Context

"It’s hardly surprising that religions, beliefs are unfurling their flags. Whether it be Islam, Israel, Jerusalem ‘the Eternal City,’ or the Christian banner. I would say it’s perfectly understandable, because facing them is a superb idol they can’t accept."
—Paul Virilio

Wallace Stevens argued that the greatest human poverty is the poverty of Imagination. It seems to me that the most familiar characterizations of the crisis of "September 11" and the "War Against America" suffer from a poverty of imagination, an inability to think beyond a truth which is persuasive because it is also trite. I hope I need say very little, in this regard, about the script that 90% of the nation is following (if our friends the pollsters at CNN, Gallop, and elsewhere are to be believed). America has been attacked; we’re "at War with Terrorism"; but "America will strike back"; because we’re a "beacon of freedom to the rest of the world"; because "innocent people lost their lives"; because "America has lost its innocence"; because there are "evil-doers" afoot; but we’ll "smoke them out of their holes"; because our cause is just and we are united.

The idea that CNN is right and 90% of the populace believes this palaver is perhaps more frightening than the threat of receiving a suspicious piece of mail postmarked New Jersey. The odds of receiving anthrax in the mail are statistically minute, but the yahoos with Old Glory rippling from the roofs of their suburban assault vehicles are everywhere and with who knows what malice for those lacking proper patriotic fervor. Much worse and more dangerous than this, of course, are organizations like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, formed by Lynne Cheney and Joseph Lieberman. For this group, any movement away from the grossly patriotic is a "failing." They would save the American university by removing from it any thought that isn’t utterly conformist with the opinion of "the public at large."

There is also considerable poverty in the left-wing critique of the events related to 9/11. The left-wing critique seeks to create a historical and geopolitical context for understanding the "tensions in the region." Thus, the roots of Al Qaeda are in nineteenth–century colonialism and Cold War meddling in Islamic countries (read: oil–producing countries) by a U.S. foreign policy premised on the idea that we have "national interests" in the region upon which depends what President Bush has called our "sacred lifestyle." Hence, it is a "foreign policy priority" to "stabilize" certain Middle Eastern client states, whether putatively democratic or plainly autocratic.

Needless to say, there is a lot more credibility in this vision of the world. It’s the "America as imperial power" point of view developed over many decades of analysis by Noam Chomsky, the Nation, and the South End Press. But more accurate though this version of things may be, its truth power is also dependent on its familiarity. It’s not as if the left has ever been immune to what Stuart Hall called the need for the "narrative construction of reality." It’s just that the left construction is not a naked expression of economic self-interest.

Frankly, in the shock of the last few months, I’ve felt at times that both the patriotic and the left-wing analyses were sufficient and sometimes my alarm was such that both seemed persuasive at the same time. We were attacked, after all. Any state, even an imperialist state with no plausible claim to innocence (for when was there ever an innocent state?), has the right and the obligation to defend its citizens. That’s why it’s good to live in scary Leviathon, as Thomas Hobbes conceived it. Leviathon protects you from other Leviathons. It’s a "necessary evil" argument.

So, as an exercise in imagination remediation, I decided to re-read a book—Paul Virilio’s Pure War (Semiotext(e), 1983)—which combines social, political, and military analysis with a unique and encompassing vision of the real that qualifies, for me, as an act of the imagination. I then thought I could use Virilio’s ideas as a breach in "received ideas" for the purpose of reimagining the world implied in the "recent events."

Virilio argues that the history of western societies is really the history of their militaries. The social hardly counts at all for him except as a consequence of the military. According to Virilio, we have moved on from a time in which we had simple War which was limited and tactical. War was once something that happened outside of the moat or city wall or Maginot Line, on this side of which civilian life went its way with its own priorities. War gave way to Total War, which overwhelmed the entirety of the social system as well as the economic and industrial capacity of the state because of its need for ever faster and more powerful war technology and its need to supply the logistical demands of its dispersed military presence. Total War is about logistics, not battlefield tactics. The American Civil War inaugurated Total War and the two World Wars fulfilled it.

Beyond Total War is Pure War. In Pure War the state is on an implicit war footing even in times of "peace." (I suppose we know this condition best as the Cold War.) Technology, the media, industrial production, the economy and certainly politics are first about a war so diffuse and ubiquitous that few people even recognize it for what it is.

