Journal of American Studies of Turkey
This essay is based on a
paper I gave at a workshop on “Rhetoric and/as Terrorism: Before and After
September 11.” Our panel of participants included: Ferhat Boratav, journalist
and Editor-in-Chief of CNN Turk; Oral Çalýþlar, columnist at Cumhuriyet; Yusuf Eradam, professor at
Ankara University and Chair of the Department of American Culture and
Literature; Banu Güven, editor, reporter, and presenter of the night news at
NTV; Bennett Lowenthal, Assistant Public Affairs Officer, Consulate General of
the United States; and Mahmut Mutman, professor at Bilkent University and Chair
of the Department of Communication and Design.
The event itself. I want to start by
suggesting that there are at least two ways to define rhetoric (which brings us
to the first of many distinctions or boundaries we will be encountering). (1)
For the first, one might begin by imagining a very different workshop, a kind
of parallel workshop, one devoted to the event itself. Here, too, we
come to a boundary: that which separates the event itself from everything
else; everything else being the rhetorical. This is rhetoric as the
realm of representation, or recollection: that which is supposed to interpose
or mediate between us and the event itself. But what is, we might ask, the
event itself? We only apprehend it, after all, through images, words, analyses.
Indeed, in the case of September 11, the event itself was designed as a
media event, an event of rhetorical dimensions. Which is not to say that such an
event does not have very real consequences.
We tend to forget, in other words, that rhetoric itself is
an event; that rhetoric is real. Which brings us to (2)
rhetoric in its classical, most traditional sense: that of language as
persuasion; language, that is, as action, the sign as an instrument of force:
what we might call (borrowing a term from the anthrax scare) the weaponized
signifier.[1]
Negative dialectics. Why is this important?
Let me answer that by way of two citations. The first from Adorno’s Negative
Dialectics: “[I]f negative dialectics,” Adorno writes, “calls for the
self-reflection of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to
be true… it must also be a thinking against itself… If thought is not measured
by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature
of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams
of its victims” (365). Adorno’s project: how to rehabilitate philosophy,
language – the whole conceptual legacy of the Enlightenment – after the horrors
of the Holocaust. Compare this to book 10 of the Republic where Plato
argues, by way of Socrates, that poetry is far too dangerous a force to leave
unguarded in the perfect polis: “so long as she is unable to make good her
defense we shall chant over to ourselves as we listen the reasons that we have
given as a countercharm to her spell” (608b). Plato’s defense against language
is, as it is for Adorno, ultimately, more language: his poison and his antidote
are made of one and the same thing.
That, too, is our quandary: language is the problem, and
language may be the only remedy. Otherwise why are we here, talking with each
other?
Rhetorical terrorism. The US military is rather fond of its smart bombs,
laser-guided missiles that home in on targets, distinguishing, when all goes
well, between friend and foe. We are asked to imagine, in effect, there is such
a thing as a “moral” weapon. What is repugnant, on the other hand, in the
tactics of terrorists, we are told, is that they fail to make distinctions.
It is ironic, then, to find that much of the language in the wake of September
11 precisely mirrors the violence that prompted it in the first place, is the
discursive equivalent of the very menace it seeks to demonize: for it is, above
all, language that fails to make distinctions; or, which fails to
mark boundaries. Such language is, I would say, a form of rhetorical
terrorism. Language as an instrument of fear, not communication, language
designed precisely not to communicate clearly. The tropes/troops[2]
that constitute a veritable rhetorical arsenal work by making the enemy not
more but less specific.[3]
Rhetorical strategies for diffusing
boundaries. Allegory. Many of Bush’s most
notorious phrases - “axis of evil,” for example - follow this obfuscatory and
abstracting logic. The effect is to convert a complicated narrative into
something like medieval allegory: a simple and transcendent struggle between
Good and Evil. Prosopopoeia. Central to this pseudo-medieval discourse,
we can see, is the trope of personification or prosopopeia (from the
Greek prosopon, “face”).[4]
The now almost universal use of “terror” – or, rather, “Terror,” instead of
“terrorism,” is the classic example. (CNN, October 18, 2002: “The Changing Face
of Terror”).[5] On other
occasions it is precisely because terrorism has no face – terrorists hide
in the shadows, they hunker down in caves – that it is so
terrifying.
