On the morning of December 7th, 1941, the American naval base of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the Empire of Japan in an unprovoked preemptive strike. The next day, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt went before a joint session of Congress, soberly laid out the events and implications of the previous twenty-four hours, and calmly requested a formal declaration of war against Japan. Congress complied, and in less than four years the United States would win through to a total victory - Japan finally formally surrendering on September 2nd, 1945, on the deck of the USS Missouri moored in Tokyo Bay.
On the morning of September 11th, 2001, the United States once again would fall victim to a surprise attack. The same night, President George Walker Bush went on television to address his fellow Americans. In a hysterical speech bereft of both calm and intelligence, he would simply and smugly declare his enemies implacably evil, the United States innately virtuous, and, without bothering to speak to Congress, unilaterally announced the commencement of the War on Terror.
Five years later, and this war continues, with no end in sight. This is hardly surprising, since it possesses neither a recognizable enemy nor a clear objective. Rather, it eschews strategy and analysis, taking instead for a target a nebulous figure of evil thought to dwell in the dark space.
Terror; it may as well be the devil, and clearly no sensible military campaign is possible against such a foe, since it occupies no sensible strategic space. K-punk has already summarized this point acutely,
"The paradoxical War on Terror is based on a kind of willed stupidity; the willed stupidity of wishful thinking. Only the logic of dreamwork can suture 'War' with 'Terror' in this way, since terrorists were, by classical definition, those without 'legitimate authority' to wage war."The sheer brutal fact of this point should have put paid long ago to the madness of our present conjucture, but for some reason it has not. The explanation for this failure is not immediately obvious, but k-punk is undoubtedly on the right track when he invokes the dialectic of desire. Alexander Solzhenitsyn makes the crucial point here, "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
The importance of this statement resides in the fact that it does not limit itself merely to a pious moral condemnation of the enemy. Rather, it carries with it a concrete productive sting, pregnant with possibility. The stubborn question still remains the same: what is to be done, how can the present situation be changed? Is it truly the case that resistance is futile, as contemporary Spektakular Kapital would like us to believe?
Solzhenitsyn demures, and claimgs instead the following: an ethic of subjective destitution in the context of a political strategy. This would have indeed been the correct course of action for the United States to have taken after 9/11 - which as Simon Jenkins pointed out in the Guardian yesterday, was not itself a politically significant act in any recognized sense of that term, but rather merely amounted to an infantile gesture of pathetic rage.
"There could be no formal defence against acts such as this," Jenkins notes acutely -and yet the idea that there somehow could be has formed the fantastic pivot around which the whole of post-9/11 US foreign policy has turned. In his own analysis, Jenkins recognizes this fact, but seems unwilling to fully engage with it, moving instead to dismiss it as simply an unfortunate error of judgement.
It is indeed such, but there is more to it than that. The truly critical problem here is the issue of the libidinal economy which creates this kind of politics in the first place. In other words, the truly critical problem is the one which concerns itself not with symptoms, but causes.
In regards to this issue, it is vital to stress the point that explanations which content themselves merely with moralizing are finally inadequate. So long as Kapital reigns supreme on this planet, prejudicial critiques directed against evil and idiocy will remain irrelevent. Kapital cares nothing for the metaphysics of morals, rather concerning itself exclusively with desiring-production, and we would do will to remember this point.
The burning question at hand is how precisely we sustain our contemporary political nightmare, and hence the question of how exactly we could awaken from it. It is a matter of a pure decision amounting to a sublime immolation. The dominant contemporary mode of politics today amounts to a politics of fear. It is an infantilizing mode, in which unfree society is simply and smugly relieved by an arrogant state of the burden of thought. It would like us to see ourselves the way that it does: as beautiful vulnerable children under constant possible threat from shadowy hideous others. It has our best interests at heart, and would prefer if we refrained from talking to strangers.
This mode, extensive and comforting, saturates our society in the form of unwritten codes and unconscious beliefs representing a hyperstititional fiction by means of which we think we can master the chaos surrounding us. It wants to know, that it wants us to know, that nothing is as sad as a man on his back counting stars. It reveals itself most succinctly and clear in the form of the yellow tabloid press, which adores more than anything penning paeans to peadophiles and hymns for murdered white girls. It conditions the spectacle on the level of a hysterical strategy, and represents the truth of the anxious idea of a war waged against terror itself.
For this reason, against this mode we should neither fear nor hope, but rather serenly and cooly disdain to annihilate it, and consequently not flinch from embracing a politics of terror itself. This would not be a spectacular terrorist politics, sad politics of a frightened teenager cutter who needs to physically manifest terror in order to comprehend it emotionally, but rather a coldly rationalist politics of drive, which eschews emotions altogether. The politics of terror equates to a politics of truth, which sunders representational crutches, rather conditioning itself by maintaining fidelity to the essential and irreducible terror at the heart of being itself. Two fingers are snapping in the abyss, a world is stirring in the scratch-sheets, it all depends on you.
