Journal
of American Studies of Turkey
14
(2001) : 35-50
Enduring Freedom: War, Corporate Television,
and the Delusion of the Delusion
“Are you not entertained?
Is this not why you are here?”
--Russell Crowe as Maximus
in the film Gladiator (2000)
When
the policy and propaganda divisions of the current Bush Administration set out
to generate a rhetoric that could be mobilized to inaugurate a new “foreign
policy” in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11th,
2001, they inadvertently radicalized Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of truth as
a “moveable army of metaphors and metonymies” by instrumentalizing this concept
to achieve a clearly stated set of interlocking stratagems: to reinterpret the
meaning of “terrorism,” to establish precedent for the disregard of
international law and the will of the electorate, and to rule the global
community by force.[1] In the
months leading up to the second Gulf War, elements of this rhetoric were
mobilized to justify any number of highly questionable maneuvers, ranging from
the attack on Afghanistan to the inhumane treatment of Taliban detainees at
Guantánamo Bay, a treatment that was legitimized by the Administration through
a particularly narrow and aberrant interpretation of the Geneva Convention,
limiting POW status—and, effectively, the human rights of prisoners—to
combatants deriving from conventionally recognized nation states.[2]
During the second Gulf War itself, the Administration and its variegated agents
once again attempted to declare any critique of its actions off-limits by
deploying the catachrestic and perplexing trope “Support Our
Troops”—catachrestic and perplexing because in actuality the troops are
supposed to support us, not the other way around.[3]
Since then, under the patronage of a new so-called Department of Homeland
Security, the moveable army of tropes has colonized an ever broadening terrain,
including even the American system of higher education, in which foreign
students attending colleges and universities across the country are now forced
to pay a “special fee” that is used by the government to fund the surveillance
of these students through a database and tracking program called “SEVIS.”
A first attempt at organizing the various international platoons of the new rhetoric under a single guiding name resulted in the term “Operation Infinite Justice,” a cynical phrase that was quickly abandoned when it became increasingly obvious that it not only conjured specters of ruthless Christian crusades throughout the Islamic world but also taunted Muslim communities whose faith teaches that Allah alone is capable of delivering Infinite Justice—and, at any rate, not George W. Bush and his generals. In an attempt to moderate, if only slightly, the moveable armies of tropes—that, since the scandalous and highly irregular presidential election of 2000, had made Bush and his cabinet appear extremist even in the eyes of many conservatives—the new name given to the Administration’s future foreign policy was “Operation Enduring Freedom.” But the tropological difficulties did not end there, as the putatively improved name bespeaks the continued, haunting presence of the specter of the Other whose fate it is to be subjected to the logic of this euphemism. While “enduring,” when read adjectivally, yields an image of freedom as lasting and durable, when read as a progressive verb form, “enduring” evokes the perspectives of all those victims who from this point on will be forced to endure the violent implementation of “freedom” as the Bush regime now defines it for its globalized empire. Thus, the uncontainable double movement of “enduring” ironically allows the Other to speak, even if only through a prosopopeia--the ghostly voice of an absent or dead speaker—as the site of a relentless will to implement world domination. We could say that the sudden and now half-forgotten shift from “Operation Infinite Justice” to “Operation Enduring Freedom” hauntingly reemerges in the double meaning encrypted within the latter phrase.
That this shift, along with many other shifts in the rhetorical
armies so effectively mobilized in the current Administration, is first and
foremost tied to the media branch of what Guy Debord as early as the 1960s
termed la société du spectacle, the
society of the spectacle, is rather uncontroversial. Indeed, the complicity of
the commercial mass media in the propagandistic dissemination of the
Administration’s policies has given the traditional term “war theater” a new
meaning. But any analysis that seeks to articulate the techno-ideological
affinities between the Administration’s army of tropes and the televisual
episteme by which they are mediated, must measure itself against Fredric
Jameson’s dictum that “thinking anything adequate about commercial television
may well involve ignoring it and thinking about something else.”[4]
This view seems to suggest that one would learn the most from commercial
television by investing one’s attention elsewhere and remaining silent about
it. But what this view also sponsors, despite its own intentions, is an
emphasis on what one might call the general “other-directedness” of
presentation as it manifests itself in the specific medium of commercial
television.[5] Thus, to
understand the workings of this medium, one must indeed look elsewhere—not,
however, in a gesture that abandons the project of understanding the medium but
rather in a gesture of taking seriously the elusive other-directedness that it
shares in principle with all acts of presentation and with all media but with
which it is saturated in television-specific
ways.
Whichever reading of Jameson’s view one
prefers, it is difficult—in light of the far-reaching Gleichschaltung, or total coordination,
of the various corporate media, for which the name “Fox News” today may stand
as a particularly disturbing metonymy—to imagine a perspective
from which these techno-medial manifestations could be submitted to scrutiny.