Hence, the trompe l’oeil in our current situation is the appearance that the hot war in Afghanistan is categorically different from the "peace" which preceded it. This, of course, means that we are asked to believe that we are still citizens of the nineteenth century and that our campaign against Afghanistan is purely tactical. This is a description of a poverty of imagination with the most dire consequences because it commits us to continue on a course that all but assures that there will be future terrorist tragedies on our own ground.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this situation is the near dead certainty that not only are our middleclass flag wavers living in utter misrecognition, but it is likely that the leaders of our country (from George II to Teddy K) are every bit as deluded and, moreover, impotent. Randy Hayes of the Rainforest Action Network once told me of a talk he had with the uber-CEO of the Mitsubishi Company. Hayes said he was able to convince this CEO that Mitsubishi’s program of global devastation for short-term profit was not in the long-term interest of either the planet or the company. Hayes achieved this moment of clarity only to have it followed by a far larger and more monstrous clarity for both himself and the Mitsubishi head: Mr. Mitsubishi had no idea how to change the practices of the company because the logic that drove the company was both systemic and autonomous. This system at which even CEOs must look with apocalyptic horror is part of the ecology of Pure War and is not available for political discussion, let alone democratic debate. In short, it is not responsive to the will or the interests of the human beings living within it. Virilio calls this situation the "State as Destiny."

Let’s look at a few passages from Pure War to see what sort of light they might shed on our current situation:

In the end, unconsciousness is the aim of Pure War.

In the Grundrisse Karl Marx argues that one of the most conspicuous products of capitalism is stupidity. There is no shortage of stupidity around at present. Still, Virilio’s idea that we’re "unconscious" (rather than stupid) has more explanatory power. Unconscious in what sense? North Americans are not speaking to their culture; they’re being spoken by it. The media is a function of the war effort, foreclosing on all deviant perspectives. And certainly we are "unconscious" in the sense that we’re so blithely unaware that our "lifestyles" (or predatory economic privilege, take your pick) has for the last half-century been the equivalent of a state of war between ourselves and those folks who will provide us cheap, cheap natural resources or pay the price. This is emphatically true of people in the Middle East who have been told, essentially, "You will suffer the injustice and indignity of a military-client-state-of-last-resort (Israel) established in your midst by Western fiat. You will suffer and live in poverty in spite of the opulence of your rulers who will rule at least in part because we guarantee them. And in return you will give us cheap oil so that General Motors and Big Oil can continue to profit, Americans can drive any sort of steel nightmare they like, and metropolitan areas can be organized around the great suburban principle ‘get in your car or stay home.’" (And while I’m on the subject of getting in the family sedan, what in the hell is the rest of the world supposed to make of the fact that we’ve been instructed by our commander-in-chief to help in the "war effort" by shopping? Afghanis are fleeing for the borders, dodging bombs, and we’re doing our bit by heading out to the mall? Just what kind of postmodern war is this, anyway?)

The military class is turning into an internal super-police. . . . In the strategy of deterrence, military institutions, no longer fighting among themselves, tend to fight only civilian societies—with, of course, a few skirmishes in the Third World.

Another critical aspect of the situation about which Pure War’s domestic accomplices are largely unconscious is the idea that these patriotic citizens are themselves enduring victims of "endo-colonization." This is most distressingly the case in the sense that the vitality of the human world has been conquered (with considerable complicity from the oppressed themselves, one ought to add) by technology as an extension of the military. This is roughly what Theodor Adorno called the "administration" of the real. Virilio writes:

Movement is now only a handicap . . . that we know only too well. A motor-handicap: a man in a car piloted by a driver (until such time as cars are completely automatic, which won’t take long) is motor-handicapped. . . . The man sitting before his television watching the soccer championship live from Santiago in Chile is seeing-handicapped. . . . Now, the prostheses of automotive-audio-visual movement create a subliminal comfort. Subliminal, meaning beyond consciousness. They allow a kind of visual—thus physical—hallucination, which tends to strip us of our consciousness. Like the "I run for you" of automobile technology, an "I see for you" is created. . . .

