11 11 Lacking the truth, [we] will however find instants of truth, and those instants are in fact all we have available to us to give some order to this chaos of horror.
—HANNAH ARENDT
ON MONDAY AUGUST 6, 1945, the United States unleashed an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 70,000 people instantly and another 70,000 within five years—an opening volley in a nuclear campaign visited on Nagasaki in the days that followed.1 In the immediate aftermath, the incineration of mostly innocent civilians was buried in official government pronouncements about the victory of the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bomb was celebrated by those who argued that its use was responsible for concluding the war with Japan. Also applauded was the power of the bomb and the wonder of science in creating it, especially “the atmosphere of technological fanaticism” in which scientists worked to create the most powerful weapon of destruction then known to the world.2 Conventional justification for dropping the atomic bombs held that “it was the most expedient measure to securing Japan’s surrender [and] that the bomb was used to shorten the agony of war and to save American lives.”3 Left out of that succinct legitimating narrative were the growing objections to the use of atomic weaponry put forth by a number of top military leaders and politicians, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was then the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, former president Herbert Hoover, and General Douglas MacArthur, all of whom argued it was not necessary to end the war.4 A position later proven to be correct.
Kenzaburo Oe, the Nobel Prize winner for literature, noted that in spite of attempts to justify the bombing “from the instant the atomic bomb exploded, it became the symbol of human evil, [embodying] the absolute evil of war.”5 What particularly troubled Oe was the scientific and intellectual complicity in the creation of the atomic bomb and in the lobbying for its use, with acute awareness that it would turn Hiroshima into a “vast ugly death chamber.”6 More pointedly, it revealed a new stage in the merging of military actions and scientific methods, indeed a new era in which the technology of destruction could destroy the earth in roughly the time it takes to boil an egg. The bombing of Hiroshima extended a new industrially enabled kind of violence and warfare in which the distinction between soldiers and civilians disappeared and the indiscriminate bombing of civilians was normalized. But more than this, the American government exhibited a “total embrace of the atom bomb,” that signaled support for the first time of a “notion of unbounded annihilation” and “the totality of destruction.”7
Hiroshima designated the beginning of the nuclear era in which, as Oh Jung points out, “Combatants were engaged on a path toward total war in which technological advances, coupled with the increasing effectiveness of an air strategy, began to undermine the ethical view that civilians should not be targeted. . . . This pattern of wholesale destruction blurred the distinction between military and civilian casualties.”8 The destructive power of the bomb and its use on civilians also marked a turning point in American self-identity in which the United States began to think of itself as a superpower, which as Robert Jay Lifton points out refers to “a national mindset—put forward strongly by a tight-knit leadership group—that takes on a sense of omnipotence, of unique standing in the world that grants it the right to hold sway over all other nations.”9 The power of the scientific imagination and its murderous deployment gave birth simultaneously to the American disimagination machine with its capacity to rewrite history in order to render it an irrelevant relic best forgotten.
Pondering what Hiroshima means for American history and consciousness proves as fraught an intellectual exercise as taking up this critical issue in the years and decades that followed this staggering inhumanity, albeit for vastly different reasons. Now that we are living in a 24/7 screen culture hawking incessant apocalypse, how we understand Foucault’s pregnant observation that history is always a history of the present takes on a greater significance, especially in light of the fact that historical memory is not simply being rewritten but is disappearing.10 Once an emancipatory pedagogical and political project predicated on the right to study and engage the past critically, history has receded into a depoliticizing culture of consumerism, a wholesale attack on science, the glorification of military ideals, an embrace of the punishing state, and a nostalgic invocation of the “greatest generation.” Inscribed in insipid patriotic platitudes and decontextualized isolated facts, history under the reign of neoliberalism has been either cleansed of its most critical impulses and dangerous memories or it has been reduced to a contrived narrative that sustains the fictions and ideologies of the rich and powerful. History has not only become a site of collective amnesia but has also been appropriated so as to transform “the past into a container full of colourful or colourless, appetizing or insipid bits, all floating with the same specific gravity.”11 Consequently, what intellectuals now have to say about Hiroshima and history in general is not of the slightest interest to nine-tenths of the American population. While writers of fiction might find such a generalized, public indifference to their craft freeing, even “inebriating” as Philip Roth has written, it is for the chroniclers of history a cry in the wilderness.12
Memories of the horror of Hiroshima are now present not only in the existential anxieties and dread of nuclear annihilation that racked the early 1950s but also in a kind of fundamentalist fatalism embodied in collective uncertainty, a predilection for apocalyptic violence, a political economy of disposability, and an expanding culture of cruelty that has fused with the entertainment industry. We’ve not produced a generation of war protesters or government agitators to be sure, but rather a generation of youth who no longer believe they have a future that will be any different from the present.13 That such connections tying the past to the present are lost signal not merely the emergence of a neoliberal public pedagogy that wages an assault on historical memory, civic literacy, and civic agency. It also points to a historical shift in which the perpetual disappearance of that atomic moment signals a further deepening in our own national psychosis.
