicalism or figurational sociology. Intellectuals and academic classes often hold romantic views of the outsider as the person who - voluntarily or involuntarily - embodies independence and freedom from the repressive world of bourgeois norms� 12 Although developed within the context of a critical tradition in cultural studies, the narrative of multiple identities can be seen as another version of this romance with border-existences and transnational spaces, offering the utopian vision of a liberation from the disciplinary power effects of modern civilization on new grounds� Moreover, within this romance of the border or of a transnational flow across borders, the new utopia of identity-multiplication is linked not only with the prospect of liberation from a unified identity, but also with the promise of a privileged critical perspective� As Emory Elliott has put it in his Presidential Address to the American Studies Association: “This is especially true for people of color� Because of ‘dislocations that can properly be considered diasporic,’ artists of color were already citizens of a ‘transnational, Pan- American world’ that only a few scholars had recognized until the last two decades” (14)� During a period of assimilation by white immigrants, “many people of color lived in fluid transnational cultural borderlands developing political and cultural centers of contact …” (15)� As a result, “they developed new perspectives and found safer positions from which to critique aspects of U�S� policies and culture” (17)� IV. But what if we take the argument seriously that no matter how many discursive subject positions we encounter, we still need an “I” that connects and coordinates these various options in a continuous and more or less coherent narrative of identity? The multiple identities Hall talks about would in this case be different manifestations of an “I” at different times; they would, in other words, contribute to a sense of self-expansion, but not necessarily to a decentering or deconstruction of the need to construct an identity based on continuity and coherence� The point can be illustrated by going back to a key debate in figurational sociology, Daniel Bell’s by now classical study The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism which at the time of its appearance was considered a major challenge to figurational sociology’s theory of modernity 12 See, e�g�, Gloria Anzaldua on the border: “It is in a constant state of transition� The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants� Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal�’ Gringos in the U�S� Southwest consider the inhabitants of the borderlands transgressors, aliens - whether they possess documents or not, whether they’re Chicanos, Indians or Blacks� Do not enter, trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot” (25)� Are Multiple Identities the Answer? 45 as a steady increase in self-constraint and self-discipline� 13 As Bell argues in confirmation of many critics of Elias especially in the 1960s and thereafter, the story of an increase in self-constraint is only one side of the story of the civilizing process� In the functional differentiation of modern consumer capitalism, there is also a counter-movement at work, namely that of an increasing informality and permissiveness, “a growing leniency in codes of conduct (manifest in language, clothing, music, dancing, relations between parents and children, sexual conduct, etc�) which seemed to provide counter evidence to Elias’ theory that civilizing processes lead to stricter regulation of conduct, more intensive emotional controls and self-constraints” (Featherstone 204)� 14 One way to respond to this critique has been to say that informalization “should not be seen as a unilinear trend; rather it is a spiral process in which waves of informalization are followed by new waves of formalization” (ibid� 205)� In contrast to such a pendulum-theory, Bell takes his point of departure from what he sees as “disjunction of realms” at the center of modern capitalist societies� These different realms are ruled by contrary principles, thereby unraveling the Protestant Ethic-link between economic rationality and character formation: “The two realms which had historically been joined to produce a single character structure … have now become unjoined” (15)� In the economic realm, self-control continues to be the supreme value in ever more professionalized contexts� In the realm of culture, on the other hand, precisely the opposite is at work, namely a liberation from discipline and selfconstraint. For Bell, these conflicting demands constitute a central contradiction of capitalism� During the day, the individual has to control himself, and exercise strict discipline, while in the evening, he is expected to switch from Jekyll to Hyde and turn into a carefree consumer and unrepentant hedonist� Or, as Bell puts it in a memorable phrase: “On the one hand, the business corporation wants an individual to work hard, pursue a career, accept delayed gratification - to be, in the crude sense, an organization man. And yet, in its products and its advertisements, the corporation promotes pleasure, instant joy, relaxing and letting go� One is to be ‘straight’ by day and a ‘swinger’ by night” (Bell 71-2)� Is Elias’ theory of the civilizing process as an increase in self-constraint and self-discipline still applicable, then, or do we have to replace it by Bell’s counter-narrative of a growing subversion of self-discipline and a bourgeois 13 For a history of the concept of self-regulation in American culture, cf� my essay “‘Every man therefore behaves after his own fashion�’ American Manners and Modernity” (2009)� 14 See, for example, Cas Wouters: “Is the trend towards informalization a reversal of the civilizing process as Elias has defined it? ” (“Informalisierung und der Prozess der Zivilisation” (290, my translation)� Of all Elias-scholars, Wouters has taken up the challenge most openly and intelligently whether modern developments can still be described in terms of an ever increasing self-regulation� Elias himself pointed to the phenomenon of a “controlled decontrolling of emotions,” for example in sports� However, theoretically speaking, this looks like a rather lame concession� Elias obviously never tried to see the two tendencies dialectically, that is, as interconnected� 46 W infried f luck middle-class habitus , proceeding, in Bell’s words, “from the Protestant Ethic to the Psychedelic Bazaar” (54)? Contrary to Bell, it seems to me that the two options he describes do not necessarily contradict each other, but may even complement one another� Just like Stuart Hall, Bell ignores that the apparently irreconcilable attitudes he highlights have to be coordinated, if the individual is not to become dysfunctional� Indeed, for the person exercising strict discipline during the day and then switching to a carefree hedonism in the after-hours, the need for coordination has become even greater than before� It is hard enough to pursue a daily regime of self-discipline and, in doing so, to repress one’s longing for liberation from the iron cage of today’s advanced stage of instrumental rationality� But it is even more of a challenge to switch between two contradictory modes, to first exercise self-discipline and then to metamorphose into exactly the opposite� It is more of a challenge, because the transition has to be managed, so that the hedonism unfolding after the daily 9 to 5 grind can be contained and does not become self-destructive� Indeed, such a “multiple-identity-management” must be even more of a challenge than traditional forms of self-control, precisely because self-control is undermined by multiple identities and thus no longer an internalized routine� If self-discipline and hedonism would remain unrelated and be in each other’s way, then capitalism might indeed have a problem� If, on the other hand, we acknowledge that these two opposite attitudes must be coordinated and in this sense “integrated,” then the need for self-control has not disappeared but increased and reached a new stage� The individual has to achieve the seemingly impossible, namely to coordinate two contradictory attitudes as part of an “I” and, as a result, this “I” may not be split by inner divisions but may even be enriched by a multiplication of options� What Bell has described is not the cultural contradictions of capitalism but the latest stage in an ever widening demand for around-the-clock-self-regulation with the potential, as his own example shows, of being able to live in several worlds at once� V. The concept of “multiple identities” would thus signal a remarkable increase in cultural options for the individual, but it would not necessarily describe an escape from the demands of a “coherent” and continuous identity-construction needed to coordinate a multiplicity of roles and subject positions successfully� 15 Indeed, the widening of identity options evoked by the concept may turn out to be exactly the opposite of what it is supposed to be in 15 Cf� Ulrich Beck on this advanced stage of individualization: “Life, death, gender, corporeality, identity, religion, marriage, parenthood, social ties - all are becoming decidable down to small print; once fragmented into options, everything must be decided” (5). “Think, calculate, plan, adjust, negotiate, define, revoke (with everything constantly starting again from the beginning): these are the ‘precarious freedoms’ that are taking hold of life as modernity advances” (6)� Are Multiple Identities the Answer? 47 critical theory and oppositional cultural studies: “Multiple identities” do not provide a liberation from the prison-house of a unified identity, but signal the arrival of a new habitus made for a time in which “flexibility” has become a supreme value and new norm, a time in which even pleasure has to be managed and integrated into what, at a closer look, is not a multiple but a multi-tasking identity� At first sight, then, the concept of multiple identities seems to undermine the idea of the habitus , but at a second, closer look, it may be just another word for the description of a new habitus � This new habitus is characterized by a multiplication of options in which the individual has increased her own possibilities dramatically� The Chicana-activist Gloria Anzaldua, whom Ashcroft calls “the exponent of in-betweenness par excellence” (21), 16 can help to illustrate the gains when she says in her book Borderlands / La Frontera : “But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female� I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos : the coming together of opposite qualities within” (41)� “So, don’t give me your tenets and your laws� Don’t give me your lukewarm gods� What I want is an accounting with all three cultures - white, Mexican, Indian� I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails” (44)� Multiple identities open up the possibility of living in multiple worlds that seemed to pose either-or options before� But this multiplication of options has its price� Far from being liberated into a new freedom, Anzaldua has to manage her three identity-options - white, Mexican, Indian - by “carving, chiselling, staunching the bleeding, and fashioning her own Gods�” 17 Clearly, she stylizes herself as a creative artist who gains freedom of self-expression by the multiplication of identities, but she also has to face the new challenge of managing all of these hard-won freedoms� Although some of her imagery is taken from artistic production, it nevertheless makes clear that the construction of multiple identities does not come easy and must eventually lead to the challenge of a multiple identities-management - in this case by combining creative activities with first-aid healing measures and even something like a religious self-fashioning� And again it is an “I” - “What I want” - that emphatically insists on her right for self-expansion and thereby constructs a new, heroic founding myth in which Anzaldua overcomes the “lukewarm gods” of others by fashioning her own gods� 16 Cf� Ashcroft: “Perhaps the exponent of in-betweenness par excellence is Gloria Anzaldua, whose Borderlands / La Frontera crosses, or subverts, borders of nationality, ethnicity, gender, geography, and history” (21)� 17 Similarly, Stuart Hall in his description of “different positionalities” and “the proliferation of the field of identities” in “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture? ” emphasizes the difficulties linked with a multiplication of identities, because these “refuse to be neatly aligned,” “refuse to coalesce,” and “are often dislocating�” In consequence, “we are always in negotiation” between them� Hall here sounds like a weary politician who, in the search for identity, has to look for feasible compromises in endless backroom sessions� 48 W infried f luck VI. Anzaldua’s case is instructive, because it allows us to set up a comparison with sociological theories of identity� In the context of sociological debates, theories of a multiplication of the self have become almost common-place today as part of an analysis of the latest stage of “turbocapitalism�” An ever growing number of choices compels the individual to manage an ever greater range of identity-options� Instead of seeing such a multiplication as liberation, however, sociological critics focus on the price: the greater the number of options, the greater also the need for coordinating and managing them - which is a task that can require constant, around-the-clock self-regulation and continuing choice-management� For Anzaldua, the multiplication of identity options is an adventure of self-exploration, for sociological commentators the adventure has already turned sour, because it has become a full time, 24/ 7 job� For Anzaldua, multiplication can be an adventure, because, at a closer look, her idea of multiple identities is still based on essentialist notions of identity politics, albeit now “multiplied�” The identity options she discusses remain those of ethnic studies, with the implication that each of the identities mentioned - white, Indian, Mexican - is a self-contained unit in itself, so that a multiplication of identity can take place only by moving to another racialized, ethnic, or engendered identity� From this perspective, the identity ascription of “Indian” is sufficient to describe the identity of a person belonging to that category - just as it seems sufficient for Hall to employ broad categories like immigrant to describe his own identity at a particular stage of his life� In contrast, sociological critics of turbocapitalism would claim that Hall’s or Anzaldua’s narratives provide a still schematic and reduced view of what constitutes multiple identities, because it does not capture the real multiplication that takes place under contemporary conditions� For example, Anzaldua’s Indian identity will be, in reality, much more than “Indian” with a capital I� She may be a social activist who later turned writer, came out of the closet, rediscovered Indian spirituality and likes to live in Germany part of the year, because Indians are admired, if not revered in Germany� Moreover, she may by now have a MacBook, an iPhone, an iPad and several different Internet identities in social networks� The subject-position “Indian” cannot capture this multiplication of identity-options� However, if this is accepted, then one of the (perhaps not so welcome) consequences is that a key utopia of cultural radicalism has to be reevaluated, namely that of a position “in-between,” considered as the best hope for non-identity and dis-interpellation, for this “in-betweenness” and other “mobility”-concepts can only be considered liberating on the basis of a view of identity as still stable and fixed. As soon as the multiplication of identities results from a movement between roles and discursive subject positions that can be (and often for professional reasons, must be) easily and frequently exchanged, configurations of in-betweenness lose their critical edge and the “in-between,” instead of being the holy grail of non-identity, becomes just another brief stop-over in a restless race between Are Multiple Identities the Answer? 49 identity-options� In fact, to be in-between may even become more of a challenge and burden. It is at this point that figurational sociology may add a helpful interpretive perspective� VII. The starting point for such an inquiry must be the consideration that from the perspective of figurational sociology, the concept of multiple identities is itself a term for a new habitus , a habitus that may be called “multiplication management�” If we accept that premise, then this would mean that a) the flexibility of identity options is on the way to become “second nature” to people; b) that the development of this new habitus is a response to changing patterns of social interdependencies; and c) that at the bottom of these changing figurations, we find new social constellations and changing modes of power� Indeed, sociologically speaking one of these new social constellations is really not that hard to describe: it consists mostly of intellectuals and cultural workers, members of new social movements and those groups within academia that have developed the concept of multiple identities and propagate it with a certain euphoria� In terms of their education and cultural capital, they are (often Ivy League) members of the dominant class; on the other hand, economically and politically they have a marginal position in relation to power and are therefore part of what Bourdieu calls the “dominated” segment of the dominant class� This position has become even more precarious because of the growing volatility of their professional dependence, and it is this “flexibility,” as a neo-liberal rhetoric has it, that finds an uncanny echo in the concept of multiple identities� In that sense, the Americanist who is trying to reenact the border romance of several identities is really not that far apart from the young professional who prides himself on his global savyness which allows him to travel around the world on different business missions and spend a life “in cars, areoplanes and trains, on the telephone or the internet” (Beck 25)� The only difference is that the business man’s flexibility pays, while the flexibility celebrated in American studies is often connected with what we have come to call a “prekariat,” a social group, including students, intellectuals, and many people with a university degree, who live in a world of freelancing and subcontracting, of growing risk and insecurity in professional prospects and living conditions� The situation of this group is characterized by uncertain, shifting employment, constant mobility, a willingness to work flexible hours and accept self-exploitation as second-nature, an irregular income and uncertain prospects for the future. Liberation from a fixed and stable identity can thus tie in with a “liberation” from a fixed income and stable social ties. The ultimate irony in this surprising parallelism is that what is described as a cunning subversion of the interpellating powers of the system coincides 50 W infried f luck with the retreat of institutions like the state or the social security system from their responsibilities in matters of state protection, business regulation, social security, welfare policies, and environmental control� To identify the social base for certain utopias is not to minimize or dismiss these utopias but to remind us all that utopias are socially embedded and have a social base. Understanding this new social configuration may also help to identify the changing patterns of interdependencies that are at work in the new habitus of “multiple/ multiplied identities�” The more volatile one’s social and professional position, the greater the chain of interdependence, because all elements of social existence are now affected by a life of increased risk and therefore have to be constantly reassessed and renegotiated� 18 This means putting together networks, constructing alliances, making deals (Lash ix)� It requires constant negotiation and an ability to move between different networks. Flexibility and the need for cooperation are complementary: flexibility means to be willing to cooperate, and increased cooperation requires new degrees of flexibility. 19 Not only identity has multiplied, but so have interdependencies� Multiple identities thus also lead to a growing multitude of networks: “Social capital is real capital in the information economy� Those who control social valves - connections between individuals - are the ones who are able to profit through information arbitrage” (Conley 31). 20 Social relations are sought “for the sake of gaining additional social relations” (ibid� 167). The individual may be liberated from the prison-house of one unified identity, but the demands imposed on her are not getting less but more� 21 The weaker the degree of internalization, the greater the need for self-observation, for self-regulation, and for a continuing management of choices� 22 What is precarious is not only one’s employment situation, but also one’s freedom, because no routine can help to negotiate the conflicting and ever increasing demands emerging from a variety of social options� The more options one 18 On this point, see Ulrich Beck: “Anyone who wants to live a life of their own must also be socially sensitive to a very high degree … the terms of living together have to be renegotiated in each case” (xxii-xxiii)� 19 Richard Florida uses that argument to effectively counter the charge of a growing loss of community in American life: “The decline in the strength of our ties to people and institutions is a product of the increasing number of ties we have” (7)� And: “A key reason that weak ties are important is that we can manage many more of them� Strong ties, by their nature, consume much more of our time and energy” (276)� 20 Cf� also Ulrich Bröckling’s description of the entrepreneurial self: “In order to accumulate and constantly update his knowledge, he has to be part of a large network - and has to be interested in expanding it continuously” (264, my translation)� The growth of social networks on the Internet provides an obvious case in point� 21 Perceptively, two books on the contemporary multiplication of identity options take their point of departure from the key word “more�” See Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice. Why More is Less and Peter Whybrow, American Mania. When More is Not Enough � 22 A new, absurd level of self-observation and self-regulation is reached in the proposal of two economists how to solve the budget crisis of California’s state university system by lay-offs instead of pay cuts: “Those who remain would get full pay but be asked to pick up much of the slack by cutting out their least productive 8% to 10% of activities” ( L.A. Times July 07, 2009)� Are Multiple Identities the Answer? 51 has, or, should one rather say: the more options one needs, the greater also the unintended consequences for which even more flexibility is needed. 23 A “narrative of given sociability” is replaced by a narrative of non-linear, openended, flexible, multiple individuality in which “biographical solutions” are set against systemic contradictions (Beck xxii)� And the next step in this story of self-expansion will be that into virtual reality� As Florian Rötzer has pointed out: “The expectation linked to the age of virtual realities is that of being able to move back and forth at any given time between multiple worlds, and in and out of different bodies and identities, so that the seemingly insurmountable tie between one’s own body and one’s own identity is broken and the I can leave the prison-house of the body, if only temporarily� Bodies are fragile, vulnerable, and dependent on outer conditions� Inevitably, they limit the possibilities of the ‘I�’ They are too slow for the Internet age, have relatively few input-output-channels, and therefore put restraints on links with other technologies” (Rötzer 281, m.t.). This utopian vision of virtual realities illustrates to what extent the concept of multiple identities articulates the fantasy of an “I” that is in search of self-expansion and looks for technological means to turn that self-expansion into a habitus � Figurational sociology challenges us to find a social context in order to explain why theories of the multiplication of identity have gained so much symbolic capital in their respective fields. Once that question is asked, a striking similarity between various groups of white collar workers in academia, culture and business emerges and identifies these groups as part of a new social formation, the so-called “creative classes,” “a new powerful group of intellectual workers” (Conley 66)� We can describe the multiplication of identity as a new habitus of this social formation, a habitus that may be called “multiplication management�” Indeed, constant, daily multiplication management demonstrates all of the compulsiveness that one links with the concept of an internalized habit� And yet, this habitus is welcome, because it provides the creative classes with a feeling of self-expansion and, hence, with a sense of superiority over the bourgeois who is still not yet as flexible. The creative classes can feel superior, because they seem to possess more (imaginary) options than others� Moreover, the possibility of frequent identity changes seems to signal independence - provocatively, one might say: the one thing they do not really have� To understand the multiplication of identity as a new habitus of the “creative classes” would also provide an answer to Daniel Bell� As a result of the 23 See on this point Scott Lash’s remarks on “reflexive individualization” in his foreword to Beck’s study Individualization : “The reflexive individualization of the second modernity presumes the existence of non-linear systems� Here system dis-equilibrium and change is produced internally to the system through feedback loops� These are open systems. The point is that the feedback loop, that is the defining property of non-linear systems, passes through the individual� Individualization now is at the same time system destabilization� Complex systems do not simply reproduce� They change� The individual is the point of passage for the unintended consequences that lead to system dis-equilibrium” (Lash viii)� 52 W infried f luck convergence of job and private life, the creative self has to become an entrepreneurial self for whom the two realms become increasingly indistinguishable� 24 Economy and culture are no longer in disjuncture but reinforce each other� As a consequence - and this seems to be the best answer to the “Eliasproblem” whether modernity is characterized by a growing need for self-constraint or by the opposite, an ever increasing plurality of individual options - self-regulation and self-constraint are no longer identical� On the contrary, self-regulation now has to include the management of attitudes that constituted opposite values in earlier times such as unconstrained self-expression and conspicuous self-fashioning. In this respect, figurational sociology may profit from theories of multiple identities. Traditionally, a habitus describes a firmly internalized identity; as such it seems to be identical with the forms of internalization typical of economic individualism in which self-discipline is the basis of success� 25 In contrast, I have argued that the multiplication of identity typical of expressive individualism is now the new habitus for whom the flexibility of identity options is becoming second nature. In effect, one may draw on figurational sociology itself in order to explain what it itself fails to acknowledge at this point� The new habitus can be seen as a response to changing patterns of interdependencies, in which fluctuating power balances of society and the increased volatilitiy of individual existences challenge the individual to increase her store of options for coming to terms with this new situation� Elias’ idea of self-constraint and Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus can no longer capture this volatility and the ensuing need for a new flexibility. But their theoretical premise that identities are shaped by changing constellations of power and social interdependencies continue to be helpful also for an analysis of the new habitus � In traditional political critiques, power resides in clearly identifiable institutions and structures of society such as the state or class structures or a dominant class ideology� But in the age of expressive individualism, culture has become the major focus in the analysis and critique of power� As a consequence, power is now more broadly defined to include those linguistic structures, cultural norms, and coercive social identities that still stand in the way of an articulation and full recognition of difference. However, as definitions of power get broader, it also becomes more difficult to identify alternative institutions or oppositional strategies� Since power is now everywhere, it has become diffuse and fluctuating. Under these circumstances, the flexibility not to be permanently tied down by seemingly all-pervasive power effects provides the only possible protection against them: as long as difference is preserved, identity ascription has not yet taken hold successfully� The multiplication of identity - and the flexibility to live with the new challenges of identity-management connected with it - opens up the utopian vision of a 24 On the concept of the entrepreneurial self, cf� Bröckling (2007) and Michalitsch (2006)� 25 The terms economic and expressive individualism have been introduced by Robert Bellah in his study Habits of the Heart. For an elaboration and discussion of their usefulness as an analytical tool cf� my essay “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism” (2002)� Are Multiple Identities the Answer? 53 permanent state of non-identity; it looks like the best and most promising way to preserve difference under an all-pervasive power regime� However, not to be tied down in any particular professional position, location, or social identity is also a major value in neo-liberalism� Again, theoretical concepts of cultural radicalism and the new social realities created by neo-liberalism show an unexpected affinity at this point. VIII. What is the point of complicating the concept of multiple identities and positions in-between fixed identities in the manner I have done here? As I said at the beginning, the concept has become important in order to explain why the oppressed do not rebel against their fate and to sketch out what, given that fact, may be a new or another option for resistance� I also said in the beginning that the objection against this option because it is still utopian is by no means a valid argument against it� Another aspect has turned out to be of greater importance: the fact that identity, at a closer look, is always narrative identity and that this narrative identity needs a narrator, an I, who is challenged to provide continuity and coherence to experience� If that experience multiplies by motion, migration, or just by the increasing mobility of modern life, this means that the task of integrating these experiences grows and that, ultimately, this challenge of an increased multiple identity-management, with its close resemblance to multi-tasking, is bound to become a new habit - a habitus that is welcome because it provides a new sense of agency and hence of empowerment� We are not far apart here from the utopia of American studies A�D�, but with one important difference: what looks like a utopia of resistance and perhaps even liberation from the perspective of A�D� revisionism, may signal the arrival of a new stage in the relentless advancement of instrumental rationality from a figurational perspective. Perhaps the reason for why there is not more resistance to current neoliberal developments does not lie in a state of exception that allows people to disavow unpleasant realities about their American identity� Perhaps the reason has to be sought in the pseudo-democratization of a basic promise of neo-liberalism, that of individual empowerment� This neo-liberal narrative has inspired a new multitude of creative entrepreneurial selves who are too busy with their own personal drama of self-expansion to realize what is really going on in the society in which they live� One may, in conclusion, take a step back and apply this observation to the field of American studies. In another context, I have claimed boldly that the history of the field can be summarized in two short sentences. American studies were established as manifestation of a romance with “America” which was then, in a second, revisionist stage, subjected to several stages of disenchantment� 26 Ethnic, race, and gender studies have revitalized the field 26 See Fluck, “The Romance with America: Approaching America through Its Ideals” (2010)� 54 W infried f luck by constructing a new romance of the border in which the fate of marginalized and disenfranchised groups is taken as the new paradigm for understanding modernity and, more specifically, American culture. Or, to apply the terminology discussed here, they have added a whole new range of identities and subject positions to our romance with America, although - or more precisely: because - this America can now be reconceived as a transnational space� However, just as the celebration of multiple identities is masking the fact that this multiplication is really, at bottom, another step in the history of the civilizing process, the romance of border, diaspora and other sites of hybridization and identity multiplication may also hide a sobering fact: not only can the center live very well with this multiplication; it may even come to actively promote it, because this form of multiplication works well not only for neo-liberal globalization but even more so for its “creative” self-authorization� Are Multiple Identities the Answer? 55 Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria� Borderlands. La Frontera. The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999 [1987]. Ashcroft, Bill� “Chicano Transnation�” Imagined Transnationalism. U.S. Latino/ a Literature, Culture, and Identity � Eds� Kevin Concannon, Francisco A� Lomeli, and Marc Priewe. New York: Palgrave, 2009. 13-28. Beck, Ulrich, and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim� Individualization � London: Sage, 2002� Bell, Daniel� The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 1976� Bellah, Robert N�, et�al� Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Bröckling, Ulrich� Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform. Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 2007� Conley, Dalton� Elsewhere U.S.A. New York: Pantheon, 2009� Elias, Norbert� Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen. Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1982. Elliott, Emory� “Diversity in the United States and Abroad: What does it Mean When American Studies is Transnational? ” American Quarterly 59�1 (2007): 1-22� Featherstone, Mike, “Norbert Elias and Figurational Sociology: Some Prefatory Remarks�” Theory, Culture & Society 4.2 (1987): 197-211. Florida, Richard� The Rise of the Creative Class. And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002� Fluck, Winfried� 27 “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism�” The Future of American Studies � Eds� Donald E� Pease and Robyn Wiegman� Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002� 211-230; repr� (extended version) in: Fluck, Romance with America? 49-68. ---� “Stuart Hall: From New Left Politics to the New Cultural Politics of Difference�” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 4 (2002): 331-352� ---� “Theories of American Culture (and the Transnational Turn in American Studies)�” REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 23 (2007): 59-77; repr� in: Fluck, Romance with America? 69-85. ---� “‘Every man therefore behaves after his own fashion? ’: American Manners and Modernity�” Civilizing America. Manners and Civility in American Literature and Culture. Ed. Dietmar Schloss. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. 277-298. ---� “American Literary History and the Romance with America�” American Literary History 21.1 (2009): 1-18. ---� Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009� ---� “The Romance With America: Approaching America Through Its Ideals�” American Studies/ Shifting Gears � Eds� Birte Christ et al� Heidelberg: Winter, 2010� 301-325; repr� in: Fluck, Romance with America? 87-104. Hall, Stuart� “New Ethnicities�” Stuart Hall. Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Eds� David Morley, and Kuan-Hsing Chen� London: Routledge, 1996� 442-450� ---� “Ethnicity: Identities and Difference�” Radical America 23.4 (1989): 9-20. 27 All essays by Winfried Fluck listed here are also accessible for reading and downloading on the website http: / / www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/ en/ v/ publications_fluck/ . 56 W infried f luck ---� “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture? ” Black Popular Culture � Ed� Gina Dent� Seattle: Bay Press, 1992; repr� in : Stuart Hall. Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Eds. David Morley, and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London: Routledge, 1996. 468- 478. ---� “Minimal Selves�” Eds� Ann Gray, and Jim McGuigan� Studying Culture. An Introductory Reader. London: Arnold, 1993. 134-138. ---� “The Question of Cultural Identity,” Modernity. An Introduction to Modern Societies � Eds� Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson� London: Blackwell, 1996� 595-634� ---� “Who Needs ‘Identity’? ” Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds� Stuart Hall, and Paul du Gay� London: Sage, 1996� 1-17� Iser, Wolfgang� “Representation: A Performative Act�” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 236-248. Jameson, Fredric� “Technology as an allegory of social relations� An Interview with Fredric Jameson�” Wolfgang Neuhaus� Heise online � March 03, 2001� Access 06 August 2011� <http: / / www�heise�de/ tp/ artikel/ 7/ 7127/ 1�html>� Lash, Scott, “Foreword: Individualization in a Non-Linear Mode�” Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim� Individualization � vii-xiii� Marx, Leo� “On Recovering the ‘Ur’ Theory of American Studies�” REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 19 (2003): 3-17� Michalitsch, Gabriele� Die neoliberale Domestizierung des Subjekts. Von den Leidenschaften zum Kalkül. Frankfurt/ Main: Campus, 2006� Rötzer, Florian� “Zukunft des Körpers�” Der Sinn der Sinne � Ed� Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland GmbH. Bonn: Steidel, 1998. 272-288. Schwartz, Barry� The Paradox of Choice. Why More is Less. New York: Harper, 2004� Whybrow, Peter C� American Mania. When More is Not Enough. New York: Norton, 2005� Wouters, Cas� “Informalisierung und der Prozeß der Zivilisation,” Materialien zu Norbert Elias’ Zivilisationstheorie. Eds� Peter Gleichmann, Johan Goudsblom and Hermann Korte. Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. 279-298. B rian t. e dWards After the American Century 1 Polemic: When did American Studies die? We have entered a period of time within which the modes of reading established by American Studies are no longer tenable for understanding twentyfirst century literary and cultural production in its historical context. As the meanings attached to the United States in the world shift toward widespread distrust of American imperial intentions, and the U�S� economy enters a putative “autumn” as the global economic crisis persists, the prevailing American Studies methodology - itself developed during the ascension of American military, economic and cultural power - proves itself to be exhausted� In order to elaborate these ambitious claims, I will approach them from outside the usual terrain of American Studies, for it is American Studies I am trying to escape� I suggest that it is from “outside” American Studies that we may derive a clearer perspective on its limitations, and thereby attempt to reconfigure it. In the last section of this essay, I discuss two aspects of the so-called Arab spring: first, the patterns of understanding the phenomenon of the Cairo January 25 movement as expressed in mainstream American media, as well as government and private sector initiatives for harnessing the power of social networking media� The limits of understanding evident in such responses to change in the Arab world reflect on the end of the American century profoundly� Then, surveying other research I have done on recent works of Arabic-language fiction, I argue that the circulation of American and other global cultural forms demands a more nuanced approach to reading new literary production than has been available� Though Egyptian politics and cultural production are outside the purview of American Studies or Americanist literary scholarship, of course, or should be, they may be put in conversation with what I have elsewhere called a cosmopolitan approach to “globalized American Studies.” Egyptian fiction of the twenty-first century, and indeed American fiction of the twenty-first century, is misread if it is understood using the vernacular tradition of American Studies methodology, within which it must appear merely derivative or useful to understanding present political realities� Instead, attention to circulation allows a more supple method to understanding the relationship of globalization to literary production, and a useful opening to revivifying American Studies methodology in the autumn 58 B rian t. e dWards of the American century. Finally, it reflects back on the heroic but fictional tale about the role of social media in the Middle East and offers a contrapuntal account of how circulation of American forms operates� 2 Autumn of America In their contribution to the 2011 collection Business as usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown, Beverly Silver and the late Giovanni Arrighi propose that the 2008 financial meltdown is “one of the latest indicators” that we are in the midst of the “‘autumn’ of U�S� world hegemony�” 1 Rehearsing and extending the argument of Arrighi’s now classic The Long Twentieth Century, and expanding on the thesis of French historian Fernand Braudel, Silver and Arrighi argue that four major periods of “systemwide financial expansion” have taken place within the history of capitalism, each of them repeating a common pattern while innovating on its predecessor� The “system” referred to in that phrase is the world system, an approach to understanding global historical change that offers an avenue into a difficult set of debates in American Studies; or perhaps a bypass - a way around those debates� For Silver and Arrighi, Braudel’s identification of the massive financial expansions that took place in 1) the Italian city states and the Republic of Genoa from the fifteenth century to the early seventeenth centuries; 2) Holland from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries; and 3) the United Kingdom, from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, should be complemented by an analysis of the fourth expansion of global capitalism beginning in the late nineteenth century, with the United States as the new center� In the third period of expansion, the United Kingdom was both a “fully developed national state” and one with a “world-encompassing commercial and territorial empire that gave its ruling groups and its capitalist class an unprecedented command over the world’s human and natural resources�” 2 With a global empire, the British did not need to rely on foreign powers for protection, as the Italian states had in their period of ascendency during the Renaissance, and so the British internalized their own protection costs� As an industrial center, the British also produced their own manufactured goods, which Silver and Arrighi argue was central to the “profitability of [their] commercial activities,” and thus internalized their production costs� During the British period, the expansion of the financial system therefore went yet further than it had under their Dutch and Italian forebears� As British industrial capitalism waned, the United States emerged with a different set of arrangements� Instead of a colonial empire of the British model, the United States was, in Silver and Arrighi’s words, a “continental 1 Beverly J� Silver and Giovanni Arrighi, “The End of the Long Twentieth Century,” in Business as usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown, eds� Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian (New York: Social Science Research Council and NYU Press, 2011), 55� 2 Ibid� 61� After the American Century 59 military-industrial complex with the power to provide effective protection for itself and its allies and to make credible threats of economic strangulation or military annihilation toward its enemies�” Thus, the power, size, insularity and “natural wealth” of the United States could internalize both protection and production costs, as had the British� The innovation, however, was the formation of “vertically integrated multinational corporations” which allowed the American capitalist class to internalize what the authors call the “transaction costs” of capital expansion: “to internalize the markets on which the self-expansion of its capital depended�” 3 The American century, from the perspective of worlds-systems analysis, is therefore a cycle of accumulation in which the multinational corporation takes the place of Britain’s global, colonial empire, but not in the same way� It innovates on the British model, and has much in common with the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - which they call a “highly profitable empire of commercial outposts” 4 - more so in some ways than the British empire with its extensive colonial holdings� Silver and Arrighi point out that as each of these cycles of accumulation ran its course, as expansion of the financial system reached its limit, a period of financialization set in: the autumn of each cycle� They point to Marx’s Capital , Vol� 1, wherein Marx himself noted a pattern “whereby expansions of the financial system … played a key role in the transfer of surplus capital from declining to rising geographical centers of capitalist trade and production” 5 : Venice “in her decadence” (quoting Marx) lent massive sums to Holland; Holland, in its late period, lent huge sums to England; and England had already been giving large amounts of credit to the United States as Marx was writing Capital � The autumn of each financial expansion is the spring for another system. Worlds-systems analysis is not without its problems or its critics, of course, particularly from the field of history. For students of literary and cultural studies, the putative theoretical shortcomings are less important than the apparent disconnection from our work: reading the analyses of great systemic shifts, the escalation of one cycle of accumulation and diminution of another, one hardly feels that the analysis of individual texts or authors matter to the grand pattern� Perhaps we might understand social movements and protest - decolonization and the civil rights movement, or globalization and the anti-globalization protests, and the literary and film texts that document them, from African American literary texts of the 1940s and 50s to the literatures of various global diasporas, for example - in a different light if we see them in terms of the waxing and waning of massive cycles and systems, but it is not immediately apparent how� Still, we need a foothold, some sort of stable ground from which to reexamine the “state” of American Studies, and this may provide a surprisingly useful one� For in the long and animated discussion of the limits and persistence of American exceptionalism - and the 3 Ibid� 62; emphasis added� 4 Ibid� 60� 5 Ibid� 59� 60 B rian t. e dWards recent resurgence of claims for American exceptionality in public discourse, particularly on the American right and center-right - it is clear that there is an anxiety about the financial meltdown and a process of coming to terms with the exuberance of the 1990s and the various economic bubbles that closed the last century� Arrighi, in a long essay called “Hegemony Unravelling,” published in two parts in the New Left Review in 2005, noted the contradictory aspects of the apparent revival of the U�S� economy in the 1990s: the escalation of U�S� foreign debt “without precedent in world history” and the “emergence of a new U�S� imperial project,” namely the Project for the New American Century� He asks “whether and how the New American Century project and its adoption by the Bush administration relate to the turbulence of the global political economy since 1970�” Arrighi thus connects the Project for the New American Century, and its “adoption as official U.S. policy,” 6 not only with a domestic response by conservatives to the perceived moral profligacy of the 1990s under the Clinton administration, but, here following his colleague David Harvey, he also regards it as “an attempt to maintain the hegemonic position of the U�S� under the conditions of unprecedented global economic integration created by endless capital accumulation at the end of the twentieth century�” 7 Arrighi makes a compelling case that we understand the Project for the New American Century in terms of the unraveling of U�S� global hegemony, an anxious awareness that the conditions of the so-called American century were now in their autumn� (In this he differs from Harvey, who points to the Project as a key example of “the New Imperialism�” 8 ) Still, we may adapt these lessons and bring them into the realm of American Studies and its own unraveling academic hegemony, by shifting the focus to the patterns of knowing - the changing context for literary and cultural production - that were also emerging in the 1990s and have now been established as our current episteme� In other words, when the anxious discourse in the 1990s about the “end of history” and loss of moral center was disrupted by the cataclysmic events of September 11, 2001, and the announcement of a “War on Terror” that lasted through the two terms of the George W� Bush administration, the neo-imperialism of the Project for the New American Century and the critique it occasioned from American Studies also served as a distraction from a changed episteme� What was occluded was the way in which the new ways of knowing that the digital revolution had opened up (global village, global cultural economy, collapsing of borders, states of diaspora, etc�) were marking the transition from one way of inhabiting the world within the long American century into yet another� This awareness ran ahead of the patterns those of us in American Studies had developed for understanding the interplay of text and politics, of representation and history, a methodology which had of 6 Giovanni Arrighi, “Hegemony Unraveling - I,” New Left Review 32 (2005): 26� 7 Ibid� 30� 8 See David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford UP, 2003)� After the American Century 61 course emerged during the height of American ascendancy, even as it was refined and debated through the long cold war. For it was the early cold war, as intellectuals and public critics alike came to terms with the downgrading of British global power, now obvious at the end of World War II, that American Studies as a discipline - or interdiscipline - was consolidated and codified. If there is something accurate about Arrighi’s claim that the autumn of a cycle of accumulation is perceivable in the move to financialization (which has been the case for the United States since 1973 and the expiration of the Bretton Woods agreement, one reasonable date for the starting point for the age of globalization), I propose by analogue that the excessive disciplinary anxiety that took over American Studies in the late 1980s and 1990s may also suggest its autumn� In the extended introduction to our edited collection Globalizing American Studies , Dilip Gaonkar and I ask whether the disciplinary anxieties of American Studies, which have been present from the start of the field’s consolidation, are more debilitating than productive� 9 We distinguish between founding narratives (those canonical works in the field to which so many have turned for methodological guidance even after their arguments have been superseded) and crisis narratives (often found in introductions, prefaces, afterwords, commentaries, etc�, many of which have become central in the bibliography of the field), and note the presence of disciplinary anxiety in both types of narratives� We suggest that in American Studies scholarship there is frequently a reflexive process of self-marking and self-constitution around five major categories: the objects, methods, theoretical commitments, tradition, and political engagements of the field. The disciplinary anxiety of American Studies - in both founding and crisis narratives - has as much to do with the heavy burden of politics framing the field as it does with scholars’ responses to intellectual trends and discoveries outside the more limited purview of American Studies� We go on to call attention to the “fragments” of America - of meanings attached to “America” as much as to “America” as an agent of capitalist modernity - and note that when Americans or American products (both cultural and commercial) travel abroad, they are taken up and reinterpreted in new contexts� This leads to our proposing a distinction between what we call a vernacular tradition of American Studies and a cosmopolitan one, wherein the latter may allow for an approach to the study of American objects and ideas “divested of the exceptionalist intellectual tradition�” 10 Such an approach means different things for different scholars� Sometimes it requires a comparative or multi-sited perspective on “Americanist” questions, researching in archives and languages traditionally considered outside the purview of 9 Brian T� Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Introduction: Globalizing American Studies,” Globalizing American Studies, eds� Brian T� Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010), 7� 10 I am drawing here, and through the rest of this paragraph, from Brian T� Edwards, “Fragments of America: Response to Marius Jucan,” American, British and Canadian Studies (Journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania) 14 (2010): 96-103� 62 B rian t. e dWards American Studies� 11 Scholars outside “American Studies” proper - whatever their base of operation - may too help us understand better the fragments of America (ideas, images, cultural products) as they enter into and alter local debates about culture, politics, and society� But these conversations have not been adequately attended to within the vernacular tradition of American Studies - nor even, until quite recently and still too little, by those committed to a critique of the exceptionalist basis of American Studies� Following my discussion of Arrighi above, I might therefore go yet further, if a bit exuberantly, to say that in the early period of American Studies, the 1940s and 1950s, as American Studies scholars internalized the protection costs and the production costs of our ways of understanding the social - via close readings of deeply contextualized texts - American Studies mirrored the American cycle of accumulation itself� The multinational corporations so key to the American century were similar to American Studies, and vice versa, in that they were blind to the ways in which the markets they were exploiting - and in the case of American Studies, the texts and contexts they were grappling with - had their own particularities and did not buy American goods silently� They internalized the markets on which their selfexpansion depended, to adopt Arrighi’s phrase about multinational corporations� It was not always easy to read or to even perceive the discrepancies; American Studies was by and large monolingual, and as it waned, it exposed the problems and logics of exceptionalism, without shifting the frame or externalizing the object of study or moving outside its borders, language(s) and archives, except in spatialized ways� Thus hemispheric approaches, an obsession with borders, etc�, have offered us important lessons and opened up key new archives, but are also stubbornly spatial and centrifugal in their attempt to reconfigure the field. The title of this essay - “After the American Century” - is a provocation, both for American Studies as a discipline and more generally� As I use the term, the “American Century” is more than a temporal demarcation for the twentieth century� It is an episteme, a way of understanding the present during a period of massive expansion, one we can now see beyond� Thus I am trying to open up a methodology by which to read the text or the situation that is able to account for its placement - and its movement - in an expanding or contracting system� In so doing, I borrow the phrase “American Century” from its key proponent, Henry Luce, to suggest that “the American Century” names not simply a unit of time, or a geospatial term for marking the political and economic dominance of the United States, but a way of understanding the role of American culture in the world, during a period when new technologies and media played a major role in circulating American cultural products as commodities� That those circulating objects of American culture were, of course, more than commodities, and that they moved off their prescribed or anticipated pathways will offer the occasion to 11 The contributions to Globalizing American Studies follow this impulse in diverse, multidisciplinary ways� After the American Century 63 wonder whether we are indeed in the autumn of the American century, and what such an awareness may mean to literary and cultural analysis� Attention to the circulation of American cultural objects in the “autumn” of the American century also permits, I argue, an opportunity to move beyond the logic that has animated American Studies as a disciplinary formation - and as a method - including in the late period of critique (the sustained attention to the limits of the exceptionalist thesis)� At the time of this writing (May-June 2011), as the French debate the conjunction of the American judicial system and our media-saturated obsession with celebrity suspects - Dominique Strauss-Kahn - they both distinguish their own legal system from the American one and find themselves fascinated by scenes and locations they know from popular American police programs such as Law and Order: Special Victims Unit � And as the conspiracy theories abound in the Middle East and North Africa about the public assassination of Osama bin Laden, first made known by a Pakistani user of Twitter, the old mythology of the U�S� as the destination of the “American dream” or the arbiter of justice is tempered for many by a more recent sense of America as imperial. How do these critical reflections on American culture, emerging from outside but intersecting with American cultural forms (the TV drama, the Twitter tweet) impact the ways in which scholars of American culture and society disrupt their own methodology? We have heard the claim that 9/ 11 “changed everything,” and yet this demarcation of a historical rupture should be resisted within American Studies as it belatedly attends to other ways of perceiving and knowing “America” from the putative outside� Thus by my title “After the American Century” I do not mean to suggest that it is only in the twenty-first century that such critical outside perspectives become valid or visible� Indeed, the claim that “everything changed” in September 2001 has served as a rhetoric by which to reinscribe those “American Century” ways of perceiving, managing, and unwittingly rejecting the “post-American world,” to use Fareed Zakaria’s phrase (Zakaria reinscribes the vernacular perspective on America even while seemingly rejecting it)� 12 We know the nefarious ways to which the administration of President George W� Bush deployed that marker of historical rupture in order to authorize itself to go back to older concerns that had little to do with the events of 9/ 11, from Baghdad to the borderlands of the American Southwest� The “state of exception,” in Donald Pease’s deconstruction of President Bush’s declaration of the so-called “War on Terror,” becomes Bush’s disavowal of the very exceptionalist thesis - this, however, clears the space, in Pease’s analysis, for a yet more confident reassertion of American Empire. 13 And in another realm of public discourse, as observers witnessed the rise of TV commentator-cum- 12 See our reading of Zakaria’s The Post-American World in Edwards and Gaonkar, 18-25. 13 See Donald E� Pease, “Amerian Studies after American Exceptionalism? Toward a Comparative Analysis of Imperial State Exceptionalisms,” in Edwards and Gaonkar, eds�, Globalizing American Studies, 47-83. 64 B rian t. e dWards university founder Glenn Beck reeducate a media public about American history, and how to interpret it, we cultural and literary historians recognized that some part of the American Studies playbook had been cut and pasted into Beck University’s mission statement: Offered exclusively to Insider Extreme subscribers, Beck University is a unique academic experience bringing together experts in the fields of religion, American history and economics� Through captivating lectures and interactive online discussions, these experts will explore the concepts of Faith, Hope and Charity and show you how they influence America’s past, her present and most importantly her future� 14 While this mission statement was roundly mocked in American media, the ways in which “Beck University” appropriated American Studies approaches to history, religion, and economics - the Parrington model of unity within diversity here, apparently, reappearing as pastiche - might give us pause� It underlines the urgency for American Studies scholars to identify what I called above the vernacular tradition of American Studies scholarship and to provincialize it� If we do not provincialize such a perspective, the “world” comes under erasure� At the 2010 annual meeting of the American Studies Association, Alan Nadel assembled a fine panel, with the participation of Winfried Fluck and Donatella Izzo, which offered a rhetorical approach to this problem and demonstrated a way out of it� 15 Entitled “How in the World Do We know 9/ 11 Changed Everything? ” Nadel suggested, in a rhetorically rich manner, the stakes of the problem and the ways in which the “world” is occluded by vernacularist approaches� By invoking that American colloquialism “how in the world? ”, Nadel suggested that there was a constitutive gap between the knowledge that conservative forces in the U�S� would have you believe is common sensical (namely, that of course 9/ 11 changed everything), and that which might threaten such common sense - a breaking of the habits, of the habitus, by looking outside “in the world,” signaled by and performed in the important contributions of Fluck and Izzo to the panel� But the American auditor does not hear the contingency of the phrase “in the world” at first, because the idiomatic, colloquial phrase “how in the world” in its very familiarity apparently shelters the American auditor from the distressing idea that “the world” might not know America in the same way as he or she does� Nadel’s turn of phrase is reminiscent of Paul De Man’s famous reading of Archie Bunker’s response to Edith Bunker’s question about how to lace his shoes - “What’s the difference? ” - by which De Man argued that the meaning of Archie’s response was not contained in its grammar� De Man writes: “‘What’s the difference? ’ did not ask for difference but meant instead ‘I don’t give a damn what the difference is’ … [G]rammar allows us to ask the question, but the sentence by means of which we ask it may deny the very pos- 14 “Announcing Beck University,” July 6, 2010, http: / / www�glennbeck�com/ content/ articles/ article/ 198/ 42502/ . 15 Some of what follows incorporates my formal comment on the panel� After the American Century 65 sibility of asking�” De Man further explains his distinction between “grammar” and “rhetoric” as follows: “Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration�” 16 Nadel’s “How in the World” starts to suggest, similarly, that “the world” might help us know whether or not 9/ 11 changed everything, but it also suggested the ways in which such a critical, “outside” perspective was framed by a vernacularist grammar� There is some notable and important anxiety embedded, therefore, in Nadel’s use of the phrase “How in the world? ” and its suggestion of the referential aberration of rhetoric� It is this crisis that was illuminated brilliantly in Nadel’s own paper and those by Fluck and Izzo, 17 which together allow us to reopen a question not only of the state of emergency or state of exception of the post-9/ 11 moment, about which the scholars from three diverse national locations were ambivalent as marker of the rupture� But also about the state of emergency, to reference the work of Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman, of American Studies itself� 18 That emergency, I argue, revolves precisely around the occlusion of “the world” in American Studies, including in its so-called transnational turn� Fluck and Izzo offered powerful readings of what I will call the “fragmentary” aspects of America in circulation in the era of globalization, that is since 1973, and also the pointed reminder that a reading of American culture and politics from outside necessarily throws the American idiom - the vernacular of America, which I will extend to the vernacular tradition of American Studies - into question� Alan Nadel’s own virtuoso reading of the 9/ 11 Commission Report as pastiche suggests the ways the rhetorical devices of popular history and suspense fiction put “the world” under erasure. In Nadel’s account, it is the Report ’s author Philip Zelinkow’s corrupt account of the history of Islam, the meaning of the work of Sayyid el Qutb, and the impoverished and a-economic account of Osama bin Laden himself that are fogged over� Thus via Nadel’s critical performance, and his own exposé of the unreliability of the narrator of the 9/ 11 Commission Report (and the stakes of the report within the career of a powerful but shady author), we may expose the fracture points in that rhetoric� If we go back to the lessons of Nadel’s own earlier work on the cold war national narratives, his crucial book Containment Culture, we see how what he then called the “straight story” now returns, and with a much more anxious referent than it did when its goal was to contain those leaky politics and threatening sexualities of the cold war period� 19 Here, 9/ 11 did 16 Paul De Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), 10� 17 Alan Nadel, “‘Temperate and Nearly Cloudless: ’ The 9/ 11 Commission Report as Postmodern Pastiche,” American Studies Association, San Antonio, TX, November 19, 2010� Izzo’s paper appears in revised form in this collection� 18 Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman, eds�, States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2009)� 19 Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995)� 66 B rian t. e dWards not change anything at all, except that the “unity of purpose” that the “nation demands” must now be seen as pastiche, and was by 2001 always already devoid of the possibility that a nation could demand any such unity at all� Following Nadel’s presentation at the American Studies Association, though taking a different tack, Winfried Fluck implored American Studies - and the New Americanists, in particular - to pay less attention to what he calls the “trauma narrative” and more to the “crisis narrative�” Gleaned from his perspective in Berlin, the four narratives of America in circulation allow us to comprehend an America disaggregated from its own American exceptionalism� America becomes known by its fragments, whether in Berlin as represented by Fluck’s account, or in Donatella Izzo’s brilliant account of the ways in which American politics, and American liberalism itself, can be reappropriated by Italy’s far right� It is precisely this perspective that “How in the World” raises and that “How in the world” powerfully suggests is constantly under threat of erasure� After the American century, then, may be synonymous with after American Studies� In this provocation, and my snarky opening sentence - when did American Studies die? - I am referring to Gayatri C� Spivak’s important critique of comparative literature, Death of a Discipline, and not only as analogue� In her important book, Spivak summons a comparative approach to a comparative literature she proclaims dead� That approach is comparative in disciplinary terms - bringing together the tactics of close reading and the regional knowledge of area studies - toward what Spivak calls teleopoesis � 20 This strategy too proves useful to imagining American Studies after the American century, or American Studies after its death� 3 The Arab Spring I would like to shift from polemic to example, and to move outside American Studies in order to elaborate my methodological argument� Three months ago, in March, I returned to Cairo for the fifth time in two and a half years� During the past few years, I have been engaged in two overlapping projects: the first, tracking and sometimes participating in the development of American Studies itself in Egypt� I wrote about this in an essay called “American Studies in Motion,” which appears as the final chapter of Globalizing American Studies � There I argue that as Egyptian Americanists reexamine American literature, cultural production, and history for their own ends, they necessarily take a localized and presentist position on the American archive� This is productive both for Egyptian American Studies (and Iranian and Indian American Studies, my other key examples, which all do it differently) and an important disruption for U�S�-based discussions of the limits of the field. My second project during this time has been to follow the 20 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia UP, 2003)� After the American Century 67 work of an exceptionally interesting group of young writers based in Cairo - novelists, essayists, dialect poets, and comic artists, all of whom publish in Arabic, and whom I will refer to briefly here. These two projects seem to have come together this past winter and spring, as the Egyptian revolution - or what might more accurately be called the January 25 movement - highlighted the complicated ways in which American patronage and American innovation have affected the Egyptian cultural landscape, and the diverse ways in which young Egyptians reflect back on U�S� political hegemony in its autumn and American cultural production� In the case of American cultural products, we must include not only the usual suspects - novels, films, music, etc. - but also cultural forms, the most prominent of which emerge from the realm of the digital: social networking software and the various logics and cultural products it has inspired� In what follows, I survey these preliminary findings through an overview of how attention to Egyptian cultural production - which has developed an innovative way to incorporate American cultural forms - may allow us to develop an understanding of circulation that provides a more useful reading strategy, a comparative approach to reading texts of the twenty-first century that engage or intersect with American forms in motion� From this, I hope to show the limits of how many Americans understood and misunderstood what was happening in Egypt earlier this year, for it was precisely around the question of circulation and the technologies of the digital age that this misunderstanding or misanalysis proliferated� This is where American cultural forms and global politics intersect, and where American Studies in its vernacular tradition becomes a trap we must escape� As I have pursued a larger project on the global flow of American culture and its forms, I have been particularly drawn to new Egyptian writing of the 2000s� 21 I have been traveling to Cairo to try to understand literary creativity within zahma , a word from the Egyptian dialect of Arabic that translates as traffic, as blockage, and one I have used as a metaphor for the social and political blockage of Egypt in the first decade of this century. Formally, much new Egyptian literature seems to refract circulation-based capitalism in startlingly original ways: it borrows from global forms and language (the graphic novel, serious comic, the vocabulary and spelling of TXT messaging, as recalibrated in Arabic)� But at the same time, as I recount in the longer essay from which this is drawn, the strongest texts express a young Egyptian consciousness, one that is mediated by the technologies of globalization and global culture yet is simultaneously local - which in this case means “national” or Egyptian - and as a result remains difficult to translate into an American idiom� As with Egyptian American Studies, this is as it should be� The difficulty in translating the work of these young Egyptian writers is not only the old question of how to render their Arabic writing in English, 21 Much of what follows is drawn or adapted from Brian T� Edwards, “ Tahrir: Ends of Circulation,” Public Culture 23�3 (2011), forthcoming� 68 B rian t. e dWards though there too is a bit of a problem� In “ Tahrir : Ends of Circulation,” I provide an example: In the summer of 2009, when I suggested to the Cairo dialect poet and young literary essayist Omar Taher that I might translate for American publication the opening chapter of his influential Shaklaha Bazet - a work several young Cairobased writers had told me was so important to their work - he told me it would be impossible to translate; no one outside of Egypt would understand it, loaded with references to both transnational cultural products and unfungible local Egyptian ones� (I did so, anyway, and included it in the ‘Cairo Portfolio’ I edited for A Public Space in the fall 2009, heavily annotated, killing the humor in the process� 22 Creativity such as this may end in Egyptian fiction - it may not be able to circulate beyond it - yet it surely has an end: it has been useful, even productive, in creating a new Egyptian reading public� The problem of translation also exposes a limit in U�S� literary studies patterns for reading the movement of American and other global cultural production into new contexts, and an important part of my case about the autumn of American Studies� The reach of American forms into Egyptian literature and cultural production (prominent examples are the language of text messaging and the form and layout of comic books) might seem to signal the elasticity of American culture, but such would be a mistake� Egyptian literature would, should we misunderstand it merely as a locus for the expansion of American cultural forms, be understood as derivative, secondary, and not worthy of more than secondary attention� In other words, as such putatively American forms make their way into Egyptian fiction, it is not a question of influence, that pernicious old pattern for reading the movement of one literature into another, or of a simple lesson about the enlarged meanings of the original text derived from the surprising readings of a new public (an idea that Azar Nafisi’s treacherous Reading Lolita in Tehran popularized)� Rather if we attend to the ways in which the movement of an American form - abstracted, condensed, stripped of its former contextualized meaning - opens up a new set of meanings, how it jumps publics in a way that does not reflect on the original public from which it has traveled, we may move beyond the anachronism of the American Studies vernacular tradition as we inhabit and attempt to understand the twenty-first century. We might derive what Dilip Gaonkar and I called a cosmopolitan approach wherein “America” is understood as a node, as an agent of capitalist modernity, and as I suggested at the beginning of this essay, wherein American hegemony is in its autumn, ceding to a new set of arrangements or new cycle of accumulation� Consider, then, how the Egyptian revolution was understood in the mainstream American media, the ways in which the otherwise clear refusal of American hegemony, both political and cultural, was negotiated� The role of the Internet and of social networking media in the January 25 movement 22 Brian T� Edwards, “Cairo 2010: After Kefaya,” A Public Space 9 (2009), 127-132� The portfolio (127-175) included work by Mansoura Ez Eldin, Mohamed El Fakhrany, Muhammad Aladdin, Ahmed Alaidy, Magdy El Shafee, Omar Taher, Khalid Kassab, and Ibrahim El Batout� After the American Century 69 was referred to frequently in American accounts� Yet I have resisted putting the Internet in such a privileged or authorial position in understanding what happened in Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt in the winter of 2011� Doing so, it seems to me, becomes a way to give credit to the West for creating and developing a technology that lead to a new cultural form (indeed a new form of cultural production): social networking and a new genre of productive texts that might flow from it. In “ Tahrir: Ends of Circulation,” I give an account that is relevant to the case I am making here: In the several months prior to the Tahrir uprisings, mainstream American publications such as Foreign Affairs, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine had variously discussed and debated the role of social networking media in effecting change, and reported on efforts within the U�S� State Department to try to harness the power of these media� The winter and spring revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa seemed to confirm this technocentric understanding. The conversation reminded me of early cold war discussions of media, and of Daniel Lerner’s massive 1958 book, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, in particular. Lerner, who drew on extensive Middle East field research (only some of it done by himself), traced the ways in which both “the grocer and the chief,” in his famous excerpt published in Harper’s under that title in 1955, responded to the arrival of the forms and technologies of modernity� As Middle East historian James Gelvin put it in 2004, Lerner thought democracy and prosperity would come to the region ‘if only everyone in the region could broaden their horizons with a transistor radio�’ 23 Lerner’s reduction of a complex region to its inhabitants’ response to modern communication technologies is echoed in much of the current discussion of the role of social networking media� Not to account for the role of the digital age, and of social media, however, would be wrong too� As Tunisian youth sparked their own revolution in December 2010 to January 2011, leading to the flight of longtime autocrat, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, their Egyptian peers watched on satellite TV, live Internet streams, and followed via Facebook groups and tweets from Tunisia� One young Egyptian writer told me that he and his generation were ‘jealous’ of Tunisia in the first weeks of January� And what had seemed impossible to many in Egypt just a few months prior - despite oppositional movements and stillborn protests earlier in the decade, such as the Kefaya movement of 2004 and 2005 - took flight in Egypt with a speed and energy that even those who came to Tahrir Square on January 25 did not expect� ��� When the Internet was shut off by an anxious regime on January 27, it did not kill the movement� Instead, the sense of being cut off from their sources of information led many back out to the street, and especially to Tahrir� With the Internet down, several told me, there was nowhere else to go but outdoors� ��� In the U�S� media, however, social networking media and digital technologies were championed as pivotal� This extended the interpretation that had been used to explain the so-called Green Movement in Iran in 2009, when American commentators highlighted the use of Twitter and cell-phone videos published on Facebook by young Iranians protesting the legitimacy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory in the June 2009 presidential election� In February 2011, writing about Cairo, the New York Times ran a story on its front page about an 23 James Gelvin, “Globalization, Religion and the State in the Middle East: The Current Crisis in Historical Perspective,” Global Development Studies 3�3-4 (2003/ 2004): 1-22� 70 B rian t. e dWards Egyptian who named his newborn daughter ‘Facebook,’ to celebrate the role of the site in the new revolution� Another front-page story lionized Google’s Egyptian chief, Wael Ghonim, and his authorial role in staging the revolution via Facebook groups� Of course, the technologies of the digital revolution did play a role in the series of uprisings that spread from Tunisia to Egypt, and then quickly around the Arab world� The digital circulation of images, rhetoric, and advice across the region was a significant factor, and apparently a novel one in linking movements in diverse locations with a rapidity and intimacy that had not been present - or had not been as available to so many - in previous global contexts� By telling the story this way, American commentators had found a way to negotiate the more uncomfortable message coming from Tahrir Square: that the massive support the U�S� government had given the Mubarak regime, and indeed the Tunisian President Ben Ali’s regime, put the United States on the side of the opponents of change� Thus when Hillary Clinton visited Cairo while I was there in March, the January 25 youth refused to meet with her, a story that barely registered in American media� The carry-over of cold war political calculus in supporting the Mubarak and Ben Ali regimes - that they were steadfast partners in the so-called “War on Terror” - was more than obvious to young Egyptians as precisely that: the anachronism of extending a twentieth century geopolitical logic into the twenty-first, the erroneous assumption that it was not the autumn of American hegemony� Thus by telling the story of the January 25 movement as one created by a Google chief, or as only possible because of Facebook and Twitter, the American media and its hungry public could manage the contradictions that were perhaps too painful to acknowledge� By taking recourse to a reading practice that emphasizes circulation - one that sees America as a key node, but not the only one, in a global network of nodes (and Cairo would surely be another such node, albeit a more minor one) - the hope is that we can escape the persistent logics of the twentieth century, the logics of the American century wherein circulation only went in one direction. That this logic was so influential in circumscribing American Studies itself - to be clear, American Studies in its vernacular tradition, not the emergent cosmopolitan tradition that was there in a minor form but overlooked - is a reason to reject it, to admit its death, and embrace that which comes after� This discussion of recent events in Egypt should be, as I remarked at the outset, “outside” of American Studies, particularly if we heed the reasonable critique of the transnational turn in American Studies: that it mirrors the very expansionist impulse of the American Imperium it would seek to resist� Yet the autumn of the American century, and the autumn of American Studies, overlap with the digital age and the accompanying episteme within which the circulation of abstracted American (and other global) forms is a major part of the cultural landscape of places like Egypt and also the United States� In both Egypt and the United States, the ways of knowing “after the After the American Century 71 American century” are not merely ones in which the United States as political entity and American culture and cultural forms are understood in the context of the waning of global hegemony, but also are known through a variety of digital technologies that abstract and fragment space and time� Thus, by bringing an account of recent Egyptian politics and cultural production into a discussion about American Studies, rather than suggest that American Studies is the appropriate framework for understanding contemporary Egypt, I mean to suggest the reverse: that a nuanced account of contemporary Egyptian recalibrations of American cultural production - precisely where they are most difficult to translate back into American Studies - may productively disrupt American Studies in its own autumn� The so-called Arab Spring offers potent lessons about the future of “American Studies” after its death� 72 B rian t. e dWards Works Cited “Announcing Beck University�” July 6, 2010� Access 10 July 2011� <http: / / www� glennbeck.com/ content/ articles/ article/ 198/ 42502/ >. Arrighi, Giovanni� “Hegemony Unraveling - I�” New Left Review 32 (2005)� Access 25 July 2011� <http: / / www�newleftreview�org/ A2552>� Castronovo, Russ, and Susan Gillman, eds� States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2009� Edwards, Brian T�, and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar� “Introduction: Globalizing American Studies�” Globalizing American Studies. Eds� Brian T� Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. 18-25. Edwards, Brian T� “Cairo 2010: After Kefaya,” A Public Space 9 (2009): 127-132� ---� “Fragments of America: Response to Marius Jucan,” American, British and Canadian Studies (Journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania) 14 (2010): 96-103� ---� “ Tahrir: Ends of Circulation” Public Culture 23�3 (2011), forthcoming� Gelvin, James� “Globalization, Religion and the State in the Middle East: The Current Crisis in Historical Perspective�” Global Development Studies 3�3-4 (2003/ 2004): 1-22� Harvey, David� The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford UP, 2003� Man, Paul De� “Semiology and Rhetoric�” Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust � New Haven: Yale UP, 1979� Nadel, Alan� Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995� ---� “‘Temperate and Nearly Cloudless: ’ The 9/ 11 Commission Report as Postmodern Pastiche�” American Studies Association, San Antonio, TX, November 19, 2010� Pease, Donald E� “Amerian Studies after American Exceptionalism? Toward a Comparative Analysis of Imperial State Exceptionalisms�” Globalizing American Studies. Eds� Brian T� Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. 47-83. Silver, Beverly J�, and Giovanni Arrighi� “The End of the Long Twentieth Century�” Business as usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown � Eds� Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian� New York: Social Science Research Council/ NYU Press, 2011� Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty� Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003� II� Liberal Democracy in Times of Crisis d onald e. P ease Black Orpheus: Barack Obama’s Governmentality This essay constitutes a preliminary effort to explain the state fantasy with which Barack Obama hegemonized an alternative to the biopolitical settlement normalizing George W� Bush’s “Global War on Terror�” 1 In what follows, I intend to argue that Obama has not utterly displaced Bush’s Homeland State of Exception but that Obama’s governmentality presupposes it as the structuring logic through which he transformed the US state’s relationship with domestic and planetary peoples� I will be interested in particular in the role that Obama’s complex negotiation with the congeries of racial fantasies that he found condensed in the figure and the film Black Orpheus played in Obama’s governmentality� Named after orphasias, the dark one, Orpheus is the historical figure credited with teaching Greeks their foundational myths and sacred rites� Orpheus’s lyre is said to have permitted the Argonauts to elude the Sirens� In the most famous of the Greek myths associated with his name, Orpheus descended into the underworld after the death of his beloved Eurydice to plead with its rulers for her release� According to Ovid, Orpheus’s eloquent entreaty on her behalf brought the underworld to a standstill� 2 The arcane rituals associated with Orpheus’s name have entered contemporary political theory to explain the transformation of bare life ( zoe ) into sovereign citizens of the body politic ( bios )� 3 Black Orpheus is also the name of a prize-winning 1959 film made in Brazil by French director Marcel Camus. Based on the play Orfeu da Conceiç-o by Vinicius de Moraes, Camus’s musical retelling of the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice is set in a Rio de Janeiro favela during 1 For an analysis of the relationship between state fantasy and governmental rule, see Donald E� Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009)� 2 The speculative claim that the civic religion of modern states derives from the transformational rituals sedimented within the Orphic movement was broached initially in what remains the best scholarly treatise on the Orphic mysteries: W� K� C� Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek religion; a study of the Orphic movement (London: Methuen & Company, 1935)� 3 In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, transl� Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), Giorgio Agamben derives homo sacer as a term of art from Roman law that can be translated as the “sacred” or the “accursed” man� In Roman law, homo sacer describes a person who is banned, may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual. The homo sacer was banned from society and denied all rights and all functions in civil religion� The genealogy of Agamben’s homo sacer can be traced back to the Orphic mysteries whose ceremonies rested on a crucial distinction in Greek between “bare life” ( zoe ) and “a qualified mode of life” ( bios )� 76 d onald e. P ease the Carnaval . Barack Obama has recently invoked the film and the mythological figure of “Black Orpheus” to explain his transformation of national and international politics� In the following passage in his 1998 autobiography, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance , Barack Obama recalled his mother’s reaction to the film Black Orpheus to exemplify the racial fantasies he entered political life to supplant: The storyline was simple: the myth of the ill-fated lovers Orpheus and Eurydice set in the favelas of Rio during carnival, in Technicolor splendour, set against scenic green hills, the black and brown Brazilians sang and danced and strummed guitars like carefree birds in colourful plumage� About halfway through the movie I decided I’d seen enough, and turned to my mother to see if she might be ready to go� But her face, lit by the blue glow of the screen, was set in a wistful gaze� At that moment I felt as if I were being given a window into her heart, the unreflective heart of her youth� I suddenly realised that the depiction of the childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen, the reverse image of Conrad’s dark savages, was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white, middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different� 4 This revelation took place in 1982 when his mother, while visiting Obama during his student years at Columbia University, asked him to accompany her to a showing of the movie at a theater in Greenwich Village� Rather than sharing his mother’s enchantment with Black Orpheus , her twenty-year-old son discerned in the film’s depiction of blacks the racial fantasy underpinning his mother’s over-idealizations of African-Americans� In his mother’s eyes, ”Every black man was Thurgood Marshall or Sidney Poitier; every black woman Fannie Lou Hamer or Lena Horne� To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear�” 5 After isolating the image-repertoire that Black Orpheus projected in his mother’s political unconscious, Obama tacitly designated his mother’s elevation of black Americans into political messiahs and Camus’s representations of them as child-like colonial savages as recto and verso images coined in the same foundational racial fantasy� Obama described his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro - “a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, positionpaper liberalism” - as a representative of the 1960s American Left� 6 In Dreams from My Father , Obama diagnosed the antithetical - let us call them Orphic - racialized images populating his mother’s gaze as having resulted from contrary but interdependent tendencies informing the political imaginaries of the majority of US citizens� He thought that his mother’s exalted images of African-American civil rights leaders presupposed opprobrious images of African-Americans as an unacknowledged rationale� In The Audacity of Hope , 4 Barack Obama� Dreams from My Father: a Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 123f� 5 Ibid� 51� 6 Ibid� 50� Black Orpheus: Barack Obama’s Governmentality 77 Obama identified this recalcitrant complex of contradictory self-representations as responsible for the constraints that African-Americans imposed on their social and political ambitions, as well� Obama grounded this diagnosis on his belief that when African-American civil rights leaders internalized the American Left’s quasi-messianic images of their political movement, they indirectly legitimated demonizing representations of American blacks� As exceptions to such degrading representations, such ennobling images of civil rights leaders only proved the rule of the oppressive imaginary� This structural racial antinomy animated a viciously circular social logic: African-Americans who felt oppressed by such humiliating images needed to idealize civil rights leaders as the emancipators from the social imaginary that these civil rights leaders also required as the justification for their rule. Obama described the black messiah/ black devil complex as the two sides of the racist antinomy that structured the history of race relations in the United States� This complex of antithetical representations also regulated what it was considered possible and impossible for African-American political leaders to desire� The only way that Obama could liberate himself from this black Orphic imaginary entailed his representing and acting upon a political desire that the Black Orpheus in Camus’ film and the political leaders in the United States never could have imagined possible� The film Black Orpheus presupposed the imaginary that Barack Obama thought monopolized the field of racial representation. Black Orpheus also displayed the recalcitrant racial complex he wanted to change� To transform the Orphic machinery that saturated the United States’ social imaginary, Obama added a scenario to United States political drama through which he persuaded the majority of American voters to act upon a desire that should have been impossible for an African-American leader to realize� Although many of his followers described him as a black messiah, Barack Obama did not aspire to become the civil rights leader of oppressed African- Americans� And, despite the fact that his political enemies assaulted him with racist stereotypes, Obama never described himself as the victim of such efforts� Instead of repudiating this structuring antinomy, Obama’s presidential campaign presupposed the system of racialized images he found depicted in Black Orpheus . Unlike the protagonist of Marcel Camus’s film, however, Obama ran as at once the effect and the limit to these structuring antitheses� Obama considered the black messiah/ black demon complex a structural racist antinomy that could not be historically surpassed� As the horizon that embraced and held the new rules and norms that Obama produced from within its framework, this structuring antinomy constituted the non-progressive backdrop for the changes Obama aspired to introduce into the political order� An event that took place during the Democratic primaries supplied then Senator Barack Obama with the occasion to show how he could turn the ineluctable tie binding African-American leaders to the black messiah/ black terrorist complex into a “teachable moment�” From January through March 78 d onald e. P ease of 2008, right-wing political commentators published selected passages from sermons delivered by Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor in Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, as proof that the man whose sermons had inspired Obama to write The Audacity of Hope was in fact an anti-American terrorist� Rather than defending Reverend Wright or castigating his opponents, Obama delivered a speech on March 18, 2008 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, entitled “A More Perfect Union” 7 that turned the controversy surrounding his pastor into an example of the recalcitrant contrariety that had haunted race relations in the United States since the nation’s founding� In his national address, Obama refused to represent his political campaign as an effort to get out of this racial divide� Had he done so, Obama would have turned himself into just another avatar of the black civil rights leader� Observing that he has never been “so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy,” Obama described the controversy as a “racial stalemate” that represented the complexities of race in this country that “we’ve never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect�” Upon locating the basis for the nation’s racial division in the United States constitution, Obama gave expression to the desire to achieve “a more perfect union�” Rather than taking up a side for or against his African-American pastor, Obama recast the Wright case as indicative of this more encompassing disparity - between “our” shared constitutive ideals and the reality of their imperfect realization� Having resituated the racial antagonism within the context of the constitutive gap separating our founding ideals from lived political reality, Obama reasserted the “impossible” desire animating his presidential run as undergirded by the conviction that in “working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union” (ibid�)� This speech permitted Barack Obama to construct a position within the social symbolic order - the rift in its perfectible union - that enabled him to represent his extraordinary desire as if it were a universal political responsibility� Instead of remaining subject to these antithetical images, President Obama suspended their rule by positioning himself within the breach in between these antagonistic representations and expressing his intention to achieve a “more perfect union” through them� Obama initially positioned himself in the rift between antagonistic positions at the 2004 Democratic National Convention when he refused to identify as either a member of the Red States or the Blue States so as to represent himself as representative of the United States of America� Obama also ran his presidential campaign from this unprecedented political space� But in aspiring to make a more perfectible union out of resolutely antagonistic partisans, Obama could not wholly identify with either one of the parties in dispute� 7 For the full text of Obama’s speech, see http: / / blogs.wsj.com/ washwire/ 2008/ 03/ 18/ text-of-obamas-speech-a-more-perfect-union/ � Black Orpheus: Barack Obama’s Governmentality 79 He occupied the strange position of being simultaneously more than and less than the constituencies through whom he aspired to render the union more perfectible� He was more than one of the antagonists because he could not perform as one of the factions he aspired to unify and render their union more perfectible; less than one because that act had to be subtracted from the political order whose union he would render more perfectible � Mid-way through his first term as President, representations of Obama’s governance have oscillated between utterly opposed representations of his leadership� The incompatible representations that antagonistic political constituencies assigned President Obama oscillated between the opposite poles of the aforementioned racial antinomy. Following Obama’s election in 2008, the members of a Tea Party movement represented Obama as a figure who lacked the state-authorized long-form birth certificate required to certify his status as a legitimate United States citizen and re-imagined him as a Muslim terrorist intent on convoking “death panels” to endanger the American people’s biopolitical welfare� Contrarily, “progressive” liberals represented Obama’s election as the birth of a post-racial nation that had decisively abandoned the juridico-political procedures through which the state reproduced the generalized civil death of racially minoritized populations� While each of these fantasies drew upon two of the primordial conditions of belonging - birthright citizenship and civil death - inherent to what I have called a neo-Orphic political imaginary, each fantasy transposed these elements into utterly antithetical characterizations of Obama’s mode of national belonging� At the one extreme Obama’s political supporters characterized him as the most inspired of the nation’s sovereign leaders; at the other extreme his political antagonists cast him as one of mankind’s accursed� In these antithetical formulations, the extimate belonging of President Obama as the sovereign head of state sat in uncanny proximity to the intimate non-belonging of President Obama as what Giorgio Agamben has called homo sacer � 8 Obama took up his position within the rift through which he would render the union more perfectible by representing both the faction who extolled him as a post-racial sovereign as well as the people who had been cast in the role as homini sacres. As homo sacer , Obama belonged to the order by not belonging to it� But in order to exercise the power to render the union more perfect, Obama took up a position within the order as the sovereign who exceeded existing ordinations� Neither the one nor the other, Obama’s oscillation between the positions of the sovereign and the homo sacer enabled him to deploy both of the positions within the structuring racist antinomy - the venerated racial prophet/ the demonized terrorist - to his political advan- 8 For a brilliant description of the role the proximity of the sublime and desecrated bodies of the sovereign played in fashioning the fiction of the “King’s two bodies,” see Eric Santer’s remarkable The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011)� 80 d onald e. P ease tage� Obama reworked the seemingly endless oscillation between these antagonistic images into the energies animating the momentum of his political movement� 9 Although Obama’s historical project has been translated into Christological terms, 10 it operates according to a temporal logic that does not affirm the telos of redemptive historiography� Upon representing the desire for change in terms of his effort to achieve a “more perfect union,” Obama ratified an understanding of history as a series of impasses� Barack Obama may have represented his presidential campaign as a truly “transformative moment,” a change whose time had come, but he did not align his political aspirations with a belief in the progress of American history� Accomplishing the aim to achieve a “more perfect union,” involved Obama in what Walter Benjamin has described as a vigilant readiness to recognize the “dialectical images” through which he could facilitate this objective� 11 Obama has frequently described his election to the presidency as a “change” whose time had come� But he invariably situates the change that has indeed come within the context of the never-ending effort to achieve a “more perfect union�” The rift from within which Obama repeatedly aspires to realize a more perfectible union is quite literally a dialectical image, to return to the Benjamin trope, that exposes progressive history as a ruse� Rather than achieving a perfected union within and through the progressive unfolding of a historical telos , the antinomy within which Obama rifts discloses the non-progressive traumatic impasses - what Benjamin calls dialectics at a standstill - that progressive history perforce disavows� I have turned to Walter Benjamin to describe the significance of Obama’s historic project because Benjamin’s philosophy of history is especially attuned to the tendency to misrecognize historic impasses as signs of progress. The “dialectical image” names the figure of thought Walter Benjamin invented to channel an accumulation of historic impasses into a “now-time” that was filled to the “bursting point” with historic eventfulness. 9 Anthony Bogues called my attention to the ways in which the oscillation between the positions of the sovereign and that of homo sacer could become the means of understanding the formation of a subaltern political movement� This dynamic underpins his analyses of the ethics of living together in his magisterial new book Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, UPNE, 2010) For an analysis of the relationship between state fantasy and governmental rule, see Pease, The New American Exceptionalism. 10 Hortense Spillers has recently spelled out the troubling political consequences of Christological readings of Obama’s campaign in a talk she delivered at Brown University in April 4, 2011� The transcript will be published in boundary 2 � 11 In his commentary on the significance of Charles Baudelaire’s understanding of modernity to new modes of industrial production, Walter Benjamin defined dialectical image as images or objects produced within industrial capitalism “in which the new is intermingled with the old�” The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, trans� Michael W� Jennings, Howard Eiland and Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006), 148. Black Orpheus: Barack Obama’s Governmentality 81 To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it as it really was� It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image, history is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous empty time, but time filled with the presence of now. Each now is the now of a particular recognizability. In it truth is filled to the bursting point with time … it is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past, rather image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. 12 During the Democratic primaries, Obama seized hold of the structuring racist antinomy haunting the “moments of danger” - the Jeremiah Wright controversy, the waving of the Confederate flag in South Carolina, President Clinton’s comparison of his campaign with Jesse Jackson’s doomed Rainbow Coalition - that came up during his campaign� Each of these moments was imbued with the structural racist antinomy (what Benjamin called a dialectical image) undergirding American history� At each of these moments, Obama positioned himself in a rift (what Walter Benjamin described as a non-synchronous contemporaneity) in which his “now-time” became full through the transformation of memories that spontaneously surged up from the past� When Obama enunciated his aspiration to achieve a more perfect union through these momentous events, the dialectical images sedimented within them revealed the non-synchronous now-time that sustained the momentum of his campaign� The transformative moment of Obama’s election and the structuring racist antinomy that should have rendered it impossible did not converge to form a post-racial American society� They instead collided into one another� But the strategies whereby Obama brought the “what has been” informed by an enduring racist logic together with the “now” of his election brought the vicious circle informing this racist antinomy to a standstill� These strategies resulted in a truth event “filled to the bursting point with time.” Every moment of Obama’s presidential movement also re-established the antagonism that re-imposed the racial divide� The past produced within the grasp of this complex, as he made clear in his 2008 address at the National Constitution Center, “isn’t dead and buried� In fact, it isn’t even past�” 13 In occupying this rift in between antagonistic positions and permanently striving for a more perfect union, Obama took up a site that envisioned American history as an accumulation of stalemates� And he characterized the project he undertook from within this location as making “a way out of no way” (ibid�)� I have chosen the term “Orphic” to describe the structuring antinomy underpinning the United States’ racial imaginary because Obama discerned this recalcitrant structure during a viewing of Black Orpheus. Barack Obama’s election to the presidency did not displace the structural antinomy that he 12 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans� Harry Zohn, eds� Howard Eiland and Michael W� Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999), 463� 13 Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” http: / / blogs.wsj.com/ washwire/ 2008/ 03/ 18/ text-ofobamas-speech-a-more-perfect-union/ � 82 d onald e. P ease found illuminated in Black Orpheus as a twenty-year-old� But twenty-eight years later, Barack Obama decided to describe the changes he had effected in the United States’ social imaginary within the context of Black Orpheus � In the following passage from an address he delivered on March 20, 2011 in the Teatro Municipal where Black Orpheus was set, Obama represented himself as a figure who would have been unimaginable to his mother, and to the film’s director as well as its audience: Now, one of my earliest impressions of Brazil was a movie I saw with my mother as a very young child, a movie called Black Orpheus , that is set in the favelas of Rio during Carnival� And my mother loved that movie, with its singing and dancing against the backdrop of the beautiful green hills. And it first premiered as a play right here in Teatro Municipal� That’s my understanding� And my mother is gone now, but she would have never imagined that her son’s first trip to Brazil would be as President of the United States� She would have never imagined that� And I never imagined that this country would be even more beautiful than it was in the movie� 14 This passage communicates a dizzying mise en abime � When he watched Black Orpheus in 1982, Barack Obama said that he feared that his mother had correlated him with the film’s images of the child-like, joyful Brazilians (the reverse side of Conrad’s colonial savages). But the figure now doing the remembering does not align with the person who first viewed the film. Whereas the film Black Orpheus displayed the racist imaginary that monopolized the field of representation in 1983, the speaker of these opening lines has become unimaginable to the repertoire of contradictory representations that Black Orpheus projected� The reason he has become unimaginable is that in between the time he first viewed Black Orpheus and now, Barack Obama added a new persona - the President of the United States - to the socio-political imaginary that he now explains by personifying Black Orpheus� During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama converted the idealized child/ savage colonial Orphic machine into the precondition for the emergence of this previously unimaginable figuration. By occupying the rift in between them, Barack Obama created a figuration of (and as) Black Orpheus that would have been unimaginable to the racial imaginary this antinomy regulated� The power to liberate from an impasse constituted one of the mythic activities traditionally assigned to Orpheus� In this passage, Barack Obama has signified the effect of the actions through which he transformed the field of political possibilities by impersonating a new iteration of Black Orpheus� It was this unimaginable Black Orpheus whose eloquence suspended the Orphic machinery reproductive of the film’s social order. It is also this Black Orpheus Barack Obama now personifies to call Eurydice back from the un- 14 Barack Obama, speech delivered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, March 20, 2011, http: / / ironicsurrealism�com/ 2011/ 03/ 20/ transcript-obama-speech-rio-de-janeiro-brazilmarch-20-2011/ � Black Orpheus: Barack Obama’s Governmentality 83 derworld so that she might enjoy a Brazil that is even more brilliant when seen through his eyes� Since Obama constructed his public addresses out of the contingencies of their historical occasion, it is likely that the spontaneous memories aroused by his trip to Brazil determined his selection of the figure of Black Orpheus to describe his production of an alternative political imaginary� I will examine the geo-political significance of the historic occasion for Obama’s Brasilia address as well as the efficacy of Obama’s Orphic fantasy at the conclusion of this essay� But let me say at the outset of this exposition that I cannot conceive a better figure of thought than Black Orpheus to represent the dialectical imagination through which Barack Obama transformed the political imaginary� According to Walter Benjamin, dialectical images function like the opening shots in a film montage in that they solicit a constellation of related images, each one of which breaks from its fixed historical context to bear partial documentary witness to the entire image-repertoire of an historical event that suddenly flashes up into visibility. 15 To keep track of the changes Barack Obama’s dialectical images effected within the US political imaginary I have organized “Black Orpheus: Obama’s Governmentality” around a montage of events - the New Orleans superdome in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Tea Party Movement’s town hall meetings, the memorial service for the Americans gunned down in Tucson, Arizona, the underside of Bush’s Homeland Security State, the Teatro Municipal - through which Obama’s iteration of “Black Orpheus” accomplished this transformation� To draw out their relationship with this mythological figure, I have entitled the disparate sections of this essay after events traditionally associated with Orpheus� But the decisive act that Obama accomplished was more than an intervention into the domain of the Orpheus legend� It changed the very conditions of what counts as politically possible� In doing so it retroactively created the conditions of its own possibility� To render thinkable the aspects of Obama’s “Black Orpheus” that would have been unimaginable to the Greek poets as well as their contemporary revisionists I have turned to Walter Benjamin as a tutelary guide� I make use of his “Theses of the Philosophy of History” to render imaginable what official history and Greek myth could not - a nonsynchronous now-time that, like Obama’s form of governmentality, is filled to the bursting point with transformative potential� 16 15 In my choice of the film montage as the appropriate terrain for the materialization of the series of dialectical images Walter Benjamin has described as a constellation, I have drawn from Benjamin’s several essays on film’s transformative power, especially “The Work of Art in the Age Of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations , ed� and intro� Hannah Arendt, transl. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), 217-253. 