Rhetoric of paranoia: the terror of
tautology. Listening to Bush, it becomes
easier to see how this discourse aims not to clarify but to cloud, not to
dispel fear but to magnify it. The use of abstractions like Terror
facilitates the linking of what may appear to be unrelated issues. The result
is a language of paranoia. Rhetorical terms can thus function like
imagistic nets, encompassing and linking the seemingly distant and disparate:
“There is a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, “Bush declares on
October 14, 2002: “Iraq is part of the war on terror. And he must disarm”
(“Disarming Iraq is Part of War on Terror, Bush Says”). There are various ways
to widen the net: above all, through a kind of numbing repetition, in which
definition becomes pure tautology (terrorism = terrorism).[6]
Bush’s demonization of terrorists, calling them “sick” or “evil” or
“cold-blooded killers,” represents, in fact, a reversal of the traditional
definition of the terrorist: it suggests that terrorists are sadistic and
amoral, in the same category as serial killers; they kill for pleasure, not
ideology. In the past terrorists had always been defined as those who killed
precisely in pursuit of an ideology – however heinous. Elsewhere that continues
to remain, apparently, Bush’s understanding of the terrorists; as when he
identifies terrorists as “people who hate freedom.” But for Bush, ultimately, terrorism
is a null set that can be filled with anything one wants.[7]
Ice-nine. I call this kind of language, viral
discourse. It operates through the logic of contagion and
crystallization, like Kurt Vonnegut’s ice-nine in his novel Cat’s
Cradle, a substance which instantly turns water into ice. Nothing escapes
the force of this rhetorical virus: it can potentially affect and infect
everyone - like terrorism itself.[8]
Note, then, that while at every moment appealing to a reassuring landscape of
fixed borders and immutable distinctions, it ultimately operates through their
erasure. We owe it to ourselves, I think, to keep a few distinctions or boundaries
in mind – whether to uphold them or to dismantle them - as a kind of antidote
to this kind of viral discourse. [9]
Present in absentia. Watching movies about
NY is different after 9/11. How many of us have caught ourselves playing a new
and perverse game: find the Twin Towers. Now you see it, now you don’t. My
brother, who has a terrible sense of direction, lamented, after the event: “Now
that they’re gone, how do I know where I am?” Spike Lee’s 25th
Hour is the first major American film that treated the empty space where
the Twin Towers used to be. Lee returns again and again to the motif of
disappearance: in shots of the devastated New York skyline, in recurrent images
of the mop-up operations at ground zero (while Levantine music, interestingly
enough, plays in the background). The Twin Towers, one might argue, are the
main character(s) of the film, haunting it like a ghost, present in absentia.[10]
The destruction of the WTC was, then, an act of an erasure, an act that can
only succeed through its failure; for, as in Derrida’s notion of the sign as a
trace, the erasure is the presence of an absence.
The ruin. There is a reason why the terrorists chose
a building, and this one in particular, as their target. For architecture,
especially great architecture, is that which proves a before and an after. (The
ruin: what or where a building used to be.)[11]
Agoraphobic cultures. And now we are to have
a new building, where the old one used to be. There is a very American logic at
work here, and, indeed, a very New York logic as well: for both are agoraphobic
cultures, driven by the fear of empty space (hence the totemic force of the
very words ground zero). More precisely: these are cultures in love with
the idea of space as something to be occupied. In akraphilic New York,
of course, this kind of mythology of manifest destiny becomes a vertical
phenomenon. Knock it down; we’ll build another one, only taller.[12]
This is precisely the logic bin Laden was counting on (just as he was counting
on Afghanistan and Iraq).[13]
Catastrophe theory. Many critics have
challenged this notion of history as a rupture between the pre- and the post-.
For Chomsky, we are absurdly
shortsighted, with conveniently short memories (remember the first attempt to
blow up the WTC, in 1993? No?); otherwise we would see all this as a drearily
familiar event. But even Chomsky agrees with more apocalyptic critics,
such as Baudrillard and Virilio, who tend to portray 9/11 as a literal catastrophe
(from the Greek kata + strophe, a downward turn): that is
to say, a system failure. And their analyses of 9/11 are catastrophe
theories in an almost mathematical sense, so that the event has its analogy
in natural phenomena – boiling, fission, stampeding, panic – where matter
shifts precipitously from one state to another. Note that because such an event
destroys or alters the very system which produced it in the first place, the
catastrophe, therefore, cannot be said to be a rupture with that system: it
neither precedes it nor follows it. For none of these critics, then, can 9/11
be called a singular event: for all of them, what makes it special is
what is says about the system.