If “Hiroshima and Nagasaki had rendered actual the most extreme fantasies of world destruction encountered in the insane or in the nightmares of ordinary people,” as Edward Glover once observed, the neoliberal disimagination machine has rendered such horrific reality a collective fantasy driven by the spectacle of violence and the theater of entertainment.14 It threatens democratic public life by devaluing social agency, historical memory, and critical consciousness, and in doing so it creates the conditions for people to be ethically compromised and politically infantilized. Returning to Hiroshima is not only necessary to break out of the moral cocoon that puts reason and memory to sleep but also to rediscover both our imaginative capacities for civic literacy on behalf of the public good, especially if such action demands that we remember, as Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell remarked: “Every small act of violence, then, has some connection with, if not sanction from, the violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”15
The anniversary and poisonous legacy of the bombing of Hiroshima, arguably one of the single largest terrorist acts in history, appears to be increasingly infused with a celebration of militarism and an investment in technological fanaticism, both of which lay bare a brazen disregard for the possibility of nuclear warfare and planetary obliteration. Reflecting on the tragic historical events of 1945, American intellectuals offer nothing more than a tepid response to the birth of the atomic age, which cannot but signify a moral failure and political retreat tantamount to a callous indifference toward human suffering. The threat of global nuclear annihilation appears to have dissolved into a domestication of the unimaginable.16 America’s intellectuals have lost sight of the horror, fear, anxieties, and sense of doom that gripped both the American public and its intellectuals during the second half of the twentieth century, despite that such fears and anxieties—and the criticism and modes of resistance to nuclear technology that grew out of them—were not without reason and are even more relevant today. If this threat is more dangerous and imminent now than in the past, how does one explain the retreat of intellectuals in the twenty-first century from addressing the memory of Hiroshima and the danger that such amped-up nuclear destruction poses to the world at this historical moment?
Jacques Derrida identified the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe as a “non-event,” a likelihood beset by a paradox caught between “the necessity and the impossibility of thinking the event.”17 In an age in which wars have become indiscriminately murderous, intellectuals find themselves confronting forms of symbolic and material violence that produce an endless series of crises. Yet these crises have been reduced to Hollywood spectacles, just as the notion of crisis now gives way to a “disimagination machine” that divorces critically engaged modes of individual and collective agency from an understanding of the conditions that threaten human beings with apocalyptic disasters.18 Instead of addressing the dark shadow of extinction that extends from Hiroshima to Fukushima, American intellectuals appear to have become quiet, tamed by the forces of privatization, commodification, and militarism while constantly being bombarded by the celebration of popular powerlessness.
As the widely circulated videos of the horrific decapitations of James Foley and Steven Sotloff by Islamic extremists in September 2014 made clear, terrorism in the age of mass media and communications technology attaches itself to the spectacle of violence so as to open up a new space in which global politics is shaped by the regressive morality of ideological fundamentalism, one that willfully exhibits its degeneration into a totalitarian pathology. As shocking as these atrocious events are, they offer no guarantees of moral outrage or political action because the substantive nature of crisis itself has become frail, subject to colonization by a neoliberal pedagogical machine that thrives on an excess of representation and surrender to the political cynicism of apocalyptic despair.
In contrast to the postwar reactions to the monstrous violence wrought by the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, violence, torture, and human suffering are now framed outside the realm of historical memory, readily dissolving into the nonstop production of Hollywood movies, media spectacles, and a screen culture that promises instant gratification. In a society in which our inner worlds are subject to the reign of the “death-haunted”19 dictates of casino capitalism, with its endless series of environmental, political, financial, and social cataclysms, the apocalypse has become a spectacle. Moreover, it is a spectacle that produces political infantilism and civic illiteracy, while thriving on a plethora of excessive violence. This is all done in the name of entertainment, which remains safely removed from the work of many academics—even though its messages are widely viewed and accepted as common sense by the American public—as if the public pedagogy produced by the merchants of desire and entertainment only exists in the realm of fiction and functions exclusively as a form of harmless amusement.20
Too many academics and other intellectuals now live under the shadow of manufactured precarity, insecurity, and the fear of relentless catastrophes in the wake of endless disasters that have become an ongoing feature of everyday life. Massive hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, droughts, along with the rise of racism, mass violence, terrorism, xenophobia, nationalism, and an increase in war around the globe are ignored or explained away in trivial analyses offered by the corporate media. Thus removed from any understanding of the conditions that produce catastrophic events, media coverage provides an endless cycle of material for consumption by what has become a culture that feeds on disaster and aesthetic depravity and that turns everything into a cheap form of entertainment or simply a crude spectacle. Lured by neoliberal dream-machines into their theater of cruelty, there is a tendency on the part of both intellectuals and the general public to become indifferent to even extreme forms of violence, preferring to flirt with irrationality and withdraw into private obsessions, all the while becoming complicit with the withering of political life. The legacy of the strong opposition to the dropping of the atom bomb and the fear of a nuclear holocaust dissipated over time and morphed into the growing vacuity and cowardice of intellectuals. Politics for many on the left dissolved as the post-1960s generation that entered academia and benefited by its rewards increasingly indulged in modes of theorizing and producing research projects that removed their work from larger social considerations and urgent political problems. Protests over nuclear arms gave rise to a left absorbed in high theory and an array of diverse movements that fractured any sense of unity or collective opposition to a potential nuclear holocaust. As critique morphed into insipid forms of professionalism and theoreticism ensconced in what often appeared to be jargon that functioned like a firewall, many intellectuals chose security over conscience and, as the twenty-first century appeared, became irrelevant.