16 In Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke UP, 2005), Ian Baucom has written movingly about the ways in which the specters of the slave trade engender what Baucom, following Benjamin, describes as “a non-synchronous contemporaneity” that can fill our now-being to the breaking point with the truth of the past� 84 d onald e. P ease Hurricane Katrina: Awakening Black Orpheus According to Walter Benjamin, there’s no such thing as a fully isolated present or past� There is only a non-synchronous now-time� Dialectical images might be described as opening up the rifts in between the torn halves of a now-time that the fantasy of historical progress cannot unite� As what cannot be included within progressive history without bringing it to its limits, dialectical images do not merely reveal the profound social antagonisms that historical progress structurally disavows, they also open up sites in which alternative social orderings might emerge� 17 Barack Obama located the origins of his movement in the sudden revelation of a non-synchronizable now-time� This moment took place during a memorial service President George H� W� Bush led to commemorate the life of the great civil rights leader Rosa Parks� While listening to President George W� Bush’s father celebrate her memory, Barack Obama recalled the abandoned and homeless people of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as the memory that this memorial service had foreclosed from recognition: As I sat and listened to the former President, my mind kept wandering back to the scenes of devastation when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and New Orleans was submerged ��� I recalled images of teenage mothers weeping or cursing in front of the New Orleans Superdome, their listless infants hosted to their hips� And old women in wheelchairs, heads rolled back, the withered legs exposed under soiled dresses ��� Listening to their stories it was clear that many of Katrina’s survivors had been abandoned before the hurricane struck� They were the faces of any inner-city neighborhood in any American city, the faces of black poverty - the jobless and almost jobless, the sick and soon to be sick, the frail, and the elderly ��� The sense that the nation had reached a transformative moment - that it had had its conscience stirred out of a long slumber; this could not die away� 18 President Bush’s idealization of this great civil rights leader from the past coincided with the state’s abandonment of the African-Americans who had been forced to take up residence in the New Orleans superdome� Their abject impoverishment and homelessness had not received the state’s notice before Hurricane Katrina, and their hopeless economic condition did not receive 17 Throughout this discussion, I have oscillated between describing the figure of Black Orpheus as the agent and as the instrument of spontaneous memories. Slavoj Žižek has relied upon a comparable ambiguation of voluntary and involuntary memories in his recent exposition of the dialectical images released by Katrina� “For a few days, New Orleans apparently regressed to a wild preserve of looting, killing, and rape� It became a city of the dead and dying, a post-apocalyptic zone where those the philosopher Agamben calls Homini sacres - people excluded from the civil order - wander� A fear permeates our lives that this kind of disintegration of the social fabric can come at any time.” This fear aroused Žižek’s suspicion that the very fragility of the social bond evidenced after Katrina was in itself a symptom: “The disintegration of the social order came as a kind of deferred action, as if natural catastrophe were repeating itself as a social catastrophe�” Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 93; 95� 18 Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006), 295� Black Orpheus: Barack Obama’s Governmentality 85 representation in the remarks with which President Bush commemorated Rosa Parks� Rather than remaining fully absorbed within President Bush’s commemoration of the historic accomplishments of the great civil rights leader Rosa Parks, Obama recalled images of the African-Americans in New Orleans whose basic rights to life and shelter had been ignored by the administrators’ Homeland Security State� Barack Obama honored Rosa Parks’ gains in the struggle to obtain African-Americans’ civil rights� But in paying his respects to her memory, he could not forget the African-Americans the state left to die after Hurricane Katrina devastated their homeland� The figures Obama recalled during the memorial service performed the dialectical work of inciting a constellation of images - of slaves beaten by their masters, of migrant laborers forced into transfer centers, of Indians slaughtered by the thousands, of Vietnamese families dragged from their huts and shot and burned - that overtook Obama’s recollections at Rosa Parks’ memorial service� Obama’s now-time did not come after these moments, it insisted in a non-synchronous and long-duration correspondence with them� President Bush correlated Rosa Parks’ leadership and the nation’s historical progress in the area of civil rights. But the undead images that flooded into Obama’s consciousness could not find their proper places in the vicious circle through which the state’s commemoration of civil rights leaders from the historical past sustained the hopeless socio-economic conditions of African-Americans in the present� The stalemate that Obama had discerned undergirding the nation’s disunity had revealed this truly “transformative moment” by disclosing the torn halves of a now-time that could not be synchronized into a unity at Rosa Parks’ memorial service - and that stirred the national conscience out of a long slumber� During President Bush eulogy to the memory of Rosa Park, Obama’s memories of the living dead returning from New Orleans disrupted the state’s commemorative ritual� It was in this eventful moment Barack Obama resolved to transform the desire for a different America into the object cause of a presidential campaign rather than a contemporary civil rights movement� In remembering everything inside the psyche that American history wills its subjects not to know, this dialectical image opened up a space in between the dismantling of one form of historical life and the emergence of another� Obama seized the revolutionary moment that surged up in this space when he linked the image of Katrina with the aforementioned montage of associated images to produce the constituent moment that inaugurated his movement. At the level of the law, Obama personified the sheer anomic or constituent power - neither constituted nor constituting state power - of what Benjamin referred to as pure or revolutionary violence� 19 This power animated the movement that supplied the warrant for undermining Bush’s state of exception� 19 I draw a correlation between Benjamin’s notion of “pure revolution” and what Antonio Negri called constituent power, in the following passage on page 207 in The New 86 d onald e. P ease Obama aspired to change America through a radical transformation of the structures of exceptionalism - the American dream, the perfectible union, the land of promise - organizing the “positionality” of the nation’s citizens. But Obama identified with the figures who were excepted from the fantasy rather than the state doing the excepting� The Americans who had lost their homes and land in New Orleans quite literally had no part in President George W� Bush’s Homeland Security State� But the tidal shift in the national self-regard that Barack Obama’s fantasy enabled was not the result of the restriction of his identification to the homeless people of New Orleans� His “movement” was grounded in a much more pervasive fantasy of dispossession - of citizens stripped of their constitutional rights by the PATRIOT Act, of parents separated from their children by war, of families forced from their homes by the subprime mortgage crisis - that was already inscribed and awaiting enactment in the script responsible for the production of the Bush Homeland Security State� Desire takes off when its object cause embodies or gives positive existence to the void which animates desire� Obama stood in the place of all of the figures who, in having been removed from their mandated position within the social order, now lacked a place� The odd man in, Obama embodied the excess of confusion and need introduced by the desire for an alternative into objective reality� As the placeholder for all who could not be constitutively included within the social order, Obama became the object cause for those disparate desires, and the object cause as well of the missing America through which those desires became imaginable� 20 Dialectical images proliferated throughout Barack Obama’s presidential campaign� Trans-generational haunting might be the appropriate term to describe the strands of fantasy these images effected� As they coursed through the inner landscapes of Obama’s presidential campaign these images awakened memories that unfolded in the deepest recesses of the nation’s social and psychic history� After the airing of an advertisement that represented a white woman rushing into the bedroom of her sleeping daughter after a 3 AM emergency call, Hillary Clinton was accused of retrieving a racist representation of black men - as terrorizing night intruders - that had historically resulted in lynching� When Bill Clinton stated that the Obama campaign was “nothing but a fairy tale,” he was faulted for having deprived the country of American Exceptionalism: Negri invented the concept of constituent power to allow us “to think political freedom in terms of its separation from the social and in terms of its rejection of synthesis with the political, for the power to constitute or to begin anew ex nihilo a new state of affairs is grasped in its non-synthetic character - this new cannot be acquired by its social basis, but comes about through a cutting off from that basis, a loss of ground which bespeaks the fact that political freedom is also an abyss� While at the same time this constituent power does not stand in a synthetic relation to what is constituted by or through it: political freedom is the ungrounded ground of every constituted power�” Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State , trans� Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999), 21� 20 I elaborate on Obama as the object cause of postnational desire and the related notion of “transnational haunting” in The New American Exceptionalism, 198-213. Black Orpheus: Barack Obama’s Governmentality 87 the empty space of fantasy where US citizens could project their desires and enter into the consciousness of their dreams� Jesse Jackson was rebuked for failing to recognize the difference between Obama’s movement and the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s� John McCain recalled the images of MIAs during his campaign when he described his handlers’ demand that he restrain himself whenever he felt the inclination to deliver “straight talk” as comparable to the constraints his guards imposed during his imprisonment in North Vietnam� 21 Obama settled the trans-historical ghosts haunting the relations between generations by giving historical substance to American dreams and nightmares� He became the subject of the fear that he might be assassinated - as were Kennedy and Lincoln and Martin and Malcolm - even as he was also made to personify historical figures - Osama bin Laden and William Ayers - who did the assassinating� Garry Wills compared Obama’s relationship with his black separatist minister Jeremiah Wright to Lincoln’s with the violent white abolitionist John Brown� 22 The mirrors that Obama added to US political culture did not merely reconfigure the existing field. They also took the grounds out from under the already positioned field, and they brought an entirely different field into view� In the acceptance speech that Obama delivered at the democratic national convention on August 29, 2008 - the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina - he associated his presidential campaign with the audacious hope for this alternative future� In his victory address at Grant Park, he associated that hope with the non-synchronous aspirations from ’68 and he invested both hopes and his disparate constituencies in the encompassing aspiration to achieve a more perfect union� The Tea Party Captivity Obama’s standing as a transformational object, his capacity to produce what could be called a surplus effect of potential change constituted the genius of his presidential campaign� It also organized the profound sense of loss that emerged once the movement for change was supplanted by specific presidential policies� Obama’s policies necessarily alienated particular constituencies even as they gratified the desires of others. His election brought audacious hope into intimate relationship with radical despair� Despite the apocalyptic pitch surrounding Barack Obama’s run against John McCain, the latter was gathering strength every week until an event took place that changed everything� The turning point in Obama’s campaign took place when he exploited the subprime mortgage crisis to persuade the majority of Americans to divest their credibility in Bush’s “Global War on Terror” and reinvest it in the ambition to make a trans-generational dream 21 For an elaboration of these claims, see ibid� 209-213� 22 Garry Wills, “Two Speeches on Race,” The New York Review of Books, May 1, 2008, http: / / www.nybooks.com/ articles/ archives/ 2008/ may/ 01/ two-speeches-on-race/ . 88 d onald e. P ease come true. Obama’s bailout of financial institutions and his proposed changes in the healthcare contract quite literally affected Americans’ most intimate sense of secure belonging - jobs, health, and home. After the financial meltdown, Obama became the beneficiary of a whole series of desperate needs and demands for the realization of a foundational change� The 9/ 11 of the economic order also incited the emergence of a populist movement that embroiled Barack Obama’s presidency� One month after his inauguration, powerful Republican lobbies and Fox News promoted the Tea Party movement. The movement included financiers and cynical politicians as well as members who had suffered real economic and emotional losses in the wake of 9/ 11 and the financial meltdown. Obama organized his presidential campaign as a populist grassroots movement that cohered around two aims: to bring an end to President George W� Bush’s unconstitutional state policies - abridgment of civil rights, preemptive strikes, renditions, internment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay - and to oppose the war in Iraq, which breached international law� Drawing together disparate constituencies that traversed traditional party lines, Obama’s “movement” successfully realized what had previously seemed an endlessly deferrable American Dream� The Tea Party movement produced a mirror image of Obama’s populist grass roots movement that had as one of its purposes the mimetic re-description of what Obama’s campaign had called audacious hope as the achievement of a terrifying reality� In the contest of fantasies that ensued in the wake of Obama’s election, the architects of the Tea Party appropriated the organizing components of Obama’s successful grassroots campaign - its anti-war initiative and its status as a constitutional movement - as models and targets� The leaders of the Tea Party movement characterized these measures as the continuation by economic means of the terrorist attack on the homeland on 9/ 11/ 2001� Just as Obama overwhelmed opposition to his presidential campaign by building on the fantasy of a new, as yet unimaginable America, so too the Tea Party goers built their own fantasy� Whereas their belief in the “audacity of hope” enabled participants in Obama’s movement to bombard Bush’s Homeland Security State with demands that Bush end state policies that violated the United States Constitution, the Tea Party goers forged a Contract from America through which they reaffirmed their primary loyalty to the security legislation spelled out in Bush’s Homeland Security Act� After the trauma of the financial collapse, the Tea Party constructed the fantasy of an autonomous political sphere - re-imagined within the representational matrix of the post-Reconstruction South - whose members were organized around a Contract from America� Whereas President Obama governed through the propagation of the desire to achieve a “more perfect union,” the Tea Party members construed themselves as having seceded from Obama’s union and forged an alternative� Black Orpheus: Barack Obama’s Governmentality 89 The Tea Party movement politics reactivated the politics of fear that the Bush administration had turned into its principle of governance to negotiate the economic and political dissatisfactions that the Obama administration was unable to address� Their allegiance to military, economic, as well as cultural American exceptionalism was prompted by the loss of the fantasy of American omnipotence and enabled them to interpret the economic setbacks and cultural change from the standpoint of the loss of Real America� This parasitic mirroring of the Obama movement produced a matrix of cultural despair out of which a whole series of new populist identities - Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry - surfaced� The participants in the Tea Party movement identified their opposition to Obama’s changes in financial and healthcare policies with the Boston patriots’ iconic revolutionary act of dumping crates of tea overboard to protest the British tyrant George III’s unfair taxation. But Tea Partisans redeployed figures instituted to conduct George W� Bush’s “Global War on Terror” - illegal aliens, detainees, US Intelligence interrogators, terrorists - as the underpinning for lurid fantasies that supplied imaginary explanations for real economic and emotional distress� In calling the Tea Party a state fantasy, I do not mean that we need only to expose its fantasmatic myth about the cause of the financial collapse to reveal the underlying truth. Following Slavoj Žižek, I would argue that instead of offering an escape from reality, fantasies actively construct social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic dimension� 23 Fantasies produce a figure, the subject who is supposed to believe in them, as the precondition of their credibility� Political commentators who believe they can dismantle the power of the fantasy by exposing its factual inaccuracies believe that credibility rises and falls with the truth of the factual state of affairs� But racism proliferates through its exponents’ contempt for factual accuracy� Because state fantasies construct a perfect order, they are always accompanied by symptom figures onto whom all the imperfections of the existing order must be projected� There would be no system without the symptom as the element that stitches up the inconsistencies of an ideological system and gives consistency to being. But the symptom figure does not exist in the social symbolic order� As the embodiment of elements that cannot be integrated within that order, it demarcates that order’s limits of tolerance and coherence� After the symptom is constructed as the cause of the disorder, a coherent account can be given to the unified order and the seemingly endless series of failures, incompletions, and contradictions that constantly interrupt it� 23 I elaborate on the central claims in this portion of my argument in “States of Fantasy: Barack Obama and the Tea Party Movement” in boundary 2 37.2 (2010): 89-105. Throughout this analysis, Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian reading of state fantasy has supplied the interpretive context for my understanding of the role state fantasy plays in the Tea Party movement. See Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (New York: Verso, 2009), especially 43-56� 90 d onald e. P ease As the principle of organization for the subject’s enjoyment, the symptom gives satisfaction� Even after the symptom is interpreted, the subject may cling to it� The interpretation may not disrupt the subject’s attachment to it� After 9/ 11, the terrorist was a symptom figure who facilitated the stitching up of inconsistencies of the entire ideological system� “The terrorist” summed up, gave coherence to, and offered a solution to a range of popular concerns� When President Obama re-described the “Global War on Terror” as “overseas contingency operations,” he dismantled the most powerful consolidating framework invented since the Cold War� After Barack Obama removed the figure of the symptomal element - the universal terrorist - that had brought into coherence a whole range of internal political forces, the whole system of managed fear that this symptomal element had organized began to come apart. In the wake of the financial disaster in 2008, the Tea Party movement put Obama into the place of the symptom figure he removed. For Tea Party goers, Obama was the most visible symptom of the loss of the American way of life� Obama was thereafter made to occupy the position of the figure that he had eradicated. The primary context for the Tea Party’s interpretation of the economic collapse was the “Global War on Terror�” Its effectiveness as a political bloc depended on two basic factors: the extent to which the weakening of the “Global War on Terror’s” conventional articulations led social elements to enter a “crisis” state of unfixity, and the extent to which the Tea Party’s new articulations borrowed from and reworked traditional frameworks� In the wake of Obama administration’s dismantling of Bush’s state fantasy, the paramilitary movements and the Christian fundamentalists that President Bush had aligned with the imperatives of the Homeland Security State have reemerged with collective fantasies of their own� The Tea Party goers who disrupt town hall meetings, demand that Obama give proof of his US citizenship, propagate rumors of death panels, plot the “teabagging” of Obama, demand state secession, declare Obama the Antichrist, issue ultimatums, refuse to permit their children to listen to the President’s schoolroom address, and bring their guns to anti-Obama rallies have refused to give up their psychic attachments to the “Global War on Terror�” Overall, the Tea Party’s fantasmatic construction of the post-9/ 11 US nation displaced the cause of all disorder onto an external source� Antagonism to Obama operated as a trigger which made the disintegration of the nation and the inevitability of national recovery imaginable� The renormalization of the financial system thereafter coexisted with populist efforts to condemn President Obama for failing to provide the security needed to protect the system and to portray him as a representative of a liberal elite who poses a threat to “our” fundamental way of life� The Tea Party movement constructed fantasies associated with birth and death at a moment in which the social contract, partially as a result of the financial meltdown, was undergoing a complete re-description, the fear produced a retroactive relation between the changes that Obama was asking for in the health care policies, in the health care campaign, that were turned into Black Orpheus: Barack Obama’s Governmentality 91 the causes of the financial crisis, rather than its remediation. Exercising a retroactive causality, they represented Obama’s health care legislation as the definitive cause of the financial catastrophe. 24 The deep psychic hold - the haptic uptake - of the birther/ deather fantasies derives from their working at the most intimate level of both the body and the psyche of those who are taken up by them� Both fantasies are underpinned by a logic of psychic reversal for which revenge supplies the rationale� If Barack Obama’s election constituted reparation for the wrongs performed against minoritized populations in the historical past, then, this fantasy has it, he is going to do to “normal” United States citizens what had been done to the historically oppressed� These beliefs cannot be answered by fact because they have inscribed persons within an order made in the image of fears that have become their reality� To put this into a slightly different register, the Tea Party movement birther/ deather fantasies represented Barack Obama as a figure who breached the Real of what Charles W� Mills called the racial contract� Mills proposed that the social contract in the United States was actually a two-tiered contract� Race regulated the social contract by dividing the contractees into two asymmetrical, incompatible groups: the persons who were the full contractual parties to whom the social contract assigned its rights and liberties were white, unmarked citizens, the subpersons who lacked complete contractual identification with the rights and liberties of “normal” US citizens were racially marked� The election of Barack Obama meant that a subperson who lacked the complete rights and liberties of “normal” US citizenship was now in charge of allocating the social contract� 25 24 The fantasy work that the Tea Party performed was evidenced on October 30, 2009, when Representative Virginia Foxx, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from North Carolina, articulated her opposition to “Obamacare” by explicitly linking healthcare legislation to the “War on Terror”: “I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill than we do from any terrorist right now in any country�” Cf� “Rep� Foxx: More to fear from reform than terrorism,” http: / / www�politico�com/ livepulse/ 1109/ Rep_Foxx_More_to_fear_from_reform_than_terrorism�html� 25 In The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997), Charles W. Mills defines the racial contract as that “set of formal or informal or meta-agreements (higher level contracts about contracts, which set the limits of the contract’s validity) between one subset of humans henceforth designated as white and coextensive with the class of full persons, and that categorizes the remaining subset of humans as non-white and of a different and inferior moral status, subpersons” (11)� The “full persons” referenced in this definition are contrapuntal ensembles that require their differentiation from subpersons to achieve self-identity� In other words, no matter how universal the applicability of this category, the figure of the person necessarily requires its distinction from the necessary and related category of the subperson� Although the racial contract that underwrites the modern social contract is constantly being rewritten, it invariably establishes epistemological norms of cognition along racial lines� It prescribes for its signatories an epistemology of ignorance, a resilient combination of disavowal and non-knowledge that guarantees that whites “will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made” (45)� 92 d onald e. P ease A fantasy does not merely represent social reality� It also tries to shape it practically, so as to control the changes that cannot be incorporated within it� But every fantasy has its Real� At the core of the Tea Party movement is a fantasy in which only the narrative of the white supervision of the black male can contain the trauma of its Real - the spectacle of a black man being in charge of himself and of the nation� The election of Obama designated that part of their practical reality that the members of the Tea Party could not incorporate� They could not acknowledge the reality of Obama’s presidency without undermining the viability of their prior construction of themselves� Obama’s election meant that America no longer needed white Americans to reproduce its structures of power� Those operating within the Tea Party could not accept this matter-of-fact truth any more than they could acknowledge the reality of the non-white President to which it referred� Tea Party goers interpreted his election as a breach of the racial contract� They would repair the breach of the racial construct through a series of mystified scenarios. The fear of the reversibility of white supremacy sustained the deep logic of each of these fantasies� The fantasies of death camps and other imagined indignities turned whites into the imaginary victims of real technologies of Euro-American racism� The terrifying prospect of the reversal of the colonial past made immigration seem akin to war and invasion� Orpheus Descending: Tucson, January 11, 2011 Fear-inspired rage took hold of the predominantly white Tea Party movement when Barack Obama, a figure who belonged to the racially marked group that the United States race contract represented as innately lacking the rights and liberties of “normal” US citizens, became the sovereign state executive responsible for distributing the health and welfare provisions of the social contract� The breach that the Tea Party imagined Obama’s election as having produced in the racial contract provoked “birther” and “deather” fantasies that brought a whole set of otherwise unrelated fears into correlation with one another� The birthers’ propagation of the belief that Obama lacks a valid American birth certificate reimagined him as an illegal immigrant. The deathers’ conjuring of scenarios in which President Obama convoked death panels to decide on the continued viability of the critically ill identified US citizens as equivalent to the detainees targeted for coercive interrogation in the “War on Terror�” These conjoined fantasies tacitly constructed President Obama himself as a “terrorist,” an enemy of the state, whose healthcare policy threatened the biopolitical security of the homeland� That fantasy began to have uptake when the town hall meetings in which Obamacare was discussed became sites for the acting out of the fear and the rage� Black Orpheus: Barack Obama’s Governmentality 93 By dissociating their project from Obama’s “now,” the Tea Party undermined Obama’s strategic use of the collective desire to form a more perfect union as the basis for “change�” Obama could not answer the explicit racism that was built into the Tea Party movement’s imagined secession without identifying himself as the leader of a civil rights faction� It took an event that re-awakened a series of past events from within what I earlier described as the United States’ trans-generational trauma to undermine the Tea Party movement’s stalemate� On January 8, 2011, a lone gunman shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen of her constituents in a political rally in Tucson, Arizona, fatally wounding six of them� This traumatizing moment recalled a series of haunting memories of the assassinations of Presidents and presidential candidates and great civil rights leaders: Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. When I first heard that a political figure had been critically wounded in a political rally in Arizona, a stronghold of the Tea Party movement, I immediately feared that the President had been shot� President Obama’s memorial service in Tucson recalled the “transformative moment” of his campaign when memories of the helpless figures huddled in the New Orleans superdome overtook his consciousness during Rosa Parks’ memorial service� But when President Barack Obama traveled to Tucson on January 12, 2011, he did not do so as a representative of the Civil Rights movement or to commemorate the achievements of a dead black leader� This time a scene of catastrophic political violence became the occasion for an African-American President to serve as the nation’s designated mourner for the victims� Tucson provided Obama with an actually-existing space in which he could materialize the position on which he ran� The persons who had been shot in Tucson were neither Presidents nor civil rights leaders� They were mostly white Americans performing everyday political activities� Obama’s Tucson address produced an answer within the real world to the Tea Party’s fantasies about death panels and Obama’s un-Americanness� The town hall meetings that members of the Tea Party members had turned into shouting matches over Obama’s health care policies supplied the scene with its biopolitical unconscious� The lone gunman’s rage, his violent hatred, his taking the law into his own hands, all of this recalled the modus operandi of the Tea Party movement� President Obama could not directly assign the movement responsibility for the shootings without reducing himself into one of their political antagonists, but his commemorative remarks conjured Tea Party demonstrations as their fantasmatic context� In Tucson, Barack Obama turned the Tea Party into the spectral accomplices within a scenario in which he executed two significant acts of dissociation: of his movement from the Tea Party, of his biopolitics from an armed terrorist’s thanato-politics� The Memorial Service enabled Obama to use the images with which the Tea Party movement had demonized him to recover 94 d onald e. P ease the position in between irreconcilable antagonists� Holding the space of the rift in between the Tea Party and their victims, Obama characterized the Tucson shootings as symptomatic of the need for a “more perfect union”: That process of reflection, of making sure we align our values with our actions - that, I believe, is what a tragedy like this requires� For those who were harmed, those who were killed - they are part of our family, an American family 300 million strong� We may not have known them personally, but we surely see ourselves in them� In George and Dot, in Dorwan and Mavy, we sense the abiding love we have for our own husbands, our own wives, our own life partners� Phyllis - she’s our mom or grandma; Gabe our brother or son� In Judge Roll, we recognize not only a man who prized his family and doing his job well, but also a man who embodied America’s fidelity to the law. In Gabby, we see a reflection of our public spiritedness, that desire to participate in that sometimes frustrating, sometimes contentious, but always necessary and never-ending process to form a more perfect union� 26 These phrases from his memorial address quite literally displayed Obama’s care� They removed each of the persons Obama commemorated from the oblivion of a mass shooting, celebrated each as part of a national family, as representative of the nation’s shared need for political forms of life, and as deserving of our collective memory� The pathos in the address Obama delivered at the memorial service deployed all the unspent anger that he refused to direct at the Tea Party� As the representative of what it means to be alive within a vital body politic, Obama fashioned his address to rejoin the order of facts with the order of feelings in a now restored political order� In attending to Americans who had been attacked while participating in a collective form of political life, President Obama renewed the state’s relationship to the health and welfare of the national body politic� Each time he restored a wounded form of civic life he separated it from the Tea Party’s violence: On Saturday morning, Gabby, her staff, many of her constituents gathered outside of a supermarket to exercise their right to peaceful assembly and free speech� They were fulfilling a central tenet of the democracy envisioned by our Founders. Representatives of the people answering to their constituents so as to carry their concerns to our nation’s capital� Gabby called it “Congress on your Corner,” - just an updated version of government of, and by, and for the people� That is the quintessentially American scene that was shattered by a gunman’s bullets, and the six people who lost their lives on Saturday, they too represented what is best in America (ibid�)� By turning this “quintessential American scene” into the dialectical image that brought back to memory all those other scenes of political violence, Obama also disclosed the non-synchronous temporalities that haunted our contemporary moment� 26 Barack Obama, speech delivered in Tucson, AZ, January 12, 2011, http: / / abcnews� go�com/ Politics/ obama-speech-transcript-President-addresses-shooting-tragedy-tucson/ story? id=12597444� Black Orpheus: Barack Obama’s Governmentality 95 The Real State of Exception: Orphic Mysteries in Bush’s Underworld Governmentality describes what happens when the movements of life and the processes of governance converge� Governmentality always involves biopolitics because it resides in the well-being of the population� President Obama’s governmentality truly began with the bio-historical event that took place in Tucson� The care Obama showed for the wounded in Tucson gave Obama access to the US body politic at the most intimate levels of biopolitical life - where the zoe of ontologically vulnerable individuals was conjoined with the bios of the body politic� Obama’s commemorative remarks drew a tacit parallel between the US citizens who lost their lives in New York and Washington D�C� on September 11, 2001 and the citizens who were subjected to a comparably senseless violence in Tucson. But comprehending the significance of this moment to Obama’s governmentality requires drawing a distinction from the bio-historic events upon which his predecessor had founded his governmentality� When he inaugurated the emergency measures of the Homeland Security State, Bush cited the traumatic power of the events that took place on 9/ 11 as justification. The Homeland Security legislation turned the state of exception into a juridical political apparatus that inscribed the body of the people within a quasi-permanent biopolitical settlement� This biopolitical arrangement first subtracted the population from the forms of civic life through which they recognized themselves as a free and equal citizenry and then positioned these life forms - the people, their constitutional rights and liberties - into non-synchronous zones of protection� 27 President Bush’s emergency measures set the citizens whose rights and liberties the Homeland State protected in an antithetical relationship with the detainees and illegal combatants that it reduced to the condition of sheer naked biological life ( homo sacer )� Stripped of the rights of citizens and prisoners of war, these persons were reduced to the status of unprotected flesh ( zoe ) whose lives the state could terminate according to decisions that were outside juridical regulation� In order to protect the entirety of the law against attack, the state subordinated its own laws to this urgent eschatological mission� The vacuum opened up by the vanishing of objective reality into this singularity was filled in by the mythologized reality in which the emergency state erected its eschatological version of realpolitik � The citizens who had been shot and killed in Tucson held a biopolitical status equivalent to the figures whose radical dislocation had been normalized by President Bush’s state of exception� They had suffered the loss of the social textures of the biopolitical lifeworlds into which they were born� Outside the protection of all particular laws, their bodies were abandoned to a field of violence. At the most intimate level of their being, they had been given over to a terrorizing power that conditioned them absolutely� But the 27 I elaborate on this account of Bush’s biopolitical settlement in mythopoetical construction in “The Mythological Foundations of the Homeland Security State,” The New American Exceptionalism, 162-179� 96 d onald e. P ease rites of commemoration that Barack Obama performed in this space of catastrophic devastation also enabled him to undo the hold of the biopolitical settlement President Bush’s Homeland Security legislation had imposed� The distinction between Barack Obama’s governmentality and George Bush’s turned on their different relationship to the state of exception� In Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin asserted that when the state of exception becomes the rule, “we must arrive at a concept of history that corresponds to this fact� Then we will have the production of a real state of exception before us as a task�” 28 During his presidential campaign, Obama connected his perception that under the Bush administration the state of exception had indeed become the rule with the imperative to undertake the production of an alternative� Obama’s presidential campaign correlated the real state of exception with the revolutionary potential of his movement� At the level of the law, Obama’s movement personified the sheer anomic or constituent power - neither constituted not constituting state power - of what Benjamin referred to as pure or revolutionary violence� 29 The revolutionary violence animating Obama’s movement supplied its members with warrants for undermining Bush’s state of exception in the name of an alternative order of legality that President Obama’s election would bring into existence� But after his election, Barack Obama did not abolish the state of exception that George Bush had normalized� The activities President Obama performed within this mythological terrain differed from President Bush’s in that Barack Obama did not invoke the state’s sovereign emergency powers as warrant for the imposition of his biopolitical regime� He instead used the Bush state of exception as the backdrop for his restoration of the normal constitutional democracy� In so doing, President Obama restricted his production of the “real” state of exception with the restoration of the constitutional rights and liberties from which President Bush’s Homeland Security legislation had dissociated United States citizens� Earlier I described the usage to which Obama put the nation’s structural racist antinomy in generating the momentum of his political movement� In his presidency, Obama has turned this racist antinomy into the dynamic jointure through which he has reconnected the body politic with their constitutive rights and liberties� Rather than supplanting this racist structure, Obama positioned himself in a rift between its antagonistic representations so as to represent two dialectically opposed iterations of the people - its sovereign citizens as well as its homini sacres. In his Tucson address, Obama turned the torsion produced by his oscillation between the two poles - sovereign leader, homo sacer - of this racist antinomy into the dynamic jointure through which 28 Walter Benjamin, “Theses of the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations , 257� 29 For an analysis of the relationship between pure revolution and constituent power, see The New American Exceptionalism , 207� Black Orpheus: Barack Obama’s Governmentality 97 he reconnected the body politic with their constitutive rights and liberties� This structural antinomy became the vital portal through which Barack Obama’s rules and norms inhabited the US body politic� In Tucson, Obama entered a site of generalized violence in which the exception had become the rule� But the Real state of exception he inaugurated at this site entailed his re-performing the constitutive rites upon which the United States was founded� At this Real state of exception in between the nation and the state, Obama reaffirmed the foundational premises of the United States social contract at the very site upon which a terrorist had forcibly removed US citizens from the condition of national belonging� In reinstituting the state’s power as the guarantor of their rights, Obama first reinstated the wounded within the condition of common humanity, then he brought them out of the realm of civic death and reconnected them with their constitutional rights and liberties� In an effort to elucidate the role Obama’s fantasy played in inaugurating his mode of governmentality, permit me to recast the symbolically efficacious action President Obama performed in Tucson as the prototypical mystery that Black Orpheus enacted within Bush’s underworld� When Barack Obama traveled to this devastated place he acted upon the attributes of the figure mythologized as Black Orpheus. Standing in between the state and persons whom a terrorizing assassin had reduced to precariously vulnerable biological life, Obama’s Black Orpheus, as the plenipotentiary of the US body politic’s vital political energies, performed the state’s foundational Orphic mystery� In the rift between these vulnerable mortalized biological life forms (what Agamben calls zoe ) and the immortal citizen-bios, Orpheus acted on the charismatic dimension of the state, the extra-legality ( lex animata ) animating the law’s effectivity� Oscillating between speaking as the sovereign and as representative of the homini sacres threatened by a gunman’s terrorizing violence, Black Orpheus, personified the jointure between natural life and the law through which they became once again entwined with the constitution� No longer bare life, these wounded recovered their participant capacities at the jointure of life and law through the intercession of Black Orpheus� Losing Eurydice: The Gaze of Orpheus In “Black Orpheus - Barack Obama’s Governmentality,” I have tried to elucidate the state fantasy Barack Obama instituted to replace George Bush’s Homeland Security State� “Black Orpheus” fantasy has enabled me to explain how Obama dissociated his biopolitical initiatives from the Tea Party’s and differentiated his governmentality from the Homeland Security State� But in representing President Obama’s governmentality primarily in terms of the Black Orpheus fantasy responsible for hegemonizing it, I have risked a dual mystification - of the particulars of President Obama’s mode of governmentality as well as of my analysis of its workings� Obama may have wanted 98 d onald e. P ease us to envision his administration through the visage of Black Orpheus� But I cannot conclude this discussion of Barack Obama’s state fantasy without asking what this fantasy mystifies. I can begin to answer this question by returning to the Teatro Municipal that was the point of departure for this excursus and reading the opening phrases in President Obama’s address from a slightly different perspective: Now, one of my earliest impressions of Brazil was a movie I saw with my mother as a very young child, a movie called Black Orpheus , that is set in the favelas of Rio during Carnival� And my mother loved that movie, with its singing and dancing against the backdrop of the beautiful green hills. And it first premiered as a play right here in Teatro Municipal� That’s my understanding� And my mother is gone now, but she would have never imagined that her son’s first trip to Brazil would be as President of the United States� She would have never imagined that� And I never imagined that this country would be even more beautiful than it was in the movie� At the outset of these remarks, I described Barack Obama as having become unimaginable to Black Orpheus’s repertoire of racist representations, and I interpreted Obama’s recollection of his dead mother as a reprise of Orpheus’s efforts to call Eurydice back from the underworld� But if these lines do indeed refer to the Black Orpheus Obama personified in achieving the presidency, the Eurydice to which they now allude cannot be restricted to Obama’s mother� “Eurydice” would necessarily include the members of the grassroots political movement that Black Orpheus’s eloquence persuaded to elect Barack Obama� In the ancient myth, Orpheus disclosed his hubris when he disobeyed Hades’ order not to look back as his song released Eurydice from the underworld� When he looks back at the political movement Black Orpheus promised to lead out of President Bush’s underworld, it is President Barack Obama who has now become unimaginable to Eurydice� The chief reason he has become unimaginable to Eurydice now has less to do with Black Orpheus’s breach of the racial imaginary than with President Barack Obama’s failure to realize the transformative change he promised� During the presidential campaign, participants in Obama’s movement bombarded President Bush with demands that he end state policies that violated the United States Constitution which were to undermine the legislation spelled out in Bush’s Homeland Security Act� Rather than moving the nation out of Bush’s underworld, President Obama has renewed the surveillance provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, ordered his Attorney General to initiate juridical proceedings against persons illegally detained at Guantánamo Bay and increased the usage of preemptive strikes� 30 30 Various scholars of International Law posit that the Obama administration’s use of drones constitutes instances of preemptive attacks, arguing “that the Obama administration appears to be acting on a theory of pre-emptive, not anticipatory self-defence, just as the Bush administration did� Only a pre-emptive theory explains the Obama administration’s attacks on individuals on the basis that they might be planning a future terrorist attack�” See “International Law and the Use of Drones,” http: / / www� scribd.com/ doc/ 45528058/ Drones-and-International-Law. Black Orpheus: Barack Obama’s Governmentality 99 President Obama signed an executive order authorizing the bombing of military bases in Libya on the exact day, March 19, that George W� Bush initiated his campaign against Saddam Hussein� Obama enunciated the rationale for the bombing in the same March 20 speech in which he recalled his initial viewing of Black Orpheus � In his address in Teatro Municipal, President Obama placed the mask of Black Orpheus over foreign policies that the members of his political movement would never have imagined him undertaking� In the body of his address President Obama’s constructed a series of dubious rhetorical analogies - they correlated the “universal” human aspirations for freedom and socioeconomic justice informing the “Arab Spring” with his own grassroots movement, with his “humanitarian” intervention in Libya, as well as with his neo-liberal trade agreements with Brazil - that would have been comparably unimaginable� President Obama’s efforts to transpose the truly revolutionary movement taking place in the Middle East into a mirror image of his disbanded grassroots political movement rivalled the cynicism evidenced in the Tea Party’s appropriative maneuvers� President Obama has named his military campaign in Libya “Odyssey Dawn” so as to draw it into the imaginary orbit of the “Arab Spring,” and he has deployed technologies - drone missiles and Special Ops units - to remove those who are killed or disfigured from the field of visibility. After the visage of Orpheus is removed, Eurydice discovers that she still remains in Bush’s underworld� During his campaign, Barack Obama took pride in his ability to take up positions in between hostile factions so as to negotiate the desire of each for a “more perfect union�” But as I am writing, President Obama’s rifts have solidified the recalcitrant antagonisms undergirding the civil war in Libya and the stalemate over the debt ceiling in the United States� These and other deadlocks the President has fostered have torn now-time apart at its roots� I concluded The New American Exceptionalism with the observation that I did not know whether the audacity of hope Barack Obama had aroused was a sign of political renewal or a symptom of radical despair� 31 It may be that we have entered the time in which audacious hope and radical despair have achieved a more perfect union� 31 “Whether that state of fantasy is a sign of the audacity of hope or a symptom of cultural despair is a question that remains to be answered�” The New American Exceptionalism , 213� 100 d onald e. 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Access 22 July 2011. <http: / / blogs.wsj. com/ washwire/ 2008/ 03/ 18/ text-of-obamas-speech-a-more-perfect-union/ >. --- (2011a)� Speech delivered in Tucson, AZ� January 12, 2011� Access 24 July 2011� <http: / / abcnews�go�com/ Politics/ obama-speech-transcript-President-addressesshootingtragedy-tucson/ story? id=12597444>� --- (2011b)� Speech delivered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil� March 20, 2011� Access 24 July 2011� <http: / / ironicsurrealism�com/ 2011/ 03/ 20/ transcript-obama-speech-riodejaneiro-brazil-march-20-2011/ >� Pease, Donald E� The New American Exceptionalism � Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009)� ---� “States of Fantasy: Barack Obama and the Tea Party Movement�” boundary 2 37�2 (2010): 89-105. “Rep� Foxx: More to fear from reform than terrorism�” Politico.com. November 02, 2009� Access 24 July 2011� <http: / / www�politico�com/ livepulse/ 1109/ Rep_Foxx_More_ to_fear_from_reform_than_terrorism�html>� Santner, Eric� The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011� Wills, Garry� “Two Speeches on Race�” The New York Review of Books . May 1, 2008. Access 24 July 2011. <http: / / www.nybooks.com/ articles/ archives/ 2008/ may/ 01/ two-speeches-on-race/ >� Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador, 2008. ---� First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009� d onatella i zzo American 9/ 11 Culture and the Naturalizing of Italy’s Right-Wing Domestic Agenda 1 1 Translational American Studies Critical interrogations of September 11 - its significance, its representations, its aftermath - have proliferated in American Studies over the last decade, both inside and outside of the United States� Inevitably, Americanist investigation has focused on the application of such categories as “state of emergency” and “state of exception” to the United States of the Bush era� In this essay, however, I will take a slightly different route: bracketing the question of the transformation of the United States during and after the Bush era, I will attempt to investigate not so much the United States per se , as the reverberations of its policies in the political culture of my own country� As most local observers would agree, the mainstream representation of the United States in Italy has not undergone any significant change since September 11, 2001, in spite of the three different administrations (one center-left and two center-right) that have succeeded one another� 2 After the wave of universal sympathy in the immediate wake of the terrorist attacks, the political and journalistic attitude to the United States administration reverted to its usual dynamics, ruled primarily by the political orientation of individual commentators, while the popularity of the American people, way of life, and cultural products (perceived as not necessarily connected with, and indeed in some cases as opposed to the Bush administration) in Italy was not perceptibly altered during Bush’s presidency� If anything, the presidential campaign of 2008 and the subsequent election and inauguration of Barack Obama - minutely covered by the Italian media and passionately followed by unusually wide strata of the population - revamped the United States myth in the Italian eyes, marking a temporary revival of the progressive rhetoric of the “other America” ingrained in a significant part of the Italian left from the 1960s to this day� 1 This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the panel entitled “How in the World Do We Know that After 9/ 11 Everything Has Changed? ”, organized by Alan M� Nadel at the 2010 ASA conference in San Antonio� I wish to thank Alan Nadel for his invitation, his feedback, and his trademark wit� Thanks also to Paolo Barcella for his precious suggestions and insights about the Northern League� 2 A center-right administration led by Silvio Berlusconi ruled Italy from June 2001 to April 2006, succeeded by a center-left one led by Romano Prodi from April 2006 to May 2008, and then again by a center-right cabinet headed by Berlusconi from 2008 to this day (August 2011)� 102 d onatella i zzo And yet, a closer look at current Italian politics and culture tells a different story, showing traces of a new, emerging version of the United States, locally produced and customized for the Italian public as the result of a new kind of ideological manipulation� In this essay I will examine some of the new uses to which American catchwords and images have been put in recent Italian political culture, in an effort to clarify what I take to be a significant shift in representational strategies triggered by some post-9/ 11 developments� I will illustrate my point through a sampling of admittedly heterogeneous examples from recent Italian cultural and political life, which for clarity’s sake will be organized under three main rubrics: security and state of exception; freedom and liberalism; nativism and immigration policies� Making a convincing case for each would require a considerably more thorough investigation than I can afford here, but I hope that even my somewhat cursory analysis will be sufficient to point to their mutual connection, suggesting the way they collectively produce what might very well turn out to be the United States of the next Italian generation. I argue, first, that within the domestic dynamics of Italian politics, American icons and rallying cries are increasingly being used to circulate and naturalize a local right-wing agenda; and second, that this agenda is frequently mystified as a progressive one by expediently making use of the inbuilt democratic associations of things American in the political unconscious of post-World War II Italy� Sorting out the global and the local in such a process is far from easy; whether and to what extent this instability of America as a floating political signifier, open to the intervention of other actors, should be ascribed to the domestic interests served by such local representational strategies or to the inherent quality of the political discourse and praxis that the United States has been exporting for more than a decade, is a question that I will leave to my readers to determine� Since in this paper the United States is not, for once, the main object of inquiry, the relevance of such an analysis to the field of American Studies might be questioned� At the risk of stating the obvious, therefore, let me try to make my premise explicit: while the United States, as the Americanist’s object of observation, may have been changed (or not) by a historical event such as the September 11 attacks, the international Americanist’s locus of observation has in turn been changing on its own, moving on with its own history� That history, as has been repeatedly noted, is itself part of the knowledge production process of an international American Studies, as the lens filtering and orienting the observer’s gaze and providing it with a guiding set of questions or - as Liam Kennedy has effectively argued - with a “demand, desire or need” that deserves to be acknowledged and investigated (3)� I would like to push this argument a little further and suggest that if we are to take the notion of a transnational American Studies seriously, then that intellectual venture perhaps requires that we should take into account not just (as I have myself proposed elsewhere) the multiple differential ways in which the world at large produces Americanist knowledge by producing American American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 103 Studies within its own locally sanctioned disciplinary fields, 3 but also the way the world at large produces America itself, multiply inflected through the endless reverberations of the uses and understandings of America within the disseminated economies of the world’s local cultural and political histories� Even more than transnational , I would like to think of this practice as a translational American Studies, one that attempts to capitalize on the intellectual and political teachings of some recent reconfigurations of Comparative Literature, such as Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone � By focusing on such an instance of the translational use of America, therefore, I will be trying to create some meaningful synergy between my professional calling as an Americanist and my daily observations as an Italian citizen and resident - a synergy that, such is my hope, might possibly enhance my understanding of both fields. I am encouraged in this hope by some recent work in American Studies that has intersected with my own, confirming its directions or pushing it into new ones� In introducing their Globalizing American Studies , Brian Edwards and Dilip Gaonkar call for exactly such a shift in focus as the one I am tentatively proposing here, arguing in favor of a “multilateralism” that would displace the privileged locus of observation from the United States to the endless archives of its worldwide reverberations, thus “provincializing” the idiom of U�S� American Studies as just one of the field’s “vernaculars.” While I am aware that Edwards and Gaonkar are thinking in terms of an enlarged global multilateralism that effectively explodes the traditional U�S�-Europe bilateralism of American Studies, so prominent in much of the discourse of internationalization and transnationalism (and still figuring evidently in my focus on Italy), I do believe that my case study is sufficiently in tune with their argument, at least conceptually, to justify my retrospective appropriation of their paradigm as a larger framework for the kind of investigation I am conducting here� The other book that has had a powerful impact on my thinking, in more than one way, is Donald Pease’s The New American Exceptionalism - a work that in its relentless focus on the United States may seem in sharp contrast with the enlarged scope advocated by Edwards and Gaonkar, but that I take to be in fact the necessary complement, as well as foundation, to their wide globalizing gesture� This is true, to my mind, not just in the general sense that American Studies is , after all, about producing knowledge on the United States and on “America” as its fantastic avatar, but also in the more specific sense that the kind of knowledge on the United States that Pease produces in his book is key to our understanding not just of the United States, but also of those “ archives of America abroad ” that Edwards and Gaonkar consider integral to Americanist discussion (17; emphasis in original)� And if this is so, it is not because America’s self-understanding precedes and founds any other nation’s understanding of America, but exactly the other way round, because in Pease’s account the exceptionalist self-understanding of the United States becomes simultaneously historicized and abstracted as the specific “horizon 3 See Izzo (2009)� 104 d onatella i zzo of intelligibility” legislating the relation of U�S� citizens to the state� Through his astute use of Jacqueline Rose’s notion of “states of fantasy” to investigate the genealogy of American Exceptionalism as the mundane history of the varying negotiations of the U�S� state with the U�S� citizens, Pease supplies us with a versatile theoretical framework to investigate not American uniqueness , but America as a case study for the ordinary operation of the modern state, thus laying the foundation for different kinds of comparative work� When the book first came out, I was struck by the way most of its argument - however specific its object and circumstantially definite its stages - could have been successfully (and instructively) transposed to Italy� What follows is an attempt to begin to effect that transposition, by investigating some instances of Italian political discourse that enable a comparison with the operation of fantasy and disavowal as analyzed by Pease, while the use of icons specifically marked as American in my case studies might further populate the disseminated archives collected by Edwards and Gaonkar� 2 After 9/ 11: Security Goes Global From a European point of view, September 11 was indeed a historical landmark, officially closing the transition opened by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and ushering in a new kind of bipolarity, whose ruling logic is no longer the spatial one of the Cold War, signified by the “Iron Curtain” metaphor, but the more fractured and deterritorialized one of the War on Terror� Within this new logic, the United States has for some time operated as the superpower leading what was once called “the Free World” towards a culture of ever-escalating surveillance� To a European person of my generation, this recalls nothing so much as the obsession with control, the repression of individual freedoms, and the obstruction of the free circulation of people and ideas once stigmatized as typical of the Soviet bloc� Times change, of course� But what I find really striking in this process is the fact that such a change is not just represented as necessary but valorized as positive within a redefined notion of what a “free” society is about� This set of semantic shifts takes place by way of a massive revival of the most hackneyed Cold War tropes about the United States, creating a conceptual framework into which new, historically specific political meanings are then injected. A good example of this kind of rhetorical manipulation, where the past is deftly evoked as a smoke screen for the present, is the much-advertised (at least on Italian pro-government media) address of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to a joint session of the U�S� Congress on March 1, 2006 - a mutual exchange of favors between Berlusconi and George W� Bush, with Bush advertising the support of the only western European country which still had troops in Iraq at that time, and Berlusconi seeking legitimation as a world-class statesman in an effort to bolster up his faltering administra- American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 105 tion, just weeks before it lost its parliamentary majority� 4 On this occasion, Berlusconi successfully refreshed the “beacon of liberty” representation of the United States, dating back to the Second World War, weaving into a seamless discursive formation the war against Nazi-Fascism, the Cold War fight against communism - with the latter, an obsessive refrain in Berlusconi’s domestic political rhetoric, receiving decidedly more emphasis than the former - and the fight against terrorism: Many American citizens have Italian roots� For them, the United States was a land of opportunity that welcomed them generously, and they contributed their intelligence and their labor to help make America great� And I am proud to see that so many Italian-Americans are today Members of the Congress of the greatest democracy in the world� For my generation of Italians, the United States is the beacon of liberty, of civil and economic progress� I will always be grateful to the United States for having saved my country from Fascism and Nazism at the cost of so many young American lives� I will also be grateful to the United States for defending Europe from the Soviet threat in the long decades of the Cold War� By devoting so much to this victorious struggle against communism, the United States enabled us Europeans to employ our precious resources in the recovery and development of our economies� I will always be grateful to the United States for having helped my country to climb out of poverty and achieve growth and prosperity after the Second World War thanks to the generosity of the Marshall Plan� We remember today this generosity� And today I am still grateful to the United States for the high price in lives you continue to pay in the fight against terrorism to assure our common security and defend human rights around the world� As I will never tire of repeating, when I see your flag, I do not merely see the flag of a great country� Above all, I see a symbol, a universal symbol of freedom and democracy� 5 The Second World War scenery is again evoked at the end of the speech, offering an allegedly personal episode - one that in its conventional quality and lack of circumstantial detail is strongly reminiscent of the war movie: Let me conclude by telling you a brief story - the story of a young man just out of high school, whose father took him to a cemetery that was the resting place for many brave young soldiers, who had crossed the ocean to restore dignity and liberty to an oppressed people� In showing him those crosses, the father made the young man vow that he would never forget the ultimate sacrifice those American 4 Berlusconi had insistently solicited this opportunity since the previous October as a self-advertising move to be spent as an asset on the domestic scene, as has since been confirmed by some notes from U.S. Ambassador to Italy Ronald Spogli, dated October 26, 2005, released by Wikileaks� 5 The official text in Italian can be found at http: / / www.governo.it/ Presidente/ Interventi/ testo_int.asp? d=27662. The first few paragraphs of the speech, quoted here, were actually delivered in English and I am reporting them as transcribed from videos broadcast by Italian television� The rest of the address was in Italian; the translation of the part quoted below is mine� 106 d onatella i zzo soldiers had made in defense of his freedom� He made him promise that he would be forever grateful to their country� That father was my father, that young man was me. I have never forgotten that sacrifice and that vow, and I never will. Note the convenient lack of any specification regarding the kind of enemy that the brave young soldiers had fought against and the precise nature of the oppressor that had threatened the people’s liberty: in light of the fact that some of the political inheritors of the Fascist party were at the time, and still are, an integral part of Berlusconi’s government, such reticence is easy to understand� But the vagueness responds to an even deeper need than just obfuscating embarrassing connections: discarding all historical specificity helps to mystify today’s struggles, recasting them in yesterday’s terms� Nicely framed by two symmetrical bookends that look back to that unassailable moment in twentieth-century American warfare, the Second World War, Berlusconi’s address is entirely devoted to buttressing the ongoing war and its sustaining ideological rationale for a U�S� audience, while justifying the Italian engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan in the eyes of his domestic constituency� Through a series of semantic slippages and historical substitutions, the democratic struggle against Fascism is abstracted from its original context and then reassociated first to an anti-communist, then to an anti-terrorist agenda, with “liberty” acting as the magic word effecting the equivalence� The United States, in its reiterated association with liberty, acts as the guarantor of this continued fight for freedom and, by extension, as the guarantor of the democratic, freedom-enhancing value of the permanent state of exception that has become the norm in most Western countries since September 11� It is by way of a similar train of associations, put in place by a similar rhetoric, that a new set of catchwords is now marketing the prioritization of security through technological surveillance as a desirable product “made in the USA�” A case in point is the sudden popularity of body scanners after the failed terrorist attack by the so-called “Christmas bomber,” 23-year-old Muslim Nigerian citizen Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the Amsterdam- Detroit flight on December 25, 2009. On that occasion, the authorities declared that the plastic explosive that Abdulmutallab had hidden in his underwear and tried to ignite during the flight might have been detected by existing full-body scanning technology, such as backscatter x-ray machines and millimeter wave scanning� Already in use for some time at U�S� airports, and in fact already available, but not routinely used on all passengers, at the Amsterdam airport where the alleged terrorist had embarked, body scanners rapidly proliferated not only in the U�S�, but also throughout the European Union� Following the example of the United States, several European countries, including my own, rushed to equip their airports with the new technology� In an interview broadcast a few days after the failed attack and given wide resonance in the media for several days, the Italian Foreign Affairs Minister of the Berlusconi administration, Franco Frattini, solemnly declared that “The right not to be blown up in an explosion is the precondi- American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 107 tion of all other liberties�” 6 This original piece of political philosophy did not take into account the vote with which the European Parliament on October 23, 2008 had rejected the use of body scanners as an unacceptably intrusive technology constituting a violation of passengers’ fundamental rights� Thus, in a perverse new twist of the universalist rhetoric of liberty and rights, an intrusive surveillance technology was represented as the foundation of the fundamental liberties guaranteed by a free country� What to me is even more striking - and troubling - is that this escalation in surveillance was approved by a majority of voters in an informal online poll in January 2010, organized by La Repubblica , a daily whose readers are overwhelmingly educated, center-left-leaning professionals or intellectuals, and virtually all anti-Berlusconi voters� And indeed, the securitarian rhetoric has been widely embraced by the center-left as well as the centerright of the political spectrum� In some ways, it is as if the “made in the USA” trademark - especially when coupled with the optimistic progressive image originally associated with the advent of president Obama - operated as a safe conduct for the kind of measures that not so long ago would have been condemned as totalitarian state control, legitimizing them as inherently democratic qua American� The global spread of a culture of surveillance has been fostered by the worldwide success of a number of American TV shows, and Italy has been no exception� As several critics have observed, shows like 24 and NCIS - and even, I would add, series ostensibly unrelated to homeland security like CSI , Without a Trace , or Dexter 7 - all revolve around a number of shared concerns: a tale of universal guilt and suspicion; the paramount importance of personal and collective security; the constantly amplified threat posed by the penetration of hostile aliens; the breathless pace of an investigation intent on averting impending doom; the justification of vigilantism; and the need for a permanent state of exception in the superior interest of individual and national defense� 8 To the extent that these shows embody and circulate an ideological agenda, it is of course in the first place an American one targeting a domestic audience� Still, these shows are transnational both in their commercial circulation and in the ideological attitude they promote� This applies, I argue, not only to the inevitable worldwide span of the so-called “war on terror,” but also to more local considerations� 6 The interview was broadcast on January 5, 2010 by the radio channel Radio24 � My translation� 7 A special issue of Ácoma , devoted to the international circulation of American TV series, featured essays reading 24 and CSI in this key, by Hamilton Carroll and myself, respectively. See Izzo and Cinzia Scarpino, eds. (2008). 8 One of these series, CSI , actually antedates September 11, having been run on CBS since October 2000 - and indeed, to the extent that it deploys a logic and rhetoric strikingly similar to those prevailing after 9/ 11, it bears witness to the fact that some of the cultural and political processes associated with the “war on terror” were already in place before that date� Without a Trace has been run by CBS since September 2002� NCIS , a spin-off of JAG , premiered on CBS in 2003; Dexter premiered in 2006 on Showtime� 108 d onatella i zzo It should be remembered in this context that virtually all of the TV system in Italy is in the hands of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, either indirectly, through his government’s political control of the three public channels of the public TV company RAI, or directly, through his personal ownership of RAI’s major private competitor Mediaset, which has three channels� 9 Given the significant interconnections between TV ownership and political life in the country, it is safe to surmise that TV programming is not just a matter of commercial consideration, but is also heavily influenced by political agendas� In this view, the increasing prominence of U�S� shows in Italian TV programming which feature violent crime and promulgate the preeminence of investigative needs over individual rights can hardly be seen as accidental� The shows mentioned above, for instance, all began to be aired in Italy after September 2001 and met with astonishing success� 10 Conveying a gloomy and lurid image of a world constantly threatened by extreme violence and in need of harsh, unconventional, and illegal measures for its defense, the paranoid fictional microcosm created by these series exactly mirrors the one that Italian right-wing political discourse is relentlessly and effectively intent on producing at a local level. Through their smooth mechanisms of identification and blatantly Manichean moral dramas, TV series are ideally suited to create in their audience a kind of ready-made, knee-jerk ideological response that makes the administration’s political rhetoric and practice more palatable, by projecting them back on a set of fictionalized images that naturalize both the rhetoric and the practice, thus encouraging their translation from the U.S. context to the Italian one. This can be verified through an examination of Italian fan blogs and forums, where one can find entries such as the one that follows, referring to 24 : “24 is a spectacular series […], with fabulous characters, especially Jack� I have watched as many as 12 episodes on end of Day 4 - impressive! I love the anti-terrorism genre, with secret services and plots� 24 is very real, not at all farfetched. […] I’m going to get an action figure of Jack to keep on my dresser, so while I’m sleeping I’ll have Jack protecting me�” 11 The next one is on Dexter : “Dex is a unique character, outside all canons and patterns […] and given the state of justice in Italy (and elsewhere) who could blame him for what he does? ”; 12 another forum participant declares: “I think everybody likes Dexter because he’s an almost utopian character�” 13 Serial 9 To be precise, the Berlusconi administration controls two of the three public, statesubsidized channels of RAI (the third channel is allotted to the parliamentary minority), while the Berlusconi family owns Mediaset with its three commercial channels� Pay TV accounts for a minor share of the audience and its major provider is the Sky network, owned by Rupert Murdoch, with Mediaset holding an increasing share of that market as well� 10 CSI has been aired by Sky starting in 2001 and by Mediaset in 2002; Senza Traccia ( Without a Trace ) has been run on RAI 2 since 2004; NCIS has been running on RAI 2 since 2005; Dexter started running in 2007 on Fox/ Sky and in 2008 on Mediaset Italia 1. 11 www.telefilm-central.org, January 3, 2008. 12 www.telefilm-central.org, November 16, 2009. 13 www.telefilm-central.org, February 12, 2008. American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 109 killing as utopia? Rather, I think what is praised here is the same disregard for the rule of law as a limit to the exercise of the sovereign will that was such a significant part of the operation of political power in Bush’s United States, and is even now the guiding principle of the administration’s political thought, speech, and action in Berlusconi’s Italy� 3 The Freedom of the Marketplace and the Marketplace of Freedom The troubling slippages of “freedom” that I have just recorded - from political freedom from Nazi and Fascist dictatorship to the freedom of “the Free World” as opposed to communist rule; from the free acceptance of limits to one’s personal freedom in the superior interest of the West’s collective freedom from Islamic terrorism to the untrammeled freedom of one’s impulses and will - are, of course, neither new in philosophical nor in political terms� In Italy, though, the recent history of the concept “freedom” has been marked by a particularly wide oscillation, which makes the inherent contradiction of some of its uses appear especially glaring� The notions of “freedom” and “liberty” - both rendered by the single Italian word “libertà” - have been long associated with democratic institutions and with the political left’s celebration of the anti-Fascist roots of the Italian republic: for the World War II and baby-boom generations, freedom was defined in terms of reclaimed political democracy, as opposed to recent Fascist rule; April 25 th , “Festa della Liberazione” (Liberation Day) is a national holiday commemorating the insurrection against Fascism and the liberation of Italy from the Nazi-Fascist troops thanks to the joint efforts of the Italian partisans and the Allied forces� Over the last two decades, however, the notion of a “liberation” from Fascism has come increasingly under attack, with the Prime Minister and his political allies refusing to celebrate it as a historical landmark and trying to reconfigure it as a generic “Festa della Libertà” (Liberty/ Freedom Day)� 14 Meanwhile, the notion of freedom has been increasingly appropriated to the lexicon of the political right, to the point of becoming synonymous with Berlusconi’s party, originally called “Forza Italia” and twice renamed over the last decade, first in 2001 as “Casa delle Libertà” and then, in 2007, as “Popolo della Libertà�” The freedom evoked by this use of the word, of course, has nothing to do with egaliberté ; rather, it has been shifted from the terrain of radical democratic politics to that of laissez-faire capitalism and right-wing libertarianism - a transition made seamless by the role played by the United States on both stages, then and now� 14 In a clear attempt to deny legitimacy to this celebration of the anti-Fascist roots of the Italian Republic, Silvio Berlusconi has never once been present at any April 25 th ceremony, breaking a custom established by all former prime ministers, and despite much criticism� 110 d onatella i zzo The distinctly neoliberal and anti-statist twist in the current political use of “libertà” might open the way to interesting potential comparisons with political and economic thinkers in the United States, were it not that it would be virtually impossible to trace any reference to current American conservative libertarian discourse in Berlusconi’s speeches� Such a practice would evidently be non-remunerative in political terms, since none of the conservative politicians, thinkers, or commentators familiar to the U�S� public enjoy any significant popularity in Italy; 15 but a further reason is that, as most observers would agree, the Berlusconi administration’s intellectual platform is haphazard at best, and its appeal to liberty and libertarianism is less a coherent theory or an ideology than the cover for a gigantic and ramified conflict of interest, and for massive diversion of public resources from the public sector to private companies� In this process, a special role is played by the use of American terms, by now endemic in the world of finance, business, and state administration� A case in point is the use of a lexicon borrowed from U�S� academia in the ongoing process of corporatizing Italian public university, a use so systematic that it would in itself warrant a separate study; suffice it to mention the recurrent expression “tenure track” (always in English) in government documents and press announcements to define the newly introduced system under which Italian university teachers in the early stages of their career - hitherto tenured from the rank of assistant professors - can only be hired on temporary three-year contracts, at the end of which they can be dismissed if the university lacks the budget to make their appointment permanent� Such a misleading version of the notion of “tenure track” is hard to read as anything but an act of bad faith; but even when such pseudo-concepts are not so evidently fraudulent, they are being used to create an aura of successful competition and progressive modernity around practices that would be immediately perceived as unpalatable if they were spelled out in Italian, and that in any case may vary considerably from their alleged American equivalents� In other words, more than being used as models or inspirations, U�S� practices and institutions are being terminologically showcased - put on display as baits or diversions� Another specific actualization of the rhetoric of freedom in recent Italian politics, one that is inspired by the U�S� political discourse to the point of overt plagiarism, is the recent transplant of the Tea Party� The “Tea Party Italia” movement was launched on May 20, 2010 during an anti-tax demonstration in Prato, near Florence; its rallying cry as summarized on the Tea Party Italia website was “against all state intervention and against the socialization of our economy� To reclaim our right to personal autonomy and individual responsibility�” 16 On October 11, 2010 the first national meeting of the Tea Party was called in Milan at Università Bocconi, a renowned private business 15 With the possible exception of Sarah Palin, due to her role in the 2008 presidential campaign� Michele Bachmann is just beginning to get some limited coverage in the Italian press in the wake of her increasing visibility in U�S� political life� 16 See http: / / www�teapartyitalia�it/ index�php/ tappe� American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 111 school, on the occasion of the “European Liberty Conference” organized by ISFIL, Italian Students for Individual Liberty, a small student association in partnership with the Milton Friedman Society - a neoliberal student group at Università Bocconi - and with the American SFL, Students for Liberty organization� Their goal as stated on the ISFIL website is to promote the values of “individual liberty, private property, free entrepreneurship, market,” and “to involve the younger generations in the fight for a free society, ultimately creating a unified students movement in favor of individual liberty.” 17 All but one born in or after 1987, the founders and leaders of the ISFIL attend elite schools and explicitly present themselves as intellectuals and/ or future professionals in the financial or legal fields; some of them are actively involved, as national representatives or local organizers, in the Tea Party Italia movement, while others declare more theoretical interests in questions of political philosophy, political economics, geopolitics, or political sciences� 18 One interesting feature of the Italian Tea Party movement is its aforementioned demographics, since this elite intellectual origin makes it the very opposite of a populist grassroots movement� Unlike the American Tea Parties, whose adherents tend to be over forty-five, the Italian movement’s proponents are young students of classical economic liberalism who are clearly trying to make their bid as future leaders of the country; unlike the marked nationalism of the American Tea Party movements, out to reclaim their own vision of what America is about, the Italian Tea Party has an emphatically international attitude, as shown by its explicit Americanization: it is allied to the Tea Party Patriots in the U�S�, it quotes Milton Friedman, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, it proudly exhibits the American flag during its meetings, 19 and it flaunts its connections to local representatives of the Tea Party in the U.S. as well as to American academic and political figures - including Jim Lark, former chair of the U�S� Libertarian Party and one of the keynote speakers at the founding conference of Tea Party Italia� An unsigned article published in Il Sole 24 Ore (the daily newspaper owned by Confindustria, the Italian association of manufacturers) on October 12, 2010, reporting on the conference in a sympathetic but somewhat condescending tone, commented that the low average age of the participants, the evident high rate of people holding Ph�D�s among them, and their fashion-conscious looks, did not bode well for the start of a mass movement, in spite of the potential wide appeal of its anti-tax platform: this group, the article concluded, felt more like “a club of nerds in love with America�” And yet, Tea Party Italia - which has been encouraged and endorsed by political characters and spin doctors very close to the present administration - is clearly eager to move into a larger arena, recruiting its adherents among the public at large� 17 See http: / / www.isfil.org/ p/ chi-siamo.html. 18 See http: / / www.isfil.org/ p/ il-team.html. 19 See the pictures on their flickr website: http: / / www.flickr.com/ photos/ teapartyitalia/ 112 d onatella i zzo While it is clearly too early to predict whether this attempt will be successful, an intriguing element in the Italian Tea Party’s approach to the Italian public is what I would describe as its schizophrenic translational strategy in regard to its American matrix� On the one hand, the connection of Tea Party Italia with a number of present-day movements and organizations in the U�S� is constantly underscored on its websites, along with the predictable catchwords “freedom” and “liberty,” and the call for competitive individualism, anti-statism, and fiscal responsibility (a notion that in the Italian political context is likely to be understood as a code word for massive tax evasion)� The definition “Tea Party,” however, is rarely explained: to the best of my knowledge, there is only one Tea Party Italia document that illustrates its origin, its very first one, tellingly titled in Italian - “let the revolution begin! ” 20 While it is safe to assume that the organization leaders are perfectly familiar with both its remote and its recent history, the expression “tea party” can hardly be taken to evoke any historical association in the minds of most Italians the way it does for Americans� 21 Rather than evoking classic economic thought, philosophical liberalism, or a historical moment of nation-building within a colonial context, in short, the complexities of meaning that lend the American Tea Party its multilayered political effectiveness, grounding its fantasy in a welter of patriotic associations, 22 the Italian “Tea Party” solely conveys an idea of anti-statist tax revolt� This strategy is calculated to appeal to the vast majority of tax rebels - or just plain tax evaders - among the ranks of Italian entrepreneurs, owners of small businesses, and professional people at all levels� Its explicit reference to the Tea Party movement in the United States is complemented by a strong emphasis on national and local realities (for instance, the homepage features pictures of various Italian cities where tea parties have lately been held)� 23 Far from keeping up with the rather self-complacent high-brow tone of its original proponents, the website of Tea Party Italia advertises the movement in a very straightforward, down-to-earth fashion through simple catchphrases such as “meno tasse più libertà” (less taxation, more freedom) and “meno stato più mercato” (less state, more free market), which seem to suggest a two-tiered movement led by a self-appointed political-financial intellectual elite with a cosmopolitan education and addressed to the capitalist “animal spirits” of a wider, less educated, and more locally rooted public� Especially interesting in this sense are the gadgets on sale on the website: 24 let me mention, by way of example, a choice of tasteful underpants for men and for women, stating “fotti lo stato” 20 See Riccardo Cavirani’s article “Che la rivoluzione ricominci,” posted online on June 30, 2010 on the occasion of the creation of the first Tea Party Italia group in Prato. 21 On the U�S� Tea Party’s relationship to and reclaiming of national history, see Jill Lepore’s recent book The Whites of Their Eyes. The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History � 22 For an analysis of the operation of state fantasy in the U�S� Tea Party movement see Pease 2010� 23 See www�teapartyitalia�it� 24 http: / / teapartyitalia�spreadshirt�it/ American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 113 (fuck the state) and “lo stato non mi avrà mai” (the state won’t have me), respectively - a heavily gender-inflected message in tune with the conservative gender politics of the political right in both Italy and the U�S�, but presumably not the kind of underwear that the “club of nerds” at Bocconi university would pick for themselves� In a translational perspective, however, what I find most interesting in this kind of merchandise is not just the way its symbols and slogans - ranging from crass sexual allusion to relatively sophisticated wordplay - cater to the potential tastes of a diverse and diversely educated audience of prospective supporters, but the different strategies they adopt in transposing their U�S� originals� A crucial element has to do with the choice of icons for the Italian Tea Party and with their color coding� Reinforcing the sense that support for the Tea Party movement need not involve an awareness of the historical origin of the expression (perhaps, in spite of their love for anti-tax rebellions, the movement leaders by and large prefer to gloss over revolutions), the Italian Tea Party has chosen a tea pot as its emblem - something that, as far as I have been able to ascertain, does not frequently appear in the emblems of U�S� Tea Parties, since of course the original “tea party” never involved a tea pot� The pot in question (itself a curiously incongruous object in a country whose unifying trait, paraphrasing Mark Twain, might probably be found in a widespread devotion to coffee) is blue on a white background with “meno tasse più libertà” inscribed in white across it, and has a very small red-whitegreen paper label hanging on the string of a tea bag emerging from under the pot cover. This label is the only trace of the colors of the Italian flag in an iconography that is otherwise entirely pervaded by the U�S� red, white, and blue� Not quite the old glory blue, though: the blue that appears everywhere in the Italian Tea Party iconography is a lighter shade - to be precise, it is the exact shade of blue that has characterized every one of Berlusconi’s parties’ emblems - a choice that creates a seamless, subliminal continuity not just between the Italian and the American Tea Party, but also between the Tea Party and Berlusconi’s party, and between both and an indefinite but powerful set of values and traditions embodied by the stars and stripes� An examination of the individual gadgets available for sale reinforces the impression of a translational strategy at work, which alternately suggests overt borrowing and deft adaptation� T-shirts are most revealing� While the inscription of a U�S� slogan such as “T�E�A� Party� Taxed Enough Already” may make sense to at least the English-speaking part of the Italian movement, what’s the point for a supporter of Tea Party Italia, I wonder, to be wearing a t-shirt announcing (in English) “Pro Gun, Pro Life, Pro Drilling”? The pro-life part certainly has a flourishing tradition in the Vatican-inspired Catholic fundamentalism of many Italian parties, but guns and drilling have never been prominent issues in Italian politics, and I suspect that many potential buyers of such shirts have no idea what debates these signifiers refer to� By selling this kind of merchandise, the Tea Party Italia is quite literally transposing Italy into the United States� We are all American: by inviting its supporters to embrace fights that are highly context-specific, Tea Party Italia 114 d onatella i zzo in fact creates a sense of belonging to a transnational resistance against state oppression and leftist agendas� Prominent among the latter is, of course, the issue of race, which Tea Party Italia does not address explicitly, but which is foregrounded in the programs of other similar groups� 4 Moving West If, as I am suggesting, local establishments may be using the U�S�-related cultural imaginary as an effective marketing device to promote their own agendas, this is nowhere more evident, to my mind, than in the blatantly mystified use of American icons in the political propaganda of the Lega Nord, or Northern League� The Northern League is a political party which in U�S� terms might be understood as something in-between the Tea Party Movement and the Redneck Manifesto: originally based in the rural areas of northern Italy as a populist movement, it rapidly expanded its influence over the whole North of the country - the wealthiest and most industrialized region in Italy - to the point of becoming the area’s leading political group� Now it is a major party nationwide, by far the most powerful in northern local administrations and rapidly expanding in other areas, and one of the mainstays of the present center-right national government� The party’s platform is based on a mixture of localism; conservative populism, anti-elitism, and anti-intellectualism; fervent anti-statist sentiments, ranging from requests for fiscal federalism to calls for secession; a gender politics based on “phallus worship” and “Mama Grizzlies”; 25 and last but far from least, a xenophobic, sometimes overtly racist attitude to immigrants and immigration� The whole unsavory mixture is kept together by a set of invented traditions - such as the notion of a “Padanian” identity stemming from fantasized Celtic origins� Given the militantly localist position of the Northern League, the degree of its self-styled Americanism is perhaps surprising� Among the many Cowboy Festivals and Cowboy Nights advertised throughout Lombardy - events that might be taken to refer to icons of masculinity rather than icons of Americanness - let me choose a particularly telling example, a hit by “Il Bepi,” 26 a local singer from Bergamo, a rich Lombard city and Northern League stronghold� The song, whose catchy tune is immediately recognizable as typical Ameri- 25 The phallus worship is quite literal: one of the earliest and most widely known (and parodied) mottos from a political speech by the Northern League leader Umberto Bossi, summarizing the party’s rising political power and uncompromising intentions, is “la Lega Nord ce l’ha duro,” “the Northern League is hard/ has a hard-on�” 26 It should be noted here that “Il Bepi” (a local diminutive of Giuseppe comparable to Joe) started as a satirical persona embodying a soccer fan from Bergamo in a local radio show, and developed through a number of songs and performances in Bergamo dialect into an enormously popular local character, especially when the return to dialect as the official language of the area became a rallying cry for the Northern League. Bepi, whose real name is Tiziano Incani, is now a regular star of local League festivals, and his song “Kentucky” is a hit� For more information see http: / / www�bepiberghem� com/ wikibepi�html� American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 115 can country music, is sung in the dialect of the Bergamo area, almost incomprehensible to outsiders, the return to dialect as the only legitimate language being one of the political claims of the Lega� Interestingly, it features no standard Italian words, but is interspersed with several English expressions, including the whole final stanza. I will provide the original text followed by my English translation, using italics for the words that are in English in the text: Ho lagàt la mè cà zo n’del Kentucky E ma so trasferìt sota Clüsù E ‘nvece di nisüline a maie i cachi E ‘nvece di serpencc a go i bisù A ghìe ü pick-up enorme piè de polver Che ‘nvece i ma dacc ön Ape rot A fa la cùa ai Fiurine coma ü màrter Oter che la fa eta on the road Ma mè sto bè po a chè Semper inàcc e ‘ndrè E ‘nvece de des miglia Rìe fo al bar a pè Ma mè sto bè po a là E mpo’ per ol parlà A mè i ma ciàma amò l’Americà Ardàe ol basket in dol Kentucky E che al ma toca ardà zügà a balù In Las Vegas very Lucky In Alsöre cülatù Purtàe ol capèl de cow boy stèle e stese E chè l bretì Bob Marley col canù Andà a vensì i rodeo l’ìa ‘l me èse Che ‘nvece ‘ndo söl Dalmen col furgù Ma me�� I left my home Kentucky I left my home far away There Elvis Presley here Don Backy Pessi Cola and casonsèi� I left my home down in Kentucky / and I moved under Clusone/ Instead of peanuts I eat kaki/ instead of snakes I have watersnakes�/ I used to have a huge dusty pickup / and here all I got is a broken Ape van/ held up in the traffic like a martyr to get to the Fiorine hills/ no way like a life on the road �/ But I like it here too, always back and forth,/ and instead of driving ten miles I can walk to the bar,/ But I liked it there too, and maybe because of my accent/ they still call me “the American�”/ I used to watch basket on tv in Kentucky / and all I have here is soccer/ in Las Vegas they called me very lucky / in Valzurio they call me “culattone” [Lombard dialect slur for gay]�/ I would wear a stars-and-stripes cowboy hat/ but here I wear a Bob Marley cap with a joint/ My hobby was winning rodeos / Now I go looking for hookers on the Dalmine road in my van�/ But I like it here too, …/ I 116 d onatella i zzo left my home Kentucky/ I left my home far away / There Elvis Presley here Don Backy [the American-sounding pseudonym of an Italian singer who enjoyed some celebrity in the 1960s] / Pepsi Cola and casonsèi [a typical Bergamo pasta dish]� Enormously popular throughout Lombardy, this song has been repeatedly posted on youtube accompanied by several videos, including one that seems tailor-made for my argument: a home-made cartoon made by a fan, illustrating the song through a juxtaposition of alternate images from the Bergamo valleys and from a jumble of American landscapes, on whose background a cartoon version of Bepi performs antics, wearing an assortment of cowboy outfits. 27 Evoking a playful nostalgia for a never-never land of American western stereotypes, and presenting its fantasized Kentucky side by side with a number of places, customs and objects from the Bergamo area that are simultaneously reviled and reclaimed in the comparison, this song plays ironically on the traditional Italian emigration song, subverting its nostalgic stereotypes of a home left behind� By paradoxically designating Kentucky as the “home” of an emphatically regional character singing in local dialect, the song is claiming an American identity that is seen not as conflicting, but as pacifically congruent with the local one. What the song achieves is to effectively bracket the Italian identity and the allegiance to Italy as a nationstate that the Northern League supporters militantly reject, by projecting the Bergamo region directly on a wider transnational stage represented by the United States, and specifically, by a version of the United States that itself foregrounds the region rather than the nation and the local rather than the global dimension - or rather, a version that by reducing the global to a local dimension, underscores the local as the universal� Such a use of American cultural icons, promoting an overlapping between the Lombard valleys and a generic “country-western” mythology where Kentucky and Monument Valley merge in a single, undifferentiated, dehistoricized image of “America,” seems aimed at lending a kind of cultural viability to the whole fantasy of Padania by drawing on a stereotypical notion of the American West� By being projected onto an established western mythology, the invented ethnic identity of the Padanians acquires a sort of fake cultural depth, and Padania is ennobled as its own myth, a place of folksy ways, rugged individualism, and unimpeded economic expansion� This kind of fantasized Americanization, which the Padanian version of country music shows in its more harmless aspect, displays a more troubling potential when it evokes the American West as a place where management of conflict is untrammeled by the political refinements and legal subtleties of a far-away federal government� This is the implication conveyed by the widespread metaphorical use of the word “sceriffo” - Italian for sheriff - to designate those Northern League village and town mayors who take extreme, openly racist and frequently unconstitutional administrative measures against immigrants, especially those from Africa and Muslim-majority countries, regardless of their documented or undocumented status� Let me 27 Il Bepi, “Kentucky,” http: / / www�youtube�com/ watch? v=CRgRqZtH7BY� American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 117 note that the sheriff is a kind of law enforcement officer that does not exist in the Italian police administration, and that the use of this term has nothing to do with county-level law enforcement agencies in the contemporary United States: in the Italian context, the notion evokes Western movies, carrying implications of summary justice and vigilantism, and depicting the latter as a desirable alternative to the lengthy process of ordinary law, perceived as an inadequate defense for the community� The notion of “defense” is key here: Northern League voters (among whom are many working-class people, as well as local entrepreneurs and owners of small businesses) share a sense of being threatened by economic globalization, which finds its ideal scapegoat in immigrants, triggering all sorts of xenophobic attitudes� A striking exhibit in this sense is the image that follows: The caption under this stereotypical portrayal of a noble, thoughtful, and impressive Native American chief reads: “They suffered immigration� Now they live on reservations� Think about it! ” Created by the Northern League for the Italian political elections of 2008, 28 this poster mobilizes the Ameri- 28 The poster was originally created by the Lega Ticinese in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, with no particular success, and borrowed by the Italian Northern League as suggested by its leader Umberto Bossi� 118 d onatella i zzo can West imaginary in a quite different, but in fact complementary key� No longer represented in terms of the close-knit and independent community of pioneers, northern electors are now asked to identify themselves with the losing side of history, the vanishing Americans threatened with extinction, dispossessed and confined within what was once their own land. Capitalizing on the anxieties caused by the sweep of economic globalization and its attendant migratory flows, the poster evokes the continental expansion of the United States and the genocide of Native Americans as a cautionary tale about the apocalyptic outcome of unchecked immigration� It matters little, of course, that in the Lombardy version of the story, economic, demographic, and technological considerations are all in favor of the natives, since the allegedly besieged community in fact comprises the overwhelming majority (90%) of the population; 29 moreover, it is the ethnic group that occupies virtually all upper positions in the financial, professional and entrepreneurial domains in a region which holds about one third (29.74%) of the overall wealth of the whole of Italy, but less than one sixth of the population� This poster, for all its counterfactual preposterousness, has been the most successful ever of the Northern League (with 200,000 copies ordered within a few days), and one of the most effective and widely recognized icons of recent electoral campaigns in Italy� 30 What it reveals is, of course, ideological dishonesty and historical ignorance, or rather, the totally dehistoricized and politically expedient fashion in which Northern League voters can be made to occupy interchangeably both opposite positions in a Cowboy and Indian drama (with the added ironical twist of an all-white, overtly racist movement donning the mantle of the Indian overwhelmed by the white man)� I would not only like to emphasize the bad faith underlying this use of the Indian, but the further twist presented by its appropriation of a former leftist icon to reactionary ends� Ever since the 1960s, support of Native American movements in Italy has belonged to a leftist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist political and cultural agenda, climaxing in the Indiani Metropolitani movement of 1977, when New Left students adopted the mask of the Indians to express their alienation both from capitalist bourgeois society and from traditional leftist political organizations� 31 Interestingly, both the leader and founder of the Northern League Umberto Bossi and his friend and party comrade (as well as present minister of the interior) Roberto Maroni were militants in far-left organizations in the 1970s; thus, when launching the Indian as a symbol of their anti-immigration campaign, they must have been perfectly aware of the associations it carried� The American Indian icon, like many other images originating from the United States, is here used as a powerful instrument 29 Immigrants in Italy constitute about 6% of the overall population, with peaks of 10% in the cradle of the Northern League, Lombardy� 30 The success of the poster is confirmed by its explicit quotation in different campaigns such as Filippo Penati’s when he ran for mayor in Milan, or struggles over the airports of Milan and Bergamo� 31 On the appropriation of Indians by the Italian student movement in the 1970s, see Mariani� American 9/ 11 Culture and Italy 119 in the creation of a symbolically effective fantasy: a mystifying device, dissimulating a right-wing agenda under established associations with democratic and radical struggles both in Italy and in the United States� America thus operates as what might be called a political euphemism for sickening practices� I will mention another one by way of conclusion: the decision of the Northern League mayor of a small town near Brescia to launch an antiimmigrant campaign involving a door-to-door combing of the town by the local police in search of undocumented immigrants in their hiding places� The campaign was launched on October 25 th , 2009 and it was scheduled to last two months, ending on December 25 th � That is why the mayor and the city council had the happy idea of calling the operation by an English name, the name of an American evergreen with unambiguous connotations in the operation’s context: “White Christmas�” 32 32 For an analysis of and comment on this episode see Portelli� 120 d onatella i zzo Works Cited Anon� “I Tea Party all’italiana tra entusiasmo giovanile e amarcord della marcia antifisco del 1986.” Il Sole 24 Ore. October 12, 2010� Access 21 June 2011� <http: / / w w w� il s ole24ore� com/ a rt/ noti zie/ 2010 -10 -12/ pa rt y-it a lia n aent u sia smo giovanile-152953�shtml>� Apter, Emily� The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature � Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006� Berlusconi, Silvio� “Discorso del Presidente del Consiglio Silvio Berlusconi al Congresso degli Stati Uniti - Washington, 1 marzo 2006�“ Access 21 June 2011� <http: / / www�governo�it/ Presidente/ Interventi/ testo_int�asp? d=27662>� Cavirani, Riccardo� “Che la rivoluzione ricominci�” Access 21 June 2011� <http: / / www�teapartyitalia�it/ index�php/ articolo/ che-la-rivoluzione-ricominci>� Edwards, Brian T� and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar� “Introduction: Globalizing American Studies�” Globalizing American Studies � Eds� Brian T� Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar� Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2010� 1-46� Il Bepi� “Kentucky�” Access 06 August 2011� <http: / / www�youtube�com/ watch? v=CRgRqZtH7BY>� ISFIL. <http: / / isfil.org>. Izzo, Donatella, and Cinzia Scarpino, eds� I Soprano e gli altri. Special issue� Ácoma 36 (Summer 2008). Izzo, Donatella� “Outside Where? Comparing Notes on Comparative American Studies and American Comparative Studies�” American Studies. An Anthology � Eds� Janice Radway, Barry Shank, Penny Von Eschen, and Kevin Gaines� Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. 588-603. Kennedy, Liam� “American Studies without Tears, or What Does America Want? ” Journal of Transnational American Studies 1�1 (2009): 1-13� Lepore, Jill� The Whites of Their Eyes. The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History � Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010� Mariani, Giorgio� “‘Was Anybody More of an Indian than Karl Marx? ’ The Indiani Metropolitani and the 1977 Movement�” Indians and Europe. An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays . Ed. Christian F. Feest. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. 585-598. Pease, Donald E� The New American Exceptionalism � Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009� ---� “States of Fantasy: Barack Obama versus the Tea Party Movement�” boundary 2 37�2 (2010): 89-105. Portelli, Alessandro� “White Christmas in Padania�” Il Manifesto. 24 November 2009� Access 21 June 2011� <http: / / alessandroportelli�blogspot�com/ 2009/ 11/ whitechristmas-in-padania�html>� Tea Party Italia� <http: / / http: / / www�teapartyitalia�it>� Telefilm Central. <http: / / www.telefilm-central.org>. s iMon s chleusener Sovereignty at Sea: Moby Dick and the Politics of Desire Introduction By showing that the novel’s protagonist Captain Ahab undermines the rule of law, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) vividly depicts a political crisis which - in the language of theorists such as Giorgio Agamben - can be referred to as a “state of exception�” Hence, with regard to the theoretical analysis of power relations, Melville’s novel raises a number of interesting questions, eventually leaving the reader wondering about the foundations of Ahab’s sovereignty� Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s “micropolitics of desire” and Spinoza’s political ontology, this essay will argue that Ahab’s sovereignty rests upon his ability to capture and mobilize the affects and desires of the members of his crew� By desiring to “thrust through the wall” (Melville 167) Ahab seems to embody the men’s own desire for the exceptionality of the sea experience, managing to lead them, however, from the one pole of the law’s “outside” to the other, that is, from the sea as a site of seemingly endless possibilities to the site of the “state of exception�” Referring to Deleuze and Guattari, it can be argued that the crew followed Ahab’s “line of flight” but did not realize that it had turned into “a line of pure destruction and abolition” (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 254)� The essay begins with a section on how to approach literary “classics” like Moby Dick today, questioning the historicist assumptions which have dominated literary analysis within the field of American Studies during the last few decades� The second section then discusses the spatiality of the sea by engaging with Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth , arguing that there exists a special relationship between the sea and the state of exception� The third section then turns to the analysis of sovereignty, discussing Ahab’s affective “politics of desire” by making use of, among other writers, Deleuze and Guattari, Spinoza, and Brian Massumi� Eventually, the essay ends with a final section in which the value of Moby Dick (and the proposed reading of the novel) is qualified in the context of recent cultural theory. 122 s iMon s chleusener Why Read Moby Dick Today? Melville, American Studies, and the Nietzschean Notion of the Untimely I do not know what meaning classical philology could have for our time if it was not untimely - that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come. Friedrich Nietzsche When dealing with a book such as Moby Dick - a so-called “classic” written in the middle of the nineteenth century and thus during the period which F�O� Matthiessen famously termed the “American Renaissance” - the first question one should be able to answer is: why still read the book today? With regard to the rise of New Historicism since the 1980s, one obvious answer from the perspective of recent Americanist criticism would be that the book is still relevant because it teaches the reader something about the context in which it was written� In other words: Moby Dick’s value is deeply connected to the historical knowledge one may draw from it� The question remains, however, what the value of a historicist reading would be from the perspective of the present� Since the classic idea proclaiming the timelessness of so-called “great literature” has been dismissed in the course of the revisionist turn, it seems that the only thing left for criticism today is to emphasize literature’s timeliness � But is this really a satisfying alternative? This question and its implications concerning the reading of “classic” American literature is taken up by Cesare Casarino in his book Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (2002)� Here, Casarino proposes a sort of “third space” between the theoretical perspectives of Old Americanists and New Americanists whose different views regarding the relationship between literature and temporality could be described as follows: While the Old Americanists typically emphasize (and celebrate) the timelessness of classic literature, the New Americanists’ aim is, on the contrary, to prove its timely character, demonstrating that the works belonging to the traditional canon of American literature are saturated with the mentalities, ideologies, and dominant thought patterns of their era� 1 Hence, the task of the New Americanist critic is to deconstruct the concept of aesthetic autonomy and move the text back into the ideological context in which it was originally produced� 2 Waichee Dimock, whose Empire for Liberty Casarino uses as a classic example for the perspective of the New Americanists , thus argues that Melville’s works are not the “timeless” expressions of a literary genius but are deeply entangled with the imperialist ambitions of the era of “Manifest Destiny�” Accordingly, she writes at the beginning of her book: 1 On the revisionist objectives of the New Americanists , see Pease 1990� The term Old Americanists (which has been chosen simply for the sake of symmetry) refers to authors like Henry Nash Smith or Leo Marx who are usually associated with the methods of the myth and symbol school and whose writings dominated the field of American Studies especially during the 1950s and 1960s (see Smith 1950 and Marx 1964)� 2 On this point, see Myra Jehlen’s programmatic introduction to the volume Ideology and Classic American Literature (Bercovitch & Jehlen 1-18). Sovereignty at Sea: Moby Dick and the Politics of Desire 123 Melville will emerge, in my account, as something of a representative author, a man who speaks for and with his contemporaries, speaking for them and with them, most of all, when he imagines himself to be above them, apart from them, opposed to them� […] Given such a premise, my goal obviously is not to uncover a timeless meaning in Melville’s writings, but to multiply within them some measure of their density of reference: to examine them, in short, not in their didactic relation to the twentieth century, but in their dialogic relation to the nineteenth (Dimock 6)� Commenting on the binarism between “timeless” and “timely,” which is not only articulated by Dimock but lies at the centre of the conflicting perspectives of Old Americanists and New Americanists , Casarino first of all emphasizes the reactive character of such a dialectic confrontation: [I]n rejecting the myth of the timeless genius, Dimock wishes to present us instead with a timely Melville, that is, with a ‘representative author’ malgré soi , in ‘dialogic relation’ with his time� I don’t doubt the fact that there is an only too timely Melville to be read in his works� But why read it? This is not a rhetorical question� What I want to put into question, in other words, is the desire at work in such a reading: it seems to me that this is to a large degree a reactive desire� In reacting against the myth of the timeless genius, we run the risk at rushing at the opposite pole of this binary relation - namely, the timely writer - without, however, having necessarily stepped outside of the conceptual, epistemological, and political perimeter of the binarism� This is, in other words, a reversal without a displacement� In this way, the logic at work in that binarism is at the very least left untouched and perhaps even reinforced - thereby reconfirming the fact that the pole we meant to critique and to abandon, namely, the myth of the timeless genius, still holds us very much in its oedipal sway as something against which we are made to feel we must at all costs react (Casarino xxxviii)� As becomes obvious in this passage, Casarino’s critique of Dimock consists of various quite different elements. On the one hand, one finds here the deconstructive notion of displacement , on the other hand, there is also a visible “Deleuzian” element in his statement that what “we meant to critique […] still holds us very much in its oedipal sway�” But what is particularly interesting regarding the temporal implications of Dimock’s passage is how Casarino attempts to “solve” the dilemma of the binarism between “timeless” and “timely,” for he does so by introducing a third type of temporality, namely the Nietzschean notion of the “untimely” ( das Unzeitgemäße )� Concerning this third kind of temporality, which is meant to function as a line of flight leading out of the binarism, Casarino explains: What remains unthought in the oedipal and dialectical structures of the binary relations between the timely and the timeless is the untimely - and the Nietzschean echo here is at once inevitable and intentional� The untimely is the temporal register of that which is nonsynchronous with its own history, of that which at once is in history and yet can never completely belong to it: the untimely is the unhistorical time of potentiality (Casarino xxxix-xl)� 3 3 Casarino’s conception of the untimely goes back to Nietzsche’s second essay of his Untimely Meditations (“On the Use and Abuse of History for Life”) and is especially influenced by Deleuze’s and Guattari’s reading of it in What is Philosophy? (see Nietzsche 2004, and Deleuze & Guattari 1994: 96-97 and 111-113)� 124 s iMon s chleusener As Casarino here demonstrates, the relationship between the untimely and history must be understood as a particularly complex one� Certainly, the untimely does not simply fall out of history, for in this case it would hardly differ from the notion of the “timeless” or the eternal� Rather, it corresponds to the “misty patch of the unhistorical” which according to Nietzsche “surrounds” history in each and every moment of its becoming� 4 Insofar as it functions as a possibility of actualization which - virtually - coexists with the historical present, the untimely could thus be defined as the non-historical element of history constitutive of any type of historical change� To read Melville as an untimely writer, one would therefore need to emphasize especially those dimensions of his work which refuse to be located and “locked,” as it were, in their own historical context� And precisely due to this very potential for resistance against a complete contextualization, Melville’s novels can be said to still be of interest today� According to Casarino, it thus is the “untimely” in Melville’s literature (and not its supposedly “timeless” character) which makes it possible to transfer his work into the present and reactivate it within a different context: “an untimely Melville is neither the timeless genius abstracted from his world nor the timely writer fully belonging to his world but rather a thinker who is at once fully in his as well as in our world and yet nonsynchronous with both” (Casarino xl)� Consequently, if in the course of this essay Moby Dick is referred to as a novel containing various elements that may prove helpful to the analysis of current politics and culture, the intention is certainly not “to uncover a timeless meaning in Melville’s writings,” as Dimock puts it� Rather, the aim is to productively engage with the untimely aspects of Moby Dick , trying to turn literature from a medium of representation into a medium of potentiality - and thus into a medium whose value effectively exceeds the realm of historical knowledge� The Nomos of the Sea: Smooth Space and the State of Exception Considering the major texts of Melville’s oeuvre it appears that there exists a rather curious connection between the untimeliness of his literature and the fact that almost all of his novels are located on the sea� This opens up the question whether the genre of the Sea Narrative may contain a certain untimely aspect in itself� In this context, one should keep in mind that whaling was one of the most advanced capitalist industries in the nineteenth century, 4 See Nietzsche 6: “The unhistorical is like an enveloping atmosphere in which life generates itself alone, only to disappear again with the destruction of this atmosphere� The truth is that, in the process by which the human being, in thinking, reflecting, comparing, separating, and combining, first limits that unhistorical sense, the process in which inside that surrounding misty cloud a bright gleaming beam of light arises, only then, through the power of using the past for living and making history out of what has happened, does a person first become a person. But in an excess of history the human being stops once again; without that cover of the unhistorical he would never have started or dared to start� Where do the actions come from which men are capable of doing without previously having gone into that misty patch of the unhistorical? ” Sovereignty at Sea: Moby Dick and the Politics of Desire 125 especially since whale oil was used for lamps before petroleum increasingly took over this function� Being a capitalist industry whaling did of course involve a strict division of labor, a precise timing of labor processes, a complex knowledge and understanding of these processes and a high degree of selfdiscipline on the part of the whole crew� At the same time, however, reading Moby Dick one also detects elements that seem to seriously counter this capitalist tendency� For if there is an unexpected calm at sea, then there will hardly be anything to do on board of the ship but to exchange stories of past adventures� In other words: The time on board of the ship is not only the time of labor and capitalist production; it is also the time of the storyteller, and part of the transgressive character of Moby Dick , i� e� the multiple voices, genres, and narratives one is confronted with in the book, may go back to this untimely element of the whale hunt� 5 Thus, if Foucault calls the ship “the heterotopia par excellence ,” this spatial exceptionality also effects the ship’s temporality so that one may speak as well of the “heterochronical” nature of the ship on which a time of capitalist acceleration exists side by side with a time of boredom and leisure� 6 In this sense, whaling in the nineteenth century can be said to have opened up an untimely possibility within capitalism, thus representing not so much a romantic flight away from the world as a “line of flight” within the world, within, even, the confines of the market. 