As Martin Heidegger once observed, “this is precisely what is so uncanny: that
everything functions and that this functioning leads to a further functioning
and that technics uproots the human being more and more, tearing him away from
the earth.”[6] The effort
of techno-ideological media coordination now includes everything from a
nation-wide streamlining of war news coverage in which a “balanced” debate
often entails nothing more than active generals arguing with retired generals,
to internet stores such as America’sNewWarStore.com that sell paraphernalia to
indulge the fantasies and fetishes of war enthusiasts, to radio coverage of the
war that, even on NPR, routinely was saturated with ominous music intended to
make “Operation Enduring Freedom” and the occupation of Iraq entertaining and
palatable. Here, indeed, “to be entertained is to be in agreement [Vergnügtsein heißt Einverstandensein],”
as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno once aptly put it.[7]
That these musical accompaniments, or soundtracks, to the latest war-related
news are meant to be as entertaining, care-free, and self-evident as the
recognizable graphics and slogans used in corporate television
coverage—“Showdown with Iraq,” “Target Iraq,” etc.—suggests a final erasure of
the borders between the remnants of journalism worthy of its name and the logic
of Hollywood blockbusters that represent the apotheosis of a certain culture
industry whose extreme abstraction, in the language of Horkheimer and Adorno,
creates subjects through “a compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural
commodities which they simultaneously see through” and for whom “personality
means hardly more than dazzling white teeth and freedom from armpit odor and emotions.”[8]
In short, recognizing the extensive media network that ever more effectively
mobilizes a moveable army of metaphors, metonymies and, now, television images,
may lead either to a certain disenchanted resistance to analysis altogether or
to a false derealization of the effects of “Operation Enduring Freedom” and of
the war on Iraq as though they were spectacular but ephemeral manifestations of
mere media simulacra.
The extreme version of the latter position is to be found in
Jean Baudrillard’s provocative assertion, apropos of the first Gulf War, that,
in light of the virtuality and infinitely mediated nature of that war for those
in the West, “the Gulf War did not take place.” The war, so the argument goes,
was made to seem unreal through the post-human perspectival regimes offered by
a far-reaching web of simulacra: by cameras fastened atop so-called smart bombs
and by other infinite chains of televisual signifiers that could never record
the event “itself” or even grant representational access to the reality of the
event.[9]
We might say that, to the extent that such images can claim any relationship to
empirical reality, they are today, at the beginning of the millennium, at best
recognizable as one among many iterations of the latest consumer penchant for
so-called Reality TV, productions that in their stagy qualities and contrived
constructions of naturalness can never, despite their permanent and seductive
claims to the contrary, quite move beyond exhibiting, not reality itself, but,
in a gesture of exhausting repetition, one more iteration of what Roland
Barthes once memorably termed l’effet de
réel--the “reality effect.”[10]
In a recent meditation on the medial specificity and textuality
of television, Jacques Derrida warns against too hastily adopting a
neoidealistic view that would deny the event itself. He suggests that
the requisite deconstruction of this artifactuality should not be used as an
alibi. It should not give way to an inflation (une surenchère) of the simulacrum and neutralize every threat in
what might be called the delusion of the delusion, the denial of the event:
“Everything,” people would then think, “even violence, suffering, war, and
death, everything is constructed, fictionalized, constituted by and for the
media apparatus. Nothing ever really happens. There is nothing but simulacrum
and delusion.” While taking the deconstruction of artifactuality as far as
possible, we must therefore do everything in our power to guard against this
critical neoidealism and remember, not only that a consistent deconstruction is
a thinking of singularity, and therefore of the event, of what it ultimately
preserves of the irreducible, but also that “information” is a contradictory
and heterogeneous process. It can and must be transformed, it can and must
serve, as it has often done, knowledge, truth, and the cause of democracy to
come, and all the questions they necessarily entail. We cannot help but hope
that artifactuality, as artificial and manipulative as it may be, will
surrender or yield to the coming of what comes, to the event that bears it and
toward which it is borne. And to which it will bear witness, even if only
despite itself.[11]
According to the logic of
Derrida’s suggestion, then, the challenge would be to confront the delusion of
the delusion, the delusion that there is only
delusion, and that this delusion is so delusional that it is thought even to
erase the concrete suffering and death of those whose fates are subjected both
to weapons and televisual recording devices. In this case, the truth of
suffering, and even of its medial presentation would potentially exist—but not for us. (Perhaps it is no coincidence
that the enormously popular television series The X-Files, broadcast on the self-avowedly right-leaning FOX
network, was organized around two paranoid mantras that interlock in each
episode to paralyzing effect: “The Truth is out there” but “Trust no one.”)[12]
The delusion of the delusion would fail to take account of the internal
self-differentiation of the delusion, the way in which delusion can never be fully and completely itself, that is, only delusional. The delusion opens up
within itself its own other, non-delusion, even as it powerfully dissimulates
the ways in which it is at odds with itself: in global networks and in the
medial transmissions and material disseminations of delusional tropes and
images.
Engaging this problematic, we might say that it would be
misleading to suggest with Baudrillard that the Gulf War did not take place,
even in the figurative or tropological sense. Rather, the war did not only take place and it did not only not take place. Yet what would
it mean to develop a critical strategy that would do justice to this double
challenge: the paralyzing threat of the delusion of the delusion, on the one
hand, and, on the other, the problematic prospect of reverting to a neo-realism
that takes mediated signs for reality rather than for reality effects, a
literalism that falls prey to the understandable but misguided desire, outlined
in Paul de Man’s concept of aesthetic ideology, in which “what we call ideology
is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference
with phenomenalism”?[13]
Such questions cannot be settled in the abstract alone but should be
complicated and elaborated apropos of singular events of presentation and acts
of signification that take their medial specificity into account. Here, I wish
to consider one such singular medial act in the spirit of these larger
concerns: US corporate television’s “live” coverage of the toppling of a giant
statue of Saddam Hussein upon the invasion of Baghdad by US military forces on
Wednesday, 9 April 2003.