Violence has become normalized even as the scale of destruction appears overwhelming and seems beyond the control of neoliberal societies such as the United States, where all social problems are largely understood through the reductive registers of individual character, responsibility, and atomized resilience. Under such circumstances, wider public and political concerns dissolve into personal dilemmas. In the absence of conceptual or practical means to address the conditions of our collective existence, growing fear feeds a crisis of meaning for many intellectuals. Any sustained critique that could motivate political action gives way to a sense of despair and flight from responsibility. The overwhelming array and scope of disaster appear beyond any hope of being addressed through the efforts of isolated individuals. As Michael Levine and William Taylor write:
People are left without the mental or physical abilities they need to cope. Government is absent or useless. We find ourselves in what amounts to what Naomi Zack describes as a Hobbesian second state of nature—where government is inoperative and chaos (moral, social, political, personal) reigns. . . . Genuine [crisis], for example war, undermines and dismantles the structures—material structures to be sure but also those of justice, human kindness, and affectivity—that give us the wherewithal to function and that are shown to be inimical to catastrophe as such. Disaster dispenses with civilization while catastrophe displaces it.21
The horrors of crises such as Hiroshima were met in the past by many intellectuals with moral outrage, criticism, and collective resistance, informed by a sense of hope for the future rooted in the power of the radical imagination. Today, such a culture of thoughtful reasoning and insightful analyses has been corroded under the flood of made-for-the-screen catastrophes that drown the moral conscience and muddy political reflection. Derrida’s call for the necessity of action in the face of a crisis such as Hiroshima and the dawn of the nuclear age becomes difficult, if not impossible, to understand and act upon at the present time as the meaning of “crisis”—with its underlying appeal to critique and action—gives way to a notion of catastrophe in which inconceivable disasters and terrors dissolve into what Susan Sontag called “the threat of unremitting banality.”22 As endless neoliberal spectacles of catastrophe move between the registers of transgressive excess and extreme violence, they exhaust their shock value and degenerate into escapist entertainment.
Under such circumstances, many intellectuals are no longer dealing with crises, which in the past were often met by thoughtful, responsible, and organized responses to the challenges produced by calamitous events such as the bombing of Hiroshima. Such a state of ethical tranquilization and political paralysis induced by catastrophic spectacles is further reinforced by the widespread cynicism that has become the modus operandi of the neoliberal machinery of misery and precarity. Rather than lift people out of the rubble of disaster, catastrophes serve to “distract us from terrors . . . by an escape into the exotic dangerous situations which have last-minute happy endings.”23
Manufactured catastrophes—and with them a generalized sense of manufactured helplessness—now reign supreme in the new interregnum of late modernity, a kind of liminal space that serves to neutralize action, derail the challenges posed by real social and political problems such as the threat of nuclear annihilation, and substitute the escape into fantasy for any attempt to challenge the terrifying conditions that often accompany a serious crisis. Such retreats from reality blunt civic courage, dull the radical imagination, and dilute any sense of moral responsibility, plunging historical acts of violence such as Hiroshima into the abyss of political indifference, ethical insensitivity, and depoliticization. Catastrophe, as Brad Evans has observed, speaks to an era of late modernity marked by “a closing of the political.”24 Resignation and acceptance of catastrophe has taken root in the ground prepared by the neoliberal notion that “nothing can be done.” If, as Zygmunt Bauman argues, crisis speaks to the need to address what exactly needs to be done,25 then what has been lost in the age of catastrophe and its overwhelming sense of precarity and uncertainty is a properly political response in the face of a pending or existing disaster.
In the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, the question emerged as what was to be done about such horror. Catastrophe, in contrast, tends to be so overpowering that the issue is no longer how might intellectuals address and rectify a crisis, but how they endure and survive it. The horror of the atomic bomb once inspired the Beat Generation, a literature of resistance, film documentaries, and a plethora of thoughtful criticism. As Howard Zinn pointed out, today’s images of violence and “the statistics of death and suffering that figures in the millions leave us numb, and nothing but the personal testimonies of individuals—even if they only faintly represent the reality—are capable of shaking us out of that numbness.”26 Such horror now survives as a script, not for confronting dark truths about human civilization, but for incorporating and embellishing as part of a Hollywood blockbuster.