7 However, that the sea does function as an alternative spatial and ontological territory and whaling as a “line of flight” which promises the entry into this territory already becomes evident at the very beginning of Moby Dick , when Ishmael explains: Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world� It is a way I have of driving off 5 On the temporal relationship between storytelling and modernity, see Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “Der Erzähler” (Benjamin 1977)� Casarino discusses Benjamin’s reflections on the storyteller with regard to Melville’s novel White-Jacket (see the second chapter in Casarino 45-61)� On storytelling in Moby Dick , see chapter 54 and chapter 71 (Melville 239-258; 303-309). 6 In his influential text on heterotopic “other spaces,” Foucault claims that “the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development […], but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination� The ship is the heterotopia par excellence � In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates“ (Foucault 27)� Rather in passing, Foucault here also makes use of the term “heterochrony”: “Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time - which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies� The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” (26)� As examples for such a connection of heterotopia and heterochrony, Foucault mentions the cemetery, the library, the museum, and the fairgrounds� 7 See Fluck 210: “Obviously, the usefulness of the Pequod to function as metaphor for a new society lies in the possibility it offers to bring together a wide range of different regions, races, and cultures� Ishmael’s decision to go to sea is thus not an escape from society but its reconstitution on a new basis�” 126 s iMon s chleusener the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can� This is my substitute for pistol and ball (Melville 21)� This last remark concerning the sea as a “substitute for pistol and ball” is particularly interesting, if one relates it to the popular vision of the sea as another kind of “frontier” embodying another kind of freedom as well as another kind of lawlessness , with pirates and buccaneers as a different kind of outlaws� The analogy to the frontier has its limits, however, since the sea’s wilderness could not possibly be turned into a garden� 8 This argument is indirectly put forward as well in Carl Schmitt’s book The Nomos of the Earth which is relevant to the subject of this essay regarding the political and ontological differentiation of land and sea and thus shall be analyzed a bit more closely now. Here, it is first of all important to be aware of the context of the book which was written at a time when Schmitt’s political thought can be said to have undergone a “spatial turn” (Ronge 10)� The book thus marks the beginning of Schmitt’s later work which can be distinguished from his “decisionist” earlier work in that Schmitt now claims that the basis of any political order is the prior existence of a territorial order of space� In a rather curious way Schmitt therefore relates the Greek conception of the nomos to the German term Nahme , stating that every positivist system of legality is preceded by a prior Landnahme , meaning an appropriation and division of the land� 9 The nomos thus refers to a condition prior to any legal order and at the same time signifies “the primeval act in founding law” (45). This constitutive act, 8 On the relationship between “wilderness” and “garden” and their metaphoric meanings in the history of American mythology, see The Machine in the Garden by Leo Marx (1964). This book also includes one of the most influential readings of Moby Dick in the context of the myth and symbol school� 9 As he connects the nomos to the “nomadic” and refers to a type of distribution which is not based on a division of space, Deleuze’s conception of the nomos radically differs from Schmitt’s: “Then there is a completely other distribution which must be called nomadic, a nomad nomos , without property, enclosure or measure� Here, there is no longer a division of that which is distributed but rather a division among those who distribute themselves in an open space - a space which is unlimited, or at least without precise limits” (Deleuze 1994: 36)� As an example of such a “nomadic distribution” Deleuze refers to the relationship between land and beasts in “Homeric society” which “had neither enclosures nor property in pastures: it was not a question of distributing the land among the beasts but, on the contrary, of distributing the beasts themselves and dividing them up here and there across an unlimited space, forest or mountainside” (309). This definition of the nomos obviously corresponds to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of “smooth space” which will be discussed later in this essay (see Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 530-531)� Sovereignty at Sea: Moby Dick and the Politics of Desire 127 however, is bound to the “solid ground” which Schmitt sharply distinguishes from the fluid space of the sea in that it has an implicit connection to the law� Accordingly, Schmitt writes: Law is bound to the earth and related to the earth� This is what the poet means when he speaks of the infinitely just earth: justissima tellus � The sea knows no such apparent unity of space and law, of order and orientation […]. On the sea, fields cannot be planted and firm lines cannot be engraved. Ships that sail across the Sea leave no trace� ‘On the wave there is nothing but waves’� The sea has no character , in the original sense of the word, which comes from the Greek charassein , meaning to engrave, to scratch, to imprint� The sea is free� According to recent international law, the sea is not considered to be state territory, and should be open equally to all for three very different spheres of human activity: fishing, peaceful navigation, and the conduct of war (Schmitt 2003: 42-43)� Within the context of Schmitt’s work, this distinction between earth and sea clearly has a geopolitical function, since it is used to legitimize the territorial nation-state and its politics of Landnahme , behind which lurks - as Friedrich Balke has argued - nothing else but the brutal fact of colonization (Balke 331)� At the same time, however, Schmitt blames “sea powers” such as England for having been engaged in an expansionist politics of “delocalization,” therefore destabilizing the nomos of the Jus Publicum Europaeum which supposedly managed a “bracketing of European wars” from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (Schmitt 2003: 140)� 10 Schmitt thus identifies England with the sea and its “freedom” (which according to his logic can only mean anarchic lawlessness), while simultaneously suggesting that the space of the sea cannot possibly be understood as a fitting object for international law. 11 But regardless of the reactionary political motivation of Schmitt’s views he nevertheless captures the fact that the fluidity and the ambivalent legal status of the sea does indeed create problems for the legal order� In other words: As a “smooth space” in the sense attributed to it by Deleuze and Guattari, the sea can be understood as a deterritorialized territory which to some extent resists the forces of “striation” as well as it resists a complete “legalization”� 12 10 Regarding the “rootlessness” of the British empire, Schmitt also argues that it comes as no surprise that the term “utopia” was coined by an English writer: “The English isle became the agency of the spatial turn to a new nomos of the earth, and, potentially, even the operational base for the later leap into the total rootlessness of modern technology� This was proclaimed in a new word, which, I believe, could have arisen only then, and only on the island of England - a word that thereafter became the signature of a whole epoch� The new word was Utopia , the title of Thomas More’s famous book” (Schmitt 2003: 178). 11 On this point, see Balke 338. One could say as well that the sea - similar to England - functions in The Nomos of the Earth as a metaphor for everything that Schmitt rejects or sees as a potential danger: Rootlessness, delocalization, deterritorialization, universalism, liberalism, lawlessness, piracy, and even technology and industry� 12 On the distinction between “smooth” and “striated” space, see Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 523-551� Generally speaking, Deleuze and Guattari understand smooth space as being “dynamic, topological and continuous,” while striated space is conceptualized as “static, geometrical, and discrete” (Berressem 219)� Although smooth space may 128 s iMon s chleusener This certainly does not mean that the law has no access to the sea at all� It does mean, however, that incidents such as military and other violent conflicts in international waters, piracy, refugees entering the country by boat, and even offshore oil drilling, seriously challenge standard legal procedures, nationally as well as internationally 13 � Instead of sticking to the romantic notion of the sea’s lawlessness and freedom it thus seems more adequate to understand the sea as an intermediate zone embodying not lawlessness but the law’s limitations� The sea can thus be said to serve as a general model for the political processes one is confronted with after the age of classic state sovereignty and under the conditions of globalization and the deterritorialization of the nation state� Here, Moby Dick already points toward the hopes as well as the nightmares this model seems to contain today: on the one hand to the rather utopian vision of universal brotherhood in a transnational or cosmopolitan “smooth space” which in Melville’s novel is represented by the multiethnic “Mariners, Renegades and Castaways” (James 2001) that make up the ship’s crew; and on the other hand to the critical question of sovereignty and political domination within a “state of exception” in which the rule of law has been abandoned� It can thus be argued that the exceptionality of the sea in Moby Dick oscillates between these two seemingly opposite poles, the poles of power and desire, which sometimes blend into each other and become indistinguishable� The togetherness of the two poles - the desire for “transnormalistic exploration” (Link 33) and the (self-)destructive frenzy of a line of flight which has mutated into “a cold line of abolition” (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 253) - is first of all represented by Ahab� For as Winfried Fluck has argued, “Ahab is a rebel and tyrant at the same time” (Fluck 210), that is, simultaneously the subject of an authoritarian power and the embodiment of the crew’s desire to break through the boundaries of the law� This desire is not only Ahab’s, but circulates everywhere on the Pequod � Ironically, Ahab’s sovereignty is therefore constituted on the basis of the desire of the very men who finally are swept to death due to his monomaniacal nihilism� The crucial political problem in Moby Dick is therefore coupled with the question of how and through which mechanisms Ahab succeeds in capturing the crew’s desire and putting it in the service of his own goals and interests� refer to many different types of territory (for instance musical spaces, mathematical spaces, deserts and glaciers), Deleuze and Guattari explicitly refer to the sea as the “smooth space par excellence” (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 529)� However, as “the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture” (524), they claim as well that the sea “was also the archetype of all striations of smooth space” (529)� 13 See, for example, the “Gaza flotilla raid” from May 2010 which resulted in the death of nine Turkish activists who were killed in a confrontation with the Israeli Navy� While Israel maintained the legality of its military action, claiming that it was meant to defend a valid naval blockade, human rights activists argued that the action took place within “international waters” and was therefore illegal� On piracy and the problem of qualifying the figure of the pirate with regard to law and legality, see Heller-Roazen 2009� Sovereignty at Sea: Moby Dick and the Politics of Desire 129 Politics of Desire: Ahab’s Sovereignty and the Power of the Multitude Regarding the problem of the constitution of sovereignty, the crucial chapter in Moby Dick is the so-called “Quarter-Deck”-chapter (Melville 163-170)� Here, Ahab finally announces his plan to exclusively hunt the white whale and manages to gain the crew’s support for this endeavor� In fact, the only person voicing any kind of opposition in this scene is Starbuck, the first mate, who strongly condemns Ahab’s plan to hunt a “dumb brute” like Moby Dick out of vengeance: I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance� How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? It will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market […]� Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous (Melville 166-167)� By representing law and reason as well as religion and the market Starbuck thus represents the standard form of capitalist-democratic sovereignty in the nineteenth century� Contrary, by singling out Moby Dick as the only whale to be hunted, Ahab consciously disregards the demands of the market and breaks “the Whalers’ law, which says that any healthy whale encountered must be hunted, without choosing one over another�” Through this “monstrous preference” (Deleuze 1997: 79) Ahab can be said to place himself above the law, thereby becoming the ship’s sovereign in the famous definition of Carl Schmitt according to which the sovereign “is he who decides on the exception” (Schmitt 2005: 5)� However, the constitutive act through which Ahab apparently becomes the unlimited leader of the Pequod does not take place in a completely lawless realm where the “survival of the fittest“ rules, but occurs within a spatial and legal border zone in which - from the “Whalers’ law” to the “right to mutiny” - a number of legal instruments exist to be actualized and made use of� Nevertheless, the crew eventually yields to the will of its captain and the much discussed mutiny fails to materialize, raising once again the question of the foundations of Ahab’s sovereignty� 14 Concerning these foundations it is first of all necessary to resist locating Ahab’s sovereignty in a transcendent realm of political “decision” understood as isolated from the more microphysical dimensions of power and desire� For even the most deadly and totalitarian form of domination in the end must be analyzed bottom up , that is, regarding its genesis and the conditions of its constitution which, in one way or another, always concern the whole collective � If the 14 As Ishmael explains in chapter 46, a revolt against Ahab, after he had communicated his real intentions to the crew, could have been carried out with “perfect impunity”: “Having […] revealed the prime but private purpose of the Pequod’s voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing, he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all further obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command” (Melville 213)� The question of why the crew does not revolt has therefore been a much discussed topic in the literature on Moby Dick (see James 50-55; Casarino 117-129)� 130 s iMon s chleusener orders and commands of the sovereign were not followed and transmitted on all levels of the respective network of power relations, then his sovereignty would lose its necessary infrastructure and simply could not operate� 15 A serious engagement with the question of sovereignty is therefore only possible insofar as sovereignty is not considered as being already constituted or as simply referring to a legal-political form� Regarding Moby Dick , it would thus not be sufficient to simply consider Ahab’s willpower and determination as constitutive of his authority as long as one fails to simultaneously explain why and how his will is either actively supported or at least accepted by a decisive part of the collective on the Pequod � For if this were not the case it would have been easy for the ship’s crew to get rid of its monomaniacal captain� From the perspective of political theory, it is therefore even more relevant to analyze the crew as the constitutive agent of Ahab’s sovereignty than to simply concentrate on the power Ahab seems to exert over the crew� In this context and with regard to all these questions of political philosophy, it is worthwhile to consult Spinoza’s uncompleted Political Treatise which was published in 1677, shortly after Spinoza’s death� Here, Spinoza distinguishes between monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy but claims that - independent from the respective form of government - the sovereignty of the state is always constituted by “the power of [the] multitude” (Spinoza 2004: 297)� What is interesting about this phrasing is that Spinoza explicitly uses the term “multitude” ( potentia multitudinis ) and does not refer to “the people” ( populus )� The importance of this difference becomes clear if one takes a look at the history of the two concepts� Thomas Hobbes, for example, explicitly warned in his book De Cive (1642) not to confuse the “multitude” with the 15 In a fascinating text Lluís Companys, the President of the Generalitat of Catalonia during the time of the Spanish Civil War, has described what remains of the state’s sovereignty in case it is deprived of its infrastructure� With regard to Franco’s initially foiled coup attempt in Barcelona in July 1936, which was followed by Spain’s “short summer of anarchy” (Enzensberger 1972), Companys writes: “The state is not a myth, some machine that functions independently of human events� It is made up by living beings that follow a pre-established system of command, a liberal or authoritarian hierarchy that forms its ‘chain of transmission’� The President gives an order and it is automatically transmitted to the Minister or advisor entrusted with carrying it out� That Minister has his own ‘chain of transmission’ which passes through his secretaries and sub-secretaries and ultimately reaches the bottom steps of the hierarchy, where the state shakes hands with the citizen and directs him along the route designated by the President� That is how a ‘normal state’ operates� On July 19 [1936], I pressed the bell in my office to summon my secretary. The bell didn’t ring, because there was no electricity. I went to my office door, but my secretary wasn’t there, because he had been unable to get to the Palace� But if he had been there, he wouldn’t have been able to communicate with the secretary of the General Director, because he hadn’t come to the Generalitat� And, if the General Director’s secretary had made it somehow, after overcoming thousands of difficulties, his superior was absent” (qtd. in Paz 451). Companys thus explains that the “essence” of state sovereignty - namely the fact that it depends upon a complicated infrastructure and a multitude of singular conditions which must exist throughout the whole “chain of transmission” - only becomes visible during a time of crisis� Sovereignty at Sea: Moby Dick and the Politics of Desire 131 “people,” stating that the concept of the people refers to an integrated and homogenized collective connected to the state: “The people is somewhat that is one , having one will , and to whom one action may be attributed; none of these can properly be said of a multitude” (Hobbes 250)� 16 The differences between the political philosophies of Spinoza and Hobbes thus become especially visible, if one accounts for their dissimilar qualifications of the multitude and the people� In this context Paolo Virno writes: For Spinoza, the multitudo indicates a plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One, without evaporating within a centripetal form of motion� Multitude is the form of social and political existence for the many, seen as being many: a permanent form, not an episodic or interstitial form� For Spinoza, the multitudo is the architrave of civil liberties […] Hobbes […] detests the multitude; he rages against it� In the social and political existence of the many, seen as being many, in the plurality which does not converge into a synthetic unity, he sees the greatest danger of a ‘supreme empire’; that is to say, for that monopoly of political decisionmaking which is the State (Virno 21-22)� Accordingly, for Hobbes a state or any form of social collectivity can only function if the multitudo turns into a populus , embodying one will and speaking with one voice� Hobbes’ “people“ thus does not simply refer to the entirety of citizens, but refers to them in the political state of an already constituted “state-people” embodying an essentially homogeneous identity� 17 In this context, it also becomes understandable why Spinoza’s concept of the multitude has received such an influential revitalization in today’s social and political theory (see Hardt & Negri 2004; Virno 2004)� For in the context of globalization and the increasing deterritorialization of the nation-state, Hobbes’ conception of the people as a unified entity appears all the more like an idealist construction of a type of homogeneity which today seems neither realizable nor desirable� Insofar as Spinoza’s notion of the multitudo refers, on the contrary, to the diverse and heterogeneous character of the multitude as the constitutive agent of sovereignty, it becomes possible - especially in the context of globalization theory - to productively reactivate his concept in and for the present� The same may as well be said of Melville’s political philosophy since his description of Ahab’s crew is much closer to Spinoza’s multitude than it is to Hobbes’ people . “They are a pack of ragamuffins picked up at random from all parts of the earth,” writes C�L�R� James of the mixed crowd of multiethnic Mariners, Renegades and Castaways the reader is confronted with in Moby Dick : 16 In the same fashion, Hobbes even claims that in a monarchy “the people” is the king: “For even in monarchies the people commands […] In a democracy and aristocracy , the citizens are the multitude , but the court is the people � And in a monarchy , the subjects are the multitude , and (however it seem a paradox) the king is the people ” (Hobbes 250)� 17 See Hardt & Negri 2001: 103: “The people […] tends toward identity and homogeneity internally while posing its difference from and excluding what remains outside of it� Whereas the multitude is an inconclusive constituent relation, the people is a constituted synthesis that is prepared for sovereignty� The people provides a single will and action that is independent of and often in conflict with the various wills and actions of the multitude� Every nation must make the multitude into a people�” 132 s iMon s chleusener “They are a world-federation of modern industrial workers […]� They owe no allegiance to anybody or anything except the work they have to do and the relations with one another on which that work depends” (James 18-20). The crucial “Spinozist” problem of this constellation now refers to the question of just how Ahab’s sovereignty, being based on the power of the crew, is finally constituted. As already described with regard to Spinoza’s Political Treatise , all forms of sovereignty are confronted with the same problem: the fact that the execution of sovereignty in the last instance always depends upon the “power of the multitude” which every government needs to account for and get under control� With Hobbes it could therefore be argued that Ahab’s problem is to transform the heterogeneous multitude of his crew into a unified people willing to place their own power in his hands and accept the unlimited sovereignty of the captain� This, however, obviously does not characterize the situation on the Pequod accurately, for Ahab does not function as a sovereign trying to tie his crew to himself “by contract�” In fact, he like no one else embodies the breach of contract, governing the ship in terms of a “state of exception�” So how does Ahab manage to receive the crew’s support, while Starbuck - who can rightly claim that he has the law on his side - fails? Referring to Max Weber, one could understand the struggle between Starbuck and Ahab as a struggle between “legal” and “charismatic” rule� 18 Nevertheless, this still does not answer the question why Ahab’s supposed charisma gains the upper hand over legality as represented by Starbuck. In various texts written during the 1980s, Donald Pease engaged with this very question and his answer was that Ahab succeeds to “persuade” the crew, since he is rhetorically superior to Starbuck (see Pease 1985; 1987). For example, by underlining the banality of Starbuck’s financial interests, Ahab manages to neutralize Starbuck’s religious views thus transforming him into the “blasphemer�” Similar, by provoking Starbuck to “anger-glow,” Ahab can claim that due to this anger he in fact lacks what his arguments supposedly represent, namely reason and rationality� 19 All these arguments are certainly convincing and can hardly be refuted on the basis of the text� But insofar as Pease puts the main focus of his text on language and analyzes the central 18 Next to legal and charismatic rule, Weber identifies yet a third type of authority, namely traditional rule� Regarding all three types of governance, see Weber 1993: 9-11 and Weber 2005: 157-222� 19 According to Pease, Ahab’s rhetorical neutralization of Starbuck implicitly also concerns the question of why the crew failed to revolt� For while Starbuck may have articulated a legitimate justification for mutiny, it is in fact Ahab who rhetorically embodies the idea of mutiny himself: “Instead of remaining the cruel captain whose exploitation of his crew would justify Starbuck’s mutiny, Ahab, in turning into the enraged victim of a cruel cosmic design, lays claim to the right to mutiny� In taking Starbuck down onto his little lower layer, he acts out Starbuck’s motive for mutiny, but does so on a scene that has at once co-opted the terms of Starbuck’s potential mutiny but also virtually eliminated any part for Starbuck to play� On this other scene, in other words, Ahab idealizes the impulse to mutiny. By elevating defiance onto an apocalyptic scene where it appears utterly coincident with his character, Ahab, instead of remaining a force to be defied, gives defiance its most noble expression” (Pease 1987: 386). Sovereignty at Sea: Moby Dick and the Politics of Desire 133 conflict between Ahab and Starbuck as a struggle between different forms of “rhetorics,” his approach seems nonetheless compromised by the textualist limitations that are characteristic for Americanist - including New Historicist - criticism in the 1980s. 20 With regard to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s “micropolitics of desire” it shall now be argued that Ahab’s superiority over Starbuck is not only due to rhetorics, but essentially depends upon Ahab’s ability to modulate and capture the affects and desires of his crew� 21 “Affectivity” and “desire” therefore function as the key concepts of a political ontology which accounts for the “power of the multitude” when analyzing any form of sovereignty and thus aims at the establishment of a strictly immanent concept of the political� 22 Since in the last instance political sovereignty always depends upon “the power of the multitude,” the affect has a decisive function in the sense that it shapes and influences the very character of the respective form of collective power in a crucial way� According to the Spinozist assumption that every body has the double capacity to affect and be affected by other bodies (Spinoza 1996: 71), the “power of the multitude“ is certainly never in a final “state of equilibrium,” but must be understood as a virtual potentiality, which organizes itself according to the particular state of forces presently circulating within its realm� 23 Thus, in order to understand how Ahab succeeds in using the power 20 On the status and conception of “rhetorics” in the context of New Historicism and New American Studies, see Fisher 1992� 21 The concepts “affect” and “affectivity” will be used here in the Spinozist conception of the terms on which the respective considerations of Deleuze and Guattari are based as well� As Spinoza explains in the third part of his Ethics (68-113), every body has the ability to affect and be affected by other bodies, so that each individual body, by way of the affect, is interactively connected with a potentially infinite number of other bodies. Also, Spinoza understands the affect as being intimately related to the so-called conatus which, in Spinozist terminology, refers to the body’s striving as well as its power of acting, but here - following Deleuze and Guattari - will primarily be referred to as desire � Accordingly, from a Spinozist perspective the relationship between affect and desire can be described in the sense that the respective quality of bodily affection either brings about an increase or a diminishing of desire� As desire increases, for example, when the body is affected with joy, it diminishes when it is affected with sadness or fear� It can thus be argued that affect politics - that is, the systematic modulation of collective affects in order to achieve a political end - cannot be separated from a “politics of desire,” because the affection of the social body has a crucial influence upon (and is usually aimed at) desire as well� 22 Due to its immanent character Deleuze’s conception of politics radically differs from the decisionist concept of the political in the style of Carl Schmitt (1976)� For as Schmitt understands the constitutive “decision” as a transcendent primeval act preceding any order or norm, Deleuze moves it back into the immanence of desire and relates it to the collective “power of the multitude�” Referring to Deleuze it thus can be argued that the decision is never autonomous or primeval but always based on an assemblage of relations on which it depends and through which it became possible in the first place. 23 See also Massumi 2002: 212-213: “What a body is, [Spinoza] says, is what it can do as it goes along. This is a totally pragmatic definition. A body is defined by what capacities it carries from step to step� What these are exactly is changing constantly� A body’s ability to affect or be affected - its charge of affect - isn’t something fixed.” 134 s iMon s chleusener of the crew for his own intentions, it is necessary to analyze the mechanisms of affective modulation and the way he manages to capture the desires circulating on the Pequod � Therefore, the analysis of political sovereignty must begin with the realm of the “micropolitics of desire” which Deleuze and Guattari discuss in their Anti-Oedipus � Here, Deleuze und Guattari refer to Spinoza and Wilhelm Reich since both authors deal with political domination not only in relation to repression or ideology, but primarily with regard to desire: Even the most deadly and the most repressive forms of social reproduction are produced by desire within the organization that is the consequence of such production under various conditions that we must analyze� That is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation? (Deleuze & Guattari 2007: 31) 24 And once again referring to Reich, they argue later in the book that “the masses were not deceived, they desired fascism and that is what has to be explained” (279)� Deleuze’s and Guattari’s “micropolitics of desire” must therefore be distinguished from the classic critique of ideology which they criticize for being based on a rather “negative” conception of power and focusing too much on the level of consciousness� While ideology may be responsible for producing illusions that get people to act against their own interests, desire cannot be “deceived” and does not have any “true” or “false” interests� Insofar as it is not unusual to desire something contrary to one’s own interests, it is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, not sufficient to simply deal with ideology when analyzing power mechanisms� Instead, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s “micropolitics of desire” is specifically designed to analyze political domination and sovereignty on the bodily-affective level of desire, examining primarily those “operations that are not failures of recognition, but rather perfectly reactionary unconscious investments” (279)� If one applies Deleuze’s and Guattari’s model to Moby Dick now, it becomes clear that desire and affectivity play an important role in the confrontation between Ahab and Starbuck in the “Quarter-Deck”-chapter� Here, Starbuck is presented as an unpretentious, rational, and reasonable character with the ability to articulate the interests of the crew, namely the interest to make money by delivering whale oil to the “Nantucket market” (Melville 167)� Starbuck fails, however, in addressing the crew on an affective level , thus failing to transform their “objective interest” into an “object of desire�” Ahab, 24 Deleuze and Guattari refer here to a famous quote from Spinoza’s preface to his Theologico-Political Treatise (1670): “But if, in despotic statecraft, the supreme and essential mystery be to hoodwink the subjects, and to mask the fear, which keeps them down, with the specious garb of religion, so that men may fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation, and count it not shame but highest honour to risk their blood and their lives for the vain glory of a tyrant; yet in a free state no more mischievous expedient could be planned or attempted” (Spinoza 5� Translation slightly modified). Sovereignty at Sea: Moby Dick and the Politics of Desire 135 on the other hand, turns out to be a true master of affectivity, managing to address the crew directly on the level of desire while also succeeding in affectively “overcoding” the men’s supposed interests� With Brian Massumi it can therefore be argued that Ahab’s politics of desire addresses “bodies from the dispositional angle of their affectivity, instead of addressing subjects from the positional angle of their ideations�” Ahab thus becomes the upholder of a government function which is not so much concerned with “the mediations of adherence or belief” but is aimed at “ direct activation” (Massumi 2005: 34)� Accordingly, Ahab nails a Spanish gold ounce to the mast which functions as a potential reward for the man who first sights Moby Dick (Melville 165)� Also, he arranges various rituals and ceremonies involving alcohol and weapons through which the ordinary sailor is led to experience a feeling of sublime power� 25 Hence, similar to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s appropriation of Wilhelm Reich’s analysis according to which Hitler “was able to sexually arouse the fascists” (Deleuze & Guattari 2007: 114), one can find a similar element of affective incentive and stimulation in Moby Dick � The example of the gold ounce is of particular interest here, since workers in the whaling business usually received no wages but “certain shares of the profits called lays ” (Melville 89). Therefore, Ahab’s strategy to reward the one who first sights the white whale with a gold ounce on the one hand raised the expectation to possibly become rich and was clearly intended to capture the financial interest of the common sailor� But more importantly, it added an affective dimension to the abstract world of rational calculation and percentages, for the gold ounce, as it was nailed to the mast, turned into the visible embodiment of a collective desire� 26 25 See Melville: “‘Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me� Well done! Let me touch the axis’� So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre […] Forthwith, slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter. […] The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss […]. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds among the frantic crew” (169-170)� 26 Ahab’s and Starbuck’s competing strategies of capture lend themselves to be productively related with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s analysis of the relationship between war machine and state apparatus (see 2004: 387-522). In this context, Starbuck would be identified with the assemblage of the state apparatus insofar as he speaks for the authority of work, the law, and generally the form of “the business we follow“ (Melville 1994, 166)� Ahab, on the other hand, would undoubtedly be located on the side of the war machine which does not represent a regime of form , but a regime “of affects “ (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 441)� This also relates to the fact that weapons and jewelry (the gold ounce) play a major role in Ahab’s strategy, since, according to Deleuze and Guattari, they both are in a special way connected with affectivity: “Affects are projectiles just like weapons […]� There is a relation between the affect and the weapon, as witnessed not only in mythology but also in the chanson de geste , and the chivalric novel or novel of courtly love� Weapons are affects and affects weapons“ (441)� Concerning jewelry, Deleuze and Guattari write: “The ambulant smith links metalworking to the weapon, and vice versa� Gold and silver have taken on many other functions but can- 136 s iMon s chleusener It can thus be said that by capturing their affective investments and desires, Ahab manipulates the crew members in a clever way for his own interests� Although this is certainly true, it should not be forgotten that Ahab’s authority also depends upon those desires and investments which, after all, he neither possesses nor is able to produce autonomously� The question which has been posed over and over again in the literature on Moby Dick , namely “Why didn’t the men revolt? ” can therefore receive a simple, even though somewhat uncanny answer: “Because they didn’t desire it�” When they had the chance to choose between the law-abiding Starbuck and the lawbreaking Ahab, they voted for the latter - and not in spite of his disregard for legality but because of it� Thus, Ahab’s desire to “thrust through the wall” can be seen as the embodiment of the men’s own desire for the exceptionality of the sea experience 27 - only that Ahab managed to secretly lead them from the one pole of the law’s “outside” to the other, that is: from the smooth space of the sea as a site of untimely possibilities and the promise of “transnormalistic exploration” (Link 33) to the site of the “state of exception” in which not only law has been suspended in the end, but all desired possibilities as well� Using once again the vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari, one can therefore say that the crew followed Ahab because he turned whaling into a “line of flight” that supposedly led out of the striated space of law, the state, and organized work� What the men did not realize, however, is that the nature of Ahab’s line of flight - always already overcoded by his monomaniacal hate against the white whale - has been destructive rather than exploratory since the beginning� Hence, the almost complete annihilation the reader is faced with at the end of Melville’s novel is based on a fatal confusion between “line of flight” and “line of destruction�” But despite this danger of confusion, Deleuze and Guattari maintain: “The difference between the two poles is great, even, and especially, from the point of view of death: the line of flight that creates, or turns into a line of destruction” (2004: 466)� 28 not be understood apart from this nomadic contribution made by the war machine […]� Jewels are the affects corresponding to weapons, that are swept up by the same speed vector“ (443)� 27 See Melville 167: “If man will strike, strike through the mask� How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me� Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond� But ‘tis enough�” 28 Deleuze and Guattari here refer to the “two poles” which they define at the end of their complex analysis of the war machine: “ at one pole , it takes war for its object and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe […]� The other pole seemed to be the essence; it is when the war machine, with infinitely lower ‘quantities’, has as its object not war but the drawing of a creative line of flight, the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space” (2004: 466)� Sovereignty at Sea: Moby Dick and the Politics of Desire 137 Moby Dick in the Context of Recent Cultural Theory Contrary to the original purpose of this essay, it may have become apparent by now that Moby Dick can indeed be read effectively within the context of American Romanticism� Here, especially in the case of the Transcendentalists, the sea - or better: nature in general - typically serves as a space that offers the subject a kind of aesthetic experience through which it shall become empowered to move from the striated space of society into a more creative or enlightened mode of being� Melville’s novel, although being associated with the “darker” side of Romanticism, is surely entangled with this discourse insofar as it can also be read as a warning against the naivety of such a conception of nature� 29 However, the fact that Moby Dick may be “rooted” in American Romanticism does not represent a hindrance to a productive actualization of the novel, since in another respect one also finds essential points of connection to current problems and positions in the book� It thus can be argued, for example, that the reader of Moby Dick is confronted with a form of governance which does not submit to the law but rather subverts and finally suspends it - a process which in today’s discourses of political theory is usually discussed under the rubric of the “state of exception” (see Agamben 2005)� It may therefore prove to be fruitful to analyze Moby Dick yet more comprehensively with regard to those postnational and postdemocratic forms of sovereignty than has been possible in this essay� 30 More importantly, to read the novel in the context of recent cultural theory may also prove to be instructive regarding a critical engagement with those “routines of theory” Adam Frank and Eve Sedgwick generally see at work within Cultural Studies and literary theory since the 1990s (512)� 31 This surely concerns the field of American Studies as well, since especially during the heyday of the New 29 See, for example, the “Mast-Head”-chapter (Melville 157-163), in which the pantheistic romantization of the sea is confronted with the real dangers of the force of nature: “But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror� Over Descartian vortices you hover� And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever� Heed it well, ye Pantheists! ” (163)� 30 In this context, see Donald Pease’s essay “C�L�R� James, Moby Dick , and the Emergence of Transnational American Studies” (Pease 2002) in which - starting from Agamben’s concept of the “state of exception” - the political context of James’ Mariners, Renegades & Castaways is discussed� The value of the text, however, is compromised by a rather reckless reading of the book by C�L�R� James, whom Pease obviously intended to turn into one of the heroes of transnational American Studies� 31 Among these routines, Sedgwick and Frank point out a supposedly political approach toward culture and literature which constantly decides between subversive “good dogs” and hegemonic “bad dogs�” This rather simple-minded “moralism” is accompanied by an anti-essentialist conception of the world serving as the measure of any cultural and theoretical manifestation’s value: “The most important question to ask about any cultural manifestation is, subversive or hegemonic? Intense moralism often characterizes such readings� […] To demonstrate (or even assert) that something is not ‘natural’ or not ‘essential’ is always to perform a powerful act” (501)� 138 s iMon s chleusener Americanists it has been the custom to conceptualize “power” as a kind of hegemonic cultural law , with the effect that the subversion of law was typically understood as “resistance” against power� 32 This approach, however (which conceives power only in terms of a top-down-mechanism, that is, as potestas rather than potentia ), obviously is not of much use in the case of Moby Dick , since the simple-minded binarism between hegemony and subversion is undermined in Melville’s novel from the start� That is to say that Ahab, insofar as he exerts an authoritarian “power” and at the same time “subverts” the law and the dominant values of nineteenth century America, significantly complicates the idea of a simple dialectic between power and resistance, hegemony and subversion, which all too often informed the “critical interventions” of the New Americanists as well� Hence, instead of presenting the reader a simple confrontation between domination and resistance, Melville underlines the complexity, processuality, and plurality of power relations by referring on the one hand to the ontological reality of the “power of the multitude,” while on the other hand discussing various strategies by which this collective power becomes mobilized and captured for different political ends� In Moby Dick , domination is therefore not conceptualized as hegemonic law or a transcendent form of order, but as the result of a struggle between conflicting forces and strategies among which “the force of the law” is but one possibility and - like all the others - as a matter of principle may also fail� A reactivation of Melville’s novel within the context of today’s theoretical discussions about power and sovereignty thus may also initiate a fruitful revision of the theoretical commonplaces that have dominated the discourse of American Studies and Cultural Studies during the last few decades� Another aspect that speaks for the actual political relevance of Moby Dick concerns the whole complex regarding the politics of desire located at the centre of this essay� Although Melville’s context was clearly the nineteenth century, the depiction of Ahab’s affective mode of governance contains a number of aspects which are also relevant for an up-to-date analysis of power� Melville demonstrates, for example, that sovereignty must not be understood as transcendent, but even in the case of the most repressive “state of exception” is coupled with the immanent “power of the multitude” from which it is - either through active support or passive acceptance - authorized in the last instance� As can be shown with regard to Moby Dick , the affect thus has a significant political function, for it is decisive in bringing about such a 32 This style of argument typically follows Lacan or operates by way of a curious wedding of Lacan’s conception of the law and the symbolic order with Foucault’s microphysics of power - “a kind of Lacanian-Foucauldianism,” as Sedgwick and Frank write (501)� That Foucault - similar to Deleuze - explicitly rejected the psychoanalytic concept of law is, however, often overlooked� See Sarasin 2010: 156: “Foucaults Position wird nur verständlich, wenn man sich vor Augen hält, gegen welche Theorie er sich im Sinne einer frontalen Kampfansage in La volonté de savoir stellte: Es ist Lacans psychoanalytisches Konzept des ‘Gesetzes’, welches darin besteht, das Subjekt dem nom-du-père und damit einer symbolischen (und normativen) Ordnung zu unterwerfen […]� Foucault wirft der psychoanalytischen Konzeption des Gesetzes vor, einem juridischen Modell zu folgen und ‘formell’ zu bleiben�” Sovereignty at Sea: Moby Dick and the Politics of Desire 139 configuration of the social collective that is necessary in order to enable the execution of sovereignty in the first place. Although this surely is not a new phenomenon, it can nevertheless be argued that affect modulation as a political strategy is of a particular relevance today, because it seems to represent one of the few options the government still possesses in order to get hold of its population as a whole� As Brian Massumi argues with regard to the United States under the Bush administration: The social and cultural diversity of the population, and the disengagement from government on the part of many of its segments, would ensure that any initiative relying on a linear cause-effect relationship between, on the one hand, proof, persuasion, and argument and, on the other, the form of a resultant action - if in fact there was to be any - was bound to fail, or to succeed only in isolated cases (2005: 34)� Accordingly, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration did not primarily succeed by argument or “ideologically” to capture and prepare the American population for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but through the systematic employment of an affective politics of fear : a type of governance based on a permanent “state of alert�” 33 Thus, similar to Melville’s Ahab, the Bush government intended to gain “signal access to the nervous systems and somatic expressions of the populace” (Massumi 2005: 34) as well, coupling this strategy, however, with a different type of affection� For according to Spinoza, fear typically inhibits desire, while joy has a stimulating effect and thus increases the body’s power of acting� 34 In the case of Moby Dick , fear of Ahab’s authority on the part of the crew may certainly have played a role and could have been one of the reasons why a mutiny failed to materialize� All things considered, however, Ahab did not primarily mean to tame his sailors, but rather intended to stimulate and capture the crew’s collective power� This may underline the complicated state of affairs that Spinoza’s “good” affections of the body do not necessarily correspond with social assemblages that could easily be defined as “good” as well. 35 Re- 33 On this point, see Massumi’s essay “Fear (The Spectrum Said)” from which the above quotations were taken: “The Bush administration’s fear in-action is a tactic as enormously reckless as it is politically powerful� Confusingly, it is likely that it can only be fought on the same affective, ontogenetic ground on which it itself operates” (Massumi 2005, 47)� See also the anthology The Politics of Everyday Fear (1993), which Massumi edited� 34 In the Ethics , fear is conceptualized as “an inconstant sadness, which has […] arisen from the image of a doubtful thing ” (Spinoza 81). As is the case with sadness, fear thus “diminishes or restrains a man’s power of acting […], that is […], diminishes or restrains the striving by which a man strives to persevere in his being�” Joy, on the other hand, “increases or aids man’s power of acting,” so that “the man affected with joy desires nothing but to preserve it, and does so with the greater desire, as the joy is greater” (89-90). 35 The complexity of Ahab’s affect modulation which operates with elements of fear while simultaneously intending to stimulate desire, is, right after the “Quarter-Deck”scene, characterized by Ishmael in the following manner: “I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and 140 s iMon s chleusener ferring to Nietzsche it can thus be argued that the politics of affectivity are situated beyond good and evil , which, however, does not make them less dangerous nor less political� 36 In any case, this should be reason enough to no longer subordinate the affective to the ideological or the symbolic, but to understand affectivity as an essential factor in the constitution of sovereignty and thus as an important element of a strictly immanent concept of the political� stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul� A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine” (Melville 180). 36 Even more important is certainly the fact that Ahab’s affect politics is not only situated beyond good and evil but also complicates the Spinozist relationship of good and bad � According to Spinoza, however, “good” affections not only lead to an increase of the body’s power of acting; they are also instrumental with regard to the body’s striving to “persevere in its being” (Spinoza 1996: 75). 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Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie � Frankfurt/ M�: Zweitausendeins, 2005� c hristoPh r aetzsch “All the News That’s Fit to Circulate” Reframing Journalistic Practices after Journalism People will be absorbed in streams of information� (…) Computers will die� They’re dying in their present form� They‘re just about as dead as distinct units� A box, a screen, a keyboard� They are melting into the texture of everyday life� Don DeLillo Cosmopolis 1 Introduction When computers were turning from an expert gadget into a household item in the early 1990s, the technology seemed less than appealing for the leisurely user: coarse VGA graphics, hazardous radiation from monitors, and slow dial-up connections, not to speak of command-line input in MS-DOS� Desktop publishing was only gradually finding its way into publishing houses and newsrooms� The private user was lucky if he or she could get a printer to fix a minimally edited text on paper. Despite these humble beginnings, today computers and data processing units have become ubiquitous and more or less absorbed into most acts of communication� Users are no longer vexed with technical details and processing routines, but see themselves confronted with the endless iterations of potential uses of mobile information technologies� The etymological root of ‘cybernetic’ - a closed feedback loop of performance and its evaluation - has transitioned from a fad of artificial intelligence prophets to a commonplace mechanism of management and control in the network age� 1 1 In his essay “Ecran Total,” Jean Baudrillard reflects on the control metaphor of ‘cybernetic’ in relation to the perceived interactivity of machines and their users� Although his Lacanian inflection of subject and object is highly debatable, his definition of cybernetic as “phantasm of ideal performance” nicely supports the present discussion� “Cela s’appelle la cybernétique : commander à l’image, au texte, au corps, de l’intérieur en quelque sorte, de la matrice, en jouant avec le code ou les modalités génétiques� C’est d’ailleurs ce phantasme de performance idéale du texte ou de l’image, cette possibilité de corriger sans fin qui provoquent chez le ‘créateur’ ce vertige d’interactivité avec son propre objet, en même temps que le vertige anxieux de n’être pas allé jusqu’aux limités technologiques de ses possibilités� En fait, c’est la machine (virtuelle) qui vous parle, c’est elle qui vous pense” (1996; emphasis added)� Cf� his essay “The Ecstasy of Communication,” which further elaborates the monadic control metaphor of the computer terminal, describing communication as “a perpetual test of the subject’s presence with its own objects, an uninterrupted interface” (1998: 127). 144 c hristoPh r aetzsch The rapid increase of computer-mediated communication (including mobile phones, tablets, terminals) and the connection of individual devices into a global network might be a surprising starting point for a discussion of the crisis of American journalism� Although technology is driving the rapidly changing patterns of journalistic selection, production, and distribution, journalism’s public role is usually measured in normative terms or assumed as integral to a democratic society of checks and balances between the three branches of government and the so-called fourth estate� The current development in American journalism, however, points to a more fundamental crisis in the authority of journalistic representations of the social world� This crisis is especially pronounced in the United States, where the dependency on advertising in news publishing has traditionally been very high 2 and where new information technologies have often enough been adopted early� But the oft quoted rapid migration of classified advertising from the pages of newspapers to the free environment of online services exemplifies a more general transition from a form of mass public to specialized “networked publics” (Ito 2008). The mere publication of documents does no longer match the interactive possibilities of online platforms - Twitter, Facebook, blogs, wikis, and (video-)chat on Skype or ICQ - which are explicitly designed as environments for communication and interaction� Despite well-meaning calls for a reaffirmation of journalists’ public role through a subsidized system of private endowments and public funding (Schudson and Downie Jr� 2009), such calls miss the problem of journalism under networked conditions because they present the problem in terms of the very institution which they seek to reform. The path of this institution can be sketched briefly. In the nineteenth century, the beginnings of mass media were characterized by increasing commercialization of the formerly semi-private business of relaying random news items to a very limited scope of (local) readers of newspapers� The commercial model of publishing newspapers increasingly relied on advertising from businesses while lowering the barrier of access for readers through very low pricing policies� If the crisis in journalism today were only a crisis in the revenue scheme, new models for advertising should be easily at hand� Although the aggregation of user data from social networking platforms and similar data-mining of consumer behavior are pointing in the direction of more focused advertising expenditure, mass media are slow to overturn their concept of serving audiences with a “one-size-fits-all” product. The conflict between losing some of the comprehensiveness as a catch-all medium, while gaining readers and viewers with more specialized interests 2 Reliance on advertising as the main source of revenue is especially high in the U�S� Whereas newspapers in Germany earn a little more than 50 per cent from advertising (in Japan only about 30 per cent), U�S� newspaper publishers rely on advertising for 87 per cent of their revenue ( Special Report 2011: 4)� For a short analysis of the crisis in the revenue scheme of journalistic enterprises in the U.S. see Tunstall 2008; Ruß-Mohl 2009: 15-32, and the excellent collection New Media, Old News. Journalism & Democracy in the Digital Age (Fenton 2010)� “All the News That’s Fit to Circulate” 145 is only gradually being implemented in newsrooms� 3 These business considerations, however, overshadow the more pertinent question of the role of journalistic practices for the creation and maintenance of social relations, of the altered function of news for interaction within networked publics� Going beyond the business side of news production, this essay proposes a new approach based on practices of cultural production to address the crisis of journalism beyond the terms established by the institution of modern mass media itself� A solution to this crisis needs to start with an understanding of the cultural implications for an altered practice of public communication in the “network society,” acknowledging in part that journalism as it was practiced for the later half of the twentieth century is at the “end of an era” (Weaver and Wilhoit 1996) and as yet, there is no discernible institution which could take its place� 4 In this transitory phase between a changing institution of public communication and a radically heterogeneous ecosystem of blogs, networks, and “commons-based peer-production” (Benkler 287) the crisis of journalism marks the transition from the old system of mass media communications to a more flexible, versatile and also polarized environment for the circulation of information� In this environment, users (as readers, viewers, consumers and producers) engage differently with publicly available information in a globalized network society than in the old days of consuming the same media at more or less the same time (cf� Anderson 2006: 33f�)� Manuel Castells aptly characterizes this new phenomenon of individualized but networked communication as “mass self-communication” (2007: 246f�)� Through wider access to information resources and the ability to (re-)publish instantly through blogs, facebook messages, tweets, and RSS feeds 5 a large number of mainly younger news consumers emulate journalistic practices for their private communication. Whatever is “fit to circulate” finds its way into the networks of users� The transposition of practices of cultural production from the domain of professional journalism to the semi-private domain of interaction 6 in online environments characterizes the current crisis of journalistic authority 3 Christopher Anderson argues that the communication between journalists and their audiences, their advertisers and sources, is becoming increasingly structured by algorithms of user behaviors and page views, sharing little with the past of journalistic reporting� Such “algorithmic communications practices,” he argues, “do not easily map onto traditional democratic theory - which is, perhaps, a sign that they represent something genuinely new” (542)� 4 Although common usage suggests otherwise, the internet itself is not an institution in the sense of either an organization, a company or a public body (cf. Shirky 2008: 56f.). In the context of this paper, internet will refer only to the technical network of digital communication� 5 “Tweets” are short messages distributed via the online platform twitter�com, using hashtags as metadata to follow ongoing discussions or individual users� RSS is the abbreviation of “Really Simple Syndication,” a subscription service similar to a newsletter which alerts users about updates on websites� 6 See Jeff Jarvis, “The Benefits of Publicness” (2010) and “The Progression of the Public” (2011) on the gradual blurring of such distinctions as private and public in networked environments� 146 c hristoPh r aetzsch beyond considerations of business plans for newspapers and similar media conglomerates. Detaching the news from the paper is just the first step to acknowledge that the social function of news in daily interaction can not be captured by intricate content analyses either, a still popular method in empirical journalism studies� Strengthening instead the perspective of practices of cultural production will emphasize the historical contingency of forms of public communication within discrete settings of media and their audiences� This essay will first consider the innovative potential of crises in general before specifically addressing the crisis of journalism from the network perspective through a comparison of the emergence of the penny papers in the 1830s with the present. The following section will develop a new model to regard practices of cultural production, i�e� journalistic practices, within the tradition of Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, and more recent scholarship in sociology and media history� This model will put forward the thesis that the widespread adoption of journalistic practices by amateurs can be regarded as an exemplary case of cultural innovation, where “media-oriented practices” (Couldry 119) are regarded as a new form of cultural production among members of the former audience� The point here is not to restate the case for “citizen journalism,” as has been argued by Dan Gillmor (2004) and others, because the practices of production within a company like CNN or The New York Times continue to differ tremendously from those used by individual bloggers� The argument stresses that the moment of crisis offers the chance to acknowledge the altered status of publicly available texts, messages and information among an audience that oscillates between productive and consumptive patterns of interaction (Bruns 2008; Jenkins 2008). 2 The Challenge of Crisis to Doxa In his article on the “Futures of News,” Rodney Benson argues that the perception of a crisis of journalism is based on an “elitist model” of mass communications, which used to rely heavily on advertising but which is now failing in online environments (195f�)� According to Benson, the established prominence of advertising has “led the press to conceive of their readers more as consumers than citizens” (ibid�) and has kept them from serving deliberative and pluralist interests of their publics� In order to acknowledge the innovative potential in this moment of crisis, “journalists will need to … loosen their monopoly on the public sphere” (199)� In a similar vein, Pierre Bourdieu characterized moments of crisis as a challenge to doxa - the often tacit or implicit, habitualized way of speaking and acting� In his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), he argued that “when the social world loses its character as a natural phenomenon ��� the question of the natural or conventional character ( phusei or nomo ) of social facts can be raised” (169)� The discussion about the changing role of news media is a case in point here because the terms used to describe the phenomenon - the challenge of network media to mass media - are through and through derived from the established institu- “All the News That’s Fit to Circulate” 147 tion of the mass media themselves� Blogs are read as alternative journalistic outlets; twitter feeds are regarded as a faster way to access first-hand accounts of eye-witnesses� But despite a few well-connected blogs and network media outlets, e�g� the technology blog BoingBoing or the Huffington Post , most blogs do not even pretend to serve a general public like a newspaper or television channel does� 7 In this disparity between an institutionalized form of public communication and a private practice of “mass self-communication” lies the potential to find a new vocabulary to describe cultural production in terms of practice. The current transitional period exemplifies how a contemporary experience is not adequately represented by the terms used for its description� In Bourdieu’s words, “the relationship between language and experience never appears more clearly than in crisis situations in which the everyday order ( Alltäglichkeit ) is challenged” (ibid� 170)� This everyday order of news consumption, the simultaneous consumption of similar or even identical media, has clearly been challenged, overturning many of the long-standing notions about publics and their interaction� Crises thus offer a moment to rethink established notions of habitualized behavior and the schemas used to rationalize such behavior� In his fervent critique of press monopolies in The Brass Check (1919), Upton Sinclair underlined that crises always held a potential for innovation, the chance of a “birth” (9)� 8 In a more theoretical vein, Marc Eli Blanchard draws on crisis discourses in the Modernist writers Paul Valéry, Walter Benjamin and André Malraux to propose that crises are accompanied by ruptures in the cultural, the ideological, and historiographic realm� In a crisis situation, the absence of dialogue between different cultures, among or between national communities, leads to confrontation� On the ideological plane, “blocs,” or groups of actors, fail to find a “common code” to communicate their diverging interests. Finally, a given crisis questions the chronology of historiography� Historiography becomes problematic, as it cannot account for the moment of crisis by rationalizing this crisis within the terms of its established discourse (1983: 49f.). These dimensions can also be found in the current crisis in journalism� On the cultural and ideological side, promoters of free content and collaboration in network media (Surowiecki 2005; Shirky 2008, 2010) encounter fierce opposition from copyrights holders and defenders of professional status in the old media (cf� Meyer 2004)� Both spheres seem to be speaking in different tongues and with different objectives� Advocates of open source software refuse to accept the “lock-in” of either proprietary software (Lanier 2010) or the 7 The State of the Blogosphere Report 2010 , compiled by the blog aggregator Technorati, finds that almost 70 per cent of all English-language blogs run by “hobbyists” have less than 5,000 page views per month (Technorati�com 2010)� The disparity to corporate media outlets becomes apparent when compared to e�g� CNN�com with 100 million page views per day or the video portal Youtube with 2 billion page views per day (Companies’ websites: CNN�com, youtube�com)� 8 “The social body to which we belong is at this moment passing through one of the greatest crises of its history, a colossal process which may best be likened to a birth” (Sinclair 1919: 9)� 148 c hristoPh r aetzsch preprogrammed communications routines in “walled gardens” such as online social networks (Dekker and Wolfersberger 2009)� Historiographically, the adoption of journalistic practices by amateurs on a gratuitous basis questions the traditional rationale of journalism history that the advancement of democracy was closely tied to the development of a free but commercially organized press (cf� Payne 1925)� Crises situations realign resources and cultural schemas along emergent calls for adaptation to a changing social and technological environment� Especially the development of new information media has repeatedly challenged established habits of communication and their practical implementation� The deliberative potential of new media is a recurrent trope, especially in American discourse, as it rejuvenates a dream of community (cf. Rheingold 1993). James Curran highlights that in the 1980s and ‘90s, the emerging potential of satellite transmissions and computer hardware gave rise to a number of futurologist visions on how these new media might contribute to changing society for the better� “The recurring tenets of this tradition of US futurology - that new media would create wealth, rejuvenate local communities, and empower the citizens - connected to central themes in the American Dream” (2010: 29)� 9 New media were and are still central to the identity of the United States: from the Stamp Act controversy in 1765 against the taxation of printing paper to the indirect subsidy of newspaper exchanges between publishers in the Early Republic and the propagation of radio, television and eventually the internet in the twentieth century� Westward expansion in the nineteenth century depended on effective means of communication for settlers to stay in touch with the administrative center as much as with those left behind� 10 As Paul Starr writes in The Creation of the Media , the early promotion of a postal network made exchanges of papers easier and established the “first national news network” after 1792� The indirect subsidy of newspaper circulation through extremely low postal rates, made cheap print a “public policy in America” (2004: 125)� The ubiquity of local newspapers in the U�S� astounded Alexis de Tocqueville in 1836, prompting him to claim that there is “scarcely a hamlet which has not its own newspaper” (2002: 214)� But Tocqueville also 9 See also James Carey’s essays “Changing Communications Technology and the Nature of the Audience” (1980) and “The Internet and the End of the National Communication System” (1998). 10 In A Fictive People. Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public, Ronald Zboray argues that sending newspapers to those left in home communities served several functions: local papers from the destination of migrants, proved that a family member had made it to a desired spot and allowed a glimpse at the local circumstances there (1993: 110-15)� Reading the same articles, novels or magazines “could be one of the few experiences correspondents shared” when they were physically far apart� Especially newspapers were a cheap and welcome item to send to family members and friends (119)� Although the world of print connected distant individuals, the introduction of news from other places also put the pastoral ideal of home in conflict with the changing times. Driven by increasing internal migration in the 1830s and ‘40s the world of print became a “surrogate for community on a national scale” (121)� “All the News That’s Fit to Circulate” 149 pointed out that papers depended on the support of their regular readers: “a newspaper can only subsist on the condition of publishing sentiments or principles common to a larger number of men“ (ibid� 636)� Writing in a time of the beginning industrialization of the journalistic enterprise, Tocqueville witnessed a shift in journalistic practices, which initiated the institutionalization of “the press” as a distinct public agent, who became slowly independent of government printing contracts or other direct subsidies from political parties� Whereas newspaper publishers had to rely on correspondence from either readers or other publishers to fill their columns, the active solicitation of news became common among the penny papers of the 1830s in the urban centers of the East Coast. Benjamin Day, printer of the first successful penny paper The Sun in 1833 in New York, and his competitors, made it a mission to condition and habitualize their audiences to reading a daily paper� The penny editors created demand by “emphasizing news both as something that the reader had to have today and with the understanding that such news was perishable, needing to be replaced tomorrow ” (Brazeal 411). The first issue of The Sun appeared on September 3, 1833 and it bore the oft-quoted, programmatic paragraph: The object of this paper is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of every one, ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY, and at the same time afford an advantageous medium for advertising� (original typography) All the central elements of a modern, commercial daily paper, seem to be mentioned here: a general public, an affordable price, and especially the comprehensiveness of the news medium� To attract advertising customers, Day copied advertising from mercantile papers like the Courier & Enquirer and published them at no cost to advertisers, e�g� ferry announcements, to lend an air of prosperity to his new venture� 11 The penny press effectively ended the problem of unpaid subscriptions, which had put publishers of papers in dire straits in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by charging for papers directly upon purchase� The new business model changed the nature of the newspaper and its daily production and ended the curious situation, where “readers pretended to be subscribers, and publishers pretended they had paying customers” (Leonard 44). In 1823, the weekly Village Register from Dedham, Massachusetts, termed the problem of “pecuniary depletion” of printers “the grand malady“ of newspaper publishing of the time� The paper ridiculed subscribers who believed that “printers live upon old newspapers, and fatten upon type metal, and that a little pure cash will jeopardize their constitutions�” 12 But despite the frequent complaints about defaulting subscribers, the cash problem continued well into the 1830s. A printer-publisher 11 The obituary for Benjamin Day details the printing process of the first paper, where Day employed what was a common practice among publishers of newspapers at the time and is ironically again so today - copy and paste: “Mr� Day procured a copy of the Courier and Enquirer, scissored out the news of the morning, and put it in type himself” (n.a. 1889). 12 Village Register and Norfolk County Advertiser, 7 Mar. 1823: 1. 150 c hristoPh r aetzsch from New York is quoted in 1833 in the Daily National Intelligencer : “[M]en who think printers can live on air, deserve themselves to live on skunk cabbage tea, flavored with assafoetida [strong variant of fennel, Devils Feet ]�” 13 The penny papers overturned the established notion that a daily newspaper served only the needs of an elite readership of politicians, bankers and merchants through turning their eye on the rapidly changing, and at times horrifyingly chaotic, urban sphere� They supplied daily updates on stories, especially in the form of human interest and murder mysteries, while continuing to publish verbatim reprints from other publications� Within the admittedly small segment of daily papers in the 1830s, 14 the penny press laid the foundations of American newspaper businesses today, instating journalism as “ the sense-making practice of modernity … a product and promoter of modern life” (Hartley 33)� But this institutionalization of journalism also entailed that the journalistic enterprise came to depend on a large pool of material, organizational and economic resources in order to invest in new printing technologies and further increase circulation� While James Gordon Bennett famously started his penny The Herald in 1835 with savings of not more than $500 (Carlson 1942), a few years later, the price of entry into the news business had risen to astronomical heights� Along with economic concerns, the form of news also became increasingly formalized� 15 Later in the century, narrative conventions of news reports such as inverted-pyramid reporting were by and large motivated by unstable telegraph connections and limited bandwidth, reporting first the core message and adding detail in following paragraphs (Stephens 253); the narrative form itself became “political” in placing topical information in a graphic hierarchy (Schudson 1995)� The challenge of the penny papers to the established mercantile dailies, among others, holds a lesson for the present discussion� While the pennies were created out of a crisis in the printing business, they also affected the entire system of correspondences and (unattributed) reprints, seeking instead news from their environs and propagating the daily consumption of such news on their pages� The pennies challenged the doxa of the age that news was an infrequent, mostly specialized and generally boring read� 13 Daily National Intelligencer, 30 Apr. 1833: 3. 14 Cf. Nerone (1987) for a historical contextualization of the penny press and his critique of its “mythology” in American journalism history� 15 Contrasting older narrative forms like the epic or the novel, with news accounts typically found in newspapers and journals, Walter Benjamin staked out “prompt verifiability” as a characteristic feature of information� Against the accumulated authority of a tradition of texts, information or news had to be “understandable in itself” without prior knowledge (89). “All the News That’s Fit to Circulate” 151 3 Against Commodification: Journalistic Practices after Journalism From today’s perspective, this move towards an industrial production of news can be seen as the commodification of communication, transforming the informational tie between readers and printers of newspapers from a semi-private exchange into a market transaction� The current proliferation of instant communication with peers and direct contact to producers and communicators through emails, blogs and news feeds appears as a partial reversal of this commodification process. The possibility of interacting with producers of content differentiates users of online news technologies from the classical audience of mass media� From this point of view, the crisis of the institutionalized news journalism is driven by a different conception of “news” altogether� Internet pioneer Clay Shirky has characterized this development as a shift “from news as an institutional prerogative to news as part of a communications ecosystem�” Users of network technology and online publishing tools employ the same technological resources, although on a smaller scale, as established media and are for the first time in the history of modern media competing within the same network� “The individual weblogs are not merely alternative sites of publishing; they are alternatives to publishing itself,” understood as a revolt against the elitism of a professional class of publishers (2008: 66). 16 The one-on-one connectivity of the Internet makes a mediator like journalists virtually obsolete� Journalistic practices in this ‘communications ecosystem’ refer to the more or less regular selection and presentation of news to readers or viewers who need not be personally known to the author of the message or to each other� In his History of News , Mitchell Stephens proposes a similar general definition of news as a “new information about a subject of some public interest that is shared with some portion of the public” (9)� The crucial difference, however, between professional journalists and journalistic practices employed by amateurs is that these forms of public communication are not necessarily an alternative form in journalism, even if blogs get included in major news sites, but to journalism as an institutionalized form of public communication� In his book Cultural Chaos , Brian McNair tries to differentiate weblogs from mass media by three main points: subjectivity, interactivity, and connectivity� Weblog authors are avowedly personal in their approach to information, they link across a vast spectrum of actors and relate content beyond the boundaries of an editorial policy� Within this chaotic environment, only some actors are able to achieve mass appeal and become more reliant on trustworthy authors and, eventually, also on advertising (121-34)� Scale and reach continue to matter in network environments and it would be misrep- 16 Journalism researcher Marc Deuze looks at weblogs from the changing occupational profiles of journalists themselves and finds that converging technologies in online media are the basis of “a discernibly different media ecology … which to some extent offers each and every individual the hardware, software, skill and post-materialist will to self-publish” (2009: 93)� 152 c hristoPh r aetzsch resenting the point to assume that small news outlets of specialized interests are only embryonic forms of future conglomerates, as seems to be the rationale behind Eric Klinenberg’s confusion of two different spheres of news production� He argues: “While bloggers have enriched the cultural content of the Web, there is little reason to believe they will provide an adequate alternative to mainstream news” (2005: 11)� Against this confusion, it can be argued that the network itself, on the basis of its commercial and technical infrastructure, is governed by “power-law distributions” of links and traffic. Few websites get most of the traffic. The network is far from being an egalitarian space, where every communicator has an equal chance to be read and noticed� In his book Linked , Albert-László Barabási referred to companies like Google, Amazon or Yahoo, as ‘hubs’ because they are the most linked-to sites and hence get far more traffic than an individual blogger. “The hubs,” Barabási argued, “are the strongest argument against the utopian vision of an egalitarian cyberspace” (2003: 58). Instead of contrasting alternative news forms and practices with their established forms, journalistic practices in amateur contexts should be regarded as a form of productive interaction among members of the former audience, 17 not in terms of generic qualities of news reports or practices of their production themselves� Although blogs continue to attract attention as an alternative platform in the process of democratic opinion formation, the majority of blogs do not step in to correct the shortcomings of classical mass media (cf� Barlow 2007), but are dedicated to the smaller things in daily life� The blog form, as an easily updated, personalized website does not lend itself only to political writing or activism� Providers like wordpress�com or blogger�com offer their service on a non-exclusive basis, designing tools and protocols, which are understandable to laypersons� From cooking recipes to self help advice, vacation reports and leisure activities, the blog seems like a welcome way to communicate publicly about more or less private things� But passing this threshold of publication requires the ability to present thoughts in a structured way, pay attention to stylistic concerns of readability and after all, addressing an unknown audience in an approachable style� Even if the theme is “adventures of housewives with their kids,” a thriving new genre in recent years, such private reminiscences need a focus that is at least potentially inclusive of readers unfamiliar with the subject or the author� In his analysis of blogging practices, Jan Schmidt argues that blogging can be seen as “semi-journalistic practice,” where “rules, relations and code” function as structured and structuring elements in communication among a given community of bloggers (2007: n�p�)� These dimensions are nicely illustrated by this example of a personal blog which is typical for millions of similar sites� Written by “a 22 year old female from the great State of Colorado,” the author publishes a personal review of Amazon’s reading device for ebooks, the Kindle� The article implements the 17 See Jay Rosen “The people formerly known as the audience” (2006) and “What I think I know about journalism” (2011)� “All the News That’s Fit to Circulate” 153 rule of topicality by choosing an issue of contemporary public interest, similar to technology reviews in magazines and newspapers� The article expresses a personal yet balanced viewpoint, arguing the benefits and downsides of ebook readers� To this day, the entry has attracted more than 151 comments from other readers, also because it was featured on the main site of the provider of the blogging software� What starts out as the private page of an individual and a private musing on an issue of contemporary interest, ends up as a contribution to a wider public discussion� This development depends in large part on the journalistic quality of the entry itself, its avoidance of outrageous statements, its argumentative and informative tone, and, above all, the choice of its subject� The comments’ section is not only an addendum to the article but reflects an interactive conversation between the author and her readers, the relations of producers and readers, who are in turn producers of online content themselves� Interspersed with additional links to similar websites and discussions, the comments’ section links a single expression to the wider network and is as much part of the actual article� 18 This short example is especially worthwhile to consider as a typical blog entry, because it underlines the embeddedness of individual utterances in a network of social interactions� While opening a new channel for communication, blog authors, however, tend to follow a rather small segment of publications, which is not surprising in face of the sheer number of blogs available� Eric Gilbert et al� have found that blog commentators are more likely to write comments on posts when they agree with a particular position� This behavior underlines a monadic tendency in online behavior which is associated with specialization (2009)� Interestingly, the output of mass media companies plays an important role in networked communication� In a recent study of German-language messages (tweets) in the short message service twitter�com, Axel Maireder found that more than 70 percent of all tweets linked back to content from classical mass media outlets (newsrooms, editorial content) or from sites of organizations or companies directly (2011: 12)� Half of all tweets linked to any kind of news, serving either soft consumer or hobby interests, hard political news or special interests (13)� Tweets furthermore showed a great level of self-referentiality by equating the content of a tweet with its author (about 30 percent) using this communication platform as a way of self-promotion (16)� In view of the ubiquity of electronic communications media in everday contexts, Mark Deuze argues that communications media are “everywhere, and therefore nowhere�” The ability to partake in various interactions through different channels creates a “personal information space,” which admittedly loses the comprehensiveness of a glance through a newspaper, yet offers a chance to engage more actively in ongoing discussions and to follow specialized interests on a regular basis� Deuze continues that media 18 “To Kindle or not to Kindle�” http: / / thestarsandthemoonandthedeepbluesea�wordpress�com/ 2010/ 05/ 26/ to-kindle-or-not-to-kindle/ # May 26, 2010 (accessed July 27, 2011)� 154 c hristoPh r aetzsch and everyday life have become so deeply entangled today that a “life lived in, rather than with, media” represents the “ontological benchmark for a 21stcentury media studies” (2011: 139, 137)� The implication of such a perspective, however, is that the constant involvement in various forms of private, semiprivate and public communication demands a more accrued awareness of the social uses of information in different contexts� If information becomes equivalent or homologous within the structure of a web page or in a channel of communication, this accentuates only more the dependency on context in order to control and manage information for individual users� As much as free information is a liberation of content, the fluidity and non-hierarchical structure of hypertext is only beginning to show its cultural implications� “Hypertext presents a radically divergent technology,” wrote Robert Coover in a short piece for the New York Times Review of Books (1992)� They are “interactive and polyvocal, favoring a plurality of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the author�” The literary principle of hypertextual writing and reading serves, in the words of Marie-Laure Ryan, as “a construction kit: it throws lexia at its readers, one at a time, and tells them: make a story with this” (589). While these early adoptions of the hypertext genre remain indebted to reader-response theory formulated by Wolfgang Iser and others, 19 the actual application of a programmed hypertext provokes quite literally that blog writers create stories on their websites, which rework and reinterpret the lexia ‘thrown’ at them by the more prominent public communicators like television stations and newspapers� Some writers may achieve the status of commentators or pundits in commercial news channels� But such prominence is often tied to an integrated media campaign of video appearances, books, interviews and the like� Few writers make it over the threshold of mass attention, preferring rather to keep communication within a smaller circle of devoted followers� What is perceivable as a communicative practice today, “mass self-communication,” does not easily fit into traditional paradigms of media effects or the constitution of political publics� In order to underline the usefulness of a practice approach for an analysis of cultural innovation and production, the current debate about journalistic practices after journalism shall be presented within a more theoretical framework� The writings of Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu show a preoccupation with practice(s) that may prove fertile to analyzing the present problem outside of the entrenched terms of journalism research� 4 Cultural Studies and Practice(s) of Cultural Production The mass media play an important role throughout Raymond Williams’ work - from his seminal “Conclusion” in Culture and Society (1958) to the Long Revolution (1961), Communications (1971) and his study Television: Technology 19 For a comprehensive overview of hypertext as a cultural condition of the network age and its implications for critical theory, see Landow 2006� “All the News That’s Fit to Circulate” 155 and Cultural Form (1975)� One of his main concerns is that television and print media continue to work in a mode of “transmission” which assumes that their audience cannot easily answer back to the producers of cultural artifacts� But since the mass media in the twentieth century operate as complex institutions, they require large amounts of capital to be run, which can only be raised by addressing the largest possible audience, that is, a mass market of customers for advertising� 20 For Williams, the partial and formulaic representation in the mass media excludes the dimensions of “reception and response” and cannot reflect the “whole experience” of life. Without “reception and response,” communication is necessarily incomplete� By contrast, a “real theory of communication,” he concludes, “is a theory of community” (1963: 301)� Although this may sound retrograde, Williams does not imply a return to premodern, communal ways of social order� It is rather an attempt to take the democratic project seriously and find a way to share experiences across the wide spectrum of the population through a change in mass media representations themselves� 21 Communication, in Williams’ understanding, is separate from communications, defining the latter as “the institutions and forms in which ideas, information, and attitudes are transmitted and received, ��� the process of transmission and reception” (Williams 1971: 17)� The dimension of response, by contrast, is absent in mass communications� Communication in a wider sense also entails a dimension of “describing, learning, persuading, and exchanging experiences” (18). Williams regards mass communications as the commercial exploitation of a basic human trait� The only “practical use of communication is the sharing of real experience” and it seems like a “perversion” to use this fundamental need as a means to sell (32)� Although the mass media have gradually brought more people in contact with cultural material, “ownership and control of the means of communication have narrowed” (33) within the same development� In The Long Revolution (1961) the cultural revolution of modernity is characterized by the spread of literacy, education, and communications� In the course of the cultural revolution, the “extension of communications” is affecting the ‘whole way of life’ and becomes part of “our most significant living experience,” Williams writes� Taken together, democracy, industry and especially extended communications “are all means rather than ends” in the process of modernity (1961: xi-xiii)� Communication, as already introduced in Culture and Society , is further elevated to a central position in the creation and development of culture� In his discussion of the “The Creative Mind” Williams defines communication “in terms of a general human creativity” which is not restricted to specialist discourses in the media or the art world� 20 Concerning the structural dependence of modern media on advertising and its effects on content, see also Williams 1979� 21 In both his study of television and Communications , Williams devotes ample space to in-depth statistical and qualitative analyses of the content of TV programming and newspaper articles� Along with his advice on policy and regulation, Williams argues for a change of media representations within the mass media themselves and does not opt for propagating alternative media outlets (Williams 1975; 1971)� 156 c hristoPh r aetzsch The artist here serves as a role model for the “organization of experiences” (1961: 31), as he is probing into new ways to represent experience and offers these representations to society as a way to perceive of itself in changing historical circumstances. In this sense, Williams can define communication as “the process of making unique experiences into common experiences” (38). Institutionalized art discourse in the form of museums, galleries and academic faculties, however, “excludes communication, as a social fact” (29)� A means of communication, in the above mentioned sense, organizes and continues to express a common meaning by which its people live� The discovery of a means of communication is the discovery of a common meaning, and the artist’s function, in many societies, is to be skilled in the means by which this meaning can continue to be experienced and activated (31)� In summary, “the ‘creative’ act, of any artist, is ��� the process of making a meaning active, by communicating an organized experience to others” (32)� For Williams, institutionalizing art as a privileged form of cultural expression is the reason for the dissociation of artistic production from the realm of “ordinary life�” The abstraction of art has been its promotion or relegation to an area of special experience ��� , which art in practice has never confined itself to, ranging in fact from the most ordinary daily activities to exceptional crises and intensities��� (39; emphasis added�)� The opposition of art and ordinary life, or the ”dismissal of art as unpractical” (37), is hence a false one: creative, non-productive, non-utilitarian work can be found in popular culture, hobby activities and everyday life� Williams states, “there are, essentially, no ‘ordinary’ activities, if by ‘ordinary’ we mean the absence of creative interpretation and effort” (37)� 22 What makes the artist, like a writer or painter, a focal point for Williams’ exploration of the dynamics of culture, is that the artist is in a privileged position to access and “activate” cultural memory and to reassemble it into new forms� The artist’s activity can count as a model of a cultural producer in general� Institutionalization, of art or journalism, may be part of the cultural development, but Williams argues that institutions rely on a “selective tradition” by appropriating and incorporating “actively residual” elements of history to legitimize their power in society and become dominant (Williams 1977: 122- 23)� Such a ‘selective tradition’ is necessarily reductive and partial, as it seeks to underpin claims to legitimacy and power� In order to grasp analytically the development of institutions, to account for a dynamic concept of culture as process, Williams proposes to distinguish between dominant, residual and emergent cultural elements which are simultaneously present in society� 22 In Marxism and Literature , Williams points out that creativity is required in general as well as specialized activities: from “the relatively simple and direct practice of everyday communication” to the classic fields of “creative practice” in the arts, where creativity relies on the “activation of a know model” of characters, settings and plots (1977: 206-11)� “All the News That’s Fit to Circulate” 157 Whereas institutions, such as universities, museums, or media companies represent a dominant (or hegemonic) cultural formation, residual elements of culture are something which “has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process ��� as an effective element of the present” (1977: 122)� The residual is perceivable as detached from the present but may have an “alternative or even oppositional relation to the dominant culture�” The emergent is to be distinguished from the residual in its radically oppositional, and not merely alternative, character in relation to the dominant order� The emergent produces “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships�” To grasp the vitality of culture, Wiliams points out that “ no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice ” (122; 125)� 23 In a general sense then, Williams extols practice, as found in the residual and emergent, as a site of opposition to the dominant order� On account of his inclusive concept of culture, residual and emergent elements stand in a challenging position, contributing to more variety in the sphere of cultural expressions� The institutional history of journalism is a case in point here, being mostly presented in the form of progress or democratizing narrative� It thus excludes those practices that run counter to the perceived trend� Popular culture is another example of a residual or emergent cultural form which can be defined in terms of its “ difference from common culture�” In popular culture, the “legitimation of cultural practice is a result of struggle and not merely growth” (Kruger 61)� Practice in Williams’ writings on culture is implicit in the sense of being assumed as the antidote to theory� At the same time, the level of practices draws attention to culture as a process, where dominant elements become subject to challenge and change� Communication understood as “making a meaning active” draws on the insight that residual and emergent elements may threaten a dominant order, once they are able to popularize this activation� For Williams, it is the realm of practice that is at the same time host of residual and emergent elements� Andrew Milner emphasizes that Williams shares a number of concerns with Pierre Bourdieu here, especially in his “attempt to theorize human sociality in terms of the strategic action of individuals within a constraining but nonetheless not determining context of values�” But where Williams stresses the experience of living in a particular era, the “structure of feeling” of an epoch, as the basis of cultural analysis, Bourdieu starts out from psychology and sociology to develop his concept of habitus as a “durable disposition” of 23 The opposition of residual and emergent cultural elements is an attempt to conceive of the Marxist dichotomy between base and superstructure in more dynamic and less deterministic terms: “By ‘residual’ I mean that some experiences, meanings and values which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in the terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the residue - cultural as well as social - of some previous social formation” (1973: 10; emphasis added)� See also (Hall, 1996) on practices in experiences and in culture: “In experience, all the different practices intersect ; within ‘culture’ the different practices interact ” (38; emphasis added). 158 c hristoPh r aetzsch individualized yet socially embedded actors (Milner 66-67)� Bourdieu and Williams emphasize that the perspective of social actors has to be included in accounts of cultural development and are critical of the structuralist abstraction of treating language as a system� For Williams, an abstraction from the social character of language into a system is a form of “alienation,” since language “is a socially shared and reciprocal activity, already embedded in active relationships, within which every move is an activation of what is already shared” (Williams 1977: 166)� In a review of Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice , Williams points out that the logic of practice sees structures and agents in a reflexive relation to each other. To account for this reflexive relation, habitus is the key term� In Williams’ words, the habitus is by definition not an individual phenomenon. That is to say it is internalized and operationalized by individuals but not to regulate solitary acts but precisely interaction … � [Habitus is] a logic derived from a common set of material conditions of existence to regulate the practice of a set of individuals in common response to those conditions (Garnham and Williams 1980: 213; emphasis added). Although habitus describes dispositions of individuals, it is a socialized and ‘inculcated’ disposition which is generative of a multitude of practices and learned through repetition and regular interaction with others� Structure and actor are mutually sustained in practices� This logic of practice creates the habitus as a “cultivated disposition” (Bourdieu 1977: 15) that in turn can serve as a “generative scheme” for practices� 24 These schemes “enabl[e] agents to generate an infinity of practices adapted to endlessly changing situations, without those schemes ever being constituted as explicit principles” (16)� Practices are structured and structuring modes of action, which are informed by the habitus of agents� In Bourdieu, culture then describes a “repertoire of actions”, which encompasses “the everyday symbolic dimension of social life and acting” (Ebrecht and Hillebrandt 2002: 8f.). Culture in this sense practically enables agents to act, to create meaning and sustain sociality� 25 The contribution of Bourdieu is that the logic of practice can be neither inferred only from individual accounts of agents nor from the social structures in which they act. The reflexivity of practices consists in their capacity to reproduce what enabled them� Building on Bourdieu’s “habitus” and Anthony Giddens’ “duality of structure,” William Sewell criticises that Bourdieu’s notion of habitus nonetheless “retains [an] agent-proof quality,” succumbing to an equally “objectified and overtotalized conception of society” where social structure accounts above 24 For Bourdieu, practices are “produced by the habitus”, and function as a “ strategygenerating principle enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations” (1977: 72; emphasis added)� 25 This goes beyond Clifford Geertz’ “semiotic” concept of culture, where the analysis concentrates on “webs of significance” between human agents, structures, practices and artifacts (Geertz 1973: 5)� As an “assemblage of texts,” cultural forms are conceived as “imaginative works built out of social materials” (1972: 26-27)� “All the News That’s Fit to Circulate” 159 all for stability - not change (Sewell Jr� 1992: 15)� Sewell’s solution is a concept of structure that can recognize the agency of actors while at the same time accounting for change� Similar to Giddens, Sewell argues: Structures shape people’s practices, but it is also people’s practices that constitute (and reproduce) structures� In this view of things, human agency and structure, far from being opposed , in fact, presuppose each other (4)� Social actors are “capable of applying a wide range of different and even incompatible schemas and have access to heterogeneous arrays of resources,” Sewell continues� Cultural schemas are generalizable and transposable to new contexts and need not be limited to the context in which they evolved� Agency under these conditions can then be conceived “as entailing the capacity to transpose and extend schemas to new contexts” (18). The conception of structures as both “empowering and constraining” (19) emphasizes that “agency arises from the actor’s knowledge of schemas, which means the ability to apply them to new contexts” (20)� While agency characterizes social actors in general, varying degrees of access to cultural schemas explain why “structures empower agents differentially” (22)� If practices are understood as routines of acting, which sustain and are enabled by existing structures, such a conceptualization can ground an analysis of journalistic practices outside normative discussion about journalism’s public role. This brief outline of a specific theoretical understanding of practices highlights that in the present crisis of journalism, a transposition of schemas from the professional realm of journalism to the private realm of interaction has taken place� This transposition has had the effect that classical news outlets are no longer valued in the sense of providing information to a public, but are now valued for their use in ongoing interactions with other members of networked publics� The possibility to link across a network of descriptions of “experiences” in their most general sense, renews Williams’ inclusive concept of culture, wherein the ‘activation of what is already shared’ can be performed not only by professionals like artists or journalists, but by many more members of a heterogeneous public� In a “search engine society” (Halavais 2009) such an activation of either residual or emergent knowledge and experience starts to become the norm of cultural expression, rather than the specialized task of experts� Yet, if professional experts do not give up their expertise so easily, they will at least need to renew their claim to dominance by opening up to the dialogical possibilities of the network age� As Viviane Serfaty argues in a recent article, blogs thrive as a “dialogical space [which] is enabled by an original use of written language,” however, in a form of ‘oralized writing’ (Serfaty 316)� Such a situation of instant communication is reminiscent of the pre-mass media age of the coffee house, as The Economist points out in its 2011 July report on the future of the news industry ( Special Report )� Both the early and the late phase of journalism, the 1830s and 2000s, are comparable on the level of practices of news production which lack an institutionalized structure of public communication� But whereas the Habermasian coffee-house still serves as a powerful metaphor 160 c hristoPh r aetzsch of bottom-up democratic movements, the mediated condition of networked communication, despite its stronger reliance on interactivity and feedback, cannot escape the constraint of space and the localized identity of political actors. In Tony Judt’s words, “global communities of elective affinity” are not equal to a political community of actors because “space matters� And politics is a function of space” (121)� The present chaotic situation of waning dominant forms and emerging new forms of public communication, offers the unprecedented chance to give “media-oriented practices” their due share of attention in cultural studies� Beyond reader-response theory, such practices should be seen not as mere reactions of an audience but as a constitutive component of public communication� The novelty of the present situation is not that audiences are actively including public communications in everyday life (cf� Bird 2003), but that such individualized forms of cultural production are now accessible in a common standard on hybrid platforms� When media become embedded into the fabric of everyday life, an institutional focus in research ignores that media are foremost, as Lisa Gitelman puts it, “socially realized structures of communication [where] communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation” (2006: 7)� In such a broad conception of media, technology is embedded in a framework of social interactions of production, communication and consumption� While blogs and other network media may serve deliberative ends in the form of citizen journalism, private self-communication or semi-journalistic practices, such media are as easily applied in partisan news sites (Breitbart�com)� If professional journalism is allowing the “democratization of truth” (Bennett forthcoming) to become the norm, accepting the chaotic yet emergent potential of a “privatization of truth” in networked communication may indeed offer a glimpse beyond the crisis� “All the News That’s Fit to Circulate” 161 Works Cited Anderson, Benedict R� Imagined Communities. 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Tabloidization, Technology and Truthiness. London and New York: Routledge, 2009� III� Precarious Others u lf s chulenBerg “This morning I read as angels read” Self-Creation, Aesthetics, and the Crisis of Black Politics in W�E�B� Du Bois’s Dark Princess Perhaps they met sometime - the painter and the dandy� Both roaming the gaslit Parisian streets and boulevards after dark� Both genuinely modern men who were aware of the fact that they were experiencing something new� The beggars, the hustlers, the prostitutes, and the wild-eyed poets - all feeling a loneliness only the crowd (‘la foule’) could offer� The painter and the dandy understood that all these people in the big city appeared as characters upon a stage. It was of course Baudelaire who first called attention to this knowledge, and who at the same time, in his attempt to elucidate the meaning of modernity, underlined that the modern painter and the dandy set themselves different tasks� In Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863), Baudelaire describes the painter Constantin Guys as a flaneur (think of Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Baudelaire in this context)� Guys, as Baudelaire maintains, is governed by an insatiable passion to see and to feel� In contrast to the dandy’s ‘impassibilité,’ his “cold detachment” (Baudelaire 2006: 399), the painter’s desire is to merge with the crowd. For the flaneur, “the perfect idler, […] the passionate observer,” life in the big city is full of adventures and miracles� ‘La fugitive beauté’ is central to “A une passante,” one of the most famous poems in Les Fleurs du mal , and it is this ephemeral beauty which the flaneur seeks in “the landscapes of stone” (400)� Roaming the streets of Paris, Guys is drawn to those places “where poetry echoes, life pulsates, music sounds” (401)� This solitary wanderer, endowed with an unusually active imagination, is looking for what Baudelaire terms ‘la modernité,’ and Guys shows himself capable of depicting the fascinating modern tension between the eternal and the transitory in his paintings� Guys is a modern man, but as Baudelaire’s piece makes clear he is no self-fashioner� He does not create or invent himself� Self-creation is typical of the figure Baudelaire calls the dandy. The dandy is a wealthy and blasé man who does not have to work and who thus “has no profession other than elegance” (419)� Characteristic of the dandy, following Baudelaire, is “the burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions” (420). His is an artificial beauty which triumphs over nature� Nature only provides the raw material, as it were, for the dandy’s selffashioning� From today’s perspective, dandyism appears as a truly protean term� Its contemporary fascination, however, most presumably derives from the fact that its various forms bring together self-creation, aesthetics, and politics in changing constellations� In this paper, I do not discuss the phe- 168 u lf s chulenBerg nomenon of dandyism but rather three different ways of understanding the notion of self-creation, as well as three ways of grasping the relation between the private and public sphere (and between aesthetics and politics). The first part seeks to elucidate the main differences between Richard Rorty’s and Michel Foucault’s respective notions of self-creation and the role it plays for an understanding of the relation between the private and public� This Franco- American conversation prepares the ground for a discussion of W�E�B� Du Bois’s second novel Dark Princess: A Romance (1928). I shall argue that in spite of Du Bois’s attempt to politicize the aesthetic, or to advocate the aesthetic as political practice, his novel is governed by a too rigid private-public separation which prevents him from fully realizing the idea of an innovative and progressive black leftist politics in his text� We shall see that not the least interesting aspect of Du Bois’s novel is that it indirectly problematizes the author’s own dictum that all art is propaganda� The notion of crisis is central to Dark Princess � The novel’s protagonist, Matthew Towns, experiences a personal and existential crisis because of his involvement in Chicago machine politics� As a young and sensitive intellectual, he is plagued by a profound ennui� Furthermore, the notion of crisis also plays a role as regards black politics� The text repeatedly addresses the question of how difficult it is to develop an effective black leftist politics which shows itself capable of mediating between race and class, brain and brawn, as well as between black and white labor, and which also contributes to the development of a new understanding of democracy� The solution which Dark Princess offers to this personal and political crisis is a leftist cosmopolitanism or transnational and multiracial radical politics� In this context it is crucial to note that in Du Bois’s novel black leftist politics is exceptional insofar as it is an early example of a leftist cosmopolitanism which is developed in the confrontation with American capitalism and its negative exceptionalism� In Democracy Matters , Cornel West defines negative exceptionalism thus: The American democratic experiment is unique in human history not because we are God’s chosen people to lead the world, nor because we are always a force for good in the world, but because of our refusal to acknowledge the deeply racist and imperial roots of our democratic project� We are exceptional because of our denial of the antidemocratic foundation stones of American democracy (2004: 41)� However, even if Du Bois’s idea of a leftist cosmopolitanism is an effective means of confronting the crisis of black leftist politics, we shall see that his novel does not answer a question which is of utmost importance: where is the poets’ place in this leftist cosmopolitanism, transnational radical politics, or Afro-Asian international? I shall seek to show the implications of Du Bois’s refusal to answer this question� “This morning I read as angels read” 169 1. “Soucie-toi de toi-même: ” The Idea of Self- Creation in a Franco-American Conversation Whereas the American liberal Richard Rorty restricts the power of creative self-invention to the private sphere, Michel Foucault, in L’Usage des plaisirs, Le Souci de soi (1984), and other later texts, shows that self-creation (or the care of the self) on the contrary might have strong effects in the public sphere and that the idea of a radical private-public split is therefore untenable� How does the idea of self-creation present itself in this Franco-American conversation or theoretical dialogue? Both Rorty and Foucault were provocative selffashioners in the field of theory. Moreover, both often felt closer to the poets than to the philosophers� As a young analytic philosopher Rorty experienced a profound melancholy because Platonism had not kept its tempting promise� In the late 1950s and 1960s Foucault’s writings on literature and art made it obvious how much he had been influenced by writers such as Nietzsche, Roussel, Blanchot, Bataille, Klossowski, Sollers (and the Tel Quel group), and de Sade� One should also think of his baroque writing style, for instance, in Les Mots et les choses � Nonetheless, the idea of self-creation plays a different role in Rorty’s and Foucault’s theoretical frameworks� In the introduction to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity , Rorty contends that his book “tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable” (1989: xv). In the same book Rorty advances the idea that the ideal member of a postmetaphysical poeticized culture is a figure he calls the ‘liberal ironist�’ The notion of liberal ironism is central to Rorty’s neopragmatist thinking� The ironist, in contrast to the metaphysician (as Platonist), is a nominalist and historicist who radically rejects the notion of intrinsic nature, who dismisses the correspondence theory of truth as outdated and useless, and who constantly calls attention to the contingency, historicity, and creativity of the various vocabularies she uses� All of Rorty’s heroes abhor the idea of stasis in the sense of getting stuck in one final vocabulary. They constantly look for new possibilities of creatively and imaginatively redescribing and recontextualizing things and persons, that is, their desire for novelty, new sets of metaphors, and surprising gestalt switches lets them contribute to the establishment of a radically new kind of postmetaphysical culture in which the notion of correct representation no longer plays a role and in which final vocabularies are considered as ‘poetic achievements.’ According to Rorty, the ironist’s search for a new and better final vocabulary “is dominated by metaphors of making rather than finding, of diversification and novelty rather than convergence to the antecedently present� She thinks of final vocabularies as poetic achievements rather than as fruits of diligent inquiry according to antecedently formulated criteria” (1989: 77). 