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Link – TerrorismParanoid threat construction of terrorism acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy, exacerbating the actual impacts of terrorism and driving the United States to the extent of nuclear warZulaika, 12 – Professor and Director, Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno (Joseba, “Mythologies of Terror: Fantasy and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in U.S. Counterterrorism,” Kroeber Anthropological Society, Vol. 102, No. 1, 10-13, http://kas.berkeley.edu/documents/Issue_102-103/2_Zulaika.pdf)//SY A central dimension of terrorism, and one that is crucial to show its self-fulfilling quality, has to do with threats and their perception and the reactions they provoke. A threat plays with the sign as representing a future event, while we never know whether the issuer actually means it or not, or whether he might change his opinion in the future. The Unabomber brought the traffic in California airports to a halt by simply sending a letter to a newspaper with the threat of bringing down an airliner, while he sent another letter to another newspaper admitting that the threat was a “prank.” The actual reality of the threat might be nothing but play -- a zero that can yet have deadly serious consequences. Counterterrorism is a prime example of what Merton labeled “the Thomas theorem:” “If men define situations as they are real in their consequences” (Merton 1968:475). Once the situation is defined as one of inevitable terrorism and endless waiting, what could happen weighs as much as what is actually the case; once a threat, whose intention or possibility is unknown to us, is taken seriously, its reality requires that we must act on it. Terrorism is the catalyst for confusing various semantic levels of linguistic, ritual and military actions. Anthropologists have examined phenomena such as divination, which manipulates the axis of time in a cultural context of magic and witchcraft. They have compared pre-modern mystical notions of causation and temporality to our own modern standards of rationality. The central premise of counterterrorism thinking is the oft-repeated formula that “it is not if, but when.” Hypotheticals are premised with the conditional if— “if A, then B.” What characterizes basic counterterrorist knowledge about the next impending attack is that it will happen. In a mind-set that parallels Azande witchcraft, the counterterrorist axiom of “not if” rules out mere hypotheses.2 The revelations are thus “unfulfilled hypotheticals” that will become real with time. Counterterrorist projections are the equivalent to oracular certainties—the horror will happen no matter what. This leads in pragmatic terms to the fatalistic attitude of disregarding actual knowledge and not taking responsibility for actual decisions—what does it really matter what we decide since it is going to happen anyway and whatever happens is out of our hands? What matters, therefore, is that we sort of divine what the course of action will be. The practical aspect of this temporality of waiting, in which the certainty of the impending evil is beyond any hypothetical (“not if”), is that we need to act preemptively now against events that are to happen in the future. The rationale behind nuclear deterrence was that developing armaments now, ready to strike at the push of a button, guaranteed that they would not be used in the future. Many commentators saw in such logic the quintessence of technological madness. But that was not enough. Since future nuclear attacks by terrorists are only a matter of time, we must wage war now preemptively even in a nuclear context, thus breaking the historic assumption that nuclear arsenals were for deterrence, not for actual usage. Thus the formula of “not if, but when” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The counterterrorist thinking makes it an imperative that the war must start now— against Saddam Hussein, against al-Qaeda, against Iran, against all potential terrorists. This is how the American public, including the liberal media, accepted the rationale to go to war against Iraq. What happens to the axis of time in the expectations of robotic technology? Robots will have to react in such speed, we are told, that in the decision cycle, reduced from minutes to microseconds, “As the loop gets shorter and shorter, there won’t be any time in it for humans,” according to an army colonel (Singer 2009:64). It is no longer the “perversion of temporality” in the waiting for terror, but the very elimination of human time—the perfect fantasy by which humans are left aside in a war in which, not only will they not die, but, by reducing time to the category of fiction, they will not have to make the tough decisions and carry the burden of their consequences. The fact that robotic technologies created to combat terrorism reinforce such self-generating quality to a frightening degree can be illustrated with the best-known case of terrorism before 9/11: the Pan Am flight 103 downed over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988, killing the 270 passengers aboard. What the public ignores is that this was preceded in July of 1988 by the downing of an Iranian airliner in the Persian Gulf by the U.S.S. Vincennes with 290 people on board, and this was the result of the cruiser being equipped with an Aegis radar system that registered the civilian plain as “Assumed Enemy.” The Iranian jet was on a consistent course and broadcasting a civilian radar and radio signal, but the automated Aegis had been designed for dealing with Soviet bombers and thus it appeared on its computer screen to be an Iranian F-14 fighter. The hard data were telling the crew that the plane wasn’t a fighter, but the computer was telling them it was. And who could challenge the robotic knowledge of Aegis? And because the Vincennes was a Robo-cruiser, the crew had the authority to fire without seeking further permission from the