When the American forces entered the Iraqi capital on that day,
they took great pains to aestheticize their military interventions in the city
so as to make the display of dominance available as a world-wide televisual
spectacle. The center piece of this aestheticization of military violence was
the wrapping, around 6:50 p.m. Baghdad time and 10:50 a.m. American EST, of
huge metal chains around the neck of a monumental statue of Hussein—erected
on Baghdad’s Firdos Square in April 2002 to celebrate the despot’s 65th
birthday—whose head first was covered by US military troops
in an American flag, then in the pre-1991 Iraqi flag. Lest this scene be
interpreted throughout the Arab world as the figurative beheading of an Arab
leader by the United States, both flags were quickly removed by an American
soldier who left the monument undraped. When a powerful US Marine armored
recovery vehicle then slowly but steadily pulled the statue down—with its
raised right arm now no longer saluting skyward but awkwardly descending toward
the ground—what appeared to be a huge mob of citizens of Baghdad could be seen
at the lower edge of the television screen waiting for the statue to hit the
ground. Once the statue came within reach of the congregation, they were shown
celebrating this event by pounding the remains of the statue, tearing off its
head and kicking it through the dust in a delirious frenzy, as well as beating
it with removed shoes in a gesture that constitutes an especially grave insult
in Arab cultures.
What was remarkable about the staging of this event which was
broadcast “live” on corporate networks such as CNN was the made-for-television
quality of the spectacle that left viewers with the distinct impression that
the Iraqi people were celebrating the American forces as liberators from a
tyrannical regime rather than rejecting them as an occupying force. After all,
the sheer number of Baghdad citizens who converged to celebrate the toppling of
Hussein appeared to speak volumes about a general sentiment among the Iraqi
people. But this impression, as it turned out, was created through heavily
orchestrated televisual editing of the “live” event. What viewers of CNN and
other corporate networks were mostly shown was in fact a closely cropped
framing of citizens gathering on the market place over which Hussein’s statue
presided—as though their numbers were in the thousands. However, a different
shot of the “same” event, very briefly seen on a local-access independent
channel, revealed, from a high-angle long shot, that the group gathered on the
expansive market place was rather small, almost difficult to discern in the
overall image. Thus, what was a fairly limited display of a relatively small
group of people in a metropolis of some four million inhabitants was
manufactured by the corporate networks and their so-called embedded reporters
to yield the false impression of an extensive popular uprising among Iraqis who
putatively joined the American invaders in their fanatical hatred of
Hussein—and, by unspoken extension, supposedly legitimated the American
military aggression that most of the international community, including most
European allies in the United Nations, had harshly condemned.
Indeed, the work of independent photographers such as the
Finnish photojournalist Ilkka Uimonen bears out the sense that the televisual
images shown on American corporate networks were edited and manipulated in
strict conformity with the American government’s ideological requirements.
Without claiming epistemological superiority for the documentary photograph
over the moving image or suggesting that there could ever be an objective or
transparent presentation of history as it “really was,” it is nevertheless
possible to develop a very different understanding of the events on Firdos
Square in light of this other evidence (Figure 1). As with the many other
important images by Uimonen that testify to the dark underbelly of the attack
on Iraq—such as a photograph of a father and a son lying dead on the bloody
front seats of their car after having been executed by US marines and the
close-ups of the horrified civilians’ faces upon witnessing the violent
eruption of American soldiers into their sphere—his photograph of the removal
of Hussein’s statue raises significant questions. One of the most striking
features of this particular image is the size of the crowd gathered to witness
the spectacle. Both the group of witnesses that is almost exclusively confined
to the lower left portion of the image and the few heads of scattered
spectators visible in outline in the foreground bespeak the relative smallness
of the gathering. This sense stands in marked contrast to the images that were
broadcast on “live” corporate television. We may even say that the raised hands
of the civilian visible in the lower right portion of the image enact the
ambivalence, and even indeterminacy, that the televisual images of the “same”
spectacle, concerned with imposing a single and stable meaning on this complex
event, so fervently sought to foreclose: are the man’s hands raised in
jubilation or in horrified disbelief? The stakes of this unanswered question
are high because it strikes at the heart of the historical status and the
political meaning of the American “liberation” of Iraq.
What made the televisual spectacle of the events on Firdos
Square so effective when it was transmitted on the major networks was not
simply the finesse and technical proficiency with which it staged and
reinforced the Administration’s ideological commitments. After all, biased war
reporting can certainly occur in print media or on internet news sites as well.