170 u lf s chulenBerg In many respects, Rorty’s liberal ironist is also a romantic� 1 Rorty calls attention to a crucial parallel when he writes that “[t]he generic task of the ironist is the one Coleridge recommended to the great and original poet: to create the taste by which he will be judged” (97)� This idea of creating the taste by which one will be judged is a profoundly Nietzschean gesture, of course, which illuminates the importance of the line which runs from the romantics to the modern writers of the twentieth century� What exactly are the parallels between the romantics, as Rorty sees them, and the liberal ironists? Both put a strong emphasis on the power of imagination and hence on the invention and introduction of new vocabularies or new sets of metaphors� This also signifies that both regard the adoption of new vocabularies by human beings and institutions as the motor of history� Both, in other words, make us understand that a story of progress has to focus primarily on linguistic change, the change of linguistic practices or the replacement of one (final) vocabulary by another� Furthermore, both draw attention to the contingency and fragility of our final vocabularies as poetic achievements, or to the transitory nature of our webs of beliefs and desires� Both make us realize the importance of creative and imaginative redescriptions and of the idea that these are all we have� What also unites the romantics and the liberal ironists is the notion of self-creation, self-invention, and Nietzschean self-overcoming - the infinite malleability of human beings as emphasized by William James in his lectures on pragmatism� Moreover, both certainly help us grasp the new kind of ‘redemption’ offered by a culture which has substituted literature for both religion and philosophy� The last parallel I want to mention is that both underscore the distinctly aesthetic component of modern subjectivity and thus the diversity of private purposes and the radically poetic character of individual lives� In this context, think of Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Baudelaire, Emerson, Wilde, Nietzsche, Huymans, Mallarmé, and Nabokov, for instance� It has been repeatedly pointed out that one of Rorty’s most provocative ideas is that of a private-public split� 2 For an understanding of the aforementioned Rortyan notion of a literary or poeticized culture the private-public 1 For Rorty’s reading of romanticism, see his pieces “Pragmatism and Romanticism” and “Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude,” Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Volume 4 (New York: Cambridge UP, 2007), 105-19 and 73-88. In this context, see also Ulf Schulenberg, “From Redescription to Writing: Rorty, Barthes, and the Idea of a Literary Culture,” New Literary History 38 (2007): 371-85; and “‘Becoming the Poets of Our Own Lives: ’ Pragmatism and Romanticism,” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 34�2 (2009): 293-314� 2 For a discussion of Rorty’s private-public distinction, see Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989), 204-10; Nancy Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technocracy,” Reading Rorty , ed� Alan Malachowski (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 303-21; Richard J� Bernstein, “Rorty’s Liberal Utopia,” The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/ Postmodernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 258-92; Richard J. Bernstein, “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” Richard Rorty , ed� Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley (New York: Cambridge UP, 2003), 124-38; Simon Critchley, “Deconstruction and Pragmatism - Is Derrida a Private Ironist or a Pub- “This morning I read as angels read” 171 split is of great importance� Rorty writes: “My ‘poeticized’ culture is one which has given up the attempt to unite one’s private ways of dealing with one’s finitude and one’s sense of obligation to other human beings” (1989: 68). While we can be playful and creative ironists or strong poets at home, Rorty wants to persuade us that it is crucial to concentrate all our energies on the attempt to establish a liberal consensus in the public realm� Rorty’s notion of self-creation and his liberal private-public distinction are also important as far as his critique of Foucault is concerned� What Rorty’s critique of Foucault boils down to is that the latter refuses to accept the liberal insistence on the necessity of a private-public split and too often wants his selfcreation and radical autonomy to shape the public sphere� Following Rorty, there are many passages in Foucault that “exemplify what Bernard Yack has called the ‘longing for total revolution,’ and the ‘demand that our autonomy be embodied in our institutions�’ It is precisely this sort of yearning which I think should, among citizens of a liberal democracy, be reserved for private life� The sort of autonomy which self-creating ironists like Nietzsche, Derrida, or Foucault seek is not the sort of thing that could ever be embodied in social institutions” (ibid� 65)� On Rorty’s account, one should “[p]rivatize the Nietzschean-Sartrean-Foucauldian attempt at authenticity and purity” (65)� Rorty’s “political differences with Foucault” (67) become especially obvious in his piece “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault�” This essay starts with a discussion of a problem which is central to many of Rorty’s texts, namely, the tension which is characteristic of a romantic intellectual who is not only a self-creator, self-inventor, and ironic redescriber but also a citizen of a liberal democratic society� As long as this romantic intellectual is willing to leave his ironic redescriptions and his desire for conceptual novelty and stimulating sets of new metaphors behind when he enters the public sphere, there will be no problem� Rorty’s contention is that it is only when a Romantic intellectual begins to want his private self to serve as a model for other human beings that his politics tend to become antiliberal� When he begins to think that other human beings have a moral duty to achieve the same inner autonomy as he himself has achieved, then he begins to think about political and social changes which will help them do so (1991: 194)� It is interesting to see that Rorty avers that Foucault, in spite of the fact that he wanted to invent and create his own self as much as Nietzsche did, most of the time was willing to leave other people alone in their private sphere and was satisfied with the attempt to reduce unnecessary suffering and to fight injustice in the public sphere. In other words, Rorty claims that Foucault’s politics was often comparable to the liberal understanding of the task politics has to fulfill. However, there were other times when Foucault unforlic Liberal? ,” Deconstruction and Pragmatism , ed� Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 19-40; Chantal Mouffe, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy,” Deconstruction and Pragmatism , ed� Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 1-12; and Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996), 173-79� 172 u lf s chulenBerg tunately “ran together his moral and his ethical identity - his sense of his responsibility to others and his rapport à soi � At these times, like Nietzsche’s case, the results were bad” (1991: 194)� Foucault’s desire for radical autonomy, his Nietzschean anti-Platonism, antifoundationalism, and perspectivism, his nominalist historicism, his Blanchotian desire to be a rootless and faceless stranger to his audience (‘le philosophe masqué’), and his preoccupation with the notions of transgression and negativity - Rorty of course maintains that all this belongs to the idea of self-creation or self-fashioning in the private sphere and will moreover be a hindrance to the attempt to establish a liberal consensus in the public sphere� Rorty underscores that he wishes that Foucault “had been more willing to separate his two roles - more willing to separate his moral identity as a citizen from his search for autonomy� Then he might have had more resistance to the temptation to which Nietzsche and Heidegger succumbed - the temptation to try to find a public, political counterpart of this latter, private search” (196)� It should be clear by now that Rorty’s bête noire is an attempt to regard the ironic or romantic intellectual’s goal of self-creation or self-overcoming as a model for a liberal society� We can become the poets of our own lives in the private sphere, we can present ourselves as strong poets introducing radically new ways of speaking and new vocabularies in the private realm, but what we need in the public realm, according to Rorty, is a common vocabulary which can be understood and used by everyone� He speaks of a “banal moral vocabulary” (196) in this context� Faithful to John Stuart Mill, Rorty points out: “The point of a liberal society is not to invent or create anything, but simply to make it as easy as possible for people to achieve their wildly different private ends without hurting each other” (196)� Rorty uses Foucault to draw attention to the allegedly damaging consequences of the refusal to divide the public from the private sphere� Rorty thinks that Foucault, like Nietzsche, “was a philosopher who claimed a poet’s privileges” (198). However, we have seen that when the (strong) poet enters the public realm there are two possibilites for him: he either behaves like the average liberal citizen and uses a common vocabulary, or he insists on his autonomy, purity, and creativity and thus becomes useless or at worst dangerous� In his essays on Derrida, Rorty repeatedly underlines how much he values the creative, funny, and allusive side of this French philosopher� But he simultaneously states that the line of ironist theorizing which runs from Hegel through Foucault and Derrida is “largely irrelevant to public life and to political questions� Ironist theorists like Hegel, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault seem to me invaluable in our attempt to form a private self-image, but pretty much useless when it comes to politics” (1989: 83). In “Foucault and Epistemology,” Rorty’s ambivalent attitude toward Foucault’s writings also becomes obvious� According to Rorty, Foucault on the one hand comes dangerously close to presenting a successor theory to epistemology and this is clearly incompatible with his Nietzschean attitude� Consequently, Rorty calls The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault’s “least successful book” (1986: 43). On the other hand, Rorty contends that Foucault helped us “This morning I read as angels read” 173 realize the possibility of establishing a postmetaphysical culture, a culture, that is, “which lacked not only a theory, not only a sense of progress, but any source of what Nietzsche called ‘metaphysical comfort�’ I do not know what such a culture would be like, and I am uncertain about both its possibility and its desirability� But sometimes I think that Foucault has caught a glimpse of it” (48). The Rortyan uncertainty as to the desirability of such a postmetaphysical or poeticized culture would of course vanish in his later texts� For our purposes it is crucial to see that as regards Foucault’s political position, Rorty once again emphasizes that “much of Foucault’s so-called ‘anarchism’ seems to me self-indulgent radical chic” (47)� In view of what I have said so far, the question inevitably arises as to how Foucault understands the relation between the private and the public realm� The two books which were published shortly before his death, L’Usage des plaisirs and Le Souci de soi (both in 1984), are particularly valuable in this context� As far as I can see, Rorty never discussed these later texts in his writings� The notion of self-creation was of utmost importance to the late Foucault� In “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” an interview with Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus, Foucault calls attention to the fact that the art of existence seem to no longer play any role in contemporary society� In a by now famous statement he formulates as follows: What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life� That art is something which is specialized or done by experts who are artists� But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life? (1983: 261). What interests Foucault in Greco-Roman culture is what the Greeks termed ‘epimeleia heautou,’ which means taking care of one’s self (‘cura sui’ in Latin)� Faithful to the idea of a Nietzschean genealogy as a critique of the present, a critique that is historical, material, multiple, and corporeal, Foucault maintains that this notion of a care of the self is almost forgotten now: We have hardly any remnant of the idea in our society that the principal work of art which one must take care of, the main area to which one must apply aesthetic values, is oneself, one’s life, one’s existence. We find this in the Renaissance, but in a slightly academic form, and yet again in nineteenth-century dandyism, but those were only episodes (271)� In The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self Foucault seeks to answer the question of how and why sexuality was constituted as a moral domain in classical and late antiquity� Furthermore, he wants to elucidate how sexual activity and sexual pleasures were problematized through certain practices or technologies of the self and in what way individuals were offered the possibility of shaping themselves as ethical subjects� 3 While The Use of Pleasure 3 For a reading of Foucault’s notion of ethics, see Arnold Davidson, “Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought,” The Cambridge Companion to Foucault � Second Edition, ed� Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 115-40; Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: 174 u lf s chulenBerg concentrates on classical Greek culture of the fourth century B�C�, The Care of the Self discusses Greek and Roman texts from the first century B.C. to the first century A.D. Undoubtedly, one of the most stimulating aspects of Foucault’s last two books is his claim that what has always been his primary concern is “a history of truth” (1985: 6). Neither the archaeologist nor the structuralist nor the Nietzschean genealogist Foucault would have used this phrase in the way he uses it in The Use of Pleasure � Foucault of course does not use the concept of truth in a theoretical, that is, transcendental-Kantian way (in the sense of an epistemology of truth)� Rather, the ‘jeux de vérité’ are to be seen in connection with the idea of an ethics of truth� For our purposes, however, it is not the concept of truth which ought to be of main interest, but the return of the subject to the theoretical framework of a formerly radically antihumanist thinker who relentlessly argued for the disappearance or dissolution of the subject (or for the even more notorious ‘death of man’ - think of Les Mots et les choses )� It is the actions of men, their activity and creativity, which are central to the arts of existence� In the introduction to The Use of Pleasure Foucault explains the arts of existence thus: “What I mean by the phrase are those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria” (10f�)� The late Foucault is interested in the way man creates himor herself as a moral and as an aesthetic being� To a certain extent, this kind of self-creation can be seen as an internalization of the constraints of power relations� Foucault is of course perfectly aware that the project of self-creation is entwined with the power structures and mechanisms of Greek and Roman societies� However, I think his texts also show that the project of self-creation as self-fulfillment is more than an illusion of transitory freedom from the aforementioned power relations� Foucault focuses primarily on self-creation as transformation, on what Rorty would call gestalt switches� The Coleridgean and Nietzschean idea of creating the taste by which one will be judged by posterity also has to be considered in this context� Following Foucault, a history of the ways in which individuals constitute themselves as subjects of moral conduct or form themselves as ethical subjects ought to be “concerned with the models proposed for setting up and developing relationships with the self, for selfreflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, for the decipherment of the self by oneself, for the transformations that one seeks to accomplish with oneself as object” (29)� U of California P, 1998); John Rajchman, “Ethics after Foucault,” Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments � Volume III , ed� Barry Smart (London: Routledge, 1994), 190-207; Wilhelm Schmid, Auf der Suche nach einer neuen Lebenskunst: Die Frage nach dem Grund und die Neubegründung der Ethik bei Foucault (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000); and Wolfgang Kersting and Claus Langbehn (ed�), Kritik der Lebenskunst (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007)� “This morning I read as angels read” 175 In his important essay “Technologies of the Self,” Foucault discusses, among other texts, Plato’s Alcibiades I . This dialogue is one of the first texts where the concern with the care of the self is a central aspect� In the context of his discussion of the relation between the Delphic principle ‘Know yourself’ and the principle ‘Take care of yourself,’ as it is represented in Plato’s early dialogue, Foucault contends that for Alcibiades, a private-public distinction in the Rortyan sense is not feasible� On Foucault’s account, Alcibiades “must become active in the political and love game� Thus, there is a dialectic between political and erotic discourse� Alcibiades makes his transition in specific ways in both politics and love” (1982: 229). In contrast to the Rortyan attempt to confine self-creation to the private sphere, Foucault thinks that Alcibiades I shows that “[b]eing occupied with oneself and political activities are linked” (231)� In other words, the practices of the self, the technologies of the self, or the attempts at moral and aesthetic self-creation do have effects in the public sphere and therefore must not be analyzed in isolation� It is of utmost importance to see that Foucault repeatedly stressed that his discussion of classical antiquity must not be interpreted as showing a desire to return to the moral and sexual ways of the ancients� In many respects, as Foucault pointed out, these ways were severely limited and are utterly incompatible with our modern world� However, these ancient ways might be useful as heuristic guides for our own attempts at self-creation and self-fashioning� If the late Foucault is still a Nietzschean genealogist striving to grasp the complexity of the present, then this might indicate that he urges us not to confine the power of self-creation, the creativity of self-invention and the dark forces of self-overcoming, to the private sphere� To put this somewhat differently, one might feel inclined to suggest that Foucault, pace Rorty, at least indirectly warns against a depoliticization of self-creation� In his discussion of Greco-Roman culture, Foucault regards ethics as the relation an individual has with himself, and at the same time he argues that an ethical practice which depends on aesthetic criteria and which is nonuniversalizing and nonnormalizing should be seen in the larger social context� Ethics in the Foucauldian sense also refers to the struggle of subjects against the forces that try to dominate, manipulate, and subjugate them� That the care of the self is a political endeavor also becomes obvious in the final volume of The History of Sexuality , The Care of the Self � As Foucault maintains, the care of the self “constituted, not an exercise in solitude, but a true social practice” (1988: 51). Moreover, the care of the self in Roman culture appears “as an intensification of social relations” (53). In spite of important changes as far as the relation between the private and the public realm was concerned, the ancient societies, as Foucault underlines, “remained societies of promiscuity, where existence was led ‘in public’” (42)� In those ancient societies, the idea and practice of the care of the self did not imply the imperative to withdraw from the public sphere and to engage in a socially irresponsible narcissism� The ancient self-fashioner was not only expected to create a beautiful private self which others might feel tempted to emulate, but the art of living also had the important function to prepare him for his role as public man (in many 176 u lf s chulenBerg cases this meant his role as a politician)� Foucault’s contention is “that the doctrines that were most attached to austerity of conduct - and the Stoics can be placed at the head of the list - were also those which insisted the most on the need to fulfill one’s obligations to mankind, to one’s fellow-citizens, and to one’s family, and which were quickest to denounce an attitude of laxity and self-satisfaction in practices of social withdrawal” (42)� As far as I can see, in his discussion of the care of the self in classical and late antiquity Foucault never claims that the ancient societies saw the necessity of establishing a strict separation between the private and the public realm� On the contrary, what primarily preoccupies Foucault is the relation between the two spheres, the creative tension and reciprocal influence that can be detected between them� In an important passage he writes: And if one wishes to understand the interest that was directed in these elites to personal ethics, to the morality of everyday conduct, private life, and pleasure, it is not all that pertinent to speak of decadence, frustration, and sullen retreat� Instead, one should see in this interest the search for a new way of conceiving the relationship that one ought to have with one’s status, one’s functions, one’s activities, and one’s obligations (1988: 84). Without doubt, the last sentence in this quotation refers mainly to public ‘activities’ and ‘obligations�’ Foucault makes clear that in Hellenistic and Roman thought the care of the self, in the context of our discussion this means the work of the self-fashioner as strong poet and creative redescriber, should not be regarded as an alternative to civic activity and political responsibilities� In contrast to Rorty’s liberal position, Greco-Roman culture urges one to realize that in many respects the aesthetic and the political are entangled with one another and that in complex ways politics begins with the care of the self� For us today this also implies that philosophers as strong poets and specific intellectuals might eventually turn out to be useful to the public� With regard to the idea of a specific intellectual one has to see that Sartre’s notion of the general or universal intellectual was one of Foucault’s bêtes noires (for most post-1945 French intellectuals, Sartre could only serve as a kind of negative foil)� Concerning the aforementioned relation between the care of the self and the sphere of politics, Foucault writes: But it is not in this choice between participation and abstention that the principal line of division lies; and it is not in opposition to the active life that the cultivation of the self places its own values and practices. It is much more concerned to define the principle of a relation to self that will make it possible to set the forms and conditions in which political action, participation in the offices of power, the exercise of a function, will be possible or not possible, acceptable or necessary (1988: 86). In this first part of my paper, I have discussed two different notions of selfcreation� Furthermore, I have sought to elucidate Rorty’s and Foucault’s different ways of understanding the relation between the private and the public sphere� While the American liberal Rorty proclaims the necessity of a radical private-public split and thus confines the work of the self-fashioner as strong poet to the private sphere, the French post-Nietzschean genealogist suggests that a discussion of the care of the self in Greco-Roman culture shows that “This morning I read as angels read” 177 there are relations between the aesthetic and the political whose analysis might be useful for contemporary politics� Self-creation, in other words, must not be depoliticized� 2. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess , Aesthetics, and the Crisis of Black Politics The notion of self-creation and the relation between the private and public sphere play a crucial role in Du Bois’s Dark Princess � One would of course assume that this black intellectual and activist, like Foucault, argues against a strict separation between the private and public sphere and that he, moreover, emphasizes that aesthetics and politics are entangled with one another� Arguing for art as propaganda and an instrumentalization of the aesthetic in “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926) and other pieces, Du Bois introduced his own version of black leftist aesthetics� Authors as different as Ross Posnock, in Color & Culture (1998), and Monica Miller, in Slaves to Fashion (2009), have advanced the idea that Dark Princess illustrates that one of Du Bois’s primary goals was to advocate the aesthetic as political practice� I wish to complicate this notion by suggesting that in Dark Princess Du Bois does not depict the full potential of aesthetics to affect the public sphere� In spite of his attempt to politicize the aesthetic, Du Bois’s novel is governed by a too rigid privatepublic dichotomy, and this prevents the author from fully realizing the idea of an innovative and progressive black leftist politics in his text� When Du Bois published Dark Princess in 1928, his fascination with Marxism had long been obvious� Undoubtedly, one might feel inclined to aver that materialist aesthetics, with the possible exception of Adorno, has always been deplorably anemic and vulgar and that it, sadly enough, culminated in Lukács’s mechanistic reflection theory of art developed during his so-called middle period� However, for our purposes it is important to see that Dark Princess is of only limited value if one seeks to use it in order to elucidate the possibility of developing a black Marxist aesthetics� Rather, this novel combines Marxist, revolutionary, and pan-African politics with a partly depoliticized understanding of the function of art and literature� To put it differently, while the radical activist Du Bois strives to use art as propaganda, the protagonist of his novel, the black intellectual Matthew Towns, leaves the impression as if he were incapable of regarding aesthetics and politics as mutually influencing each other� What role does aesthetic form play for black radical politics? Is it possible to use poetic sensibility in order to create new visions and vocabularies in the public sphere? How might a strong poet as romantic in the Rortyan sense contribute to the development of leftist politics? I shall argue that Dark Princess does not answer these questions, although one might have expected an answer considering the author’s political position� 4 4 It is crucial to appreciate the status of my suggestions� I shall not offer a critique of the idea that art should function as propaganda and that it is legitimate to instrumentalize the aesthetic� This has been done numerous times, and most of those critiques are 178 u lf s chulenBerg When Du Bois published “Criteria of Negro Art” in 1926, he wanted to express his dissatisfaction with the development of the Harlem Renaissance. In his review of Claude McKay’s first novel Home to Harlem (1928), Du Bois would later criticize the author for concentrating exclusively on black promiscuity and moral degeneration instead of contributing to the fight for black political rights� Du Bois’s review of Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) was not as negative but it became obvious that Du Bois was unwilling to appreciate the formal complexity of this black modernist text� Underscoring that he felt “unduly irritated by this sort of thing” (1924: 1210), Du Bois seemed to hold that Toomer had been too much influenced by the formal experimentation of modernist writers such as Stein and Joyce and that this was damaging to his art� In “Criteria of Negro Art,” the author makes unequivocally clear that black art and literature ought to be seen as part of “a new battle” or “the great fight” (1926: 998, 993). In the most famous passage of this essay Du Bois contends: “Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists� I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy� I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda” (1000)� At the beginning of Dark Princess the protagonist is confronted with this question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics� After having fled a racist America in August 1923, the Hampton-educated, former medical student Matthew Towns becomes an exile in Berlin where he meets and falls in love with a beautiful woman of color, Princess Kautilya of India� Kautilya is the head of an organization, “a great committee of the darker peoples” (Du Bois 1928: 16; henceforth quoted as DP), which fights Western imperialism. Matthew immediately feels attracted to this Indian woman who elegantly combines socialism, anti-imperialism, and cosmopolitanism� At a dinner party given by the Princess, Matthew is introduced to a new world� The members of the committee of the darker peoples are sophisticated and cosmopolitan intellectuals from Japan, China, India, Egypt, and Arabia� “They talked art in French, literature in Italian, politics in German, and everything in clear English” (DP: 19)� Allusions to expressionism, cubism, futurism, vorticism, Proust, Croce, Schönberg, Picasso and Matisse only puzzle Matthew� He feels excluded from the dinner conversation and thinks that the other guests “easily penetrated worlds where he was a stranger� Frankly, but for the context he would not have known whether Picasso was a man, a city, or a vegetable� He had never heard of Matisse� Lightly, almost carelessly, as he thought, his companions leapt to unknown subjects” (DP: 20)� Moreover, during the conversation it becomes clear that the members of the committee are doubtful about the ability of people of African descent to contribute to their anti-imperialist struggle� As an African American, Matthew detects “the shadow of a color convincing� To many literary scholars, the notion of art as propaganda, or the idea of didactic art, is an abhorrence� I hope to offer a new perspective by calling attention to the question of how to interpret and productively use the difference between the theorist and activist Du Bois on the one hand and the political novelist on the other� “This morning I read as angels read” 179 line within a color line” (DP: 22)� Feeling “his lack of culture audible,” and in the confrontation with the doubt about “the ability, qualifications, and real possibilities of the black race in Africa or elsewhere” (DP: 24, 21), he suddenly finds himself singing a spiritual. By singing “Go Down, Moses” in front of these cosmopolitan intellectuals, Matthew seeks to urge his listeners to acknowledge the existence of African-American culture and its long tradition of resistance� While the cosmopolitan intellectuals show a rather elitist understanding of art and literature, Towns calls attention to the significance of the attempt to democratize culture and the aesthetic� This attempt, as he maintains, is typical of the U�S�: “America is teaching the world one thing and only one thing of real value, and that is, that ability and capacity for culture is not the hereditary monopoly of a few, but the widespread possibility for the majority of mankind if they only have a decent chance in life” (DP: 26)� The idea of democratizing access to art and the aesthetic is central to Du Bois’s thinking and to that of his protagonist in Dark Princess � In a Deweyan manner, Matthew strives to bring ordinary and aesthetic experience together� 5 According to Ross Posnock, Du Bois questions the following oppositions in “Criteria of Negro Art”: “Truth and Beauty, propaganda and art, politics and culture, aesthetic experience and American blacks” (1998: 139). A questioning of these dualisms is also central to Dark Princess � However, it is important to note in this context that while Matthew’s aesthetic education draws attention to the necessity of linking aesthetics and politics, it does not show how the former might creatively influence and shape, or redefine, the latter� Although Du Bois’s novel is meant to be directed against the ideology of aestheticized self-culture, many passages are governed by the dichotomy of private aesthetic education vs� public (radical) politics� In Slaves to Fashion , Monica Miller maintains that Matthew’s experience in Berlin has given him an “access to the aesthetic that bears a direct relation to politics and even revolutionary change” (2009: 153)� I wish to submit that it is precisely this idea of a ‘direct relation’ that should be questioned� After having become involved with the Council of the Darker Peoples of the World in Berlin, Matthew goes back to the U.S. He first works as a Pullman porter, becomes active in labor politics, and takes part in a scheme to dynamite a train which carries a delegation of Ku Klux Klansmen to a convention in Chicago� In the last minute, Matthew is persuaded by Kautilya, who unexpectedly also rides on the train, not to commit this act of violence� In the third part of the novel, Matthew becomes involved in Chicago machine politics� Working for the black Chicago ward politician and shady businessman Sammy 5 In this context, see John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 1980 [1934]); and Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art � Second Edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). In addition, see Winfried Fluck, “John Deweys Ästhetik und die Literaturtheorie der Gegenwart,“ Philosophie der Demokratie: Beiträge zum Werk John Deweys , ed� Hans Joas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 160-93; and Thomas M� Alexander, “The Art of Life: Dewey’s Aesthetics,” Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation , ed� Larry A� Hickman (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1998), 1-22. 180 u lf s chulenBerg Scott, Matthew is soon elected to the Illinois state legislature� He marries Scott’s secretary, the pathologically ambitious Sara Andrews, and eventually finds himself a tool of diverse interests. Matthew is perfectly aware that he is being manipulated by Scott and Sara� All idealism gone, he “gave up all thought of a career, of leadership, of greatly or essentially changing this world� He would protect himself from hurt” (DP: 126)� Matthew experiences a profound personal and existential crisis� His enthusiasm and his hope for political change are gone, and he sees life as “a great, immovable, terrible thing” (DP: 126)� At the same time, the reader becomes aware of the fact that the protagonist’s personal crisis also has political dimensions and that it has to be seen in connection with the problem of black leftist politics� Matthew, as the narrator underscores, has “no illusions as to American democracy” (DP: 126)� We shall see that the utopian element of black politics dominates the final part of Du Bois’s novel where the idea of a transnational and multiracial coalition becomes increasingly important� At the beginning of Matthew’s political career he rents an apartment in an old house in a working-class neighborhood� This apartment he furnishes with nothing but a bed, a chair, and a bureau� Yet the aspect of his apartment slowly begins to change� In a secondhand store, Matthew buys a rug which “burn[s] him with its brilliance” and which fascinates him because of “the subtle charm of its weaving and shadows of coloring” (DP: 128). He also has a parquet floor put in the living room. In the following months “the beauty of that room grew” (DP: 129)� Matthew’s awareness that self-creation in his public role as a local politician is impossible since he is nothing but a tool for Scott and Sara’s plans leads to his desire to fill this void. He is convinced that only the private realm offers a possibility of leading a different life, a life which consists of “beauty, music, books, leisure” (DP: 136)� Clearly, Matthew seeks to counterbalance the emptiness and meaninglessness of his public life as a politician with private aesthetic bliss� It is this private-public dichotomy which governs most of the novel� Concerning Matthew’s wife Sara, the narrator states that her “private life was entirely in public; her clothes, her limbs, her hair and complexion, her well-appointed home, her handsome, well-tailored husband and his career; her reputation for wealth” (DP: 153)� Her apartment “was machine-made, to be sure, but it was wax-neat and in perfect order” (DP: 137)� In contrast to Matthew, Sara buys books not to read them but “to fill the space above the writing desk” (DP: 137). Shortly before their marriage, Matthew and Sara have to furnish their new house� It becomes obvious in the text that this house will never be a home for Matthew since it is part of the public sphere governed by manipulation, greed, firm hierarchies, and the power of classifications. In the new house, there is “new and shining furniture, each piece standing exactly where it should” (DP: 142)� Furthermore, instead of a fireplace with real logs, which Matthew wants very much, there is “an electric log” (DP: 142)� Matthew, the aesthete, also does not like the “pictures and ornaments” (DP: 142) in the house� Consequently, “he went downtown and bought a painting which he had long coveted� It was a copy of a master - cleverly and daringly done with a flame of color and a “This morning I read as angels read” 181 woman’s long and naked body. It talked to Matthew of endless strife, of fire and beauty and never-dying flesh. He bought, too, a deliciously ugly Chinese god” (DP: 142f�)� Sara, of course, exchanges this painting for a realist painting of a landscape and she also hides the Chinese god in a dark corner� From what I have said so far it can be seen that the private-public dichotomy works on two levels� First, Matthew strictly separates his empty life as a politician from his moments of private aesthetic bliss� Second, the private-public dualism must also be understood spatially and geographically with his own apartment, growing increasingly beautiful, on the one hand, and Sara’s apartment, later their house, his office, and Scott’s office, on the other� The aversion of the (hyper)sensitive aesthete to the vulgarity, triviality, and depravity of (capitalist) modern society of course has a long tradition in Western literature� Its acme was reached in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884) whose protagonist, the dandy and aesthete Des Esseintes, creates an artificial paradise which even Baudelaire could not have dreamed of. 6 To what extent Matthew’s perspective is that of the aesthete can also be seen in his reaction to his fellow politicians� As a member of the Illinois legislature he is in almost daily contact with corrupt politicians, lobbyists, and other people who consider politics as a means of becoming powerful and rich� Matthew, as the narrator underscores, “disliked these men esthetically” (DP: 146)� The revolt which stirs in him “was not moral revolt� It was esthetic disquiet” (DP: 147)� Matthew’s revolt “was against things unsuitable, ill adjusted, and in bad taste; the illogical lack of fundamental harmony; the unnecessary dirt and waste - the ugliness of it all [���]” (DP: 147)� As I will argue further below, Matthew does not try to mediate between aesthetics and politics, that is, he does not seek to use his aesthetic insights, the realm of beauty and form, to transform and redefine politics. In spite of his ‘esthetic disquiet’ and his depressed mood, Matthew continues to play the political game� Having been elected to the state legislature, Sara and Scott’s next goal for Matthew is a seat in Congress� The higher he climbs up the political ladder, the more important the realm of beauty becomes for Matthew. He still has the apartment in the slums, “chiefly because Sara would not have the things he had accumulated there in her new and shining house; and he hated to throw them all away” (DP: 192)� The decoration of his refuge continues� Matthew buys a two-hundred-dollar “Turkish rug for the bedroom - a silken thing of dark, soft, warm coloring” (DP: 193)� He also buys “a copy of a Picasso - a wild, unintelligible, intriguing thing of gray and yellow and black” (DP: 193)� “[T]rying to counteract the ugliness of the congressional campaign” with the purchase of these beautiful things, 6 For an understanding of the phenomenon of dandyism, the following books are particularly suggestive: Susan Fillin-Yeh (ed�), Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture (New York: New York UP, 2001); Rhonda Garelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Peformance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988); and Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (New York: Viking Press, 1960)� 182 u lf s chulenBerg Matthew is fully aware of the fact that there “was no place in Sara’s house - it was always Sara’s house in his thought - for anything of this, for anything of his” (DP: 193)� One ought to note that Matthew’s apartment also is the place where he reads, or rather studies, books� Whereas Sara buys the collected works of Balzac since they nicely fill the space above the desk, Matthew’s books have been made “dirty and torn and dog-eared by reading” (DP: 193)� The “pamphlets” he has studied will not “stand straight or regular or in rows” (DP: 193)� Du Bois does not tell his readers what Matthew reads when alone in his apartment� The word ‘pamphlets’ of course indicates that he also studies political texts� However, the main problem, it seems, is that the author does not show to what extent Matthew’s (private) reading has an effect on his (political) thinking� If all art has to function as propaganda, according to Du Bois, the question inevitably arises as to why he refrains from depicting the changes which Matthew’s aesthetic education produces in his political thought� It is crucial to see that the private-public dichotomy not only structures the relation between aesthetics and machine politics, and between private and public space, but also that between aesthetics/ art and labor politics� After having ended his career as a Chicago politician, and after having spent a beautiful time with his lover Kautilya, Matthew starts to work as a common laborer� He digs tunnels for the new Chicago subway� In this new work, he experiences “a sense of reality” (DP: 264) such as he has never had before� Kautilya, who is about to go back to India to engage in the anti-imperialist struggle, and Matthew dismantle the latter’s apartment, “this little space of beauty” (DP: 263), and he moves to a sparely furnished room� In describing his work in a letter to Kautilya, Matthew points out how important his “physical emancipation” has become to him and that he almost fears “[d]reams and fancies, pictures and thoughts” (DP: 269) which dance in his head while he works� One day, Matthew arises with the dawn before work and starts reading Hamlet . It seems to him as if he were reading this drama for the first time. As he nicely describes his impression to Kautilya: This morning I read as angels read, swooping with the thought, keen and happy with the inner spirit of the thing� Hamlet lived, and he and I suffered together with an all too easily comprehended hesitation at life� I shall do much reading like this� I know now what reading is� I am going to master a hundred books (DP: 270)� Matthew is convinced that his new experience of reading will lead to his “purification,” and that it will offer him the possibility of rising “to the high and spiritual purity of love” (DP: 270)� The dichotomy of spiritual purification vs. physical emancipation is central here� Reading as angels read, the protagonist of Du Bois’s novel seems to cherish the idea of private perfection as long as it is separated from his physical emancipation� There is apparently no necessity of mediating between those two spheres since labor politics can go on as before� Workers that want their new aesthetic experiences, their angelic visions, as it were, to influence their politics would only be a hindrance to the emancipation of the (black) working class� Is that what Du Bois’s text says? How much Matthew’s think- “This morning I read as angels read” 183 ing is governed by a traditional (or ‘bourgeois’ in a somewhat old-fashioned terminology) understanding of art and beauty becomes clear in the following passage: If only I could work and work wildly, unstintingly, hilariously for six full, long hours; after that, while I lie in a warm bath, I should like to hear Tschaikowsky’s Fourth Symphony� You know the lilt and cry of it� There must be much other music like it� Then I would like to have clean, soft clothes and fair, fresh food daintily prepared on a shining table� Afterward, a ride in green pastures and beside still waters; a film, a play, a novel, and always you. You, and long, deep arguments of the intricate, beautiful, winding ways of the world; and at last sleep, deep sleep within your arms� Then morning and the fray (DP: 271)� Posnock has termed Matthew Towns a “political aesthete” (1995: 505)� This is problematic insofar as a political aesthete sees it as one of his primary tasks to elegantly bring aesthetics and politics together, to create new dynamic tensions and to detect stimulating reciprocal influences between these two. By contrast, Matthew lets his aesthetic education and his political work and thinking exist almost independently of each other� An important passage near the end of the novel confirms our suggestion that the private-public separation structures most of the text� Matthew is still a laborer, but one day he gets up and decides not to go to work� He goes to the art gallery instead� He is fascinated by the new exhibition which shows paintings from all over the world� Matthew visits this gallery day after day, completely forgets about his job, and bathes himself “in a new world of beauty” (DP: 279)� He spends a whole week at the gallery, fascinated with paintings by Monet, Matisse, Gauguin, Cézanne, Renoir, Picasso, and Van Gogh� What effect does this week at the art gallery have on Matthew? Do the colors of Monet and Matisse, the “mad lines” of Picasso, or “the lucent blue water” (DP: 280) of Cézanne change something in Du Bois’s protagonist? Furthermore, the question arises whether the influence of art and aesthetics on the thought of a young leftist intellectual must always be as openly depicted as, for instance, in Peter Weiss’s materialist Bildungsroman, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1983). Matthew’s reaction after his visit to the gallery differs from that of Weiss’s young heroes� After having slept “to dreams of clouds of light,” Matthew “rose the next morning light-headed, rested and strong, and went down blithely to that hole in the ground, to the grim, gigantic task� I was a more complete man - a unit of a real democracy” (DP: 280). Apparently, the week spent contemplating modern art has refreshed Matthew, it has strengthened him, so that he can go ‘blithely’ back to his hard labor� Again, the question must be posed why Du Bois does not tell his readers to what extent his protagonist is capable of using French impressionism and Van Gogh and Picasso’s modernism to give a new direction to his thought� Is he willing and able to use aesthetic form, impressionist coloring, avantgarde experimentation, and the vehemence of the new for the development 184 u lf s chulenBerg of new political ideas and concepts? 7 After his confrontation with this ‘new world of beauty,’ Matthew simply goes back to work, and joins the union after he is fired because of the week he stayed away from work. Modernist art and traditional labor politics again remain unmediated� What this also signifies is that aesthetic pleasure and traditional leftist politics exist in separate spheres� ‘I was a more complete man - a unit of a real democracy’ - this is as far as Du Bois goes� He depicts Matthew Towns as a black democrat and leftist intellectual with access to cultural capital who wants to democratize access to the aesthetic and who wants people to potentially use art and beauty in the fight for racial justice and black civil rights. Regarding the nature of the relation between aesthetics and politics, and the ways the former might have an effect on or even change the latter, the author remains deplorably vague� Following Monica Miller, Du Bois’s novel seeks to demonstrate that an “engagement with actual pieces of art, coupled with a sense of the potential liberating and focusing force of affect inspired by the aesthetic, serves rather than hinders the revolutionary cause” (2009: 155)� By contrast, I argue that Du Bois’s novel would have profited from showing the consequences of the protagonist’s ‘engagement with actual pieces of art’ and that the text, moreover, does not at all explain in what way ‘actual pieces of art’ and the aesthetic in general ‘serve’ the revolutionary cause� Consequently, I disagree with Miller when she advances the idea that Matthew, especially in the second half of Dark Princess , establishes “a relationship between political progress, freedom of the soul, and the value of contemplating the beautiful” (160-61)� Having escaped from Chicago machine politics, the lovers Kautilya and Matthew spend a beautiful time together� They create for themselves a small world of beauty, a world full of music, paintings, lovemaking, delicious food, and poetry� Kautilya laughs “in the sheer delight of it all” (DP: 220)� Their days are filled “with beauty and sound, full of color and content” (DP: 220). However, the radical activist Kautilya knows that this is not the real thing, 7 Even those theorists who consider materialist aesthetics as old-fashioned, or never interesting in the first place, are often willing to admit that Adorno’s elaborations on the significance of aesthetic form, the central category of his late Ästhetische Theorie , are highly stimulating� Adorno of course abhors the idea of art as propaganda� On his account, art is part of society, but its function is that of an antithesis: “Kunst ist die gesellschaftliche Antithesis zur Gesellschaft, nicht unmittelbar aus dieser zu deduzieren” (1973: 19); “Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it” (1997: 8). It is form which lets art become ‘the social antithesis of society.’ In order to fully grasp the significance of form for Adorno’s aesthetics, the following two sentences are crucial: “Der Formbegriff markiert die schroffe Antithese der Kunst zum empirischen Leben, in welchem ihr Daseinsrecht ungewiß ward� Kunst hat soviel Chance wie die Form, und nicht mehr” (1973: 213); “The concept of form marks out art’s sharp antithesis to an empirical world in which art’s right to exist is uncertain� Art has precisely the same chance of survival as does form, no better” (1997: 141)� In this context, see the chapter “T� W� Adorno; or, Historical Tropes” in Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971), 3-59; and “Truth-Content and Political Art” in his Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 1990), 220-25� “This morning I read as angels read” 185 as it were� This world of beauty can only be a temporary refuge from the real world of politics and activism� After Matthew’s decision to work as a laborer, Kautilya enthusiastically cries out: “For us now, life begins� Come, my man, we have played and, oh! such sweet and beautiful play� Now the time of work dawns” (DP: 256)� The dichotomy between play (in a not-quite-Schillerian sense) and work is obvious here� The world of beauty, throughout the novel, is too disconnected from the (real) world of work and politics to let Dark Princess illustrate the idea that the aesthetic might affect the public sphere� At the end of the novel, Du Bois becomes explicit regarding the respective status of beauty and work� In a passage where his Marxist penchant is obvious he characterizes Matthew’s attitude as follows: Now he would seek nothing but work, and work for work’s own sake� That work must be in large degree physical, because it was the physical work of the world that had to be done as prelude to its thought and beauty� And then beyond and above all this was the ultimate emancipation of the world by the uplift of the darker races (DP: 287). To what degree Du Bois had incorporated the Marxian base-superstructure model into his thinking in the 1920s and 1930s can also be seen in the following important passage from his autobiography Dusk of Dawn : [���] I believed and still believe that Karl Marx was one of the greatest men of modern times and that he put his finger squarely upon our difficulties when he said that economic foundations, the way in which men earn their living, are the determining factors in the development of civilization, in literature, religion, and the basic pattern of culture� And this conviction I had to express or spiritually die (1940: 775)� 8 Our contemporary perspective has of course been shaped by Althusserian and Jamesonian retheorizations of this Marxist model, yet for the purposes of this paper, suffice it to stress that the black leftist intellectual and activist Du Bois was admired for being a poet in the broadest sense whereas the same cannot be said of his hero in Dark Princess � Concerning Du Bois’s understanding of his role, Cornel West correctly maintains: “Like Emerson, Du Bois always viewed himself as a poet in the broad nineteenth-century sense; that is, one who creates new visions and vocabularies for the moral enhancement of humanity. This poetic sensibility is manifest in his several poems and five novels” (1989: 142). By contrast, Matthew’s ‘poetic sensibility’ seems mostly confined to the private sphere, limited to the task of aesthetic education and self-creation, and it thus does not lead to ‘new visions and vocabularies’ in the public sphere� 8 For a discussion of Du Bois’s Marxism, see Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1976), 163-69; Cedric J� Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition � Second Edition (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000), 185-240; and David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 496-553� 186 u lf s chulenBerg However, against my argument one could say that Dark Princess does offer a ‘new vision,’ namely, a leftist cosmopolitanism and transnational radical politics� Paul Gilroy speaks of an “intercultural, transnational anti-imperialist alliance” (1993: 144) in this context� 9 This idea of a transnational radical alliance is indeed central to Du Bois’s novel� During the aforementioned dinner Kautilya explains the goals of the Council of the Darker Peoples of the World by underscoring “that Pan-Africa belongs logically with Pan-Asia” (DP: 20)� Matthew’s “great dream of world alliance” and Kautilya’s vision of a “new vast union of the darker peoples of the world” and “a mighty synthesis”(DP: 187, 246, 286) not only refer to an ideal, but they also call attention to the existence of a new version of transnational politics� While Matthew is caught up in Chicago machine politics, Kautilya helps organize a congress in London where, for the first time, “the leaders of a thousand million of the darker peoples” are brought together with “black Africa and black America” (DP: 225)� Kautilya makes clear that during this congress “one great new thing emerged,” namely, that the participants “recognized democracy as a method of discovering real aristocracy” (DP: 225). What this signifies is that Kautilya’s, and her fellow agitators’, theoretical approach, this stimulating mixture of socialism, antiracism, anticolonialism, and cosmopolitanism, strives to combine the liberation of the black masses and the black working class with the discovery and education of the Talented Tenth� Kautilya formulates thus: “We looked frankly forward to raising not all the dead, sluggish, brutalized masses of men, but to discovering among them genius, gift, and ability in far larger number than among the privileged and ruling classes� Search, weed out, encourage; educate, train, and open all doors! Democracy is not an end; it is a method of aristocracy” (DP: 225)� 10 Du Bois’s leftist cosmopolitanism, as he develops it in Dark Princess , ought to be seen as an answer to the crisis of black politics� In this context it is crucial to see that in the 1920s and 1930s Du Bois’s attitude toward communism and socialism was ambivalent� He claimed, for instance, that the “American Socialist party is out to emancipate the white worker and if this does not automatically free the colored man, he can continue in slavery” (1931: 590)� What this boiled down to was his conviction that Marxism, a diagnosis and critique of the situation in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, had to be radically modified in the U.S., and especially with regard to the situation of black workers� In Dark Princess the seriously troubled relationship between black and white labor also plays an important role� Working as 9 In this context, see Bill V� Mullen, “Du Bois, Dark Princess , and the Afro-Asian International,” positions 11: 1 (2003): 217-39� In addition, see Robert Gregg and Madhavi Kale, “ The Negro and the Dark Princess : Two Legacies of the Universal Races Congress,” Radical History Review 92 (Spring 2005): 133-52, and Amor Kohli, “But that’s just mad! Reading the Utopian Impulse in Dark Princess and Black Empire ,” African Identities 7: 2 (May 2009): 161-75� 10 For a critique of Du Bois’s “inability to immerse himself fully in the rich cultural currents of black everyday life” and of his “inadequate grasp of the tragicomic sense of life,” see West (1996: 56, 57)� “This morning I read as angels read” 187 a scullion on a ship on his way back to the U�S� after his exile in Berlin, Matthew is forced to recognize that his fellow workers “despised themselves” (DP: 38). There is not the slightest trace of solidarity among the workers on this ship: “There was so little kindness or sympathy for each other here among these men� They loved cruelty� They hated and despised most of their fellows, and they fell like a pack of wolves on the weakest� Yet they all had the common bond of toil; their sweat and the sweat of toilers like them made one vast ocean around the world” (DP: 40)� Further below in the text the formulations resemble those of Du Bois’s “The Class Struggle” and “Marxism and the Negro Problem�” The narrator’s contention is that blacks “looked upon the white labor unions as open enemies because the stronger and better-organized white unions deliberately excluded Negroes� The whole economic history of the Negro in Chicago was a fight for bread against white labor unions” (DP: 178). While Du Bois’s ‘Romance,’ as Dark Princess is subtitled, seeks to cope with this crisis of black politics, it does not fully answer the question as to where the poets’ place is in this new political vision� In a letter to Kautilya Matthew writes: “They that do the world’s work must do it [sic] thinking� The thinkers, dreamers, poets of the world must be its workers� Work is God” (DP: 266)� What becomes obvious in sentences like these is the tension between the self-creation of the poet who wrote The Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater , with their innovative and unpredictable combination of autobiography, history, sociological analysis, short story, and poetry, and Matthew’s understanding of art and the task of the poet� The difference between the author and the protagonist of Dark Princess illuminates the multilayered complexity of a black leftist aesthetics� 3. Conclusion In this paper, I have discussed three different ways of understanding the notion of self-creation, as well as three ways of grasping the relation between the private and public sphere� My discussion of Rorty and Foucault has prepared the ground, and offered the conceptual tools, for an analysis of Du Bois’s Dark Princess � Du Bois’s second novel is an interesting text insofar as it indirectly, and involuntarily, problematizes the author’s own dictum that all art is propaganda� Dark Princess combines Marxist, revolutionary, and pan- African politics - a leftist cosmopolitanism or transnational radical politics as an answer to the crisis of black politics - with a partly depoliticized understanding of art and literature that would rather find its place in a liberal framework� Furthermore, Dark Princess to a high degree is governed by materialist thought, yet uses it in too reductionist a manner� Du Bois’s aesthetics are dominated by the base-superstructure model, and this leads to his protagonist’s incapability of productively mediating between aesthetics and politics� I have argued that Matthew’s poetic sensibility is too consigned to the private sphere and too focused on the task of aesthetic education and 188 u lf s chulenBerg self-creation. Hence, the novel makes it difficult for the reader to imagine the possible consequences of the poet’s work in the public sphere� When the contemplation of art contributes to the development of a fuller self, as Du Bois’s novel suggests, the text seems to avoid an answer to the question of what would happen if the full selves of individuals with their creative energies were offered the possibility of shaping the public realm by means of their radical politics� Paradoxically enough for a political author, in Dark Princess the world of art and beauty is too disconnected from the (real) world of work and politics to allow this novel to contribute to an illumination of the idea that the aesthetic might affect the public sphere� All three authors discussed in this paper, in spite of their profound differences, call attention to the importance of the following question: Where is the poets’ place? I have sought to elucidate some implications of the question of whether their versions of self-creation or self-fashioning ought to be confined to the private sphere or whether they on the contrary ought to play a role in the public sphere� Du Bois talks about his attempt to become “the poet of his own life” (cf. Nietzsche 1887: 538) in Dusk of Dawn � He concentrates on his poetic self-creation in the chapter “Education,” where he describes his reaction upon first arriving in Europe. Du Bois stresses that in Europe “something of the possible beauty and elegance of life permeated my soul; [���] Form, color, and words took new combinations and meanings” (1940: 587). It is precisely this idea of ‘form, color, and words’ taking ‘new combinations and meanings’ in a transnational or cosmopolitan perspective which Du Bois repeatedly discusses in his texts� A cosmopolitan and political aesthete, Du Bois put an emphasis on the necessity of the attempt to mediate between aesthetics and politics, and he moreover advocated the aesthetic as political practice� His failure to depict a successful mediation between aesthetics and politics in Dark Princess , however, ought to be regarded as a questioning of his own dictum that all art is propaganda� Du Bois’s work as a poet in the Emersonian and Rortyan sense and Matthew reading like angels read show that in full modernism the autonomy of art, that is, the self-reflexivity, opacity, and radical novelty of those forms, colors, and words, productively complicates the relation between the private and public sphere� “This morning I read as angels read” 189 Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W� Ästhetische Theorie � Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973 [1970]� ---� Aesthetic Theory � Trans� Robert Hullot-Kentor� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997� Baudelaire, Charles� Selected Writings on Art and Literature � Trans� P�E� Charvet� New York: Penguin, 2006� Du Bois, W�E�B� “The Younger Literary Movement�” 1924� W.E.B. 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Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth. Ed� Paul Rabinow� Trans� Robert Hurley et al� New York: The New Press, 1997� 303-319� --- (1984b). “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations.” 1984. Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth. Ed� Paul Rabinow� Trans� Robert Hurley et al� New York: The New Press, 1997� 111-119� ---� The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality. Volume 2. Trans� Robert Hurley� New York: Vintage, 1985. ---� The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality. Volume 3. Trans� Robert Hurley� New York: Vintage, 1988. Gilroy, Paul� The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness � Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993� Miller, Monica L� Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity � Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009� Nietzsche, Friedrich� Die fröhliche Wissenschaft . 1887. Kritische Studienausgabe Band 3. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988. Posnock, Ross� “The Distinction of Du Bois: Aesthetics, Pragmatism, Politics�” American Literary History 3�3 (1995)� 500-524� ---� Color & Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual � Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998. Rorty, Richard� “Foucault and Epistemology�” Foucault: A Critical Reader. Ed� David Couzens Hoy. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1986. 41-49. ---� Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity . New York: Cambridge UP, 1989. ---� “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault�” Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers. Volume 2. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991. 193-198. West, Cornel� The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism � Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989. 190 u lf s chulenBerg ---� “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization�” The Future of the Race. Eds� Henry Louis Gates, Jr�, and Cornel West� New York: Vintage, 1996� 53-112� ---� Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism � New York: Penguin, 2004� J onathan g aBoury The Gothic Leadership of Martin Delany and Delany’s Blake Martin Delany, the father of American Black Nationalism, moved to Chatham, Canada West, in 1856. Chatham was once heralded as the Black Man’s Mecca for its critical embrace of fugitive slaves, but perhaps more beguilingly in 2003 it was crowned the twin city of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, the town where, in 1859, messianic abolitionist John Brown led twenty-one white and black soldiers into the dizzy cul-de-sac of thwarted slave insurrection� Such geographical sanctioning of Harpers Ferry by way of Chatham, this mirroring of cities, proposes a symmetrical relationship between the two on two counts: the first, in Chatham, Delany met with John Brown to discuss the Underground Railroad as well as Harpers Ferry, but Delany refused to participate in the future raid; and the second symmetrical relationship, in his novel Blake , Delany does what Brown did, that is, his persona Henry Blake secretly orchestrates slave rebellion in the American South, and then later in Cuba, a geographical movement which Eric Sundquist sees as “a kind of twin, a shadow play, of the American South” (185), only for the serialized novel to break off on the cusp of final insurrection. Blake ends as a character known for brandishing a carving knife “left the room to spread among the blacks an authentic statement of the outrage: ‘Woe be unto those devils of whites, I say! ’” (313)� The novel as we have it today is resolutely irresolute, and this narrative incompleteness circumstantially becomes another refusal of violence on Delany’s part� Refusal, I argue, accomplishes what twinning accomplishes: it corrects a preconceived singularity or single-mindedness (both Brown’s), and therefore renders asymmetrical the overtly symmetrical act of twinning� The Twinning Proclamation for the municipality of Chatham-Kent “recognizes the importance of twinning with other communities as a means of providing both leadership and historical knowledge to local residents and visitors to the community” (Corporation of the Municipality of Chatham-Kent)� These official words describe Delany’s own goals as an exemplary Black leader, which are precisely predicated on rejecting a twinned identity with John Brown and Harpers Ferry� While the twinning “will allow Chatham-Kent to further explore its shared cultural history with that community” (ibid�), Harpers Ferry, and what was portentous, violent, and unsuccessful about 1859, will rather be recuperated by Chatham and by Delany himself� Delany is made into a kind of doppelganger of Brown: bound to him, chastising him, shadowing him - and I use “shadowing” with all the racial implications behind it� I aim to see Delany as a facilitator of urgent hyperbolic suspense, and I will risk the American literary trope of blackness, that trope of white anxiety articulated 192 J onathan g aBoury by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark , by calling Delany a proponent of gothic leadership� If, as Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith claim, “The Gothic is the perfect anonymous language for the peculiar unwillingness of the past to go away” (4), then Delany’s serialized ethic will not go away, will in fact keep extending itself, until it encroaches upon every subject’s territory� What is at stake, beyond the obvious, in thinking of Martin Delany as a corrective to John Brown and to his efforts at insurrection and emancipation? It is difficult to deny that the old saw of the exceptional American figure categorically binds Delany to Brown and both Delany and Brown to someone like John Wilkes Booth� Each mobilized a conspiracy for the liberation or redemption of a larger body (although Delany did so in fiction). To construct this continuum of leaders from Brown to Delany and Delany’s Blake to Booth by way of Abraham Lincoln, circa 1856 to 1865, might seem counterintuitive, because politically one would then be aligning Delany’s fiction with Brown’s raid and Booth’s assassination, the two contradictory-to-each-other violent public actions of the few in the service of the many which retrospectively bracket the American Civil War� These events trouble and delegitimize the claim of the few or the one to speak for a people, whether Brown for slaves or Booth for the South� Both actions, regardless of intent, are immediately neutralized by the media and the state, such that antislavery and proslavery causes are temporarily rendered interchangeable or negligible, only to become untangled in posterity� 1 The synecdochical dangers of a minority’s small numbers are Delany’s too, both in reality and in fiction, but unlike Brown’s or Booth’s leadership, Delany’s only approaches the brink of violent or even overt action� Speaking about the Chatham conference, Robert S� Levine tries to recreate Delany’s mindset: surely “Brown would liberate but, Delany may have wondered, would he regenerate? ” (183). This thought allows us to read Delany’s refusal 1 For example, on February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech at the Cooper Union in Manhattan to officially distance the Republican Party from John Brown’s image and his “peculiar” and “absurd” raid (125)� He does so by rhetorically transmuting Brown into an “enthusiast” and the raid into an “affair”: “That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors� An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them� He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution” (125)� Similarly, in a study of newspapers, speeches, and letters from the week after Lincoln’s assassination, Thomas Reed Turner observes the “relative infrequency with which the assassin’s name was mentioned in sermons … almost as if Booth did not exist as an individual� The lack of urgency that most pastors felt about the apprehension of Booth also shows that they believed he was merely a tool” (80). This co-optation of representative claims is a response to the seemingly anti-democratic provocation of small numbers and, as Arjun Appadurai argues, “the associated dangers of nepotism, collusion, subversion, and deception” (240)� Speaking of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), in which a slave revolt is orchestrated to the point of invisibility, Sundquist contends that Melville “wrote in a culture in which every gesture toward slave subversion was itself open to countersubversion - if not by proslavery polemicists then by the forces of northern political and popular culture,” such as minstrelsy (139)� The Gothic Leadership of Martin Delany and Delany’s Blake 193 to participate in terms of posterity (regeneration as an end) and not methodology (armed insurrection as the means)� With respect to posterity, it is instructive to consider how Delany mourns President Lincoln’s assassination� 2 He calls for “every individual of our race [to] contribute one cent ” (392) towards the creation of a “ very African” statue of commemoration: “an ideal representative genius of the race, as Europa, Britannia, America, or the Goddess of Liberty, is to the European race” (394)� The statue works as a tribute to the Emancipation Proclamation and, more significantly, to numerical accountability: the statue is reverential, but also material and financial. The call for many first transactions as freepersons envisions future enfranchised transactions, which will leave behind, or create the sediment of, a “very African” quasi-national symbol� Delany writes, “The penny, or one cent contribution, would amount to the handsome sum of forty thousand (40,000) dollars, as a tribute from the black race … and would not at all be felt” (393), which satirically contrasts the excessive emotion elicited by Lincoln’s funeral processions with Delany’s sober response (which punningly “would not at all be felt ”)� The project of African regeneration was for Delany often unwieldy, and his career vacillates and heaves between commitments and ideologies� Arming slaves with pikes is desirable, but not simple; one must also be armed with education and community� 3 Paul Gilroy calls Delany “a figure of extraordinary complexity whose political trajectory through abolitionisms and emigrationisms … dissolves any single attempts to fix him as consistently either conservative or radical” (20)� Delany’s restlessness of thought is crucial for understanding his exemplarity, which every critical study of Delany must personify with a litany of his Renaissance man doings� Here, for example, is Robert S� Levine’s list: “social activist and reformer, black nationalist, abolitionist, physician, reporter and editor, explorer, jurist, realtor, politician, publisher, educator, army officer, ethnographer, novelist, and political and legal theorist” (2003a: 1)� Delany’s serialized novel Blake; or The Huts of America was written and published over the years 1859 and 1861-62, and it metamorphosed as Delany wrestled with the concentrated blunders and surrenders of the United States in the 1850s, such as the Fugitive Slave Law, the Dred Scott ruling, the raid on Harpers Ferry, and the debates around emigration versus colonization and the possible American annexation of Cuba� In short, his career and book are similarly fluctuating. The eclecticism of his career divests Delany of the exclusionary monomania of John Brown� He is so thoroughly embedded in the realpolitik of a black activist under slavery that it is more fitting to say that Delany is an incessantly inclusive presence, which means that as a kind of racial agnostic 2 I am fusing together two separate notices published 13 May and 10 June 1865 in the Weekly Anglo-African � 3 Delany differs from Brown on these two matters� Paraphrasing David Reynolds, Jonathan Earle writes that “the raid reflected Brown’s overconfidence in white people’s ability to rise above racism and black people’s willingness to rise against their masters in armed insurrection…” (29)� 194 J onathan g aBoury he must reexamine his own beliefs as the legal and social status of blacks is blocked, upended, or destroyed� For instance, his emigrationist stance paused when Lincoln made Delany the first black major during the Civil War in 1865. The fictional Henry Blake reflects this self-effacing self-reappraisal as well: Bruce A� Harvey notes that Blake has the “visionary faculties of a millennial redeemer� He never suffers, however, from religious delusions or the self-absorption of the fanatic” (227)� There is one overt Blake-as-Moses parallel in the novel, but it is brief, literary, and not at all delusional� On the shores of the Red River, Blake intones, Could I but climb where Moses stood, And view the landscape o’er; Not Jordan’s streams, nor death’s cold flood, Could drive me from the shore! (69) The song’s “coulds” place the Biblical precedent at an arm’s length, and in the novel there are several hesitations by Blake about whether he is fit to be a representative of the race� Indeed, to frame the song, we are told that “a feeling of humbleness and a sensibility of unworthiness impressed him” (69)� Hesitation is narrated, is engaged with, because the necessity of liberation demands coordination, which demands a leader, but these necessities do not build a space for any particular person, the arbitrariness and necessity of which demands some leader sooner rather than later, more preventative than perfect� Yet, even as Delany refuses the arbitrariness of the position of leader, he is nevertheless insistent on the rightness of himself, maybe not as leader but as example (Levine wryly claims that “clearly he protested too much” [2003b: 71]�)� In Blake , Henry Blake is described as “the singular black man” (79), and we are told that “Henry was a black - a pure Negro - handsome, manly and intelligent” (16)� Blake’s persuasive skin color (part of a doctrine of Ethiopianism) is contrasted with a variety of complexions, such as the “orange-peel” (192) of the Cuban poet Placido, just as, outside the text, William Lloyd Garrison’s description “black as jet” (qtd� in Levine 2003b: 69) positions Delany himself against Frederick Douglass, the other prominent public spokesman for black identity, whose skin is lighter� For Delany, the “pure Negro” will make the best case for equality to whites� 4 Delany struggles with the tension between ego and community that is inherent in action� On the one hand, he insists on what Harvey calls the “secretive enclaves” of Black Freemasonry for their discipline and elitism, 4 Addressing what Harvey sees as “Delany’s elite politics of black male leadership” (205), Ifeoma Nwankwo raises the issue that in Blake “[t]he expansion of the territorial boundaries of Blackness does not lead to an expansion of the gender boundaries of Blackness or the definition of a true race leader” (57). I am lenient toward the novel’s smooth-it-away operations because they themselves are unstable in their assertions� By the end of the novel, Blake the leader has “nothing to say” (311), Placido, his righthand man, has been “mutilated and crippled” (308), and a violated Ambrosina, of the prominent Cordora family, reluctantly professes her faith in a smoothed-out group, “My lot is cast with that of my race, whether for weal or woe” (313), right before Gondolier gets the last word� The Gothic Leadership of Martin Delany and Delany’s Blake 195 and where Delany can position himself as the exemplary Black leader (233)� On the other hand, he espouses the vision of a Pan-African community that defies national precincts and resists what Gilroy calls “ethnic absolutisms” (29)� Maurice Wallace sees Delany as a “disciplinary individual” (404): a deliberately crafted model, a black image to be transmitted through time, one that is “typical, general and reproducible,” according to Mark Seltzer (qtd� in Wallace 397)� Wallace theorizes that “the disciplinary individual submits his body, Pauline fashion, to the will and muscles of the body politic” (404), and in this submission we can see why in part two of Blake , as he travels to and across Cuba, Blake is “strangely passive” (Delany 236)� A lengthy affair in the second half of the serialized novel sees Blake aboard the slave ship Vulture , home to its own conspiracy, and Delany’s prose exchanges the singularity of Blake (his narrative primacy) for the sublime sensationalism of natural and moral parallels, sympathies, and doublings: The black and frowning skies and raging hurricane above; the black and frowning slaves with raging passions below, rendered [the scene] dreadful without, fearful within, and terrible all around� Whilst captain, mate, and crew were with might and main struggling against the fierce contending elements above, the master spirit of the captives seized the opportunity to release his fellow slaves from their fetters (234)� Like the language, the slave insurrection roils without ever running over; the weather breaks� Levine suggests that by making Blake a spectator, detached from this conspiracy, Delany “may be giving expression to his own fears … that uncontrolled revolution could erupt as a form of intemperance” (208). However, this “self-directed critique,” in Harvey’s words (233), is doubtlessly courted in structural terms since the novel’s extension into Cuba repudiates a series of self-enclosed circles of meaning: Blake as a lone leader, slavery as a concrete entity or merely Southern institution, the United States as a site for regeneration, and the American Revolution as a model for rebellion� 5 The conspiracy’s hemispheric expansion cannot be diluted by a charge of monomania, which is mad Ahab’s disease, inaugurated by the trauma of a torn limb: in other words, one may call John Brown a monomaniac, but how could we ever risk calling Delany one? According to Robert E� McGlone, in his book on John Brown, “[m]onomania became a catchall term for the singleminded pursuit of a chimerical goal, the cliché malady of the ambitious or obsessional, and a facile explanation for isolated acts of violence” (176), such as a mother killing her child� McGlone claims that American physicians who used the term “banished those who were so alienated from or incensed by the indifference or depravity of society as to abandon a settled vocation and inflict their madness on the world” (177). This nineteenth-century diagnosis “banished” deviant or errant elements from society, and we can see how this charge would be farcical if applied to Delany: he is already banished because he is disenfranchised� In Blake , what Delany gives us instead of the banish- 5 See Andy Doolen’s essay about how “the Revolution … cannot serve as the ideological origin for a black independence struggle that exceeds national time and space” (157)� 196 J onathan g aBoury ing monomania of Brown is an inflected, sympathetic, dispersed, but still obsessive, monomania� As he recruits members for the mission, Blake recites his credo: All you have to do, is to find one good man or woman - I don’t care which, so that they prove to be the right person - on a single plantation, and hold a seclusion and impart the secret to them, and then the organizers of their own plantation, and they in like manner impart it to some other next to them, and so on� In this way it will spread like smallpox among them” (41)� Blake is monomaniacal because of the single-mindedness of its non-chimerical mission (immediate emancipation) and its method (the initiation and installation of many ones in many places), but more importantly because it promotes single-mindedness and the eradication of racial nuance in whites� Early in the novel, Colonel Franks reacts to Henry’s impudence by “seiz[ing] a revolver” and when asked about the meaning of this action he responds, “Mean, my dear? It’s rebellion! A plot - this is but the shadow of a cloud that’s fast gathering around us! ” (19f�)� Nuance drops: any and every sign feasts on rebellion, but it is an icon of rebellion composed without reference to the qualities of its rebels, that is, without reference to the worthiness or competence of individual members� The “disciplinary individual’s” sacrificed individualism exploits the sympathetic imagination between blacks and whites: both sides of the chasm obsess about insurrection, and this mutual obsession, another kind of twinning, prolongs a state of emergency� A temporary suspension of nuance surely swallows its children (as revolution is prone to do), but will also hopefully permit what Harvey calls “the tutelary spirit of rebellion” (232) to see emancipation through and to see it into the inevitable future contests around national identity, governance, participation, and dignity� As Gilroy argues, This anti-mystical racial rationalism required that blacks of all shades, classes, and ethnic groups give up the merely accidental differences that served only to mask the deeper unity waiting to be constructed not so much from their African heritage as from the common orientation to the future produced by their militant struggles against slavery (28). The cost of the plot, of Blake ’s narrative plotting, then, is the anonymity of gothic language: the inflexible and untethered monomania of past terror (the history of slavery) consciously and unconsciously asserting itself in the present such that, to return to Sage and Smith, the present’s “very presentness is diminished and vitiated by irruptive images of the past” (2). If Slavoj Žižek argues that “the properly ‘terrorist’ dimension of every authentic democratic explosion” is “the brutal imposition of a new order” (xxxv), then, since Delany’s novel could not rewrite history by depicting a successful multi-site rebellion, Delany’s impositions can be said to continuously approach, but back away from, the asymptote of brutality, preferring instead to incrementally The Gothic Leadership of Martin Delany and Delany’s Blake 197 dismantle aristocratic and tyrannical habits� 6 These conspiratorial impositions are so broadly social - they are meant to be shared - that the agency of just who is imposing on whom is ambiguous: slaves organize against whites while whitened psychologies, such as the quick-to-the-gun Colonel, participate in dreaming up both the terror and the new world order� Rebecca Biggio sees the macrocosmic truncation of the novel as that which permits the vital creation of a cultural community: “Whether or not an alternative ending does exist, conspiracy is the operative word, inseparable from both the community it creates and the violence portended” (440)� What emerges in Blake is that “community-building secrecy is, in and of itself, the central and consistent insurrectionary message of the novel” (Biggio 439), such that “black community is more frightening than black violence” (440)� I think we must add to that creation the agitations of Blake and of Delany himself, which offer up an insurrectionary community that is purposefully pliable (for instance, the novel’s “chronological confusion” [Sundquist 206]) and even at times deferentially disposable (made to look as if it never existed at the drop of a hat). Thus, to return to the final extant words of the serialized novel Blake : Gofer Gondolier goes out “to spread among the blacks an authentic statement of the outrage: ‘Woe be unto those devils of whites, I say! ’” The first part, “spread[ing] … an authentic statement,” trumps the content of the second part, the aggressive words themselves, because a continually transmitted insurrection that never comes off but is sustained in anticipation is the task of the black monomaniac� 7 In the novel Blake exclaims, “They shall only live - while I live - under the most alarming apprehensions” (192), and by doing so creates a unique politics of the old-fashioned doppelganger� Planning for insurrection under a black Black leader is also planning for a future nationalism under a black Black leader, but before we get insurrection or nationalism, the ego of the leader gets commandeered by genre - black temporarily becomes gothic and organization becomes terror� For Delany, this repeating sequence (black-gothic-black) can anchor a vision of radical community. It is fitting to note that Delany does not emerge as an obvious literary or public voice of the Reconstruction period, even though he lived until 1885; Douglass is certainly the more vocal representative. But Martin Delany, inveterate jack-of-trades and social monomaniac, remains stronger and stranger this way� 6 For Žižek, Robespierre and John Brown are “ figures without habits ”: “To cast off the yoke of habit means: if all men are equal, then all men are to be effectively treated as equal; if blacks are also human, they should be immediately treated as such” (xix)� 7 As Glenn Hendler claims, “Delany refigures virtually everything in the slaves’ experience as a medium of communication� Again, what is curious is that as far we can tell the revolution consists of nothing but this naturalized and generalized circuit of communicative exchange” (75)� 198 J onathan g aBoury Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun� “Fear of Small Numbers�” Emotions: A Cultural Studies Reader � Eds� Jennifer Harding and E� Deidre Pribram� London: Routledge, 2009� 235-250� Biggio, Rebecca Skidmore� “The Specter of Conspiracy in Martin Delany’s Blake �” African American Review 42.3-4 (2008): 439-454. Corporation of the Municipality of Chatham-Kent� Proclamation: Twinning Agreement with Harpers Ferry, U�S�A� 3 May 2003� Access 1 May 2011� <http: / / www�chathamkent�ca/ cityBundle_services/ downloadsService/ downloadfiles/ 6dbb32aa-2694- 4ea8-b162-19ae18cf0c64_Twinning%20Proclamation.pdf>. Delany, Martin� Blake, or The Huts of America � Boston: Beacon Press, 1970� Doolen, Andy� “‘Be Cautious of the Word “Rebel’: Race, Revolution, and Transnational History in Martin Delany’s Blake; or, The Huts of America �” American Literature 81.1 (2009): 153-179� Earle, Jonathan� John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry: A Brief History with Documents � Boston: Bedford, 2008. Gilroy, Paul� The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness � London: Verso, 1993� Harvey, Bruce A� American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830-1865 � Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001� Hendler, Glenn� Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature � Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001� Levine, Robert S� Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity � Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997� --- (2003a)� “Introduction�” Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader � Part One� Ed� Robert S� Levine� Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2003� 1-22� --- (2003b)� “The North Star�” Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader � Part Two� Ed� Robert S� Levine� Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2003� 69-72� Lincoln, Abraham� “Address at Cooper Institute, New York City�” Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865 . Ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher. New York: Library of America, 1989. 111-130� McGlone, Robert E� John Brown’s War Against Slavery � Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009� Nwankwo, Ifeoma Kiddoe� Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas � Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005� Sage, Victor, and Allan Lloyd Smith� “Introduction�” Modern Gothic: A Reader � Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996� 1-5� Sundquist, Eric J� To Wake the Nations: Race and the Making of American Literature � Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1993� Turner, Thomas Reed� Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1982. Wallace, Maurice� “‘Are We Men? ’: Prince Hall, Martin Delany, and the Masculine Ideal in Black Freemasonry, 1775-1865.” American Literary History 9�3 (1997): 396-424� Žižek, Slavoj. “Introduction: Robespierre, or, the ‘Divine Violence’ of Terror.” Robespierre: Virtue and Terror � London: Verso, 2007� k iMBerly a lecia s ingletary Opposing Blackness: Black American Women and Questions of Citizenship in the U�S� Media In March 2010, Nightline , a TV news program on ABC, aired a story entitled “ Nightline Face-Off: Why Can’t a Successful Black Woman Find a Man? ” The program, billed as a serious look into the low marriage rates for black American women, featured statistics and interviews, and footage from a town hallstyle meeting in which two black women and two black men responded to questions from moderators and members of the audience, which featured both men and women - although women constituted the majority - ranging from young professionals to those more advanced in age� On stage, the discussion was moderated by both a man and a woman; the panelists sat in chairs on either side of the moderators on the bare stage� It was hard to tell which kind of woman was the target audience for the show, aside from black women in general� The women on stage and in the audience were of varying height, weight, and skin tone� Some had straight hair, others natural hair� Once the program got underway, however, viewers understood the problem� Black women, the male panelists opined, were too demanding and unrealistic about their own flaws as they pointed out the flaws of their men. They were not able to recognize love. They were inflexible. The black female panelists held their own, refusing to believe that lowering or discarding their expectations was the best way to find a partnership based on equality and respect� As the program continued, black women were explicitly told they were deficient; blame as explanation was a silent theme of the evening. Blame was even embedded within the show’s title question, “Why can’t a successful black woman find a man? ” The title identifies not only the type of woman (black) but also her relationship status (single, not married, and, by default, heterosexual) and socioeconomic class (“successful” is understood to mean that these women are at least middle class; a higher education level is also assumed)� On paper, the program’s title suggests, these women have it all: disposable income, education, career� Nightline does so much work portraying black women as accomplished in all other aspects of their lives that it neglects to include important contextual information about the impact race and class may have on their romantic lives� As Melissa Harris-Perry argues, Nightline failed to call on any sociologists, psychologists, historians or therapists who could have contributed context, statistics or analysis about the ‘marriage crisis’��� Instead, these delicate and compelling issues were addressed by comedians, actors, bloggers and journalists� It is hard to imagine Nightline assembling a panel of actors and comedians to discuss the economy, the war in Iraq, the Catholic Church or any other relevant issue� 200 k iMBerly a lecia s ingletary What Harris-Perry expresses is not an expectation that all the respondents should have been experts, but rather that not one expert was called upon to analyze what is a deeply unsatisfactory situation for some black women� The program did not encourage viewers to engage critical thought and reduced a complex issue - one involving not only birth rates, but also educational and professional opportunities, socioeconomics, and discrimination in the criminal justice system, among other non-mutually exclusive, simultaneously occurring factors - to an occurrence that could be sufficiently explained by laypersons in sixty minutes� Nightline is just one example of the mainstream U�S� media’s portrayal of black women as deficient, preventing them from being understood as “equal to” rather than a “distraction from” the concept of U�S� citizen� I contend that black women become visually disassociated from the ideal image of “American” female personhood by means of their portrayal in the U�S� media, which, I will show, makes it difficult for viewers to empathize and identify with black American women� Exploring visual framing of blackness and whiteness, I argue that images can negatively impact viewers’ perception of black female personhood; interrogating the concept of empathy, I argue that empathy plays a major role in the inclusion of American blacks in the concept of citizen� I conduct three case studies of the media portrayal of accomplished black women - Gabourey Sidibe, star of the Oscar-nominated film Precious (2009) , Shoshana Johnson, a black POW captured by Iraqi forces in 2003, and Michelle Obama, the first black First Lady in the history of the United States. I contend that these media portrayals indicate how black women are visually classified as “flawed citizens,” and subsequently explore the impact this flawed citizenship has on black women. In these three examples, as well as the Nightline program, it is apparent how the narratives of flawed citizenship apply to more scenarios and to more people than just those featured in this paper� For example, the Nightline program was in the format of a town hall meeting, yet the only things the participants had in common was their color and their momentary geographic location� The use of color as an all-encompassing group marker elided the potentially significant differences in linguistic or cultural heritage among participants, who were possibly American, African immigrants, or of Caribbean descent, to name but a few possible ethno-national backgrounds� Color is presented as the town in which all of the participants live, as if blackness were a place where one might settle, rather than a socially constructed designation that often settles what place one occupies� It is ironic that the idea of a town hall meeting connotes citizenship and belonging, yet not only was this a false “town,” the majority of its “citizens” were framed as flawed. Furthermore, the meeting’s classification as a “face-off” connotes battle and disagreement, rather than consensusbuilding� Thus, the show’s title already established that viewers tuned into a program which framed the diverse black population in the U�S� as an indistinguishable (brown) monolith, whose female portion is deficient enough to warrant a “town” meeting to address the “problem�” This problem - black Opposing Blackness 201 women - is explosive enough to be understood as a battle waged between town “inhabitants�” In nearly every respect, complexity and nuance is erased from the Nightline program� To fully understand the program’s reductionisms, however, one must critically engage issues surrounding black women’s visual representation in the mass media; race may be a social construct, but it is culturally positioned as a real entity and used to categorize and diminish certain groups of people� In this paper, I employ the concept of being raced, which indicates a fixity, an entrenchment of a category that has less to do with the process of becoming racial as indicated by the term racialized, and more to do with the inability to escape the categorical bindings that make race into a wholly unchallenged concept despite the ways it shape-shifts and demonstrates its innate flexibility, changing its visual definition in each country, region, and culture� In many instances, the popular media is the sole means by which we engage with or come to know another group and those initial interactions can have long-lasting effects on how we regard other groups� 1 For instance, the popularity of rap music, a cultural product of U�S� origins, in many parts of the world, has been well documented, despite language and cultural barriers that would seem to make U.S. rap music difficult to relate to outside the U.S. context. Yet rappers and their songs have influenced musical styles, fashion, and popular culture in countries far from U�S� shores and far from the communities and experiences which inspired those songs� 2 Films are another example of what I will call here “cross-cultural distance learning,” which has less to do with an official academic course than with gaining knowledge about another culture or people without the privilege of prolonged personto-person interaction� Predominantly, people have learned and continue to learn about the United States not through an extended stay in various regions of the country, but through films about American culture, which highlight linguistic idiosyncrasies, youth culture, and/ or the life experiences of certain racial or immigrant groups. Apart from films, there are a myriad of other means of seeing Others that almost any person can access at almost any time. We are, and have been for quite some time, firmly entrenched in a visual culture that informs much of our everyday lives� Although Cara Finnegan maintains that a solid definition of a visual culture has not surfaced just yet, referencing W�J�T� Mitchell she argues, “at base, the concept of visual culture recognizes that visuality frames our experience and acknowledges ‘that vision is a mode of cultural expression and human communication as funda- 1 See Wilson and Gutierrez (1995) for a discussion dealing specifically with the U.S. media and Georgiou (2010) for a discussion on international media� 2 Condry (2007) provides an ethnography of “yellow B-Boys” in Japan and how Japanese youths have used U�S� hip-hop culture to address political issues, express pride in Japanese culture and history and manipulate linguistic forms of Japanese to achieve the proper “flow” for a rap song. Covell Waegner (2004) discusses the popularity of music, literature, fashion trends, television shows and films produced by or significantly featuring American blacks in Germany, which she attributes to what she has deemed “cultural adulation�” 202 k iMBerly a lecia s ingletary mental and widespread as language�’” (33)� The integral role vision plays in the lives of millions of people calls for increased attention to the intricacies of how and what images communicate, on how many levels, and to how many different types of people� There are positive aspects of using media to learn about others as well as serious issues relating to the ways people of different racial groups are visually defined for a viewing public. Even as portrayals of American blacks become more varied, for instance, American whites have consistently been presented as the ideal American� “[T]he ideal white American self, which is constructed as good-looking, powerful, brave, cordial, kind, firm, and generous: a natural-born leader worthy of the loyalty of slaves or subordinates of another color” (Vera and Gordon 2), has remained a staple “character” in U�S� visual culture, a character against which others are compared� Images act as polysemous texts in that they can represent more than one meaning to more than one viewer� But it is not the case that a polysemous text can be read in any way by any audience members� Rather, “polysemy indicates a bounded multiplicity, a circumscribed opening of the text in which we acknowledge diverse but finite meanings” (Ceccarelli 398). In other words, readings of images must relate in some way to the existing conduit of knowledge, so as to remain tethered to the objects and people which are pictured� The readings of images in this paper are of a group which is both gendered and raced in a country that subscribes to the rhetoric of colorblindness, in which one’s color is purported to be a non-factor in the social, political, or economic opportunities one has - this rhetoric is at odds with the everyday experiences of people of color, however, and the desire to avoid discursively acknowledging color may have resulted in unchecked inequality (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Lewis, Chester and Formen 2000)� But that discussion goes beyond the scope of this paper� For now, in this paper’s discussion, I aim to illustrate that certain kinds of visual representations procure narratives about black female personhood which belie the claim that color is not a factor in contemporary U�S� society� Ariella Azoulay argues, “A solitary image cannot testify to what is revealed through it, but must be attached to another image, another piece of information […] An image is only ever another statement in a regime of statements” (191)� An image of a black American, then, would naturally be “read” in relation to the regime of statements already in existence� When those images have historically been tainted by prejudice, I argue, it becomes more difficult to see a contemporary image in isolation from all previous image statements� Viewers may consider themselves savvy media consumers, but when an image is presented as real, accurate, or a mirror-like representation, it seems all the more difficult to scrutinize the message of this image, especially if the image reinforces our current beliefs� 3 For instance, someone watching a movie or reality TV show that negatively frames black people may be able 3 Derrida (2002) provides a related discussion on the role of religion in the U�S� media; Lutz and Collins (1993) discuss how National Geographic magazine reinforces U�S� middle-class values and solidifies stereotypes about the Third World. Opposing Blackness 203 to dismiss what he or she sees as fictional because the images are located in the realm of entertainment� But if similar images appear in the news, those images have more credibility, if not the aura of reflecting the truth. Writing toward the end of the twentieth century, Clint Wilson and Felix Gutierrez argue, “As the twenty-first century approaches, there remains increasing fear among media critics that oversimplifying news coverage of people of color contributes to racial polarization, making them scapegoats for the nation’s problems and fueling White fears and hatred of other racial groups and lifestyles” (154)� Yanick St� Jean and Joe R� Feagin echoed this statement a few years later when they argued, “Many videotapes of movies and television programs portraying black Americans in a negative light are shown around the world every day of the week� In this way, people across the globe who have never met an African-American pick up the hoary racist stereotypes crafted in America” (119)� One might be tempted to argue that eleven years into the twenty-first century those fears have much less foundation, but as Feagin notes in a separate, more recent account, The white-controlled mass media play a central role in making the dominant racial framing widespread and making it appear apparently ‘normal�’ The subtle or overt goal of many whites with influence in the media, schools, and other whitecontrolled institutions is to reduce the resistance to persisting racial inequalities and discriminations by Americans of color (189). In effect, prejudices that have existed for centuries still are in play today, although they are perhaps better concealed these days� When Gabourey Sidibe began garnering extensive media coverage, for instance, attempts to hide her from view were attributed to factors such as an abundance of talented actresses, rather than an overabundance of melanin and body weight� Hidden in Plain Sight On its face, Sidibe’s rise to fame is the stuff of true Hollywood legend� A New York City college student, Sidibe had never before acted, but became an overnight sensation after being cast in the lead role for Precious (2009), a film about a sexually and emotionally abused obese illiterate teenager, the eponymous Precious, who uses her imagination to escape a world in which she is treated as anything but precious� The actress Sidibe’s life was a far cry from that of her character� Funny and vivacious, with a ribald sense of humor, Sidibe was the cool new Hollywood “it girl”, albeit with certain key exceptions: dark-skinned and obese, Sidibe looked far different than other top actresses her age - who were overwhelmingly thin and overwhelmingly white� The mainstream U�S� media seemed unable to embrace Sidibe as much as they had embraced Precious � In Vanity Fair ’s “Young Hollywood 2010” issue, nine up-and-coming actresses, all white, all thin, all pale, were featured on the cover; Sidibe was mentioned inside� As journalist Dodai Stewart notes about the traditional young Hollywood starlet, 204 k iMBerly a lecia s ingletary her ‘All-American’ good looks meant that she was a WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) or a fresh-faced farmgirl. Certainly not black, definitely not fat, and never both� Looking at the March 2010 [ Vanity Fair ] issue, has anything changed? Even [ Vanity Fair editor] Evgenia Peretz’s descriptions of the actresses - ‘Ivory-soap-girl features,’ ‘patrician looks’ ‘dewy, wide-eyed loveliness’ - reinforce the idea that a successful actress is a pretty, aristocratic-looking (read: white) actress� Peretz’s characterizations of the actresses adorning the magazine cover reference long-circulating narratives relating to a mid-nineteenth-century idea about “ideal” femininity� I maintain that the Vanity Fair cover reflected a visual narrative that followed closely to the nineteenth-century ideal of womanhood and that Sidibe’s inability to match that ideal - in both color and size - led to her exclusion from the cover� The concept of an ideal femininity, its central pillars being piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity, may seem outdated, especially as the idea came to fruition in antebellum America, but the “Cult of True Womanhood,” as outlined by Barbara Welter (21), could be understood as instrumental in distinguishing American white female personhood from American black female personhood� The descriptions and images of U�S� femininity presented black and white women as “diametrically opposed” (Jewell 37)� bell hooks argues, “[Nineteenth-century white women] were extolled as the ‘nobler half of humanity,’ whose duty was to elevate men’s sentiments and inspire their higher impulses” (hooks 1999: 31)� Black women, on the other hand, “were naturally seen as the embodiment of female evil and sexual lust� They were labeled jezebels and sexual temptresses and accused of leading white men away from spiritual purity into sin” (ibid� 33)� Coincidentally, these ideas came into vogue around the same time print culture began to be mass produced in the United States� 4 Sidibe may not be considered a sexual temptress by some, but her large size and her dark skin represent excess, thus positioning her at a far distance from traditional definitions of femininity such as dewy, patrician, or dainty� According to Nicole Fleetwood, “[B]lack female corporeality is rendered as an excessive over-determination and as overdetermined excess” (9)� Vanity Fair did not explicitly express that Sidibe was unworthy of inclusion in their “Young Hollywood” cover because of her color and size; it is entirely possible that there were so many young, talented actresses that editors made tough choices and the result just happened to be a bevy of thin, pale white women� It is the photo that appeared in December 2009, however, shortly after Precious hit movie theatres, that is most telling in terms of the way the magazine conceptualized Sidibe, which was in obvious opposition to the feminine ideal visually expressed on the “Young Hollywood” cover, which appeared just four months later� 4 Paul Starr argues that in the mid-nineteenth century, “growing numbers of women, young readers, working-class as well as middle-class adults, and new immigrants as well as some free blacks,” made up a growing reading public in the United States (114)� Coupled with the creation of roads, railroads and new transportation routes, a national market for print developed� Opposing Blackness 205 While the starlets on the 2010 “Young Hollywood” cover are sitting with legs curled underneath them, in soft pastels and lightweight, sheer fabrics, the sun glowing softly behind them, Sidibe’s photo in 2009 is shot in stark black and white, a knee-length black sheath pulled up to her mid-thigh, drawing attention to her girth� She lies on the ground while Precious director Lee Daniels sits on a low cushion next to her� Daniels, the thin, winsome director does not escape negative racial framing, either� The cushion on which he sits is so low that at first glance it seems as if he is sitting on his plus-sized screen siren� His legs are splayed open; as one reads the images from left to right, the eye is drawn to his pelvic area which is almost at the same level with Sidibe’s pelvic area� The image is infused with sex� Sidibe’s right arm is fully extended and her wrist hangs limply in the air; the eye is drawn to Sidibe’s oversized arm, which is even with the height of Daniels’ eyes� It is difficult not to compare her arm with those of other actresses. If true womanhood involves resisting the pleasures of the flesh by remaining pure, yet alluring, Sidibe looks as if she offers her body willingly to the camera, less allure than wholesale consumption� One of her bare legs curls behind Daniel’s pant legs and she is propped up on her elbow, her head resting on her left hand� She looks bored, as if she is tired of waiting for someone to take the bait, someone to call her name� In this photo, Daniels, who seems to sit patiently, waiting for someone to make the next move, is reminiscent of a pimp, allowing Sidibe to put her body on display, but blocking that one part of her, that small portion of her legs, so we know to whom she belongs� Sidibe, in the end, is framed as a jezebel, the bad black girl who “reinforces cultural stereotypes regarding the hypersexuality of the African-American female, who yearns for sexual encounters” (Jewell 46)� Thus, the entire image is infused with sex; the black man, historically a figure associated with sexual brutality, and the black woman, historically associated with sexual deviance, pose together daring the viewer to think of anything other than fornication� It seems that the magazine’s inability to make Sidibe match the editors’ definition of beautiful resulted in her hypersexualization - as far from purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity as one can get� Sidibe has often commented on journalists’ inability to see her as socially and physically desirable� “[The media] try to paint this picture that I was this downtrodden, ugly girl who was unpopular in school and in life, and then I got the role and now I’m awesome� But the truth is, that I’ve been awesome and then I got this role” Sidibe has said (Murphy)� There is nothing in her photo with Daniels, however, that highlights Sidibe’s personality� The raw intensity or heart-melting sensitivity Sidibe needed to play her character in Precious are missing� Even as a cover model, Sidibe is not celebrated for who she is, but subjected to attempts of making her more visually palatable to viewers� In the case of Elle magazine, visual palatability came in the form of lightening Sidibe’s skin� As one of four cover models of a crop of twenty-five accomplished women in their twenties to commemorate Elle ’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Sidibe was by far the most unnatural-looking� Unlike the other three, white actresses on the cover who were shot from the knees up, Sidibe was shown from the chest 206 k iMBerly a lecia s ingletary up, indicating that editors sought to hide Sidibe’s whole body from sight� While the other cover models had hair that seemed to move effortlessly, Sidibe’s weave looked fake, which is the exact opposite effect a hair weave should have� Perhaps most jarring, however, was the fact that Sidibe’s skin was significantly lighter in the photo than in real life. Although Elle editors insisted Sidibe’s photo had no more retouching than any other cover model’s - and it is entirely possible that the studio lights used to photograph Sidibe were unusually bright - the fact that the magazine’s editors did not think to color-correct her skin color so it would be more reflective of its natural tone, indicates that they considered lighter skin as better-looking� “The fashion industry clearly gets flummoxed by any women whose body and skin color are outside American society’s narrow definition of beauty,” writes Julianne Hing, referencing Sidibe’s Elle cover . When Sidibe appeared on the cover of Ebony, a magazine catering primarily to American blacks, in their March 2010 issue (the same month Vanity Fair chose ten other up-and-coming actresses for its cover), Sidibe’s entire body was pictured, her clothing flattering, her hair well styled, and her face well lit; Ebony, like Elle , also uses studio lights� Sidibe’s cover treatment in Elle is reminiscent of the controversy surrounding Beyonce Knowles’ advertisement for L’Oreal’s “Feria” hair care line in 2008, in which the singer’s skin appeared so light she looked almost unrecognizable� Sidibe’s physical traits were not expressly mentioned as reasons for her questionable coverage� But those images still connote stereotypes and assumptions that degrade black women� What Sidibe’s coverage in the mainstream media alerts viewers to extends far beyond Sidibe herself, and into a larger discussion about the ways in which images can reinforce the perception that blackness, and even more so: overweight blackness, is undesirable to the point that excluding it or hiding it are justified actions (cf. St. Jean and Feagin 73-98). Saving Shoshana Like Sidibe, Shoshana Johnson found herself hidden from the public eye, but in contrast, Johnson’s problem was not related to her physical attractiveness; rather, it was the media’s ignoring of her story� When Johnson was captured, tortured and held captive for 22 days by Iraqi forces in 2003, she became the first black female Prisoner of War (POW) in American history. Americans were riveted as they watched Johnson and other POWs in video feeds sent to the United States from their captors� Upon Johnson’s homecoming, she fell largely out of public view as the media overwhelmingly directed their attention at Jessica Lynch, another member of Johnson’s unit, who was also captured but spent half the time in captivity as Johnson� Lynch’s story was headline news for weeks; she received a major book deal, a made-for-TV movie, and instant celebrity status� It was speculated that Lynch, who later said that the government embellished the story of her capture, was being used as the face of an unpopular war in order to garner public support� “[W]ith her good Opposing Blackness 207 looks and compelling story, Lynch looked like a figure from Central Casting at a time when the Pentagon desperately needed one,” wrote William Douglas� Many Americans felt that Johnson’s lack of media attention was attributable to her color, and even Johnson, who was reluctant to cry racism, said she thought the physical differences between her and Lynch made a difference� Stocky and dark-skinned with her hair in braids at the time of her capture, Johnson noted in an interview: “If I’d been a petite cutesy thing, [the coverage] would’ve been different” (ibid�)� I argue that it was Johnson’s status as a black single mother which impacted audiences’ ability to empathize with her, and as a result impacted the amount of media attention she received� Unlike Sidibe, Johnson’s job did not require time spent on a press junket or posing for photo shoots; her job involved much more personal sacrifice than a few hours out of the day to speak to reporters� But it is the absence of images of Johnson that is important in this regard, especially given her service to the nation and in comparison to Lynch’s ubiquitous photos� I contend that the difference between Lynch and Johnson is, again, related to those pillars of womanhood� It is harder to ascribe purity, piety, domesticity, and submissiveness to a single mother who works outside of the home� Add to this that as a black woman, Johnson is already positioned as unable to attain those characteristics� Lynch, on the other hand, had the blonde hair and blue eyes, pale skin, and patrician features that reflected the image of femininity in place since the nineteenth century� Of course it is possible that Lynch’s story would naturally be the more compelling one� Ten years Johnson’s junior, Lynch had a lifetime of adventures ahead of her; she joined the army at eighteen, coming from a West Virginian family that could not pay for her elder brother’s college education, much less for hers� Her physical stature was often noted, as “she was pale, skinny, with thin, straight legs that look as if they would be easy to snap” (Gibbs), which only reinforced the idea that Lynch was a girl who was so determined to protect her country that she gave her all, even if it exceeded her physical capabilities� In contrast, Johnson was a Panama-born, second-generation Army veteran� In contrast to Lynch’s, Johnson’s story is that of an immigrant who came to the