authorities. In short, “the computer was trusted even more than any human captain’s independent judgment on whether to shoot or not” (Singer 2009:125). Five months after the tragedy provoked by the Vincennes came the terrorist attack on the Pan Am 103, and prominent experts saw a case of revenge or “blood feuding” (TT 11). A classic case of counterterrorism’s self-generating logic. What are the practical results of the drone campaign? The number of terrorist attacks in Pakistan has gone up sharply in a wave of anti-Americanism, for Pakistanis “overwhelmingly believe that most of those who die in the attacks are civilians” (Caryl 2007:56). One concrete instance of such a link was provided by Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American known for the failed bomb in Times Square in May 2010, who declared in his trial that “I’m avenging the attack” of “drones [that] kill women, children... everybody... I am part of the answer” (Hari 2010). Add to this the stark fact that the CIA drone strikes set a precedent for the nearly 50 other nations, including Pakistan and Iran, that already possess the same unmanned technology. Counterterrorists know all of this. Yet why is it that these very drones, that help increase terrorist insurgency “exponentially,” are still “the only game in town”? In short, counterterrorism knows that its tactics operate clearly along the path of a self-fulfilling feedback, and yet there is nothing else better to do. Such an impasse— if we do nothing, terrorism will flourish; if we do something it will flourish even more—shows dramatically the current crisis in counterterrorist knowledge. There is at the domestic level another dimension of how counterterrorism needs terrorists, much like a hunter needs the beastly prey, and which can be gathered from Trevor Aaronson, working here in Berkeley, in his article “The Informants” (2011): “Informants report to their handlers on people who have, say, made statements sympathizing with terrorists. Those names are then cross-referenced with existing intelligence data, such as immigration and criminal records. FBI agents may then assign an undercover operative to approach the target by posing as a radical. Sometimes the operative will propose a plot, provide explosives, even lead the target in a fake oath to al-Qaeda. Once enough incriminating information has been gathered, there’s an arrest—and a press conference announcing another foiled plot.” The Washington Metro bombing plot, the New York subway plot, the plot to blow up the Sears Tower, the one to bomb a Portland Christmas tree lighting, and dozens more across the nation were organized and led by the FBI. Mother Jones, having examined the prosecutions of 508 defendants in terrorism-related cases, found that all the high-profile terrorism plots of the last decade, with the exception of three,3 were FBI stings (Aaronson 2011:30-43). The FBI consumes now most of its budget (3.3 billion) on counterterrorism, not on organized crime (2.2 billion). It has 15,000 spies, many of them with the task of infiltrating Muslim communities, paid as much as $100,000 in some cases. As one defense lawyer put it, “They’re creating crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the war on terror” (Aaronson 2011:33). Attorney Eric Holder argued in a speech that sting operations have “proven to be an essential law enforcement tool in uncovering and preventing potential terror attacks” (Aaronson 2011:33). But what this view doesn’t take into account is the extent to which the sting operation is actually creating terrorism. There is no better case to prove this than the case of the blind Sheikh, which several writers consider to be a crucial event leading to 9/11. What cannot be answered is of course how many of the FBI’s targeted “terrorists” would have never become one were it not for an informant. In the case of the blind Sheik, the evidence points to the fact that, if not for the sting operation based on a paid informant notorious for lying to everyone, according to the New York Times, his fatwa would not have taken place, a key event in the making of 9/11. The final result of such counterterrorist culture is that regular crimes are now frequently viewed by law enforcement and intelligence agencies with the suspicion that they are possibly linked to terrorism.4 What greater success could al-Qaeda have in the end than it be considered by the U.S. security as a bigger threat than the Soviet superpower during the Cold War, deserving in counterreaction so far several trillion dollars? Counterterrorist surveillance is ineffective not because of any specific program but because of the misguided fantasies of terrorist threatsZulaika, 12 – Professor and Director, Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno (Joseba, “Mythologies of Terror: Fantasy and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in U.S. Counterterrorism,” Kroeber Anthropological Society, Vol. 102, No. 1, 7-8, http://kas.berkeley.edu/documents/Issue_102-103/2_Zulaika.pdf)//SY What concerns us most here is a crisis of knowledge in terrorism studies. Right from their inception, a sign of this crisis has been the difficulties of, not only defining the term itself, but the very interpretive frameworks of the events covered by the concept. A critical analysis must inquire into the genealogy of this discourse and world-view, beginning with the very naming of the phenomenon; it must examine its conceptual premises and policies, question its politics and ethics. It is the placement of the terrorists in a context of taboo, the willful ignorance of their political subjectivities, the role of fantasy in the entire phenomenon—these are aspects that need investigation to find out the extend of the crisis of knowledge in the entire field. One has to begin such study by examining what counts as a standard of evidence and as valuable information in such context of taboo, what type of experience should be respected, what sort of associative logic links