After Auschwitz. Others, certainly, have treated 9/11 as something transcendent
or singular. One might compare the disagreement here to the debate over the singularity
of the Holocaust. And it seems right to
return to Adorno at this point and his famous statement, “to write
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” (Which is, of course, not the same thing
as saying that one shouldn’t write it.)[14]
Note that what has been consistently stressed in the media
reportage on Daniel Libeskind is his links – both biographical and
architectural – to the Holocaust. Hirschkorn writes at CNN.com that
Libeskind “immigrated with his parents, both Holocaust survivors, in 1959,” and
that he will go on to become the architect of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
From Auschwitz to Hiroshima. The comparison,
I think, is misguided; there are simply too many crucial differences. For the
death-camps were less an event than a arrangement of many events; in effect, an
entire culture (a nightmarish one, like Homer’s Hades or Dante’s Inferno) –
and, significantly, a covert one, hidden from view. Hiroshima, on the other
hand, is perhaps a better analogy (although the proponents of singularity would
suggest that all analogies are doomed to fail): the very model of the event as
cataclysm and spectacle.
The terrorism of spectacle. The destruction
of the WTC was not something that simply happened: it was something we watched
happening. The terrorists, of course, were counting on that. The spectacle
of terrorism proves, Baudrillard argues in The Spirit of Terrorism
and Requiem for the Twin Towers, the terrorism of spectacle. We
live in a world of spectacle, a world dominated by images.[15]
For Virilio, too, in Ground
Zero, culture itself has increasingly become a totalitarianism of the image
(26). (Virilio asks us to consider the global reach of media conglomerates, or
Berlusconi’s government of telecracy [30].)[16]
Art. In its sheer power as an image, the fall
of the Twin Towers would seem to offer us the modern paradigm of the sublime.
Many were outraged at Stockhausen’s now infamous remark, cited by Virilio in Ground
Zero (45): “What we have witnessed is the greatest work of art there has
ever been!” [das grösste
Kunstwerk, das es je gegeben hat]. But Stockhausen may have
been referring to the unfathomability of the sublime: the power of the image as
something incomprehensible, overwhelming.
Accident. In this sublime catastrophe, the attack,
in Virilio’s terms, becomes accident (Ground Zero). Our century,
for Virilio, has thus moved past different “horizons of expectations”: from The
Great Revolution, to The Great War, to The Great Accident (Crepuscular Dawn 176-177).
Consider the universal response before the advent of the 2nd plane:
“I thought it was an accident.”[17]
This was, of course, no accident, but it was certainly designed to look like
one. See Virilio in Crepuscular Dawn on the “logic of the accident”
(148), and the “Accident-Weapon” (172).
Event as suicide. For most of the critics I have cited, 9/11
was, I have suggested, an example of system failure on a massive scale. And in
a world where the system is as hegemonic as ours, the accident may be
the only remaining mode of resistance. Many critics have suggested that in 9/11
we are witness, then, not to a battle between forces, even less a clash
of civilizations: but an attack on globalization - one, ironically enough,
produced by globalization itself. 9/11, in this sense, is a suicide.[18]
Virilio in Crepuscular Dawn:
“September 11 opened Pandora’s Box. In this new situation, New York is what
Sarajevo was. Sarajevo triggered the First World War. New York is the attack in
the first war of globalization. An internecine war, a civil war” (178). For the
first time, a war without a front.
Terror against terror. This is Baudrillard’s
perspective, too, already announced, prophetically, in Simulations
(1983). “Why,” Baudrillard asks, “are there two towers at New York’s World
Trade Center?” (135). “The fact that there are two of them signifies the end of
all competition, the end of all original reference” (136) – the triumph, that
is, of global capitalism. Any such monolithic totalitarianism, no matter how
benevolent, Baudrillard warns us, will generate resistance. [19]
The destruction of the Twin Towers, as for Virilio, is therefore a systemic
suicide: “one had the impression that they were committing suicide in response
to the suicide of the suicide planes.” “Terror,” in another of these
Baudrillardian formulations, is “terror against terror.”