And even a still photograph can be—and, since the invention of photography in
the middle of the nineteenth century, always has been—manipulated: through
techniques of cropping, lightening and darkening, montage, perspectival
shifting, special effect lenses, film sensitivity, etc., so that even the
“reality” of so-called documentary photography is always heavily staged and
constructed. But what makes the televisual image so seemingly immune, in the
moment of its reception, to the critical gaze of distanciation and analysis is
precisely its pretense to broadcast a “live” event, transmitted from reality
itself, unconstructed, unproduced, and unmediated, through a representational
window on the fully referential empirical world itself. Here, Hussein’s severed
head bespeaks and radicalizes the “live” event’s allegiance to a mimetic
ideology.
What a “live” broadcast dissimulates is precisely the delusion
that, as Deborah Esch puts it, “visibility translates as cognitive
availability,” when in fact the “unproblematic articulation of live TV with the
real (and with real time) has its impulse in a broader realist ideology that
finds its opportunity in the failure to reflect on the medium, on the distances
of space and time that characterize its structure and effects.”[14]
As Esch reminds us, the “live” broadcast is inscribed in the “generalized
fantasy that the image is direct
(functioning as if it were not a technology of representation but somehow an
unmediated presentation that would render analysis moot) and direct for me (as if it were addressed
to me, here and now, by an other of myself, in the familiar guise of the
evening news anchor.” Accordingly, she continues, it is “crucial to resist the
seductions of this generalized fantasy and to recall in particular the
temporality of ‘live’ news broadcasting, ‘the complex interplay of image and
sound that makes the news prerecorded even as it goes out live.’’’[15]
Disregarding the technically mediated and postponed nature of the live image,
which comes to us in the guise of the “real,” may promise a final return to the
referent in an age in which referentiality itself is so severely
problematized—but this promise comes at a price, a Verspechen that in German means both to promise and to misspeak.
When the highly mediated and produced image of a “live” transmission such as
the toppling of Hussein’s statue is mistaken, even in the unconscious, for the
event itself, that is, when the presentational structure is confused with a
referent and when televisual images of people are confused with the empirical
people themselves—then the ideology of a purely reproductive form of mimesis
threatens to foreclose what remains to be thought in the ways in which an
event, and even television as medium, is at odds with itself and, in this
self-differentiation, deserves to be read
closely. To refuse to subscribe fully to this realist fantasy of the “live”
broadcast and to watch television the way that Walter Benjamin wishes to read
the image of history itself—that is, “gegen den Strich,” against the grain—can be a
decisively political act that will not content itself with older models of
merely content-based Ideologiekritik
that often disregard the presentational specificity of the medium with which
they engage.
Perhaps more than any of the other new media, television
resists the viewer’s efforts at such an anti-realist reading against the grain.
One of the multiple ways in which it resists such a reading is encoded in the
tendency to make available to the viewing subject not only a multitude of
different perspectives but also perspectives that the visual mechanism of a
human body could never assume. For instance, in the “live” broadcast of NASCAR
races, a multitude of cameras may be installed within a race car to transmit
simultaneously a number of images that, in their radical heterogeneity of
perspectives, the “naked” human eye—constrained by internal
optical mechanics and by limitations of time and space—could
not receive all at once. Or, in the case of Hussein’s toppled statue, several
perspectives were assumed by the camera’s lense hovering slightly above the
event, from a quasi-omniscient, “supervisory” point in space that no human eye
could assume on its own. Rather than working to destabilize the realism of the
mimetic ideology—with “artificiality” acting as analytic distancing and
defamiliarization—the mobilization of such perspectives contributes to the
apotheosis of the medial gaze they sponsor. Precisely because a perspective is
“post-human,” it is not fully available to human critique and close analysis.
Indeed, it tendentially paralyzes the very idea of a limited human subject
reading the more powerful technical and post-human gaze of the recording and
transmitting apparatus against the grain.
With such displacement and expansion of the human perspective
in television, what is at stake is not simply the perception of this or that
image but the logic and status of vision itself. As Samuel Weber tells us,
“what one looks at in watching television is not first and foremost images. As
the name of the medium says very precisely, one looks at a certain kind of vision” which is “taking place not simply on the
screen but simultaneously—or rather, quasi-simultaneously, since there is
always a time-lag—somewhere else.” This vision possesses a specificity that is
inseparable from television as a medium. As Weber continues:
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why one does not
usually speak, in English, of “seeing” television but rather of “watching” it.
To “see something” suggests a more or less direct contact of perceiver and
perceived; and this in turn implies the givenness of an object to be seen: a perceptum. We do not on the other hand speak of “looking at a television program.” To “look at” entails a far
more mediate, more distanced relationship. As the “at” makes clear, we are
dealing with an indirect object. But the verb that is most specific to
television is not “looking at” but rather “watching.” For we still speak of
“looking at a painting” or a “photograph”; but we would rarely dream of watching them. (Interestingly, we also
do not speak of “watching” a film.) Rather, we watch events whose outcome is in
doubt, like sporting events. To watch
carries with it the connotation of a scrutiny that suggests more and less than
mere seeing or looking at. To watch is very close to watching out for or looking
out for, that is, being sensorially alert for something that may happen. In the case of television,
the primary “object” of our watching is neither a particular image nor even a
particular program: it is the medium itself, which includes its
institutions—above all, stations and networks.[16]
If,
then, the “object” of televisual watching is the act of watching itself, we
might inquire into the status that the televisual mode of seeing is accorded
when it assumes this or that specific form. For, while Weber is surely right to
insist that seeing televisually always means watching and seeing the medium as
such, that general watching and viewing must always take the shape of a singular form, even as that form is
inseparable from all other quasi-identical forms. That is to say, the general
kind of seeing that television stages can never not be in the form of this or
that particular and singular presentation, this or that event or image. Thus,
while the network coverage of Hussein’s statue was certainly inscribed in the
more general mechanisms and techno-ideological commitments of all other network
coverage—indeed, could not have made any sense to the audience without these arche-inscriptions—it nevertheless
mobilized a set of specific images, or a particular kind of watching and
monitoring, the so-called liberation of Baghdad as it was allegorized in the
toppled and subsequently disfigured monument of the despot.
