“WAR” AND “terrorism” have traditionally been associated with one another, but to link them both to “spectacle” constitutes a relatively new phenomenon. To “link” does not, of course, mean to identify: it does not suggest that war, terrorism, and spectacle are the same. But it implies a necessary relationship among them. And that is new, in a very specific way. War has traditionally been associated with spectacle, with pageantry, parades, and demonstrations of all kinds, but perhaps never in the way we are witnessing it today, when a certain kind of theatricalization has come to constitute one of war’s most essential components, one not, as in the past, limited primarily to the celebration of its victorious outcome.
To be sure, a certain theatricalization has always played an important part in the conduct of military affairs. Intimidation of the enemy has always been a major goal in combat operations, and reliance on spectacular effects of all kinds has been a long-standing result. In the German Blitzkrieg, dive-bombers of the Luftwaffe were outfitted with deafening sirens in order to add psychological terror to physical destruction and thus more fully demoralize the adversary. And of course concerted propaganda campaigns also demonstrated the importance of presenting a perspective and narrative of the ongoing struggle that would not be decided by strictly military means.
Yet to understand the distinct role played by theatricalization in conflict resolution today, it is important to take into account the new political and military significance assigned to the notions of “terror” and “terrorism.” This may well be the first time in history that the world’s reigning power has declared “terror” to be its main enemy—and, moreover, an enemy whose reach is no less global than its own.
On the day following the destruction of the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon, President Bush proclaimed that the events were “more than acts of terror: they were acts of war,” perpetrated by “a different enemy than we have ever faced: this enemy hides in the shadows… . This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil, but good will prevail.”1
Whether or not the attacks of September 11 changed everything, as is often asserted, is open to question. But they certainly changed the perceptions of those living in the United States who were convinced that “it can’t happen here”: namely, that organized, mass destruction was something that was exclusively limited to the nightly news. The bombing in Oklahoma City, of course, marked a first breach in this widely held belief. But it could still be regarded as the exception that confirms the rule. That rule, however, collapsed together with the imploding towers on September 11.
One should be as precise as possible here. American society and its media have long been obsessed with violence: The massacres at Columbine High School or of the Branch Davidians in Waco are just two recent instances. But violence in the United States has generally been portrayed, if not always perpetrated, as a private affair, done either by desperate or deranged individuals, or against desperate or deranged individuals. Violence tends to be individualized or, better, privatized, as with the Mafia and “organized crime,” understood as an extension of individuals, of the family, or of private groups. This is the violence that is demonstrated from morning to evening on the broadcast media, from the reports of mayhem on the highways that accompany the breakfast traffic reports to the incessant series of murders and killings that make up the not so new “nightly news.” “Security” has thus for decades been a long-standing preoccupation both of individuals and of the American nation.2
What is new is the growing efficacy of an organized violence that is no longer simply private or individual, no longer simply “criminal” but rather “terrorist”: which is to say, whose goal is to disrupt and destroy the very fabric of society. Of course, this is not absolutely new, far from it. In his message to the special joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, President Bush himself compared al Qaeda to the Mafia: “Al Qaeda is to terror what the Mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money; its goal is remaking the world.” And he promised: “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” Finally, President Bush emphasized the motif that was to recur again and again in the months and, indeed, years to follow—the absolute uniqueness of this “war”: “Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success.”3
The attacks of September 11, 2001, were thus presented to the American public and its representatives by the president as an entirely new and unprecedented phenomenon, one that required an entirely new and unprecedented response. But the “war on terror” that followed was by no means the first such “war” declared by American governments. Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, declared a “War on Poverty,” while pursuing the less metaphorical war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Succeeding presidents declared a “War on Drugs.” And now we have the “War on Terror.” As commonly understood, “war” generally implies a conflict between states. Notable exceptions, of course, are civil and guerilla wars, in which the conflict is not between states but within a single state, or between an occupying power and an irregular resistance. But in all these cases what is at stake is state power—that of an organized polity within a delimited territory. From this point of view, which associates “war” with a constituted “state,” “terrorism” can be seen as its excluded other, for what is generally called “terrorism” is the more or less organized use of violence by entities other than established states. Terrorism is, of course, never merely a descriptive, constative term: it is an evaluative one. Traditionally, the word has been used to designate a violence considered to be illegitimate, evil, morally reprehensible because it is exercised by nonstate organizations, groups, or individuals. The state is thus identified as the guardian of law and order. Where this presumption breaks down, the prevailing conception of terrorism reveals itself to be too simple. Thus, in the years 1940–44, the German occupying power in Europe designated all resistance movements, in France and elsewhere, as “terrorists.” Almost every state defends its claim to hold a monopoly of organized violence, in the name of peace and security, by defining the violence of its adversaries—those who do not equate legality with legitimacy—as “terrorist.”