These technological "prostheses" are, for Virilio, completely alienating. And yet they are at the heart of what our involvement in the Middle East is really about. The relation of past, present and future wars in the area are all too clearly related to our automobiles. But the car is only part of what our "sacred lifestyle" involves. I’ve been wondering lately what would happen if you could call these issues to consciousness and resolve them through a democratic and political process. I think that the question for this imaginary plebiscite would essentially be:

"Okay, in order to have a moral and peaceful relation with the rest of the world, especially the Third World, we will need to radically reimagine urban planning so that it is not all about accommodating the automobile; we will need to accept less prosperity in the form of discretionary income to purchase consumer items because we will need to let more of the wealth generated by the work of people in the Third World stay in Bangladesh and the maquiladoras of Mexico; we will need to radically reduce our dependence on our cars; and we will need to stop thinking of ourselves as the one great military (and nuclear) exception in world relations. We will also need to do the work to wrest political authority over our own society and culture from corporations and their international allies. If these are not things which you are willing to accept, if you like the life that corporate culture, international capital and the military class which protect them provide for us, you must be willing to accept as the price for these privileges the understanding that a significant percentage of the rest of the world will see us as something ranging from Great Satan to imperialist to unacceptable idol. We will also have the periodic obligation of dropping bombs, killing a few civilians in the process, and destroying the occasional pharmaceutical lab in the Sudan, thus obliging our political leaders to behave like state terrorists. And we will still need to send our own soldiers off to fight and die in international police incidents in the name of the preservation of these privileges. But it is a sacred lifestyle!"

I think that it’s pretty clear that the de facto decision has been for the second option, albeit that decision has been "unconscious," that is, not fully weighed by ethical reason. But even, as I say, if we could imagine bringing these issues successfully to consciousness, my fear is that the choice would be, "I accept the premises of Pure War. I understand that the maintenance of my privilege is dependent on others’ misery, and I’m willing to suffer the occasional terrorist attack and consequent military policing to maintain it. And I am willing that in the name of Homeland Security a dominant part of civilian life be in fact war in the form of an eternal declaration of our willingness to make war."

It is in this sense that we are already, as Virilio puts it, "citizen soldiers." The success of the techno-military is in the fact that people don’t recognize their own militarization. Our commitment to technological rationality as "progress" is in reality a commitment to the techno/military as fate. Coming to consciousness about these matters isn’t an uncommon thing; in fact, it’s so common and banal that we hardly recognize it for what it is. For example, I recently had the following experience. My printer wouldn’t work. Why? After a certain period of time, a computer chip on the ink cartridge essentially declared that it was done, never mind that I probably hadn’t used a tenth of the ink. So I went to the damned store and paid twenty-five bucks for the damned cartridge, took the old out, replaced with the new, and, of course, it didn’t work. So, I removed the cartridge and inspected it for God knows what and replaced the culprit to no visible benefit. I could see that I was being driven to the owner’s manual. What I discovered there was the unpalatable fact that there were buttons I had to push in a certain sequence before installing the cartridge and, I learned, if I was dumb enough to think that I could remove the cartridge for inspection, well that permanently deactivated the clever little piece of crap.

At that point it became luminously clear to me that this machine was training me. And so I concluded by thinking, "What habits of mind are required in order to live in accord with my car, my television, and my computer? And are these new habits of mind good or bad things? And just when do we get to ask these questions?"

This example is perhaps no more significant than the familiar whining about setting the clock on the VCR. But for me it is a sign of a certain resentment in the species about the indignity of having to adapt to the needs of machines. When Virilio looks at similar misadventures, the response he has is that to live a life substantially mediated by technology of one sort or another is to live in a world that has no endurance, that is always "disappearing." The images on the TV do not linger, they disappear. The world outside your car window does not linger, it vanishes. It is the opposite of what Buddhists call "meditative equipoise." One does not live in the moment; one is always being slung into a constantly accelerating future. Faster is better, we think, just as every military general since time immemorial has thought. Velocity is the common term between quotidian life and the logic of military need. (Or as Lycos founder Bob Davis puts it in the title of his recent book, Speed is Life.)

Either we wait for the coming of a hypothetical universal state with I don’t know what primate at its head, or else we finally understand that what is at the center is no longer a monarch . . . but an absolute weapon.

Osama bin Laden’s position is beyond politics. Al Qaeda is not represented by any state that could articulate its point of view. Al Qaeda is utterly deterritorialized. It may have temporary hosts, but it doesn’t have a home. In this sense, Bush’s insistence that there can be no negotiation with terrorism is both redundant and irrelevant. Bin Laden’s first premise is that his efforts are post-political and thus outside of any framework for negotiation. What makes this situation doubly ironic is the fact that the United States and its American trading partners, in lockstep with the newly-formed European Union, are also engaged in making nation states irrelevant and antique. Terrorism’s deterritorialization is a negative reflection of our own economic and political tendencies. And yet politicians and the media (especially Hollywood) continue to appeal to a sentimental patriotism in order to purchase the consent for our military excursions. The United States may be part of a postmodern global reality without economic or political borders, but its citizens continue to need to be appealed to in more old-fashioned ways.