We might ask, then, what it is in the televisual medium that
makes this tension between, on the one hand, what Weber calls watching the
medium itself and, on the other, the specificity and constraints of a
particular televised event, available as a potentially
readable text to the human subject. What is it that mediates the different
layers of the mediation at work in the medium of television? And how,
ultimately, might these open questions be inflected by the techno-ideological
particularity of recent war coverage?
One way of approaching these issues is to
acknowledge that there is a deep and knotted relationship between the tensions
in the presentational and transmissive strategies of television and certain
unresolved psychic tensions. Half a century ago, when television was still in
its infancy as a “new medium,” Adorno devoted his attention to it in a series
of interrelated studies from the early 1950s, including his American essay for
the Hacker Foundation, “How to Look at Television,” and his German essays
“Prolog zum Fernsehen” (“Prologue to Television”) and “Fernsehen als Ideologie”
(“Television as Ideology”).[17]
In the 1953 “Prolog zum Fernsehen” we read:
The analogy to the two totalitarian states of both
versions imposes itself; the more that which diverges (das Auseindanderweisende) is integrated under a dictatorial will,
the more disintegration progresses, the more that which does not inherently
belong together but is merely externally added up falls apart. The gapless
world of images (lückenlose Bilderwelt)
becomes cracked. On the surface the audience is not much disturbed by this. But
it surely knows about it unconsciously. The suspicion that the reality being
served up is not the one that it pretends to be will grow. But this does not at
first lead to resistance; rather, one loves, with clenched teeth, the
unavoidable and the deeply hated all the more fanatically.[18]
When
television creates the illusion of integration, the mobilization of all its
heterogeneous images into the hegemony of a single meaning—not of this or that
meaning, but of meaning itself—a sense that is identical to itself and that
can be transmitted and received in and as this self-identity, it does so by
violently forcing into conformity what has no common measure and by creating
the false impression that this conformity of meaning is natural and
self-evident when in fact it is carefully produced and edited, even when it is
shown “live.” Yet television is not capable of only perpetuating itself in this strategy of dissimulation, it is
also interrupted by incalculable moments that in the blink of an eye flash up
briefly to disturb the picture of total integration and smooth meaning, much
like Barthes’s erratic punctum
disturbs or “pricks” the intended surface or studium of a photograph, a model that implicitly borrows from
Benjamin’s notion of the “optical unconscious.”[19]
This tension makes the lückenlose Bilderwelt
precisely lückenhaft, full of gaps.
What we could call, extending Adorno, the gappy Lückenhaftigkeit of the lückenlose
Bilderwelt will not yield to the prescriptions of a certain kind of reading
against the grain, an analytic application of the critique of televisual
ideology. After all, the Lückhaftigkeit
of television’s lückenhafte Bilderwelt
is lodged not in conscious cognition and its faculties of enlightenment but in
the unconscious. Because this knowledge is unconscious, it cannot yield
critique or interruption but causes a perverse identification with the
simultaneously hated and fetishized object. Thus, while viewers of the war
coverage on CNN or FOX unconsciously “know” that the constructed smoothness of
the Bilderwelt and its singularity of
meaning are in fact porous and delusional, they come to fetishize this delusion
and the virtual character of its ideologically overdetermined transmission.
This fetishization comes about not in spite of the delusional character of its
object but rather because of it. The affectively charged object—the
delusional, cartoonish, biased war coverage in its television-specific modes of
dissemination—is simultaneously loathed and eroticized, eroticized in its
loathfulness and loathed in its eroticization. As a viewer of television images
of US army tanks rolling into Baghdad and of Hussein’s statue being toppled, I
may have an unconscious suspicion that the “reality” of this so-called live
coverage is being manufactured for me, but I still tune in—I loathe myself as
the one who watches the delusional spectacle and I transfer my deep-seated but
dissimulated disgust with the televisual spectacle on to myself as the one who
enjoys it. In this narcissistic move, what I unconsciously love, hate, and
fetishize in the televisual transmission is, among other things, myself as the
perverse, proto-pornographic subject.