In the twentieth century, however, and probably long before, this use of the term became more complicated, as the example of the Nazi occupation suggests. It became increasingly common to designate states themselves as terrorist: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union under Stalin, and so on. The Israeli government led by Ariel Sharon has designated Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority “terrorist,” and Arafat has replied by calling Sharon’s Israel a terrorist state. The ETA is a terrorist organization for Spain and France, but a movement of national liberation for segments of the Basque population.
If states are constituted in violence (for instance, through a “revolution”) and maintained through the exercise of force, both external and domestic, then the difference between “terror” and “legitimate force” is never simply a neutral assessment, but rather a function of perspective, situation, interpretation, and evaluation. This does not mean that it is entirely arbitrary, of course, but rather that it is always relational: a function of its relation to other elements, never simply a judgment that can be self-contained.
American authorities have recently criticized the BBC World Service for its policy of using the word terrorism too sparingly, at least by comparison with the American media. But this linguistic restraint is not limited to the Middle East: over the past decades the BBC has rarely if ever referred to the IRA, for instance, as a “terrorist” organization.
Nevertheless, “terrorism” continues to be defined as the enemy of the state as such: and if, as Carl Schmitt persuasively argues, the concept of the political is based on the identification of an “enemy,” then this discursive practice amounts to nothing less than identifying the terrorist as the enabling other of the state: its negative justification. The more powerful the terrorist organization(s), the more powerful the state in its military-political-security functions must become and, correspondingly, the weaker its civilian and civil functions must be made. Such a tendency takes on a special signification in a period when the traditional conception, if not functions, of the nation-state are more in question than at any time probably since its inception. In the post-Cold War period of “globalization” and transnational capitalism, a new “enemy” is needed to consolidate the role and to reinforce the legitimacy of nation-states, which are ever more openly dependent upon, and agents of, transnational corporate interests.4 Today not just the presidents of universities are primarily fund-raisers rather than policy-makers (at least in the United States): presidents and chief executives of nation-states serve with increasing openness as emissaries and advocates of their country’s respective economic interests.5 Since these interests are also increasingly difficult to identify with the common good of the populations of their respective states, enemies are needed in order to justify the “sacrifices” demanded of populations subjected to increasing social precariousness.
“International terrorism” is at the moment the leading candidate for Public Enemy Number One. But it is an unusual candidate, at least in the forms it has recently assumed. And its unusual quality has to do with the third term, to which I now turn: spectacle.
The notion of “spectacle” can help us describe just what is distinctive about “international terrorism” being declared Public Enemy Number One. In order for something to be a spectacle, it must, quite simply, take place—which is to say, it must be localizable. Whether inside, in a theater (of whatever kind), or outside, in the open, a spectacle must be placed in order to be seen (and heard). But the place and taking place of a spectacle entails no ordinary locality, not at least in the way place has traditionally been defined: namely, as a stable, self-contained container. The stage or scene of a spectacle is never fully self-contained. To function as a stage or a scene, a place must itself take place in relation to another place, the place of spectators or audience. The space of a theater is divided into the space of the stage and that of the audience. This makes the place and taking place of a spectacle singularly difficult to pin down, since, as Guy Debord puts it in his book, The Society of the Spectacle, “The world the spectacle holds up to view is at once here and elsewhere; it is the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience. The commodity world is thus shown as it really is, for its logic is one with men’s estrangement from one another and from … what they produce.”6
Debord’s notion of “spectacle” is an elaboration of Marx’s chapter on the “fetish-character of the commodity,” in which a social relation that is invisible as such appears in the form of a self-contained material or natural substance. But Debord’s notion of the spectacle foregrounds what is only implicit in Marx: the relation to the spectator (who is, of course, also a listener—an audience). The spectator of the spectacle—which for Debord is always the spectacle of a society determined by the production of commodities—is both separated and isolated: from others, but also from him-or herself. In this context, Debord asserts that “the spectacle is simply the common language that bridges this division… . Spectators are linked by a one-way relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another. The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness” (p. 22).