Equally interesting, if also horrifying, is the manner in which terrorism has seized upon our own technology as its weapons of choice. Our airliners are bombs. Our buildings are bombs. Our nuclear reactors are certainly dirty bombs, in potentia, as we’ve long known. Our bureaucracies (like the postal system) are bombs. Our bombs are their bombs because every bomb we drop, they believe, ultimately furthers their interests. Even the anthrax was developed by our scientists in our own biological weapons programs. In short, terrorism has seized upon the "accidents" (plane crashes, slaughter on the freeways, nuclear meltdowns, misplaced or stolen anthrax, plutonium, nuclear secrets, etc.) that have always slumbered within technological rationality. This curious fact should have been made clear on November 12, 2001, when an American Airline jet headed for the Dominican Republic crashed in Queens. But of course the American media couldn’t see it this way without jeopardizing the confidence game it administers. An absolute distinction had to be maintained between terrorist acts of war and a mechanical accident. While the media found it reasonable that Americans should shy away from jets if the reason was that terrorists might be plunging them into buildings, the idea that we should shy away from jets because they have always had a tendency to plunge to the ground in a statistically predictable manner has not been depicted by the media as at all reasonable. On the contrary, such accidents are being managed in the media and in popular consciousness (whatever that is) by faith in the calculations of actuarial science and cost benefit analyses, and by faith in the raw ideology of technical progress. This faith must be maintained in the face of the fact that 43,000 North Americans die annually in traffic accidents, never mind the hundreds of thousands who are injured. That death rate ranks up there with prostate and breast cancer. The "cure" for this "epidemic" is simple: design communities so that people are not obliged to get in cars in order to live. And yet a call for a solution which denied that there is a social good in "commuting" as a national lifestyle would be depicted by media pundits as irrational, just as any "travel anxiety" generated by Queens 11-12 is irrational. The crash in Queens was an "unfortunate coincidence," and is lamented largely because it is yet another psychological impediment to the much-desired recovery of the economy. So what can you do to help your country? Bury your silly fears. Fly somewhere. Better yet, fly somewhere and go shopping.

What bin Laden seems to understand is that Pure War, understood as the technological totalization of the human world, can be pushed where it has been headed all along but where perhaps it would rather not go on someone else’s command: techno-military apocalypse. In this sense, his destination is not all that different from the anticipation of our own fundamentalist Baptists: the End of Days. Revelation. The Second Coming. This is the conclusion of the confrontation between the Holy Warrior and the Global State Technician. Unlike the gruesome Cold War relationship between the nuclear couple, the United States and the Soviet Union, in which deterrence provided the Peace of Pure War (the peace of the "balance of terror," or "mutually assured mass destruction") our new antagonist has no illusions about that grim dance. Muslims of bin Laden’s stripe will have the life they want (however cruel and medieval) or they will have death, about which they have no fear or illusions because the religious thinking at the heart of their activities makes death irrelevant.

It’s hard to imagine anything gloomier than this analysis. Fortunately, Virilio does offer an alternative and a way of confronting the present madness, but it is a strategy of resistance that is addressed not only to the Taliban but also to our own techno-military state. What he offers is this: a pacifism that works religiously in that it returns us to our "identity as mortal beings."

One of the most revealing news clips I’ve heard since September 11 was an analysis of "consumer confidence" that pointed out that one of the hindrances to a return to normal by American consumers was precisely that the destruction and death involved in the World Trade Center had turned people away from the superficial happiness of consumption and had made them all too aware of their human vulnerability. The destruction of the World Trade Center turned people toward marriage, church and commitment to others. That turn, oddly enough, is what Virilio sees as the beginning of the internal dissolution of the empire of Pure War and the religious fanaticism it has empowered. The Soviet Union was not confronted and defeated; it was dissolved internally by its failure to provide for the human needs of its own citizens (and I’m not talking about the need for television sets and satellite hookups). Perhaps it is such a spiritual turn that can undo the grip of the military, the technocrats and the multinational vision of the New World Order.

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

CONTEXT is available at bookstores nationwide.