If television compels this kind of unconscious identification
and displacement, it could be said to be inscribed in a grammar that links the
destructive drive and the death drive. In his 1932 correspondence with Albert
Einstein, published in 1933 as “Warum
Krieg?” (“Why War?”), Sigmund Freud situates the psyche’s propensity for
war in its aggressive drives that can never be fully mastered. Taking up
concerns that had first occupied him in his 1915 meditation “Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod” (“Timely Meditations on War and
Death”) and elaborating on the conceptual relays between the dynamic
constitution of the individual psyche and broader cultural processes and aberrations
in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents) of
1930, Freud writes:
Yet I wish to linger for a while with our
destructive drive (Destruktionstrieb)
whose popularity by no means keeps pace with its meaning. For with the help of
some speculation we have reached the view that this drive is at work within
every living being and strives to bring this being to its fall, to return life
to the condition of inanimate matter. It deserves in all seriousness the name
death drive, while the erotic drive represents the strivings toward life. The
death drive becomes a destructive drive in that it, with the help of special
forces, is turned toward the outside, toward objects. The living being as it
were preserves its own life by destroying that of another. But a part of the
death drive remains at work within the living being (Ein Anteil des Todestriebes verbleibt aber im Innern des Lebewesens
tätig), and we have attempted to deduce from this internalization of the
destructive drive a whole series of normal and pathological phenomena.[20]
If
the destructive drive, despite its popularity as a conceptual category is, as
Freud suggests, always one step ahead of any fixed meaning that one may attach
to it, that is, if it is always already on the way to another venue, then this is in no small measure due to the
perpetually shifting movement to which it itself is constantly subjected: the
vacillation between, and imbrication of, the destructive drive and the death
drive, their ceaseless gestures of externalization and internalization. As
opposed to the erotic drive, which generally works to affirm life, the death
drive can become, in the destructive drive, a form of other-directedness. In
its fluctuation between self-directedness and other-directedness, the death
drive either threatens to eradicate the self that it traverses or else it
works, now in the guise of the destructive drive and in a movement that
protects the self from annihilation, upon an external object. By destroying the
object or the Other, the death drive is paid its due without undoing the self
that experiences it. The self traversed by the death drive maintains itself in
the annihilation of the Other as fetishized enemy-object, and war itself
becomes the radicalization of this displacement.[21]
But, as psychoanalysis observes, a strange residue remains even in the psyche
that has transformed the death drive into the other-directed form of the
destructive drive: something cannot fully be transformed; something resists and
persists as an unassimilatable remainder. Freudian theory more generally gives
the effects of this unassimilatable remainder a variety of distinct but
interlaced names: conscience, sublimation, or religion, among others.
We
could say that the corporate networks’ coverage of the second Gulf War made
available to the viewing subject this doubly coded displacement. On the one
hand, it participated in the gesture of the other-directedness of the death
drive in that it allowed the subject to transform the death drive into the
destructive drive by staging the televisual theatricality of attacking and
killing the external enemy-object. Yet, on the other hand, it also helped to lodge within the watching
subject the spectral presence of an unassimilatable remainder, a ghostly form
of self-differentiation that would not fully yield to the self-identity and
relative stability of the production of the destructive drive and its hostile
engagement with the fetishized enemy-object. This latter lodging of the
remainder would seem to work against the transformative movement of
externalized aggression, even as it enables it. The television coverage
colonized and articulated the viewing subject so effectively, then, not in
spite of these tensions but because of them. Indeed, what the war coverage showed
and facilitated was not simply one more instance of a transformation of the
self-directed death drive into the object-directed destructive drive in which
an unassimilatable remainder persists—even though it was that, among other
things. Rather, what the war coverage transmitted to the viewing subject was
both this general economy of displacements and remainders and a self-reflexive image of the general logic of that very
economy. In this way, the corporate networks delivered both the transformative
mechanisms of displacement and a self-reflexive general commentary on the
possibilities and limitations of these mechanisms. But rather than making this
general self-reflexive commentary available as a site of resistance or
otherness to the logic on which it comments and to the marching plan of the
medium in which it occurs, the war coverage assimilated even the commentary on
its psychic investments into the delusion of the lückenlose Bilderwelt that it disseminates. Here, the viewing
subject is situated as the one whose resistance even to the delusion of the
delusion, and to the violent virtualization of death and suffering, is
refunctionalized and co-opted as part of that very delusion. The medium that
makes all these gestures and displacements—as well as any commentary on
them—possible is then valorized as the source of a posthuman pleasure in which
the reality of suffering and death that is attached, in certain of its
formulations, to the concept of the human, merges with the apparatus itself. As
a form of psycho-epistemological “uploading” of the human into the technical
network, its transmissions effectively scramble the building of human communities whose emotive
attachments (Freud’s “Gefühlsbindungen”)
and willingness to transfer personal power to a non-violent communal idea or
goal are, as Freud suggests to Einstein, the only thinkable tools and small
hope in what remains of any struggle against violence, war, and perpetual
genocide.
This
transfer, based on repression and sublimation yet working against war and
violence, is threatened, among other things, by the ways in which killing the
enemy may be understood as the satisfaction of a deep-seated desire. Unlike the
constitutional theory of Carl Schmitt—later a leading legal philosopher of the
Nazi state—who, during the same year in which Freud composed his meditations,
developed an influential philosophy that elaborated the fundamental distinction
between friend and enemy into the concept of the political as such, Freud’s
stance does not insist on the absolute actuality or reality of the enemy-other.[22]
Whereas Schmitt tirelessly argues that the distinction between friend and enemy
must be real—that is, not merely rhetorically or
representationally constructed—Freud implicitly challenges Schmitt’s theory
when he suggests that the fantasy of killing the other, and the desire that is
inscribed in this hostile fantasy, expresses itself along imaginary and even
phantasmagorically exaggerated psychic inventions of that very other. Within
this fantasy of the other, Freud argues, the “killing of the enemy satisfies an
instinctual tendency [triefhafte Neigung].”