The spectacle, in being “at once here and elsewhere,” marks the division of the here and now or rather, more precisely, their separation: the here is not just now, and the now is not just here. At the same time, the spectacle plays to spectators who are similarly neither here nor there, or—which amounts to the same—here and there at once. The upshot is that such spectators are not just separated from one another, but from themselves, insofar as these “selves” are defined through their position as spectators.
Debord’s theory of the spectacle and of the spectator gives a certain relief to the deliberately provocative response of Jean Baudrillard to the attacks of September 11. In an article published in Le Monde on November 3, 2001, Baudrillard writes:
All the speeches and commentaries betray a gigantic abreaction to the event and to the fascination that it exercises. Moral condemnation, the sacred alliance against terrorism are in direct proportion to the prodigious jubilation of seeing this global superpower destroyed or better, in some sense, destroy itself… . That we dreamt of such an event, that everyone without exception dreamt of it, because no one could not not dream of the destruction of any superpower having attained such a degree of hegemony—this is unacceptable to the Western moral conscience, but it remains a fact, which can be measured precisely by the pathetic violence of all the speeches that seek to erase it.
In the end, it is they who did it but it is we who wanted it.
In the light of Debord’s discussion, the voice speaking here—the “we who wanted it”—is the spectator of the society of the spectacle. Some thirty-five years after Debord wrote his book, however, those spectators can be more precisely situated and described: they are television viewers who themselves are sold qua commodities to the advertisers who are the real customers of the national and multinational media. This is, of course, entirely true in the United States and increasingly true in Europe.
Baudrillard’s assertion makes sense, I would argue, only insofar as it is understood to articulate the position of “spectators,” a position that is not the same in Paris as it is in New York, but that nevertheless shares certain general characteristics, which Debord was one of the first to discern. Debord emphasizes that the spectacle perpetuates the separation and isolation of individuals in a commodity society, while seeking to conceal and surmount that isolation. The televisual view of the world propagated by the nightly news, in every country with which I am familiar (a very limited number, to be sure, mainly North America and Western Europe), heightens the ambivalence that Debord described but never named as such: that which results when anxieties related to the limitations of physical (and social) existence, involving frailty, vulnerability, and ultimately mortality, are provisionally suppressed through images that position the spectator as an invulnerable and all-seeing survivor: surviving all the catastrophes that constitute the bulk of the nightly news, at least in the United States. The situation of this spectator is akin to that of the child described by Lacan as the mirror stage, characterized by an “imaginary” identification with an image of wholeness. The internal contradiction of such identification is that it institutes an image of unity while occupying two places at once: the desired place of wholeness and the feared place of disunity. In the images of catastrophe that dominate broadcast media “news,” disunity is projected into the image itself, while the desired unity is reserved for the spectator off-scene (and for the media itself as global network). To support such identification and the binary opposition upon which its success depends, images must appear to be clearly localizable, self-contained, and meaningful at the same time as they englobe destruction, mutilation, and implosion. They must comprehend the catastrophes that thereby appear to be intelligible in and of themselves, without requiring the spectator to look elsewhere. The spectator thus can sustain the illusion of occupying a stable and enduring position, which allows one to “stay the same” indefinitely. This is the moral of the story, whether it is called “enduring freedom” or “infinite justice.” The “War on Terror” is thus conducted in the name of “enduring freedom” as the freedom to remain the same, to keep one’s place indefinitely. This is also the message of “infinite justice”: to remain indefinitely the same is to pursue the enemy relentlessly, without end, until he is cornered in his innermost redoubts and destroyed. The trajectory that leads from the twin towers to the caves of Toro Bora marks the will to power as a will to endure. This is the not so hidden religious subtext of the ostensibly secular “War on Terror,” which is above all a defense and affirmation of “globalization” as the right of the One (superpower) to rule over all the others.
To rule the planet, one must survive. But to survive one must rule. And the rule must serve the one. Which is why the “war against terror” marks the move from the rule of law to the law of the rule. Or, more precisely, to the rule of rule. “Law” entails “due process,” and thus both more and less than undivided rule. It must therefore be subordinated to the law of the rule, in which the suspension of law and the state of exception become the general rule and the principle by which power is exercised.