U�S�, created a life there, and was willing to risk her life for her adopted country� Both stories are compelling, both fit into traditional American narratives about working one’s way to prosperity despite humble or foreign beginnings� And yet, Johnson’s story was largely absent from the news until 2010, when she published a memoir, I’m Still Standing: From Captive U.S. Soldier to Free Citizen , which she promoted on a press tour� Note that the title of her memoir stresses her position as an American soldier and later as a free citizen , as if to reinforce that she was fighting for, and was a lawful citizen of the United States when captured. That such clarification is even necessary highlights the potential that Johnson could be mistaken as non-American� In one telling incident, when a guest on the former evening news talk show Larry King Live , Johnson questioned JAG Officer Tom Kenniff’s knowledge of the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on ranking officers in the military� Kenniff responded by telling her he spent a year in Iraq and 208 k iMBerly a lecia s ingletary asked sarcastically if she had ever been to Iraq� Johnson responded, “I was a POW� I got shot�” 5 That even a fellow former soldier could forget Johnson so quickly perhaps indicates that viewers could not muster the same amount of empathy for her as for Lynch� As Janine Jones argues, motivation can be a significant factor in whether one chooses to empathize with another, i.e. to “attempt to comprehend either positive or negative [mental] states of another” (68). What motivates one to empathize can be related to a range of factors� Johnson’s status as a black single mother may have prevented some from empathizing with Johnson� As Patricia Hill Collins notes: Women are differentially evaluated based on their perceived value to give birth to the right kind of children, pass on appropriate American family values, and become worthy symbols of the nation� African-American women encounter differential treatment based on our perceived value as giving birth to the wrong race of children, as unable to socialize them properly because we [African-American women] bring them into bad family structures, and as unworthy symbols for U�S� patriotism (230)� The stigma attached to black motherhood underscores the differential treatment in the media� Whereas Johnson might have been a mother who is willing to sacrifice her life for her country, the stigma of being a bad black mother renders her a woman who abandons her child for work� “The independent role black women were obliged to play both in the labor force and in the family was automatically perceived as unladylike” in U.S. society (ibid. 78). White women are perceived differently in this regard� As hooks notes, “when white women enter the workforce today it is seen as a positive step, a move toward gaining independence” (hooks 1999: 83). This same narrative plays out in the differing media coverage Johnson and Lynch received, which lauded Lynch’s decision to join the Army, “because she wanted to see the world” (Gibbs)� While Lynch’s youth certainly could have influenced her coverage, it cannot be assumed that Lynch’s youth played a more significant role than Johnson’s being a black single mother� In 2010, Alexis Hutchinson refused deployment for Afghanistan because she could not find a suitable child-care option, which led her to face court martial� Although Hutchinson ultimately avoided a court martial, the damage to her image was already done� Hutchinson’s portrayal in the media not only emphasized her single motherhood, but also her mother’s single motherhood� Even the headline “Single Woman Avoids Court Martial” emphasizes Hutchinson’s lack of a husband� Wrote journalist James Dao in The New York Times , “Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, a 21-year-old Army cook and single parent, was days from deploying to Afghanistan last fall when her mother backed out of an agreement to take care of her 10-month-old son for the duration of her one-year tour.” Dao tells readers in the article’s first sentence that Hutchinson is young, is a single mother, and waited until the last minute to 5 A full transcript of the conversation can be found on the Crooks and Liars website, http: / / videocafe�crooksandliars�com/ heather/ shoshanna-johnson-calls-out-jag-tomkennif� Opposing Blackness 209 inform her employers that she could not fulfill her contract. Not only do readers understand Hutchinson as a bad mother, we are meant to understand her mother as the source of Hutchinson’s bad mothering� Hutchinson falls victim to media framing which diminishes her attempted public service and desire to be a strong parental figure, and highlights her deficiency at both. Harris- Perry argues, “As a volunteer soldier in wartime, she ought to embody the very core of American citizen sacrifice. Instead she is a bad black mother. Hutchinson has failed to marry a responsible, present, bread-winning man who would free her of the need to labor outside of the home� [H]er parenting is presented as disruptive to her duties as a citizen” (Harris-Perry 2009)� Furthermore, Hutchinson’s mother is presented as shirking her responsibilities to her grandson, forcing Hutchinson to shirk her responsibility to the government. Deficiency, it is implied, is hereditary. While other single mothers, soldiers who are parents, and a range of other people might have been able to identify and empathize with Hutchinson, the story is framed so as to suggest that her problem is specific to black culture and that black culture is to blame for bringing about this situation� Hence, empathy from white audience members is not to be expected� According to Jones, “[E]mpathy is a mapping of one’s experience onto the situations, goals, and emotions of another� [The Goodwill white] may not choose to look for a mappable experience if she is not motivated to do so� And without seeing you, seeing what you feel, she may make a judgment about you” (78). As was the case with Sidibe, the coverage Johnson and Hutchinson received was affected by stereotypes and assumptions about their color and gender� As Collins argues, “Even when the initial conditions that foster controlling images disappear, such images prove remarkably tenacious because they not only subjugate U�S� black women, but are key in maintaining intersecting oppressions� African American women’s status as outsiders become the point from which other groups define their normality” (70). If ideas about femininity are based on a model that over values whiteness, a woman’s blackness prevents her from ever fully matching that model� Images of black women, then, reflect far more than just the individual in the picture’s frame. Managing Michelle The First Lady, regardless of her color, is conceptualized as a reflection of the American woman� She is a perfect living model of the pillars of womanhood. But until Barack Obama assumed the presidency in 2008, no black woman had ever held the position, leaving the implicit conflation of “ladylike” with “white” intact. In two prominent examples - the July 21, 2008. New Yorker magazine cover and Obama’s official photo taken in the Blue Room of the White House - created just before and just after she became FLOTUS (First Lady of the United States), Obama’s color, not her official position is highlighted. In the first example, a caricature of Barack and Michelle Obama stresses their “foreignness” as a would-be First Family� Michelle’s portrayal is 210 k iMBerly a lecia s ingletary grossly exaggerated, but reinforces long-standing stereotypes about the “Angry Black Woman; ” the image also reinforces a cultural stereotype that natural hairstyles on black women are improper and unprofessional, allowing for the (false) ideal of womanhood to remain intact� In the second example, Obama’s color is center stage, but the image subtly suggests that ideals are goals, not necessarily realities� When Obama became First Lady, there was unchecked excitement at Obama’s youth and her sartorial choices, which led to her being somewhat forcefully compared to Jackie Kennedy; there was also enthusiasm bordering on hysteria surrounding Obama’s communicative relationship with her husband and outspokenness in general� However, most media coverage of Obama contained an uneasiness about her person, a titter of both excitement and fear� Some critics saw Obama’s pride in her blackness as a detriment and questioned her ability to adequately represent Americans� 6 Even the National First Ladies Library was concerned about Obama’s ability to reconcile her blackness with her official position: Even though she will be the first African-American First Lady, Michelle Obama will represent all of the people of the United States …While certainly there may be particular organizations she will work with or support that will seek to aid African-Americans, it is certain she will not do so exclusively (National First Ladies Library)� The Library attempts to assuage fears that Obama is not a Black Nationalist by referencing other First Ladies who were different because of their religion or a disability: “The press and public became accustomed to the novelty of these rare elements of their personal lives, and it eventually wore off” (ibid�)� The Library’s rhetoric links color, a non-mutable physical trait, to a “rare” characteristic others learn to tolerate like a deformity or personality flaw. The Library does not make the same color-based disclaimers for other First Ladies� For example, website visitors are not told that white First Ladies managed to represent all Americans even though they were white� The focus on Obama’s blackness as being the major barrier to her ability to represent (white) Americans illustrates that blackness is conceptualized as opposed to the ideal of womanhood� Obama, an educated, dedicated mother and savvy businesswoman who supported her husband’s dreams even as she followed her own, meets a couple of the criteria central to the ideal of womanhood� The only difference is that she meets these criteria as a black woman� The Library assumes that people are necessarily worried that Obama will purposefully not represent anyone other than black Americans, and by playing into that assumption transforms it into a verified certainty. Obama illustrates Azoulay’s concept of a flawed citizen, defined as one who 6 In an article on the website Slate�com, for instance, Christopher Hitchens criticized Obama’s writing ability and intelligence as evidenced by her senior college thesis, and claimed she was influenced by the Black Separatist movement. Fox News once referred to her as “Obama’s Baby Mama,” a derogatory term often used in reference to a black woman who had a baby out of wedlock� Opposing Blackness 211 belongs to an injured population subject “to a differential system of citizenship that discriminates … on the basis of differences in religion, gender, race, class, ethnicity, or language� [F]lawed citizens are more exposed than ‘proper’ citizens to hazards, and risks and their vulnerability is systemic” (36)� Azoulay examines flawed citizenship with “respect to the practices and situations that mark its past exclusion from and contemporary unequal access to the body politic and its inferior share in the advantages and protection of citizenship” (37)� As a well-off, educated woman who now has her own security detail, Obama does not easily lend herself to being understood as a vulnerable individual. But her color has rendered her a flawed citizen who is unable to meet the requirement that she act as a stand-in for all (white) American women, making her vulnerable to criticisms which postulate that her color will keep her from doing justice to her duties as First Lady� As was the case with Sidibe and Johnson, however, critics never explicitly mention Obama’s color as a barrier to acceptance� The New Yorker magazine cover depicting the Obamas in the White House is now no less incendiary than when it first hit the newsstands in July 2008. The satirical cartoon “The Politics of Fear,” drawn by Barry Blitt, depicts President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama standing in the Oval Office of the White House looking at each other, giving one another a fist bump, a hand gesture in which two people bump knuckles. As they stand in the center of the room, an American flag is burning in the fireplace behind them; the wall is adorned with a painting of what appears to be Osama bin Laden� President Obama is wearing a turban, sandals, and wide pants and a long shirt - traditional clothing for men in some parts of the Muslim world� He is looking slyly at the camera, as if to say “You never even knew�” The cartoon references accusations that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim who hates America� Even more jarring, however, is the depiction of Michelle Obama. Dressed in camouflage pants, combat boots, with an AK-47 gun strapped over her shoulder, Michelle stares intently at Barack, her head tilted slightly toward his� The image references critics’ claims that Michelle is angry and ungrateful for her educational and professional opportunities, claims that reached a fever pitch in February 2008 when she spoke at a political event in Wisconsin, and said: “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback” (cf� Thomas)� Although she later tried to explain that she had referenced her pride at seeing so many people join her husband’s campaign to bring about change, the damage was done� Critics postulated that she - a descendant of slaves and high-powered executive - should be the proudest of all Americans, because her ancestors’ (forced) humble beginnings did not exclude her from achieving a good education and a high-profile job. The New Yorker cover capitalized on those criticisms but added their own twist� The caricature features a gigantic afro in place of Obama’s signature styled and straightened hair� At no point during Barack Obama’s campaign, when most Americans became familiar with Michelle Obama, had she worn anything resembling an afro� In Blitt’s portrait, Obama’s hair acts as an excla- 212 k iMBerly a lecia s ingletary mation point to drive home the idea that Obama, like her husband, is living a secret life� He may be a secret Muslim, but she is a secret militant - just like her critics said� Obama’s hair, as drawn on the New Yorker cover, dredged up old stereotypes about black women being angry and assumptions about the inappropriateness of black hair. The afro does not exist as a neutral signifier in U�S� cultural history� “Afro hairstyles of the 1960s and 1970a were easily decipherable statements of black pride, bold challenges to a white aesthetic that had long made curly and kinky hair a symbol of inferiority,” write Shane White and Graham White (53)� The black hair care industry is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States, spearheaded primarily by women who straighten, cut, color, weave, and/ or braid their hair into various styles for everyday life and work� For some, it is just a fashion statement, for others, it speaks to a long, painful history in the United States which cast having curly or kinky hair as unclean, unprofessional, or militant� Robin D�G� Kelley notes that in addition to the afro’s political dimension, it was adopted by many women because it was a chic hairstyle (334)� Even when black women began wearing the afro as a fashion statement more so than a political statement, their natural hair retained its political undertones in the larger U�S� society� 7 Women who wore their hair in a natural style were at risk of losing their jobs, and certain hairstyles were banned from workplaces - tactics that punished black women for wanting to wear styles that would compliment and show pride in the specificities of black hair. “While the close-cut ‘fro did not carry as much explicit political baggage as the big ‘fro, conditions rendered the style oppositional� It not only challenged gender conventions in a world where long hair was a marker of femininity, but it was interpreted as a sign of militancy” Kelley argues (349)� It has been through their hair, inter alia, that black women have been made vulnerable, and in the example presently discussed, Obama’s afro renders her the vulnerable, flawed citizen Azoulay describes� What the New Yorker cover does in its attempt to satirize critics’ claims is denigrate black women’s hair and, by extension, black women; by depicting her in this fashion in the crucial months before the 2008 presidential elections, the New Yorker cover postulated that Obama would be an inappropriate First Lady who does not conform to the ideal of womanhood and is thus unfit to represent all (white) American women. What the New Yorker ’s caricature engenders is a comment on belonging and national identity� As an American black women with all the trappings of success, the unmasking that takes place in the cartoon shows viewers that she does not really belong in the White House or as a representative of the United States� Even though the image is meant to be a satire, the stereotypes and assumptions it references are far from satirical as they still are issues which vex black women as they live and work in the United States today� The problem goes beyond Obama’s social standing and bleeds into a larger issue about black women and national belonging� Referencing T�H� Marshall, Nira Yuval- Davis writes that in thinking of citizenship as a “status bestowed upon those 7 For a detailed discussion on the politics of black hair, see Mercer (1990)� Opposing Blackness 213 who are members of a community,” we are linking citizenship to community membership, not to the nation-state� This allows us, she argues, “to discuss citizenship as a multi-tier construct, which applies to people’s membership in a variety of collectivities - local, ethnic, national and transnational” (5)� This understanding, Yuval-Davis stresses, “enables us to raise the question of the relationship between ‘the community’ and the state and how this affects people’s citizenship” (ibid�)� It is not only the top-down relationship between state and community but also the horizontal relationship between communities that is of importance� Here, Obama represents a horizontal relationship between races, and her portrayal makes bare the continuing distrust some non-black Americans have of American blacks� Obama’s presence discloses how fragile the ideas of womanhood are: either the pillars of womanhood are a false ideal, or the present First Lady and those before her cannot and could not actually represent ideal womanhood� For those ideals and the idea that the First Lady is the best representative of those ideals to remain intact, Obama must be presented as diametrically opposed to both� Her negative media coverage that gained momentum during her husband’s presidential campaign illustrates the conflict some Americans had in broadening the scope of who could be considered “representative” of the American public� Lois Romano references the “awkward early days of the 2008 campaign when opponents portrayed her as unpatriotic, snobby, and a caricature of an angry black woman … Conservative commentators, who carefully steered clear of racial references when it came to Barack, had no such reservations about stirring up racial stereotypes about his wife�” Obama was able to present a challenge to these criticisms, however, soon after she assumed the office of the First Lady and posed for her official White House photo. Michelle Obama is standing in the Blue Room of the White House, wearing a simple black sheath by the American designer Michael Kors, with a double strand of pearls around her neck and pearl studs in her ears� Her left hand is balanced on a table with a vase brimming over with flowers. The photo is elegant and simple, showing off Obama’s fashion sense as well as her much ballyhooed muscular arms� On the wall behind her there is a portrait of Thomas Jefferson� Jefferson, a Founding Father, is revered in U�S� history for being influential in setting the standards and ideals that continue to shape the trajectory of the United States� He also was a notorious slave owner who carried on a relationship with his slave Sally Hemmings for several years� Obama posed for her photo in the Blue Room, a room traditionally used to welcome guests such as foreign dignitaries, and in doing so she claimed ownership of the room and of her explicit right to be the face of all American people� She is standing in front of a painting of arguably the most prominent intellectual and slave owner in U�S� history, implicitly suggesting that ideals are as socially constructed as race, and rather than creating rigid qualifications of ideal personhood, those ideals should remain flexible, lest they prove to be so unrealistic that no woman - or man - can match them� 214 k iMBerly a lecia s ingletary Conclusion Black women’s negative portrayal in the U�S� media has resulted in their denigration - as beauty ideals, as patriotic citizens, as able representatives of the American people� There is an erroneous belief that hierarchies of race and gender no longer negatively impact one’s social standing� When one group is routinely presented as the polar opposite of an ideal American, over time, one is hard-pressed to consider that group as equally American� How could one assume that that flawed group, a group that cannot or will not fit in, is as deserving of the social, professional, and educational benefits of citizen-group membership as someone else who works hard to contribute to the country? This logic, however, does not acknowledge that inter-racial group interactions begin from an uneven playing field. To level that playing field, all those involved must acknowledge the ways they are hindered - or helped - by their particular racial, ethnic, and/ or gendered subjectivities� To really change the game, one must identify and eradicate existing, entrenched racial hierarchies, but in many ways, identifying may be easier than eradicating�Images of black women have by and large represented black women as flawed citizens who are justifiably ignored, or even ridiculed and ostracized. Although the examples chosen in this paper are of women who have, in some respects, become household names either for their talent, their bravery, or their title, this does not diminish the impact negative images have on the average black woman� For if an Academy Award-nominated woman can routinely be subjected to ridicule because she is too dark and/ or too fat, or a POW can fade into oblivion upon her return home, or the First Lady is attacked for not being grateful enough, this indicates that no black woman is safe from being vilified in the public, and that we must be vigilant as to how the representation of black female personhood in the mainstream media can taint the way all Americans regard black women� As Mary C� Curtis notes, “[I]n America, there’s seldom a cost for disrespecting black women�” Perhaps it is time to issue the bill� Opposing Blackness 215 Works Cited Azoulay, Ariella� The Civil Contract of Photography . New York: Zone Books, 2008. 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White, Shane, and Graham White� “Slave Hair and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries�” Journal of Southern History 61�1 (1995): 45-76� Wilson, Clint C�, and Felix Gutierrez� Race, Multiculturalism, and the Media: From Mass to Class Communication � 2nd ed� Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995� Yuval-Davis, Nira� “Women, Citizenship and Difference�” Feminist Review 57 (1997): 4-27� k atharina M otyl No Longer a Promised Land - The Arab and Muslim Experience in the U�S� after 9/ 11 1 September 11 and the ensuing “War on Terror” catapulted the Arab and Muslim communities in the United States into a state of crisis� President George W� Bush on September 20, 2001, famously said before Congress: “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make� Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” (Bush 2001)� Adopting this “us vs� them” rhetoric, the Bush administration and the corporate media constructed the image of an Arab, Muslim enemy which threatened the freedom of the West and thus deserved to be disciplined and punished (cf� Merskin)� Not only did this discourse serve to justify U�S�-led war in two Muslim-majority countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), as well as torture and other violations of human rights of Arabs and Muslims in Guantánamo and in the cases of extraordinary rendition� Domestically, those who traced their origins to Muslim-majority countries in the Greater Middle East were disciplined, as well� As the following statement of attorney general John Ashcroft from October 25, 2001 illustrates, the Bush administration raised the specter of an internal Arab, Muslim enemy who was to be fought - both by the government and the American public: On September 11, the wheel of history turned and the world will never be the same� […] The attacks of September 11 were acts of terrorism against America orchestrated and carried out by individuals living within our borders� Today’s terrorists enjoy the benefits of our free society even as they commit themselves to our destruction� They live in our communities - plotting, planning, and waiting to kill Americans again. […] The federal government cannot fight this reign of terror alone� Every American must help us defend our nation against this enemy (Ashcroft)� And indeed, in the months following 9/ 11, the punitive nexus of government and the American people Ashcroft conjured up operated at full throttle; the government enacted security policies which specifically targeted Arabs and Muslims; private individuals subjected them to harassment and hate crimes� In addition, the news media’s coverage was overwhelmingly tainted with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias (cf� Joseph and D’Harlingue), and the entertainment media exploited the Arab-as-terrorist plot and discursively supported the suspension of Arabs’ and Muslims’ rights (cf� Alsultany; Shaheen)� In a perverse logic of kin liability, Arab American citizens and Arab immigrants, many of whom had been living in the U�S� for a long time and/ or had children who were U�S� citizens, were punished for acts they abhorred, carried 1 I would like to thank my colleague Christoph Raetzsch for his sharp eye and poignant criticism, which have enriched this essay� 218 k atharina M otyl out by extremists from Saudi Arabia and three other Arab countries who were affiliated with the Islamic terrorist network al Qaeda. In short, the “War on Terror” transformed the average person of Arab descent into a “potential terrorist,” 2 creating a sense of “homeland insecurity” (Cainkar) for Arab and Muslim Americans� This dimension of the “War on Terror,” i�e� its effects on the lives of Arabs and Muslims in the U�S�, is the central concern of my paper� First, I will discuss the U�S� government’s targeting of Arabs and Muslims, focusing on the “special registration” program, which ascribed a malicious essence to persons descending from Muslim-majority countries, and outline the kinds of harassment and hate crimes Arabs and Muslims faced in everyday life� I will briefly address the American news and entertainment media’s complicity in the anti-Arab backlash, which for decades have been invested in portraying Arabs and Muslims in negative ways� I will then provide demographic data on the Arab and Muslim communities in the U�S�, which exposes the popular perception that all Arabs are Muslim and all Muslims are Arab as an illusion� After theorizing contemporary anti-Arab sentiment and Islamophobia, which, I argue, constitute what Etienne Balibar calls cultural racism , I will discuss a literary negotiation of the situation of Arab and Muslim Americans in the “War on Terror�” I read the novel Once in a Promised Land (2007) by Jordanian American author Laila Halaby as a counter-narrative to post-9/ 11 dominant discourses� Halaby’s central criticism of post-9/ 11 American society, I argue, is its essentialist thinking - a thinking which is manifest, inter alia, in the Bush administration’s draconic security policies� Anti-Arab Backlash after September 11 While the U�S� government passed some legislation that curtailed the civil liberties of all Americans, twenty-five of the thirty-seven known government security initiatives implemented between September 12, 2001, and mid-2003 either explicitly or implicitly targeted Arabs and Muslims in the U�S� (Tsao and Gutierrez)� As Louise Cainkar documents in her comprehensive sociological study Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience after 9/ 11 , these security initiatives included mass arrests, secret and indefinite detentions, prolonged detention of ‘material witnesses,’ closed hearings and the use of secret evidence, government eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations, FBI home and work visits, wiretapping, seizures of property, removals of aliens with technical visa violations, freezing the assets of charities, and mandatory special registration (119)� Conservative estimates put the number of Arabs and Muslims in the U�S� who personally experienced at least one of these measures at 100,000 (ibid�), 2 I borrow this notion from Kent Ono, who argues that Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslims are interpellated as “potential terrorists” in the post-9/ 11 American polity� No Longer a Promised Land 219 though other sources point to much higher numbers� 3 While many of these measures run counter to the legal standards of the liberal-democratic tradition, inverting the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” for Arabs and Muslims, 4 I want to focus on special registration at this point, because it is the measure which most clearly expresses the Bush administration’s association of Arabs and Muslims with terrorism� Special registration, the term commonly used for the National Security Entry-Exist Registration System (NSEERS) implemented on September 11, 2002, required male nonimmigrant aliens over the age of sixteen who are citizens and nationals from select countries to be interviewed under oath, fingerprinted, and photographed by an Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) official (cf. Cainkar 128; Bayoumi 271). 5 The countries selected for special registration were almost exclusively Muslim-majority countries, as we shall see� Those who entered the U�S� from another country had to register at the point of entry� Those already in the country, until December 2003, had to undergo call-in registration, i.e. report to designated INS offices. 6 Registrants had to provide proof of their legal status to remain in the U�S�, proof of residence, and proof of study or employment� Some also had to supply their credit card numbers, the names and addresses of two U�S� citizens 3 A higher number seems plausible considering the following facts: nearly 83,000 persons tracing their heritage to Muslim-majority countries had to undergo domestic callin registration (Cainkar 288); Michael E. Rolince, former FBI special agent in charge of counterterrorism and Section Chief of the International Terrorism Operations Section, said that his agency had conducted about half a million interviews, overwhelmingly with Arab and Muslim Americans (Rolince 2005)� 4 To mention just a couple of striking examples, in the mass arrests made shortly after September 11, men who matched an Arab/ Muslim phenotype and were deemed for any reason to be suspicious, were locked up; thereafter, the government searched for violations with which to charge them� Some of these men were detained for months, which constitutes a due process violation (Cole 2003)� Moreover, section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which has been principally used on Arabs and Muslims, permits the FBI to obtain in total secrecy objects pertaining to a person not suspected of criminal activity (! ) such as books, records, papers, and documents, whether they are in the person’s home or in the possession of a third party� The section does not require the government to show probable cause for its actions and imposes a gag order on the parties served with a section 215 order, prohibiting them from informing anyone of the government’s actions or the gag order (Cainkar 123f�)� 5 To be more specific, this group encompasses all those who are not U.S. citizens, permanent residents, applicants for permanent residency, or applicants for asylum (cf� Cainkar 288). 6 Domestic call-in registration was suspended on December 2, 2003� On December 5, 2003, NSEERS was subsumed under US-VISIT (United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology)� US-VISIT requires all visa-holding visitors to be electronically photographed and fingerprinted upon entry. Since it does not focus on Muslim male visitors alone, it is an improvement over the NSEERS program� However, US-VISIT did not suspend special registration� For many years, those matching the criteria still had to undergo port-of-entry registration (cf. Bayoumi: 289f.). On April 27, 2011, the Department of Homeland Security finally announced the elimination of port-of-entry registration (cf� Seyfarth Shaw Attorneys)� 220 k atharina M otyl who could authenticate their identity, and to answer questions regarding their political and religious beliefs (Bayoumi 271)� Registrants had to report changes of address within ten days (Cainkar 133), and, if they remained in the country for more than thirty days, to check in with an INS official within forty days of their arrival� Moreover, registrants could only enter and exit the U.S. from specific ports designated by the INS. Every time he entered and left the U�S�, the nonimmigrant male had to undergo the strenuous registration process again (Bayoumi 271f�)� Special registration applied to citizens and nationals of the following countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Indonesia� Regarding call-in registration, those matching the criteria were ordered to register with specified INS offices in four rounds between November 15, 2002 and March 28, 2003. To publicize the call-in program, the INS distributed flyers with “THIS NOTICE IS FOR YOU” splayed across the top (Cainkar 133), which were reminiscent of the notices announcing the rounding up of Japanese Americans in the Western states during World War II. During the first round of call-in registration, almost 1,200 registrants nationwide were arrested and detained for visa violations - despite the fact that they had voluntarily complied with the program (“US Detains nearly 1,200 during Registry”)� Many of the men detained had been living in the U�S� for over a decade and had children who were U�S� citizens (Bayoumi 272); quite a few had pending applications for permanent residency (Serjeant)� Moreover, it became known that many whose status was, in fact, legal were arrested because of INS backlogs (Lee)� Most of the detained were eventually released on bail, with deportation proceedings started by the INS (Cainkar 134)� Overall, according to the Department of Homeland Security, 7 deportation orders were issued for 13,434 of the roughly 83,000 men who underwent call-in registration, based on visa irregularities (qtd� in Cainkar 128). 8 Thousands of families with a member whose immigration status was irregular left the country permanently to evade registration, which would, they were right to fear, lead to deportation (ibid� 130)� Surveillance, arrest, detainment, deportation - special registration disrupted the lives of tens of thousands of families in the U�S� But this is only one of the grounds on which the program has been criticized� Special regis- 7 The INS, a division of the Department of Justice, ceased to exist on March 1, 2003, when its responsibilities were assumed by the newly created Department of Homeland Security� 8 While there was a sharp increase in removals of nationals from countries selected for special registration beginning in fiscal year 2002, it is unknown what number of those ordered deported as a result of special registration were, in fact, eventually deported� However, the potential deportation of almost 13,500 persons from Muslim-majority countries is to be interpreted as ethnic profiling, given that there are 3.2 million to 3.6 million persons living in the U�S� while “out of status” (e�g� overstay a tourist/ student visa, work without authorization, etc.) and an additional 8 million to 12 million undocumented persons (cf. Cainkar 128f.). No Longer a Promised Land 221 tration was also inefficient. Although the government advertised it as an essential tool in the fight against terrorism, the program did not lead to a single charge of terrorism (Bayoumi 272)� This is not surprising, however, since the program was logically flawed. As Moustafa Bayoumi poignantly puts it, this blunt program … was unlikely to result in the capture of a terrorist, who, if he or she were in the country already, would logically not bother to register before carrying out any nefarious activity. Since the mechanism (i.e., the profile) of the program was known, it was also highly unlikely to catch an incoming terrorist, who would again logically search for ways to circumvent special registration’s categories (273)� Not least, special registration was discriminatory; it discriminated by age, gender, and, most significantly, religion - thus being a legal reification of the assumption that Muslims are potential terrorists. Of the twenty-five countries on the registration list, six are listed by the State Department as state-sponsors of terrorism (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and North Korea)� Cuba, the seventh state-sponsor of terrorism, is - tellingly - not on the list� Two of the countries on the list (Afghanistan and Iraq) have recently been invaded by the U�S� The vast majority of the rest of the listed countries, however, are U�S� allies (Bayoumi 273)� Thus, one can conclude that the program was driven by a logic other than enemy nationality. Government officials stated that the countries on the list were selected because of al Qaeda presence (cf� Cainkar 129)� However, some selected countries had no proven al Qaeda presence, while other countries with known al Qaeda presence, such as Germany and England, were excluded from the list� What unites the countries subjected to registration, in fact, is that they are Muslim-majority countries� 9 The Department of Homeland Security justified special registration as a “pilot project focusing on a smaller segment of the nonimmigrant alien population deemed to be of risk to national security” (qtd� in Cainkar 129)� What can be inferred from this statement, then, is that the U�S� government considered males born into Islamicate 10 cultures in the Middle East, North Africa or Asia to pose a security threat to the U�S� 11 In the words of Bayoumi, special registration “reinscribed, through a legal mechanism, the cultural assumption that a terrorist is foreign-born, an alien in the United States, and a Muslim, and that all Muslim men who fit this profile are potential terrorists” (275)� The assumption that Muslims are more prone to terrorism than non-Muslims is as flawed as the assumption that a citizen of a given country is unlikely to inflict harm on his/ her own country and compatriots. To illustrate, the Red Army Faction, which terrorized West German society in the 1970s, 9 Except for Eritrea and North Korea� However, Eritrea is heavily Muslim, and North Korea is essentially a null category, since the number of visitors from North Korea to the U�S� must be close to zero (cf� Bayoumi: 290)� 10 Cultures which have been shaped by Islam� 11 Since the program operated on a country-basis, Iranian and Arab Jews, Iranian Baha’is, Arab Christians and other non-Muslims had to register, as well� 222 k atharina M otyl overwhelmingly consisted of citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany� To return to the U�S� context, Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, was neither Muslim nor a nonimmigrant alien� To put things bluntly, imagine the outrage if those matching the religious affiliation and citizenship status of McVeigh had had to register after the Oklahoma City bombing - Catholic males with U�S� citizenship� Many human rights advocacy groups decried special registration as racial profiling, the proliferation of which has been one of the most troubling consequences of the “War on Terror” for Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. Profiling of persons who are (or “look”) Arab is, for instance, extensively practiced at airport security checks, a phenomenon known in the affected communities as “flying while Arab.” According to Cainkar, enough Arab and Muslim men were removed from airplanes in the three years following 9/ 11 to foster a widespread fear of flying - a fear of humiliation more than of arrest (182). 12 Special registration, racial profiling and the other post-9/ 11 domestic security measures, which Georgetown Law professor David Cole characterized as the “most aggressive national campaign of ethnic profiling since World War II” (2006: 17), did not achieve what government officials had stated as their goal: after five thousand preventive detentions, some eighty-three thousand call-in registrations, and hundreds of thousands of FBI interviews, etc�, not a single individual was convicted of a terrorist crime (ibid�) The Bush administration’s rhetorical association of Arab Americans with terrorism not only served to justify the anti-Arab policies outlined above, it also aimed to silence Arab American protest against these policies� In times of national crisis, Steven Salaita states, there reigns a climate of “imperative patriotism,” which “assumes (or demands) that dissent in matters of governance and foreign affairs is unpatriotic and therefore unsavory” (154)� In post-9/ 11 America, Arab American dissent was perceived as “against us,” and thus as support (or at least sympathy) for terrorism� Moreover, the government’s message that Arab and Muslim Americans were enemies of the nation who deserved punishment encouraged some Americans to engage in harassment and hate crimes against members of these communities� Hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims in the U�S� surged after 9/ 11� The FBI reported a 1,600 (sic) percent increase in hate-based incidents against persons perceived to be Muslim between 2000 and 2001� 13 Throughout the country, Arabs and Muslims faced slurs such as “f***ing terrorist” or “camel jockey, go home,” and gestures of contempt, such as being spat at� Some had eggs or feces thrown at their homes, and mosques were desecrated (cf� Cain- 12 See David Harris’ article “Flying While Arab: Lessons from the Racial Profiling Controversy” (2002) for an in-depth discussion of the issue� 13 Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur said in a press release: “The FBI reports that the number of anti-Muslim incidents rose 1600% from 2000 to 2001, largely due to post-9/ 11 backlash” (Kaptur)� As a May 2002 report issued by Chris Allen and Jørgen S� Nielsen on behalf of the European Union’s European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia showed, anti-Muslim hate crimes increased in Europe after September 11, as well� No Longer a Promised Land 223 kar; Naber 2008b). Others were even assaulted physically; at least four individuals were killed for being Arab or Muslim - or mistaken to be such (cf� Naber 2008b: 289). For non-Muslim Middle Easterners and South Asians also fell victim to hate crimes because they were presumed to be Muslim� On September 15, 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi, an Indian Sikh, was gunned down outside his gas station in Mesa, Arizona, because he was wearing the traditional Sikh head covering� His assassin had previously bragged of his intention to “kill the ragheads responsible for September 11” (cf� Hanania)� But while only a fraction of Americans expressed anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiment as violently as in the cases of harassment and hate crimes outlined above - in fact, a wave of outrage swept through the country after Sodhi’s murder - a significant amount of Americans had such sentiments, as many polls documented� For instance, the Detroit Arab American Study, conducted under the egis of the University of Michigan in 2003, inquired about post-9/ 11 attitudes towards security and civil liberties among the general and the Arab American population, procuring the following findings: 49 percent of the general population would support increased surveillance of Muslim and Arab Americans; 23 percent of the general population would support increased police powers to stop and search Muslim and Arab Americans; 41 percent of the general population would uphold the detention of suspicious Arabs and Muslims even without sufficient evidence to prosecute (Baker et al� 20)� 14 To sum up, the government’s policies and rhetoric, whose tenets many Americans adopted, interpellated Arabs and Muslims as “potential terrorists,” a notion introduced by Kent Ono� According to Ono, “Hate crimes, surveillance by the repressive apparatus of the state, and surveillance and disciplining technologies have erected a powerful discursive barrier to full participation in society by those marked as ‘potential terrorists’” (443)� This exclusion of Arabs and Muslims was only possible because they had been structurally weakened by decades of Orientalist media representations� Media Images of Arab and Muslim Americans The American news and entertainment media have traditionally represented the Arab world in two fashions: 1) as an uncivilized place in which violent male despots oppress subdued women (barbarization), and 2) as a mysterious and exotic place in which desires repressed in the West can be acted out (exoticization)� Both strategies are Orientalist in that they represent “the Orient” as essentially different from, and inferior to, the West� While Arabs are driven by instincts (sex drive, power drive, etc�) and lack self-control, the West, endowed with the faculty of reason, has left these instincts behind in 14 See the complete study online http: / / www�ns�umich�edu/ Releases/ 2004/ Jul04/ daas� pdf� 224 k atharina M otyl favor of civilization� 15 Until mid-twentieth century, the figures of the sheik lusting after Western virgins, the mysterious veiled woman, and the seductive bellydancer dominated representations of Arabs in U�S� popular culture� However, while these discourses represented Arabs in monolithic, inferiorizing ways, Arabs were not yet portrayed as a threat� Only when U�S� interests in the Middle East and Arab interests grew increasingly apart since the 1960s, epitomized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War (Six-Day War) and the oil embargo of the early 1970s, did the U�S� entertainment media start to portray Arabs as enemies threatening America/ the West� 16 In Hollywood Blockbusters such as True Lies (1994), in which a Palestinian terrorist group named “Crimson Jihad” infiltrates the U.S. and plants a nuclear bomb in the Florida Keys that threatens to kill two million Americans, which is, of course, averted when a special agent (Arnold Schwarzenegger) kills the jihadis and warns the Floridians so that, very plausibly, no one is hurt by the nuclear bomb’s detonation, Arabs have been featured as villains and/ or the Arab world has been vilified. At the same time, very few Hollywood movies have depicted Arabs in humane terms, let alone portrayed Arab/ Islamic culture in a positive light (cf� Shaheen 2009)� Thus, negative representations have not been balanced out by positive representations, damaging the image of Arabs with Americans at large� As for the news media, events in the Arab/ Muslim world (as I will discuss, media discourses often conflate the two categories) only receive coverage when they are relevant to U�S� interests, e�g� involve oil or terrorism, while “real life” in the area is never reported on, and thus veiled - a phenomenon Edward Said termed “covering Islam” in his eponymous study of 1981. What the representations of Arabs in the corporate news and entertainment media since the 1960s have in common, is to portray Arabs as inferior to, less civilized than and posing a threat to Americans� By portraying Arabs in this fashion, the media have effected two things. First, they have justified U.S. intervention in the Middle East� For if Arabs are in need of civilization and pose a threat to America, the U�S�, the logic goes, clearly has a right to intervene in the Middle East� Thus, the corporate media’s portrayal of Arabs has effectively served a neocolonialist agenda� Second, the byproduct of the media’s vilification of Arabs in the Middle East has been the racialization of Arabs in the U�S� While the racialization of other groups served a domestic agenda - e�g� the appropriation of aboriginal land in the case of Native Americans or the consolidation of chattel slavery in the case of African Americans - scholars agree that the racialization of Arab Americans has been tied to events in the Middle East� For instance, Baha Abu-Laban and Michael Suleiman observe 15 While Orientalism started out as a European discourse on “the Orient” in the Enlightenment era, it was later “exported” to the Americas by European colonialists (cf� Said 2003 [1978]). 16 For an in-depth discussion of the representation of Arabs in Hollywood films since the early twentieth century, see Jack Shaheen’s comprehensive study Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2009), or Tim Jon Semmerling’s analysis “Evil” Arabs in American Popular Film: Orientalist Fear (2006) . No Longer a Promised Land 225 that the source of bias against Arabs in the U�S� relates “more to the original homeland and peoples than to the Arab-American community” (5)� Before I explain in detail why it is appropriate to conceive of Arab Americans’ marginalization as racialization, let me contrast the media image of Arabs I have previously outlined with demographic data� As I mentioned before, the entertainment media already vilified Arabs before September 11� What changed after 9/ 11 is that representations of Arabs as terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists have largely replaced all other Orientalist tropes, such as the rich oil sheik or the cunning despot lusting after Western women� 17 Moreover, a novelty of post-9/ 11 film and TV productions is the depiction of American Arabs and American Muslims as “perfidious and traitorous citizens” (Shaheen 2008: 46). TV dramas have been especially prolific in propagating the stereotype of the “Arab American neighbor as terrorist�” According to communications scholar Jack Shaheen, more than 50 programs, including audience hits like The Practice and Sleeper Cell , have portrayed Arab and Muslim Americans as threats to national security, as “backward religious radicals who merit profiling, imprisonment, torture, and death” (ibid� 47)� Fox’s hit series 24 has been particularly damaging: super agent Jack Bauer frequently uses torturing methods on Muslim and Arab (American) characters that real U�S� government agents have used on terror suspects, e�g� waterboarding� Some programs, especially courtroom dramas like Law & Order , discuss the alleged trade-off between Arabs’ and Muslims’ civil liberties and national security in more nuanced ways - a common strategy is to have the prosecutor point out the threat of Arab and Muslim Americans to national security while the defense lawyer cites the universality of civil liberties� However, these programs ultimately advocate that racist practices against Arab and Muslim Americans are wrong, but necessary in the “War on Terror�” According to media scholar Evelyn Alsultany, [Some] TV dramas … on the surface appear to contest the dominant positioning of Arabs as terrorists, Islam as a violent extremist ideology, and Arabs and Islam as antithetical to U�S� citizenship and the U�S� nation� These TV programs are regarded as ‘liberal’ or socially conscious as they take the stance that racism toward Arab and Muslim Americans post-9/ 11 is wrong […] Nonetheless, despite somewhat sympathetic portrayals of Arab and Muslim Americans, they narrate the logic of ambivalence - that racism is wrong but essential - and thus participate in serving the U�S� government narratives … [U]ltimately, discourses of the nation in crisis not only trump the Arab American plight, but also inadvertently support U.S. government initiatives in the ‘war on terror’ (208). The news media - which unlike the entertainment media cannot claim fictitiousness - proceed in a similar vein� While it comes as no surprise that Fox News and such right-wing pundits as Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter eye Arab and Muslim Americans with suspicion, even news media with a liberal 17 However, one should bear in mind that a number of successful post-9/ 11 films have portrayed Arabs and Muslims in human terms, or even thematized the psychological toll U�S� imperialist policies in the Middle East take on the local populations� Examples include Rendition (2007), Babel (2006), and The Situation (2006)� 226 k atharina M otyl reputation report on Arab and Muslim Americans in biased ways� According to Suad Joseph and Benjamin D’Harlingue, The New York Times, which is generally known for its advocacy of civil and human rights, “narrates Arab Americans and Muslims Americans in ways that result from and enable racial policing by associating them with terrorism and a demonized, globalized Islam” (229)� Demographic Reality The media images outlined above not only portray Arabs and Muslims in negative, but also in monolithic ways, by conflating the categories Arab, Middle Eastern and Muslim� Whereas the region known as the Middle East (itself a concept invented by the West) is highly heterogeneous in national, ethnic, religious and linguistic terms, U�S� discourses create the image of a Middle Eastern monolith, erasing the Other’s internal differences and thus creating the perception of a “people without history” who are only to profit from Westernization or even Western intervention� This procedure is a classic manifestation of Orientalism and underlines Edward Said’s claim that the U�S� adopted the discourses of the former colonial powers in the Arab region, Great Britain and France, after 1945� These discourses erase the differences between Arab and non-Arab Middle Easterners, such as Iranians, Turks and Armenians� Moreover, they obscure the fact that not all Arabs are Muslim and not all Muslims are Arab� Indeed, the Arab region comprises a wide range of religious denominations, including Catholics, Jews, Shi’a Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Maronites, to name but a few� The majority of the world’s 1�2 billion Muslims, on the other hand, does not reside in the Arab region, where 300 million Muslims live, but in South and Southeast Asia; the six countries with the largest Muslim population worldwide are Indonesia (170 million), Pakistan (136 million), Bangladesh (106 million), India (103 million), Turkey (62 million), and Iran (61 million) (Naber 2008a: 5f.). With regard to the U.S., the perception that all Arabs are Muslims and all Muslims are Arab is particularly absurd� Of the estimated 4 million Arab Americans, about 63 percent are Christian and 24 percent are Muslim, while the rest follows other religions (such as Judaism) or no religion� While it is true that Arab immigration to the U�S� since 1965 has overwhelmingly been Muslim, the majority of all Arab Americans today is still Christian� And the majority of American Muslims is not Arab� Of the 6 to 7 million Muslims living in the U�S�, Arabs make up about 25 percent� One of the largest Muslim groups in the U�S� are actually African Americans (30 percent), while 33 percent are South Asian, 4 percent each sub-Saharan African, other Asian, and converts, and 3 percent European (cf� Haddad)� 18 18 It is important to bear in mind that these are extrapolations, which explains why one research team cites the number of Muslim Arab Americans with 24 percent of 4 million (which is roughly 1 million) and another cites the number of Muslim Arab Americans No Longer a Promised Land 227 Despite this demographic reality, most Americans conceive of Arab Americans as Muslim (not least due to the media’s reductionism outlined above)� Hence, the discourse of Islamophobia is an important factor to bear in mind when theorizing the marginalization Arab Americans have experienced� Cultural Racism Classical frameworks on racialization in the U�S�, such as Michael Omi’s and Howard Winant’s seminal Racial Formation in the United States , have focused on the racialization of groups based on biological differences� Arab Americans have primarily not been discriminated against on grounds of biology, but rather based on the assumption that they pose a security and/ or civilizational threat to the U�S� Still, I argue, the marginalization of Arab Americans constitutes racialization, since they are constructed as essentially different� But this alleged difference is cultural, not biological� Building on Etienne Balibar, I argue that the logic operative in the racialization of Arab Americans is cultural racism. Developing his notion of cultural racism around the animus directed against immigrants in France, Balibar says: The new racism is a racism of the era of ‘decolonization’, of the reversal of population movements between the old colonies and the old metropolises, and the division of humanity within a single political space� Ideologically, current racism, which in France centres upon the immigration complex, fits into a framework of ‘racism without races’ which is already widely developed in other countries, particularly the Anglo-Saxon ones� It is a racism whose dominant theme is not biological or heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions (21)� Cultural racism, then, constructs perceived cultural (e�g� Arab), religious (e�g� Muslim), and civilizational (e�g� “the Orient”) differences as natural and insurmountable� The behavior of individuals is not explained by blood or genes, but seen as the result of their belonging to historical “cultures” (ibid�)� The differences between cultures, however, are in turn regarded as natural� Balibar explains: [B]iological or genetic naturalism is not the only means of naturalizing human behavior and social affinities. … [C]ulture can also function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin (22)� Discourses of cultural racism may still instrumentalize biological features� Contemporary Arabophobia utilizes biological features in the racialization process; for instance, Arabs are frequently imagined as having hooked noses� with 25 percent of 6 to 7 million (which is between 1�25 and 1�75 million)� Still, these figures convey an approximate impression of the religious makeup of the Arab and Muslim communities in the U�S� 228 k atharina M otyl However, these bodily stigmata are employed as signifiers of a spiritual inheritance rather than a biological heredity (ibid� 24)� Thus, Balibar summarizes, “the return of the biological theme is permitted … within the framework of a cultural racism” (26)� The discourse of Islamophobia is especially relevant to the racialization of Arab and Muslim Americans� Structurally similar to anti-Semitism, contemporary Islamophobic discourses impute an intrinsic, malicious nature to Islam� Consider George Frederickson’s observation that anti-Judaism became anti-Semitism, and hence racism, “when the belief took hold that Jews were intrinsically and organically evil rather than merely having false beliefs and wrong dispositions” (19)� As I have shown, U�S� discourses since 9/ 11 present Arabs, who are constructed as all-Muslim, as malicious, rather than criticizing them for holding “false” (i.e. Muslim) beliefs. Balibar’s reflections on European Arabophobia in the early 1990s bear relevance to the racialization of Arab Americans today: [C]ontemporary Arabophobia, … carries with it an image of Islam as a ‘conception of the world’ which is incompatible with Europeanness and an enterprise of universal ideological domination, and therefore a systematic confusion of ‘Arabness’ and ‘Islamicism’ (24)� Substituting “Europeanness” with “Americanness,” one gets an adequate description of contemporary anti-Arab discourses in the U�S� The racialization of Arabs according to the logic of cultural racism is especially evident in special registration, which collapsed citizenship, ethnicity and religion into race� Consider the provision that special registration extend to “a nonimmigrant alien who is a dual national and is applying for admission as a national of a country that is not subject to special registration, but the alien’s other nationality would subject him or her to special registration” (qtd� in Bayoumi 277)� The implication that every national of a Muslimmajority country was required to register meant that if one happened to hold dual citizenship with, for instance, Sweden and Morocco, or if one was born in Morocco but was not its citizen, or if one was born out of Morocco but to parents who were Moroccan, one qualified for special registration. Citizenship of a country not listed for special registration, even if it was one’s only citizenship, did not protect one from special registration if one was born or one’s parents were born in a Muslim-majority country (ibid. 278). Thus, special registration posited that Islam was inheritable, turning a religious category into a racial one� Moustafa Bayoumi elaborates: [C]onsidering the broad geography of special registration, it makes descent or inheritability of Islam the defining criterion. And that inheritability has nothing to do with enemy nationality … Nor has it anything to do with belief or political affiliation … Rather, it is only about one’s blood relationship to Islam. Through that blood relationship, legal barriers have been established to exclude as many Muslims as possible, and that fact consequently turns Islam into a racial category (ibid�)� No Longer a Promised Land 229 Having outlined and theorized the anti-Arab climate in post-9/ 11 America, I will now turn to Laila Halaby’s novel Once in a Promised Land , which powerfully imagines the toll the “War on Terror” has taken on the psyche of Arab Americans� Being Arab in the U.S. after 9/ 11 in Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land Once in a Promised Land traces the trajectory of a Muslim Arab American couple from a relatively assimilated, and content - if not quite happy - life into chaos and despair in the wake of September 11� Jassim and Salwa Haddad are a couple of Jordanian and Palestinian background, respectively, who immigrated to the U�S� in their early twenties� Both are university-educated professionals� Jassim, who holds a PhD in hydrology, works as an expert on water quality control with a consulting firm, and Salwa works at a bank, supplementing her income with a second job as a realtor� The childless couple leads what could be termed a comfortable Yuppie lifestyle in Tucson, Arizona� They speak immaculate English and have a couple of friends outside the Arab American community� While both of them are Muslim by denomination, Jassim is not religious� Salwa is a secular Muslim (for example, she celebrates Eid, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting), but neither practices the Muslim prayer rituals nor wears hijab , as the head covering of Muslimas is called� In short, neither of them conforms to the stereotypical image of “the Muslim” projected by the U�S� media, i�e� the bearded, patriarchal male and the veiled, subdued female� Although they speak Arabic at home and have their grievances with American society - Salwa, for instance, bemoans what she considers most Americans’ lack of education - both of them have embraced American culture in certain ways� Most noticeably, both have succumbed to the seductive lure of American consumerism; Jassim’s lavish salary enables him to wear designer clothes and drive a $ 50,000 Mercedes sedan, while Salwa’s predilection for silk nightwear has earned her the nickname “queen of silk pajamas�” All in all, one could say that they have integrated well into American society and live by its rules� We first meet the two protagonists on the morning of September 11, 2001, hours prior to the terrorist attacks which are to change their lives forever� While Jassim has risen early and gone for a swim, as he does every morning, Salwa allows herself to sleep a little longer: “Nestled there under cool covers … Salwa found peace, a peace she would remember for years, as it would be scratched away within the hour by men whose culture was a first cousin to her culture, whose religion was her religion” (11)� Meanwhile, Jassim is chatted up by a middle-aged man, Jack Franks, in the gym’s locker room� When Jack learns that Jassim is from Jordan, he reveals that his daughter moved there years ago: “‘She married a Jordanian� Not one like you, though� This one was from the sticks - or the sand, as the case was� […] She converted� She’s an Arab now� Probably still lives there� […] Haven’t talked to her for 230 k atharina M otyl years’” (6)� Jack proceeds to interrogate Jassim, who would prefer not to be part of this conversation, about his wife� Having learned that she is Arab, Jack first asks, “She veiled? ” (7), and, when Jassim negates this, whether she is beautiful: “This question went too far, and Jack Franks seemed to sense it� ‘No offense intended� I’m just amazed by the beauty of the women there� Incredible� The hair, the eyes� No wonder you fellas cover them up’” (7)� First of all, this episode draws attention to the fact that stereotypes about Arabs were already in place before 9/ 11� Jack can be read as an allegory of Orientalist thinking, which the media have distributed for decades with their representations of Arabs and Muslims� Jack uses “Arab” and “Muslim” interchangeably, conflating religious and ethno-cultural categories - but while one can either convert to Islam or become an Arab (by becoming a naturalized citizen of a country of the Arab League), or both, one cannot become an Arab by conversion� While Jack’s daughter most likely adopted Jordanian citizenship by marrying a Jordanian man and, assuming that he is Muslim, converted to Islam for this marriage to be possible, she certainly could not have “converted” to “Arabness�” Moreover, Jack’s primary associations with Arab women are hijab and exotic looks enticing male desire, two seemingly contradictory tropes which are, however, connected by the underlying logic that the “Orient” is lacking the civilization the West has attained, as women are oppressed and sexual desires have not (yet) been restrained� Jack explicitly denies Muslim women’s agency by asserting that men force them to wear hijab - that a woman would choose to wear hijab is unconceivable to Jack - as it is to many Westerners, I would argue� But while a Westerner may think that covering one’s hair limits one’s freedom, a Muslima who wears hijab may argue that hijab enlarges her freedom as it shields her from the male gaze� At any rate, Saudi Arabia is the only Arab country in which hijab is mandatory, and there are women in Arab countries (and the U�S�) who identify as Muslim, but do not wear hijab. The use of stereotypes about Arabs, exemplified in Jack’s remarks, only intensifies after 9/ 11. Although both Salwa and Jassim abhor the terrorist acts - Jassim thinks, “What entered into someone’s mind to make him (them! ) want to do such a thing? It was incomprehensible”(20), and “Salwa had talked to her friend Randa several times … about how horrible it was” (21) - they are rendered dangerous and disloyal to the U�S� in the eyes of the American mainstream, based solely on the fact that they share the same religion and regional origins with the perpetrators of the attacks� For instance, a few days after the attacks, a shop assistant in a mall, Amber, calls security on Jassim� Enraged, Salwa confronts Amber, demanding to know why she did this: ‘Why did you call that security guard on my husband? ’ […] ‘He just scared me� […] He just stood there and stared for a really long time, like he was high or something� And then I remembered all the stuff that’s been going on�’ Here the girl stopped and looked at her as though she were checking to make sure her reference was understood� The words slid into Salwa’s understanding, narrowing and sharpening her anger� ‘I see� You thought he might want to blow up the mall in his Ferragamo shoes�’ […] No Longer a Promised Land 231 Amber’s face changed in blotches� Something seemed to be building up in her, and she blurted, ‘My uncle died in the Twin Towers�’ Salwa knew something like this was coming, had been waiting for the moment when it became spoken� ‘I am sorry to hear that� Are you planning to have every Arab arrested now? ’ (29f�)� This episode vividly illuminates the dangerous effects of the post-9/ 11 surveillance culture which followed the Bush administration’s admonition of the American public to be vigilant and report suspicious activities� Persons who seemed of “Arab phenotype” and displayed “suspicious behavior” were transformed into potential terrorists� As Amber’s actions make clear, however, any behavior, even if it was as harmless as staring, could be perceived as “suspicious behavior” if its agent seemed of “Arab phenotype�” At bottom, then, any person who seemed of “Arab phenotype” could be transformed into a potential terrorist� But another phenomenon is problematized in this episode� By invoking Jassim’s designer shoes, Salwa is clearly trying to trump her husband’s racial background with his class position� While her question “Are you planning to have every Arab arrested now? ”, criticizes the interpellation of Arabs as potential terrorists in general, she seems to think that her husband’s upper middle class background should have “bought him out” of being perceived as a potential terrorist in the first place. Rather than opposing the profiling of all Arab men, Salwa in effect critiques the profiling of Arab men who are clean-shaven and wear designer-gear� Anti-Arab racism in post-9/ 11 American society has more severe consequences for the protagonists, though, than mere unpleasant social situations such as these. Both characters eventually find themselves in precarious situations, Jassim by being at the wrong place at the wrong time, Salwa by a bad choice� Jassim accidentally hits a boy on a skateboard with his car, resulting in the teenager’s death� Salwa starts an affair with a younger WASP co-worker� To err is human� This principle does not hold for Arabs in the U�S� after September 11 - to err as an Arab, the novel posits, has devastating consequences� Since the boy Jassim hit had strong anti-Arab feelings - his skateboard is adorned with a sticker that reads “Terrorist Hunting License” (77) and he “had no hair except for a tiny tuft at the base of his neck” (119), which suggests he might have been a skinhead - the FBI starts investigating Jassim although the officer on the scene cleared him of any wrongdoing, insinuating Jassim might have killed the boy intentionally� Jassim is sucked into a Kafkaesque vortex as the FBI investigates ever more ways in which he may be connected to terrorism� While the FBI agents initially investigate him in the context of the car accident, their main concern soon becomes the fact that Jassim “oversee[s] the testing and quality control of the water supply” (229) of the city of Tucson� When asked to describe his daily routine, Jassim says: “I swim, I work, I go home� Not unlike the rest of America I suspect,” to which one of the agents tellingly replies: “That may be, but the rest of America does not have access to the entire city’s water supply with the means to tamper with it” (232)� The FBI visits Jassim at his workplace, raising suspicion with 232 k atharina M otyl some of his conservative co-workers, and contacts his clients to ask questions about him� As a consequence, various clients cancel their contracts with Jassim’s consulting firm, to Jassim’s infinite incredulity: Jassim had done nothing wrong and this was America and there should have to be proof of negligence on his part for his job to be affected� People, companies, the city, shouldn’t be able to pull accounts on the basis of his being an Arab. Yes, finally he saw what had been sitting at the back of his consciousness for some time in a not-so-whispered voice: with or against � But was he not with? I understand American society , he wanted to scream� I speak your language. I pay taxes to your government. I play your game. I have a right to be here. How could this be happening? (234) Ultimately, Jassim loses his job as a result of the FBI investigation� Jassim’s boss and friend Marcus, the prototypical liberal - “‘Are you pissing off the conservative right again, Jassim? ’” (107) - used to defend Jassim against hyperpatriotic co-workers and the FBI for a long time. He even fired a receptionist for spying and keeping a notebook on Jassim. However, when he finally learns from the FBI that Jassim killed a boy in a car accident, Marcus feels Jassim has betrayed his trust by not confiding in him, and decides to lay him off: It was no longer a matter of defending a friend, of standing up for what he believed was right� He was only a partner in the business, and it was out of his hands� […] In the lifetime of his company, Marcus had fired seven people, all administrative and technical. He had never fired someone he considered to be his equal, nor had he let someone go for such ambiguous reasons as with Jassim� He hated doing it, having to be so decisive about another person’s life� Even when things were clear-cut, he liked to give his employees a chance to redeem themselves� If they didn’t, if they continued the behavior, he always questioned himself over and over, before, during, and after the firing. If only people had a better sense and could excuse themselves when they were no longer appropriate� In this case there was no behavior to change� Jassim could not change who he was, and Marcus recognized consciously that in part he was firing him for that reason , though it would be the lost contracts and unreliability on which he would focus (295f�; emphasis added)� While Marcus has a right to be offended as a friend by Jassim’s failure to tell him about the accident, he sees Jassim not only as an untrustworthy friend, but an untrustworthy Arab friend� And if the untrustworthy Arab friend kept such crucial information from him, who knows what else Jassim may be involved in that Marcus does not know about? Though Marcus recognizes the perverse logic of firing Jassim because the latter cannot change who he is, he accepts acting on the basis of an essentialist logic, because it is no longer “profitable” for him to employ an Arab. Economic considerations, in Marcus’ thinking, ultimately trump political ones� Marcus’ liberal political thought and his profit-orientation suggest that we read Marcus as an allegory for liberal capitalism� Such a reading suggests that, like Marcus, liberal capitalism accepts minorities as long as they generate surplus value� As soon as their protection costs the system, they are on their own� Marcus’ transformation, I suggest, is the novel’s actual tragedy� If anti-Arab discourses and government practices (exemplified by the FBI’s sketchy investigation) are so perva- No Longer a Promised Land 233 sive that even liberal individuals who believe in the upholding of civil and human rights, are ultimately influenced by them, Arabs and Muslims are left with precious few allies to oppose their marginalization� Salwa even viscerally suffers as a consequence of the Orientalist discourses disseminated by the Bush administration and the corporate media� She starts an affair with Jake, the son of affluent diplomats, who, unbeknownst to Salwa, is also a white-collar drug dealer� Working at Salwa’s bank during the day, he also deals and uses hard drugs: “It was as though he were two people: one who went through the day doing what was expected of him, going to class, going to work, and one who was entirely focused on maintaining his high and having sex�” Jake, who thinks of his colleague as “the gorgeous Arab” and “[e]xotic,” uses his snippets of Arabic, which he studies in order “to learn the language of opium,” to lure Salwa, whom “he desperately wanted to make love to” (170f). Salwa, mistaking Jake’s flattery for genuine interest in her culture, finally succumbs to his courting. After a couple of exhilarating encounters, which are, however, always followed by feelings of guilt - “[A]t night, during those hours she lay awake … she was trapped by her thoughts, pinned down by the ugliness of what she had done while her clean husband lay next to her�” (191) - Salwa decides to end this affair and spend some time in Jordan to sort out her life� When she visits Jake in his apartment to break up with him, he has a rage attack and repeatedly smashes a heavy silver picture frame on her head, the broken glass and metal cutting her face, while he screams: “Bitch! Goddam fucking Arab bitch! You ruined everything! ” (322)� The post-9/ 11 vilification of Arabs figures in two ways in this act. A troubled young man unable to meet his parents’ expectations and dealing with drugs, Jake’s self-esteem is deeply shattered by this Arab Muslim woman’s breaking up with him� In the days following 9/ 11, narratives of the oppression of women in Afghanistan abounded� These narratives reinforced the image of the powerless, subdued Muslim female� Jake perceives the fact that he cannot even control a “powerless Muslim woman” as a crisis in his masculinity and self-conception� He seeks to restore his superiority by exercising the one realm in which he is superior to Salwa, i�e� physical strength� Hence, Jake’s masculinity is restored by physically punishing Salwa for her agency� On a second level, Jake’s humiliation coincides with the sense of crisis and humiliation that September 11 instilled in the American self-image� Salwa’s violent punishment for violating Jake’s sense of masculinity, then, can be read as a symbolic punishment of Arab Muslims for destroying the Twin Towers (which were, after all, phallic symbols signifying American might) and thus shattering the American self-image of being almighty, invulnerable and in control� Halaby has chosen an ambiguous ending for her novel� It is left unclear whether Salwa will survive this onslaught or die� This can, of course, be read as an ambiguous outlook on the future of Arabs in the U�S� 234 k atharina M otyl Works Cited Abu-Laban, Baha, and Michael Suleiman, eds� Arab Americans: Continuity and Change � Monograph Series no� 24� Belmont, MA: Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAUG), 1989. 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Seyfarth Shaw Attorneys� “DHS Announces Elimination of NSEERS Special Registration Requirement�” May 04, 2011� Access 05 July 2011� <http: / / www� seyfarth.com/ dir_docs/ news_item/ a98dd4ff-a9e5- 42b8-bcba-b8a58ba49616_ documentupload�pdf>� Shaheen, Jack� Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/ 11 � Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2008. ---� Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2009� Tsao, Fred, and Rhoda Rae Gutierrez� Losing Ground: The Loss of Freedom, Equality, and Opportunity for America’s Immigrants since the September 11 Attacks. Chicago: Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), 2003� “US Detains nearly 1,200 during Registry�” Washington Post. January 17, 2003: A14� IV. Violence and Conflict J an d. k ucharzeWski “Only after Disaster Can We Be Resurrected” The Crisis of Masculinity in David Fincher’s Fight Club Man’s Last Stand A close-up of a man in his thirties, lying on a bed covered by immaculate white sheets� The static camera lingers on his vacant stare� From the off, a male, slightly lethargic voice starts narrating: “I will get up and walk the dog at six-thirty a�m� I will eat some fruit as part of my breakfast� I will shave� I will clean the sink after I shave�” Cut to an African-American man, also around thirty, sitting in a non-descript room, gazing apathetically into the camera. The same voice continues: “I will be at work by 8 a.m. I will sit through two-hour meetings� I will say ‘yes’ when you want me to say ‘yes�’ I will be quiet when you don’t want to hear me say ‘no�’” Cut to a bearded man in a scruffy black T-shirt with a blank expression on his face� “I will take your call� I will listen to your opinion of my friends� I will listen to your friends’ opinions of my friends� I will be civil to your mother�” Another cut to a man in a black suit and a matching blue tie� His face mirrors the empty gaze of his predecessors� The camera starts to zoom in on his eyes as the voice from the off goes through its litany of concessions: “I will put the seat down� I will separate the recycling� I will carry your lip balm� I will watch your vampire TV shows with you� I will take my socks off before getting into bed�” The camera is moving closer and closer to the man’s pupils� “I will put my underwear in the basket�” A rising drone begins to accompany the monologue� “And because I do this …” Cut� The howling of a cranked engine� The camera is showing the cockpit view from a car racing down a deserted highway� Then a rapid sequence of external shots exhibiting the front, the back, and the sides of a black sports sedan speeding along the road at high velocity� “I will drive the car I want to drive�” A score reminiscent of the opening fanfares of Monty Norman’s James Bond theme accompanies the next three words that are inserted in bold white letters over the shot of the moving car: “Man’s Last Stand�” The car seems to race straight into the camera and the ad ends with a red Dodge Charger logo on a black background� 240 J an d. k ucharzeWski This TV commercial 1 for Chrysler’s Dodge subdivision was aired during the Super Bowl of 2010, the most prestigious and expensive advertising block in American television which at the time rated an average of 106 million viewers and became the most watched telecast in history� Placed into the context of the inherently aggressive and hyper-masculine sport of American Football, the narrative of the spot suggests an elemental crisis of masculinity: men have become emasculated and the perpetrators of this emasculation are manifold: women (“I will carry your lip balm”), a white-collar working environment (“I will sit through two-hour meetings”), a domestic sphere portrayed as innately feminine (“I will put the seat down”), household responsibilities (“I will walk the dog”), and the media (“I will watch your vampire TV shows with you”)� In short: the Dodge commercial implies that men have been weakened by the various manifestations of late-capitalist consumer culture� Yet, in an unintentionally ironic moment of self-implosion, the advertisement also claims that consumerism might be the very answer to this crisis of masculinity: by complying with the requirements of a domesticated performance of masculinity, men have earned the right to buy a car that evokes a nostalgic mode of rugged masculine autonomy� This type of masculinity symbolically manifests itself through the slightly modified Bond -Theme, the suggestive vista of the endless American highway, and the fact that Dodge’s Charger brand started out as a so called ‘muscle car’ in the 1960s� In what could probably be described as a textbook aporia, the difference between cure and disease is nullified, since buying a specific brand of car is presented as the solution to a crisis of masculinity that is portrayed as a consequence of commodity culture� A similar tension emerges from David Fincher’s 1999 screen adaptation (written by Jim Uhls) of Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 debut novel Fight Club , in which a nameless 2 corporate employee (Edward Norton) invents a hypermasculine alter ego named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who enables him to violently rage against the perceived feminization associated with late-capitalist consumerism� In an interview, the director summarizes the predicament of his protagonist, who is also the unreliable first-person narrator of the film, as follows: “We’re designed to be hunters and we’re in a society of shopping. There’s nothing to kill anymore, there’s nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore� In that social emasculation this everyman [the film’s narrator] is created” (Smith 60). Since the denouement of the plot reveals Tyler and the narrator to be the same person, Tyler’s liberationist rhetoric is identified as the subconscious desire of a white-collar worker who feels disenfranchised as a consumerist subject� According to Tyler, this crisis of the heterosexual male can only be resolved through a revolution against consumerism that would restore a primal scene governed by a Dar- 1 “Dodge: Man’s Last Stand,” dir� Mark Romanek, Advertisement Company: Wieden and Kennedy, USA, CBS , 7 February 2010 <http: / / www�youtube�com/ watch? v=2RyPamyWotM>� 2 Jim Uhls’ script and most critical writings refer to the film’s nameless narrator as “Jack” and I will follow this convention in this paper� “Only after Disaster Can We Be Resurrected” 241 winian struggle for survival� As the ultimate outcome of his cataclysmic plan to bring about the “collapse of financial history” (02: 05: 30), Tyler envisions a post-consumerist arcadia in which men will hunt “elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center� You will wear leather clothes that last you the rest of your life� You will climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower� And when you look down you will see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of the ruins of a superhighway” (01: 37: 44)� Or, as Tyler announces in Palahniuk’s novel: “Only after disaster can we be resurrected” (70)� The central ambiguity of Fight Club and the central concern of this paper is that Tyler’s proposed cure to the assumed crisis of masculinity ultimately reproduces the very iconography and ideology that Tyler intends to replace with his message of anarchy, violence, and destruction� This paradox manifests itself most vividly in the extra-diegetic fact that the narrator imagines his idea of authentic masculinity literally as Brad Pitt� The casting of a former underwear model as a perpetrator of crimes against consumerism is an indicator that Tyler’s liberationist message and the movie’s attitude towards this message should not be confused� While some initial academic criticism of Fight Club dismissed the film as a regressive and misogynistic glorification of male violence (cf� Giroux), Tyler’s anti-consumerist stance is delivered by an actor who is one of Hollywood’s most recognizable and commercially viable representatives; the ironic dissonance thus created between the rhetoric and the associations transported by Pitt’s performance will help to elucidate the film’s treatment of masculinity in crisis. Scarring the Unmarked Case The notion of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ has been around for a while now� Especially the 1990s saw a noticeable peak in cultural productions that postulated white masculinity to be under siege by feminism, multiculturalism, and demographic shifts in the workforce� Movies like Falling Down (1993), Disclosure , (1994), The Game (1997), 3 Unforgiven (1992), Misery (1990), Magnolia (1999), or American Beauty (1999) either explicitly or metaphorically depicted men struggling to come to terms with a changed cultural environment that no longer favored traditional performances of masculinity in which men are commonly seen as providers, protectors, and warriors� Self-help books along the lines of On Men: Masculinity in Crisis (2001) by Anthony W� Clark and the blatantly anti-feminist treatise The Myth of Male Power (1993) by Warren Farrell promised to mend the wounds purportedly inflicted on the white male body and psyche by a culture that “forced countless numbers of men to reconsider previously held beliefs about male roles and dominant masculinities” (Whitehead 48). Although studies like Mark Anthony Neal’s New Black 3 Falling Down, Disclosure and The Game all starred Michael Douglas in a leading role, who was the emblematic actor to embody white men in crisis in the 1990s� Cf� Weingarten 256-293� 242 J an d. k ucharzeWski Man (2006) or bell hooks’ We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2003) also identify crisis tendencies within African-American masculinities, “[p]ostsixties gender and racial struggles are most often conceptualized as a battle between ‘multiculturalists’ and the white, male spokesmen for unmarked normativity” (Robinson 2)� While white heterosexual men were previously ‘invisible’ as the ‘unmarked case’ that dictated the parameters according to which other groups had to be defined, “white men have become marked man , not only pushed away from the symbolic centers of American iconography but recentered as malicious and jealous protectors of the status quo” (ibid� 5)� Hence contemporary discourses of the crisis of masculinity tend to spotlight white males as the primary representatives of a patriarchal hegemony which has been destabilized by recent cultural, social, and political developments� As often as this crisis of masculinity has been announced in popular and critical writings, it has also been discarded as an ideological scheme to secure hegemonic power by putting men once again at the center of attention: “[I]n order for white masculinity to negotiate its position within the field of identity politics, white men must claim a symbolic disenfranchisement, must compete with various others for cultural authority bestowed upon the authentically disempowered, the visibly wounded” (ibid� 12)� Other interpretations propose that the discourse of a crisis of masculinity frequently depends on an outdated conceptualization of gender that presumes a fixed and essentialist entity: “many writings on the crisis of masculinity assume that men and their masculinity are homogenous and biologically indivisible, sustained by a natural order that has been severely threatened by women’s ‘misguided’ attempts to transform the gender ‘balance’” (Whitehead 56)� Whether the crisis of masculinity is an actual, perceived, or even hegemonically constructed condition ultimately does not make much of a difference when considering that “the rhetoric of crisis gets used by white men to negotiate shifts in understandings of white masculinity” (Robinson 10)� Since masculinity “might be in crisis when many men in a given context feel tension with larger ideologies that dominate or begin to dominate that context” (Reeser 27), the rise of feminism and the ensuing challenges to patriarchal power are conventionally identified as the catalyst for this reconfiguration of masculinity. 4 Additionally, it is often “observed that the economic transition from industry to service, or from production to consumption, is symbolically a move from the traditional masculine to the traditional feminine” (Faludi 38). Even when avoiding Tyler’s polemic of socio-evolutionary atavism that separates the archaic categories of hunters and gatherers along a binary gender line, consumer culture is conventionally seen as a feminine sphere� While capitalism in general is conceptualized as aggressive, active, self-reliant and male, consumerism - although a manifestation of the same socio-economic system - is regarded as complacent, passive, and feminine� In accordance with Andreas Huyssen and Walter Benjamin, Swanson argues that “the feminine becomes inscribed onto mass 4 Cf. Connell 88; Faludi 13-24; Robinson 2-6; Whitehead 48. “Only after Disaster Can We Be Resurrected” 243 culture as a sign of its inauthenticity; imitative and reproductive, corrupted by the success of its own degenerative allure, mass culture is understood in terms of a feminine threat to civilization” (90)� Faludi coins the terms “ornamental culture” (35) in order to explain the correlation between masculinity in crisis and consumerism: Constructed around celebrity and image, glamour and entertainment, marketing and consumerism, [ornamental culture] is a ceremonial gateway to nowhere� Its essence is not just the selling act but the act of selling the self, and in this quest every man is essentially on his own, a lone sales rep marketing his own image (ibid� 35)� Critics like Henry A� Giroux argue that Fincher’s Fight Club could be located securely in the context of regressive narratives that glorify male violence as a legitimate challenge to the discourse of consumer culture� According to Giroux: “If Jack represents the crisis of capitalism repackaged as the crisis of a domestic masculinity, Durden represents the redemption of masculinity repackaged as the promise of violence in the interest of social and political anarchy” (13)� However, I will argue that Fight Club actually acknowledges the impossibility of a stable gender identity and indeed exposes the notion of violence as a regenerative force for masculinity as a myth� Remaining Men Together Fight Club deconstructs Tyler’s discourse of masculinity by mapping the crisis of its male characters onto the system of representation itself, i�e� the movie constantly exposes itself as a self-referential construct rather than a mimetic representation and thus problematizes the very idea of authenticity and coherence with which its protagonists operate� In Fight Club the representation of crisis also generates a crisis of representation� This becomes especially evident in one of the film’s early pivotal moments which shows Jack - prior to the schizophrenic creation of his alter ego Tyler - as he is sitting on the toilet, reading a catalogue� The camera zooms into an image from the catalogue and then cross-fades to a pan of Jack’s condo which looks exactly like the living room depicted in the catalogue� As Jack narrates from the off over the camera pan, each item of furniture mentioned in the monologue suddenly appears in the empty room with labels and short product descriptions popping up next to it, gradually transforming the barren apartment into the likeness of a generic living quarter typically displayed in furniture stores: Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct� If I saw something like a clever coffee table in the shape of a yin and yang, I had to have it� Like the Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern� Or the Rislampa wire lamps of environmentally-friendly unbleached paper� Even the Vild hall clock of galvanized steel, resting on the Klipsk shelving unit. I would flip through catalogs and wonder, “What kind of dining set defines me as a person? ” We used to read pornography� Now it was the Horchow Collection� I had it all� Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of wherever (00: 04: 32-00: 05: 22)� 244 J an d. k ucharzeWski Halfway through his monologue Jack walks through the shot, a phone to his ear as he orders another designer item from a mail order company, his skinny body obscuring some of the labels that continue hanging in the air� By imploding the difference between the artificial construction of domesticity presented in the furniture catalogue and Jack’s apartment, this scene frames commodity culture as a realm of simulacra and simulations which seems to be taken right out of Jean Baudrillard’s writings on hyperreality� Baudrillard hyperbolically postulates a postmodern condition in which original and replica can no longer be distinguished from one another: The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control - and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance� It is no longer anything but operational� In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore� It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere (1993: 343)� Besides locating Jack in a “hyperspace without atmosphere,” the scene also suggests a symbolic castration as Jack has so utterly succumbed to the “Ikea nesting instinct” that he no longer masturbates to pornography but instead reads interior design magazines� Lethargic domesticity has replaced the male sex drive and the film makes a point of showing Jack seated on the toilet, his pants around his ankles, deliberately breaking with conventional representations of male physique in Hollywood cinema� During a guided meditation that he attends early on in the film, Jack is asked to envision his “power animal” (00: 10: 35) and he comes up with the image of a penguin, a flightless (read ‘castrated’) bird well known for the fact that its males actively participate in the nesting and incubation duties. Jack’s weary self-identification as a conspicuous consumer (“What kind of dining set defines me as a person? ”) later prompts Tyler to call him “Ikea boy” (02: 07: 55), and since the only other name attached to the character is an alias he gives himself when visiting a support group for cancer patients, Jack is presented as a non-identity, an empty signifier in a consumerist hyperreality. In its opening scenes Fight Club links a crisis of referentiality to a crisis of male gender identity� For Jack, the inauthentic environment of late-capitalist consumerism cannot produce an ‘authentic’ male gender identity� The inauthenticity of consumerism and its allegedly emasculating effects become interchangeable: consumer culture is feminine and inauthentic and therefore the cause of a crisis of male identity� At the beginning of the movie, Jack’s crisis of masculinity/ authenticity manifests itself through bouts of insomnia which plunge him into an almost catatonic condition in which “everything is a copy of a copy of a copy” (00: 03: 45)� Before subconsciously creating his alter ego Tyler as a non-conformist fantasia of male virility and assertiveness, Jack visits a variety of support groups in the hope of filling the void in his life. He joins the first group after his doctor tells him that he should not complain too much about his sleeplessness: “You want to see pain? Swing by First Methodist Tuesday nights� See the guys with testicular cancer� That’s pain” (00: 06: 00)� In this “Only after Disaster Can We Be Resurrected” 245 group called “Remaining Men Together” Jack, who pretends to also suffer from cancer, meets the heavily overweight Robert “Big Bob” Paulson (Meat Loaf), an ex-bodybuilder who invented a chest expansion program that was advertised on late night television� Another male victim of consumerism, Bob became obsessed with an ideal of the male body unattainable by natural means and started taking steroids� The steroid injections gave Bob testicular cancer - his testicles had to be removed, his business went bankrupt, and his wife divorced him� As part of the cancer therapy, Bob has to take hormone supplements which cause his body to overproduce estrogen and make him develop breasts. As the former spokesman for a profit-oriented chest expansion program whose body has grown female breasts, Bob literally embodies Tyler’s claim that consumerism turns men into women� Furthermore, Bob’s attempts to transfigure his body into the mimicry of a 1980s action hero à la Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger suggests that consumerism provides men with unfeasible models of masculinity that ultimately amplify the crisis tendencies in their gender performance� The crisis at the centre of Fight Club is generated by the clash of two seemingly incompatible conceptualizations of masculinity that are nevertheless equally ingrained in the discourse of contemporary culture, i�e� the domestic male and the aggressive male� Whereas political and cultural discourses demand a restrained form of masculinity, the iconography of manhood as it emerges from the various transmutations of the male action hero in Hollywood cinema, in many advertisements and in professional sports, still favors a nostalgic notion of men as warriors and hunters� The rugged individualism of the American frontier hero is in many ways still the dominant paradigm of masculinity in American mainstream media, yet this paradigm is also steeped in a melancholic aura of the unattainable� In Fight Club , these two dominant conceptualizations of masculinity are presented as incongruent to the point where the film’s central character suffers a schizophrenic breakdown during which two different performances of male subjectivity are particularized in two different personas: the aggressive, violent, and selfreliant Tyler and the domestic, emasculated, passive Jack� By condensing the socio-cultural crisis of masculinity into a crisis of individual identity, Fight Club follows a pattern of individualization that Faludi identifies as central to the crisis of masculinity: “Instead of collectively confronting brutalizing forces, each man is expected to dramatize his own struggle by himself, to confront arbitrarily designated enemies in a staged fight - a fight separated from society the way a boxing ring is roped off from the crowd” (15)� The support groups initially provide Jack with an alternative to this privatized performance of male identity as they emphasize the communal and communicative dimension of manhood. The men in the first group Jack joins out of curiosity are “Remaining Men Together,” i�e� their experience of masculinity is a shared one and the title leaves it open to interpretation whether they will remain men together despite having their testicles removed or whether they are the few remaining men who are able to adopt a societal idea of masculinity� 246 J an d. k ucharzeWski During the support group meetings, the men are asked to form “one-onones” in which two men embrace each other and “really open” themselves up (00: 07: 10)� Jack reluctantly teams up with Bob and as the latter pushes Jack’s face between his breasts, Jack begins to cry himself into cathartic bliss: “Then something happened� I was lost in oblivion - dark and silent and complete� I found freedom� Losing all hope was freedom� Babies don’t sleep that well” (00: 08: 50). Jack’s insomnia is temporarily cured by his attendance of the support groups and he becomes “addicted” (00: 09: 20) to them, joining a different group each night in order to be able to sleep: “I wasn’t really dying, I wasn’t host to cancer or parasites; I was the warm little center that the life of this world crowded around� […] Every evening I died and every evening I was born again� Resurrected� […] This was my vacation” (00: 10: 01-00: 11: 15)� Considering that Jack’s crisis of masculinity is also a crisis of authenticity, the support groups seem to supply him with a form of experience that reaches beyond the commodified bubble of his existence. Consumer culture glosses over the frailty and transience of life by implying that the cure for every human predicament might be right around the corner� But in the support groups, Jack finds real pain, real suffering, and real death; he gains access to a world that eludes commodification and this brush with the realities of life briefly resolves his subconscious crisis. Of course, Jack himself is not sick and the genuineness he finds in the support groups is itself a simulacrum. He does not really leave his commodified lifestyle behind but vicariously participates in someone else’s pain� There clearly is a pornographic component to Jack’s sensation of release and his simultaneous disengagement from the suffering at hand� While the legitimate members of the support groups are actually forming a community and a reprieve from consumerism, Jack uses their forum as an extension of the very circumstance that is causing his insomnia. The authenticity of the groups is as artificial as the sense of individuality he hopes to acquire from purchasing a piece of designer furniture� The simulation and its anodizing effects on Jack are shattered when he meets Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) who is also frequents the support groups without being afflicted by any disease: “Marla - the big tourist. Her lie reflected my lie” (00: 11: 52). Significantly, Marla - unlike Jack - does not pretend to be sick when she visits the groups: she smokes in a lung cancer group and also joins “Remaining Men Together,” telling Jack that “[t]echnically, I have more of a right to be there than you� You still have your balls” (00: 16: 32)� Marla is therefore not using the groups as a simulacrum but attends them for voyeuristic purposes that immediately signal her outsider status to the other participants� While ethically equally problematic, Marla receives a different form of satisfaction from the groups when compared to Jack’s full immersion� Marla’s pleasure belongs to the realm of representation (watching someone else’s suffering from a safe distance) whereas Jack participates in a simulation by pretending to be sick himself� “Only after Disaster Can We Be Resurrected” 247 The First Rule of Fight Club is … Franchising After ‘inventing’ Tyler, Jack blows up his condo in the guise of his alter ego, making it look like a gas-leak accident, thus manifesting his subconscious desire to rage against commodity culture� Confronted with the ruins of his former life, Jack then ‘calls’ Tyler whom he believes to have met on an airplane the day before and moves in with him into an abandoned and dilapidated Victorian house in a deserted industrial district, explicitly disengaging from the comforts and aesthetics of consumerism� The movie then traces Jack’s self-education through his proxy Tyler� First Jack/ Tyler start an illegal underground boxing club, i�e� the eponymous Fight Club, in which the “disenfranchised” male American workforce can reassert its masculinity in ritualistic one-to-one fist fights. After the failure of the support groups, Fight Club ostensibly provides Jack with another alternative to the hyperreal consumerism that has emasculated him, an arena in which men can prove themselves in front of other men by performing archaic rites of bonding and passage� Starting out in the cellar of a decrepit bar (which forms a sharp contrast to the church basements in which the support groups meet), Fight Club eventually branches out into most major American cities and attracts an increasing number of men who enter the club with bodies looking like “cookie dough” but within a few weeks are “carved out of wood” (00: 41: 50)� As the self-declared patriarch of this underground self-help group, Tyler recites the rules of Fight Club at the beginning of each meeting: The first rule of Fight Club is - you don’t talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is - you don’t talk about Fight Club� The third rule of Fight Club is - when someone says “stop” or goes limp, the fight is over. Fourth rule is - only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule - one fight at a time. Sixth rule - no shirts, no shoes. Seventh rule - fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule - if this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight (00: 44: 21-00: 44: 58). Whereas the support groups were based on communication and sharing, Fight Club constitutes an antipodal realm of silence and violence, reducing masculinity to a physical performance that is deemed to be redemptive in a culture eroded by therapy, conspicuous consumption, and domestication� One of the most noteworthy aspects about the mode of masculinity as it is acted out by the men in Fight Club, is the explicitly homoerotic iconography in which the film frames their physical interaction. During the fights the camera lingers on semi-naked men with muscular and perpetually sweaty bodies that pummel each other while spilling spit and blood� The soundtrack provides an exaggerated soundscape of flesh hitting flesh, of heavy breathing and quasi-aroused moaning. When the fight is over, the two contestants embrace each other in an imitation of post-coital exhaustion while being surrounded by a circle of cheering men� Fight Club explicitly turns masculinity into a spectacle of pornographic masochism, thus creating a discrepancy between Tyler’s narrative of traditional heteronormative manhood and the movie’s self-conscious implementation of homoerotic aesthetics� Both the 248 J an d. k ucharzeWski masochistic and the homoerotic components of Fight Club are the focus of several critical writings on the film. Lynn M. Ta, for example, suggests that the film’s masculinity-qua-masochism trope is strikingly paradoxical: What is interesting about the solution of fighting, though, is that it feminizes Jack even as he seeks to reassert his masculinity. By fighting himself or deriving pleasure from taking a hit, he enjoys masochistic satisfaction that has been traditionally associated with feminine, for to be the aggressor is to be masculine and to receive this to be female (273)� Likewise, Robinson observes that masochism in general is a vital element in many representations of masculinities in crisis: “Masochistic narratives, structured so as to defer closure or a resolution, often feature white men displaying their wounds as evidence of disempowerment, and finding a pleasure in explorations of pain” (11)� As a result of this convention, depictions of “wounded white men most often work to personalize the crisis of white masculinity and, thus, to erase its social and political causes and effects” (ibid� 8). However, the film deploys a variety of disruptive and metaleptic devices that complicate the relationship between Tyler and the viewer, thereby engaging in a meta-discourse about the representational trope of the wounded white man in American cinema� Jack believes that Fight Club provides him with a much realer experience than the support groups: after being hit by Tyler for the first time, he is utterly astonished by his pain: “It really hurts” (00: 33: 31)� A closer examination of the ontology of Fight Club reveals, however, that this ‘authenticity’ is as illusionary as the simulated catharsis Jack experienced as a faker in the support groups� First and foremost, the initial fight between Jack and Tyler and with it the invention of Fight Club, is in fact a purely masochistic act during which Jack beats himself up in a parking lot, assuming both the roles of himself and Tyler in his imagination� While for the participants of Fight Club, its regenerative quality primarily depends on the man-to-man contest of the fights, the genesis of this movement is actually a self-referential event� Fight Club is conceived in a moment of masturbatory masochism� Additionally, Palahniuk’s novel describes how the narrator swings his fist at “Tyler’s jaw like in every cowboy movie we’d ever seen” (52f�), implying that this ostensibly authentic act of violence is already participating in a mediated process of signification before it even begins. When considering that Tyler sees in Fight Club a “generation of men raised by women,” and that Jack constantly complains about his lack of a male role model in his life (“Our fathers were our models for God� And, if our fathers bailed, what does that tell us about God? ” [01: 00: 09]), his notion of violence as a crucial part of the male experience is not anchored in a social tradition but an idea derived from countless films and television shows that establish a close connection between masculinity and violence� When Tyler asks Jack to hit him for the first time, the picture suddenly freezes and in one of many metaleptic disruptions in this movie, Jack begins to address the audience directly: “Let me tell you a little bit about Tyler Durden” (00: 30: 49)� What follows is a brief montage of Tyler’s background story narrated by Jack, who at various points talks right into the camera� Among “Only after Disaster Can We Be Resurrected” 249 other things, Tyler is shown working as a movie projectionist in a cinema where he splices frames of pornographic material into the reels of generic Hollywood blockbuster films with the intention of undermining the effeminizing system of post-industrial consumer culture with a subliminal message of hyperreal masculinity. When the montage ends, the film returns to a still image of Tyler and Jack in the parking lot, unfreezes it, and resumes the narrative from the moment Tyler asked Jack to hit him� The metaleptic shift thus frames the violence to follow in an entirely mediated context, implicitly connecting it to Hollywood films and pornography, thereby indicating that Jack’s experience of real pain is taking place in a self-referential film. Fight Club, like the support groups when viewed from Jack’s illegitimate position as a “tourist,” cannot function as a reprieve from consumerism but instead reduplicates the very system it sets out to subvert� It is part of the same “ornamental culture” in which men “confront arbitrarily designated enemies in a staged fight” (Faludi 15). As soon as Fight Club reaches a critical mass of members, Tyler begins to set up “franchises, all over the country” (01: 45: 25) like any other late-capitalist fast-food or coffeehouse chain� Tyler’s first and second rule of Fight Club - “You don’t talk about Fight Club” - implements a fairly conventional marketing strategy of generating exclusivity through implied exclusion (indeed, more and more men begin to join the club despite - or because of - Tyler’s first two rules). Additionally, the participants of Fight Club wear the wounds, scars, and bruises they receive during fights like fashion accessories, allowing members to recognize each other outside of Fight Club which only exists “in the hours between when Fight Club starts and when Fight Club ends” (00: 41: 35)� Instead of shopping for khakis at Banana Republic, men join Fight Club and in a hyperbolically Marxist version of capitalist ideology, exchange suffering for signifiers. As is the case with any effectively branded fashion item, the members of Fight Club believe these scars to be unique material markers of actual violence, despite the fact that they received them in staged and strictly regulated fights. Following Baudrillard’s argument on the simulacrum here, the wounds and bruises acquired in Fight Club “substitute signs of the real for the real itself” (1993: 343)� The aporetic nature of Fight Club which evokes the inherent paradox of the Dodge TV spot, manifests itself most vividly in a scene where Jack and Tyler, brimming with masculine confidence from their last fight, step onto a bus and Jack points out a print ad for Gucci underwear, depicting a halfnaked male model with accentuated abdominal muscles� From the off Jack muses “I felt sorry for all the guys packing into gyms, trying to look like what Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger said they should” (00: 42: 20). Mockingly, Jack asks Tyler: “Is that what a man looks like? ” (00: 42: 30), whereupon Tyler depreciatingly shakes his head� Suddenly, Jack and Tyler are rudely pushed away by another man walking down the aisle and for a few brief seconds the potential of unrestrained violence hangs in the air but evaporates just as quickly� Exhausted by the pornographic spectacle of Fight Club, the men in fact shy away from violence outside the safety of the simulacrum that they have constructed for themselves� While Tyler insists that Fight Club provides 250 J an d. k ucharzeWski an antidote to the hyperreality of consumerism, the film exposes Fight Club as a continuation of the system itself: the next shot shows Tyler getting up from a beaten opponent in Fight Club, wearing nothing but a pair of tight red leather pants, and the camera prominently takes in Tyler’s six pack and muscular torso that looks strikingly similar to the image of masculinity presented in the Gucci poster� The scene is edited in such a way as to establish a direct correlation between the Gucci model and Tyler, exposing the latter as an emblematic manifestation of a consumerist iconography of masculinity: In a culture of ornament […] manhood is defined by appearance, by youth and attractiveness, by money and aggression, by posture and swagger and ‘props,’ by the curled lip and petulant sulk and flexed biceps, by the glamour of the cover boy, and by the market-bartered ‘individuality’ that sets one astronaut or athlete or gangster above another (Faludi 38). Jack’s vision of authentic manhood is thus utterly congruent with the consumerist paradigm of masculinity as described by Faludi� This is further emphasized when Tyler’s image is inserted briefly at two points in the movie as a single frame before Jack meets his alter ego for the first time, hence anchoring the idea of Tyler in the realm of the imaginary and the artificial. When considering that the actor Brad Pitt is dressed in an ostentatious form of punk haute couture throughout the movie and also modeled for a variety of fashion labels which helped to perpetuate the very image of the male body derided by Tyler, Fight Club once again undermines the essentialist gender discourse of its protagonists� By deliberately objectifying the male body as a spectacle, “attractive men are set up to inspire and to receive the gaze of the camera and of other characters” (Hirsch 13)� Fight Club therefore enables a “sexually appraising gaze” on masculinity which is legitimized in a heteronormative context by the wounds these men display� However, this appraising gaze was “formerly reserved for the sexual woman only” (ibid�)� Rather than re-masculating men, the film’s aesthetics move masculinity closer to the representational conventions of femininity, placing men in the “very world women so recently shucked off as demeaning and dehumanizing” (Faludi 39)� Boon, Grønstad, and Ta suggest that Faludi’s Stiffed , with its account of a crisis of masculinity caused by late-capitalist consumerism, can serve as a key text for an understanding of Fight Club � Whereas these critics primarily rely on Faludi in order to diagnose Jack in his initial frustration about his ‘effeminate’ existence as a passive consumer deprived of male role models, I would go a step further and suggest that in its cinematic realization, Fight Club not only depicts men as the victims of commodity culture, but simultaneously complicates the solution to this malaise offered by Tyler� While Stiffed certainly helps to historicize Jack’s crisis of identity, it can also be applied to Fincher’s distinct way of depicting this crisis in Fight Club � According to Faludi, By the end of the American Century, every outlet of the consumer world - magazines, ads, movies, sports, music videos - would deliver the message that manhood had become a performance game to be won in the marketplace, not the workplace, and that male anger was now part of the show� An ornamental culture “Only after Disaster Can We Be Resurrected” 251 encouraged young men to see surliness, hostility, and violence as expressions of glamour, a way to showcase themselves without being feminized before an otherwise potentially girlish mirror� But if celebrity masculinity enshrined the pose of the “bad boy,” his rebellion was largely cosmetic� There was nowhere for him to take a grievance because there was no society to take it to (37)� Although superficially informed by a similar stance against “ornamental culture,” Tyler’s rhetoric in Fight Club differs fundamentally from Faludi’s arguments: I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who have ever lived - an entire generation pumping gas and waiting tables; or they’re slaves with white collars� Advertisement has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need� We are the middle children of history, with no purpose or place� We have no great war, or great depression� Our great war is a spiritual war� Our great depression is our lives� We were raised by television to believe that we’d be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars - but we won’t� And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed-off (01: 07: 20-01: 08: 24). While Tyler preaches violence and aggression as a remedy against the entrapments of “ornamental culture,” Faludi argues that “male anger” is indeed part of the problem� Consequently, Tyler’s ideology can be placed much closer to the aporetic gesture of the Dodge ad than to Faludi’s study� The fact that Tyler’s revolution initially only manifests itself as surface inscriptions on the bodies of his followers (i�e� their scars and wounds), indeed makes it a “largely cosmetic” rebellion as defined by Faludi. Soap Opera of Destruction In one of the pivotal scenes of the movie, Tyler kisses Jack’s hand and then pours lye on it, branding Jack with a chemical burn in the shape of his lips� Although the hand kiss establishes physical intimacy between the two men, it also feminizes Jack as the recipient of Tyler’s patriarchal gesture� Within seconds this intimacy is once again transformed into violence as the lye burns itself into Jack’s skin, suggesting that only through the heteronormative stabilizer of violence can male bonding be