Neoliberal regimes locked into the orbits of privatization, commodification, disposability, and militarization elevate extreme violence and its effects into a cultural and pedagogical spectacle. The spectacle in this sense is part of a pedagogical apparatus in which historical, individual, and social modes of agency degenerate, presenting a serious challenge to intellectuals regarding the very possibility of addressing diverse crises. Instead of responding to crises with the desire to correct a wrong and to reimagine a different future, all that appears to be left among many intellectuals, especially in the academy, is the desire to merely survive in the face of endless representations of state and non-state violence and the ever-encroaching apocalypses produced by the neoliberal machinery of disposability. The mass public indifference to the nuclear arms race and the threat of human extinction; the use of state torture; the indiscriminate and mass killing of children; the rise of debtors’ prisons; the war against women; the militarization of the totality of American society; and the state violence waged against nonviolent student protesters—is only a short list indicating how the looming shadows of apocalypse and experiences of actual suffering have moved out of the realm of political responsibility and moral sensibility into the black hole of a depoliticizing mode of entertainment and suppression of dangerous memories. At the same time, mass violence has become individualized in that real-life violence in both screen culture and the corporate-controlled media is reduced to representations of suffering and tortured individuals rather than masses of people. Under such circumstances, mass violence such as what happened at Hiroshima becomes faceless and invisible since only the individual body denotes a legitimate representation of suffering, violence, brutality, and death. This individualization of violence reinforces the logic of neoliberal misery and disposability, construing the individual’s plight as a matter of fate removed from larger structural forces as the normal and acceptable state of affairs. Mass deaths make it harder to strip away the humanity of the victims and the horror of the violence and are not easily forgotten. Today, the traces of both memory and moral responsibility become more difficult for intellectuals to address and grasp as crises are abstracted from the broader social, economic, and political conditions of their production.
As crisis gives way to catastrophe, the quest to merely survive now misdirects moral and political outrage toward forms of entertainment that lull us into a moral coma. As violence becomes normalized, it becomes more difficult to conceive other kinds of social behavior, modes of mediation, and types of collective resistance, let alone a more just and democratic future. Hence, the spectacle of the catastrophe signals a society in which a collective sense of despair merges with the notion of a future that is no longer worth fighting for. The lesson to be drawn here, however tentative, is that under the reign of neoliberalism the roles and responsibilities of the intellectual are being devalued, reduced to a stance marked by a flight from moral and political responsibility, infused by an indifference to the unpleasant necessities of mass violence, and safely tamed within public spheres such as higher education that have given themselves over to a crude instrumental rationality and endorsement of market-based values, practices, and policies.27
Many Americans now inhabit modes of time and space in which violence and the logic of disposability mutually reinforce each other. For example, the unarmed African American youth Michael Brown, standing with his hands raised, was not only shot and killed by a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, but his body was left in the street for four hours—which was eerily reminiscent of the treatment given the low-income, largely African American inhabitants of New Orleans whose bodies, rendered worthless and undeserving of compassion, were also left in the streets after Hurricane Katrina swept through the city.
The logic of disposability has a long history in the United States and has spurned a number of resistance movements and a plethora of dissent among intellectuals. Unfortunately, times have changed for the worse. In the case of the killings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray, there was an enormous expression of outrage by many poor minorities of color and some white progressives, yet too little was heard from American intellectuals and academics. In the absence of such an outcry, public attitudes are reinforced in their acceptance of the neoliberal notion that disposable populations and individuals are the new living dead—legitimately made invisible and rightly relegated to zones of terminal exclusion and impoverishment. Such silence reinforces the notion that the disposable are by their own actions the unknowable, invisible, and powerless marginalized by class and race and living in ghettoes that serve as dumping grounds largely patrolled by armies of police dressed like soldiers inspecting a war zone.
The disposable people inhabiting these sites, or what João Biehl calls “zones of social abandonment,”28 constitute a new form of underclass, an expanding group of the American population that extends from poor urban minorities to a collapsing middle class to the millions incarcerated by the punishing state, to an entire generation of young people whose lives have been short-circuited by a rogue financial class that has robbed them of a future and who now live in a constant state of uncertainty and precarity.29 Made voiceless, and hence powerless, the subjectivity of the dispossessed becomes not just the locus of politics, but part of the machinery of social and political death. The logic of disposability has become all-encompassing in American society, extending its tentacles outward from the neighborhoods of the poor and destitute to the middle-class confines of the suburbs and outlying rural communities. The power and reach of neoliberal misery and disposability have created a new culture of hopelessness and conformity among the many intellectuals who are themselves feeling always on the brink of being thrust into the ranks of the disposable. Increasingly, they appear too afraid of losing their jobs or of a fate even worse—such as incarceration—if they speak out against the violence that is now embedded in the nervous system of American society. In the face of a state government that hardly shies away from surveillance, punishment, and mass incarceration—and in these respects appears far more harsh and powerful than the one that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima—many intellectuals fear for their futures, and in some cases their lives.30 Abandoning all efforts to advocate for change and embracing the survivalist mode peddled by the neoliberal social order and a 24/7 nonstop consumerist culture, intellectuals retreat from dangerous memories, making it easier for the logic of disposability to become the norm rather than the exception.