However, the “intention to kill can also be contradicted by the consideration
that the enemy could be utilized for convenient service tasks if he is kept
alive in an intimidated state. In that case violence contents itself with
subordinating the enemy rather than killing him.” Freud continues to suggest
that this scenario is “the beginning of the sparing of the enemy, but the
conqueror must now fear the perpetual lust for revenge [laufende Rachsucht] of the conquered, giving up a piece of his
security.”[23] It would
follow, then, that the repression of one’s instinct to kill the enemy-other
names both the condition of possibility of building human communities based on Gefühlsbindungen and signals,
potentially, the continued repression and exploitation of the enemy-other whom
one has kept alive. According to Freud’s model, the repression of certain triefhafte Neigungen is thus no recipe
or implementable program for the ethical treatment of the enemy-other or,
indeed, any Other. Far from distancing itself from these tensions inscribed
deep in the dark underbelly of culture, recent television war coverage exposes
and radicalizes these very instincts, even if in highly mediated form. After
all, we could say that the cruel theatricality of the war coverage speaks
precisely to its viewers’ triebhafte
Neigung to kill—or see killed—the enemy-other on
the mediating site of the television screen. That the invading soldiers, rather
than killing the enemy-other, subject this enemy-other instead to exploitation
and domination and thus make themselves perpetually vulnerable to revenge and
guerrilla opposition, stages, on the quasi-pornographic screen of the so-called
war theater, the psychic tensions that subconsciously traverse the instinctual
life of the television-consuming subject itself. The continued attacks and
erratic ambushes by Iraqis on the American occupiers since the official
cessation of active military hostilities now exemplify this dynamic almost
daily.
Far
from resolving the difficulties presented by the delusion of the delusion, it
is our perpetual engagement with the structural logic and televisual mediations
of “enduring” freedom that names the stakes and the terms by which our reading
of the world’s textuality today is measured in ethico-political dimensions.
Whether our triebhafte Neigung yields
to the politically invested interventions of reading images in the critical,
emphatic sense that turns around the uncontrollable aporias of presentation, or
whether this triebhafte Neigung
functions merely as one more weapon in an arsenal mobilizable at will by the
US-led military-industrial-medial empire of gobal coordination, or Gleichschaltung, of geopolitical Gleichschalten as perpetual
channel-surfing, or Umschalten,
remains an open question. It deserves at any given moment—now—to be asked and thought one more time. After all,
it is never “only” the Other, or other Others, but also always we ourselves,
even ourselves as other and as other-directed, who are at stake.
[1] Friedrich
Nietzsche, “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne,” in Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 1, eds. Giorgio
Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich and Berlin: DTV and de Gruyter, 1999),
873-890, here 880. Unless indicated otherwise, translations are my own.
For general
analyses of these new foreign policies and the so-called war on terror, see for
instance Noam Chomsky’s 9-11 (New
York: Seven Stories, 2001) and his essay “Confronting the Empire,” available at
znet, the internet site of Z Magazine,
under
<http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=2938>.
Genealogical aspects of the imbrication of technology and terrorism are
outlined by Friedrich A. Kittler, “Von Staaten und ihren Terroristen,” in
Étienne Balibar, Friedrich A. Kittler, and Martin van Creveld, Vom Krieg
zum Terrorismus?, Mosse-Lectures, Winter 2002-2003 (Berlin:
Humboldt-Universität, 2003), 33-50.
[2] See Judith Butler, “Guantánamo Limbo:
International Law Offers Too Little Protection for the Prisoners of the New
War,” The Nation, April 1, 2002:
20-24.
[3] The manifold rhetorical and political
implications of this catachresis are perceptively analyzed in the context of
the first Gulf War in Avital Ronell, “Support Our Tropes: Reading Desert Storm”
and “Activist Supplement: Papers on the Gulf War,” both in Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 269-291 and 292-304, respectively.
[4] Fredric Jameson, “Reading without
Interpretation: Postmodernism and the Video-Text,” in The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature,
Nigel Fabb (ed.), (New York: Methuen, 1987), 199-223; quoted as the book motto
of Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces:
Place and Memory in Visual Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), n.p. For more recent critical
assessments of the new media from epistemo-political perspectives, see Henry
Jenkins and David Thorburn (eds.), Democracy
and the New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003) as well as Mary E. Hocks
and Michelle R. Kendrick (eds.), Eloquent
Images: Word and Image in the Age of New
Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
[5] I borrow the term “other-directedness” from
Samuel Weber’s discussion of textuality as “a figure that designates the other-directedness of structures of
signification” which “entails an approach to the other as articulation and
to articulation as other.” “Catching Up With the Past,” in Mass Mediauras: Form,
Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 168-208, here
201.