enacted in Tyler’s world� While Tyler claims that the pain of the chemical burn provides Jack with an important lesson in fragility (“First, you have to know that someday, you are going to die” [01: 00: 45]), the scar left by the burn also brands Jack like a cattle, marking him as Tyler’s property� Each member of Project Mayhem, the next phase in Tyler’s revolution, subsequently bears the lye kiss as another cosmetic inscription of Tyler’s increasingly totalitarian narrative. But as with the first fight between Jack and Tyler, the original lye kiss was a masochistic gesture (Jack kissing and burning his own hand) which retrospectively identifies the corporeal emblem as a self-referential signifier. As a final scheme in his insurgency, Tyler founds a paramilitary terrorist organization called Project Mayhem� He realizes that the cathartic potential of Fight Club’s masochism has been exhausted since it privatizes suffering instead of attacking the society Tyler holds responsible for causing this suf- 252 J an d. k ucharzeWski fering� Project Mayhem begins more or less harmlessly with a series of situationist pranks played against the insignias of consumerism (magnetizing the tapes in a rental video store, smashing status-symbol cars and satellite dishes with baseball bats, spraying a gigantic smiley face onto the façade of a corporate skyscraper) but eventually Tyler plans to rig the financial district of a major American city with explosives in order to erase all credit records and install a pre-consumerist utopia (in the novel Tyler intends to make a skyscraper collapse onto a museum, thus symbolically erasing history)� Yet, even this act of terrorism remains, to rely on Faludi’s terminology, largely ornamental and cosmetic as the physical destruction of the buildings will not liberate American men from their debts and financial obligations (similarly, destroying a museum will not erase history)� Instead, Tyler’s terrorism is designed to produce the very symbolic spectacle that could form an apposite pyrotechnical climax to the action movie as which Fight Club was originally advertised� Tyler’s strategies and the narrative demands of the movie become identical, suggesting that the leader of Project Mayhem is not interested in fundamentally altering the social conditions entrapping the American Everyman but in imitating the iconography of the Hollywood blockbuster� Released in 1999 Fight Club is a pre-9/ 11 movie that nonetheless anticipates what Baudrillard two years later was to call the “spirit of terrorism” in his controversial response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: Never is it [terrorism] to attack the system through power relations� This belongs to the revolutionary imaginary imposed by the system itself, which survives by ceaselessly bringing those who oppose it to fight in the domain of the real, which is always its own. But it moves the fight into the symbolic domain, where the rule is the rule of challenge, of reversal, of escalation (2001)� Like Fight Club, Project Mayhem therefore offers no valid challenge to consumerism� In fact, it even extrapolates the problematic aspects of late-capitalism into a despotic dogma: the members of Project Mayhem are reduced to foot soldiers whom Tyler calls “space monkeys,” since they have to obey his orders without knowing the ultimate purpose of their actions (01: 26: 30); they are as much deprived of their identity as the consumerist subjects Tyler set out to emancipate. Tyler’s first rule of Project Mayhem is “You don’t ask questions about Project Mayhem” (hence moving from Fight Club’s marketing strategy to a bureaucratic need-to-know policy), and each new applicant has to stand three days and nights on Tyler’s/ Jack’s porch while being humiliated by an enlisted member of Project Mayhem before being allowed to join the group, thereby creating a spiral of humiliation and degradation not unlike the masochism that fuels consumerism� The men then have to shave their heads, are only allowed to wear black clothing, must give up their names, and are assigned a variety of tasks in preparation of Tyler’s upcoming insurrection� All the while, Tyler indoctrinates them with aphorisms that are meant to correct a consumerist ideology which raised them to believe that they will be “millionaires and movies gods and rock stars”: “Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else� We are all part “Only after Disaster Can We Be Resurrected” 253 of the same compost heap� We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world” (01: 27: 00)� Tyler simply replaces the generic means of creating identity through conspicuous consumption (“What kind of dining set defines me as a person? ”) with a tyrannical eradication of identity (“But, in Project Mayhem, we have no names” [01: 43: 00]), which equally deprives the members of Project Mayhem of autonomy and agency� With its strict regulations and restrictions as well as its total devotion to the leader-figure Tyler, Project Mayhem ultimately becomes a proto-fascist organization� At this point in the movie, Jack, who realizes that Tyler is building “an army” (01: 27: 07) with his “space monkeys,” begins to distance himself from his alter ego, and, as he finally understands that he and Tyler are the same person, actively opposes Tyler in order to regain control over his body and his actions. The showdown of the film finds Jack and Tyler on the top floor of a skyscraper with “front row seats to this Theater of Mass Destruction” (00: 02: 23) that Tyler is orchestrating� Tyler’s “space monkeys” have previously infiltrated key positions in the security services, the police force, the fire department, the cleaning crews, and other infrastructural nodes of the urban sprawl and evacuated the buildings that are about to go down� In a culmination of their homoerotic relationship Tyler puts a gun - the most conventional substitute phallus in American cinema - into Jack’s mouth, threatening to kill him if Jack continues to resist� Eventually, Jack understands that he himself is actually holding the gun, pointing it at himself, about to commit suicide� The camera reveals that Jack is indeed alone and thus transforms the homoerotic significance of the gesture once again into the autoerotic masochism that was the external reality of the relationship between Jack and Tyler� Jack then ‘fakes’ a suicide by shooting himself through the cheek in order to ‘kill’ Tyler� The part of himself who is Tyler seems to believe that Jack has committed suicide, and Tyler drops dead as Jack reasserts his agency� With regard to the crisis of masculinity depicted in Fight Club , this finale remains ambivalent� Although within the narrative of the movie, Jack has defeated Tyler, hence suggesting that Tyler’s violent mode of masculinity has been overcome (albeit through an act of masochistic violence), Tyler’s “space monkeys” still take Jack for Tyler as there are no external changes to mark the transformation besides yet another self-inflicted injury on Jack’s body. Although Tyler disappears from Jack’s subjective reality, the outside world does not take notice of this victory as Tyler’s minions continue to obey Jack� Instead of catharsis, the fake murder-suicide of Tyler is the culmination of Tyler’s strategy of the hyperreal, since it simulates death, the “ultimate signified” in Baudrillard’s theory. According to Baudrillard, “every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of death, its real agony” (1993: 357)� Tyler’s death stabilizes the system that he had previously implemented by removing its original referent from the equation, immortalizing him as a detached signifier that is bound to outlive Jack’s body; after all, “the age of simulation [���] begins with the liquidation of all referentials” (ibid� 343)� Pettus hence argues that “Tyler’s narrative continues to reproduce itself despite the absence of its original reference” 254 J an d. k ucharzeWski and that “Project Mayhem succeeds not only in reproducing itself, but also in reproducing the dominant system it opposes” (125)� However, Pettus, who refers to Palahniuk’s novel, believes that Fight Club ’s narrative fails to recognize the contradiction it has created� Using Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964) as the basis for his reading, Pettus concludes “that dominant systems maintain hegemony through assimilative inclusion of opposing forces, thus instituting a totality of experience in that it allows only itself as a reference” (111)� Like Giroux, Pettus sees Fight Club as a critique of late-capitalist consumerism that unwittingly reproduces the ideology it criticizes and that cannot transcend the one-dimensional universe of consumerism� In this interpretation, Fight Club principally offers the same degree of critique as the Dodge ad that announces a systemic crisis of masculinity which can nevertheless be overcome with the help of a systemic solution (buying a car, and reviving a nostalgic concept of male gender identity, respectively)� While I agree with Pettus and Giroux that Fight Club does not offer a solution to the crisis conditions it identifies, I nevertheless suggest that the film enables a discourse about the alleged crisis of masculinity by emphasizing its own constructedness and thus implicitly marking Jack’s problems and Tyler’s solution as cultural performances� The distinct and highly stylized aesthetics of the film caught the attention of many critics who praised Fincher’s visual virtuosity but often condemned the film’s excessive depiction of violence (cf� S� Clark 412f�)� With its jump-cuts and its dizzying tracking shots that allow the camera to move through walls or into the brain of its protagonist (the title sequence retraces bio-electric impulses traveling across the synapses of Jack’s brain), with its extensive use of post-production filters and digital images, as well as with its deliberate insertion of stutters, projection errors, and cue marks into the film, Fight Club ’s aesthetic perpetually hovers between agitprop alienation effects and a glorified music video hysteria, between a challenge to the dominant system and its self-indulgent celebration� Formally, Fight Club depicts a world in which authenticity is no longer a possibility, in which rapid sequences of signifiers gloss over any incoherence and contradiction� In the last moments of the film Marla, who has been captured by a group of “space monkeys,” is about to confront Jack, but as soon as she sees the bleeding hole in his cheek, her anger is deflated and she starts dressing his wound in an almost maternal fashion� Jack apologetically tells her that she has “met [him] at a very strange time in [his] life” (02: 10: 46), takes her hand and in this moment the explosives go off, bringing down a number of skyscrapers in synchronized detonations as Marla and Jack observe the scene from the safe distance of a picture-window� Fight Club thus ends with the paradoxical image of the symbolic destruction of the architectural phalluses of consumerist capitalism (shown from Marla’s and Jack’s perspective as if it were a movie) and the simultaneous restoration of a heteronormative order as Jack and Marla are ‘reunited’ after the death of Tyler� Babylonic (the falling towers) and prelapsarian (the heteronormative core-unit restored) motifs overlap with each other, and the movie seems to end in this confusion of “Only after Disaster Can We Be Resurrected” 255 symbolism that indeed suggests an aporetic universe in which cause and effect, oppositions and dominance collapse into each other� Before the credits start to roll, the film slows down noticeably, allowing a brief glimpse at the amateurishly inserted frame of a penis as the last image to be seen before the screen goes dark. Ta reads this final frame as the symbolic reclamation of the phallic order: The film up to this point has indeed provided a sophisticated and critical diagnosis of male disillusionment, but at the end, heteronormative and phallic power are once again reinforced� While the crumbling of the phallic-shaped skyscrapers might imply that corporations and consumerism, as they have been erected by men, need to be the new enemies to take down in the battle for masculinity, the reinsertion of the penis at the very end suggests that the phallus, the heteronormative phallus, will continue to overwrite any meaningful gender relations (275-76)� This reading is certainly compelling but fails to acknowledge that this specific image of a penis has already been intrinsically contextualized in the movie: it is the same frame Tyler splices into the reels of Hollywood blockbuster films as an act of subliminal resistance. The myse en abyme thus created - i�e� Fight Club exposes itself as a product of the very same system that its protagonist sets out to eradicate in his search for ‘authentic’ masculinity - establishes a correlation between the crisis of the male subject and its cinematic representation� Rather than reinforcing heteronormative phallic power, the final image de-normalizes this power, marking the unmarked case, and presenting it as a signifier whose signified is absent. Both the novel and the movie Fight Club are very much aware of the paradoxes generated by Tyler’s agenda and formalistically criticize what the narrative - which, after all, is a first-person account told by a schizophrenic man - asserts� This awareness is most vividly articulated via the symbol of soap that serves as a leitmotif in Fight Club � Besides branding his disciples with chemical burns, Tyler also uses lye to manufacture soap, introducing himself as a travelling soap salesman when Jack ‘meets’ him for the first time. Fight Club , like Richard Powers’s novel Gain (1998), deploys soap as a metaphor for the aporetic nature of consumerist and anti-consumerist discourses: traditionally, soap is made from waste animal fat (in one of the film’s more unsavory moments, Tyler and Jack break into a clinic and steal the excess fat from liposuctions for their soap-making, thus “selling rich women their own fat asses back to them” [01: 01: 40]), but once the chemical conversion is completed, waste fat is transformed into a symbol for cleanliness� In Gain , Powers therefore writes that soap stands as “a Janus-faced intermediary between seeming incompatibles, an interlocutor that managed to coax mutually hostile materials onto speaking terms” (46)� The aporetic nature of soap as a “Janus-faced intermediary” between binary opposites is furthermore underlined by the fact that Tyler utilizes soap in order to make explosives: “If you were to add nitric acid to the soap-making process, one would get nitroglycerin� With enough soap, one could blow up just about anything” (00: 59: 10)� According to Tyler, soap is therefore both “the yardstick of civilization” (00: 22: 30) and the means by which civilization can be destroyed� 256 J an d. k ucharzeWski In Fight Club , the metaphorical potential of soap can certainly be applied to the relationship between Jack and Tyler, who represent diametrical versions of masculinity that are ultimately revealed to exist in a single body, but it also indicates that cause and effect, problem and solution, the status quo and crisis are no clear cut categories in the world of Fight Club � Like the platonic pharmakon as read by Derrida, soap signifies the inherent aporia of Tyler’s discourse which reproduces structural aspects of consumerism� Tyler recurrently claims that the alleged crisis of hegemonic masculinity at the beginning of the millennium can only be resolved through an apocalyptic reboot of society, because “[o]nly after disaster can we be resurrected” (Palahniuk 70)� However, Tyler’s scheme to reconstruct society according to a nostalgic template of essentialist gender roles after the cathartic purge attests to his inability to conceive a system outside of the very same parameters he intends to shatter� In an analogous fashion, the movie Fight Club simultaneously criticizes the hyperreality of consumerism while implicitly undermining Tyler’s regressive strategy of resistance� In this regard, Fight Club adopts a schizophrenic position that mirrors the predicament of its protagonist� The fact that the movie closes with the free-floating signifier of a remediated phallus while the reunited heteronormative couple witnesses the collapse of yet another symbol of the phallic order, demonstrates that in Fight Club , the representation of crisis culminates in a crisis of representation� “Only after Disaster Can We Be Resurrected” 257 Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean� “The Precession of Simulacra�” Trans� Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman� Rpt� in: A Postmodern Reader � Eds� Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon� Albany, NY: State of New York UP, 1993� 342-375� ---� “The Spirit of Terrorism�” Trans� Rachel Bloul� Le Monde. November 2, 2001� Access 06 August 2011� <http: / / www�egs�edu/ faculty/ jean-baudrillard/ articles/ the-spiritof-terrorism/ >� Boon, Kevin Alexander� “Men and Nostalgia for Violence: Culture and Culpability in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club �” The Journal of Men’s Studies 11�3 (2003): 267-76� Clark, Anthony W� On Men: Masculinity in Crisis � London: Arrow Books, 2001� Clark, Suzanne� “ Fight Club : Historicizing the Rhetoric of Masculinity, Violence, and Sentimentality�” Journal of Advanced Composition 21�2 (2001): 411-419� Connell, R�W� Masculinities � 2nd ed� Berkeley: U of California P, 2005� “Dodge: Man’s Last Stand�” Dir� Mark Romanek� Advertisement Company: Wieden and Kennedy, USA� CBS � 7 February 2010� <http: / / www�youtube�com / watch? v=2RyPamyWotM>� Faludi, Susan� Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man � New York: Harper Perennial, 1999� Farrell, Warren� The Myth of Male Power � New York: Berkley Trade, 1993� Fight Club � Dir� David Fincher� Perf� Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter� Art Linson Production, 1999� Gibson, James William� Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America � New York: Hill and Wang, 1994� Giroux, Henry A� “Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: Fight Club , Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculine Violence�” Journal of Advanced Composition 21�1 (2001): 1-31� Access 06 August 2011� <http: / / www�henryagiroux�com/ online_articles/ fight_club.htm>. 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New York: Routledge, 2003� Neal, Mark Anthony� New Black Man � New York: Routledge, 2006� Palahniuk, Chuck� Fight Club � London: Vintage, 2003� Pettus, Mark� “Terminal Simulation: ‘Revolution’ in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club �” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 6�2 (2000): 111-127� Powers, Richard� Gain � New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999� Reeser, Todd W� Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction � Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010� Robinson, Sally� Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis � New York: Columbia UP, 2000� Smith, Gavin� “Inside Out: Gavin Smith Goes One-on-One with David Fincher�” Film Comment (September/ October 1999)� Access 06 August 2011� <http: / / www�edwardnorton.org/ fc/ articles/ filmcom.html>. 258 J an d. k ucharzeWski Swanson, Gillian� “‘Drunk with the Glitter’: Consuming Spaces and Sexual Geographies�” Postmodern Cities and Spaces � Eds� Sophie Watson, and Katherine Gibson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. 80-98. Ta, Lynn M� “Hurt So Good: Fight Club , Masculine Violence, and the Crisis of Capitalism�” The Journal of American Cultur e 29�3 (2006): 265-277� Weingarten, Susanne� Bodies of Evidence: Geschlechtsrepräsentation von Hollywood-Stars. Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2003� Whitehead, Stephen W� Men and Masculinities � Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002 t heodora t siMPouki “A war after a war, a war before a war” Traumatic Testimonies in E� L� Doctorow’s The March “The real war will never get in the books�” Walt Whitman In his 1977 essay “False Documents,” E� L� Doctorow states that “All history is contemporary history,” before adding (quoting Benedetto Croce): “‘However remote in time events may seem to be, every historical judgment refers to present needs and situations�’ That is why history has to be written and rewritten from one generation to another� The act of composing never ends” (24)� In light of this essay, Doctorow’s almost entire oeuvre can be read as an attempt to “recompose” history by deconstructing previously accepted notions of historical truth while, at the same time, the assumption of truth is preserved in the act of storytelling� By considering traumatic events in history as testimonial fragments framed around the necessity to be told, Doctorow reveals history to be unpredictable and open-ended rather than closed and cohesive� What is more, his compulsive return to eminent moments of American history reflects his unflinching commitment to challenge our “acquired knowledge or doxa” of the past (Jameson 24) and to make us confront our ideological and political dilemmas in the present� However, The March , I will submit, is significantly different from the author’s previous postmodernist writings� It ought not to be seen as a reassessment of Doctorow’s postmodern aesthetics, as yet another discursive evidence of Fredric Jameson’s “crisis in historicity” (1991: 25) or of Linda Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafictional” paradigm. 1 Drawing on recent trauma theory and photographic discourse, I will show how in The March , Doctorow revisits the devastated lands of Georgia and the Carolinas in the aftermath of General Sherman’s march of 62,000 soldiers and 20,000 to 30,000 newly freed slaves, not only to challenge historical and fictional representations of the Civil War, but - by imaginatively reenacting the theme of war trauma - to make us bear witness, albeit belatedly, to the human cost of war whose impact exceeds the boundaries of place (the South) and time (1864-5). Moreover, taking into consideration Doctorow’s persistent belief in historical events not as encapsulated in the past but as evolving in today’s historical, political and artistic scene, we can read the present novel as a traumatic 1 Linda Hutcheon labels “historiographic metafiction” those “novels that are intensely self-reflective but that also both re-introduce historical context into metafiction and problematize the entire question of historical knowledge” (285-286). 260 t heodora t siMPouki testimony (Felman and Loeb 5) that not only resists closure but whose significance is powerfully enhanced by the open wound of 9/ 11. Therefore, by making the Civil War the novel’s constitutive principle, Doctorow introduces a historical parallel between a crucial period in American identity formation and a post-9/ 11 time in which questions of national identification, politically as well as culturally and ethically, resurface� 2 After examining narrative acts of telling from the position of authority granted by an eye-witness and a survivor, in the second part of the essay, I concentrate on Doctorow’s use of imaginary pictures rather than visual images of the civil conflict as more accurate evidence to represent the traumatic reality of war� The fact that in The March the intermedial reference to images is hidden (verbal) rather than manifest (visual) does not counter their emergence or diminish their crucial role as witness and evidence� As with earlier novels - Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate , for example - in The March , Doctorow interpolates historical figures and events seamlessly into the fictional narrative of the novel. As suggested above, the author’s apparent disregard for historical authority is the subject of many critical writings� More recently, as Matthew A� Henry has pointed out, Doctorow’s novels “are filled with historical circumstances and personages fleshed out to meet the standards of his fiction and facilitate interrogation and subsequent rewriting of the past” (32-33)� In The March , Doctorow weaves together a variety of narrative strands, often subordinating historical events and personages to fictional narrative in order to give agency and voice to what may have been silenced and ignored or rendered invisible in those accounts that have dominated national and cultural points of view� For example, there is Emily Thompson, the Southern-born sheltered daughter of Judge Thompson who, after the death of her father and brother, crosses over into Union lines, volunteering to help the Union field surgeon, Wrede Sartorius. Her decision to move on is dictated by her witnessing of the random burnings and pillage in her hometown of Milledgeville by Unionists and Confederates alike� She concludes that this was not a war, but “an infestation” (26)� 3 Then, there is Pearl, a mixed-race slave-child who passes for white and is disguised as a drummer boy in the Union army so that she does not get “sent back” with the rest of the newly freed slaves� There are also Arly Wilcox and Will Kirkland, the Confederate privates, who pull the uniforms off of two dead Union soldiers in order to escape prison and avoid being killed� Set against the worlds of these fictional characters that have all experienced some war-related loss is the historical General William Tecumseh Sherman, the novel’s most self-reflexive character, endowed as he is with the ability to meditate on the act of large-scale slaughter for which he is mainly responsible� Toward the end of the novel, as the General watches his victori- 2 Cf� Jaap Kooijman, “Are We All Americans? 9/ 11 and the Discourse of Multiculturalism in the Netherlands” (183). See also endnote 8 in the same article. 3 Subsequent references to the novel are given parenthetically in the text and are from the following edition: E� L� Doctorow, The March. New York: Random House Trade Paperback Edition, 2006� Traumatic Testimonies in E� L� Doctorow’s The March 261 ous but tired and somewhat disoriented army march through the Southern streets, he speculates on the absurdity of the Civil War, which he sees as “a war after a war, a war before a war” (359)� For Sherman, “‘this unmeaning inhuman planet’” needs his “generation’s “‘warring imprint’” in order to acquire a “redemptive sense of value” (Hales 147)� Although he is aware that “our civil war” consists of “the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons” (359), Sherman has eradicated in himself all appreciation for human life in order to victoriously survive the war� For him, the “death of one soldier” is “first and foremost, a numerical disadvantage, an entry in the liability column” (89). To this he adds proudly: “It is a utilitarian idea of death - that I am reduced by one in my ability to fight a war” (89). In many ways, Doctorow’s depiction of the fictional Sherman as a controversial character, oscillating between authoritarianism and indulgence, control and compassion, rashness and hesitation, cynicism and idealism relies on Sherman’s own Memoirs and is therefore to a large extent accurate to the historical figure. Apart from rendering The March different from his previous, more playful or subversive engagements with history, Doctorow’s careful mediation of historical documents in this particular novel seems important to me in two ways: on the level of artistic production, the precise designation of the historical Sherman operates powerfully to reify the character and to make it impossible for the reader to receive his interpretation without the interception of already acquired knowledge - something which, as Jameson has pointed out, “lends the text an extraordinary sense of déjà vu and a peculiar familiarity one is tempted to associate with Freud’s ‘return of the repressed’” (24)� 4 The uncanny effect of the historical penetrating the fictional, challenges the reader to reassess the heroic ideals of the Civil War and to confront the issues whose lack of resolution has haunted Americans ever since� But, also, on the level of historiographic formulation of the past, Doctorow’s “too faithful” citing of Sherman’s own memoirs, especially when they come from an author criticized for turning “the historical novel into a gravity-free, faintly sadistic game” (Updike 98) seems like an invitation to open our ears and listen to the testimonial speech of an eye-witness to the war� 5 Doctorow’s descriptive and exacting references to the controversial Memoirs (1875) of the real, historical Sherman invoke the ethical, moral and political “imperative that compels someone to take up the position of the witness” (Marder 4) of a traumatic war experience, even when, or perhaps, especially when, this is done from the perspective of “the old man who unhappily commanded” war action (Sherman 5)� “I wish my friends and enemies to understand that I disclaim the character of historian, but assume to be a witness on the stand before the great tribunal of history,” Sherman stated in his Memoirs to defend himself 4 Jameson’s reference is to Ragtime but applies equally well to The March. 5 For a more detailed analysis of Doctorow’s direct quotations and references to Sherman’s Memoirs , see Hales’s “Marching Through Memory” and Stephen F� Criniti’s dissertation chapter “‘It’s Always Now’: History as Analogy in E� L� Doctorow’s The March ” (45-67)� 262 t heodora t siMPouki from “the swarm of criticism” aroused from “traduced veterans” (Fellman vi-vii)� Like the historical Sherman, who put a “version of facts in [a] truthful narration” (Sherman 5), the fictional Sherman, too, acts as witness, illustrating Shoshana Felman’s argument that testimony must go beyond the personal experience of the individual and that “the history of trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another” (11)� That his cataclysmic march to the sea inflicted pain and suffering upon the South he loved was a hard truth Sherman never evaded� “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will,” he told the citizens of Atlanta before ordering the city’s evacuation. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it … �” 6 However, Doctorow’s interest does not exhaust itself with Sherman and his narrative account of the senseless hideousness of war� As mentioned earlier, The March is a polyphonic novel, in which history is retold through multiple viewpoints and voices of ordinary people on whom the toll of war had left its scars but who, unlike Sherman, were unable to account for their trauma� “You can’t think seriously about this country without pondering the Civil War� The sin it expunged, the sin it became� It’s our DNA,” Doctorow asserts in a Time interview� And he adds: “[T]he fracture in our society widened� It’s still there - that crack still goes down the middle of it� You could call the war a trauma” (qtd� in Grossman 2006)� In view of this authorial statement, one can offer a reading of The March as attempting to make visible and therefore intelligible the horrific consequences of the violation of America on its own soil, which reverberate more eloquently in the wake of 9/ 11 and the war in Iraq� Throughout the novel, Doctorow foregrounds individual cases whose lives are left in shambles, unanchored from their traditional landscape and place: Pearl, the light-skinned former slave, Emily, the Southern aristocrat, Mattie Jameson, Pearl’s stepmother, Arly Wilcox, the Confederate soldier and Sherman’s would-be assassin, and many more individual characters, all suffer the impact of violence and loss and bear witness to a history that needs to be told� 7 At the same time, the calamitous displacement of an entire culture which brought about the transformation of identity of anyone participating in the “nomadic life-worm,” as Doctorow has dubbed Sherman’s march, finds its correlative relationship in today’s post-traumatic, post-9/ 11 culture, a culture vulnerable to terror and other forms of victimization� “Any time you set a book in the past you’re inevitably writing about the present,” Doctorow declares and it is this conviction that informs his practice as a writer and a public man of letters� 8 6 “General William Tecumseh Sherman to the Mayor and Councilmen of Atlanta�” http: / / www�rjgeib�com/ thoughts/ sherman/ sherman-to-burn-atlanta�html 7 In his “Marching Through Memory,” Scott Hales reads the lives of characters as stories of war related loss that “leave in their wake a trail of alienation and pain that is not easily reconciled” (153)� This he takes as Doctorow’s subtle critique on reconciliatory approaches to the Civil War, whether fictional or historical. 8 “Doctorow, E� L� - Author, Career, Sidelights, Selected writings, Novels, Short stories, Plays,Essays�”http: / / encyclopedia�jrank�org/ articles/ pages/ 3942/ Doctorow-E-L�html� Traumatic Testimonies in E� L� Doctorow’s The March 263 In many ways, then, Doctorow’s narrative emanates from the attempt to vividly convey the damaging, tragic dimensions and unaccountable consequences in human, animal and material casualties procured by Sherman’s otherwise victorious military campaign. The reader watches the fictional characters trying to come to grips with a collective trauma whose full impact they are unable to assimilate contemporaneously� The language of rupture and fragmentation used by Doctorow to depict the incompressibility of their experience is coupled with the application of vivid imagery� For example, the endless pageant of the rapacious Union soldiers, homeless families, the wounded and dying, survivors of the dead, and confederate prisoners of war is represented as a mythical beast, “a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day, a creature of a hundred thousand feet” (61)� Or, the sense of loss and accumulated fear of the Jameson household in the novel’s opening paragraph is evoked by a series of confused, disarrayed images which are articulated in a frenzied, disjointed language that disrupts/ undercuts linearity� 9 There are numerous scenes of this sort in which Doctorow employs a camera-eye method 10 to enhance the illusion of realism relying as he is on the claim that photography is an accurate and hence truthful mode of representation� One might anticipate that - coming from a postmodernist novelist - the appeal to literary or visual realism is deceptive as its power to represent authentic experience is constantly undermined� Nevertheless, the emulation of the tools of photography is by no means accidental, as it serves as a reminder of the relation of the photographic to the literary� It is important to note that it is during the American Civil War that photography was used for the first time to capture a history-in-the-making. One name in particular comes to mind in reference to Civil War photography, that of Mathew Brady. Brady’s pictures of battlefields and ruined towns, generals and army officials, prisoners and prisons, civilians and refugees, gave the American people a view into the true nature of war, documenting the hardships the men endured and the devastation left behind� Doctorow draws on this photojournalistic tradition premiered by Brady, according to which photographs are thought to record reality, accurately and hence truthfully� However, the “photographic” which persistently intervenes within Doctorow’s prose through the use not only of illustrative and descriptive language but also by the invocation of narrativized pictures promises the authenticity of the reality portrayed - even though it is constantly undermined by the The parallels between Doctorow’s portrait of a long gone American war and the war in Iraq was mentioned by reviewers of The March , such as Zach Baron� 9 “John, leaping out of bed, grabbing his rifle, and Roscoe … rous[ing] from the back house, his bare feet pounding: Mattie hurriedly pull[ing] on her robe, … fly[ing] down the stairs to see through the door open in the lamplight (…) the two horses, steam rising from their flanks, their heads lifting, their eyes wild, the driver a young darkie with rounded shoulders, showing stolid patience even in this” (3)� 10 The cinematic qualities of The March have been pointed out by several reviews of the novel� See, for example, Walter Kirn in The New York Times Book Review (2005)� 264 t heodora t siMPouki exposure of how reality is manipulated� 11 By verbally recreating the circumstances of the “frozen moment,” or the “slice of time,” Doctorow aims at resuscitating the harrowing events of war while precluding the photographer’s manipulative intervention or the viewer’s interpretative response� Much in the way Sherman’s memoirs and Brady’s photographs bear witness to the atrocities of war, Doctorow’s verbal images give access to a direct encounter with the experience of trauma, breaking the silence of the photographic still and naming what has gone unnamed� Not surprisingly, Doctorow has admitted in an interview that The March was born out of two pictures whose evocative power aroused his imagination: the first was of a photograph of the destruction in Columbia, S.C. after the fire, and the second was a picture of Sherman and his generals seated, posing in front of a tent� 12 In my analysis, I argue that while Doctorow relies on photography’s potential to capture traumatic experiences, he gives precedence to the authority of words over images because of language’s capacity to cut through the ambiguity that can surround photographs; rather, he uses words to retrieve the narrative buried in them� Drawing on the rich resonances of the many visual images of the American Civil War, Doctorow introduces three and a half text-generated pictures in an attempt to direct our gaze toward what we normally would fail to see in a photographic still� The imaginary photographs introduced in the narrative bear witness to the carnage of war; they become agents of revelation, conveying the disturbing sense of being witness to a reality as it really might have been� By assuming a testimonial stance, these textual images make the photographed person or object seem more real than reality itself� They allude to the veracity of photographic representation at the same time that they remind the reader by their explicit construction of the narrative that these verbal photographs stage experiences that were never factually, or photographically, documented� Furthermore, Doctorow’s treatment of photography while conforming to the prevailing assumption of the medium’s authenticity, in effect undercuts its documentary character by raising questions of visual representation and mediation� In other words, as with his use of Sherman’s Memoirs , Doctorow’s reference to photography serves to provide for the “effect of the Real” and to simultaneously subvert its apparent truthtelling: he foregrounds the medium’s theatricality and manipulative tactics� Finally, through the irruption of narrativized photos rather than through an inclusion of photographic images themselves, Doctorow attempts to “encircle again and again the site” of trauma (Slavoj Žižek 272), whether it is the battlegrounds and ruined cities of the American Civil War or the suggested 11 Doctorow’s realistic representation combined with social and political commentary has been described as “postmodernist photo-realism” by David Cunningham, Andrew Fisher and Sas Mays (5)� 12 “Non-fiction, photos led E. L. Doctorow to write his novel about the civil war.” Dec. 14, 2005 <http: / / www.wtop.com/ ? nid=&sid=648533>. Traumatic Testimonies in E� L� Doctorow’s The March 265 violence of a city in the wake of 9/ 11; he thus privileges “the literary” over the photographic image or the imagined narrative over that of historical discourse� Despite foregrounding the written over the visual image, Doctorow offers a significant role to Josiah Culp, the photographer licensed by the United States Army to document the Civil War� Doctorow’s Culp is inspired by Mathew B� Brady, whose legacy is synonymous with the photographic legacy of the Civil War� Though Culp is a minor character, who dies fairly quickly, he is important to the narrative� As he himself puts it, he is set to make “a pictorial record of this terrible conflict”(173). Doctorow recreates in detail the circumstances (the wagon of photographic equipment followed by Calvin Harper, a black assistant to the photographer) and cumbersome conditions of the photographic process (171) while stressing the zeal and earnestness of Culp’s purpose to take advantage of his privileged medium to visually represent the carnage of war� As he surveys the scene of razed houses and burning farms, he spots two soldiers in Union uniform resting “in the quiet of the burned air under the blackened tree” (171) whom he considers an ideal subject to photograph. He soon finds out, however, that one of the two soldiers is not resting but is dead: He’s dead? You hear that, Calvin? The other one is dead� Yes, I see the stains on his tunic� Of course� That’s even better� Sit back down there with your dead comrade, sir� The light this morning is not as good as I’d like it, but if you hold still for a few moments I am going to make you famous (172)� To be sure, Doctorow alludes here to the “first significant crisis in modern history to occur within the memorializing gaze of the camera�” 13 If Civil War photographers had moved corpses to attain more successful compositions, if photographs can manipulate reality, how does this affect our notion that historical knowledge declares its true value by its “photographability”? Of course, Doctorow does not aim at undermining the value of “historicism-byphotography,” to use Alan Trachtenberg’s words (287). Rather, his intention is to empower fictional narrative to make “visible” what a picture in its putative unmediated actuality can hide or alter� If, to the historians in “False Documents” we must now add the photographers who refuse to acknowledge their mediating role in documenting truth, then, fiction writers are the only ones left to admit they lie and therefore are to be trusted in bearing witness to the legacy of war� 14 13 See Trachtenberg’s “Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs” and endnote 3 in the same article� 14 “Novelists know explicitly that the world in which we live is still to be formed and that reality is amenable to any construction that is placed upon it� It is a world made for liars and we are born liars� But we are to be trusted because ours is the only profession forced to admit that it lies - and that bestows upon us the mantle of honesty” (Doctorow 1983: 27). 266 t heodora t siMPouki Thus, what Culp’s picture hides from the putative viewer is not the face of death since the dead soldier, unbeknownst to him, played at being alive for the camera but that Arly Wilcox, the surviving soldier, is as much of a victim of war as his dead comrade� Although Arly is viewed by most critical reviewers of The March as “a clownish Rebel straggler” (Kirn) and “a canny conman” (Kakutani), Arly epitomizes the survivor of war, exhibiting all signs of trauma� War atrocities affect him, making him demented as well as highly verbal� For example, the recognition that his friend was already dead when the picture was taken makes for a curious play here with Arly’s insistence on talking to it (201, 205, 322)� The picture neither belongs to the same ontological sphere as he does, nor do he and his dead friend share, within the parameters of the picture, the same ontological status: death found only his friend while it missed him, and Arly seems totally unprepared to take in such a shock� As a matter of fact, this may be what Cathy Caruth, following Freud, has in mind when she maintains that what causes trauma is not “the literal threatening of bodily life, but the fact that the threat is recognized as such by the mind one minute too late” (25)� In the aftermath of his friend’s burial, Arly experiences a messianic sense of purpose and invulnerability, once he conceives of his dangerous plan to assassinate General Sherman� After Culp’s death, Arly puts on the photographer’s disguise and poses as the government’s hired photographer himself in order to approach the General and make an attempt on his life� Before this happens, however, Culp’s black assistant, Calvin Harper, having been initiated by his master not only to the technical details of the photographic practice but to the medium’s memorializing purpose, attempts to embrace the entire spectacle of war, taking pictures of the sites of the events, from desolate towns to civilian camps� As a consequence, Calvin “set up his camera to make a photograph of the old bell lying askew in the rubble of the spire that had held it�” But, as if the iconographic description of the picture is not adequate, Calvin feels obliged to turn visibility to legibility, to ascribe a narrative in his photograph: Whether it pleasures me or not, it is part of the historic record, Calvin said� This bell now fallen here in the dirt is like what has happened to the Confederacy� It is like the ruin of the old slaveholding South is laying there, so I got to photograph it, just like Mr. Culp would (198). In Regarding the Pain of Others , Susan Sontag argued that “In contrast to a written account - which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership - a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all” (20)� Yet, Doctorow seems to believe that visual images are “irredeemably mute” (Burke 34) if they are not subjected to interpretation� Thus, Culp endows his image with the ennobling meaning of the Union’s crusade against slavery� But, contemporary putative viewers of the ruined “old” tower bell might “read” the image as evidence of the massive loss and large scale disaster that war, any war, causes� Ruins are what is left of cities in the path of war� Buildings in shambles speak visually of the ruptures in normal life during war time� They also invoke the future and the extent to which the vanished past is implicated Traumatic Testimonies in E� L� Doctorow’s The March 267 in the present� “Time goes on, things change from moment to moment, and a photo is all that remains of the moment past” (203), Calvin muses as he and Arly, wearing Mr Culp’s coat, are approaching the Union forces� The third textual photo interpolated in the narrative is of Emily Thomson with the orphans� Again, it is Calvin who gives stage directions with meticulousness and attention to detail in order for Arly, who is already waiting with his head under the dark cloth of the camera on the sturdy tripod, to take a picture of them: [Emily] was looking straight at him, her arms around the children at her sides� Behind her on the porch steps rose more ranks of orphans, standing stiffly according to Calvin’s instructions� You must stand perfectly still, Calvin said in a loud voice� Like soldiers at attention� And up at the back was a black woman, with one of the meal sacks on her shoulders. That, too, was Calvin’s idea (208). The charred church of the previous narrativized picture has now been given over to the innocent victims of the conflict. That the camera eye simply pretends neutrality does not diminish the shock from the host of torments these children have suffered� Or, it does not weaken Emily’s dignity as she faces an increasing expanse of corpses and destruction� In fact, Emily’s return of Arly’s gaze constitutes a “fundamental upheaval,” to use Lacan’s phrase� The self-reflexivity of the gaze, the passing from Arly to Emily and back to Arly, the “entry of the gaze itself into the secret, the intimate” completely unsettles Arly� It is also the “moment necessary for the entry of the voyeur” according to Lacan (qtd. in Žižek 38). “He was disturbed to see, miniaturized on the glass, a woman looking into his eyes so as to negate all his operative calculations of self-interest” (208). Yet, another feeling, unnameable because unregistered by consciousness, troubles Arly: “An unaccountable feeling rose in him, that had he been able to understand it, he would have recognized it as compassion” (208). Despite their differences in gender, status and function in the war, Emily and Arly are bound together in their shared victimization� The final photograph, which determined the photo wagon’s itinerary from the start, is the photograph that is never taken, and for that I consider it a partially completed task� As I have mentioned, Arly’s purpose all along the photographic wagon’s route was, in his disguise as a US photographer, to gain access to General Sherman so as to assassinate him� As a result, when Arly states that he is going “to shoot General Sherman’s picture” (321), he has literally loaded the camera to aim and shoot at him� Because, “[p]oking through the socket where a lens should have been, … was the barrel of Mr� Culp’s pistol” (324)� Arly’s murderous act evokes Sontag’s remark in her collection of essays On Photography � “To photograph someone is sublimated murder” (14-15), Sontag asserts, referring to the photographer as violator of privacy� In Arly’s case, however, the photographer turns literally into an aggressor and a would-be-assassin reflecting the excessive violence of war. His depiction as a “hysterical” soldier, a psychologically disabled war victim does not permit the erasure of the traumatic effects of war or the denial of responsibility for 268 t heodora t siMPouki its human costs. In fact, the infliction of psychological damage caused by direct experiences of conflict is considered as legitimate a wound as any other among war survivors� Doctorow’s depiction of Sherman and his generals posing to be photographed serves yet another purpose. Patterned after a historically verifiable picture of Sherman and his staff taken by Brady at his studio, the embedded image calls into question the historic picture’s authenticity and foregrounds its factiousness� To that end, while the historic picture features only eight generals (Glatthaar qtd� in Criniti 57), Doctorow increases the number of generals to eleven, so as to include historically based characters who were not truly present (such as General Kilpatrick) as well as fictional characters (such as General Teack) in the same picture� Doctorow’s imaginative manipulation of the real picture, however, adds up to an earlier manipulation of the original picture� According to historical evidence, General Francis P� Blair, an important member of Sherman’s staff, could not attend the photo shoot� Nevertheless, the group picture was taken� At a later date, the image of his head was then attached to the group picture with his name already printed (Pollack qtd� in Lester)� 15 Doubly removed from reality, this picture then cannot be considered a “miniature of reality,” to quote Sontag (1977), but as a “constructed image” which clearly undermines the authenticity of the photographic image that hides the actual, lived experience� It becomes obvious that Doctorow’s preoccupation with photography, though brief in The March , is twofold: it provides a basis to address the question of the construction of historical reality and, to the extend that photographs record only what occurs, to inscribe a traumatic event in language, to bear witness to a history that remains untold, forgotten, or cast aside� The events of September 11 caused “shock and awe,” 16 to re-contextualize the Bush administration’s war slogan, in the American nation as well as in the global community� The need to make sense, to incorporate in some way the traumatic “absolute event” (Derrida 2003), triggered a great number of public responses, among them Doctorow’s Lamentation 9/ 11 , a collection of the writer’s thoughts coupled with photographs of posters for the missing 15 “In 1865, shortly after the war ended, Mathew Brady offered to photograph William Tecumseh Sherman along with all of his generals� According to Brady, Sherman doubted that his staff would remain in Washington for the picture, but with characteristic energy the photographer appointed an hour and notified all seven men (Oliver Otis Howard, John A� Logan, William B� Hazen, Jefferson C� Davis, Henry Warner Slocum, Joseph A� Mower, and Francis P� Blair)� Blair alone missed the sitting, and he is missing from the first set of photographs … . But Brady arranged to photograph him separately and added him to later versions of the portrait by pasting Blair’s image onto an existing photograph … � Brady then photographed the new, complete picture in order to make a negative that recorded Sherman’s entire staff, and used it to print many copies of Sherman and His Generals�” “Sherman and His Generals�” Mathew Brady Portraits� The National Portrait Gallery. Smithsonian Institution � http: / / www�npg�si�edu/ exh/ brady/ gallery/ 57gal�html� 16 Officials in the United States armed forces described their plan of intervention in Iraq as employing “shock and awe�” Traumatic Testimonies in E� L� Doctorow’s The March 269 following the dreadful attack� Unlike The March, where we find an implicit evocation of the visual, in Lamentation 9/ 11 visuality is incorporated in the narrative� This is done on the account that visual representation of the atrocities of war or other incidents of crimes against humanity can play an important role as witness and evidence of trauma (Sontag)� Especially in the case of September 11, photography was crucial in the commemoration of the thousands of individuals who were killed but also those missing without leaving a trace (Kroes)� As if visual imagery was not enough to provide a voice to silent victims, a testimonial narrative had to accompany the photos of Lamentation 9/ 11 � As Doctorow said in an interview after looking at the pictures of the photographer David Finn, he felt that he had “to translate into words what these people were saying,” to put down what was unwritten out of the victims’ silence� 17 Accordingly, Doctorow wrote The March to commemorate an “unprecedented event” that “marked” a period in American history� If every collective trauma bears the trace of another, then, The March is more than a fictional account of the brutal facts of the American Civil War. 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For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor � London: Verso, 2008. s oPhia f rese “Can’t you hear the shooting? ” Death and Violence in Palestinian-American Literature on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict “Can’t you hear the shooting? ” we are asked in a haunting poem by Palestinian-American author Lisa Suhair Majaj� 1 This plea to hear the bullets fired in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict pertains to a core part of the Palestinian experience: life in the occupied territories is marked by the omnipresence of violence and death, a bitter reality that the Palestinian diaspora in America calls our attention to by producing literature, music and art dealing with the siege under which their compatriots live. These diasporic reflections are not produced in a neutral environment; they have to be understood as situated within the wider discursive field describing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States. The literature and art produced on the conflict in the American diaspora, I argue, responds to the reality in Israel/ Palestine on the one hand, but it is also an intervention into a one-sided representation and perception of the conflict in the US and other Western countries that traditionally side with Israel� The American discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is characteristically simplistic and shaped by a partial political approach that is also present in the American mainstream media’s biased reporting� 2 In her study of American foreign policy and the mainstream media’s reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Marda Dunsky shows how both media and politics contribute to an abridged and partisan public discourse on the subject� She documents the media’s failure to develop an independent perspective on the conflict and concludes that coverage rarely “goes beyond superficial details,” thereby “leaving the American public without important contextual information of why the conflict remains so intractable�” 3 Palestinian-American writers and artists who work in this cli- 1 Lisa Suhair Majaj, “What She Said,” Geographies of Light (Washington, D�C�: Del Sol Press, 2009), 10-11; Majaj’s work will be analyzed extensively in my forthcoming dissertation� 2 In the chapter “The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique,” Judith Butler shows how difficult it is to criticize Israel in America. Her demand that critical thinking about Israel has to be possible without being met with the automated accusation of Anti-Semitism is based on the recognition of a problematic and impossible conflation between Israel and all Jews. Judith Butler, “The Charge of Anti- Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique,” Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, eds� Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon (New York: Grove Press, 2003), 249-265� 3 Marda Dunsky, Pens and Swords: How the American Mainstream Media Report the Israeli- Palestinian Conflict (New York: Columbia UP, 2007), 3� 274 s oPhia f rese mate struggle to represent the other side of the conflict by filling the discursive voids with what they feel is left unsaid� They urge us to hear “the shots fired,” they plead with us to recognize their compatriots as human beings rather than the frenzied terrorists or stone-throwing radicals that the media often make them out to be� Moreover, by narrating the injustices committed against a people that has long lived under military occupation, they work to jolt us from our complacency and communicate their indignation about the ongoing suffering produced by the conflict. In this analysis, I will present two such aesthetic reflections on violent death, the most brutal facet of armed conflict: a poem by Palestinian-American writer Naomi Shihab Nye and a song by an Arab-American hip hop group called The N�O�M�A�D�S� 4 To dispel any misconceptions about my own position at the outset, I want to clarify that although my theoretical engagement with Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon and Talal Asad seeks to shed some light on the conflict’s bloodshed by understanding its preconditions and mechanisms, I do not condone any acts of violence, regardless of who commits them and no matter what the justifications are. But as long as simplistic views on the conflict and its dynamic prevail, hopes for a solution to the ongoing suffering are likely to be naïve or illusory� Many artistic productions concerned with this conflict - in particular those of the Palestinian and Jewish diasporas - aim to puncture prevailing perceptions, thereby contributing to a more complicated and nuanced view� I argue that the literary and musical pieces I will discuss here represent discursive interventions that enable us to test our own convictions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: they provide us with alternate narratives of how violence arises, how it affects those who are subject to it and those who commit it� As aesthetic negotiations, they present us with perspectives differing sharply from the mere coverage of facts and the worn-out tone of political rhetoric� To develop an instructive understanding of how violence arises, I have chosen Hannah Arendt’s seminal essay “On Violence” as my primary framework� Her conceptualization of violence is particularly helpful in relation to the conflict, because she urges us to understand it as a rational phenomenon. 5 She insists that violent acts are mostly based on rational considerations, rath- 4 Naomi Shihab Nye, “For the 500 th Dead Palestinian, Ibtisam Bozieh,” 19 Varieties of Gazelle. Poems of the Middle East (New York: Greenwillow Books, 2005), 53-54; The N�O�M�A�D�S�, “Moot,” Poets for Palestine, ed� Remi Kanazi (New York: Al Jisser Group, 2008), 34-36. The N.O.M.A.D.S. is short for Notoriously Offensive Male Arabs Discussing Shit� On their myspace page they introduce themselves as follows: “Always on the Offensive, Open-Minded, Tactfull, Tastefull, & Talented beyond belief type-tip��� Notoriously Offensive Male Arabs Discussing Sh*t - the N�O�M�A�D�S� Omar Offendum and Mr�Tibbz, partners in rhyme since grade 7, bring an Arab/ African American voice to Hip-Hop culture...No we don’t claim to be the first to have done it... but we are the best���Shaaalom suckaz…” http: / / www�myspace�com/ thenomads� 5 As a German Jew thinking about the history of European violence from an American diasporic position, Arendt is situated in a similar position to the Palestinian-American diaspora that looks back at their home country trying to understand the violent conflict that bears down on the country. “Can’t you hear the shooting? ” 275 er than describing them as irrational reactions, thereby making it difficult to dismiss them as instinctual and hence beyond the realm of reason� 6 Arendt’s assertion forces us to approach violence as a rational phenomenon that we must try to comprehend� In order to understand her conception of violence, it is crucial to realize that she grounds it in a political scenario where power and violence form a conceptual but mutually exclusive pair� As I will demonstrate later, she maps out an ideal form of shared and legitimate power to contrast it with its sinister opposition, a mode of domination that inevitably leads to violence� 7 Her understanding of violence is thus inevitably connected to an analysis of the political conditions out of which it arises� I contend that Arendt’s thoughts on violence can be put in a fruitful dialogue with the situation in Israel/ Palestine as they are born out of a deep and historically grounded concernment with political conditions leading to violence - conditions, to be sure, that are not comparable to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Arendt’s need to test her considerations within the realm of contemporary political predicaments lead her to view writing as a mode of action, “a moral injunction (…) an act of justice” that always had to be guided by the goal of putting theory into the service of a contested and problematic reality� 8 Similarly, I propose to read the literary texts dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as political actions and deliberate interventions into a current political struggle� 9 When political conflicts, such as the situation in Israel and the occupied territories, repeatedly escalate in violence this could be indicative of a deeply felt hopelessness by those who view violent intervention as their last resort� Another reason for using violence may lie in perceiving the opponent as essentially unworthy of freedom and respect� As I have mentioned before, Arendt deliberately describes violence as a tool that is used for a specific purpose and is rational by that definition (Arendt 46). However, by ascertaining the calculating reason that often backs violent action she does not deny the 6 Another proponent of denaturalizing our understanding of violence, particularly in respect to war, is Michael Walzer, who argues in his book Just and Unjust Wars that the “references to necessity and duress” when it comes to the use of violence in war function as “a kind of apology” with which we attempt to relieve ourselves of our moral responsibility� Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 4 th ed� (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 4� 7 As J� Peter Euben shows in his essay “Arendt’s Hellenism,” the model for this shared power was Athenian democracy which Arendt viewed as unmitigated and based on the principles of participation� In her idealized vision of Athenian democracy, Arendt chose to overlook the deeply unequal traits of a democracy that was reserved to an elite, excluding such minorities as women and slaves from the beginning� J� Peter Euben, “Arendt’s Hellenism,” The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed� Dana Villa (New York: Cambridge UP, 2000), 151-164� 8 Cf� Susan Visvanathan, “Hannah Arendt and the Problem of our Age,” Economic and Political Weekly 36.16 (Apr. 21-27, 2001): 1308. 9 For a further contextualization of Hannah Arendt’s work within postcolonial studies see Christopher J� Lee, “Locating Hannah Arendt in Postcolonial Thought,” College Literature 38.1 (2011): 95-115. 276 s oPhia f rese influence of affect. Rather, she rejects a naturalizing and thereby apologetic stance on violence in order to avoid the possibility of describing perpetrators as mere victims of their instincts� In order to distinguish between a rationally guided form of aggression and one that is provoked by affect, Arendt differentiates between violence and rage� According to this distinction, violence is an implementation of strength while rage is the result of an offended sense of justice� This differentiation will be important in the interpretation of the primary texts I present later (63)� The origins of the omnipresent violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can best be discussed by considering Arendt’s distinction between power and violence� “Power is never the property of an individual,” she maintains, instead “it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together” (44)� She claims that power is “always in need of numbers” and observes that it arises out of the “human ability […] to act in concert” (ibid�)� Accordingly for Arendt, power as a negotiated and shared property is strongly linked to the idea of a collective acting together, and at its core is thus a democratic sense of legitimacy � 10 Much in line with my own reading of Arendt’s thoughts on the matter, Paul Ricœur suggests that her work consciously establishes power as an ideal, a shared property that is continually negotiated� 11 For Ricœur, her recovery of power is based on the equality of the citizens who hold it and goes against the grain of “a political philosophy (…) for which political relations are defined as relations of domination” a school of thought for which “power (…) remains the power to constrain” (Ricœur 21). In Arendt’s thought this definition of power is misleading, because it has forgotten its democratic foundations and has a limited vision of “the power to constrain, as the power of man over man” (ibid�)� According to Arendt, the misuse of power leads to its inevitable disintegration, ultimate self-destruction and the decline into violence. The Arendtian definition of power as legitimate and fundamentally democratic presents an ideal that we can juxtapose to a form of power struggling on the cusp of illegitimacy, as in the case of the unequal relationship between Palestinians and Israelis� Such a contested form of power, lacking the support of a large part of those who are subject to it qua military occupation, both turns violent and provokes violence in response� Following this argument, Israel’s power is constantly under threat, since it does not represent a large part of its constituency, because 10 Although this sense of a legitimate power is integral to Arendt’s thinking, she also hints at a perverted form of power: “The extreme form of power is all against one” (42)� Arendt’s recovery of such a shared and democratic form of power is closely linked to her idea of political action which is realized in “persuasive speech (…) argument and deliberation” that testifies to the plurality of perspectives onto the “public thing.” This Arendtian definition of political action allows us to see the literary texts on the conflict not only as expressions of alternative perspectives and counter narratives on the matter, but also permits us to describe the texts themselves as a form of political action� Dana Villa, “Heideggerian Themes in The Human Condition ,” Hannah Arendt: Verborgene Tradition - Unzeitgemäße Aktualität? , ed� Heinrich Böll Stiftung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), 90� 11 Paul Ricœur, “Power and Violence,” Theory, Society and Culture 27.5 (2010): 18-36. “Can’t you hear the shooting? ” 277 it has labored to remove the Palestinians from the public political space and continues to deny them the right to self-determination� From the beginning, the Israeli state has thus been envisioned as exclusive� 12 Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14 1948 reads: “We hereby proclaim the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine, to be called Medinath Yisrael (The State of Israel)�” 13 The nation was conceived as Jewish, as a safe haven for Jewish survivors of the Shoah and as a home for the wider Jewish diaspora� Political theorist Sammy Smooha defines such an exclusive form of government as an “ethnic democracy, […] because of the definition of the state as belonging to a particular religious or ethnic group�” 14 It is because of this exclusive constitution that Israel offers insufficient forums for democratic representation and civil rights to the Palestinians� 15 By way of its constitutional document, the Israeli state has effectively transformed Palestinians into second-class citizens in their own country; the resulting inequality between Israelis and Palestinians renders the state’s power precarious� 16 This leads to violence both on the side of the Palestinians, who consider themselves the oppressed natives and the State of Israel that is suspicious of its Palestinian population and views them as a security risk� The state’s deeply rooted mistrust expresses itself, for example, in the harsh control exercised by the Israeli Defense Forces over the Palestinian territories that constitutes violence, because it severely delimits Palestinian civil rights� The state’s manifold control mechanisms vis-à-vis the Palestinians indicate that the Arab minority is viewed as a potential danger that must be subjected to constant surveillance� These disciplining measures reveal the state’s need to affirm its assumedly threatened power. Or, as Arendt put it: “Violence appears where power is in jeopardy” (56)� Speaking of state brutality, Arendt observes that “in foreign relations as in domestic affairs violence appears as a last resort to keep the power structure intact against individual challengers, the foreign enemy, the native crimi- 12 For a more detailed analysis of the contradictory claim for universality and particularistic interests see Ilan Peleg, „Jewish-Palestinian Relations in Israel: From Hegemony to Equality? ” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 17�3 (2004): 415-437� 13 State of Israel, “Declaration of Independence,” The Israel-Arab Reader , 7 th ed�, eds� Walter Laqueur and Barry Ruben (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 81f. 14 Sammy Smooha, “Minority Status in an Ethnic Democracy� The Status of the Arab Minority in Israel,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 13.3 (1990): 389; 391. 15 The close to 700,000 Israeli Palestinians must be considered second-class citizens, because “their citizenship does not assure them equality in law […] The West Bank and Gaza Strip are actually incorporated into Israel, while their Palestinian inhabitants are denied civil and political rights” (Smooha 391f�)� 16 For a detailed description of the devastating effects of the military occupation on the Palestinian population see Saree Makdisi‘s history of the occupation, Palestine Inside Out. An Everyday Occupation. The ousting of Palestinians from the political process and the public arena is spatially expressed in the building of a wall separating the occupied territories from Israel. By 2008 the “projected length of (the) West Bank wall,” was estimated at “437 miles�” Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out (New York: Norton, 2008), 23� Fencing off the Palestinian population in such a fashion is a clear visual reminder that they are not seen as potential citizens but rather as a danger to the state that must be ‘reigned in�’ 278 s oPhia f rese nal” (47; my emphasis)� 17 It is worthwhile to pay close attention to Arendt’s phrasing here� She speaks of violence as a last resort and thus argues that by choosing violence to maintain its troubled hegemony, a state involuntarily reveals that all other means have failed� In a more sinister reading, assuming that the state has no such inhibitions to use force as a political tool, one could also argue that other means are simply not considered, since they might appear to be less efficient means for the quick achievement of goals. According to Arendt, however, state-induced violence brings to light the government’s attitude toward those it uses it against, as enemies of the state� Moreover, the use of force indicates that the state’s power does not stand unquestioned, that its monopoly is under attack. It is this unjust and unjustified use of force by an oppressive state power that many Palestinian-American writers and artists raise their voices against� I propose to read these indignant voices as an archive of aesthetic resistance against violence’s muting power, its ability “to disperse, silence and isolate people�” 18 As aesthetic expressions of the Palestinian diaspora, these poems, songs and other art forms produce and reproduce a sense of illegitimacy with respect to the occupying power� With Arendt, I have provided a possible explanation for the continuing bloodshed of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, keeping in mind that whereas violence is instrumental in character, it is rarely monocausal in its origins� 19 Finally, Arendt also considers the affective undercurrents that provoke aggression: focusing on rage, she singles out an offended sense of justice as a trigger capable of igniting such an emotion in humans� Pointing to the last straw that transforms the “engages into enrages,” Arendt argues that it is “not injustice that ranks first but hypocrisy” (65). In the Palestinian-American poem and song that I will be analyzing here, the line between violence and rage is not always so clear-cut� However, Arendt’s considerations on violence and rage constitute an illuminating backdrop against which the poem and song can be understood: they are grappling with an overwhelming sense of injustice and rage in negotiating the dehumanizing effects of violence� While rage and injustice are recurring themes in Palestinian-American literature dealing with violence, solidarity also features prominently� Whereas a perceived injustice can ignite rage and rage in turn seeks violent outlets, solidarity can be understood as another possible effect of being exposed to violence and exposing others to it� Arendt describes this phenomenon as an emerging “brotherhood on the battlefield,” echoing Franz Fanon’s asser- 17 Obviously, her underlying assumption is that violence is an unacceptable instrument as a means of political maneuvering in the first place, a stance that most contemporary states certainly do not subscribe to� 18 Andre Duarte, “Hannah Arendt, Biopolitics, And the Problem of Violence: From Animal Laboran to Homo Sacer,” Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide , eds� Richard H� King and Dan Stone (London: Berghahn Books, 2008), 191. 19 For a psychoanalytic perspective on the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the rhetoric of self-defense see Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005)� “Can’t you hear the shooting? ” 279 tion that “the practice of violence binds men together” (qtd� in Arendt 67)� Many Palestinian-American poems demonstrate the multiple solidarities created on the battlefield: the solidarity of violent perpetrators, the solidarity of victims among themselves and the transatlantic solidarity expressed by the Palestinian diaspora for their compatriots in the homeland� A striking side-effect of this solidarity against another, either a victim or perpetrator, is the (momentarily) waning individual consciousness� Instead of focusing on individual responses to violence, most Palestinian-American texts highlight collective suffering. Fanon testifies to the same collectivizing effect in the decolonization struggle declaring that “Individualism is the first to disappear,” when the “native (…) has the opportunity to return to the people during the struggle for freedom�” 20 Finally, I want to stress that in the Palestinian-American texts speaking up for their compatriots, solidarity is not limited to those exposed to violence, but becomes what I call a transnational diasporic practice � 21 Returning to violence, I will briefly focus on its most gruesome outcome: the termination of a human life� If solidarity is an effect of being subjected to violence or committing it, death is the ultimate threat posed by armed conflict. When writing about the countless violent escalations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Palestinian-American authors have to confront the ultimate frontier of our knowledge: death. The finality of death that Shakespeare captured in the metaphor of “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns” poses a challenge for the writers who confront the topic in their works� 22 But although death epitomizes irreversible physical separation, many Palestinian-American poets, much like Hamlet, are haunted by their dead� In Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “For the 500 th Dead Palestinian, Ibtisam Bozieh,” the speaker admits that the dead girl inhabits her dreams� The rupture of death implies that witnessing another dying inevitably means to be left behind� As a survivor, one stands before a locked door without the keys to enter� This impossibility of traversing the barrier of physical separation is performed in a poetic motion away from the dead and towards the living, as we shall later see in Nye’s poem about Ibtisam Bozieh’s death� Death’s insuperableness also explains the importance given to contextual information in the reflections on it. Nye’s poem briefly hones in on the moment of death, only to proceed to an introspective meditation on the implications of witnessing Palestinian suffering from the distance of a diasporic home� “Moot,” the hip hop track written by The N�O�M�A�D�S�, too focuses on the path leading up to death, rather than the actual moment of dying� 20 Frantz Fanon� The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963), 47� 21 I borrow the term from Brent Hayes Edwards’ study of the Black Atlantic� Cf� Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003)� 22 William Shakespeare, Hamlet , Act 3, Scene 1, 1600-1601� The Complete Works of William Shakespeare , http: / / www.shakespeare-literature.com/ Hamlet/ 8.html. 280 s oPhia f rese The anthropologist Linda M� Pitcher has studied the ritual, symbolization and narrative of martyrdom in Palestinian culture� 23 Pitcher has shown that the telling of a martyr’s death is an integral part of the funeral� During her research she lived with numerous Palestinian families and recorded their stories about the practice of martyrdom� Pitcher’s research demonstrates that news of someone killed by the Israeli Defense Forces spreads fast in the affected Palestinian neighborhood� In this process, the news of the death is transformed into the story of the martyr that is repeatedly told and thereby transformed into an oral tradition� Although Pitcher focuses particularly on what are called the “Intifada martyrs,” her findings are helpful to frame our understanding of textual, diasporic witness practices of Palestinian deaths� To describe the function of these accounts of the martyr’s death, Pitcher introduces the act of witnessing, drawing on the Arabic concept of shahada - to bear witness. I contend that the aesthetic reflections produced in the Palestinian diaspora are practices of witnessing in their own right, albeit in other genres� They produce literature, music and movies that bear witness to their compatriots’ suffering in a land that they have left behind� Crucially however, these texts do not witness the deaths directly� Instead, they testify to the agony they cause to the Palestinian community, while also broadcasting them beyond the walls of occupied territories that might otherwise prevent us from ever hearing of the turmoil inside� I propose to read these aesthetic modes of witnessing as a diasporic practice of solidarity that becomes the ethical and communicative hinge connecting globally dispersed peoples� Reading Palestinian-American literature in the context of a Palestinian witnessing tradition helps us to consider the various implications of such a practice� But despite contextualizing this practice in a Palestinian shahada tradition, the diasporic texts also perform a labor that must be recognized in its difference that I have marked as a transnational practice of solidarity� The issue of witnessing can only be touched upon here; I want to leave it at summarizing two possible consequences of witnessing, which are acutely present in both texts that will be analyzed in the following� Firstly, witnessing the Palestinian plight from a diasporic position is a means of rendering it visible not only to one’s own community, but also to a broader Anglophone audience that might otherwise be unaware of it� Secondly, to bear witness to suffering evokes our ethical responsibility to attend to it� To become aware of the absence of justice in the occupied territories produces a sense of guilt and indignation, both in the reader and the writer, as my reading of Nye’s poem on the death of Ibtisam Bozieh will show� Nye’s poem “For the 500 th Dead Palestinian, Ibtisam Bozieh” explicitly presents itself as textual witness to the death of a 13-year-old Palestinian girl� The title immediately confronts the readers with an irresolvable tension between a claim for individuality and a statistical number, an anonymous 23 Linda M� Pitcher, “‘The Divine Impatience�’ Ritual, Narrative and Symbolization in the Practice of Martyrdom Palestine,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 12�1 (“The Embodiment of Violence”) (1998): 8-30. “Can’t you hear the shooting? ” 281 casualty of the war� The title’s word succession suggests that Ibtisam Bozieh’s death has a primarily representative function: she seems to owe the honor of having a poem written for her not to her death’s individual significance, or to the fact that it is more remarkable than others, but to being the 500 th victim of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, despite its initial focus on her death as the 500 th in this enduring strife, Nye’s poem also rescues Ibtisam Bozieh from the obscurity of being forgotten or becoming an abstract number, one of countless victims� Nye’s lines preserve and broadcast some of Ibtisam Bozieh’s individuality that would have been lost otherwise, performing a balancing act between individuality and representativeness� In the first line, the speaker addresses the dead girl as “Little sister Ibtisam Bozieh,” transforming her into a part of the Palestinian collective while in the same breath constituting the collective as a family (Nye 53)� By calling her a sister, Nye’s poem invokes the solidarity engendered among the oppressed and the diaspora that witnesses their distant suffering� Fanon notes a very similar change of vocabulary in the colonial environment, a rhetoric of familial ties that testifies to the rise of a collective consciousness in the face of the colonizer� 24 Ibtisam Bozieh’s name, the first verse continues, haunts the sleep of Palestinians; she cannot be forgotten, or, in a more bold reading, she enters the Palestinian subconscious� Line four and five of the first stanza report the specificities of her death: “Dead at 13, for staring through/ the window into a gun barrel/ which did not know you wanted to be/ a doctor” (ibid�)� Her youth stands out and emphasizes her innocence to the readers, an innocence that is underscored by the grotesque causality established by the forth line� She is dead, “for staring through the window,” an innocuous activity (ibid�)� Next to constituting Ibtisam Bozieh as a victim, these lines also create a crass image� By making the reader envision the face of a girl opposite a gun barrel, the verse creates a stark opposition between the child victim and the ruthless perpetrator� Killing Ibtisam Bozieh is depicted as a heinous act that underscores the cruelty and injustice of her assassin� Through the prism of Arendt’s analysis, the perpetrator, who is not so much an individual actor as he is a member of the state’s army, is exposed as abusing his superior power� When children become military targets, the legitimacy of a government using force against an occupied civilian population appears in a questionable light� By stressing the injustice of Ibtisam Bozieh’s death, the poem also attempts to antagonize its readers against the perpetrators of such crimes, or, to put it in Arendtian terminology, the text labors to transform the readers into enraged secondary witnesses of an unjust killing that is claimed to be representative of many others� Further promoting the readers’ sympathy for the girl, the shooter remains invisible throughout the poem; Nye establishes this fatal encounter as an antinomy between human and machine� Whereas this opposition suc- 24 Fanon narrates the rise of a family-centered vocabulary among the colonized as a mode of resistance against the colonizer who attempts to isolate the colonized in order to weaken their ability to act in concert and rise against him (47)� 282 s oPhia f rese ceeds in establishing Ibtisam Bozieh’s vulnerable humanity, it also prevents the readers from seeing the killer in human terms� Simple as this observation may appear, it points to the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the other is hardly visible as human, in which one’s own humanity is asserted too frequently through a fundamental denial of the other’s� The gun, the instrument of Ibtisam Bozieh’s death, remains wholly inhumane although it is personified when we learn that the gun was unaware the girl wanted “to be/ a doctor�” Lines six and seven draw on the girl’s obliterated future, her dream of becoming a doctor, and thereby remind the readers of her lost potential, the void that has replaced hope� Moreover, these lines also capture the blindness of armed conflict as evident in the callousness at work when innocent children are murdered� The girl’s wish to become a doctor creates a further contrast: whereas the shooter is an agent of destruction, she aspired to a career that would be centered on saving lives rather than taking them� The second and third stanzas are suffused by a sense of survivor’s guilt felt by the speaker who reveals herself to be an exiled Palestinian: “Had I stayed in your land,/ I might have been dead too […] guiltily, you, not me” (ibid�)� Ibtisam Bozieh’s death is transformed into an occasion on which the poem’s speaker contemplates her own mortality; her premature end becomes a memento mori for those left behind� Rather than stopping short at contemplating her own mortality, the speaker proceeds to reflect on her own privileged position as part of a diasporic community whose life is not rendered fragile by a continuous armed conflict. This fundamental difference between life in the diaspora and in Israel/ Palestine as well as the girl’s death cause the speaker to experience an overwhelming sense of powerlessness that is triggered by two factors: the spatial distance from the scene of events that renders any form of direct intervention impossible and, maybe more importantly, a profound helplessness in the face of death’s finality. This perceived inadequacy in light of the tragedy produces a self-conscious grief that always already knows its insufficiency: I would smooth your life in my hands, pull you back� […] Throwing this ragged grief into the street, scissoring news stories free from the page but they live on my desk with letters, not cries (ibid�)� The conditional form used in the first two lines of the second stanza, accentuate the tension between the desire to undo the girl’s death and the impossibility of realizing that wish� Nye’s poem also inquires into the ethical implications of witnessing the death of one’s people from the diasporic distance� Being removed from the site of the conflict can produce a guilty conscience for not being there, but it also creates a moment of diasporic solidarity� Thus, Nye’s poem can be understood both as a practice of diasporic solidarity and a tribute to the Palestinians who remained in their homeland. The final lines of the last stanza circle around an insurmountable detachment from the homeland; letters become the abstract representatives of actual felt pain� They are inadequate substi- “Can’t you hear the shooting? ” 283 tutes for the unattainable reality of lived experience; Palestine has become an abstract concept, rather than a sensually experienced reality� However, these last lines of the poem also demonstrate a deep yearning and perhaps even an obsession to stay informed about the events in the homeland� By cutting out news stories about Palestine, the speaker removes them from their original site, the newspaper� Similarly, she herself has been removed from her original context by being expelled from Palestine� Therefore, I propose to read the cutting out of news stories about a distant land as an allegory for being exiled� For the Palestinian diaspora, the process of being displaced was and is violent, as it renders them forcefully removed from their origins� But having to leave Palestine is also liberating (the speaker refers to the process of cutting as freeing ) because it means being removed from the site of a potentially life-threatening conflict. Through these reflections on removal Nye’s poem functions as a prism of displacement� In the following, I will contrast Nye’s poem about Ibtisam Bozieh’s death with the self-determined deaths of the so-called martyrs, or the shaheed , as they are called according to a Palestinian tradition� The concept of martyrdom is as hard to approach as it is to understand, because a martyr defies the rationality of self-preservation and forces us to enter into mental spaces that we usually eschew� Pitcher argues that it is ill-considered “to forsake [our] fundamental responsibility to foster an understanding of phenomena that affronts, offends or questions our own cultural norms and assumptions” (8). To stop short at our initial revulsion would also mean to ignore a practice that has developed into a gory ritual performed by radicalized Palestinians� By discussing a hip hop piece, I am accounting for the fact that Palestinian-American artists choose diverse media for expressing their views� Hip hop is only one of the art forms of choice for young artists in the Palestinian diaspora� The N�O�M�A�D�S�, an Arab-American hip hop group, have written a song entitled “Moot” that features two opposing monologues - one by an Israeli soldier, and another by a Palestinian suicide bomber� Strikingly, both roles are spoken by one and the same persona, Mr� Tibbz� 25 As the title suggests, the tone of the song is aggressive and belligerent; the language is colloquial and engages in verbal saber-rattling, heavily drawing on slang� Speaking back to Arendt’s account of what circumstances may generate violent behavior, the self-proclaimed freedom fighter in “Moot” tells us how the injustice of living under military occupation lead him to become a suicide bomber. In contrast to Nye’s poem, “Moot” takes on both sides of the conflict by lending a voice not only to a Palestinian, but also to an Israeli soldier� This dual perspective on the conflict is significant as it represents an attempt to escape the confines of unilateral partisanship. It does so by juxtaposing two stories, two evolutionary histories of violence, thereby displaying the ability to go beyond one’s own concerns by taking an imaginary leap into the 25 Choosing the same speaker for both the Israeli soldier and the Palestinian suicide bomber is a provocative underscoring of their commonalities, as both have lost family through the conflict and have to deal with the resulting grief and aggression. 284 s oPhia f rese mind of the enemy� Through this narrative strategy, “Moot” points to the lack of dialogue, the unwillingness to confront the other’s suffering that is so central to the conflict’s longevity. The song - an introduction followed by the monologues of the Israeli soldier and the “freedom fighter” - maintains the monological form thereby neither glossing over the lack of communication nor fading out these contesting voices� The task of generating a dialogue is left to the reader, who is encouraged to think beyond the limitations of a one-sided view� Subverting the equality of voices, the song begins with an introduction by Omar Offendum, who expresses his solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians and insists on a bond between the disenfranchised, be they “Blacks” or “Native Americans�” By locating the Palestinian struggle within a wider struggle for decolonization, the speaker frames the colonizers as enemies that have to be fought: “Rocks in fists ready to topple these regimes despite/ Odds that would have made the general poker player think twice” (The N�O�M�A�D�S� 34)� Offendum continues this generalizing rhetoric by speaking of colonial, or imperial regimes in the plural, but simultaneously returns to a concrete example: that the war he speaks of is fought with stones associates it with the Intifada, the Palestinian uprisings of 1987 and 2000, the first of which was also known as the War of Stones. Tallying with Arendt’s observation that violence is more often employed as a means to an end than it is the result of an instinctual reaction, Offendum describes the Palestinian uprising against their oppressors as goal-oriented and therefore instrumental in nature� As the song deals with violence in a setting that is described as colonial, Frantz Fanon’s considerations in The Wretched of the Earth (1963) provide a helpful background for its analysis� For Fanon, the decolonization process is necessarily marked by violence: National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon (79)� His description of the colonial space is reflected in the introduction to “Moot,” when the speaker informs us that all he can see is suffering, that his Palestinian cousins are malnourished, their backs bear the “marks of oppression” and their land is taken from them (The N�O�M�A�D�S . 34)� Depicting a similarly destitute landscape, Fanon describes the town of the natives as “a place filled of ill fame (…) The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of light� The native town is a crouching village (…), a town on its knees� It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs” (Fanon 39)� This theme of destitution is repeated in reference to the Palestinian space, not only in the introduction but also in the “freedom fighter’s” account of his life. Much like Arendt’s analysis - and Fanon in his description of the decolonizing struggle - “Moot” also reminds us that each violent escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian strife is accompanied by a rational explanation underpinning and justifying the action� However, echoing the Arendtian conception of violence as both rationally guided and emotionally sustained, The “Can’t you hear the shooting? ” 285 N�O�M�A�D�S� also make clear that even when violence supposedly serves a specific purpose, i.e. ridding oneself of the oppressor, it is never exclusively based on rationality. Thus, we learn that the odds of winning this fight would have made the “average poker player think twice” (34)� The Palestinians’ determination to fight despite their slim chances against a much stronger opponent is thus obviously not based on reason alone, as rational consideration would speak against it� Their emotional state is such that further inaction seems unbearable; their existence, Offendum claims in the introduction, is reduced to suffering� As “uttering a cry for help is pretty useless” (ibid�), they are resolved to fight for themselves. Their struggle is thus less based on rational considerations than on an emotional necessity that keeps them going� Following this introduction by a voice from the Palestinian side, “Moot” introduces a second speaker, identified as an “Israeli Soldier.” His angry monologue reveals that he hates the Palestinians because they are responsible for the death of his fiancé and that he too has a good reason to go to war. Telling us what happened to Tara, his bride, the soldiers says “The bastards shot my bride-to-be the day before my marriage” (ibid� 35)� The trauma of losing his fiancé - an innocent civilian - makes the young man join the army willingly� He is driven by the desire to avenge her death: I wish I had a Kalashnikov so I could let off some pressure� Run in the mosque during Fajr, And split the bastards wide open like a secretary does a letter (ibid�)� His own life has been marked by Palestinian violence through the killing of his bride and in turn, he now wishes to unleash violence on those whom he blames for her death� The Palestinians as enemies exist only in the plural; they are all the same, all murderous madmen. He is fighting them “for Tara.” In The Human Condition, Arendt thinks about vengeance and forgiveness as antithetical� 26 Whereas vengeance is inevitably caught up in a “chain reaction,” a spiral of violence, forgiveness lifts those who practice it out of the vicious circle. Resisting one’s urge to retaliate therefore means to affirm one’s self-determined agency, one’s ability to rise above the desire for revenge� 27 As we shall see, “Moot” constructs the Israeli soldier as winning the battle against his vengefulness at least in part� But his individual resolution to break the cycle of violence is just a drop in the ocean� That the soldier creates an analogy between shooting up the mosque visitors and a secretary opening a letter is a further key to the mechanics of violence� By likening the killing of human beings to the treatment of an envelope, the song shows how a reification of the other frames them as inhuman objects and renders violence against them permissible� Their annihilation is not a murderous act anymore, but appears as a useful procedure that will - like the opening of the 26 Dana Villa, “Heideggerian Themes in the Human Condition, ” Hannah Arendt: Verborgene Tradition - Unzeitgemäße Aktualität? Ed� Heinrich Böll Stiftung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), 87-101. 27 Cf� Bernadette Meyler, ‘Does Forgiveness Have a Place? Hegel, Arendt and the Revolution,’ Theory and Event 6�1 (2002): 2� 286 s oPhia f rese letter - help the actor to get what he wants� Indoctrination further prepares the path to accept the oppression and destruction of the Palestinians as the only way of dealing with them� The Israeli soldier reiterates a classic racist image of the other as animal-like: “They’re nothing but animals crawling on all fours,/ So when they attack we react with armed force” (The N�O�M�A�D�S� 35)� Just like reifying them by comparing them to objects, calling them animals is a strategic dehumanization which justifies their inhumane treatment. Fanon sees this dehumanization of the native by the settler as a consequence of colonialism’s mental architecture when he writes: At times this Manicheanism goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal� In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms (42)� “Moot’s” introduction puts a further twist on the settler’s animalization of the native by showing that the latter partially adapts or at least reflects this demeaning vocabulary in his self-description. Despite Offedum’s defiant declaration that the Palestinians “ain’t no mice,” the listeners are also informed that “Still sometimes I’m feeling like a lab rat/ The type that scientists like to stab at” (The N�O�M�A�D�S� 34)� Comparing himself to an animal, Offendum performs the corrosiveness of the colonial ideology that eventually infects the self-perception of the natives as well� The soldier’s account of his relationship to the Palestinians is insightful because it illustrates that our judgment of the other is restricted to our own experiential horizon� For the speaker, having been subjected to Palestinian violence results in a hostile collectivization of a whole group that forecloses a differentiated view of the conflict. In addition, the conviction that one’s own side merely reacts to enemy provocations helps to view oneself as acting in self-defense, whereas the others are described as attackers� This Manichean opposition of self and other is evident in the following statement of the soldier: “It’s never enough, we give them land and they want more/ They must be nuts, we give them peace and they want war” (ibid�)� In these lines the speaker portrays the Israelis as giving and peaceful in opposition to the Palestinians, who have insatiable demands and are belligerent� Fanon registers the same dichotomic dynamic when writing about the colonizer’s description of the native as a morally decrepit force: the “settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil (…) he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values” (41). As the analysis of the “freedom fighter’s” monologue shows, the same condemning rhetoric is not only employed by the settler vis-à-vis the native, but also vice versa� The Israeli soldier’s monologue comes to a surprising halt when he distances himself explicitly from his drill sergeant: although he has a clear-cut image of the enemy, he reacts defensively when confronted with a mirror image of his own xenophobia� Recalling his entry into the army, he tells us: The first day the drill sergeant told us cadets, he said “The Arabs are your enemy, Palestinians especially, And wiping them all out - that’s the safest remedy” (The N�O�M�A�D�S� 35)� “Can’t you hear the shooting? ” 287 Fanon’s diagnosis of the settler’s condemnation of the native as quintessentially evil and inhuman is taken to its logical conclusion in these lines: the drill sergeant’s words expose the genocidal potential of a view that posits the annihilation of Palestinians as a safety operation� Fanon describes this twisted logic by citing the Manichean division of the colonial world in which ridding oneself of what is described as absolute evil is consequently seen as a good deed� In the instance where the Israeli soldier’s hatred is mirrored back to him and taken a step further by suggesting the annihilation of a whole collective, he dissociates himself from such hate speech� It is not forgiveness, then, that moves him to break the cycle of violence and abstain from revenge, but an amplification of his own murderous desires. Amending Arendt’s theory of how to escape the perpetuation of violence, “Moot” suggests that forgiveness is not the only way of ending it� Instead, being confronted with the final consequences of one’s own conception of the other as inhuman can suffice. Finally, being exposed to discriminatory propaganda has a surprising effect on the soldier who ends up rejecting the hatred of his superiors: That’s what they keep telling me But I ain’t that way� So I’ma chill at this East Tel Aviv café (ibid�)� Ironically, it is precisely at the café where he dissociates himself from the genocidal rhetoric of his superiors that he will have a fatal encounter with the song’s other protagonist, the self-proclaimed “freedom fighter” whose monologue I will analyze in the following� Instead of speaking about the suicide bomber, The N�O�M�A�D�S . wrote his part in the first-person singular as well. This narrative strategy fosters the illusion that we as listeners/ readers gain an undisguised insight into the mind of the “freedom-fighter.” As a formal choice, the first-person narrative breaks a taboo; instead of keeping a safe distance to the suicide bomber and thereby allowing us to dismiss him as pathological, we are forced to trace his thoughts that end in a suicide attack� In On Suicide Bombing, Talal Asad observes that Western attempts to understand the motives of suicide bombers generally describe them as “pathological (…) as being alienated - that is not properly integrated into Western society” (41)� 28 “Moot” complicates 28 In this book, Talal Asad traces the epistemological labor of distinguishing between terrorism and war and he is also concerned with the accounts that the West gives of suicide bombing� He notes that the question of whether we accept a killing as legitimate or condemn it as a terrorist act depends on the way we frame it� His “argument is directed against thinking of terrorism simply as an illegal and immoral form of violence and advocates an examination of what the discourse of terror - and the perpetration of terror - does in the world of power�” Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia UP, 2007), 26� Similarly, The N�O�M�A�D�S . also force us to see that even if we do not agree with it, certain circumstances are fertile ground for the rise of terrorism� By offering a fictional history of a suicide bomber as a first-person account, the Hip Hop group shows that from his perspective, the Israeli state’s treatment of his people looks like terrorism to him: he describes in some detail how he and his family are terrorized by the occupying force� 288 s oPhia f rese these facile explanations� Instead of a pathological individual alienated from our horizon of understanding, the “freedom fighter’s” decision to become a suicide bomber is the reluctant outcome of a history of suffering and political disenfranchisement� First and foremost, he appears as a desperate man whose integration into Western society has been his life-long submission to military occupation� In his study of Western approaches to suicide attacks, Asad demonstrates that most readings of suicide bombers follow a schema of “finding the culprit as well as the religious sources that feed his criminality” (45). This simplified explanation is a facile way of othering that absolves us from the difficult task of understanding suicide attacks in a wider context of political conflicts from which we might not be as detached as we hope. “Moot” objects to this stereotypical approach by presenting us with a personal history of suffering and political disillusionment that motivates the “freedom fighter” to become a suicide bomber. Rather than describing him only in terms of a perpetrator, his monologue shows that he has been victimized as well� Beginning with a negation, “Never had a home/ My country wasn’t mine,” the Palestinian suicide bomber describes a life of abjection and oppression (The N�O�M�A�D�S� 35)� In his lamentation, he asserts the omnipresence of violence in the occupied territories by informing us that he has already lost his father and his brother. The “freedom fighter’s” description of conditions in Gaza echoes Fanon’s vision of the native town as a desperate and violent space: “Not a day passed, without my mother crying/ They shot the protesters, that’s more brothers dying,” and continues to inform us that he was raised by his mother “’cause I never knew my father,/ They shot him and my brother in the first intifada” (ibid.). But his monologue does not stop short at deploring a life of privations� He continues to curse those who he sees as the culprits� Telling us that “the Zionists” euphemistically call the fenced-in and intensely controlled Palestinian territories “crowd containment camps,” the speaker gives us his opinion of them: “But we all know a Zionist is nothing but a lying bitch” (ibid�)� 29 The “freedom fighter’s” indignation about the euphemistic language used to describe Palestinian territories attests to Arendt’s analysis that it is not primarily an offended sense of justice that will trigger rage, but the exposure to hypocrisy that most likely transforms an engaged individual into an enraged warrior� In an escalation of hate speech, the speaker reveals the full extent of his anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism: “Fuck the Jews, Americans too� All they do is shoot us up and then brag about it on the news” (ibid� 36)� Cursing the Jews as a collective bespeaks his inability to differentiate: Jews for him are all the same� This epistemological violence that was also performed by the Israeli soldier rhymes with Fanon’s observation that the colonial zone is not only compartmentalized spatially but also an antithetical space: 29 The word “camps” also conjures up the image of a concentration camp, a reference that further complicates the label given to the occupied territories, but that I cannot elaborate on here due to space constraints� “Can’t you hear the shooting? ” 289 In this colonial context there is no truthful behavior, and the good is quite simply that which is evil for ‘them�’ Thus we see that the primary Manicheanism which governed colonial society is preserved intact during the period of decolonization; that is to say the settler never ceases to be the enemy, the foe that must be overthrown (50f�)� “Moot” stages this Manichean conception of self and other, demonstrating how both figures, the Israeli soldier and the Palestinian “freedom fighter” fail to see the other as anything other than an enemy� In addition, both speakers are firmly convinced that their own actions are mere reactions, that the violence that they commit is self-defense against the other’s onslaught� As listeners we are tracing the “freedom fighter’s” inflamed hatred toward “the Jews” and “the Americans” and his increasing desperation that ends in him joining Hamas, a choice that represents his determination to bring about change: By 9: 30 I’m on the streets of East Tel Aviv� Final prayer to god “A-yo Allah help me please, I didn’t want to kill but Israel won’t let me be�” Count to three - take my last steps� Get in the café - take my last breath� Set of the detonator - big blast effect� My life was pure hell so in death I rest (The N�O�M�A�D�S� 36)� The speaker, however, does not unequivocally affirm his suicide attack. He insists on his initial unwillingness to become a suicide bomber, thereby conveying the sense of being forced into this desperate act by the testing circumstances� Towards the end of his monologue, the lines become shorter, the beat slows down and the eerie rhythmical calm coincides with an increased introspection of the speaker� The victims of his attack are not even mentioned, they remain completely invisible, their deaths unmentioned� If the monologue was dominated by outrage, expressed in belligerent accusations against the perceived culprits, its last words suggest an overwhelming desire to escape the turmoil of a troubled Palestinian life, without repeating the wish to bring about change� Devoid of the hopeful notes that Fanon assigns to the violent uprising of the colonized, these last words express resignation� Contradicting Fanon’s idealization of anti-colonial violence, The N.O.M.A.D.S. do not depict the “freedom fighter’s” attack as “rehabilitative and healing,” unless, of course, to use Fanon’s medical vocabulary, one considers the death of a patient a medical success� 30 Does this hip hop song suggest that there is a prototypical development of a martyr, or a suicide bomber? The form gives us a crucial hint; the first-person narration emphasizes the individuality of the speaker. Rather than providing us with a universally valid answer as to what motivates a person to kill himor herself and others, ”Moot” presents this anguished monologue as one possible story , the subjective tale of an individual marked 30 Gail M� Presbey, “Fanon on the Role of Violence in Liberation,” Fanon: A Critical Reader , eds. Lewis R. Gordon et al. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 284. 290 s oPhia f rese by the injustices of occupation and the sense of being politically betrayed� The “freedom fighter’s” monologue delineates a coherent development that is best described in terms of a role reversal: initially, the suicide bomber describes himself as a victim without agency, but the moment he joins Hamas represents a turning point� Becoming a member of Hamas, however, is depicted as an act of political frustration, the consequence of other local and international political actors failing him: he tells us that Arafat “talks smack but don’t deliver shit” and “The UN can’t help, they act like they ain’t go a clue” (The N�O�M�A�D�S� 36)� To the “freedom fighter,” Hamas seems to represent the only possibility for concrete action, as he proclaims, “I’m gonna make a change and so I’m siding with Hamas” (ibid�) . Siding with Hamas is equated with agency and becoming politically engaged� The “freedom fighter’s” decision to become a suicide bomber followed by a three-day fast is the culmination of self-control� A Palestinian man who was unable to lead a self-determined life under military occupation ironically reclaims his right to self-determination by choosing his own death and killing others� “Moot” describes the development of a suicide bomber as a journey from being a victim to becoming a perpetrator� Fanon writes of a similarly radical transformation, but for him the emphasis lies on becoming human through the struggle for one’s own liberation� He writes: Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men� But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the “thing” which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself (80). 31 Much like Frederick Douglass’ account of the fight he put up against his cruel master in which his “long-crushed spirit” rose once “cowardice departed” and “bold defiance took its place,” and he resolved “the day had passed forever when I could be a slave,” Fanon also celebrates the euphoria of violent struggle for one’s own liberation as a humanizing experience� 32 For Fanon, as for Douglass, violence becomes the means of re-establishing one’s manhood, one’s humanity� 33 In contrast, “Moot” takes a much more somber view of violent action� In “Moot,” violence is not a tool for self-renewal or the re-birth of a liberated subject, but the expression of man despairing� In the “freedom fighter’s” account of his suicide attack the motive of delivering himself from his miserable reality looms large, accordingly� Killing himself and others is less a revolutionary act in the struggle for decolonization than it is a sign of giving up, of misguided politics that ends in a murderous crime� From a 31 With the important difference that Fanon’s new man creates a new world for himself in this world, rather than leaving it through suicide� 32 Frederick Douglass, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature , ed� Henry Louis Gates, Jr�, et al� (New York: Norton & Company, 1997), 344� 33 Like Douglass’s liberation account, Fanon’s rhetoric of liberation also describes the struggle for freedom in deeply masculine terms, in which the emasculated subject transforms himself into a masculine agent through the use of his manly strength� “Can’t you hear the shooting? ” 291 cynical perspective, one could even argue that he relieves the Israeli sergeant of his work by annihilating himself, thereby contributing to the lethal mission that the military official advocates. Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “For the 500 th Dead Palestinian, Ibtisam Bozieh,” and the song “Moot” by the hip hop group The N�O�M�A�D�S� tell stories of death and dying, of suffering under the shadow of violence, yet from very different vantage points� Nye’s text describes the callously accepted collateral damage of an innocent girl while “Moot” deals with a struggling Israeli soldier and the suicide mission of a self-proclaimed freedom fighter. In Nye’s poem, the death of Ibtisam Bozieh is told from an explicitly diasporic perspective that consciously reflects on distance as influencing the speaker’s subject position and her perception of the girl’s death, while The N�O�M�A�D�S�’ song attempts to bridge the gap between the diasporic experience and Palestinian life in the homeland by taking an imaginary leap into the mind of an Israeli soldier and a suicide bomber� “Moot” works through the first-person narrative, which produces the illusion of an authentic insight into the minds of the suicide bomber and the soldier� If the circumstances of Ibtisam Bozieh’s death transform her into the epitome of the innocent victim and highlight the injustice of her killing, the question of being a victim is more complicated in the case of the “freedom fighter.” In “Moot,” the listeners are confronted with an amalgamation of perpetrator and victim� Rather than representing perpetrator and victim as two principally exclusive concepts, The N�O�M�A�D�S� show how these seemingly contradictory roles coincide in one and the same person, thereby creating a moral grey area that cannot be described in terms of absolute guilt or pure innocence� Despite their difference, Nye’s poem and The N�O�M�A�D�S�’ song are both concerned with the prerequisites of killing� In Nye’s poem it is based on the rejection of the other’s humanity; in “Moot” it is the effect of hopeless conditions� In Nye’s poem the killer appears as a mere machine, a faceless gun; in “Moot” the enemy’s humanity falls prey to the harsh reality of conflict. We learn how the growing hate of collectives, such as “the Jews” and the “Americans” renders their deaths acceptable, perhaps even desirable� Despite their formal and thematic diversity, both texts share a common background - the Israeli- Palestinian strife - and are thus both concerned with the continuing cycle of violence� At the intersection of these texts, the suicide bomber and the girl’s death have to be understood as effects of a downward spiral of hate� In the fog of war, the other’s humanity becomes irrelevant, invisible� 292 s oPhia f rese Works Cited Arendt, Hannah� On Violence. New York: Harvest, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1970� Asad, Talal� On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia UP, 2007� Butler, Judith� “The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique�” Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli- Palestinian Conflict. 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Ed� Remi Kanazi� New York: Al Jisser Group, 2008. 34-36. ---� “Myspace Page�” Access 02 July 2011� <http: / / www�myspace�com/ thenomads>� Villa, Dana� “Heideggerian Themes in the Human Condition” Hannah Arendt: Verborgene Tradition - Unzeitgemäße Aktualität? Ed� Heinrich Böll Stiftung� Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007. 