As consumerism becomes the only obligation of citizenship and expression of agency left, the pleasure of passive spectatorship along with a sterile careerism blunt for many intellectuals any sense of political engagement and the need to address crucial social problems. At the same time, the machinery of commodification rolls on in its efforts to promote a cleansing of historical memory, removing any trace of social and political irresponsibility, if not willful indifference, for which past and current generations might be held accountable.31 Any thoughts of challenging mass violence and apocalyptic crisis are now left to the superheroes that populate comics, video games, and Hollywood films, all of which testify to the ways in which the dominant cultural apparatuses of our time depoliticize intellectuals by rendering, as David Graeber points out, “any thought of changing the world seem [like] an idle fantasy.”32 The apocalypse has come home, and it has become a video game and reality TV show at once effectively dethroning the political while smothering the never-ending task of history to enable moral witnessing and provide a critique of the horrors that give rise to what seems like an endless series of crises. The disimagination machine, especially regarding the nightmare of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ushered in the nuclear age, now controls all the commanding institutions that once preserved history, and serves largely to erase memory. As Tom Engelhardt observes:
Seventy years later, the apocalypse is us. Yet in the United States, the only nuclear bomb you’re likely to read about is Iran’s (even though that country possesses no such weapon). For a serious discussion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, those more than 4,800 increasingly ill-kept weapons that could incinerate several Earth-sized planets, you need to look not to the country’s major newspapers or news programs.33
Yet there is more at stake here than the erasure of historical memory among American intellectuals. Across the whole culture, the machinery of entertainment and its various cultural apparatuses advance the celebration of what might be called an aesthetics of catastrophe that merges spectacles of violence, war, and brutality into forms of collective pleasure that constitute an important and new symbiosis among visual pleasure, violence, and suffering. The aesthetics of catastrophe revels in images of human suffering that are subordinated to the formal properties of beauty, design, and taste—thus serving in the main to “bleach out a moral response to what is shown.”34 For social critic Susan Sontag and many other critical theorists, the aesthetics of catastrophe is revealed when it takes as its object the misery of others, murderous displays of torture, mutilated bodies, and intense suffering while simultaneously erasing the names, histories, and voices of the victims of such brutal and horrible acts. The philosopher Paul Virilio, in a meditation on the extermination of bodies and the environment from Hiroshima and Auschwitz to Chernobyl, refers to this depraved form of art as an “aesthetics of disappearance that would come to characterize the whole fin-de-siècle” of the twentieth century.35
The spectacles of intense violence, hyper-masculinity, celebrity culture, and extreme sports fit neatly into a culture that celebrates the devastation wreaked by unchecked market forces and embraces a survival-of-the-fittest ethic. Conformity and forgetting increasingly give way to a heightened mode of cruelty that is pleasure-driven and infuses not only the video game and Hollywood film industries but also the military-industrial-surveillance complex. Tied to forms of pleasurable consumption and sensations that delight in images of suffering, the depravity of catastrophe functions to anesthetize the entire culture ethically and politically, prompting passivity or even joy in the midst of violence, suffering, and injustice. Embodied in the form of reality TV shows, video games, and escapist entertainment, neoliberal public pedagogy now suppresses concrete memories of the suffering and horror associated with war and events such as the bombing of Hiroshima. This marriage of pleasure and depravity should not be seen as the province of individual pathology or evil; to the contrary, it functions largely to produce a collective subject through an economy of affect and meaning that traps people in their own narcissistic desires and callous self-interests while promoting an endless spectacle of catastrophes. Drawing upon the work of writers Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, I would argue that the aesthetics of catastrophe works in tandem with casino capitalism so as to produce a kind of “psychic numbing” both for intellectuals and the American public. Psychic numbing manifests itself most clearly in the total disregard, if not disdain, voiced in response to the suffering of others on the part of powerful conservative elites, anti-public intellectuals, mainstream politicians, and the financial ruling classes. This is a notion of catastrophe in which unrestrained self-interest and ruthless competitiveness become the only intellectual and ethical values that matter.36