But in its encapsulated individuality and its claim to indivisible authority, the rule must be constantly renewed, and with it, the state of exception, the emergency, the danger, and the enemy. Because this is an enemy that wears no uniform and never appears as such, it can never be definitively located, “smoked out,” and defeated.
Thus “freedom” may be “enduring,” but its duration is marked by breaks, interruptions, and the ever-present threat of catastrophe. For the moment, this catastrophe is rendered visible in the spectacle of the twin towers imploding—a phallic fate if ever there was one—and of a portion of the Pentagon in ruins. Broadcast in “real time,” this had two effects. On the one hand, it heightened the anxiety of the “break” on which the appeal of consumption is based. Consumer confidence was shattered, at least temporarily, and after a period of mourning the official discourse had to urge all citizens not, as one might have expected, to “get back to work,” but to “get back to consuming,” and start spending again. The promise of immortality was interrupted, but only to be reasserted for those who would “stay with us … after the break.” And since such traumatic breaks are the most powerful goad to consume, the basic structure and process were not fundamentally altered. As long, that is, as the putative cause of anxiety could be located in an image, confined to a site, a stage. Or rather, to multiple sites and stages, but in succession, one after the other. This is the end of the military response to “terrorism”: it must be named (al Qaeda), given a face (Osama bin Laden) and then, above all, located (Afghanistan, Tora Bora, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, etc.): in order then to be depicted, if possible, and destroyed.
On the other hand, when “terrorism” is defined as “international,” it becomes more difficult to locate, situate, personify, and identify. Or rather, it can only be located in sequence, one site after the other, not all at once. From this point on, the war on terrorism becomes a scenario, a sitcom that unfolds, step by step and intrinsically without end, in its effort to bring the infinite enemy to “infinite justice.” Almost from the beginning of this “war,” the Bush administration has asserted that the enemy is “international” in character, neither limited to one person, however important, nor to one state, however nefarious. Thus, the War on Terror, unlike the Cold War, cannot be defined primarily as a war against a single state, the Soviet Union, or against its international emanation, “The Communist Conspiracy.” It is not even a war against a single “terrorist” organization, however decentralized, such as al Qaeda. “International Terrorism” englobes all the “rogue” states that for years have been designated by the U.S. State Department as aiding and abetting “terrorism”: Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and so on. What characterizes this policy is its continuing effort to tie terrorist networks to nation-states. This identification both supplies and supplants any discussion of other possible “causes,” conditions, or ramifications. In this view, all these can be located in the pathological behavior of individual “rogue” states, whose roguishness consists in their refusal to follow the norms of international behavior as laid down by the United States government. (In passing, it should be noted that the political use of the word rogue has an interesting history. As far as I can remember, the first time I became aware of the word was in relation to the assassination of President Kennedy, when it was used by investigators—and certainly not by the government—to describe elements of the government (“intelligence” services, military) that might have acted secretly, outside the official chain of command; later the term was used to designate states that did not comply with American expectations of proper political behavior, such as Libya, Cuba, North Korea, and Iraq. In short, from a term designating the disunity of “official” state organizations, it became a designator of abnormal political-state behavior, a symptomatic development, to say the least.
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To conclude: the spectacle, at least as staged by the mainstream broadcast media, seeks simultaneously to assuage and exacerbate anxieties of all sorts by providing images on which they can be projected, ostensibly comprehended, and, above all, removed. Schematically, the fear of death is encouraged to project itself onto an image of the other, which as enemy is to be liquidated or subjugated. The viewer is encouraged to “look forward” and simultaneously forget the past; encouraged to identify with the ostensibly invulnerable perspective of the camera registering as blips the earth-bound destruction tens of thousands of feet below. Such a position seems to assure the triumph of the spectator over the perils of earthbound life. The trails of the B52s in the stratosphere high above the earth announce the demise of the caves and the second coming of the towers.
If, as Carl Schmitt writes, “the enemy is our own question as figure,” then what is new and different about international terrorism is its resistance to figuration. This serves not just to make it the inexhaustible justification of an unending mobilization, but even more, to obscure the extent to which this enemy is indeed “our question.”7
The war against terror thus presents itself as the answer to a question that it does everything not to ask.