87-101. Visvanathan, Susan� “Hannah Arendt and the Problem of our Age�” Economic and Political Weekly 36�16 (2001): 1307-1309� Walzer, Michael� Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations � 4th ed� New York: Basic Books, 2006� s onJa s chillings The Concept of Hostis Humani Generis in Cultural Translation: Somali Piracy, Discursive Containment, and the Creation of an Extralegal Space 1 Introduction Within less than five years, Somali piracy has become the epitomization of contemporary piracy in the United States. Particularly during the years 2008 and 2009, spectacular raids have caused a visibility that the much more enduring and brutal maritime violence in other hotspots has never reached� Obviously, efforts have been made to explain the great political and popular interest in Somali piracy� The discussion is dominated by three perspectives� First, the broad discussion of Somali piracy in U�S� media is due to the fact that international (including Western) vessels, companies, and sailors are victimized - rather than local fishermen, boat people, and the occasional tourist, as in Southeast Asia. Second, states promote the fight against Somali pirates; the massive military and judicial response to piracy is primarily a convenient proxy conflict for states to follow their own geostrategic interests in the region� 2 Third, trade companies, particularly those in the energy business, have launced massive lobbying campaigns to emphasize the danger of Somali piracy and its potential union with terrorism in order to protect trade routes� 3 This paper goes one step back and explores why a Somali pirate, other than maritime aggressors in other hotspots, is so particularly thinkable and how this thinking affects actual forms of violence around the Horn of Africa� I will argue that pirate images that already prevail in the U�S� are particularly easy to relate to the Somali case, and that these images are evoked according to a very specific narrative logic. This narrative logic is my main interest here. Importantly, the narrative patterns of piracy do not only have consequences for the violent actors themselves, but for everyone in the political context 1 I thank Garnet Kindervater and Karin Loevy for offering criticisms and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper� 2 See Birgit Mahnkopf, Piratenhatz am Horn von Afrika. Zur politischen Ökonomie eines Piratenkonflikts und seiner geopolitischen Bedeutung, http: / / library.fes.de/ pdf-files/ ipg/ ipg- 2010-1/ 05_mahnkopf�pdf� 3 See Charles N� Dragonette, “Lost at Sea� Letter to the Editor,” Foreign Affairs 84.2 (2005); or Martin N� Murphy, Small Boats, Weak States, Dirty Money. Piracy and Maritime Terrorism in the Modern World (New York: Columbia UP, 2009)� 296 s onJa s chillings within which they move� This analysis of this paper will therefore emphasize the spatial dimension of claims to legitimate violence against pirates, using the 1854 Greytown Affair as a central reference point. By naming the maritime violence at the Horn of Africa piracy , a certain cultural understanding of the “nature” of these actors has been put forward, and certain implications of this nature have been accepted a priori. The implied pirate nature can be summarized in one term, which is also at the heart of this paper: hostis humani generis , the enemy of all humankind� The most influential definition of a pirate as hostis humani generis has been put forward by William Blackstone: Lastly, the crime of piracy, or robbery and depredation upon the high seas, is an offence against the universal law of society; a pirate being, according to Sir Edward Coke (3 Inst� 113) hostis humani generis� As, therefore, he has renounced all the benefits of society and government, and has reduced himself afresh to the savage state of nature, by declaring war against all mankind, all mankind must declare war against him; so that every community hath a right by the rule of selfdefence, to inflict that punishment upon him which every individual would in a state of nature have been otherwise entitled to do, for any invasion of his person or personal property (Blackstone 71)� Even though a conventional crime (robbery) is mentioned in this definition, the pirate becomes hostis humani generis primarily by being an aggressive fragment of wilderness that attacks civilization at large, whereupon civilization - sovereign states, in the conventional sense - must destroy this enemy in an act of self-defense� This understanding of a pirate is not based on performance , meaning that particular forms of behavior are recognized as piratical� Indeed, definitions of piracy have virtually always lacked a coherent understanding of the specific acts piracy consists of� 4 Instead, piracy has usually been defined by constellation - not the act itself is central, but the legal, political, and cultural implications of the act� The implications concern both the actor himor herself and the space he or she operates in. I will elaborate on the notion of space in the first section of this paper, and argue that the perception of Somalia as an ungovernable territory allows the legal treatment of Somalia as a space where pirates can, by definition, exist. In a second step, I will explicitly return to the discursive situation in the United States and ask how a pirate is recognized there; I will essentially argue that the pirate serves a cultural purpose, namely to represent a philosophical question as to the legitimacy of violence� This question is virtually always raised in the context of U�S� discussions of Somali pirates� The last part of this paper discusses the implications of this observation� Using the example of a text by Douglas Stewart on contemporary piracy, I will show how the constellations presupposed in the United States already set the stage for an extremely biased view of Somali actors, their political role, and their likely future� 4 For a recent U�S� case in point, see Keith Johnson, “Who’s a Pirate? U�S� Court Sees Duel over Definition,” The Wall Street Journal , August 14, 2010� The Concept of Hostis Humani Generis in Cultural Translation 297 The concept of hostis humani generis underlies all of these thoughts; even though it is originally a legal concept, the constellations implied here have been used in all kinds of cultural contexts to make the notion of piracy accessible in narratives� The way we understand pirates is strongly and directly based on the hostis humani generis concept, and has inherited its very specific bias� In this paper’s discussion of the discursive logic of pirate attributions, the analysis of the hostis humani generis concept’s inherent bias is a key concern� Somalia is Like the Sea: The Notion of Space in “Pure” Piracy In Western legal discourse, the pirate is largely defined by the space in which he or she operates� Geographic space, in this context, is fundamentally structured along the symbolic parameters of legal convention� When I speak of space, I only mean spaces constituted by legal distinction� For example, one conventionally distinguishes between piracy, which takes place on the high seas, and armed robbery, which takes place in territorial waters� This distinction, which is reflected in international law, 5 is primarily made to protect concerned states’ sovereignty over territorial waters from outside claims to universal jurisdiction over actors who operate there� It follows that legally, “proper” acts of piracy hardly exist according to this definition, because most attacks take place in territorial waters� This is a fact that has been criticized by a number of institutions and scholars concerned with maritime violence� 6 Culturally, the fact that pirates are defined via the high seas translates into an image of an almost virtual aggressor, a roamer of the sea without any national or cultural ties� The pirate is an Other who stands outside of all nations and cultures; the pirate is a “wild fragment of nature” (Rediker 146) a part of a wilderness that, by definition, lies radically outside of “every human community” (Blackstone 376)� As mentioned above, the wilderness itself is understood as a space in that it stands outside of all legal spaces� Being a representative of this wilderness, the hostis humani generis not only addresses the limits of civilization in theory; by virtue of his or her existence, he or she indicates where this ungovernable space beyond civilization exists in the real world� The definition of civilization underlying this perception is resoundingly clear� The binary opposition between the pirate and civilization is, in the case of an actual trial, manifested by an actor who represents piracy and a state which represents civilization� Following the legal opinion of seventeenthcentury author Matthew Tindal, one state may generally act on behalf of all states because the notion of transgression inherent to the concept of hostis 5 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), particularly articles 100 to 107, and 110� 6 The most notable institutional critic is the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), which uses a definition of piracy that marks piracy as violence against a ship regardless of its location� 298 s onJa s chillings humani generis implies, above all, a dangerous abandonment of statehood (25)� Statehood itself stands for the notion of civilized order� Consequently, the concept of hostis humani generis imagines the pirate as an entity lacking a home base within a state, but defines the pirate as a fragment of the sea, i.e. the ungovernable wilderness� The wilderness is a space which both removes the pirate from state influence and allows the application of universal jurisdiction over the pirate. The bias of such definitions is obvious, as they exclude other political formations than states from the definition of civilization, but these understandings have been at the core of Western legal and political pirate understandings since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries� They have also spurred on a very specific political use of the concept of hostis humani generis that is relevant for the case of Somali pirates� The central aspect here is the moment when the status of a certain space starts to allow universal jurisdiction over the pirate� Universal jurisdiction means that every state is allowed to fight and to try the pirate even if the common legal reference points to determine jurisdiction 7 are not given because, as both Tindal and Blackstone have argued, the use of force against a pirate is by definition self-defense against an act of aggression from outside. This aspect of the definition legitimates unchecked violence against actors constructed as pirates� This dimension has increasingly become the focus of attention for scholars in the context of the “War on Terror�” For instance, Daniel Heller-Roazen has expressed concern that the concept of hostis humani generis may be used to systematically create the absolute subjection of persons� By utilizing the legal implications of hostis humani generis , the exception to the law can be framed and permanently secured as an integral part of the legal system; the exception can be incorporated into the legal structure of a state� “One might consider the contemporary pirate,” writes Heller-Roazen, “as an ‘ambulating ocean,’ or ‘moving sea,’ in fact perhaps on national terrain, but viewed, nonetheless, from a legal perspective as if he crossed a no man’s land�” 8 In what he calls an inversion of the “classic relation” between the high seas and the pirate (179), Heller-Roazen postulates that the body may determine the legal space, not the other way around� Despite his intriguing argument supporting these remarks, I disagree with Heller-Roazen’s conclusion� An inversion does take place, but it does not mean that the pirate becomes a one-man legal realm� Rather, the inversion, I suggest, is this: the empty space no longer marks the body as piratical, 7 These are the perpetrator’s nationality, the victim’s nationality, and national territory. In the context of regular courts, the year 1705 marks the first time that piracy is tried as a universal offense, which does not require the usual national attachments to make a particular court a legitimate place to try an offense� In 1705, the Englishman Thomas Green was charged with piracy by the High Courth of Admiralty of Scotland, although neither he was of Scottish nationality, nor were his alleged victims or the territories where the attacks supposedly took place� 8 Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All. Piracy and the Law of Nations (New York: Zone Books, 2009): 180. The Concept of Hostis Humani Generis in Cultural Translation 299 but the piratical bodies mark a space as empty - and thus open to unchecked intervention. This space in this definition is not geographical, but a political kind of space that is defined as open to legitimate outside violence. For instance, when the inhabitants of Greytown 9 were attacked as hostes humani generis by the U.S. government in 1854, President Pierce defended his actions by arguing that the space of this particular town in Nicaragua was “a piratical resort of outlaws�” 10 A statement about the town was necessary to justify exceptional acts of violence abroad� The people of Greytown were hostes humani generis not because they all had this status individually, but because this particular city had been marked as a space that bred enemies of all humankind� Had Pierce’s actions been legitimated by Congress, the fact that Greytown had been marked as a space open to violent subjection would have caused a general precedent against the space called “city�” All cities would then have been potentially vulnerable to such treatment, because a city would have become a legitimate site of the violent struggle between civilization (U�S� government) and violent fragments of wilderness (inhabitants) in a space of wilderness (city)� By using the concept of hostes humani generis in this context, the city would have been a space of wilderness by definition. The hostis humani generis , in short, threatens to mark a particular kind of territory as open to violent expansion - not only one particular geographic territory, but all territories that are politically organized in the same way� This, not the fate of an individual, is the actual problem about the notion� I have discussed this point at such length because the case of Somalia is special both in terms of general political spatiality and the use made of this space by the actors constructed as “pirates�” On the map, Somalia is a state with a discernble territory, population, and clear borders� At the same time, it has been the prime example of a failed state for more than twenty years� The paralyzation of local government structures resulting from this situation was used to establish a stable power base for actors engaged in the abduction of foreign ships and crews� Because ships and hostages sometimes spend months in Somali ports before a ransom is paid, the land is as central 9 Greytown is the English name for the town of San Juan del Norte in Nicaragua� As the incident I will discuss here is known as the “Greytown Affair,” I will use the English name here� 10 In the Greytown Affair, the U.S. military “flattened Greytown with gunfire” because the town would not relent in a conflict with the U.S. minister to Nicaragua, Solon Borland� Borland had ordered the death of a local captain after a boat collision which the Nicaraguan inhabitants of the town refused to accept as lawful� The U�S� government’s violent response was read as an act of war in the national press, and President Franklin Pierce was strongly criticized for violations of the constitution (mainly because he had passed over Congress in ordering a violent attack)� “In a message to Congress in December 1854,” writes Kenneth B. Moss, “Pierce argued that this action could not fall in the category of war because Greytown was not an organized society but ‘a piratical resort of outlaws.’” Because citizens were thus defined as pirates (and because a federal circuit suit supported this opinion), Pierce considered unchecked violence against them as lawful� Cf� Kenneth B� Moss, Undeclared War and the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008): 58f. 300 s onJa s chillings to the business as the sea� In this, Somalia differs sharply from other piracy hotspots, where pirates cannot claim domination over entire towns and regions� I will argue that in effect, this twofold special situation of a failed state and stable pirate ports implies an understanding of Somalia not only as wilderness, but even, quite literally, as a sea� Through its “failure” as a state, Somalia has become thinkable as a nonstate, and therefore a wilderness� Numerous attempts after the dictatorship of Siad Barre to reintegrate Somalia into the “civilized” realm of central statehood have failed� Attempts to interfere in Somalia diplomatically or militarily, to install functioning state governments from outside, even to establish successful foreign business all have failed� To paraphrase Cornelius van Bynkershoek, it seems that Somalia just “cannot be possessed�” 11 As in the case of the Greytown Affair, the state status of Somalia allows a geographical statement regarding the limits of a hostis humani generis status� But there is yet another interesting aspect to it, namely in regard to the role of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG)� This faction is internationally acknowledged as the national government of Somalia, but de facto does not govern more than a minimal portion of Somalia. The TFG serves as the fiction of a national government in order to keep the state-based international system universal; for instance, it rubber-stamps treaties when international law requires that a national government approves of foreign intervention in the region� The legal role of this fictional national government is a very interesting one� I will only mention one case in point here, namely the TFG’s role in Security Council Resolution 1816 (2008). According to point seven of this resolution, other states may treat the territorial waters of Somalia as if they were the high seas when the TFG allows them to do so� Several states have made such agreements with the TFG, among them the United States, and the legal force of the Security Council Resolutions that allow such practices has been prolonged regularly� The legal space of the high seas is defined by the structural impossibility to exercise government control� An understanding of territorial waters is immediately derived from such an understanding: Territorial waters are spaces that a government has an exclusive legal claim to, even though it cannot actually be expected to govern there� If the TFG is a national government even though it effectively controls only a few streets, the whole rest of Somalia is by implication a space that can be understood as the territorial waters of these few streets - nominally possessed yet ungovernable� If some of these regions are in the hands of pirates, this twofold maritime implication strongly underlines the characterization of Somalia as a wilderness� 11 The original statement is: “The vast ocean cannot be possessed�” Cf� Cornelius van Bynkershoek, De Domino Maris Dissertatio, ed� James Brown Scott (London: Oxford UP, 1923): 88. The Concept of Hostis Humani Generis in Cultural Translation 301 Constructions such as these are not possible in other hotspots of maritime violence such as Southeast Asia or Nigeria� In my view, the treatment of Somalia as a quasi-sea strongly contributes to an explanation why maritime aggressors in Somalia, rather than those in the Malacca Straits, Nigeria or elsewhere, have so quickly and successfully turned into the epizomization of modern piracy� Because Somalia can be constructed as a quasi-sea, Somali pirates satisfy the central aspects of a hostis humani generis : first, the subjection to universal jurisdiction wherever they attack, and second, the direct association with a space of wilderness that is quite universally accepted as such (“failed state”)� In this sense, they are indeed the only existing “proper” pirates today� Legitimate Violence and Pirates as Discursive Representatives I have argued before that the legal construction of universal jurisdiction is directly linked to cultural notions of the wilderness� I will now go a step further in my argument, and focus on the discursive role of pirates in the United States that is derived from such a construction� When legal constellations are transformed into culturally accessible narratives, it is an oversimplification to define civilization as states, and wilderness as the mere absence of statehood� The violence between actors associated with civilization and wilderness, respectively, is narrated with an emphasis on “civilizational” legitimacy; it is the construction of legitimacy which effects the construction of hostes humani generis as actors� In order to discuss such legitimacy constructions, the present section relies on Foucault’s understanding of the connection between power and legitimacy as put forward in the volume of Society Must Be Defended � According to Foucault, historians of the seventeenth century introduce a new way of assessing history� History is no longer “the State talking about itself” (Foucault 142) a universally valid, organic narrative punctuated by war and told in order to support the “truth” of the current sovereign’s legitimate claim over his or her reign� Instead, the notion of truth in history is disconnected from any universally valid claim of the sovereign; it is rather linked to the idea of a state of war, a struggle of perspectives and ideas� Precisely by virtue of being partisan, those perspectives are able to provide truth, while the different truths about one and the same event can differ dramatically� Winning a struggle for power and asserting a particular version of truth now belong together as equivalent objectives in a struggle� At the same time, the challenge of power is now always accompanied by alternative versions of truth� The basic tool to create such a struggle is to imagine history not as a succession of princes, but as a struggle between races� This new revolutionand struggle-based approach to historical “fact” goes hand in hand with the rise of new regimes of state power as the prime locus of civilization� A struggle between sub-state normative perspectives becomes central to the construction of history� All of these sub-state groups 302 s onJa s chillings attempt to hegemonize their values and views; what makes this struggle special is that the groups do not simply refrain from violence against each other, but also acknowledge the legitimacy of the state’s monopoly of force as a common ground� They have implicitly agreed that the only way to hegemonize their own perspective is to capture legitimate state violence for their cause� In order to capture legitimate state violence, however, these groups have to make credible that their own perspective is representative of the nation� Foucault argues that in order to represent the nation, and to defend itself against other, revolutionary truth regimes, the regulatory state makes a strong and consistent claim to represent “the norm�” In the same vein, challenges to the regulatory state within and without are constructed as deviance from the norm� Foucault’s famous inversion of Clausewitz is to be understood in this vein (ibid� 15)� Scholars like Robert Cover and Donald Pease have made arguments that confirm this situation of normative struggle as central for the legal 12 and cultural 13 realms in the United States� However, in order to be able to use a version of truth strategically against, say, a political opponent, certain common discursive reference points between the opposing parties as well as the nation state as a whole must exist� There must be a network of implicit agreements, and a common language, to restrict the normative struggle to a struggle for inter-state hegemony, and to prevent all-out violence between different normative perspectives� 14 Foucault offers the “homogenous field” as a way to establish such discursive common ground: If different subjects are to be able to speak, to occupy different tactical positions, and if they are to be able to find themselves in mutually adversarial positions, there has to be a tight field, there has to be a very tightly woven network to regularize historical knowledge. As the field of knowledge becomes more regular, it becomes increasingly possible for the subjects who speak within it to be divided along strict lines of confrontation, and it becomes increasingly possible to make the contending discourses function as different tactical units within overall strategies� […] The tactical reversibility of the discourse is, in other words, directly proportional to the homogeneity of the field in which it is formed. It is the regularily of the epistomological field, the homogeinity of the discourse’s mode of formation, that allows it to be used in struggles that are extradiscursive (Foucault 208). Foucault introduces the barbarian as an outside force that can serve as a reference point in such a homogenous field. The barbarian is a primitive warrior who stands outside of civilization, a conquerer whose excessive freedom “is based solely upon the freedom others have lost” (ibid� 196�)� Like the enemy of all humankind, the barbarian is an aggressive Other who cannot be ignored or reasoned with� The barbarian in his discursive function “has to be bad 12 Robert M� Cover� “Nomos and Narrative�” Narrative, Violence, and the Law. The Essays of Robert Cover � Ed� Martha Minow et al� Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1992� 95-172� 13 Donald Pease� The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009� 14 A similar argument is pursued in Robert M� Cover, “The Uses of Judicial Redundancy: Interest, Ideology, and Innovation,” Narrative, Violence, and the Law. The Essays of Robert Cover , ed� Martha Minow et al� (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1992): 51 - 94� The Concept of Hostis Humani Generis in Cultural Translation 303 and wicked, even if we have to admit that he does have certain qualities� He has to be full of arrogance and has to be inhuman” (ibid�)� Foucault’s homogenous field restricts itself to certain selected, widely shared statements about the nature of the barbarian, and keeps these generally accepted statements on his nature open to conflicting interpretation. For example, the homogenous aspect of a discourse may be that the barbarian “lives only for war … the sword being his right, and he exercises it without remorse�” 15 Then the disputed aspect may be whether living by the sword is a good or a bad thing in a certain situation, whether we should see the barbarian as a model or a scarecrow� One could, for instance, imagine that a state must decide whether it goes to war: a group of doves within that state may proclaim that its hawkish opponents are barbarians, and therefore have no legitimate place at all in a civilized nation� The opposing hawks may reversely proclaim that all members of the nation are barbarians at heart as soon as they want to do away with the frivolous fuss put up by the peace-promoting doves, and actually want to get something done� In such an imagined conversation, the barbarian stands for a strategy of force outside of a framework of standardized conflict procedures. The struggle of these two imagined groups is fundamentally a struggle about this question� Like the legendary quarrel between Agamemnon and Achill, 16 the barbarian’s conflict with civilization as interpreted within a homogenous field is able to stand for a fundamental philosophical question; the barbarian is a discursive representative of this question� The concept of discursive representative stands to organize a notion of the barbarian which can be used to personify a particular fundamental question, in this case: is it legitimate to say that the end justifies the means to achieve change that is for the good of society - or might the observance of the correct means be more important to uphold society as something worthy of protection? Within a discursive tradition, such a question may be fairly stably attached to a given representative, and successful attempts to harmonize representations of the barbarian and the underlying question attached to him or her are celebrated as particularly good and enduring images� The pirate as a hostis humani generis is a discursive representative as well� The question attached to his or her is epitomized by the story of an encounter between Alexander the Great and a pirate: For it was a witty and a truthful rejoinder which was given by a captured pirate to Alexander the Great� The king asked the fellow, ‘What is your idea, in infesting the sea? ’ And the pirate answered, with uninhibited insolence, ‘The same as 15 Bonneville quoted in ibid� 196� 16 Joachim Latacz argues that this quarrel which dominates the Iliad addresses the question: Who can claim the spoils of war, the one who has the greatest claim by virtue of lineage and high birth, or the one who is supreme in battle? This question is so central because it addresses the more fundamental and enduring question: Who should be allowed to claim leadership, the noblest or the best? Joachim Latacz, “Die Ilias: Inhalt und Aufbau,“ Homer. Der Mythos von Troja in Dichtung und Kunst , eds� Joachim Latacz et al. (München: Hirmer, 2008): 117. 304 s onJa s chillings yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I’m called a pirate: because you have a mighty navy, you’re called an emperor (Saint Augustine 139)� 17 This story, which is often cited in the context of Somali piracy as well, addresses the fundamental problem of piracy definitions: namely that the performance of wild actors (the pirate) need not differ from the performance of civilized actors (the emperor)� The provocative potential of the story results from the fact that it is stripped of all narratives of legitimacy that usually accompany the clash of pirate and state� By virtue of their striking absence, the story is able to draw attention to the centrality of these narratives in the creation of the pirate as a natural foe� If we assume that legitimacy is central to all such piracy definitions, the hostis humani generis may be the discursive representative of a question as to the legitimacy of organized violence� The question of the pirate as hostis humani generis can be summarized as: Who can rightfully grant legitimacy to violence? A successful hostis humani generis narrative is always directly connected to challenging questions of legitimate violence� Second, a successful hostis humani generis narrative always features ambivalent actions of “the pirate” because the primary function of a hostis humani generis representative is to personify a question � This characteristic ambivalence is epitomized by the two most common characterizations of pirates in Western culture: (1) deviant monster/ hardened criminal, or (2) rebellious underdog who acts against a fundamentally unjust system/ poor person who can only choose between crime and extinction� The two contrasting characterizations are typically evoked in discourses on hostes humani generis � They represent a negative vs� a positive reading of the pirate that may mirror a commentator’s stand on piracy in debates; later in this paper, I will discuss an example of such perspectives in detail� In the genre of pirate fiction, one can even find these two contrasting readings of piracy in one and the same narrative, when a “good” pirate and a “bad” pirate are at conflict. What is important is that these readings do not actually contradict each other� A deviant monster may very well be capable of social criticism; a criminal may very well be poor, and the other way around� Indeed, most characterizations of pirates implicitly allow that all four features may be satisfied by one and the same actor. Depending on whether a pirate figure is condemned or celebrated, one or the other reading is emphasized. However, it has to be said that most characterizations of contemporary piracy lean to a strong condemnation of the pirate� In the context of Somali piracy, the large majority of U�S� commentators has condemned Somali pi- 17 This book, De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos , was written in the fifth century, and, very generally put, discusses relationships and conflicts between the political and the spiritual realms in Christian philosophy� The greater context of the story is an argument that is deeply concerned with conflicting claims of legitimacy. The Concept of Hostis Humani Generis in Cultural Translation 305 rates’ attacks 18 while only a small minority saw some legitimacy in their actions� 19 And even in the cases that acknowledge a certain legitimacy of the pirate’s actions, restoring the claim to superior legitimacy of “the king over the pirate” is viewed as a key concern� 20 This tendency to condemn the pirate, and to favor the emperor who represents civilization, is an inbuilt characteristic of hostis humani generis narratives� The construction of a pirate as hostis humani generis leaves little alternative than to legitimate the emperor explicitly or implicitly� As the history of legal application shows, groups of hostes humani generis are not conceptualized as communities including families, division of work and binding traditions� Rather, hostis humani generis communities are imagined to be allmale brigades� The enemy of all humankind is not imagined to consider any common good because his or her group is not stable enough for this kind of thinking� Instead, hostes humani generis organize in fight-based communities that attack not for a collective reason, but simply because all members happen to have the same reason to attack� A group of hostes humani generis does not think strategically in terms of self-reproduction, but tactically in terms of individual betterment of all members within a context other than the group itself� As soon as the objective of individual betterment is no longer met by the group, the group disassembles, and the members recontextualize themselves� 21 This is, in short, how these groups are conventionally imagined� This obvious difficulty to keep such an inherently fragile group together implies two things� First, the enemy of all humankind is necessarily an aggressor in permanent war with the world - just as Blackstone would have it - because the only way to keep up a group like this is to keep up the common objectives of the members� Since those objectives are exclusively met by aggression against others, aggression has to be acted out permanently, and with reccurring experiences of success� Second, enemies of all humankind do not reproduce, they recruit. The constant flow of new recruits is neces- 18 See Douglas R� Burgess, The World for Ransom. Piracy is Terrorism, Terrorism is Piracy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010); Jack A� Gottschalk, and Brian P� Flanagan, Jolly Roger with an Uzi. The Rise and Threat of Modern Piracy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000)� 19 See Johann Hari, “You Are Being Lied To About Pirates,” Huffington Post , January 4, 2009� 20 For instance in this typical statement: “Somali in power justify piracy, and rationalize support for piratical activities, because of illegal foreign fishing and alleged toxic dumping� Whether or not those claims are correct, they are believed locally and a prominent narrative of victimhood is widely accepted� Integral to the campaign to combat Somali piracy, therefore, is [to] create an ad hoc international/ Somali body under the UN Security Council to ascertain the truth and falsity of toxic dumping allegations and to investigate reports of illegal fishing.” Robert I. Rotberg, World Peace Foundation, Policy Brief # 11, January 2010: 5� 21 For example, the tendency of pirate crews to disassemble is recognized as a central feature of the most prototypical pirates in the Western world, namely the third-generation Golden Age pirates who operated in the Atlantic region between 1716 and 1726� An illustrative graph of these complex and unstable relations between different pirate crews can be found in Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations. Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (London: Verso, 2004): 80. 306 s onJa s chillings sary to maintain the existence of such groups� Quarrels and better individual prospects, as well as battle and death, easily cause membership numbers to decrease� Since new members with the same objective do not come from the group itself, they have to come from somewhere else� This twofold dependence on a world around the hostis humani generis group, via a flow of prey and recruits, explains why these groups are imagined to be inherently small and marginal: they are essentially constructed as parasites� The double strategy of constant aggression and constant recruitment makes the hostis humani generis group vulnerable to changes in the world around it� If a great number of members are lured away from the group, if the numbers of recruits dry up, or if the group meets decided and successful resistance, the group is likely to falter� This is why the hostis humani generis’ existence is constructed as temporary and his eventual defeat as inevitable� His or her only - retrospective - contribution to the culture he or she has attacked, then, is either to serve as the spearhead of national expansion, or to provide an exotic, primitive image of those who once tried in vain to challenge the ways of the world, which are equivalent with the ways of a nation state-based system� If knowledge about an enemy of humankind is thus standardized, and if the primary agreement is achieved that a particular actor is indeed a hostis humani generis , this strongly limits possible interpretations of that actor’s motivation, actions, and general position� If an actor is conceptualized as a hostis humani generis , it is implicitly agreed that 1) the actor in question is small, marginal and unstably organized, 2) the actor is parasitical and capitalizes on given structures around him or her instead of offering a substantial alternative to these structures, 3) the actor is illegitimate and has a criminal leaning, and 4) the actor is likely to be defeated sooner or later� Indeed, in most cultural U�S� reproductions of pirates, pirates do not prevail; even when they are the triumphant heroes, they are constructed as the last of their kind who always sense their own dawning destruction� The popular images of pirates as the colorful outcasts on their last stand against a technocratic world order are a case in point here� Pirate Constructions as Discursive Containment The concrete political usefulness of such narratives and the creation of homogenous fields now becomes visible. The hostis humani generis is not only constructed as a mortal enemy; rather, he or she is an illegitimate enemy that cannot by definition be legitimate or prevalent. Constructing a political actor as a pirate thus has much deeper implications than declaring this actor an enemy� Recall, for instance, the long and tedious history of growing legal respect for the Barbary states in Europe� This is an example of a discursive change in which an actor is grudgingly allowed to be interpreted in a different vein than that of the illegitimate aggressor who is doomed to fail� But it took centuries to change this perspective; in fact, the tradition of constructing The Concept of Hostis Humani Generis in Cultural Translation 307 Barbary corsairs as hostes humani generis has never completely disappeared� 22 If an actor is to become thinkable as an achiever of serious and lasting political effects, he or she must not be conceptualized as a hostis humani generis � The reading of Somali actors as pirates substantially limits their political reach� Constructing them as pirates precisely does not imply that they are legitimate actors at eye level, or that one should pick up their actions as a model for political change, or that their appearance could be considered the beginning of a new era� Instead, piratical violence is constructed as nothing more than a gesture of provocative subversion� It is quite secondary how this provocative subversion is spelled out specifically: if enemies of all humankind are considered reminiscient of Plato’s Commonwealth, if they are constructed as the most radical democrats or the most devout believers, if they are talked up as the avengers of the Third World who set an example against exploitation, or as colorful individualists who challenge a technocratic world order - in all of these cases, the actions of a hostis humani generis are in fact reduced to strictly symbolic and essentially impotent gestures� In contrast, consider how easy it is to argue against an actor constructed as a hostis humani generis within the logic of the hostis humani generis concept, and to promote actual political action on the basis of this underlying constellation� A randomly chosen example from 2002, which is before contemporary maritime piracy becomes an acknowledged political issue, can demonstrate this point: Common sense tells us that most raids covered in this book are acts of piracy, even if there may be some quirky legal discussion about it in some cases� Since that glorified epoch when Blackbeard, Mary Read, and Anne Bony [sic] hoised the skull and crossbone over their sailing ships, the word ‘pirate’ has a romantic connotation� In Las Vegas, tourists may marvel at a staged pirate attack every day [���] The audience’s sympathy is always with the pirate - they are the underdogs rebelling against authority� Forget this romantic illusion; reality is merciless� While you are reading these lines, heavily armed pirates assault someone somewhere on the high seas� People are intimidated, abused, taken hostage, murdered on the spot, or coldbloodedly thrown overboard� Modern pirates do not deserve any sympathy, even though many come from a more than modest background� It would be wrong to belittle their crimes out of pity, because they all too often act out of brutal calculation and greed, sometimes out of sheer bloodlust� 23 22 For instance, Wheelan constructs the representatives of Barbary states as hostes humani generis , as the title of his book already implies� Joseph Wheelan, Jefferson’s War. America’s First War on Terror 1801 - 1805 (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003)� 23 Douglas Stewart, Piraten. Das organisierte Verbrechen auf See (Berlin: Mare, 2002): 10� The first edition of this book only exists in the German translation of the English manuscript. In 2006, when contemporary piracy had officially become a popular topic, a strongly abridged English version of the book was published under the title The Brutal Seas. Organised Crime at Work � This quote is my own translation from the earlier German edition� The original German passage reads: “Die meisten Überfälle, von denen dieses Buch erzählt, sind für den gesunden Menschenverstand Akte der Piraterie, auch wenn es darum im Einzelnen spitzfindige juristische Diskussionen geben mag. Seit jener verklärten Epoche, als Blackbeard, Mary Read und Anne Bony [sic] auf ihren 308 s onJa s chillings In this passage, the author Douglas Stewart 24 relates to the two most widespread positive readings of the hostis humani generis , namely the image of a rebellious underdog and that of a poor man without any alternative� In Stewart’s argument, both of these readings are bluntly dismissed as “wrong�” By evoking pop culture interpretations of piracy, Stewart discounts the first reading of the rebellious underdog as the naïve illusion of a romantic against which he contrasts the “merciless reality” of his own reading� He tactically grants that this reality is merciless to the pirate, too, thus leading over to the second positive reading; yet the reading of the pirate as a poor man without an alternative is portrayed as equally naïve and sentimental� What is more, this more political reading is immediately accused of viciously downplaying the traumatic experience of people who fell victim to bloodthirsty, moneygrubbing sociopaths� In this passage, the two main positive readings of the pirate in Western culture are countered by evoking strong binary oppositions: reality v. fiction (rebel), and individual guilt v. structural conditions (poor man)� The concept of the hostis humani generis presupposes an emphasis on individual guilt. It would be difficult to use the hostis humani generis narrative without presupposing some notion of individual responsibility for one’s own actions; neither the idea of piracy as a crime, nor the concept of unstable allmale brigades could be sustained otherwise� The pirate was not driven to his or her deed, but chose to do it� It implicitly follows that whatever the punishment, the pirate knew it was dawning upon him or her, so it is deserved� 25 Within the logic of a hostis humani generis narrative, individual guilt in a pirate is taken as self-evident, as ‘common sense’, even as a ‘reality’� Stewart’s hostis humani generis narrative assumes a binary structure with clear lines of enmity� The poles of individual guilt and reality are directly linked to one other, in the sense of: ‘It is a reality that an individual guilt of Segelschiffen die Totenkopfflagge setzten, hat das Wort ‚Pirat‘ einen romantischen Beiklang� In Las Vegas können Touristen jeden Tag einen nachgestellten Piratenangriff bestaunen […] Die Sympathie der Zuschauer gilt immer den Piraten - sie sind die Underdogs, die gegen die Obrigkeit aufbegehren� / Vergessen Sie diese romantische Scheinwelt; die Realität ist gnadenlos� Während Sie diese Zeilen lesen, verüben irgendwo auf hoher See schwer bewaffnete Piraten einen Überfall� Menschen werden eingeschüchtert, misshandelt, als Geiseln genommen, gleich vor Ort ermordet oder kaltblütig über Bord geworfen� Die modernen Seeräuber verdienen keine Sympathie, auch wenn viele aus mehr als dürftigen Verhältnissen stammen� Es wäre verkehrt, aus Mitleid ihre Verbrechen zu verharmlosen, denn allzu oft handeln sie aus Berechnung und Habgier, manchmal aus purer Mordlust�” 24 Douglas Stewart is a lawyer and a writer of fiction as well as non-fiction with close ties to the ICC International Maritime Bureau� 25 See the fictional statement of the pirate Mary Read: “She answer’d, that as to hanging, she thought it no great Hardship, for, were it not that, every cowardly Fellow would turn Pyrate, and so infest the Seas, that Men of Courage must starve: [and] that the Trade, in a little Time, would not be worth following�” Daniel Defoe, A General History of the Pyrates , ed. Manuel Schonhorn (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999): 158f. In this typical statement, it is assumed that the pirate not only knows the consequences of her actions, but even approves of them as a necessary framework of her trade� The Concept of Hostis Humani Generis in Cultural Translation 309 pirates exists�’ What seems like a banal statement in itself is able to unfold great force in this context� The enemy of all humankind opposes civilization; the representatives of that civilization and the pirate are mortal enemies that wage permanent war� It makes narrative sense to presuppose that whatever characterizes the one may not characterize the other� So if individual guilt is directly connected to reality within a binary structure, someone like Stewart is easily, almost in passing, able to suggest that structual conditions for piracy and fiction are directly linked as well. Stewart can afford to waive a reason for his dismissal of structural conditions as a potential cause of a rise in piracy by drawing on the ‘reality’ of the legal notion of individual guilt� The real strength of his argument is not argumentative, but the deliberate use of underlying narrative presuppositions� These narrative assumptions are based on strong binary oppositions; the arguments’ task is only to connect those narrative to notions of political ‘reality’� As soon as a link between his narrative and reality is successfully achieved, any counter-argument to martial claims like Stewart’s is substantially weakened from the start� Assume a counter-argument, for instance, that grants the reality of individual guilt, but disagrees with the narrative implications evoked here� There is a great likeliness that such disagreement turns into a refined variation of the argument itself. For example, the following sentence is such a failed disagreement: I do not deny that acts of violence are committed by pirates, and that they individually bear responsibility for it, but the structural reasons for their deeds must be considered the most important factor for explaining pirates’ actions� Failed disagreement does not seriously challenge the core narrative evoked by Stewart, namely that pirates are essentially evil actors� It simply highlights an aspect of the debate that Stewart does not even deny; it is a mere change in emphasis� An indication of a certain relatedness in spirit is that the failed disagreement can easily adopt the term ‘pirate’ that Stewart uses as a characterization of maritime actors� The most obvious sign of a more substantial contrary claim is that it tends not to use the word ‘pirate’ as the characterization of the respective actors� For instance: The emphasis on the individual guilt of attackers falsely and viciously diverts the gaze from the structural conditions that actually drive the world’s poor to acts of piracy� The real problem identified here is poverty, not piracy, so ‘the poor’ rather than ‘the pirates’ are identified as actors. This sentence mirrors Stewart’s method; it evokes a strong binary opposition between individual guilt and structural conditions, and makes a bold claim to reality while dismissing contrary claims as morally unsound� Yet this disagreement has two weaknesses� First, even though it makes a claim to reality, it fails to expose Stewart’s claim as untrue� It does not disqualify the opponent’s claim as a legitimate political opinion and establishes itself as an advocate of ‘reality’ in the way Stewart does� Second, whereas Stewart does not need to spell out what he consid- 310 s onJa s chillings ers the necessary political steps - namely, military intervention in order to eradicate pirates once and for all - the disagreeing claim is unable to evoke an alternative narrative that makes the claim politically self-explanatory� ‘The poor’ per se are not linked to any narrative that provides convincing discursive access to those actors that Stewart conveniently calls ‘pirates’� The ‘violent poor’ in Western narratives are either portrayed as revolutionary masses or lonely social climbers� A narrative to frame forms of poverty-driven violence that lie between the extremes of mass movement and individual action - such as those of alleged pirate communities - cannot be presupposed� The second disagreement therefore tends to be dependent on argument alone, whereas Stewart can rely both on argument and narrative� In summary, the binary structure of the hostis humani generis narrative, its constant reference to a supreme access to legal and political ‘reality’, and the ambiguity of the enemy of all humankind itself help restrict the discourse to a realm where disagreement can be channeled and contained� As soon as the hostis humani generis is accepted as the dominant discursive representative of a particular political phenomenon, two things can be achieved� First, the easily established link between specific political actors and a narrative based on the individual guilt of obstinate aggressors allows a forceful plea for clearcut, aggressive political consequences� By linking these aggressive pleas to the notion of reality, supreme legitimacy for a political program is claimed and oftentimes achieved� Second, the inherent ambiguity of the hostis humani generis narrative seems to invite for dissent at first sight, but the biased binary structure of the narrative only allows a particular kind of dissent: namely the kind which can be integrated as an agreement in principle, ridiculed as naïve, defeated as purposeless, dismissed as unrealistic, or ignored as a minority opinion� As soon as the concept of hostis humani generis is accepted as the prime description of an actor, this actor becomes a discursive weapon to defend the legitimacy of a supreme power claim� Conclusion What does all of this say about ‘the Somali pirates,’ and their wide acceptance as the modern epitomization of piracy? The least surprising result is, obviously, that one should be careful not to miss important developments around the Horn of Africa, or important features of maritime actors, simply because these features and developments do not match Western understandings of pirates as hostes humani generis � However, it has also become clear that this discourse is not only problematic because it produces terminology which leads to misunderstanding; its political implications, in fact, run deeper� Constructing one’s opponent as a pirate is a claim to legitimacy which is all the more powerful in its apparent ambiguity� Representatives of this view The Concept of Hostis Humani Generis in Cultural Translation 311 are often able to deliver a clear and accessible message without any noteworthy resort to argument, while alternative views outside of the homogenous field are difficult to argue from the start. Once specific political actors are characterized as hostes humani generis , the treatment of these actors even affects the political space they operate in, or are set in relation to� In other words, the legal features of the high seas can be transferred if an alleged hostis humani generis is identified at land. Such a sealike space can be a city like Greytown, or a state like Somalia� It is not only the bodies of individual ‘enemies of all humankind,’ but this entire political space that can be subjected to unchecked violence� The hostis humani generis characterization of an actor is difficult to avert once it is established� Both Barbary corsairs and Somali pirates, for instance, do not really satisfy the description; in the Barbary case, it was even acknowledged at some point that the description was flawed. Nevertheless, both groups are stubbornly called pirates down to the present day� The narrative construction remains very powerful, not least because it is based on the construction of a civilization-wilderness divide that is very accessible in Western cultures� Yet the concept, powerful as it is, is unable to unfold this power in some cases. If an attack is justified by the concept as in the case of Greytown, it can at least be stripped of its spatial consequences� The reference to a superior legal framework has proven successful in the case of Greytown; to declare the attack an unconstitutional act of war has prevented a precedent of the city as a space of wilderness� Importantly, it was a discourse in the United States themselves which discouraged this use of the concept� In Somalia, the incontrovertible sovereignty of states could have achieved what the constitution had achieved in the Greytown Affair� However, an aversion of the hostis humani generis characterization of the territory has been outflanked in the case of Somalia. Even though the United States again attacks ‘a piratical resort of outlaws,’ and use hostis humani generis narratives for the sake of political legitimization, the use of the concept is carefully avoided whereas it was successfully blocked in the case of Greytown - in the general legal frameworks of political action� The TFG as the nominal government of Somalia legitimates the treatment of potentially all Somali as subjects to universal jurisdiction; legally, that is as if Nicaragua had officially allowed the U�S� to seek violent retribution against the people of Greytown� Powerful legal objections that are immediately culturally accessible falter in such a case� As the sovereignty of Somalia is successfully outmaneuvered, the only culturally thinkable approaches that remain to address the very real violence in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean are based on the concept of hostis humani generis - a concept which in effect promotes unchecked foreign violence, and which is able to absorb years of substantial criticism as an agreement in principle� 312 s onJa s chillings Works Cited Blackstone, William� “Of Offences against the Law of Nations�” Commentaries on the Laws of England , Book VI, Chap. 5. 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New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003� V� 9/ 11 and its Aftershocks B oris v orMann Visibilizing Risk: Risk Perception and Maritime Infrastructure in the ‘War on Terror’ 1 The September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon galvanized U�S�-American popular support for an historic military effort� The National Security Strategy of 2002 which was developed in the direct aftermath of the attacks on these institutions of financial and military power defined what was to become known as the Bush doctrine of preemptive warfare� One of its main tenets was the objective of “defending the United States, the American people, and our interests at home and abroad by identifying and destroying the threat before it reaches our borders” (The White House 2002)� Fought internationally and ‘at home,’ the ‘War on Terror’ cost the U�S� government approximately one trillion dollars between September 11, 2001 and the beginning of Barack Obama’s administration (Thompson 2008). 2 Despite this Herculean effort, certain questions have lacked clarification throughout this period� Where exactly to draw the line between ‘at home and abroad’? How to identify the ‘threat’? What constitutes a ‘border’ in the era of globalized trade and migration? These concepts become even more blurred at the physical nodal points connecting international flows and fixed infrastructure: in places such as container ports and airports notions of ‘at home and abroad’ are porous and the complex interaction of global and local forces renders ‘borders’ intangible� Determining policies on different levels of government, the dictum of securitization has led to the introduction of new technologies and new systematic approaches to these elusive areas of transition� But whereas the domains of aviation or border security, have frequently been addressed in public debates and in the media, equally important changes in maritime and port security have been less visible to the public eye� This essay examines the political and discursive dynamics that led to these transformations� More precisely, this means to assess the impact of the September 11 attacks on the perception of risk emanating from ports and global supply chains as well as to examine the resulting policy adaptations� How did the political momentum of the pervasive discourse of securitization 1 I thank Gina Caison for her very helpful comments and suggestions for improvement� 2 Policy and budget priorities shifted considerably toward security and defense spending to the detriment of other sectors of the domestic economy. From the fiscal year 2001 to 2008, federal government spending on defense and security increased by 7.5% (from 21.7% to 29.3%) while spending for social security and medicare/ aid diminished by 2.4% (45.9% to 43.5%). Domestic discretionary spending shrunk by 3.7% (18.4% to 14.7%) in the same period (Kogan 2008). 318 B oris v orMann after September 11 render otherwise invisible risks and infrastructure into a dominant paradigm of Homeland Security? Which discursive tendencies rendered these risks politically intolerable and what were the consequences for supply chain governance? As a process of ‘semiosis,’ or meaning-making, the assessment of risks is not an objective process - as is often argued - but depends on collective and insider knowledge, existing experience and historical context� In a similar vein, Ulrich Beck, who points to the socially constructed nature of risk in his analysis of the World Risk Society, has argued that the tolerability of any given risk is historically and culturally contingent (Beck 2008: 34). Based on these assumptions, this essay explores the dynamic process that is the construction of risk scenarios� For several reasons, which I will explore in the first section of this essay, ports and maritime infrastructure have become invisible to the public in the second half of the twentieth century� How and why did September 11 change this perception? Which threats were envisioned by security experts and politicians and how were these assessments constructed? Since the definition of risk is a matter of power and since the staging (“Inszenierung”) of risk, as Beck has argued, can serve political purposes, the second part of this essay addresses political outcomes resulting from these risk assessments (271)� I argue that through the mobilization of preexisting discourses and narratives of maritime vulnerability, that have resonated with public opinion after September 11, 2001, threat scenarios have left institutional traces at various governmental levels� Rather than simply evaluating the crisis response capabilities that have been developed, then, the set of questions that this section of the essay addresses pertains to the mobilization and fusion of preexisting discourses which have led to persisting organizational consequences in the supply chain� 3 In the final section, I argue that an irresolvable trade-off between the efficiency of global production networks and free trade on one side, and national security on the other has been recognized in expert circles� Insider discourses on maritime and port security have consequently shifted toward a focus on ‘resilience’ and a ‘multi-layered risk-based approach’ - rather than preemption; the tradeoff between security and efficiency, however, has been reinterpreted by the state to secure the functioning of supply chains by simultaneously serving other, more economically oriented projects� Securitization has hence meant two things: securing the nation from terrorist attacks on its supply chains, 3 This analysis is based largely on an examination of public and government discourses, as well as on legislative changes that have affected ports and port workers since September 11, 2001� Although similar processes in other North American port cities are abounding, I focus mainly on the development of New York City and its metropolitan area as an example, especially in the first section of the essay. Interestingly, the securitization happened in both constitutive places of the port city, the container port and the inner-city waterfront� The Maritime Security Initiative (MSI), for instance, has led to a securitization of the redeveloped waterfront� Yet, space constraints limit this analysis to the container port and supply chains� Visibilizing Risk 319 and, more pro-actively, securing the seamless functioning of global production networks by reinterpreting any possible hindrance to the flow of goods as a threat to national security� In this sense, I conclude that the September 11 terrorist attacks have served to amplify and secure preexisting processes and power hierarchies by strengthening coalitions between the federal state and businesses that facilitate the functioning of global production networks, most notably those in the transportation industries� While questions of maritime security lost their resonance with the broader public, the institutionalized dynamics of crisis persist and are readily available for future political change� The necessary contingent weakness of the ports continues to allow for a potential mobilization of risk scenarios� The Invisibility of Port Infrastructure in Global Production Networks In a recent publication, Stephen Graham reminds us of the critical role of infrastructure in the twenty-first century and points to its invisibility in everyday life� Graham cites anthropologists, sociologists, and urban designers who have emphasized ‘invisibility’ as a characteristic feature of ‘advanced’ infrastructure� These researchers have argued that the taken-for-grantedness of functioning infrastructure and its invisibility have tendentially been interpreted, particularly in Western countries, as signs of higher development (Graham 2010: 7)� In port cities, two concurring transitions in the second half of the twentieth century have reinforced the invisibility of maritime infrastructure: the declining visibility of the port and its functions after ‘containerization’ and the increased visibility of the inner-city, post-industrial waterfront in a new economic context of urban entrepreneurialism� In the following paragraphs I briefly outline these processes. The container’s role in facilitating today’s national and global consumption patterns deserves more credit than is oftentimes acknowledged� Because handling containers necessitates more space than the historical trade of goods, container ports had to be relocated from within the city to an external (and less visible) site within the metropolitan area. This has had significant consequences not only for the port city - which witnessed a distancing of inner-city waterfront and container port - but also for the economy in general� The invention of the container in the late 1950s and technological advances in information technologies led to significant decreases in transportation and coordination costs which have facilitated a ‘spatial unbundling’ of production processes and have resulted in a realignment of supply chains in global production networks� Increased offshore production and a new emphasis on the knowledge-based aspects of the economy - as well as political realignments following multiple economic shocks in the mid-1970s - have fostered the decline of manufacturing and the rise of service jobs in the United States� The reorganization of production processes that accelerated after these cri- 320 B oris v orMann ses has changed consumption and lifestyles - both in the port city and beyond� 4 The functioning of this regime has depended largely on the efficiency of global supply chains and has shaped them in turn� On a global scale, sea cargo more than tripled from 10,650 to 32,930 ton miles 5 in the period between 1970 and 2007 (bpb 2010). In 2008, according to the American Association of Port Authorities “deep-draft ports, which accommodate oceangoing vessels, [moved] 99�4 percent of U�S� overseas trade by volume and 64�1 percent by value” (AAPA 2008). Passing through container ports outside the inner-city these increases have gone largely unnoticed by urbanites� If one reason for the invisibility of the container port and logistics industries has been the physical relocation of the container port, another one is its lack of a shared identity with the urban community - which stands in stark contrast to the post-industrial waterfront� A highly functionalized place, the container port serves solely the transshipment of goods� With the advance of logistics technology, the amount of longshoremen and dockworkers has been drastically reduced, and machines, cranes and containers dominate the terminals of U�S� ports� Marc Augé has coined the term ‘non-place’ to refer to places without an anthropological past and a lack of collective memory� One could undoubtedly add container ports to supermarkets, airports and rooms of hotel chains, which Augé lists as paradigmatic examples (Augé 2010)� Yet, while hotel rooms and supermarkets are places that are still ‘lived,’ the invisibility of the container port and its purely technical function as an intermodal node in global production networks make it a peculiar kind of non-place� The analoguous development to the increasingly invisible port has been the rise of the post-industrial water-front in the inner-city� In contrast to the container port as a ‘non-place,’ it has been constitutive of the port city’s collective identity formation� The massive expansion of commercial trade and new transportation technologies that developed in the decades following World War II rid inner-city entrepôts, warehouses as well as piers, quays, and docks of their intended economic purpose (Meyer 1999: 13)� At the same time that de-industrialization produced derelict harbor spaces - and that the suburbanization of jobs had led to a decline of inner-city tax bases - the federal and state governments drew back their financial support for urban development. Combined with the fiscal crises of the mid-1970s, this led many American cities to recur to more entrepreneurial strategies to overcome the debilitating effects of tight budgets (Harvey 1989: 4; Greenberg 2008). One 4 Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, has argued that this new, more flexible economy, which has brought down the oligopolies of the Fordist era, has benefitted consumers and investors by driving down consumer prices and opening up new possibilities for investment (Reich 2008). In everyday life, one-stop shopping at big box stores has produced a ‘bargain culture’ and made consumption of a larger variety of fashion basics possible for the broader mass public (Harvey 1989a, Zukin 2005)� 5 Defined by the ‘Business Dictionary’ as: “Unit of a transporter’s revenue turnover, equal to one ton of freight-paying cargo hauled for one mile” (Business Dictionary 2010)� Visibilizing Risk 321 of these strategies was to brand cities by evoking certain images of a place in order to attract investors and tourists, for instance, through the use of ad campaigns, new spectacular architecture, luxury condominiums, and festivals. In many port cities, municipal officials chose to redevelop the derelict port to create access to the waterfront, ‘authentic’ lofts and maritime theme parks� New York City’s government realigned its priorities in a similar fashion after the fiscal crisis of 1975 and has served as an example for other waterfront developments� In a more entrepreneurial stance, the city’s political and economic elites dedicated their efforts toward the fostering of “markets in high end services, including finance, insurance, and real estate [FIRE], as well as tourism” (Greenberg 2006: 5)� 6 Miriam Greenberg has pointed to the “extreme image-sensitivity ” of these industries� Mostly, these images were directed against the city’s immediate labor past and drew on “mythic, transhistorical representations of the city as a national and global capital,” as Greenberg argued� These images were “to be embraced by the city government and turned into a large-scale, summerlong campaign, strategically linked to two national media events that were coming to town: New York City’s celebration of the U�S� Bicentennial, and its hosting of the 1976 Democratic National Convention�” ‘Operation Sail,’ the “big photo-op […] in which regattas of colonial-era tall-ships and modern luxury liners cruised New York Harbor past the Statue of Liberty and a downtown skyline crowned by the newly completed World Trade Center” created a “visual montage” that conveyed the impression of a post-industrial New York City which had overcome problems attributed to the Fordist regime of accumulation (Greenberg 2008: 162). 7 Urban entrepreneurialism has served as a guideline for waterfront developments in North America since� In the New York City metropolitan area this entailed building tourist destinations and trademark architecture, and expanding leisure sites toward the shorelines of Lower Manhattan, West Brooklyn and the Jersey City-Hoboken waterfront� While the container port has become a non-place, then, waterfronts have become highly visible places� The economic, political and cultural assertion of a new era - leaving behind the fiscal crisis of the city and the physical crisis of the waterfront by assuming the promises of the new economy - has been reinforced in the everyday experience of North American urban dwellers and has become a powerful narrative in the discourse on post-industrial waterfronts by urban planners and architects� Richard Marshall from the Graduate School of Urban Design at Harvard University, for instance, argues that “the waterfront is an expression of what we are as a culture� […] These are the sites of post-industrial city 6 These industries increased the city’s tax base at low cost� In other words, this type of restructuring was politically feasible� 7 As the committee on Urban Waterfront Lands found in 1980, the “enthusiasm and excitement aroused by the Operation Sail July 4th festivities in 1976, coupled with other events, have brought about a new attitude toward reclaiming the waterfront” (Committee on Urban Waterfront Lands 1980: 91). Providing a business friendly climate was a crucial feature of this new kind of thinking (New York Encyclopedia 2011: 1354)� 322 B oris v orMann space-making” (2007: 4)� In a similar vein, Raymond W� Gastil insists that, in the twenty-first century waterfronts in port cities around the world “serve as front yard and service alley, cultural stage and civic space, playground and profit center. In short, it is the paradigmatic site for the future of public life” (2002: 19)� Securing the Port City: Old Narratives and New Layers of Governance Before the September 11 attacks, maritime infrastructure was just as invisible to urbanites, tourists and real-estate investors as it was to public debates and thorough political scrutiny� Kenneth Christopher, who held police and security positions at the Port of Miami from 1996 through 2006, states in his book Port Security Management that, although “[s]eaports are a critical component of the global transportation infrastructure,” before September 11, they “have not been subject to comprehensive governmental regulation and security oversight�” Only the terrorist attacks, “a paradigm-shifting event for transportation systems’ security,” as Christopher continues, “[…] prompted dramatic shifts in the focused perspectives on security now required by anyone even remotely affiliated with the management of port security” (2009: 3)� Similarly, Stephen Flynn, a former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former Coast Guard Commander, argued that the “ambitious approach” that he deemed necessary “to securing the trade and transportation system would have been a nonstarter before 9/ 11” (2004: 104)� The dependence on imports as well as the location of container ports within metropolitan areas make the potential for disruption of a terrorist attack enormous. The U.S. has 361 sea and river ports. Roughly 8,100 foreign cargo ships, carrying more than 3,000 containers 8 each, enter the U�S� 50,000 times every year. This adds up to nearly 8 million containers (equaling 21,000 containers per day) that arrive from 3,000 ports around the globe (cf� Public Citizen 2004: 88). If, for instance, a terrorist organization succeeded in interrupting crude oil shipments to the Port of Los Angeles, as Richard Clarke, former security advisor to three U�S� presidents, has argued, “auto-dependent Southern California would literally run out of gas within two weeks” (Clarke & Beers 2006: 190/ 191)� In addition to an attack’s economic consequences, other risks imply the security threat to the lives of U�S� citizens� With a new awareness of these challenges, the Homeland Security Department set out to implement new security measures after September 11, 2001 (Department of Homeland Security 2004: 2)� Although port facilities have fallen into obscurity over the second half of the twentieth century - both visually and politically - the role of ports as 8 Today’s biggest ships carry around 12,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs, the standard measurement for containers)� According to the Journal of Commerce, the world’s largest shipping line, Maersk, has ordered 18,000 TEU vessels which it is planning to deploy on the EU-Asia trade route between 2013 and 2015 (Leach 2011)� Visibilizing Risk 323 geo-strategic sites during wars, revolutionary movements and international disputes has a long tradition in military history� Historical episodes such as the Boston Tea Party, the Caroline dispute in 1837, or the role of the Port of London in the liberation of Europe during World War II are often invoked examples from the three past centuries� 9 It comes as little surprise then, that institutional arrangements to secure ports have mainly developed in times of crisis� For instance, in 1917, the “Espionage Act assigned the Coast Guard the responsibility of securing U�S� ports and waterways during times of war” (Homeland Security & Defense Business Council 2011)� 10 In the context of World War II, the vulnerability of ports similarly became a political issue and new risk scenarios emerged� More than 60 years ago, Albert Einstein warned Franklin D� Roosevelt of the risk that “a single bomb [���] carried by boat and exploded in a port might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory” (Greenway 73)� Hence, the focus of government agencies and security experts on port cities as vulnerable points after September 11 seems plausible; even more so since terrorist groups had shown an increased tendency to attack ‘soft’ non-military targets and transportation nodes before 2001 (Clarke & Beers 2006)� But the above-mentioned dangers existed prior to the September 11 attacks and persisted even after most public attention had abated� Indeed, the fact that maritime security played such a minor role in political and public debates before the September 11 attacks, despite these risks, astonished some commentators� New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, for instance, referring to officials on the federal level and security experts, asked in his radio program: “Where were these people for the last few decades? […] I mean, come on, this is the cheapest political shot in the world� Everybody’s rushing to save our ports; it isn’t like this hasn’t been brewing for two decades” (Bloomberg in Hu 2006: B4)� Only with the potential threat of further terrorist attacks after September 11, however, did old narratives of vulnerability reemerge and resonate with a broader public so as to become a political issue to be addressed at the federal level� These narratives have served to conceptualize risk scenarios that guided policy change� But the scenarios envisaged in political circles and public debates have changed over time, varying according to political circumstances as well as to available intelligence� The changing validity of some narratives of vulnerability over others delineates a dynamic process that has - over the years and in an incoherent manner - developed into a master narrative of port security which has not lost any of its potential political clout until today� 9 Ulrich Beck points to early intercontinental merchant shipping as the beginning of the modern risk society� He argues that, in opposition to premodern external or divine ‘blows of fate,’ the worst catastrophes in the nascent modern society of the nineteenth and twentieth century were man-made; and so were the related risks (Beck 2008: 25). 10 A mission that “evolved into modern port security units that protect the U�S� maritime domain from terrorism” as the Homeland Security & Defense Business Council states (2011)� 324 B oris v orMann In the days following September 11, 2001, the memory of the attack against Navy destroyer U.S.S. Cole on October 12, 2000 11 guided much of the improvised response to protect the ports� In what could be understood as a reflex movement, the Port of New York and New Jersey stopped its services on September 11, 2001, and “reopened […] the next day, with security inspections of all entering ships” (Smothers/ NYTimes A12)� Stephen Flynn commented that “[f]reezing our transport networks first and asking questions later was clearly appropriate” but caustically added that the “first campaign in the war to protect the American homeland was to impose an embargo - on our economy” (2001: A23)� Flynn’s statement makes clear that, very early, there was an awareness of a trade-off between national security and free and efficient trade - a trade-off which was reinterpreted over the years as we will see below� As a September 20, 2001 article by John Kifner reported, an improvised “armada” continued “patrolling the harbor” for the week that followed, the “greatest fear” being “a repetition of the attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen last year” (B13)� While for two and a half weeks, all incoming vessels were searched, 12 inspections were reduced on September 28 and Coast Guard officials boarded only “up to half of the 20 or so daily arrivals” (Baker B11). 13 Six weeks after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the threat scenario publicly envisaged by security experts still looked somewhat different from risk assessments made later on. Influenced in his assertion by the September 11 attacks as well as by the attack against the U.S.S. Cole , Captain Michael R� Watson of the American Pilots’ Association stated before a Senate committee on maritime security that two scenarios would be imaginable: The first would be where one or more individuals takes control of the ship away from the pilot with the intention of steering it into another ship, a bridge, a fuel dock or some other structure with maximum destructive potential� […] The second would be, as in the case of the U�S�S� Cole, a deliberate suicide attack on a vessel carrying hazardous cargoes (Watson in Baker B11)� 11 The U.S.S. Cole bombing was a suicide attack on the Navy destroyer in the Port of Aden in Yemen in 2000� 12 A report on September 19, 2001 states that “all incoming freighters, tankers and other commercial ships are stopped and held at Ambrose Light, while two Coast Guard teams board them� One is the regular inspection, checking the ship’s papers and those of its captain and crew� The second, he [Captain of the Port Adm� Richard E� Bennis] said, is a ‘full law enforcement sweep’ searching the ship for anything suspicious” (Kifner B13)� 13 In order to reduce the number of inspections and to secure the flow of goods, the Coast Guard started to collect information on cargo ships four days before their arrival “passing that data to law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and boarding those deemed to pose the highest risk, such as ships from the Middle Eastern nations” (Baker 2001: B11)� According to Coast Guard Lt� Cmdr� Brian T� Fisher, the selective screening followed a simple logic: “Obviously, something coming from a country we’re at war with would draw our attention for targeting much more than something coming from a country we’re not at war with” (Baker 2001: B11)� Visibilizing Risk 325 In November 2001, a New York Times article pointed out in more detail the specific vulnerability of ports, using Portland to illustrate the dangers. Peter T� Kilborn noted that the “unscrutinized containers, the bridge, the oil tanks, the dormant but still radioactive nuclear power plant 20 miles north of the harbor - all form a volatile mix in a time of terrorism� […] All that makes ports among the greatest points of vulnerability” (B5)� While for “Portland’s officials, the scene [of maritime traffic], at least before Sept. 11, was a point of pride, the sign of a strong economy,” now, after September 11, it “evokes fear and uncertainty” (ibid�)� Scenarios of fear and uncertainty were also envisaged by officials in other port cities. In the spring of 2002, New York City’s particular vulnerability to an attack on its port gained more and more public attention� New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez “whose district includes the huge container ports and fuel tank farms of Port Newark and the Elizabeth Marine Terminal” warned in March 2002 that: “The port represents a huge opportunity for those who would wish us harm […] The superport of the East Coast has to be moved up on the list of security priorities because there is not a more vulnerable port in the nation” (Menendez in Smothers A12)� At a hearing of the subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation of the House Transportation Committee, experts underpinned this claim when they argued that the Port of New York and New Jersey, being “the biggest container port on the East Coast,” constituted “an appealing target for terrorists who might consider packing biological weapons or explosives into sealed shipping containers […]� It is also the largest fuel depot in the nation, so any explosion would cause widespread destruction” (Smothers A12)� While the attack of a ship or the utilization of a vessel as a weapon had dominated accounts of potential danger in the months directly following 9/ 11, and while regionally specific risk scenarios were developed for each city and discussed in public, the focus on containers as carriers of weapons of mass destruction became more explicit in 2002 and 2003� Stephen Flynn, who, according to CBS News , had “spent the last two and a half years studying the security, or lack of it, at U�S� seaports,” argued that “shipping containers are the weak link” (Flynn in Eaglin)� As opposed to the risk assumptions deduced from the U�S�S� Cole incident and the 9/ 11 attacks, this assessment was based on events following September 11� “Five weeks after Sept� 11,” Nina Eaglin reported for CBS News in 2003, “authorities found a suspected terrorist trying to smuggle himself from Egypt to Canada inside a shipping container equipped with a makeshift bed and enough food and water for the three-week journey�” 14 Eaglin continues: “The Commandant of the U�S� Coast Guard, Admiral James Loy, told us there’s evidence that terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden are directly involved in the shipping business�” As a consequence, U.S. officials, amongst them James Loy, concluded that foreign ports should be included in the search for terrorists� Since the U�S� believed 14 According to Eaglin’s report, “[t]he stowaway was a trained airplane mechanic, and he was carrying a laptop computer, a satellite phone, fake credit cards and an airport security pass” (n� p�)� 326 B oris v orMann in 2003 that “one of those ships delivered the explosives used in [Al Qaeda’s] embassy bombings in Africa […] the U�S� Navy and the Marines have been boarding freighters and opening up containers looking for terrorists, including bin Laden” in the Arabian Sea, where the U�S� surmised Al Qaeda’s ships (Eaglin 2003)� Statements of government officials such as Stephen Flynn’s also became more elaborate and specific with regard to technical details. Flynn warned in 2003 that “it wouldn’t be difficult for a terrorist to track a container with a global positioning system and to detonate a weapon hidden inside” (Flynn quoted in Cowen & Bunce 431). In a similar fashion, but one of the first commentators to publicly point to the danger of nuclear weapons, H�D�S� Greenway argued in 2003: If 19 terrorists could so artfully use America’s air transportation system against the United States, what might they do to take advantage of the country’s infinitely larger and harder to keep track of maritime transportation system? Everybody’s nightmare is a nuclear weapon brought into this country on a container ship (73)� Experts within the administration and in the security community combined these scenarios and warned that Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups might attempt to smuggle a container carrying a nuclear or dirty bomb into the port of a metropolitan area such as Newark or Baltimore with devastating consequences for the area’s population� In government circles, these fears were amplified, as a Wikileaks dossier published by the New York Times in April 2011 (Shane & Weiser) revealed, by the interrogation of the Guantanamodetainee Saifullah Paracha in 2003� According to U�S� investigators, Paracha had “offered his assistance with the shipment of explosives into the U�S� and advised (al Qaeda) on shipping and port security […]� With his knowledge of international shipping, business connections and stature within Pakistan, [the] detainee was an extremely valuable asset to al Qaeda and its operations” (Journal of Commerce 2011)� In hindsight, these scenarios seem to have been influenced not just by historically contingent security assessments and new intelligence, but also by popular narratives� In a 2010 conference, Steven Bucci, former Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary to Donald Rumsfeld, stated that his “old boss […] used to use the Tom Clancy ‘the sum of all fears scenario’ of the nuke coming into the United States on a ship” (Bucci 2010) - an analogy that retrieved its metaphorical power from the movie adaptation of Clancy’s novel, which starred Ben Affleck and Morgan Freeman and was released in March 2002 under the book’s title� While this became the predominant narrative of vulnerability - one that persists through today 15 - other groups also entered the debate on port security, upping the political ante for the federal government� Civil society became aware of the security loopholes in the supply chain and various actors 15 In 2010, J� Michael Barrett even took this worst-case scenario a step further when he argued at the Heritage Foundation’s ‘Homeland Security 2020’ panel that “[…] a nuclear weapon that goes off in a city is very bad. It is a horrific absolutely devastating event. But it is not necessarily unrecoverable� A nuclear weapon arriving through the global Visibilizing Risk 327 criticized the lack of effort of government institutions� Members of Congress, non-government security experts, and non-profit organizations - such as Public Citizen, a major, left wing non-profit organization - deplored the lack of an “overall strategic plan” and the absence of “strong federal leadership” as well as a lack of $1 billion to improve port security (Public Citizen 2004: 2)� The main accusation was directed at the fact that of the 8 million containers entering the U.S. every year, only 4-6% were being inspected (Public Citizen 2004)� These accusations lost some momentum in 2004 and 2005, perhaps due to a shifting political climate and a growing focus on foreign affairs, most notably on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq� 16 However, the Dubai Ports World Controversy in February 2006 caused a resurgence of the ready scenarios and debates� Dubai Ports World, a state-owned company from the United Arab Emirates, planned to buy port management businesses in several U�S� ports, which in turn stirred a political debate on whether this critical infrastructure should be owned by foreign companies or whether (Arab) foreign ownership would compromise national security� While George W� Bush eventually had to back down from his support for the deal due to public pressure - according to a poll 66 percent of Americans opposed the deal at the time (CQ Researcher 316) - the debate on port security had regained momentum� Echoing earlier assessments, a New York Times article published in March 2006 was one among many to report that “[t]he nightmare is that an atomic bomb or some other weapon - perhaps a ‘dirty bomb’ spewing radiation, or a biological or chemical agent - might be smuggled in on a container ship and either detonated in the terminal or exploded elsewhere in the country” (New York Times A20)� 17 The heated up political debate and institutional dynamics reinforced policy change vis-à-vis maritime security and port governance� Following the reinvigorated debate on port security in 2006 as well as recommendations by the 9/ 11 Commission’s report of 2007 18 , George W� Bush signed into law H.R. 1 Implementing Recommendations of the 9/ 11 Commission Act of 2007 calling for “the 100-percent scanning of maritime cargo before it’s loaded onto vessels supply chain such that the system is shut down following that event - that could be unrecoverable� That could be an existential threat - at least to the lives and the livelihoods of the economy as we currently know it” (Barrett 2010)� 16 While 2004 and 2005 yielded some ‘hope’ for the U�S� War on Terror, since President Hamid Karzai was elected (in 2004) and Saddam Hussein tried (2004-2006), attacks by ‘insurgents’ grew stronger during that time� 17 The article went on to acknowledge, however, that “[n]obody knows whether terrorists would risk sending such weapons in unguarded containers, but it would be reckless to leave the way open” (New York Times 2006: A20)� 18 The SAFE Port Act of 2006 preceded this piece of legislation: “On 13 October 2006, the U�S� enacted The Security and Accountability for Every (SAFE) Port Act (The SAFE Port Act of 2006), which, inter alia, (1) codified in law CSI and C-TPAT; (2) required testing the feasibility of scanning all U�S�-bound cargo containers; and (3) required scanning of all containers for radiation at the 22 busiest U�S� ports […]” (Ireland 2009: 10)� 328 B oris v orMann heading for the United States to be required by 2012” (Berman 2010)� 19 As Steven Bucci commented laconically, “The American people put us a pretty high standard, […] like, perfect” (Fellow 2010)� Efficiency versus Security? Published in April 2011, a Globe Newswire article asked “Port Maritime Security: Are We Ready for the Day Before Tomorrow? ” (Globe Newswire 2011)� Most U�S� security experts today would answer this question in the negative� Stephen Flynn, under the immediate impression of the terrorist attacks, had argued in 2001 that “[w]e are now experiencing the dark side of a transport system in which efficiency has trumped public security” (Flynn 2001: A23). Today, most experts in the United States agree that 100 percent security is impossible while the business community pushes for more efficiency in the supply chain� Unsurprisingly, the 2007 mandate on 100 percent scanning was opposed by the international and U�S� business community as well as the Worlds Customs Organization� Adam Salerno, Senior Manager at the U�S� Chamber of Commerce, argued that technical challenges, inadequate infrastructure in foreign ports, an opposition to the 2007 mandate by trading partners such as the European Union 20 , and, most importantly, the cost of implementation made 100 percent security impossible� Installing the scanning technology would cost $6 million for each U�S� port; for U�S�-EU trade, “the initial costs to continue trade” under this mandate “would equal a 10 percent increase in costs for businesses” (Fellow 2010)� The bottom line is clear, as Salerno outlines: “My member companies talk about a competitive advantage when they talk about the supply chain� A 10 percent increase across the board for something that we have already determined has little to no security benefit is not worth the risk for our economy” (Salerno 2010)� Instead, Salerno and others opt for a “multi-layered risk based approach�” 21 Since “not everything can be secured, not everything can be scanned,” as security expert J� Michael Barrett put it� Multiple layers of security - cheaper and more effective than 100 percent scanning, as it is argued - are supposed to increase the likelihood of stopping a terrorist attack (Barrett 2010)� The creation of the TWIC -Card (Transportation Worker Identification Credential), a security card for workers in the goods-moving industries, the Container Security Initiative to inspect ships in foreign ports (CSI), and the Customs-Trade 19 In 2009, however, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano reported to the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee that 100-percent scanning would not meet this deadline (Berman 2010)� 20 Trade partners have criticized the mandate as a non-tariff barrier� 21 According to Avery Fellow, “Col� Steven Bucci, former Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary, explained that the maritime officials were currently operating under a ‘Swiss cheese’ model of maritime defense, which he called ‘imperfect�’ He said the goal for security officials is to ‘get the holes in the Swiss cheese as small as they can get them.’” (Fellow 2010) Visibilizing Risk 329 Partnership Against Terrorism which fast-lanes its member shipping lines (C- TPAT) were but some of the measures implemented since 2001 in order to secure the port from international terrorism while keeping the U�S� ‘open for business�’ These multiple layers of initiatives were complemented by a more selective, risk-based approach that sought to distinguish between high-risk and low-risk elements in the supply chain in order to allow for a more specific targeting of potential security threats. From a strategic point of view, port security over the decade following September 11 has shifted toward both a national and international harmonization of those programs in place on one side as well as to ‘resilience’ on the other� Rather than focusing on preemption as the National Security Strategy had set out to do, the focus today has hence moved toward the capacity to absorb the shock of an attack and carry on� This implies psychological post-traumatic support for victims of a possible attack as much as the maintenance of secure trade routes after the shock (Barrett 2010)� The latter is reflected, for instance, in programs such as the Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT) that highlights ‘Business Resumption’ after an attack as one of the benefits for partners and members of the program (CBP 2011: 2)� 22 From the perspective of the multi-layered risk-based approach, the question whether George W� Bush’s port security strategy was lax is a matter of degree� Since “[i]t is physically impossible to check every container without essentially stopping global commerce,” as Flynn had already argued in a 2003 interview with CBS News (Eaglin 2003), it is the perceived effort of securitization that counts� Its success is the non-event of a terrorist attack on maritime infrastructure; its strategy that of giving the impression of security through the plethora of programs and initiatives - to deter terrorists from possible attacks, to reassure the public, and to encourage the business community� As J� Michael Barrett, co-author of Securing Global Transportation Networks , has argued, after September 11 “something had to change, something tangible, even if only cosmetic, so that you could restore faith in the system” (Barrett 2010)� However, while defensive preparedness and resilience seem to form a logical consensus for maritime security strategies amongst government officials and security experts today, those layers of security that have been implemented by the government have served purposes that were, indeed, much more pro-active� Turning toward the domestic realm, the national security discourse underwent a subtle but crucial epistemological transition: While in the direct aftermath of September 11, the port was secured to protect U�S� citizens from a potential terrorist attack - since earlier attacks and avail- 22 The Customs and Border Protection “has conducted comprehensive business resumption planning in the event of a significant disruption in the flow of trade to ensure actions are taken to maintain communication and coordination of CBP processes at our border with U�S� Government and foreign government stakeholders, as well as the trade community� C-TPAT status will be taken into consideration when CBP resumes the processing of shipments” (CBP 2011: 2)� 330 B oris v orMann able intelligence suggested the plausibility of such a scenario - in the years that followed, any risk to the functioning of global supply chains, terrorist or other, could be perceived as a potential security threat� In other words, the Homeland Security discourse created a political space where unwanted behavior could be sanctioned by reinterpreting threats to supply chains as threats to national security. This transition is perhaps best exemplified by George W� Bush’s invocation of the Taft-Hartley Act in late 2002 which set a precedent for the larger reorganization of the supply chain� 23 A dispute between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA - representing ocean carriers and terminal operators) caused a lock-out in the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach in the fall of 2002. Interrupting trade flows for several days, this lock-out created costs that amounted to several billion U.S. dollars as final products did not reach their customers and the stalled supply of intermediate goods paralyzed Just-in-Time production� From an economic point of view, the crisis was disastrous since it disrupted the lifelines of American businesses� To resolve the interruption of global supply chains, the federal government stepped in by explicitly recurring to the Homeland Security discourse� The former director of the DHS, Tom Ridge, cautioned the ILWU that “strikes would not be tolerated because they were not in the ‘national interest’” (Cowen 2006: 433)� In October 2002, President Bush acted on this premonition and declared the conflict a crisis of national security. In his “Rose Garden Statement,” George W. Bush justified his invocation of the Taft-Hartley Act by arguing: The crisis in our Western ports is hurting the economy� It is hurting the security of our country, and the federal government must act� Americans are working hard every day to bring our economy back from recession� This nation simply cannot afford to have hundreds of billions of dollars a year in potential manufacturing and agricultural trade sitting idle (Sanger & Greenhouse 2002)� As longshoremen were forced back to work, Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the A�F�L�-C�I�O�, did not hide his frustration: “We’re absolutely furious […]� The P�M�A� locked the workers out, contrived a phony crisis and then gets rescued by the administration� They’re getting their way and have the weight of the government behind them” (Sanger & Greenhouse 2002)� The invocation of the Taft-Hartley Act clearly signaled the willingness of the federal government to put economic growth and the demands of shippers and terminal operators over the concerns of organized labor� The precedent also displayed the potential of the Homeland Security discourse to function as a new tool of governance in the transportation industries which the U�S� had become so dependent on since the 1980s. Demonstrating the vital political and economic dependence of the United States on its imports, the actions of the federal government provided a blueprint on how the national security 23 The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947, allows presidents to seek injunctions against strikes and lock-outs that “imperil the national health or safety” (Sanger & Greenhouse 2002)� Visibilizing Risk 331 discourse could be used to ensure the seamless functioning of supply chains as an end in itself. In other words, if the balance between efficiency and security was seen as a zero-sum game, in practice, security could serve as a political tool by reframing the threat to trade flows as a national security issue and thereby enhancing their efficiency. Security by Obscurity? With regard to a narrowing of the public sphere in cities after September 11, 2001 Peter Marcuse has argued that “[t]he term ‘security’ was a catch-all defined at the discretion of the police and the professionals in Homeland Security�” An “existential insecurity,” he continues, is ”a deep and fundamental threatening anxiety, without a sharp focus on a specific danger” (2006: 923 f.). It is this type of diffuse anxiety that has driven the reassessment of risk scenarios in the maritime domain and that has shaped supply chain governance since September 11, 2001� As we have seen, the post-industrial spatial division of port cities has rendered maritime infrastructure invisible, attenuating the discussion of maritime security questions in broader public discourse prior to September 11, 2001� The terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center led to a resurgence of preexisting discourses of port cities’ vulnerability producing ‘new’ risk scenarios as well as a political momentum which needed to be addressed by the federal government� As the analysis of these risk assessments shows, it is not the degree of ‘riskiness’ that has determined the visibility of the risk and the political attention that has been attributed to it, but its plausibility in a specific cultural and historical context. In a manner that seems tautological only at first glance, Ulrich Beck claims that acceptable risks are those that have been accepted (Beck 2008: 36). This essay both supports and transcends Beck’s thesis by arguing that the production of this consensus is dynamic and that its political momentum can ebb off� In other words, the acceptance of a risk can change over time and depends on its public visibility� Perhaps Jaron Lanier was right in his assumption that “[s]urely obscurity is the only fundamental form of security that exists” (Lanier 67)� Nonetheless: while the acuteness of threats coming through maritime infrastructure has lost resonance in public debates after the Dubai Ports World controversy of 2006, decisions taken on various levels of government after the crisis have had long term effects on port governance� Similar to the Taft- Hartley Act, the C-TPAT, the Container Security Initiative and the TWIC card have been attempts to mitigate the trade-off between efficiency and security. These initiatives, too, raise questions as to who defines risk and how this definition can serve preexisting power hierarchies� What seems clear, a decade after September 11, is that, inevitably, this tradeoff persists in a system that depends on a balance of low transportation costs and secure supply chains� 332 B oris v orMann If the maritime security discourse can still be activated for political or economic purposes today, envisaging these threat scenarios bears a dangerous dialectical moment� While states assume, as one of their most pertinent tasks in the twenty-first century, the anticipation of potential risks to protect their citizens, the cultural process of assessing and pronouncing certain risks more than others produces further potential targets� The state’s staging of threats in the Homeland Security discourse makes it both an involuntary accomplice of global terrorism as well as its potential victim in that it produces scenarios to which it has to respond� Visibilizing Risk 333 Works Cited American Association of Port Authorities, AAPA� “U�S� Public Port Facts�” Access 06 August 2011� <http: / / www�aapa-ports�org/ Industry/ content�cfm? 