Surely it is possible to reinvigorate society so that there is a collective understanding that the problems people suffer individually should only be understood within a wider set of economic, social, and political considerations. There is no other choice, as a social order that has become a breeding ground for violence against those considered excess, disposable, and other is set on a course for self-destruction.37 As material and symbolic forms of violence merge with the sadistic discourse of hate radio and right-wing politicians, a new and more intense culture of cruelty emerges that targets increasing numbers of people for disposal rather than compassion, trust, and empathy. Humane interventions and public values wane while the celebration of war-like values, militarism, a friend/enemy divide, and even the murder of children, as we have seen in Gaza, is sanctioned by the ruthless logic of military necessity.38
We now live in a time of administered lawlessness that not only fabricates legal illegalities, but also suggests that any impending crisis demands lawlessness and preemptive violence, which, while defining itself as an exception, becomes normalized as an expected facet of everyday behavior—if not also a source of cheap sensationalism and entertainment. Lawlessness is not only justified as a military imperative; it becomes part of the workings of corrupt politics and financial power. How else to explain that President Obama refused to prosecute the CIA operatives who illegally tortured people under the Bush-Cheney administration?39 Or the fact that “Director of National Intelligence James Clapper perjured himself on camera with little or no fallout”?40 Another example of lawlessness is clear in the case of “the CEO of JPMorgan who presided over various scams that resulted in $20 billion worth of fines and, for his trouble, he was awarded a 74 percent raise,” rather than prosecuted and put in jail.41 Then there is the egregious example of banking giant HSBC, “which admitted to laundering $850 million for a pair of Central and South American drug cartels,” and, once again, nobody went to jail.42
Inundated by apocalyptic catastrophes and their spectacularization, we seem to shrug off the reign of corrupt financiers and politicians who operate outside the law. As Lifton and Mitchell have argued, we also fail to see the plight of those living in our midst as we “become increasingly insensitive to violence and suffering around us, to killing in general, but also to poverty and homelessness.”43 This echoes the sentiments of Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis who insist that “violence shown every day ceases to provoke amazement, or disgust. It, as it were, grows on you. At the same time, it stays unreal—it still seems it cannot happen to us.”44 Furthermore, rather than being alarmed, for example, over the defense industry, which “embodies the primeval archetype of unencumbered raw violence,”45 growing numbers of intellectuals mimic, through their silence, if not tacit support, an American public that seeks out more spectacular bloodshed as a way to ramp up the pleasure quotient and fulfill a collective desire for instant gratification and the need to feel something, anything. How else to explain the muteness of intellectuals regarding the legislation being passed in a number of states that will require teachers to carry weapons in their classrooms and allow people to take weapons into bars, thus clearly promoting a toxic gun culture that gives rise to, among other things, vigilante and militia groups patrolling the borders of the Southwest hunting for illegal immigrants?46 How else to understand the silence in the face of an endless spate of violence against black urban youth in the past decade, which until recently has been barely reported in the media except in terms that describe it as routine policing rather than as acts of exceptional and unacceptable brutality?47 As Antonio Thomas points out, according to the 2010 National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project, within a time frame of 16 months, there were
5,986 reports of police brutality that are reported resulting in 382 deaths, [of which] a great majority of these individuals have been black men and women. But due to the amount of fear that police use to terrorize the black community . . . most victims of police brutality do not report it to the proper authorities for fear of retaliation from a police force who has sworn to serve and protect them. What is wors[e] is that out of those 5,986 reports only 33% went through conviction, [of those convicted] only 64% has received a prison sentence and on an average the police only serve a maximum of 14 months.48
How is it that intellectuals have so little to say publicly about the overt racism in law enforcement, not to mention the way the media report on the shootings of poor minority youth in the nation’s cities often as defensible homicides. This is especially disturbing at a time when those responsible for protecting the public indicate that they would rather inflict violence on young people and incarcerate them than provide them with decent education, training, health care, and employment? As intellectuals surrender their civic courage and intellectual capacities to the dictates of a neoliberal regime, it becomes all the more difficult to recognize that a pervasive inattentiveness to the lessons of history will inevitably breed these kinds of horrors.