Could the real demon be sameness? Žižek
wonders, in Welcome to the Desert of the Real! if the goal of “today’s
fundamentalist terror” is “to awaken us, Western citizens, from our numbness,
from immersion in our everyday ideological universe” (9). And the irony of
this, in a return to the theme of the essentially rhetorical or mediated nature
of the event, is that this “passion for the Real,” as Žižek calls it,
“culminates in its apparent opposite, in a theatrical spectacle” (9). This passion
for the Real, a term Žižek borrows from Alain Badiou’s Le
Siècle, is indeed, Žižek suggests, the distinctive feature
of the twentieth-century. And it brings us back, ominously, to Adorno’s
repudiation of the semiotic realm – language, rhetoric, the concept itself – as
that which has failed to prevent, or worse, given birth to, the Holocaust. The
death camps: not the banality of evil, not the real; rather, the “Real in its
extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceptive layers
of reality” (5-6).
Viral terrorism. Globalization, for
these critics, is itself a form of terror, incubating its own destruction from
without and within. We are all terrorists, in the end. There is no clash here,
no border between us and them (on that point, Chomsky and Baudrillard are in
agreement). Hence the rhetoric of “exorcism”: a moral purging – precisely
because terrorism is anywhere and everywhere. There is a “terroristic imagination,”
Baudrillard suggests, in all of us. Baudrillard expands this notion into a
national death-drive: “They did it; but we wished for it.” (We may recall here
the way the terrorists inoculated themselves into American culture: they lived
like us, they looked like us; they could be any of us!) Hence the deployment,
again, of a viral rhetoric. Terrorism, in the national imagination, is
thus not a rogue cancer, a gangrenous limb, an allegorical clash between good
and evil, men in white hats and men in black hats, bodies and anti-bodies:
rather, terrorism is a virus.
The uncanny. Future project: compare the Twin Towers to
the twin ghosts that appear in Kubrick’s The Shining. The horror of
replication, and the loss of reference. Two towers, two planes; two events? A
matter for insurance companies to decide.
Adorno, Theodor, W. Negative Dialectics. Trans.
E. B. Ashton. NY: Continuum, 1987.
Baudrillard. Jean. Simulations. Trans.
P. Foss, P. Patton, and P. Beitchman. NY: Semiotext(e), 1983.
-----.
“The Spirit of Terrorism. ” Excerpts
from Le Monde. November 11,
2001. http://us-them.com/september11/baud.html.
-----,
trans. Chris Turner. The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin
Towers. NY: Verso, 2002.
CNN
Broadcast. “ The Changing Face of Terror. ” October 18, 2002.
-----.
“Seeds of Terror. ” June 14, 2001.
Chomksy,
Noam. Reflections on 9-11. NY: Seven Stories P, 2001.
Chomksy,
Noam, and Edward S. Herman. Manufacturing Consent. NY: Pantheon Books,
1988.
Jones, Charisse and Maria Puente. “
Memorial at Heart of Winning WTC Design ‘Breathtaking and Practical. ” USA
Today. June 13, 2003. http://www.usatoday.com/
“New
World Trade Center Designs. ”Lower Manhattan.info.
http://www.lowermanh…build.
Ronell, Avital. “Support our
Tropes: Reading Desert Storm.” Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the
Millenium. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1994: 269-91.
Shorey, Paul, trans. Plato:
The Republic. Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1930.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Cat’s
Cradle. London: Penguin Books, 1965.
[1]
Chomksy’s “manufacturing consent,” for
example (see Chomsky and Herman 1988, although the term was in use long before
Chomsky) is in essence the notion of rhetoric.
[2] I borrow the pun from Avital Ronell’s essay
“Support our Tropes: Reading Desert Storm.”
[3] Compare Slavov Žižek’s comments
in Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: “all the main terms we use to
designate the present conflict – ‘war on terrorism,’ ‘democracy and freedom,’
‘human rights,’ and so on – are false terms, mystifying our perception of the
situation instead of allowing us to think it” (2).
[4] As in the medieval morality play, where
Virtue, for example, does battle with Vice.
[5] Chomsky notes in Reflections on 9-11:
“It is much easier to personalize the enemy, identified as the symbol of
ultimate evil, than to seek to understand what lies behind major atrocities”
(37).
[6] The force of this rhetorical net becomes
evident in Bush’s response to a journalist’s question as to whether or not the
sniper attacks in the D.C. area can be considered terrorist attacks: “First of
all, it is a form of terrorism, but in terms of the terrorism that we think of,
we have no evidence one way or the other, obviously. But anytime anybody is randomly
shooting, randomly killing, randomly taking life, it’s cold-blooded murder and
it’s – it’s a sick mind who loves terrorizing society” (“Remarks by the
President Upon Departure for Michigan,” October 14, 2002).