[6] Martin Heidegger, "Nur
noch ein Gott kann uns retten," Der
Spiegel 23 (31 May 1976): 193-219, here 206. Some of the television-specific implications
for culture of this uncanny functioning are put into conceptual circulation by
Vilem Flusser, “Two Approaches to the Phenomenon, Television,” trans. Ursula
Beiter, German 20th Century
Philosophical Writings, ed. Wolfgang Schirmacher (New
York: Continuum, 2003), 10-21.
[7] Max Horkheimer
and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der
Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989),
153.
[8] Ibid., 176.
[9] See Jean
Baudrillard, La guerre du Golf n’a pas eu
lieu (Paris: Galilée, 1991) and “Der Feind ist verschwunden,” Der Spiegel 45: 6 (4 February 1991),
220-21. For his views on the
September 11 attacks, compare further The
Spirit of Terrorism (London: Verso, 2002).
[10] Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard
Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 141-48.
[11] Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television, trans.
Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 5f.
[12] I thank Sam Weber for our discussions of The X-Files and its relation to the
current war coverage as well as for sharing with me in this context his as of
yet unpublished essays “Networks, Netwar, and Narratives” and “The Joy of
Killing,” both of which speak in important ways to the imbrication of questions
of media presentation and the trajectories of certain US-led strategies of
global domination.
[13] Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory,” in
The Resistance to Theory
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 3-20, here 11. These
concerns are enlarged and deepened in the essays collected in his Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej
Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
[14] Deborah Esch, “No Time Like the Present,”
in In the Event: Reading Journalism,
Reading Theory (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999), 61-70, here 62 and 65.
[15] Esch, “Missing In Action,” in In the Event, 71-76, here 76.
[16]Weber, “Television: Set and Screen,” in Mass Mediauras, 108-128, here 118.
[17] We might note that Adorno’s American essay
is called “How to Look at Television” rather than “How to Watch Television”—it
is the act of looking at television,
turning it into an object of scrutiny, that requires critical instruction,
whereas merely watching it, consuming
it as a medium, requires little more training than does opening one’s mouth to
devour a Bratwurst. Small wonder, then,
that Adorno writes of television: “Like the husband to whom a fairy grants
three wishes makes a sausage appear and then disappear again from his wife’s
nose [seinem Weib eine Bratwurst an die
Nase und wieder fortzaubert], so
to whomever the ghost who dominates nature has granted the capability of seeing
what is distant, sees only the usual, enriched by the lie that pretends it were
something different and that spreads to yield the false sense of his
existence.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Prolog zum Fernsehen,” in Eingriffe. Neun kritische Modelle (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1963), 69-80, here 80.
[18] In German,
Adorno’s rich passage reads: “Die Analogie zu den totalitären Staaten beider
Versionen drängt sich auf; je mehr, unter diktatorialem Willen, das Auseinanderweisende
integriert wird, um so mehr schreitet die Disintegration fort, um so mehr fällt
auseinander, was nicht von sich aus zusammengehört, sondern bloß äußerlich
addiert wird. Die lückenlose Bilderwelt gerät brüchig. An der Oberfläche läßt
sich das Publikum wenig davon stören. Unbewußt wird es davon wissen. Der
Verdacht, daß die Realität, die man serviert, nicht die sei, für die sie sich
ausgibt, wird wachsen. Nur führt das zunächst nicht zum Widerstand, sondern man
liebt, mit verbissenen Zähnen, das Unausweichliche und zuinnerst Verhaßte um so
fanatischer.” Adorno, “Prolog zum Fernsehen,” 72.
[19] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
[20] Sigmund Freud, “Warum Krieg?,” in Studienausgabe,
Vol. 9, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et.al. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2000),
271-286, here 282.
[21] It would be necessary to investigate the
ways in which the fantasy of this enemy-other is constructed in corporate
television more generally. A start has been made by Slavoj Žižek who points out that “every feature
attributed to the Other is already present at the very heart of the USA.
Murderous fanaticism? There are in the USA today more than two million Rightist
populist ‘fundamentalists’ who also practice a terror of their own, legitimized
by (their understanding of) Christianity. Since America is, in a way,
‘harboring’ them, should the US Army have punished Americans themselves after
the Oklahoma bombing? And what about the way Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson
reacted to the events of September 11, perceiving them as a sign that God had
withdrawn His protection from the USA because of the sinful lives of the
Americans, putting the blame on hedonist materialism, liberalism, and rampant
sexuality, and claiming that America got what it desevered? The fact that this
very same condemnation of ‘liberal’ America as the one from the Muslim Other
came from the very heart of l’Amérique
profonde should give us food for thought…George W. Bush himself had to
concede that the most probable perpetrators of the anthrax attacks were not
Muslim terrorists but America’s own extreme Right Christian
fundamentalists—again, does not the fact that acts first attributed to an
external enemy may turn out to be acts perpetrated by the very heart of l’Amérique profonde provide an
unexpected confirmation of the thesis that the true clash is the clash within
each civilization?” “Reappropriations: The Lesson of Mullah Omar,” in Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five
Essays on September 11 and Related Dates
(London: Verso, 2002), 33-57, here 43f. One might add that several of the
September 11th terrorists themselves were also “harbored” by the US
itself, leading mostly banal suburban lives.
[22] Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen. Text von 1932
mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien
(Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1963).
[23] Freud, “Warum
Krieg?,” 276.