As the spectacle of neoliberal terrorism, violence, and misery becomes one of the major organizing principles of daily life, it is all the more imperative for intellectuals, educators, artists, parents, students, and others to examine the myriad of cultural apparatuses that currently represent not only powerful political and pedagogical forces in shaping a culture of fear and violence—invoked by state and non-state groups to legitimize lawlessness—but also a new technology and pedagogical machinery for redefining the very nature of power itself. This is all the more crucial to recognize since the central elements of the spectacle of terrorism and the aesthetics of catastrophe are unlike anything many intellectuals have faced in the past—given their enshrinement of hyper-real violence, unadulterated appeal to fear, resistance to state authority and the rule of law, and elevation of the visual image to a place of social, cultural, and political dominance. Given how such cultural apparatuses have the power to work pedagogically and politically to wage a war on communal relations, the social state, and the radical imagination, it is crucial to remember, as Hannah Tennant-Moore reminds us, that “fear loves nothing so much as punishment.”49
The spreading orgy of global violence that characterizes the twenty-first century can be traced from at least the birth of the atomic age extending to the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers. This historical trajectory links the power of violent images with the culture of fear, constituting a new space that has opened up for intellectuals to engage the political as a pedagogical force and the spectacle as the new language of politics.50 C. Wright Mills raised this issue in his analysis of the importance of what he called the pedagogical role of the cultural apparatuses in capitalist societies, as did Raymond Williams in his astute definition of what he called “permanent education”:
What [permanent education] valuably stresses is the educational force of our whole social and cultural experience. It is therefore concerned not only with continuing education, of a formal or informal kind, but with what the whole environment, its institutions and relationships, actively and profoundly teaches.51
The tangible effects of extreme violence are now made visible through the theatrical staging efforts of both state and non-state terrorists. Shock videos such as the strangling by a New York police officer of Eric Garner and the shooting of Tamir Rice are aired repeatedly on the nightly news right alongside references to beheading videos (though the actual act is never shown on mainstream media outlets). In these circumstances, such horrific violence is removed from any historical context and aired within the registers of a smothering disimagination machine of shock, hyper-violence, and an aesthetics of destruction, rendering almost impossible any serious analysis of such events. Dwight Macdonald once argued after the firebombing of Tokyo that liberal intellectuals “have grown callous to massacre,” dismissing them as “totalitarian liberals.”52
One might argue that the tepidness of intellectuals has gotten worse in that they now find themselves living under a regime of neoliberalism in which virtually everyone is at risk of homelessness, facing a life of uncertainty and temporary jobs, and cut off from larger social issues. This is especially true for academics, given the current state of higher education in which the concept of the intellectual has been reduced to the status of a Walmart worker or technician. Professionalism has become corporatized, thus banishing the imperative for intellectuals to relate their academic interests and scholarship to larger social issues. Increasingly, broader political engagement is neglected in an attempt to survive in institutions that now resemble corporations governed by a business culture and that view students as customers whose education involves nothing more than job training.
Under the reign of the neoliberal dystopian dream machine, war, violence, and politics have taken on a new disturbing sense of urgency. As politics is constituted increasingly outside the law, one of its first victims is any viable sense of the relationship between private troubles and larger public considerations. The public sphere withers into privatized orbits of desire and understanding, and not surprisingly, the diverse realms of public life decay. American intellectuals now inhabit an amnesiac, if not psychopathic, society—one that under the reign of a depoliticizing neoliberalism appears to forget Hannah Arendt’s warning that “humanity is never acquired in solitude.”53 For many intellectuals, the radical imagination has dissolved into a dystopian nightmare as marketplace values and the dictates of financialization define politics, the national zeitgeist, and the country’s utopian possibilities. Charles Pierce is right in suggesting that intellectuals along with the American public have allowed themselves “to become mired in the habits of oligarchy, as though no other politics is possible.”54
When the struggle to survive is removed from the much needed fight for justice, the results will be increasingly limited political horizons. In the United States, the specter of militarism, the ongoing pursuit of perpetual war, and commodification of just about everything have provided the conditions for the production of a new form of politics and a disimagination machine—which raises serious questions that intellectuals need to address. These include: how are fear and anxiety marketed; how is terrorism used to recruit people in support of authoritarian causes; how is the neoliberal theater of violence being produced in a vast array of pedagogical sites created by the old and new media; how does the state use mediated images of violence to justify its monopoly over the means of coercion; and how does the aesthetics of catastrophe manifest itself in an age of enormous injustices, deep insecurities, disembodied social relations, fragmented communities, and a growing militarization of everyday life? Totalitarian politics, militaristic violence, and a life-draining social atomization not only mutually inform one another, they have become the most important elements of power as mediating forces that shape identities, desires, and social relations. Given these circumstances, it is no wonder that the legacy of Hiroshima has dissolved into a neoliberal culture of violence, cruelty, and disposability.
The United States is in a new historical conjuncture defined largely by global neoliberal capitalism in which the relationships among cultural institutions, political power, and everyday life have become central to how we understand politics and the work it does.55 At one level, the market has eroded the affective and symbolic relationships that create public trust, public life, and the bonds of social life. At the same time, politics has become intensely educative in terms of how it constructs the ways in which people understand themselves, their relations to others, and the wider society. Doreen Massey is right in arguing that “it is the internalization of the system that can potentially corrode our ability to imagine that things could be otherwise.”56 And that is precisely why, as the late Pierre Bourdieu argued, progressive intellectuals can no longer underestimate “the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle” if they are going to forge “appropriate weapons to fight on this front.”57
If intellectuals are going to address the legacy of Hiroshima and the ongoing threat of nuclear annihilation, they will have to recognize that the struggle for a democratic formative culture will need to come from below; it will simply not take place at the behest of prevailing economic and political power. Moreover, they will have to acknowledge that matters of subjectivity, culture, and identity cannot be separated from material circumstances and commanding institutions, however complex that relationship often is. On the contrary, for such institutions and relations to be challenged collectively, they must be viewed as inextricably related, and they also have to be made visible—connected to the dynamics of everyday life—in order to become part of a transformative consciousness and struggle in which pedagogy becomes central to politics.