[7] “I understand,” says Chomsky, the term
‘terrorism’ exactly in the sense defined in official U.S. documents: “the
calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are
political, religious, or ideological in nature. This is done though
intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear.” That is its “literal meaning” (and
by that definition, Chomsky notes, the U.S. regularly practices terrorism); but
in its standard “propagandistic usage,” “the term ‘terrorism’ is used to refer
to terrorist acts committed by enemies against us or our allies” (89-90).
[8] Consider the program aired by CNN on June
14, 2001: “Seeds of Terror,” investigating the organization of terrorist groups
into “sleeper cells.” “There is,” Jean Baudrillard suggests in The Spirit of
Terrorism, hardly a friend of George Bush, “a terroristic imagination” in
all of us (5). But in a way that is precisely Bush’s conviction. For the
American political establisment and the media alike, terrorism operates
virally.
[9] Naturally the same scrutiny ought to be
directed at the rhetorical strategies of political or religious discourse in
the Middle East. See, for example, Farish A. Noor’s “The Evolution of ‘Jihad’
in Islamist Political Discourse: How a Plastic Concept Became Harder.”
[10] In Requiem for the Twin Towers
Baudrillard notes: “although the two towers have disappeared, they have not
been annihilated. Even in their pulverized state, they have left behind an
intense awareness of their presence.” (52).
[11] These buildings were, for the terrorists,
Baudrillard points out, worth destroying (50). Why did Al Qaeda
target a building? Globalization, Baudrillard argues, in Requiem for the
Twin Towers, is also architectural. For Buadrillard, the horror of their
destruction can only be compared to the horror of living and working in them.
[12]
One might compare Berlin to New York here; specifically, the ruins of Kaiser
Wilhelm Memorial Church on Kurfurstendam, to the new WTC at ground zero.
[13]Daniel
Libeskind’s plan for a new commercial and cultural center at ground zero,
selected after a long competition, clearly demonstrates this agoraphobic logic,
a logic that suggests another form of repetition-compulsion. The plan is
everywhere vexed by a contradictory and agoraphobic logic, by the demands of
remembering and forgetting, memorialization and money. See “New World Trade
Center Designs,” LowerManhattan.info at http://www.lowermanh…build.
[14] Adorno also writes: “After Auschwitz, our
feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as
wronging the victims” (361); and “Perennial suffering has as much right to
expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say
that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to
raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living”
(362-63).
[15] In the first version of “The Spirit of
Terrorism” which appeared as an article in Le Monde”on November 11,
2001, Baudrillard writes: “The fascination is first that of the image… In this
case, then, the real is added to the image as a plus of terror, as an extra
frisson. Not only is it terrifying but, what’s more, it’s real.”
[16] For Virilio,
history itself in Crepuscular Dawn is narrated as a progressive
effacement of the body as we move towards an imaginary body: a
collective suicide. Reflected in Nazi eugenics, in Hollywood fantasies of the
triumph of the machine (Terminator, Blade Runner, Matrix),
fashion as the mutilation of the body (piercing, tattooing), in body art
(Orlan, 118), in an entire culture of biopolitik. The body is now
replaced by “simulators of proximity” that offer the “imposture of immediacy.”
[17] What Virilio calls the accident,
Baudrillard calls the pure or the absolute event. There is no
specific meaning in the event, no ideology (Islam is a convenient vehicle):
this is terror against terror (the monopoly of the good; the good as any
monolithic ideology). And therefore, the pure event is a symbolic
event, a sacrificial event. Such events are outmoded, prohibited,
obsolete in our global culture: progress has outlawed them.
[18] Such an argument, for Chomsky, is another
convenient way of avoiding responsibility for American actions. But if for
Chomsky 9/11 is neither apocalyptic, nor singular, it nevertheless has its
origins, ultimately, in American actions, and therefore obeys, as Virilio and
others suggest it does, a kind of reciprocal or suicidal logic. It depends, in
the end, on how close we are to the event: the farther we pull back, the larger
and more diffuse the event itself.
[19] For “any unitary system,” Baudrillard
argues, “if it wishes to survive, must acquire a binary regulation. You need
two superpowers to keep the universe under control: a single empire would
crumble of itself. And the equilibrium of terror alone can allow a regulated
opposition to be established, for the strategy is structural, never atomic.”
(From Simulations, written in 1984).