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How Shopping Changed American Culture � New York: Routledge, 2005� M arcel h artWig History in the Making: Lessons and Legacies of “Pearl Harbor” and “9/ 11” In the light of the “manned missile” attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (DeLillo 38), and the crashing of United Airlines Flight 93 in Shanksville (PA) on September 11, 2001, prominent Republican politician Newt Gingrich publicly suggested: “We’ve had a Pearl Harbor� It’s called 9/ 11” (Hannity and Colmes)� 1 He repeated his analogy while the controversy over the construction of a mosque near “Ground Zero” heated up in the late summer of 2010: “We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor” (Thorsten and White)� Such statements are in tune with the first media representations of the terrorist attacks. After September 11, 2001, several editorialists, news anchors, and politicians were quick to establish a direct link to the events of December 7, 1941� Dan Rather, CBS news anchor, referred to 9/ 11 as “the Pearl Harbor of Terrorism,” the September 12 issue of the New York Times featured thirteen articles mentioning Pearl Harbor, and the New Yorker re-published a December 1941 “Talk of the Town”-article to draw an analogy to the days after 9/ 11 (Rosenberg 175-7)� In speeches during the presidential campaigns of 2003 and 2004, then President George W� Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly compared 9/ 11 to Pearl Harbor (cf� Connor)� Similar analogies appear in current debates around the ongoing maintenance of the purpose-built prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba and the announced military trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (cf� Hertzberg)� Finally, the completion and expansion of the two memorial sites commemorating the victims of the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor (the new and modernized 56 million U�S�-Dollar Pearl Harbor U�S�S� Arizona Memorial visitor center was opened in December 2010) and the victims of the 9/ 11 terrorist attacks (located at the site of the former World Trade Center complex, the 9/ 11 Memorial will be opened on September 11, 2011) will establish a permanent link between both events� Ten years after 9/ 11, we are still living with the legacy of this hastily drawn analogy between “Pearl Harbor” and “9/ 11” and the subsequent global “War on Terror�” Both then President George W� Bush and the dominant media almost immediately conceived of the latter as a reissue of World War II in terms of what Stud Terkel once coined a “Good War” (1997 [1985]). With regard to stricter security measures at tourist destinations, hotels and on public transport the resultant global war permeated the various social spheres in the Western hemisphere� Germany, for example, still faces the consequences 1 In May 2011, Gingrich announced his intention to run as a GOP presidential candidate in 2012� 338 M arcel h artWig of the terrorist attacks of September 11 on a daily basis� One may think of the various debates concerning the retention of communications traffic data, security checks at airports, the German involvement in Afghanistan, and continuing Islamophobia visible, for instance, in German reactions to France’s anti-burqa law of April 2011� This ongoing Western anxiety about Muslim and Arab influences on our cultural life is largely rooted in two premises: the American superpower status as defined by U.S. military and political strength - recently apparent in the persistent demand for American drones in the 2011 Libyan civil war - and the widespread perception that the U�S� has the authority to use that strength to foil terrorist threats ever since the 9/ 11 attacks� Yet this authority is based on a rhetoric of danger that first became manifest in the American war against the Japanese and their German and Italian Axis allies in World War II. This political rhetoric continued to define American foreign policy throughout the Cold War� References to Pearl Harbor, the defining moment for the American Century, also rendered the initial public perception of 9/ 11 as a “second Day of Infamy�“ The following media and cultural-historical analysis will therefore reassess the link between the Pearl Harbor and 9/ 11 attacks in order to find out why the Pearl Harbor memory is the immediate event of choice to cope with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001� How do American mainstream discourses represent both events? Why are both events studied as national traumata? What significance does the Pearl Harbor memory have ten years after 9/ 11? To work on these questions, this paper first assesses this issue in a historical comparison of the initial reactions to both events� In a second step, it discusses media representations of the two attacks� Finally, this paper examines its findings in the broader light of current debates concerning cultural and national traumata� This paper holds that the popular cultural narrativization of Pearl Harbor heavily informs recent representations of 9/ 11 as a cultural trauma� Where is Pearl Harbor? During the “American Century,” 2 the United States managed to maintain its superpower status by means of economic and political isolation of enemy states and the nationwide evocation of a common enemy� In other words, the American global preeminence is based on an ongoing national and international restoration and reassessment of an eternal state of emergency� David Campbell regards a state of danger as a function of interpretation that is spread by rhetoric which by the same turn motivates national identifica- 2 The term “American Century” describes the history of the United States since the beginnings of Modern America� It was prominently used by the TIME publisher Henry Luce in February 1941� He claims that an “authentic creation of the 20th century - [���] the first great American Century” (Luce 65) can only be achieved by American involvement in World War II� Lessons and Legacies of “Pearl Harbor” and “9/ 11” 339 tion� Therefore, he holds that “the boundaries of a state’s identity are secured by the representation of danger integral to foreign policy” (3)� Hence, a compelling threat is needed to maintain this state of emergency� Formal commemoration such as national holidays and the repeated invocation of culturally and nationally established symbols and myths can be regarded as key elements in the rhetorical process of a national “reality” production� How is such a threat initially created and communicated, and what established symbols were used in the creation of the Pearl Harbor legacy? A closer look at the historical facts behind this event will help to answer these questions� Ever since the forced opening of Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry’s Black Ships in July 1853, the relationship between the U.S. and the “Empire of the Sun” had been strained� 3 In 1893, U.S. Navy Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan first wrote about a possible armed conflict between both countries in his essay “Hawaii and Our Future Sea Power” (Mahan 31-59; 175-217)� In 1941, this conflict would become reality. When World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, the U�S� was in a state of isolation� 4 While the country suffered from a crisis-ridden economy, high inflation rates, and high rates of unemployment, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised that America would not enter the war� Yet the years between 1930 and 1941 had also been years of deteriorating relations between Japan and the United States� Political issues over the status of China and the security of Southeast Asia were triggered by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1934� Japan ignored American protests and continued their attacks on Chinese territory in 1937� Yet, neither the U�S� nor any other nation was willing to halt Japan by the use of military force� Instead, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States sought to avert further Japanese expansion by means of economic restrictions� After Japanese troops occupied French Indo-China in 1940, Roosevelt ordered a freeze on all Japanese assets in the U�S� and simultaneously imposed oil and trade embargoes on Japan� In the meantime, Japanese and American ambassadors tried to resolve the conflict through negotiations� However, both sides’ conditions were unacceptable for the other side so that the negotiations were bound to fail� 3 For a closer study of the power relations between Japan and the United States see the historical studies of Feifer (2006), LaFeber (1998), and Schodt (1994). After World War II the idea of a “Hundred Year War with Japan” became very popular; according to former U�S� ambassador to Japan, Edwin O� Reischauer, “During the 20th century as a whole, no country has more consistently regarded itself as in essential conflict with the United States than has Japan, and no country has been more uniformly looked upon as a potential enemy by Americans” (qtd� in Friedman and Lebard vii)� 4 Not every nation remembers World War II as the global conflict between the years 1939 and 1945, starting with the German invasion of Poland� China comemmorates either a Chinese War of Resistance, starting with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, or a longer Sino-Japanese War, starting with an armed conflict over the control in Korea in 1894 (cf. Fujitani, White, and Yoneyama 3). Japan memorialized this conflict as Jugo’nen senso (Fifteen Year War), or as Dai toa senso , (Greater East Asia War) (cf� Shimizu 17)� 340 M arcel h artWig This conflict heated up when Cordell Hull, then Secretary of State, sent a note containing a demand for the immediate withdrawal of all occupying Japanese forces from Indochina and China� The submission of the “Hull Note” culminated in a movement of the U.S. Navy’s largest Pacific fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor� Japan may have regarded both this document and the fleet movement as an ultimatum. Only hours later, the Japanese Navy left Tankan Bay en route to Hawaii� On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the American naval base Pearl Harbor in Hawaii� “The Pearl Harbor attack killed 2403 people, destroyed or damaged 18 U.S. battleships, cruisers and destroyers and 188 airplanes” (Donald 41). Despite the foreign political tensions between Japan and the U�S�, several historians and contemporary witnesses claim that “[t]he United States was in an easy, carefree mode, right up to the commencement of the Pearl Harbor attack” (McAdams 32)� Hence this attack is remembered as a “sneaky act of war,“ a “day of infamy�“ Many Americans received the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor while they were listening to their favorite radio programs� When the news about the raid hit the radio stations, many Americans first checked their atlases: “‘Where’s Pearl Harbor? ’ […] was a common question“ (McConnaughey)� Not only did many Americans not know where Pearl Harbor was; most did not even know of the naval station’s existence (Zinsser 73; McAdams 30)� In view of this, raising political and locational awareness was then the highest priority in government press releases, public statements, and President Roosevelt’s initial address to the nation of December 8, 1941. In his speech, Roosevelt chooses a rhetorically well-versed geographic short cut by emphazising that the Japanese bombs hit “the USA” (Freeman, Schamel, and West 468). He neither mentions details about the political background, nor does he give the exact geographical position of Pearl Harbor nor even name the naval station� The coinciding Japanese attacks on the Phillipines, a former American colony, only receive a scant treatment in the President’s message� Rather he emphasizes that “ the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan” (ibid�)� In a rhetorically remarkable speech Roosevelt turns the complex backgrounds concerning the United States’ interest in Hawaii and the past negotiations with Japan into a simple message of a war-mongering Empire at the gates of fortress America� Even though Pearl Harbor is located 2�500 miles off the West Coast, the presidential address manages to evoke a temporal and local proximity of the event and thereby stresses the necessity of the proposed declaration of war� He declares December 7th as “a date which will live in infamy” (ibid� 470)� President Roosevelt’s speech can thus be regarded as a key moment in the creation of the Pearl Harbor narrative� In commenting on Roosevelt’s rhetoric, the historian Emily Rosenberg argues: The infamy trope worked better if the attack was positioned clearly on American soil� A persuasive speech […] is meant to mobilize� It necessarily aims to simplify, to flatten complexity and reduce ambivalence. If the story it tells is already famil- Lessons and Legacies of “Pearl Harbor” and “9/ 11” 341 iar as a background legend in culture, the work of persuasion becomes less difficult� [… President Roosevelt’s] message was especially memorable because words, not photographs sketched the initial public image of the attack (Rosenberg 15)� Devoid of any complexity, Roosevelt’s talk of “infamy,” “deliberate attacks”, and “treachery” therefore functions as a jeremiad that stirs nation-wide anxiety, a feeling of lost security, and vulnerability� Broadcast on the radio, the dominant medium of that time (cf� Daniels 50), the presidential message was received in every American living room� On the following day, long queues were formed in front of the recruitment offices of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. Newspaper front pages announced impossible news of Japanese “Enemy Planes near N�Y� from Atlantic! ”, and for lack of photos printed paintings of then renowned painters such as Ted Kautzky� According to William Zinsser, an immediate collective Japan angst took hold of the nation: Surely an attack as cunningly planned as the Pearl Harbor raid was only a prelude� Hawaii was about to be invaded! California was about to be invaded! If hundreds of Japanese planes could materialize out of nowhere, so could some Japanese divisions. Spies were imagined everywhere (80). This national fear of Japanese enemies did not only arise from verbal, intellectual and cognitive discourse, e�g� Roosevelt’s speech, but also from visual sources such as paintings, cartoons, films, and photographs, which trigger emotions and address the national unconscious� In commenting on enemy representations in the World War II Combat Film, Jeanine Basinger concludes: “[W]e viewed the war with the Japanese as a race war, and the war with the Germans as an ideological war� When we disliked Germans, it was the Nazis we meant� When we disliked the Japanese, it was all of them” (26)� Common stereotypes that were employed in this “race war” were referring to the Japanese as “no tail baboons,“ “yellow-skinned, slanty-eyed bastards,“ “nips,” “Japs,” or “apes in khaki” (cf� Dower 77-93)� Films like Bataan (Tay Garnett 1943), The Purple Heart (Lewis Milestone 1944), or Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series (1942-1945) made strong use of these stereotypes� 5 Together with Roosevelt’s “infamy” trope they created the narrative of a righteous American revenge� In February 1942, first pictures of the attack were published in Life under the headline “Pictures of the Nation’s Worst Naval Disaster Show Pearl Harbor Hell.” Those pictures should only confirm what a whole nation had been fantasizing about for weeks� That is why, despite the media images, the radio remained the most important news source� It broadcast patriotic music, Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats,” and played Sammy Kaye’s song “Remember Pearl Harbor” in heavy rotation� Furthermore, the American public sphere was immediately put under military control� Daily news, interviews, and any other broadcast material was regulated by the newly established Office of 5 Hollywood vilified Japanese people in several War films. See Dower (1986), Eckert (1999), and Moeller (1996) for more details about the patterns of this race war� 342 M arcel h artWig War Information (OWI)� This institution monitored mass entertainment on a national scale� Robert E� May and Randy Roberts insist that not only radio, but cinema, too, was under strict surveillance of the OWI: [T]he United States government was quite interested in the content of movies� The average ticket sales in America each week during World War II ranged between eighty and ninety million, or two-third of the country’s population� Movies […] exerted an awesome power to influence and mold public opinion (19). In the radio, newspapers, and cinema, the story of a surprise attack became the narrative frame of the “Pearl Harbor attacks,” everyone agreed on who was to blame for this event: the “sneaky” and “backstabbing” Imperial Japanese Army� In 1942, the Pearl Harbor legacy rested on two pillars: (i) the reissue of “Remember the Alamo”-slogans in the new war motto “Remember Pearl Harbor” and (ii) the iconographic reproduction of the burning U�S�S� Arizona on war bonds advertisements, in cinema ads, and in movies like Remember Pearl Harbor (1942)� When Roosevelt announced that “no matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory” (Freeman, Schamel, and West 470), he first employed the Alamo trope by pointing out the “righteous might” of the American people in this war against Japan� Sammy Kaye’s song adapted this reference to the battle of the Alamo when he sung “Let’s remember Pearl Harbor/ As we go to meet the foe/ Let’s remember Pearl Harbor/ As we did the Alamo” (Kaye)� The Alamo trope thus became a meaningful narrative device to address and motivate the American nation to support the war� A closer look at the most famous iconographic representation of the burning U�S�S� Arizona reveals yet another historical continuity� First published in February 1942, the above picture was taken during the Japanese attack� It immediately added a visual frame to Roosevelt’s “infamy trope” (cf� Rosenberg)� Visible in the center of the photo is the major mast of the U�S�S� Arizona shrouded in smoke and ash� No victims can be seen in the picture, the action Fig� 1: U�S�S� Arizona burning on December 7, 1941� <http: / / bit�ly/ nG1X2g>� Lessons and Legacies of “Pearl Harbor” and “9/ 11” 343 is frozen in time, the ship has not yet sunk� In other words, in this picture the event outranks the victims, the spectacle is more important than the actual loss� This act of destruction became the most important symbol of the Pearl Harbor attack, a burning warship thus turned into the icon of the American revenge� It is remarkable that this photo served as a stand-in for the 1,177 crew members who died on board of the U�S�S� Arizona � In fact, dying American soldiers were missing in all of the photos published three months after the actual attack� Those pictures may be regarded as a place holder for a collective imaginary, in which the ships become containers, sinking caskets, carrying Americans that are unmarked in means of their gender, social class, and ethnic background� In showing how this vessel is about to explode, this picture thus marks a national rupture and addresses a multiethnic American nation. It thereby implies a chance to reverse the shown event by fulfilling the iconic marker’s purpose as a visual reminder for a righteous war against whoever is responsible for this explosion� A similar representation was well known in 1942 and could easily be linked to the burning U�S�S� Arizona - the explosion of the U�S�S� Maine in Havana Harbor, Cuba� The ship became the symbol for the Spanish American War of 1898. In both cases, the iconographic representation renders the human toll invisible and, by the same token, elevates a burning war machine as the symbol of each attack� Structured along the lines of the battle of the Alamo, the Hearst Press first propagated the battle cry “Remember the Maine.” In this regard, the visual representation of the attack on the U�S�S� Arizona is presented in similar terms and can therefore be regarded as an event in a national historical continuum� Today, on the one hand, the above-discussed representation of the burning U�S�S� Arizona remains the symbol of the Pearl Harbor attack� This photo is reproduced on leaflet covers at the Pearl Harbor Memorial and every year it serves as accompanying photo in American news coverage on National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day� On the other hand, it has also become a discrete symbol for Japanese war mongering and has been used as additional news footage whenever a supposedly new Japanese threat emerged, e�g� after the Ehime Maru incident on February 9, 2001, or during the 1990s economic boom of the Japanese economy� Both the “Remember”-slogans and the iconographic representations thus form a simple, nationalistic reenactment of past events in the present� Therefore the Pearl Harbor memory is marked by a temporal and local proximity to a national history that employs similar “infamy tropes” (cf� Rosenberg 15)� Moreover, the Pearl Harbor narrative serves as a memory medium of a mythic history (cf� White 1997) about a wounded American nation that overcomes the wound and rises like a phoenix from the ashes in order to strike back� According to Geoffrey M� White, [b]oth history and myth are narrative genres that work to locate the self in relation to a culturally constructed social environment […] [N]arrative is designed as much for purposes of sharing and communication of memory as for individual storage and retrieval (1997: 66)� 344 M arcel h artWig This narrative is shared not only in innumerable war movies of the past and the present, amongst them classics such as Flying Tigers (David Miller 1942), Destination Tokyo (Delmer Daves 1943), or Gung Ho (Ray Enright 1943), but also in public and political rhetoric during and after World War II� Therefore, the term “Pearl Harbor” today no longer serves as a designated name for a location in the Pacific, rather it stands for the attack itself. Coordinates of time and place turn into a symbolic frame of reference in the very term “Pearl Harbor”� Therefore, the term itself could easily become shorthand for the events of 9/ 11� Not least because of the iconic template of the Pearl Harbor narrative (including the Remember-slogans and the visual representations), the layout of the most popular shots of the burning Twin Towers of September 11 bear a striking resemblance to the pictures of the burning U�S�S� Arizona (cf� White 2004)� In sum, the Pearl Harbor memory consists of both (i) the traumatic memory resulting from a national Japan angst, and (ii) a mythologic reenactment of what Richard Slotkin calls a “regeneration through violence“ (5)� Widely published pictures of the attack and eye-witness reports constitute the ‘perceived reality’ of the attack on Pearl Harbor and thereby turn the event into a specific form of reality experience. Eye-witness reports, in particular, structure a certain narrative around the logical nature of this event (i�e� the “day of infamy” as the starting point of what is now commonly understood as a “good war”), and make possible a clear-cut distinction between the attacked and the attackers (“us” and “them”)� Therefore, “December 7” is structured along the lines of American Exceptionalism and confirms the national myth of an “American people [that] in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory” by the American entry into World War II for reasons of a supposedly defensive war (Freeman, Schamel, and West 470)� It comes as no surprise that popular culture adopted this topos and embraced the Pearl-Harbor-Memory in various forms� Only three months before the 9/ 11 attacks, Disney’s Pearl Harbor, a 140 million Dollar blockbuster made with extensive Pentagon support, hit the multiplexes� The marketing for the film created a hype during the spring and summer of 2001. Rosenberg comments on the film’s aggressive advertising campaign, “Pearl Harbor memories had become so prominent and ubiquitous in American culture by the summer of 2001 that a stranger to the planet might have imagined that the bombs had just been dropped” (173)� 9/ 11: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century” (G.W. Bush) After the September 11 attacks, the renaissance of the Pearl Harbor memory, as mentioned previously, served as a shorthand to justify the American battle against a vaguely defined enemy. We know today that the talk of a “War on Terror” was not a rhetorical trope� It led to the American invasion of Afghanistan and then of Iraq. And yet, this war was first and foremost understood as a re-issue of what Stud Terkel (1985) called the last “good war”: World War Lessons and Legacies of “Pearl Harbor” and “9/ 11” 345 II� This analogy was a recurring rhetoric in the presidential speeches of then President George W� Bush� 6 It comes as no surprise that the iconic images of the Japanese attacks and the Pacific War were appropriated in the dominant representations of 9/ 11: Appeals to the historical precedent of the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor are prominent in the iconic photographs of the burning Twin Towers that were to shape the 9/ 11 memory for years� Even though those pictures may show a burning civil target, they appear to resemble the photographic compositions of the above discussed representations of the U�S�S� Maine and the U�S�S� Arizona. But why should the World Trade Center rather than the Pentagon or the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 become the symbol for the attacks? Slavoj Žižek rightly points to the process of virtualization inherent in the terrorist attacks and maintains that “the terrorists did not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but for the spectacular effect of it ” (11)� In fact, most contemporary witnesses received the news of September 11 on their TV screens� There was only a relatively small number of New Yorkers who actually experienced what is now the dominant memory of 9/ 11: the two planes crashing into the World Trade Center, people falling from its upper floors, the tumbling towers, the vast clouds of smoke and ash� Considered a “global symbol instantly recognized to stand for America” (Gillespie 5), the destruction of the WTC came close to what Americans had been anxious about ever since King Kong first climbed the Twin Towers on cinema screens in 1976. That is why the collision was first understood in terms of an overwhelming spectacle� Yet, after the “reality” of this attack sank in, the burning Towers were read in terms of a tremendous civil catastrophe; they instantly became a symbol for the ruthless brutality of the attacks� The “horror” of 9/ 11 stems from (i) the unexpected nature of the event, (ii) the symbolic erasure of an icon from New York’s skyline, (iii) the use of civil aircrafts inlcuding all their passengers as missiles, and (iv) the almost 3,000 civilian casualities� And yet, there was something “unreal” about the media representations of the events. Žižek criticizes the “derealization” of the WTC collapse: “while the number of victims - 3000 - is repeated all the time, it is surprising how little of the actual carnage we see - no dismembered bodies, no blood, no desperate faces of dying people“ (13)� This “ideological censorship” highlights the symbolic character of the burning towers� Therefore, it is safe to say that due to their unexpected nature, the terrorist attacks and especially the symbolically charged images that surrounded them are indelible� As a result, the media representations evoke emotional effects such as shock, surprise, or distress� Today, nobody is merely referring to a date when using the phrases “September 11” or “9/ 11�” Instead, the numeric descriptors function as symbolic reminders of the images of the attack - they are entangled with each other. Furthermore, as they are not showing any ethnically identifiable 6 See K� P� Schneider (2002) for a revealing study on the language of the Bush administration� 346 M arcel h artWig victims, the burning Twin Towers can serve as meaningful reminders to a multicultural society and thus can stand as the sole, easily identifyable national symbol for the various attacks of September 11� Announced as a “New Day of Infamy,“ the terrorist attacks immediately entered the realm of a national historical continuum that was first established with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor� Not only did the iconic images of 9/ 11 - the burning Twin Towers - resemble the burning U�S�S� Arizona � Also, both “Pearl Harbor” and “9/ 11” are similar in their narrative structure� Both are air attacks, caused by an “alien” enemy which disrupted the normalcy of everyday life and propelled a change in the social order of the attacked country; both are regarded as threatening to American existence (cf� Neal)� Yet, it is not to be denied that the differences between Pearl Harbor and 9/ 11 are obvious: the former is a military operation in the Pacific, almost 2.500 miles off the mainland� The latter is a set of terrorist attacks on American military and financial control centers causing nearly 3000 civilian casualities. Nevertheless, it is the psychological effect, the nation-wide anxiety of an alien enemy that links both events� Both attacks are framed as infamous and insidious acts of war - a narrative that closes the divide between Pearl Harbor and 9/ 11� Therefore, Cultural Studies discusses both events as cultural, national or collective traumata� World War II and the so-called global “War on Terror” can thus both be regarded as symptoms of an eternal state of emergency and an affirmation of a national trauma, or as Elizabeth Goren has put it: “As history has repeatedly shown, societies go to war to redress and redeem injury and trauma and as a culturally sanctioned means of mourning, especially when in a state of continuing fear” (52)� This state of emergency was again maintained by the creation of national fear of an ethnic Other� When Bush announced the year 2002 as a “year of war,“ the attacks had already been embedded in rhetorics of cultural essentialism� They were a realization of what Samuel P� Huntington recognized as the central issue in global politics in his Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996): an armed conflict between the two different cultural blocks of the Western civilization and the Islamic civilization� In the U�S�, this new Manichean mindset became visible in the opportunistic naming of “enemies of the moment” by adding potential war mongerers to the “Axis of Evil” (a modern-day version of the World War II “Axis Alliance”), a demand for strong retaliation in American foreign policy, and “a demonizing [media] coverage of bin Laden and his al-Quaeda network of terrorists” (Kellner 165)� In cultural, media, and political discourses, terrorist acts and the terrorists themselves were represented in ways that imply a simple, metonymic relationship between religious practice and ideological beliefs� In other words, greater parts of the Arab world were accused of practicing Islamic fundamentalism and therefore of supporting terrorist acts against a supposedly morally and ethically superior West� Terrorists were regarded as savages and the war against them became a civilizing mission, as was visible e�g� in the humanitarianist appeal and moral rigor in the names of the American military operations such as “Iraqi Free- Lessons and Legacies of “Pearl Harbor” and “9/ 11” 347 dom” and “Enduring Freedom�” According to Inderpal Grewal, “The Muslim as terrorist and the racialized figure of the person who ‘looks like a Muslim’ as a racial figure of the terrorist thus emerge [… as] those who are believed to provide the highest risk to the nation” (540)� This new enemy was widely advertised in mugshots of the terrorist hijackers and thus clearly marked by gender and ethnic features: dark-skinned men with black hair, bushy eyebrows and beards� The simplicity of such enemy pictures is striking� They resemble the first WWII-awareness campaigns in the media concerning the physical appearance of the Japanese after “Pearl Harbor”� Such representations of a hostile racial Other transformed the various multicultural spaces in the U�S� While the war against the aggressors happened outside the national realm, there was a certain need to emphasize national belonging and American patriotism on the inside� Whereas the multicultural community may be regarded as a conglomerate of “racialised and gendered subjects who see themselves as ‘American’ at some points and as different kinds of Americans at other times and places” (ibid. 538), a heterogeneous attitude towards individual contributions to the national community may be taken for granted� Such an attitude is marked in the ethnic belonging of the hyphenated American subject (e�g� Arab-American, Japanese-American, etc�)� Grewal emphasizes that in any state of emergency there is the need to dissolve the ethnic marker in order to tell Americans from the aggressors (540)� According to Heinz Ickstadt, in such a state of crisis there is always a pressure for consensus inside the community with regard to an explicit patriotic commitment to the U�S� (259)� After 9/ 11, Grewal observes a shift from hyphenated to singular American identities: Figs� 2, 3 (left, middle): “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs,” published in TIME on December 22, 1941� Fig� 4 (right): Widely circulated mugshots of the hijackers of Flights 11, 175, 77, and 93� FBI Press Release, September 27, 2001� <1usa�gov/ p0jbzk>� 348 M arcel h artWig America had claimed, finally, even the multicultural spaces that many believed would be able to resist national belonging to the U�S� Sikh temples posted signs that said ‘God Bless America’, assuming that religiosity attached to nationalism might provide protection against this new racism, and that disctinction between Sikhs and Muslims could be clarified (549). This commitment can also be seen in the numerous American flags people of various ethnic backgrounds wore on their shirts or waved out their windows. N.R. Kleinfield comments: “People wore their patriotism and defiance openly� A new cohesiveness, a oneness, was going to remold the character of American citizenry” (2009: A1)� After “Pearl Harbor,” many Japanese-Americans were not able to save themselves by raising the American flag. Irrespective of their individual sense of national belonging and political attitude, about 110,000 Japanese Americans from the Pacific coast were assigned numbers and relocated to one of ten internment camps: Amache (Colorado), Gila River and Poston (Arizona), Heart Mountain (Wyoming), Jerome and Rowher (Arkansas), Minidoka (Idaho), Topaz (Utah), Manzanar, and Tule Lake (California)� As the hostile Other was publicly propagated in a similar vein as after 9/ 11, several Chinese-Americans were afraid of being affected by anti-Japanese racism and violence� TIME (1941) and several other magazines published pictures showing physical differences between Chinese and Japanese men under the headline “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs” [see figs. 3 and 4]. Furthermore, Chinese-Americans expressed their patriotic commitment by wearing buttons and posting signs that indicated both their actual ethnic background and their love for America� The detained Japanese-Americans could only show a similar American allegiance by voluntarily entering the war� Most of the detained Japanese-Americans joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team - a yet unseen form of forced recruitment in the U�S� (Renov 111)� Ten years after 9/ 11, an end of this new race war is not in sight� After bin Laden’s death, the above discussed patriotism reemerged in forms of victory dances and marches in New York and Washington, D�C� The May 20 TIME featured a special report on Osama bin Laden’s death analyzing the “seeds of evil” in the “doomsday sheik’s” past� The former president George W� Bush is quoted with a statement that has to be read against the backdrop of WWII-rhetorics and Franklin Delany Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech: “The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done” (Drehle)� As this statement shows, the current state of emergency in the U�S� still rests on the fear of an ethnic Other and the possibility of sudden terrorist attacks� Accordingly, the cover of the mentioned issue of TIME aesthetically renders bin Laden’s death as part of a historical continuum that originated with WWII and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor� Lessons and Legacies of “Pearl Harbor” and “9/ 11” 349 On September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden, who was by then considered a leading figure of the “New Terrorism,“ became the face of the terrorist attacks� After his death, the “War on Terror” will not end� Despite the removal of an ideological leader, terrorists remain a vaguely defined group of enemies that will continue to be marked first and foremost by their ethnic features. Pearl Harbor and 9/ 11 as National Traumata As this article has shown, the legacy of World War II and the attack on Pearl Harbor have significantly infiltrated the trauma narrative of the 9/ 11 attacks. On September 12, the then Republican Senator of Nebraska, Charles Hagel, fittingly commented on the attacks: “This is the second Pearl Harbor. I don’t think that I overstate it” (qtd� in Rosenberg 175)� Yet, it was not only the Pearl Harbor memory that dominated media discourses and political rhetoric� Also the naming of the WTC site as a “Ground Zero,“ possibly resulting from initial news reports that compared the clouds of ash and smoke to a “mushroom cloud,“ rudely ignores the American decision to use atomic bombs in World War II� Instead the naming of the site of the former WTC complex hints at a national effort to repress U�S� military involvement in the so-called “atomic holocaust” in Japan in favor of the production of an own national trauma� After 9/ 11, Manhattan’s “Ground Zero” became a substitute term for the original name of the hypocenter of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki of August 1945 - despite the fact that the bombs were developed in the New York-based “Manhattan Project” (cf� Asada 174-206)� Both events have to be regarded as essential to narrative discourses about an American national identity� “Pearl Harbor” in “9/ 11” therefore continues the narrative of “the American century” to maintain the national identity of the U�S� as an international superpower� Thus any cultural representation that makes use of the above discussed names and rhetorics can be said to positively support the political need for a “War on Terror�“ Arthur G� Neal claims that any event which disrupts the normalcy of everyday life, propels a change in the social order of a nation, or is threatening to a nation, can be regarded as a national trauma� Regarding the anxiety of Figs. 5-8: TIME Covers of 7 May 1945, 20 August 1945, 21 April 2003, and 20 Mai 2011� (left to right)� 350 M arcel h artWig possible Japanese spies in the U�S� after the Pearl Harbor attack, possible sightings of the Japanese fleet or planes near San Francisco or even New York, the censorship of the OWI, the internment of about 110�000 Japanese-Americans, and the vilification of Japanese enemies, Neal’s term can be applied to the Pearl Harbor attacks� “September 11” caused a similar stir of emotions and the still ongoing “War on Terror�“ Today, the PATRIOT Act of October 2001 still influences decisions on national security issues and Homeland Security, established in 2002, continues to function as the driving force in realizing security efforts to protect the United States against terrorist activities� Both the war and the national security measures intruded and altered American society by revealing “the fragility of social order” (Neal 197)� According to Neal, both events can thus be regarded as national traumata� However, the term “national trauma” also emphasizes the national character of the events and therefore makes obvious the need for nationally relevant histories to tell about the event� This need to dress the “national trauma” of 9/ 11 in WWII rhetorics may also be read as the required repetition of a “good war” and the need to insist on the morally and ethically superior American nation to maintain a national identity that once was formed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This process was first and foremost furthered by the dominant media and political discourses� On the one hand, the examples discussed in this paper exemplify a media-based constructedness of “Pearl Harbor” and “9/ 11” as national traumata� They also offer working models of the national self and the enemy� On the other hand, by enforcing emotionally charged pictures that address a multiethnic community, the same examples make tangible the American national space and time� In short, they represent the past as part of a mythologically charged historical continuum that as such has never been a present� That said, “Pearl Harbor” and “9/ 11” cannot be regarded as traumatic per se ; rather, they are constructed retrospectively in a media-based and therefore social and polictical process as traumatic� Furthermore, the dominant media pictures of the events constitute a mutual frame of reference in their mode of meaning production� They further assign a compulsive repetition of those pictures and their narratives� While the politics of WWII and the “War on Terror” enter the lived-in world of their audiences via media representations, the dominant pictures of the initial reasons for both wars offer the symbols and the vocabulary that are necessary to tell about, to feel, and to experience this memory� It is exactly this procedure that assigns the compulsively repeated Pearl Harbor memory to an immovable place in the American national time� Lessons and Legacies of “Pearl Harbor” and “9/ 11” 351 Works Cited Akira, Shimizu� “War and Cinema in Japan�” The Japanese/ America Film Wars: World War II Propaganda and Its Cultural Context. 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To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city what we would never allow to be done to ourselves� Colson Whitehead As the opening credits of Spike Lee’s 2002 film 25 th Hour roll, Terence Blanchard’s haunting score swells in ominous tones� 2 Abstract images of light and darkness play across the screen and a fixed camera pointed upward captures what appears to be the sun shining in a cloudless sky� As the sky darkens, the sun transforms into a synthetic illumination: the point at which two vertical columns of light, projected by the 88 search lights that remain out of the camera’s view, converge in the night sky over Manhattan� The two towers of light, blue pillars in which dust or smoke appear to swirl, are shot from below and seem to meet in the center of the frame� It is only after several shots from this low angle and several more from inside the columns that the camera moves outward, showing the massive beams against the twinkling city skyline� The music swells and the camera moves upward and out, so that we see the now ‘legible’ memorial lights from an increasing distance: the first shot shows us the scene from New Jersey so that the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building flank the memorial lights and a second shot appears to originate from underneath the Brooklyn Bridge so that the dark expanse of the East River shimmers in the shot’s foreground. In the final image of the sequence, the camera rests upon a panorama of Manhattan, the two columns of light just left of center� When the lamenting vocals of Blanchard’s composition reach a fever pitch, the beams suddenly collapse, fading in intensity so that they disappear vertically down the screen until all that remain are the silhouettes of the surrounding buildings, their many lights shining in the darkness of a New York night� What is the emotion that the careful choreography of this opening montage is meant to evoke? We are seduced by the images’ beauty, surprised when the ambiguous visions are shown to belong to the Tribute In Light me- 1 For their critical comments, generous suggestions, and unflagging support, I wish to thank Zahid Chaudhary, Anne Cheng, Emily Hyde, Zakir Paul, Moritz Schularick, and Baerbel Tischleder� 2 25 th Hour, Dir� Spike Lee� Touchstone Pictures, 2002� All quotations come from my own transcription� 356 s arah W asserMan morial to 9/ 11, 3 and haunted by the ghostly projections that fill the cityscape before disappearing in a descent that inevitably echoes the Twin Towers’ spectacular collapse� This sequence shows us an image of New York that unsettles us with its strangeness while at the same time provoking, and perhaps satisfying, certain deep longings� For this is a post-9/ 11 New York as we want it to be: meaningful, pristine, poetic� The screenwriter remarks that the sequence causes us to “mourn for a lost city�” Such mourning, though, is complicated by the sequence’s own images, which serve as potent evidence of a city that may be haunted, but retains a dynamism and a presence that makes it anything but lost. Nevertheless, the film’s composition indeed kindles a desire for something : a longing that is as striking and as elusive as the beams of light themselves, which replicate the towers while simultaneously emphasizing their absence� To long for a home that no longer exists, and may have never existed at all, is to experience nostalgia, that sentiment of loss and displacement that fills us with the desire ( algia ) to return home ( nostos ). When a film or a novel contemplates the losses incurred on 9/ 11 in a nostalgic mode, rather than an elegiac one, it represents a specific form of mourning that mobilizes our fantasies as much as our grief; the “home” we long for is largely imagined� As Susan Stewart explains, the sadness of nostalgia “creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience” (23)� This vexing, “inauthentic” character of nostalgia differentiates it from mourning� Whereas mourning is the process by which libido is withdrawn from a deceased or departed love object, nostalgia prohibits libido from genuinely attaching to or withdrawing from any specific object. Nostalgia sustains itself by seeking an imagined time and place that constitute not a lost object, but an absence that is the very generating mechanism of desire� This form of desire, without the possibility of fulfillment, also differs from melancholia, in which an individual languishes in the refusal to grieve� 4 In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed and countless millions “experienced” the events of the day via the indelible images disseminated and endlessly replayed by the media, the nostalgic desire to grieve assumed new dimensions� Much has been said about the prelapsarian fantasies generated by 9/ 11: the idea that New York City, or the nation at large, was a harmonious, innocent place prior to the attacks on the Twin Towers� To imagine a pre-9/ 11 time or place in which we were “safe” or “united” in any coherent way is to engage in the sort of nostalgia that wears a utopian face, a “face turned toward a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality” (Stewart 23)� The ideological concep- 3 Since 2002, a light installation projecting two beams of light into the air where the Twin Towers once stood annually commemorates the victims of the 9/ 11 attacks� 4 These definitions of mourning and melancholia are standard Freudian ones. See “Mourning and Melancholia” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , Volume 14 (New York: Vintage, 1999)� No Place Like Home 357 tion of a pre-9/ 11 world was, of course, mobilized for political means� 5 But such political machinations did not invent a new sort of longing� Rather, they drew on the nostalgia that has long been cited as a foundational characteristic of New York City, one that entails a desire for a place that has disappeared or a time that is now distant� As Colson Whitehead articulates in the opening of his impressionistic ode to the city, “You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now” (3)� It would seem then, that despite the countless times we have watched the signature sequence of 9/ 11 - the streaking planes, the smoking rubble, the death clouds attending the towers’ collapse - the imposing, stoic towers remain “more real and solid” than the vast ruins of Ground Zero� Nostalgia, then, was the dubious means by which everyone could grieve as a New Yorker� Individual longing was transformed into a collective belonging that relied on the events of 9/ 11 to transcend personal memories� 6 This collective bereavement posited a utopian past now irreparably lost and was soon augmented, if not largely replaced, by a very different type of longing� The fantasy of a pre-9/ 11 way of life marked by security and unity gave way to a troubling desire not to undo the attacks, but rather to relive them� The insatiable urge to replay and re-watch the towers’ destruction, the praise for the way that New York and the world came together in response to the attacks, and the first-person “where I was” convention that is used so often to narrate the events of that day demonstrate a longing for 9/ 11� Whether this longing arises from attempts to understand the trauma of that day or to experience something “authentic,” it is evidence of a nostalgia that posits the traumatic event - rather than the victims or the towers - as the lost, loved object� The main character of Jay McInerney’s novel The Good Life , for example, channels such desires into relief work: Her initial desire to flee the city … had partially subsided as she felt herself drawn beyond the barricades … She felt strangely at home at Bowling Green, near the epicenter of the trauma that had ruined their sleep and clouded their dreams … somehow the zone was more alive in the dark hours, the work she was doing was more urgent, the sense of isolation and containment more complete� (147) If the impulse to be “near the epicenter” of the attacks can be understood in terms of a repetition compulsion in which the subject revives and prolongs the intensity of her initial experience, that impulse becomes even more clearly nostalgic in other attempts to relive 9/ 11� 5 Then President George W� Bush drew upon the notion of a utopian future-past in several of his public speeches� In his address to a Joint Session of Congress on September 21, 2001, for example, he said of the attacks: “All of this was brought upon us in a single day - and night fell on a different world , a world where freedom itself is under attack” (my emphasis)� 6 Svetlana Boym makes the related point: “Defeats in the past figure as prominently as victories in uniting the nation� The nation-state at best is based on the social contract that is also an emotional contract, stamped by the charisma of the past” (15)� 358 s arah W asserMan From Peter Eisenman’s 2002 design proposal to rebuild Ground Zero with three sets of twinned towers that appear suspended in a permanent state of implosion and collapse (fig. 1) to Robert Gober’s full-room art installation, “September Twelve,” in which lithographed copies of New York Times pages from September 12, 2001 are overlaid with drawings of nude figures in various states of embrace, artists have tried to represent the event by preserving or reenacting it� Further dramatizing this notion of reenactment, on November 25, 2009, WikiLeaks released half a million US national text pager intercepts from the 24-hour period surrounding the 9/ 11 attacks� The messages were broadcast “live” online, synchronized to the time of day they were originally sent� 7 Although the organizers of the broadcast claimed that they hoped “[the archive’s] entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism, and war,” they offer no explanation of their decision to release the messages in “real time” (“Pager Intercepts”)� Our desire to watch the events unfold once again, nearly a decade after their occurrence, suggests that we continue to yearn, nostalgically, for the very disaster that we claim to mourn� That yearning, as the WikiLeaks endeavor so clearly demonstrates, relies upon specific conceptions of both time and space� When we partake in 9/ 11 nostalgia, we attempt to revive a city and a past that now appear irreparably lost� For the majority of individuals without connection to the dead, the injured, or the displaced, grief and nostalgia would be cathected onto the World Trade Center buildings, which were transformed so suddenly into a narrative of spectacular images� The literal “hole in the familiar” that Ground Zero created made the “home pain” of nostalgia potent and pervasive� As Andreas Huyssen remarks, “the image of the twin towers simply represented home in the metropolis. Often, you first saw them approaching New York from the 7 Persons operating in a federal, official capacity usually carry US national text pagers� Messages in the WikiLeaks archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA, and NYPD exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center� See http: / / 911�wikileaks�org/ � Fig� 1: WTC Proposal, New York, 2002, by Peter Eisenman� New York Times Magazine. No Place Like Home 359 air� Year after year, you saw them in the distance driving back home from the airports in Queens, Brooklyn, or New Jersey” (160)� Thanks to the ubiquitous visibility of the New York skyline - in films, photographs, tourist guides and souvenir merchandise of all kinds - the Twin Towers could be missed by nostalgics of every ilk� This conception of “home,” shaped in large part by a mode of looking that travel, tourism and media have made widely available and amenable to individual desires, was rapidly transformed into a national idea of “homeland�” Once our gaze and our longing were attached to the Twin Towers and their spectacular destruction, the nostos of the nation was not merely an Edenic pre-9/ 11 New York but also a place of suffering, sacrifice, and glory. It was this palimpsest of nostalgia that the Bush administration funneled into a sense of collective belonging in order to justify measures including the creation of a state of emergency, the surrender of various privacies in the name of security, as well as acts of war and incidents of torture� Donald Pease explains that “the metaphor of the homeland fostered the collective representation of a vulnerable citizenry that had become internally estranged from its ‘country of origin’ and dependent upon the protection of the state” (209)� What Pease’s statement about vulnerability and estrangement makes clear is the way that the nostalgic longing for absolute presence in the face of the visceral and visible absences created on 9/ 11 could be appropriated and manipulated via metaphor and representation� In sum, 9/ 11 nostalgia is constituted by a gaze turned toward a prelapsarian time and/ or a traumatic event� Although nostalgia always depends on a directional gaze (that “face turned toward a future-past”), the monstrous visibility of the attacks on the World Trade Center, the relentless coverage by millennial media that imprinted them so thoroughly in our minds, and even the “viewing platform” erected over the mystic gulf of Ground Zero ensured that what and how we see would remain at the heart of all 9/ 11-inspired longings� To revisit or represent 9/ 11 without nostalgia, then, does not simply require an unsentimental subject who can dispense with fictions and desires. Instead, the assumption of an anti-nostalgic stance depends upon a way of looking that frees the event and its objects from a fixed position amenable to nostalgia’s insatiable yearning� Amidst the many 9/ 11 narratives that capitalize on that yearning and seek to set the event in a legible historical or psychic location, there exist works like Spike Lee’s film 25 th Hour that direct our viewing practices so as to move us away from the fixity that nostalgia requires. Lee’s film tells a story of sustained departure, one that moves toward a vanishing point where images of home and dreams of return recede into the distance� Returning to the cobalt columns of light rising upward in the opening of Spike Lee’s film, it becomes clear that any nostalgic longing the sequence inspires is complicated by its formal dimensions� Lee (and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto) juxtapose the facticity of content with the subjectivity of form, highlighting the degree to which our desires are shaped by our gaze� Although the three-and-a-half-minute sequence presents the Tribute in Light 360 s arah W asserMan memorial in a manner that might initially be called documentary, the artistic rendering of the images moves them into the realm of fiction, without imposing a clear narrative meaning. For the first minute and a half of the sequence, the images of the lights remain so abstract that we are unable to attach to them any meaning at all� This cinematic “reveal” shows just how readily an iconic image - the memorial to the Twin Towers - can be readily disassembled into meaningless, constituent parts of light and dark� The frequent jump cuts, occurring at regular intervals of eight seconds before slowing down to linger on the broader, more panoramic shots of New York City, add controlled movement to an otherwise static object� Although the visual content and music in the sequence seem designed to arouse elegiac or nostalgic sentiment, the technique calls sufficient attention to itself so as to simultaneously disrupt that sentiment� Lee’s decision to use montage here establishes a trend that continues throughout the film: a means by which the vision of a pre-9/ 11 New York or a “successful” mode of mourning are interrogated and unsettled, rather than fusing into one harmonizing perspective� The sequence as a whole seems an unsettling opening, given that 25 th Hour is not a film “about” 9/ 11, but about a petty drug dealer interacting with his family and friends� Despite this fact, 25 th Hour was heavily hyped in 2002 as the first major motion picture to candidly depict New York as it had been altered by 9/ 11� The story of a single day in the life of drug-dealer Monty Brogan, David Benioff’s novel on which the film is based focuses a narrow lens on the negotiations between a guilty man and the people he loves� Likewise, the original film script called for an intimate portrait of a man on his last day before beginning a seven-year sentence in a New York prison� Despite accusations of opportunism, Spike Lee maintains that he was ethically obligated to incorporate the events and aftermath of 9/ 11 into his film. He says of 9/ 11: It’s not in the book and it wasn’t in David Benioff’s script� I mean, the script I read was done before September 11 th . I just knew that we were going to do this film, that we were going to be shooting after September 11 th � I just thought it would be criminal on my part not to include it� So, I didn’t think of it as such a big decision� For me the big decision was how to implement September 11 th into the film. We did not want to appear like it was appended or anything like that� It had to feel organic, like it was there from the beginning� And I think we were successful in doing that (“Finest Hour”)� Lee’s comment, his desire for the devastation of 9/ 11 to seem “organic, like it was there from the beginning” might lead us to expect the film to offer a visual testimony of 9/ 11 that coalesces seamlessly with Benioff’s narrative� However, Monty’s story and that of New York City in the months after 9/ 11 are not brought together in a unified whole. Instead, the two stories push against one another and the meditations on the September attacks are marked by different visual and temporal styles� Because these meditations stand in striking formal contrast to the otherwise straightforward narrative of Monty’s final day before prison, 9/ 11 becomes, in the course of the film, an obdurate object in our field of vision. In Lee’s movie, 9/ 11 remains inassimi- No Place Like Home 361 lable for its overwhelming facticity and form is the means by which we see that efforts to “understand” the day’s events and its aftermath via a nostalgic or nationalist narrative inevitably fail� The second encounter with Ground Zero in the film works similarly to that staged in the opening credits� When Monty’s closest friends Jacob, a high school literature teacher and Frank, a Wall Street trader, meet after sunset at Frank’s Lower Manhattan penthouse apartment, we are presented with a lengthy, unflinching view of the “howling space” where the Twin Towers once stood (DeLillo 34)� The camera places us inside with the two men for a full minute before revealing that the windows of this luxury apartment overlook Ground Zero at shockingly close proximity� The camera follows behind the shadowy figures of the two men as they approach the window and a jump cut centers the large window in the frame� While the camera steadily rises so that our gaze is directed downward, between the two men who position themselves on either side of the window, the musical motif of the opening credits returns and we are shown what lies directly below for the first time� Through the window, Ground Zero emerges like a lunar landscape: all grey and blue tones with indistinct craters and alien terrain� Illuminated by the temporary lights erected for clean-up crews and construction workers, the ruins of the World Trade Center are most striking in this part of the sequence for their sheer size - a fact which Lee chooses to emphasizes by pushing his actors to the edges of the frame and allowing Ground Zero to dominate the composition� When Jacob exhales a stunned “Jesus Christ,” the camera stops moving and records, in a single take, the four-minute conversation that transpires between the two men, all the while with Ground Zero as the shot’s central focus� What Lee gives us with this sequence is a naked view of 9/ 11’s physical aftermath that cannot be romanticized or interpolated into any coherent narrative - not even into that of the film itself. The barren, uncanny expanse that we see here makes it difficult to conjure up the towers that formerly stood or the image of the victims that we know died in the event that resulted in this rubble. Even the dialogue reflects only briefly, and superficially, on the site: Jacob meekly comments, “ The Times says the air down here is bad,” and the conversation then quickly turns to the evening’s plans� The overwhelming facticity of Ground Zero is so thoroughly defamiliarizing here that it seems to impede grief and nostalgia, instead eliciting only the sustained, but relatively stoic shock that Jacob displays� If the presence of such destruction temporarily adds gravitas to the conversation that Frank and Jacob have about Monty’s fate in prison, the end of the sequence emphatically severs the link between the film’s narrative and the non-diegetic reality of Ground Zero� When their conversation concludes, Frank leaves his seat and the camera moves closer to the window� Suddenly, a jump cut appears to bring us “through” the window and to the beginning of a montage sequence very similar in form to the opening credits� 362 s arah W asserMan The montage is composed of eight rhythmically ordered shots of Ground Zero, each one present for three seconds before a jump cut proceeds to the next� The images of the towers’ exposed and deformed footprints, the debrisfilled truck beds moving slowly across provisional roads, and five luminescent, neon-clad workers raking the ashen ground presumably in search of human remains are accompanied by the musical score which includes a military drum, a lamenting Irish bagpipe and the mournful tones of a song in Arabic. This ending (after the final shot of the workers, the image simply fades to black and the next sequence is a flash-back in which Monty is interrogated by the police after his initial arrest) makes this an inassimilable sequence in which the pictures of Ground Zero stand apart in non-diegetic isolation� The music accompanying the montage reinforces the resistance of 9/ 11 to being integrated within a single narrative or fixed by a single desire. Simultaneously war cry and dirge, the military drumbeat arouses aggression while the Irish bagpipes evoke and lament overwhelming loss� The melismatic tones of the Arabic vocals remain inscrutable: at one moment the sound seems vengeful, at the next, grief-stricken� 8 When Lee considers the effect that 9/ 11 has had on Monty and his father, he also uses form in such a way that these reflections, like the opening credits and the Ground Zero sequence, stand apart from the rest of the film. However, where the previous sequences present what we might call the stark reality of New York City’s topography after the attacks, the scenes in which Monty negotiates his relationship with the city proceed along ambiguous, fantastical lines� These dream(ed) sequences call explicit attention to their construction; thereby illuminating that Monty’s desire for “home” depends upon a fiction of suture. The first of these sequences takes place when Monty visits his father’s bar, Brogan’s� The “typical” Irish pub has become an impromptu shrine to the Irish-American firefighter patrons who lost their lives in the Twin Towers� After lingering on the exterior of the bar, the camera moves inside and we are greeted by a brief montage - this time, seven shots of the different FDNY paraphernalia and mementos that decorate the bar and pay tribute to “fallen” New York firefighters. A banner that reads “Welcome Firefighters,” two stained glass windows depicting company insignias, and a cluster of photographs of the dead hung beneath a folded American flag appear in rhythmic succession before the camera cuts to Monty and his father James sitting at a table in front of an Engine 160 seal that remains visible throughout their dialogue� This blatant excess of material reminders 8 In the DVD commentary, Spike Lee says of the music, “There’s an Arabic voice here that you also heard in the opening credits� And I told Terence [Blanchard, the composer] early on that I wanted to have this voice, this hovering-over music, over New York city, and that would be the voice of how George Bush would say ‘The TaliBAAANNN� The TaliBAAANNN�’” That the voice Blanchard chose to express this sound is in fact that of Cheb Mami further supports the notion that the symbols and techniques used to represent 9/ 11 are overdetermined and contradictory, rather than firmly ascribed within a single narrative� No Place Like Home 363 helps to sustain what Monty will later criticize as his father’s “endless grief,” but initially, they alert us to the persistent tension between Monty’s personal tragedy and that of the city� As James reminisces about the past and his failures as a father in the midst of so many 9/ 11 “souvenirs,” nostalgia threatens to overwhelm both the characters. Monty’s flight from this nostalgia, into the bathroom, at first seems a complete failure: to the left of the restroom mirror hang countless firefighter patches and to the right, a postcard depicting two black silhouettes of the Twin Towers against an American flag. Next to this memento mori we can read another patch, emblazoned with the “Never Forget” slogan, an imperative that seems superfluous given the surfeit of reminders thus far. But a small scrawl on the bottom corner of the mirror catalyzes Monty and the film enters a register that transports us out of the past and into a different register where nostalgia is rebuked� After noticing the words “fuck you” written on the mirror, Monty begins an argument with his mirror image� Using a green-screen effect that enables Monty and his reflected image to talk and move independently of one another, Lee intercuts the dialogue with images of New York that create a montage that is both a rage-filled rant against the city and an homage to its diversity, beauty, and resilience� Monty, looking at the scribble, exclaims “Yeah, fuck you, too.” His reflection, suddenly animated, replies “Fuck me? Fuck you. Fuck you and this whole city and everyone in it�” The other, “real” Monty quietly exhales “no, no, no, no, no,” but this feeble admonishment does not stop the wave of anger that the mirrored Monty has released� A tide of images rolls past, illustrating in vivid color the New Yorkers and cityscapes that Monty describes� Beginning with “the panhandlers grubbing for money” and continuing on to the “Sikhs and Pakistanis bombing down the avenues in decrepit cabs” to the “Korean grocers … still no speak-e English,” the “Russians in Brighton Beach” and the “Upper East Side wives, with their overfed faces getting pulled and lifted and stretched all tight and shiny,” Monty’s tirade seems to spare no group or borough in New York� The complex staging of the scene and its dramatic break from the visual styling of the rest of the film allow the montage to impart more meaning than merely the hate component of a “love-hate relationship” with the city of New York� 9 The mirror allows, for this short span in the film, Monty to be literally split in two - one self displaces his guilt and anger onto the city through vehement disavowal, and an-other accepts that guilt in the scene’s final lines. For at the end of the sequence, the “real” Monty admonishes his reflection: “No� Fuck you, Montgomery Brogan� You had it all, and you threw it away, you dumb fuck! ” 9 In the interview cited earlier, Spike Lee says of his relationship to New York, “Well, I think that anyone who lives in New York, who’s lived here, who’s spent any time here, knows that it’s basically a love-hate relationship, you might say�” It would appear that the extra-diegetic montage is one tactic that Lee turns to in order to express this “lovehate relationship�” Another example of this is Radio Raheem’s monologue, “The Story of Love and Hate” delivered in Do the Right Thing. 364 s arah W asserMan But even this disavowal is vexed, for the sequence clearly creates an intentional dissonance for the viewer� Different camera stocks produce the saturated, beautiful images of New York’s inhabitants, and this diverse terrain is juxtaposed with the sound of Monty’s curses as well as dark, tightly constrained shots of his mirror image delivering these words� The epithet itself, of course, expresses competing emotions, as “fuck you” conveys both the desire to violate and destroy as well as the desire to merge and possess� Monty’s tirade is an extended exercise in disidentification - a shoring up of the self, of what he calls his authentic “Irish ass” against the panoply of others who he feels unrightfully populate and threaten his imagined New York� But the fact that these “others” arise only when Monty examines himself in the mirror remind us that “the Chelsea boys,” “the Uptown brothers” and the “Bensonhurst Italians” are projections: although they are “real” in the visual lexicon of the film, they are figuratively contained within Monty. 10 The structure of the sequence therefore mandates that any emotion directed “outward” at the city is literally reflected back onto the film’s protagonist. Moreover, the positioning of the camera in the restroom disorients us, so that even the viewer’s gaze is radically unfixed by the conclusion of the montage. When we look straight on at Monty’s reflection, it is as if we have assumed Monty’s place at the sink and the face that delivers the monologue must therefore be a reflection of our own. But the darkness that surrounds Monty and the narrow focus of these shots offer no clues as to which Monty we are, in fact, seeing� Alternating between shots that put us in Monty’s place and those that confuse us as to what that place is, the sequence deprives us of any easy point of identification. Although the scene reaches its emotional climax when Monty directly addresses, for the first time in the film, the events of 9/ 11, Lee uses form to suggest that this outburst remains insufficient and incomplete. Monty calls out “Fuck Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and backward-ass, cave-dwelling fundamentalist assholes everywhere� On the names of innocent thousands murdered, I pray you spend the rest of eternity with your whores roasting in a jet-fuel fire in hell. You towel-headed camel jockeys can kiss my royal Irish ass! ” It is during these enraged racist remarks that for the first and only time in the entire film, Lee incorporates images from the news media; rather than original montage images, we see familiar clips of Osama bin Laden and shots of a newspaper’s front page that declares bin Laden “Wanted Dead or Alive�” These stock images give us the impression that we have reached a limit to Monty’s visual imaginary - the facticity of 9/ 11 demands a non-diegetic encounter with “reality” that the film stages with these citational clips. However, while these images may not be fully assimilated into a uniform piece, Lee does re-territorialize them via context and editing� The four cuts that offer different views of the newspaper, for instance - at varying distances 10 The point that disidentification may be manufactured in the subconscious and the perception of difference therefore rooted within the recognition of similarity, has been argued in various contexts (e�g� by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble , Anne Cheng in The Melancholy of Race , and Diana Fuss in Identification Papers )� No Place Like Home 365 and focused on different elements of the front page - defamiliarize the wellknown image� Amalgamated with the Technicolor, idiosyncratic tableaux of Monty’s imagined New York, the newsreels and newspaper become subjective artifacts� Like the news media that loses its objective status, the idea of his hometown that Monty constructs and for which he longs is shown to be a fantasy projection� Elements of this montage reappear at the film’s conclusion, once again generating visual and emotional dissonance� Monty, bloodied from the beating that he has willingly received at his best friend’s hands in the hopes that disfigurement will protect him in prison, leans his head against the passenger side window of his father’s car as they begin their journey to the jail� The camera cuts from Monty gazing out the window to what, ostensibly, he sees on the other side of the glass� The faces that Monty imagined earlier, of the Korean grocers, the Pakistani taxi driver, and the African-American basketball players stare back in silence, following the movement of the car with their eyes and smiling cryptic, ambiguous smiles� Their appearance suggest that Monty’s projections mourn his departure, and that Monty is at last able to see beauty in what he previously despised� But these visions with their mysterious expressions make it impossible to tell whether these “other” New Yorkers sympathize with Monty, mock him, or fail to see him at all� If Monty conjures up these images - the symbols of a collective and a home that has never existed in the particular way he imagines - his nostalgic longings are thwarted by the ambivalence of their gaze� The projections have been granted the power to look back, and the indecipherable expressions on their faces as the camera pans from right to left refuse to satisfy the nostalgic desire for comfort or clarity� The directional gaze is complicated even by a small gesture Monty makes to inscribe himself onto the world before his departure� When the car stops at a traffic light next to a New York City bus, a boy from inside looks out, waves to Monty and traces his name “Tom” into the condensation on the bus’s window� The boy has written his name so that it appears legible from the inside but backwards to the camera positioned outside the bus: “moT�” Monty responds by writing his own name onto the window of his father’s car, tracing the letters backwards so that they are properly intelligible to an outside observer� The similarity of the two names, the collapse of inside and outside, and the game that is played with direction highlight the tenuous spatial and temporal constructions on which the film’s legibility depends. In another desperate gesture, Monty’s father offers his son the chance to flee from his prison sentence: “Give me the word, and I’ll take a left turn […] Take the GW Bridge and go west�” Although Monty declines the offer, he leans back with his eyes closed and listens to his father describe the simple, happy life that Monty could lead if he were to escape New York and start anew in smalltown America� This new life is depicted in a gorgeous dream sequence, featuring panoramic shots of the changing landscape, tender moments shared between father and son during the journey, and even an undeniably overthe-top image of the biracial family Monty has created, standing in front of 366 s arah W asserMan a white picket fence� Even if the dream sequence is clearly intended as an impossible fiction, we are left to wonder whose dream this is: is it Monty who dreams of this happy ending while he sleeps or does he visualize the images while his father narrates? Or is this James’ dream, which he uses to sustain himself in the face of his son’s figurative death? If the dream is not entirely attributable to either James of Monty, it is because the dream is also a national one - an “American dream” that posits a future-past in which Monty departs New York in order to return to “a simpler place and time�” Although the dream sequence depicts moments of intimacy between the two men, and later between Monty and his girlfriend, it is a fantasy largely composed from stock images of American idealism: the road trip, the sublime desert, and the frontier as a locus for rebirth. It is an utterly conflicted dream: a dream of escape that never moves beyond the predetermined limits of our nation and its already written-narratives� The dream and its inherent nostalgia are quickly undermined - revealed to be an implausible fantasy once Lee returns us to the car as it exits the highway toward the prison� The very last image of the film is Monty, who lies still with his eyes closed as his father concludes his tale of “the life that came so close to never happening,” a line he repeats in an incantatory fashion while the car rolls past the George Washington Bridge� The dream deferred, we nonetheless remain in a somnambulist’s haze� What is left, in the absence of the American dream is the refusal to awaken and another, less idealistic departure� 11 Because the desires for home have been formally deconstructed and exposed as composite, untenable fictions, the film positions us so that we can find little comfort in personal or national nostalgia� We end 25 th Hour like Monty: leaving the city, turned away from the aftermath of 9/ 11, with our eyes closed to the possibility of false desires� 11 As Cathy Caruth points out in Unclaimed Experience, leave-taking enables us to see the way that we are implicated in each other’s traumas; we might say that this sequence not only binds the narrative of Monty’s trauma with that caused by 9/ 11, but also forces a flight on the part of the viewer - a movement between the film’s diegesis and our own history� No Place Like Home 367 Works Cited 25 th Hour. Dir� Spike Lee� Touchstone Pictures, 2002� Film� “9/ 11 Tragedy Pager Intercepts�” WikiLeaks�org� November 24, 2009� Access 15 September 2010� <http: / / wikileaks�org>� Boym, Svetlana� The Future of Nostalgia � New York: Basic Books, 2001� Butler, Judith� Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990� Caruth, Cathy� Unclaimed Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996� Cheng, Anne� The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001� DeLillo, Don� “In the Ruins of The Future�” Harper’s Magazine (December 2001): 33-40� Do the Right Thing. Dir. Spike Lee. Universal Pictures, 1989. Film. “Finest Hour, The Spike Lee Interview�” DVDtalk�com� January 16, 2003� Access 15 September 2010� <http: / / www�dvdtalk�com>� Fuss, Diana� Identification Papers: Readings on Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1995� Huyssen, Andreas� Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory � Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003� McInerney, Jay� The Good Life � New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006� Pease, Donald E� “From Virgin Land to Ground Zero�” Dissent from the Homeland: Essays After September 11 � Eds� Stanley Hauerwas, and Frank Lentricchia� Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003� Stewart, Susan, On Longing � Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993� Strachey, James, ed� The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol� 14� New York: Vintage, 1999� Whitehead, Colson� The Colossus of New York � New York: Random House, 2003� J aMes d orson “9/ 11” and the Rhetoric of Rupture What happened on September 11, 2001, that date which has inscribed itself on the global imagination as “9/ 11,” the first calendared stigma of the twenty-first century? Although few dispute what Don DeLillo has called the “raw event” - the Real horror of the devastation that killed nearly 3,000 people - to date there is no consensus on the meaning of that event� Did it constitute a criminal act, or was it rather a declaration of war, as George W� Bush maintained in his first address to the nation after the attacks? Was the event an expression of a Huntingtonesque “clash of civilizations,” of religious fundamentalism, or the result of worldwide socioeconomic inequities? Was it predictable, already acted out in countless Hollywood movies, or was it something unimaginable, “A Failure of the Imagination,” as Thomas Friedman wrote in his op-ed piece for The New York Times ? And did it have a precedent? Did it make sense to compare it with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or was it more closely related to another world-historical September 11, the 1973 CIAbacked coup in Chile that put Augusto Pinochet into power? Was it unprovoked, or was it a case of “chickens coming home to roost”? Should it even be described as an “event,” with its connotations of change and rupture, or was it rather a “spectacle,” a media event perfectly executed and endlessly repeated on television? Did it represent “The End of Our Holiday From History,” as George Will wrote in The Washington Post the next day? Was it perhaps a great work of art, as Karl Heinz Stockhausen claimed to public uproar? Or did it actually mark the end of postmodern irony, as Roger Rosenblatt insisted� 1 And what should we even call the attacks, because “[w]hen you say ‘September 11’ you are already citing,” as Derrida said, and this citation implies a retributive logic of its own which, if nothing else, the use of scrap metal from the ruins of the World Trace Center to build a warship (the U.S.S. New York ) has made unquestionably clear (85)? 2 The questions that “9/ 11” raises are rife with contention and loaded with inflammatory political significance. But if there can be no agreement over the signification of the event, then at least we might agree that few events demonstrate so well - and in view of the recent culture wars in the U�S�, so dramatically - the yawning gap between what happens and how we make sense of it� With the attacks now exactly a decade behind us, it is becoming increasingly easier to detach ourselves from the drama of interpretation that it precipitated� Still, while the dramatic reading of the event by the Bush 1 See Roger Rosenblatt, “The Age of Irony Comes to an End,” Time , September 24, 2001� 2 See “Ship Built With WTC Steel Comes to Namesake City,” The New York Times , November 2, 2009� 370 J aMes d orson administration by now has been vehemently dissected and denounced, the field of American Studies has been slower to gauge its own reactions to both the “raw event” itself and the official interpretation of it. Perhaps the time has come now to ask what motivated and conditioned the predominant response to “9/ 11” in our own field of study, what assumptions this response was based on, and what it entailed� As interesting as it is to learn what critics have to say about “9/ 11,” we must also ask what “9/ 11” has to say about critics� The objective of this essay is therefore not to shed more light on “9/ 11” - flooded as it already is with critical light - but to raise questions about the Americanist interpretation of it, which in turn raises serious questions about what Amy Kaplan in her 2003 presidential address to the American Studies Association described as the “method of exposure” in American Studies (3)� I. Before we can address this methodological question, however, we must first recall the dominant interpretation in the U�S� of what happened on the morning of September 11, 2001� In both the Bush administration and mainstream media, and subsequently also in the general public once the immediate shock had waned, the attacks were not just interpreted in the symbolic order of language and meaning, where all such events must be made sense of, but also dramatically intercepted in the mythological order of the nation� Even more than just a horrendous breach of national security, a vindictive wakeup call to a country that had been lulled to sleep by a false sense of insulation, the attacks were considered an assault on something as abstract as “freedom” itself� Now the world was no longer the same but one “where freedom itself is under attack,” as Bush ominously claimed in his response to the attacks� 3 It was consequently not only those killed or wounded in the attacks and their relatives who were affected by them, but also the narrative (in which “freedom” is a keyword) that makes people “American,” the glue that makes the imagined community of the nation cohere, which had come under attack� “All of America was touched,” Bush asserted, expressing a feeling that was reinforced by the ensuing spate of flag-waving and chest-thumping patriotism� The meaning of the attacks was trumpeted loud and clear by the administration and in the media� It was shed of ambiguity and uncertainty in public discourse, where calls for national unity drowned out every other voice, and “moral clarity” became the new watchword� If the intoxicating force of national mythology had slumbered through the booming 1990s, stupefied by the collapse of the Cold War paradigm, it had now reawakened with a vengeance� But of course there was no “natural” reason for any of this� Clarity always comes at the price of reality, in which nothing is pregiven, every meaning constructed and contested� The sense of crisis and emergency, and the need 3 See Bush’s “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,” September 20, 2001� “9/ 11” and the Rhetoric of Rupture 371 for decisive action to deal with it, was not a necessary or inevitable result of the attacks� Rather, as Frank Kermode writes in The Sense of an Ending , “[c]risis is a way of thinking about one’s moment, and not inherent in the moment itself” (101)� The attacks could therefore have been interpreted in a number of different ways that need not have involved national mythology at all� In order to perceive the rush of real events as having a bearing on a nation’s sense of itself, one must look through the right mythopoeic lenses� The government might have chosen a number of other interpretations that would not have struck such a chord in the national register� Seen through different lenses, the attacks might have been regarded as but another disaster in the ongoing tragedy of life� Or they could have been viewed in the context of the violent upheavals that shake the world on a regular basis in an era of global capitalism and alienating social change� While a crisis might certainly be prompted by historical events, it is only through our interpretation of them that events acquire the significance of a crisis. It is not the historical events themselves that precipitate a crisis but our narrative understanding of them that does� For Kermode, a crisis is a way of endowing reality with meaning that is closely related to the apocalyptic fictions of the past, a form of closure and emplotment that humanizes the horrors of purely successive time, something “which helps us to make sense of and to move in the world” (37)� As the etymological meaning of crisis (from the Greek krinein ) suggests, the description of a situation as a crisis is tantamount to passing judgment on that situation, and a far cry from a disinterested observation� As such, other judgments could have been passed on the September 11 attacks, ones that might have questioned the premises of liberalism, cast doubt on the legitimacy of global capitalism, or, as Judith Butler suggested, bring about “a transformation in our sense of international ties that would crucially rearticulate the possibility of democratic political culture” ( Precarious Life 40)� For this reason, we should not limit ourselves to ask what a crisis implies - in the case of “9/ 11,” a resurgent nationalism and transformed ideological landscape - but also question and scrutinize the very construction of something as a crisis, and in particular the interests that motivate this construction� For the two principle actors involved in the September 11 attacks and their interpretation - the perpetrators and the Bush administration - the answer to this question is fairly obvious� The true aim of terrorism is not the civilians it targets but the symbolic order that legitimates a given state� This was presumably the reason why al Qaeda directed their attacks explicitly at the symbols of the U�S� economic, political, and military power, respectively� Indeed, if an act of terrorism fails to inflict a wound on the symbolic order, it will not even be considered terrorism� This is why terrorism relies exclusively on the government and media, which provide it with significance beyond the immediate destruction that it occasions� In this way, it can be distinguished both from crime, which usually has no bearing on the symbolic order, and from war, in which the target is military and the objective is to overcome force with force� The rationale for terrorism is precisely that the opposition sees no hope for changing the system by peaceful means, and is too weak 372 J aMes d orson to change it by military ones. As a character in the Palestinian film Paradise Now says, echoing a conversation in Gillo Pontecorvo’s acclaimed The Battle of Algiers : “If we had airplanes, we wouldn’t need martyrs�” In other words, terrorism is not a demonstration of force but an expression of powerlessness� It compensates for its lack of force by turning its wrath on the ideological system of the state in the anticipation that the state in retaliation will reveal its true colors, the repressive force that ultimately maintains a given order� If the state takes the terrorist bait - as did the Bush administration, hook, line, and sinker, with its declaration of a so-called “war on terror” - the dramatic exhibition of the force of law that normally is cloaked by the symbolic order will eventually corrode the legitimacy of the state in the face of its citizens� This is the crisis that terrorism seeks to provoke: effectively, it aims to break up the matrimonial relationship between nation and state, the imagined and the real of a given order� If the force upholding the law and order of the state was visible in the first place, and not obscured by the mythological significations that justify it, then terrorism would be pointless� It seeks to win over the spectators for whom it stages its violent spectacles by forcing the state to overreact and thus become visible behind its ideological cover� This is the game of hide and seek that terrorism plays with state power� However, beyond the obvious ethical concerns that terrorism raises, it is also strategically flawed. Violence alone is not capable of breaking up the symbolic order of the liberal capitalist state, as Antonio Gramsci knew well when he made the famous distinction between the cultural “war of position” and the material “war of maneuver,” where the former is a precondition for the success of the latter� Terrorism may negate a position, but it does not suggest a counterposition� The recourse to terrorism by definition means that one has relinquished the possibility of a “war of position” in favor of pure eschatological negation� As such, terrorism is not only literally self-destructive (in the case of suicide attacks), but also in the sense that it destroys its own chances for success in the hegemonic contest of positions that inevitably follow in the wake of negation� Consequently, in the symbolic void that ensues, the ideological field is bound to be resutured by those with enough political and economic power to do so� The rupture that a terrorist attack precipitates is thus more than likely to benefit the dominant class, which in the midst of ideological turmoil may seize the opportunity to ram through desired changes� 4 Moreover, the “wound” that terrorism inflicts in the symbolic order further authorizes the state to make security its new legitimizing fantasy� Because this allows the state to reassert its force in the protection of its subjects, terrorism in effect precipitates a death match between itself and the state at the cost of the general public� Instead of an 4 This was in fact the scenario that unfolded in the aftermath of “9/ 11” when neoconservatives around the New Citizenship Project, a Republican think tank, saw their chance to implement their Project for the New American Century � “9/ 11” and the Rhetoric of Rupture 373 auspice of new times to come, terrorism ultimately signifies an endgame, a sign that the desire for social change has been replaced with the desire for mutual destruction� But while terrorists may stage their attack in a way that optimizes its chances of being received in the symbolic order, its reception is finally beyond their control� Most have the resources to create a spectacle, but few have the resources needed to influence and direct its reception by the public. Perhaps only the state apparatus - and the corporate interests that increasingly manipulate it - has this power, to the degree that it is possible to disseminate and command a narrative in the first place. 5 However, this makes little difference when the state (and those in the government who administer it) shares with terrorism the need to interpret events like the September 11 attacks in mythological terms� The mythological realm is where the state intercepts events in order to let them play out in the national imaginary instead of them having a direct impact on its institutions and activities� To view the attacks as directed against the principles of the state and not its actions means that those principles come up to revision and not the actions� In the case of the U�S�, this meant defending the ideas of freedom and democracy instead of its worldwide military, political, and economic dominance� It is quite possible that a challenge to one’s principles may change one’s actions, but it is not necessarily so, nor is the change likely to take immediate effect� The nation-state thus always has a vested interest in shifting attention from the state to the nation� Indeed, if the Bush administration had not interpreted the attacks as a blow from the “enemies of freedom” - to use Bush’s convenient vocabulary again - it might well have been perceived as a blow from the “enemies of capitalism” or the “enemies of imperialism,” which of necessity would have sparked a completely different public debate, where the state may have been called upon to defend its interests in the Middle East or the disparity between rich and poor countries� However, even as containing events within the boundaries of national mythology is crucial for the nation-state, the state also chooses to play the destructive game of terrorists because it cannot resist the temptation to assert its own force� The greater the perceived threat to a state is, the less it needs a mythological pretense to legitimize its use of force� What a state therefore loses in the realm of “right” from a terrorist attack it gains in the realm of “might�” Nothing illustrates this better than when journalist Ron Suskind reported an encounter with a senior Bush aide who told him: “’We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality’�” To create ones own reality is the ultimate sovereign act, in which the gap between doing and done is closed� It suggests a quasi-ontological divine power that creates and 5 There is, of course, never an exact correspondence between what is said by one agent and what is heard, believed, experienced, or repeated by another� But if ideology is unable to work through a direct process of “interpellation” - as Louis Althusser is criticized for arguing - but instead is a question of how meaning is perpetually interpreted and negotiated, then one party is nevertheless bound to have the upper hand in this process of semantic negotiation� 374 J aMes d orson controls, where questions of right and wrong are silenced by the supreme authority of state power� If the mythological order of the nation obscures the relationship between people and state, it also shields those people from the state’s full exertion of force, and as long as the state has to uphold its appearance of right, it needs to restrain its might� Since the force that the U�S� uses to secure its hegemonic position in the world is encumbered with the task of appearing legitimate (one of the upsides of liberalism), it is required to hold up the freedom torch with one hand even as it clobbers its enemies with the other� But when the September 11 attacks were perceived as a national security threat, the state had a unique opportunity to put the freedom torch aside and slacken the reins of its own ruling fantasies� In this way, the perceived threat brought about an emergency that greatly facilitated the creation of a new domestic and geopolitical “reality�” 6 II. From the above discussion of what terrorists and the state each stood to gain from the construction of the September 11 attacks as a national crisis, we now turn to what stakes our own embattled discipline had in this interpretation� If there is a certain disconcerting irony in the knowledge that the liberal capitalist state and those who seek its destruction both had a strong interest in seeing the September 11 attacks as a rupture in the national order, one that struck at the heart of what Americans supposedly believe and value, the irony was not lessened by the fact that prominent Americanists too shared this interest� The reading of “9/ 11” in American Studies that the remainder and greater part of this essay will focus on is that demonstrated by the generation of “New Americanists,” who in the late 1980s usurped the myth-and-symbol paradigm in the field. Whereas the first Americanists in the Myth and Symbol School notoriously played a role in constructing a postwar mythology of national innocence and exceptionalism, New Americanists have spent much of their critical energy on tearing it down again� 7 Although programmatically unprogrammatic, this group of scholars - whose methods and assumptions, it should be added, now dominate the field - has focused as much on national identity as its predecessors, only now with the valences reversed. Whereas the first Americanists searched for myths and symbols of national coherence, regardless of how misconceived or deceptive they considered them, New Americanists searched for fragmentation, for the cracks and fissures in the ideological edifice of the nation that would once 6 With the state’s force thus more visible, it is no wonder that notions like Michel Foucault’s conception of biopolitics and Giorgio Agamben’s resuscitation of Carl Schmitt’s idea of the “state of exception” have become academic buzzwords since “9/ 11�” 7 The disciplinary history of American Studies is complicated and rife with contention, as well as a perpetual source of metadiscourse� For a recent account and critique of the fundamental shift in American Studies from the Myth and Symbol School to the New Americanists, see Johannes Voelz’ Transcendental Resistance discussed later in this essay� “9/ 11” and the Rhetoric of Rupture 375 more make visible the antagonisms of race, gender, and class that the liberal Cold War consensus had swept under the carpet� Whereas earlier, the focus had been on national uniqueness, on how the U�S� was a historical aberration from the imperial and stratified societies of Europe, now the focus was on historical continuity with the empires of old, and especially on the Cultures of United States Imperialism , as a seminal 1993 volume of New Americanist criticism edited by Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan was titled� Neither the label “postnational,” which gained traction during the 1990s, culminating in a collection of essays suggestively called Post-Nationalist American Studies , nor the more recent “transnational turn” have managed to separate the focus in American Studies from its national namesake� As both of these concepts arose in reaction to the constraints and exclusions of the national fixation that dominated Cold War research in the field, they too are inherently tied up with the fate of the nation� 8 Consequently, when the Bush administration interpreted the attacks on September 11 in mythological terms, New Americanists did not offer alternative readings but instead embraced such interpretations as a chance to deliver yet another blow to the Virgin Land Myth, which ever since Henry Nash Smith’s publication of Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth in 1950 had been a cornerstone in U�S� cultural understanding� Although a gross misrepresentation of the land - basically expressing the idea that the North American continent was uninhabited when Europeans reached its shores - the book nevertheless served as a ground for the belief in American Exceptionalism� However, as Donald Pease - the front-runner in the New Americanist charge against the myth-and-symbol model - argues in “The Global Homeland State: Bush’s Biopolitical Settlement,” the Virgin Land Myth was based on a historical sense of inviolability that made it unable to deal with the violation experienced during the September 11 attacks� 9 Rather than criticizing the Bush administration for inserting the attacks into a mythological framework in the first place, thus precluding both local and global frameworks, Pease’s reading instead aimed to draw out the logical consequences of this interpretation� While Bush viewed the attacks as a “wound to our 8 The label “postnational” became popular at a time when it began to seem plausible that the circumscribed space of the nation would be superseded in the near future by that of the global marketplace, as a range of economic, political, and technological developments were transferring power from the sovereign state onto an intangible network of global actors� As a concept, it was meant to performatively bring about what it named, a new era released from the clutches of nationalism� The idea of the “transnational,” on the other hand, is a result of the continuous search for positions that are not contained within the national one, as New Americanists consider such positions irredeemably tainted by national ideology� Winfried Fluck sums up this rationale in the following way: “Since power is so all-pervasive within the nation-state that it can easily interpellate individuals into subject positions, the only way left to evade this subjection is to go outside the nation-state” (2007: 25)� 9 A slightly revised version of this article was later reprinted in Pease’s The New American Exceptionalism (2009)� 376 J aMes d orson country” 10 that called for retaliation, Pease saw it as a deadly wound to the Virgin Land Myth, one which “precipitated a ‘reality’ that the national metanarratives could neither comprehend nor master” (2)� This interpretation was consonant with how Richard Slotkin in the final volume of his revisionist trilogy of the American West conceived of a disruptive historical moment, where a “myth/ ideological system” is faced with “historical contingencies” so severe or abrupt that they “produce a crisis that cannot be fully explained or controlled by invoking the received wisdom embodied in myth� At such moments of cognitive dissonance or ‘discontent,’ the identification of ideological principles with the narratives of myth may be disrupted and a more or less deliberate and systematic attempt may be made to analyze and revise the intellectual/ moral content of the underlying ideology” (6)� In The New American Exceptionalism , Pease echoes this view of rupture and revision when he writes in his introduction that “traumatic events precipitate states of emergency that become the inaugural moments in a different symbolic order and take place on a scale that exceeds the grasp of the available representations from the national mythology” (5)� Yet for Pease, the revisions that the traumatic shock on September 11 entailed did not attempt to reformulate a social compact between the state and its citizenry, as much as suspend that compact in what he variously refers to as “Bush’s Homeland Security State,” “Bush’s Biopolitical Settlement,” and “Bush’s State of Exception” (2009: 4, 173, 181). 11 As troubling as a state of exception is, and as bleak as the Bush years were for American liberals, there was nevertheless cause for optimism on the Left� When the state unleashes the force of law without the law, as the Bush administration did at home and abroad, it cannot avoid the concomitant risk of demonstrating that the condition of law is nothing but force itself� Accordingly, when the Bush administration was perceived to have made an exception to the liberal democratic rule that it promoted, it inadvertently called attention to the fact that this rule was predicated on the violent exception, and had been so from the first Indian genocides to the invasion of Iraq� Already in 1922, Carl Schmitt famously observed that “[t]he exception is more interesting than the rule� The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception” (15)� It was this new visibility of the rule that provided encouragement to those critics who had sought to lift the veils of national ideology� In The Terror Dream , Susan Faludi expresses this sense of optimism in her journalistic assessment of the political environment after “9/ 11�” Her otherwise bleak account ends on the following upbeat note: “We 10 “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People” delivered on September 20, 2001� 11 Pease accordingly sees the transformed national space as analogous to the “exceptional space that Justice Marshall had called a ‘domestic dependent nation’ in his 1831 ruling on the rights of the Cherokees,” where instead of “sharing sovereignty with the state, U�S� citizens were treated as denizens of a protectorate that the State of Exception defended rather than answered to” ( The New American Exceptionalism 169)� “9/ 11” and the Rhetoric of Rupture 377 live at a moment of great possibility� By returning us to the original trauma that produced our national myth, the attacks on 9/ 11 present us with a historic watershed: faced with a replay of our formative experience, we have the opportunity to resolve the old story in a new way that honors the country and its citizens” (295-96)� This was how the reading of the September 11 attacks as a national rupture could serve the New Americanist project, just as it served the aim of terrorism, although now with critique instead of violence as the means for disruption - of bringing about a new order, one no longer structured and constrained by a national frame of reference, but this time one that was postnational, transnational, or cosmopolitan� In this spirit, Pease ends his essay on “9/ 11” with a vague suggestion of an “order to come,” where the people of the world will “play the part of articulating alternatives to the existing order” of the “Global Homeland” that has disenfranchised them (18). This new order will supposedly emerge once “the global state of emergency state is itself exposed as the cause of the traumas it purports to oppose” (18). In other words, when the ideological facade of the state is penetrated and the state is revealed for what it is - “the cause of the traumas it purports to oppose” - then we will see the emergence of a new democratic order� The rupture that “9/ 11” was presented a “watershed” for Faludi because it disclosed the violence from which the nation derived, thereby making it possible to redefine its founding premises. But if the rupture of “9/ 11” exposed the violence that the Virgin Land Myth disavowed, the task for Pease was now to expose the violence that the Global Homeland obscures and legitimates� The keyword in this logic of social change is visibility� The culture of imperialism in the U�S� works to sanction a reality that without the apologetics of this culture would of necessity be different� The September 11 attacks were a case in point because, according to Pease, they represented the uncanny return (to visibility) of the nation’s founding violence� 12 There is a distinct messianic undertone to such arguments, a disruptive rationale of Benjaminian Jetztzeit and dialectical images, which Pease makes clear in The New American Exceptionalism when, for instance, he discusses the “revolutionary moment” of the Rodney King film as “images from an unacknowledged past [that] suddenly burst into the present as if rising from the wrongs suffered at the hands of dominant fantasy” (39)� The violence of September 11 could then be seen as nothing but a dramatic manifestation of the abrupt and disruptive return of past injuries that revisionist historians like Slotkin and New Americanists like Pease had tried to produce all along� 13 12 As Pease claims, the September 11 “violation assumed the form of the forcible dislocation of a settled population,” which resembled “the violent removal of occupants from their site of residence,” and therefore “recalled the suppressed historical knowledge of the United States’ origins in the devastation of Native peoples’ homelands” (2003: 5)� 13 Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence from 1973 was a landmark in revisionist histories of the U�S� that very effectively disclosed the violent realities of westward expansion that Smith’s Virgin Land had elided� 378 J aMes d orson Yet if the new visibility of imperial violence was a cause for optimism, because it necessitated a revision of exceptionalist beliefs, it was also a cause for disconcertion� What did it mean that the visibility of empire was also embraced by the state (then controlled by neoconservatives), which now proudly displayed its imperial nature - in both “shock and awe” speech and action - instead of disguising it, and how could this disclosure so long desired by New Americanists possibly result in a “Global Homeland State” instead of the new democratic order that they had anticipated? As Amy Kaplan notes, this curious volte-face made her “wonder about the limits of my own approach, which we might call a method of exposure, one that reveals the repressed violence embedded in cultural productions or that recovers stories of violent oppression absent from prior master historical narratives” (3)� In contrast to the first Americanists, who likewise criticized (if they also simultaneously constructed) national myths for obscuring the realities of modern capitalist society, New Americanists maintained that U�S� culture was permeated by imperialistic ideology, which consequently made the dominant New Critical approach to literature in the Myth and Symbol School untenable� From what Lawrence Buell has called a “hermeneutics of empathy,” in which the critic discovered modes of resistance in the ambiguities and doubts that great writers expressed about their culture, New Americanists turned to a “hermeneutics of skepticism” that no longer considered the realm of culture as separate from that of power, but rather as part and parcel of a pervasive culture of imperialism, whose forms of complicity with the official ideology New Americanists strived to expose (35)� But if the New Americanist objective was to make visible the realities of imperial power, what did the Bush administration’s embrace of this power tell us about this objective in the first place? And why did “exposure” not automatically entail a social revolution? The answer is suggested by Winfried Fluck in his essay on “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism,” in which he argues that the radicalism assumed by New Americanists (and in the humanities in the U.S. today in general) is by definition cultural, in contrast to earlier forms of political radicalism which, for instance, dominated the intellectual atmosphere of the Progressive Era or the 1960s student movements� This shift towards “cultural radicalism” was occasioned by “a redefinition of power as exerted not by agents or institutions of the state but by the system’s cunning ways of constituting ‘subjects’ or ascribing ‘identities’ through cultural forms,” where domination therefore was “no longer attributed to the level of political institutions and economic structures, but to culture” (55f�)� While the myth-and-symbol critics had regarded culture as separate from politics, in New Americanist criticism it became the key battlefield, since this was where the insidious effects of power and domination were most radically felt, not just in social terms but in terms of subjectivity and the psyche itself. Although the final aim of New Americanists presumably is political and social - although they rarely flesh this out - their immediate purpose is cultural, to “change the hegemonic self-representation of the United States’ culture,” as Pease defined it in “New Americanists: Re- “9/ 11” and the Rhetoric of Rupture 379 visionist Interventions into the Canon” (1990: 32)� Because culture is politics and vice versa, radical cultural transformations are supposed to be tantamount to radical transformations in politics, and since a political revolution is impossible as long as the internalized structures of domination remain intact - what Fluck calls the “all-pervasive, underlying systemic element that constitutes the system’s power in an ‘invisible’ but highly effective way” - the objective must first and foremost be to expose and disrupt the dominant culture (1998: 56f.). In order to reach this goal, New Americanists have strived to replace what myth-and-symbol critic Leo Marx retrospectively has called the “doctrine of doubleness” that was at the heart of his school’s critical approach (2005: 130). This method allowed the first Americanists to appropriate midnineteenth century literature and set it against their own cultural environment as a critical continuum in American society� It favored the “ideal” over the “real,” which for Pease was precisely the problem with Lionel Trilling’s Liberal Imagination � Because Trilling disconnected the cultural and the political sphere, meaning that “an otherwise politically engaged liberal subject can experience the disconnection between what commits him and the place where commitment can be realized,” it was possible to experience a “surrogate fulfillment” of political ideals in the cultural realm while remaining passive in the political one (1990: 8). In contrast, New Americanists aimed to burst the autonomous bubble within which myth-and-symbol scholarship was understood to operate� According to Pease, “New Americanists separate their discipline from the liberal consensus” when their work “continues the struggles taking place outside the academy or realizes the connection between their disciplinary practices and oppositional political movements,” (1990: 19)� However, with the theoretical refusal of the separation of spheres, where cultural struggle becomes equivalent to political struggle, in practice, this separation has ironically returned through the backdoor of the “cultural radicalism” of New Americanist scholarship� While there can be no question about the interrelationship between culture and politics, many questions can be raised as to the nature of this relationship� Cultural radicalism is based on the assumption that interventions in culture are interventions in politics� But is this truly the case? Pierre Bourdieu describes the academic or public intellectual as a “demolisher of social illusions�” Yet this complement is more than balanced out when in the same breath he likens “the modern intellectual” to “the character of the fool,” who is allowed “transgression without consequences” (165)� According to Bourdieu’s cultural sociology, the academic field can be seen to occupy “a dominated position in the dominant class” (164)� That is to say, academics are critics of power and not producers of it, no matter how much we like to invoke Percy Shelley’s famous line that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (which happens to be the epigraph to The New American Exceptionalism ). In this way, the influence of cultural producers on the social sphere is essentially circumscribed by the field of power without there being a direct correlation between the two. Breaks and ruptures in the one field are 380 J aMes d orson therefore not necessarily breaks and ruptures in the other, but may in fact be subsumed and accommodated by the field of power, or even - more troubling yet - may be utilized for other purposes� If nothing else, the embrace of the cultural but not the political radicalism of the 1960s by the free market ideology of the past four decades has proved that it is possible to be culturally radical while at the same time supporting the political and economic status quo� 14 Moreover, the shift away from the analysis of power as embedded in political institutions to pervading the culture itself also feeds into the market logic of perpetual differentiation that drives the field of academic production. As Fluck observes: “If power resides in hitherto unacknowledged aspects of language, discourse, or the symbolic order, then there is literally no limit to ever new and more radical discoveries of power effects” (1998: 56). Because scholarship, in order to legitimate itself, needs continuously to produce new research which reassesses what had come before, scholarship more often than not leaves popular discourse lagging far behind in scope and vision� It is therefore not difficult to discern a need for “distinction” at work in the transformative zest of the New Americanists� As Bourdieu states, the university is “a universe in which to exist is to differ�” Academics “must assert their difference […] by endeavoring to impose new modes of thought and expression, out of key with the prevailing modes of thought and with the doxa, and [are] therefore bound to disconcert the orthodox by their ‘obscurity’ and ‘pointlessness.’” New labels of self-identification such as “New Americanist” or “Transnational American Studies” can thus be read as “position-takings” that distinguish one emerging group of scholars from another that is already established (1993: 58). This does not mean that the positions taken are not warranted or legitimate in their own right� Many of the revisions undertaken by New Americanists were certainly called for� It does however mean that the rupture demanded and supposedly performed by New Americanists has been more of a rupture within the academic field itself than within the field of power where social formations are made and broken� The problem is that the rhetorical assurance that a rupture in fact has occurred gives a sense of premature accomplishment, with the result that New Americanist research often responds more to its own theoretical achievements - and the latest academic turn - than to actual social reality, which continues to be plagued by the effects of globalization and imperial violence� As such, the sometimes overblown rhetoric of New Americanists often appears to lay claim to what speech act theory calls an illocutionary performative power, where the immediate effect of language is backed by the sovereign power of the state, when in fact the only speech that academics (in their “dominated-dominant” 14 Walter Benn Michaels even takes the step further to assert that the identity politics that came out of the student movements actually works for the neoliberal agenda of breaking down the borders and limits of capital� See his controversial The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006)� “9/ 11” and the Rhetoric of Rupture 381 position) have access to is perlocutionary, which may or may not entail any consequences over time, and rarely those consequences that were intended� 15 As Butler writes in Excitable Speech , “the one who is invested with legitimate power makes language act; the one who is not invested may recite the same formula, but produces no effect” (146)� In this sense, the overstated performative power of New Americanists can be seen to enact its own “surrogate fulfillment,” now only in a radical imagination”instead of a liberal one, where actual social change - transforming the power structures that generate social and economic inequality - is just as illusive as it was for the first Americanists� III. What lessons about the relationship between social change and cultural production does this allow us to draw? In Transcendental Resistance , Johannes Voelz makes a point similar to the one I have made here about the limitations of the transformative power of New Americanist methods� He writes about the aim of changing the hegemonic culture that “both its potential and its dangers may be missed if all hope is placed in some form of radical resistance - what Gramsci calls a ‘definitive forward march’ - that promises greater gains than can be achieved from the back-and-forth of entrenched fighting” (49)� 16 Drawing on Fluck’s critique of New Americanists, Voelz blames this deceptive blitzkrieg method on how “critics of empire have rendered absolute the claim that culture is imperial, thereby constructing a view of culture as monolithic” (188). But as he demonstrates well in his reading of Emerson, this uncompromising approach ultimately misrepresents the nature of cultural criticism, which “necessarily involves a degree of complicity” (4)� Without some form of affirmation there can be no negation. The tension between the two is the irresolvable inner struggle of art, which must be addressed lest we slip into false reductions of artworks as either purely conservative or purely radical� This is the idea behind “immanent critique,” which mythand-symbol critics practiced (even if their critique often turned into celebra- 15 Referring to J� L� Austin’s speech act theory in which “illocutionary” and “perlocutionary” speech acts were first distinguished from each other, Judith Butler writes that “the former are speech acts that, in saying do what they say, and do it in the moment of that saying; the latter are speech acts that produce certain effects as their consequence; by saying something, a certain effect follows” ( Excitable Speech 3)� Although Butler upholds this distinction, she makes the important observation that speech in fact “is always in some ways out of our control” (15)� 16 Pease explicitly puts the aim of New Americanists in Gramscian terms, for instance when he talks about the New Americanists’ construction of “an oppositional common sense to form a community of justice in their war of position with the post-cold war state” (2006: 80). 382 J aMes d orson tion), and which Voelz defends against what he considers to be the “idealist totalization” that New Americanists have succumbed to in their “either-or” conception of culture and resistance (10, 3)� 17 But while Voelz’s argument is an indictment of the late 1980s New Americanist turn, criticizing it for not living up to its own Gramscian terms, in one significant way it is also an indication of it: there is practically no mention of capitalism� This is partly due to his focus on “empire criticism,” and his purpose of compelling the field toward new ways “of conceptualizing the relationship between culture and imperialism,” including a comprehensive “retheorization of power” (Voelz 189, 203). Yet his categorical rejection of “totalization” - as based on the Foucauldian/ Althusserian belief in the “all-pervasive scope of cultural power” - does not take account of the one domain where precisely such a conception of totality seems warranted, namely the ubiquitous system of capitalist production and consumption (3)� While culture and ideology may not be a question of “either-or,” an economic system is� An economy cannot be capitalist and communist at the same time� Even the social-democratic Third Way is unarguably capitalist, because like all capitalist economies it ultimately relies, for better or worse, on profit and growth� Either an economy is based on growth or it is not, and even when important parts of it are autonomous from the profit motive, they will nevertheless be subordinated to the overarching goal of economic growth, without which, at some point, the capitalist system must eventually either collapse or cease to be capitalist� Today it is neither culture nor ideology that is “all-pervasive” but capital� “Capital alone appears perpetual and absolute, increasingly unaccountable and primordial, the source of all commands, yet beyond the reach of the nomos ,” Wendy Brown observes (64)� “Capital creates the conditions (or their absence) for all sentient life while being fully accountable to no political sovereign” (64-65)� This is not to totalize the culture of capitalism - which like any culture is a question of give and take - but to recognize that at the present moment in history the practice of capitalism is the only system there 17 Although Transcendental Resistance maintains the New Americanist critique of the myth-and-symbol generation’s backhanded nationalism, Voelz nevertheless tends to embrace the first Americanists’ method of distinguishing in the texts they canonized a productive dialectic between the “ideal” and the “real,” particularly in his key concept of “fractured idealism�” He writes of Emerson’s idealism that “while he called for the realization of the ideal, such realization could be no more than glimpsed; it remained a motivating impossibility, which in turn necessitated the continuing renewal of the call for realization” (181). This reading bears a strong resemblance to Leo Marx’s understanding of “complex pastoralism in which the ideal is inseparably yoked to its opposite” (1967: 318), and even suggests Richard Chase’s conception of the American romance-novel in his influential The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957)� Indeed, there is perhaps nothing more crucial to the Myth and Symbol School’s national ideal than what Voelz describes as a “motivating impossibility,” which necessitates “the continuing renewal of the call for realization�” Was this not the whole point of the Virgin Land Myth, that the ideal could never be consummated and that fulfillment was always postponed to the indefinite future? “9/ 11” and the Rhetoric of Rupture 383 is� Neither the “cultural radicalism” in the humanities of the past four decades nor the rupture that “9/ 11” has been interpreted as has changed this fact� In this sense, the September 11 attacks did not indicate a break with a pervasive totality but actually expressed such a totality� It demonstrated that even if a transnational “outside” perspective on U�S� mythology is possible, there is no “outside” of the global capitalist economy, as even the “medievalism” that was ascribed to al Qaeda was no more than the simulated effect of a paradigmatic late capitalist network� Although the New Americanist use of the rhetoric of rupture is a performative strategy meant to produce a crisis, to bring about what it names, its effect on state and corporate power is at best marginal and indirect� At worst, this rhetoric functions as a distraction from questions of distribution and equality, or even, as Walter Benn Michaels claims, works hand in glove with neoliberal interests� Behind the constant ruptures and breaks in the mythological order of the nation, the power and structure of the liberal capitalist state appear to be unaffected� So what does a perceived rupture or crisis mean when the interconnected economic and geopolitical purpose and practice of the state is left intact? And, crucially, what does a new postnational, transnational, or cosmopolitan order mean if that order continues to be tied to the law and order of liberal capitalism? Quoting the theologian Rudolf Bultmann, Kermode writes that “’in every moment slumbers the possibility of being the eschatological moment� You must awake it’” (25)� In terms of national mythology, this has always been the purpose of the New Americanist rhetoric of rupture� But like the terrorists of “9/ 11,” they have failed to see beyond the apocalypse� They have privileged the messianic moment over the drawn-out hegemonic struggle, where by far most of the work in the field of cultural production takes place. Art and criticism might suggest what moment to awaken, but since they have no direct impact on the field of power they cannot decide when to awaken it� Susan Sontag argued that the great artwork has the power to modify “our consciousness and sensibility, changing the composition, however slightly, of the humus that nourishes all specific ideas and sentiments” (300). This is surely no insignificant power to have, even if it fades in comparison with the lurid fireworks of revolution. However, to argue that artists and critics are not frontline revolutionaries, as Voelz does, is not grounds enough for completely dismissing the possibility of “resistance leading to the emergence of new orders that transcend the old limitations of the given” (202)� 18 It is only to say that the revolution, to paraphrase the late Gil Scott-Heron, will not first be published in journals of art and criticism� That social change through art and critique is not as dramatic as we would like does not mean that we can draw the same conclusion about social change through activism and politics, and thus categorically reject revolution in favor of reform� If revolutions do 18 Although Voelz’s book is a polemic against “totalization,” he is nevertheless guilty of one himself when he insists that “the way in which New Americanists have appropriated the idea of identity construction from Althusserian theory has led them to make implicit, normative claims that are themselves ultimately liberal” (107-8). If ideology is not “all-pervasive,” it would seem, according to Voelz, that liberalism is� 384 J aMes d orson not begin at academic conferences we cannot therefore conclude that they do not begin at all - in fact, doing so is once more to confuse the fields of cultural production and political power� For art and criticism instead to totalize capitalism - through whatever aesthetic and critical means we have at our disposal - is not to naively believe that our academic work may rupture this totality at any given moment and replace it with a utopia of our fancy� But neither is it necessarily to accept the “limitations of the given,” especially when the very structures underlying and conditioning the given are considered unjust� If nothing else, the decades of “cultural radicalism” in our field, which has come up with a multitude of ways for challenging what is perceived to be the totality of ideology, has shown how extremely productive a sense of totality can be� What would it mean today if we were to rethink this sense of totality in terms of capitalism itself - its premises, structures, and consequences - instead of its many-faced ideology? And would we be able to combine such a sense of totality with the awareness that in the arts and humanities, resistance always comes at the price of at least a minimum of complicity? “9/ 11” and the Rhetoric of Rupture 385 Works Cited Bourdieu, Pierre� The Field of Cultural Production � Ed� Randal Johnson� New York: Columbia UP, 1993� Brown, Wendy� Walled States, Waning Sovereignty � New York: Zone Books, 2010� Buell, Lawrence� The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture � Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard UP, 1995� Butler, Judith� Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative � New York: Routledge, 1997� ---� Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence � New York: Verso, 2006 [2004]� DeLillo, Don� “In the Ruins of the Future�” Harper’s Magazine (December 2001): 33-40� Derrida, Jacques� “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides�” Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues With Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida � Ed� Giovanni Boradorri� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. 85-136. Faludi, Susan� The Terror Dream: What 9/ 11 Revealed About America � London: Atlanta Books, 2008 [2007]. Fluck, Winfried� “The Humanities in the Age of Expressive Individualism and Cultural Radicalism�” Cultural Critique 40 (1998): 49-71. ---� “Inside and Outside: What Kind of Knowledge Do We Need? A Response to the Presidential Address�” American Quarterly 59�1 (2007): 23-32� Kaplan, Amy� “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 17, 2003�” American Quarterly 56.1 (2004): 1-18. Kermode, Frank� The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction � New York: Oxford UP, 1973 [1966]� Marx, Leo� The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America � New York: Oxford UP, 1967 [1964]� ---� “On Recovering the ‘Ur’ Theory of American Studies� American Literary History 17�1 (2005): 118-134. Paradise Now. Dir� Hany Abu-Assad� Augustus Film, 2005� Pease, Donald� “New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon�” Boundary 2 17�1 (1990): 1-37� ---� “The Global Homeland State: Bush’s Biopolitical Settlement�” Boundary 2 30.3 (2003): 1-18. ---� “9/ 11: When was ‘American Studies After the New Americanists? ’” Boundary 2 33�3 (2006): 73-101� ---� The New American Exceptionalism � Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009� Schmitt, Carl� Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty � Trans� George Schwab. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985 [1922]. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “A Defense of Poetry.” Bartleby.com. 1821. Access 28 April 2011. <http: / / www�bartleby�com/ 27/ 23�html>� Slotkin, Richard� Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America � New York: Atheneum, 1992� Sontag, Susan� “One Culture and the New Sensibility�” 1963� Against Interpretation and Other Essays � New York: Anchor, 1990� 293-304� Suskind, Ron� “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W� Bush�” The New York Times. October 17, 2004� Access 11 Apr� 2011� <http: / / www�nytimes�com/ 2004/ 10/ 17/ magazine/ 17BUSH�html>� Voelz, Johannes� Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge � Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010� Call for Papers Critical and Cultural Transformations: Shakespeare’s The Tempest - 1611 to the Present edited by Tobias Döring First performed ca� 1611, Shakespeare’s Tempest has flourished ever since, whether in the study, on the stage, whether in writers’, artists’, actors’, directors’ or film-makers’ imaginations. In its four hundred year history, The Tempest has thus served as a multivalent cultural signifier, changing through the generations and from one area of the globe to another� As commentators have frequently noted, Shakespeare drew upon accounts of new world exploration and colonialism in shaping his play and its characters and plot� At the same time, The Tempest reflects discourses of old world politics, drawing perhaps on the imperial court history of Prague and the Bohemian succession� This volume will provide the opportunity to explore any and all of these critical and cultural transformations� Papers may focus on the text at the moment of production, on its transmission through editorial processes and changing interpretive and staging practices, or on contemporary re-readings, filmings or appropriations� Our goal is to set changing Tempest s within their historical, social and political contexts and to showcase the many ways Shakespeare’s last solo play is both a shaper and a receptor of cultural significance. REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Modern cities offer a stage for the emergence, development, and negotiation of transcultural spaces. Here, the dialogue/ struggle between urbanity, ecology, and the environment is experienced in its most visible form. Tensions between the creative and destructive aspects of global cities reverberate throughout the humanities. In the wake of the recent politicization of the humanities and especially the ‘transnational turn’ within the discipline of American Studies, the ‘environment’ and ‘culture’ have increasingly been represented as hybrid entities. This volume addresses a number of questions that are related to the symbolic construction of transcultural spaces in academic and literary discourse: How should - and how can - an interdisciplinary approach react productively to the post-ecological turn of the 2000s? What contributions have literary and cinematic fiction, the visual arts, and other discourses in Germany and the United States made to participate in a dialogue on environmental and technological issues? How are we, as scholars of American studies, to deal with the challenges of the ongoing environmental crisis which is, by all means, also a crisis of technological progress? The individual contributions to this anthology discuss both the modes of amalgamation and hybridisation by which city and nature are constituted as complementary figures as well as the emergence of ‘transethnic,’ ‘posturban’ and ‘virtual’ environments. Literature Volume 26 (201 Transcultural Spaces: Challenges of Urbanity, and he Edited by