The need for a democratic formative culture in which critical intellectuals can thrive raises crucial questions about the educative nature of politics, and how the public pedagogy produced by the old and new media can be used to expand rather than close down democratic relations. Central to such a task is the attempt on the part of educators, intellectuals, artists, and other cultural workers to address what agents, conditions, contents, and structural transformations are necessary to rethink the importance of both the new media and a democratic formative culture in an advanced society so as to configure social practices within rather than outside of the realm of a substantive democracy.
If American intellectuals are to confront the horrors of Hiroshima, the long shadow of nuclear warfare that has developed since the rise of the atomic age, and the memory of the horrors visited upon thousands of civilians, must be revisited and made discernible. This is especially necessary if intellectuals are going to remember and condemn the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, call for the elimination of nuclear weapons and the oligarchic militarized governments that profit from them, and renounce the killing of civilians in the name of military necessity—a legacy that extends from Hiroshima to the slaughter of civilians in present-day Gaza.
But such struggles will only succeed if they are understood within a new political discourse and a new sense of crisis informed by an awareness of the world of images, digital technologies, the Internet, and alternative pedagogical spaces and cultural apparatuses so that they can be used in the struggle for a new type of agency, new modes of collective resistance, and an organized and long-term transformative struggle for a radical democracy. The struggles for justice and a radically new, democratically inspired society in which nuclear weapons and the dictates of perpetual war will no longer exist will only come when intellectuals and the wider public both understand and feel connected to the struggles of which they are asked to be a part. This is what Stuart Hall has called the “educative nature of politics.” Hall spells this out in his claim that such a politics is sorely lacking on the left:
The left has no sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things. . . . The left is in trouble. It’s not got any ideas, it’s not got any independent analysis of its own, and therefore it’s got no vision. It just takes the temperature: “Whoa, that’s no good, let’s move to the right.” It has no sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things.58
Hall is arguing, rightly in my view, that the left and its intellectuals need to take seriously what it means to change the subjectivities, desires, and consciousness of people so that they can act as critically informed and engaged agents, capable of learning how to lead and govern rather than simply be assailed, subjugated, and ruthlessly controlled.
Democracy is under assault and appears to have fallen over the edge into what Hannah Arendt once called “dark times.” But, as Catherine Clément has noted, “every culture has an imaginary zone for what it excludes, and it is that zone that we must remember today.”59 Such memory work can start with the seventieth anniversary of Hiroshima so that its horrible legacy and effects are no longer part of a purposeful zone of forgetting. I believe that such zones of exclusion are crucial to remember because they make evident the long history of struggle by labor, unions, workers, young people, feminists, civil rights advocates, gay activists, progressive educators, and others who believe in the promise of a radical democracy along with the necessity to struggle with a renewed sense of urgency and collective strength. Such historical memories also make it easier for intellectuals and others to dispute the myth that governments should be trusted because they always act in the best interest of the people.
The time is ripe for the long historical struggle to ban nuclear weapons technology to come alive once more so as to shake off the authoritarian nightmare now engulfing the globe. It is time for intellectuals once again to question the deadly missions of the sixth and ninth of August. As Howard Zinn observed, if we “declare nuclear weapons an unacceptable means, even if it ends a war a month or two earlier,” then it may lead to larger questions regarding what role intellectuals might play in creating the conditions for questioning political leaders and stopping monstrous acts before they happen.60 The old familiar ways of defining and engaging politics no longer work. It is a time to reclaim the struggles and movements of resistance to nuclear weapons and once again take up the quest for global nuclear disarmament, on a different terrain, under new conditions, and with a renewed sense of urgency and hope.
I conclude by recalling Hannah Arendt’s notion of “instants of truth” discussed in the epigraph of this chapter. Such instants often come in the form of images, narratives, and stories that shock. They don’t accommodate reality as much as they turn it upside down, eviscerating commonsense assumptions a culture has about itself while revealing an intellectual and emotional chasm that runs through established modes of rationality and understanding. Such flashpoints not only rupture dominant modes of consciousness, they give rise to heated passions and debates, sometimes leading to massive displays of collective anguish and resistance, even revolutions. We have seen such “instants of truth” in Ferguson, Missouri, where images of Michael Brown’s shooting and death helped to inspire huge waves of protests throughout the United States. These images of violence and human suffering inflamed a society to connect heated emotional investments to a politics in which unthinkable acts of violence are confronted as part of a larger “commitment to political accountability, community, and the importance of positive affect for both belonging and change.”61 Hiroshima provides another “instant of truth” through which intellectuals can confront the crimes of the past in order to develop a collective struggle and an energized politics for a democratically inspired present and future. There may be no greater challenge than this one facing intellectuals in the twenty-first century. As terrorism becomes normalized in the United States, it is imperative that the ethical, radical imagination once again makes visible the horrors of crimes against humanity not just as historical memories but as looming threats to the future of humankind.