together various kinds of events. Forty percent of the U.S. military budget is secret (Johnson 2007:209), as are the budgets of the intelligence agencies. The number of classified documents has tripled since 2001 to 23 million. Priest and Arkin provide evidence that no one in government knows how much is spent in counterterrorism nor is in charge of managing its exponential growth nor is responsible for the overall effort. Yet the critical question is: does secrecy help or make a country more vulnerable in the current culture of instant electronic information? The National Security Agency “now ingests 1.7 billion pieces of intercepted communications every twenty-four hours” (Priest and Arkin 2011:77). After 9/11 government agencies published some 50,000 intelligence reports. The usefulness of the report depends on the quality of the analysts, and these are among the lowest paid employees, young people making $40,000 to $60,000, two-thirds of whom at the CIA have less than five years of experience, and are typically ignorant of the languages or the cultures of the countries they are working on. The intelligence veterans have migrated to the lucrative private sector. As director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, John M. Custer III grew so angry at the lack of useful information coming from the gigantic National Counterterrorism Center that in 2007 he visited its director and told him “that after four and a half years, this organization had never provided one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!” (Priest and Arkin 2011:84-85). Priest and Arkin’s conclusion is that nobody is in charge of Counterterrorism in Top Secret America. Which explains, for example, that in the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian known as the “underwear bomber,” who tried to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit in Christmas of 2009, not only was information from the British intelligence connecting him to Anwar al-Awlaki, but his own father had contacted the CIA officers at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, alerting them of the danger posed by his son’s “extremely religious views.” And yet his name was not added to the No Fly List nor was his U.S. visa revoked. This was déjà vu of the knowledge had by fifty to sixty officers for a period of over a year that two of the future 9/11 plotters were in this country and nothing was being done about it. Which brings us to the relevant issue of the extent to which counterterrorism has become terrorism’s best ally. It is a fact recognized by the 9/11 Commission Report that the plotters could have been found and the attacks prevented. What are the premises and blind spots in counterterrorism that not only allowed 9/11, but might have contributed to making the problem much worse? And isn’t the drone war just another flight into counterterrorist fantasy and one more chapter in self-fulfilling prophecy? What is the meaning of “information” in such terrorist scenarios of states of exception and in the presence of a community of believers whose basic structure separates those who “know” the secret information and the rest of us who are to be kept in the dark? Secrecy means that no critical judgment can be exercised, much like in mystical societies where knowledge belongs only to the sacred specialist. Intelligence becomes ancillary information when belief drives knowledge. Once the decision has been made that the enemy is a Hitler-like monster, the ordinary standards of factual evidence are supplemented with untested premises grounded on moral and political principles. The main role of information is no longer procuring factual evidence but helping uncover the secret intentions of the evildoer. The affirmative’s counter-terror mindset embodies “violent innocence” – this results in the projection of aggression onto the Other and lash-out – they create more terrorists motivated by “violent innocence” than they attempt to destroyHollander 14 – Currently a research psychoanalyst, educated at the Psychoanalytic Center of California, Former Professor of History at California State University, Dominguez Hills (Nancy Caro Hollander, 4/8/2014, Routledge, Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas, ISBN: 978-0881634914 // SM) An important component of the traumatic significance of 9/11 was our experience of ourselves as targets of an arbitrary and unfathomably aggressive act. Why did we become the innocent victims of such a monstrous assault? As an ostensibly puzzled President Bush put it, “But why do they hate us? We are so good.“ This stance represents what Christopher Bollas (I992) posits as “violent or radical innocence,” a psychic defense by which the denial of one's own aggression is projected onto the other, who is then experienced as the source of one's innocent victimhood. This defense simplifies consciousness and inhibits the capacity for symbolization, promoting paranoid schizoid splitting and projective mechanisms that characterized the states of mind of both leaders and citizens in this country. Shortly after 9/11, Hedda had an experience that illustrates this phenomenon. She called together a group of her colleagues to discuss their responses to the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. “Of course, early on, the question of ‘why do they hate us’ came up,” she told me, with more than a little irritation, “and I thought, okay, I know a little about this, so I tried to explain something about this country's role in the world. I got resistance to this line of thinking, so l tried suggesting that we think together about how people are looking to Bush as a father figure who in fantasy we need to rely on to keep us safe. But that kind of minimal psychoanalytic thinking was not what they were interested in. They wanted to talk about revenge, how we could get even with the terrorists. They were afraid it might happen again, and no one but me was afraid of what we might do, what Bush might carry out in a kind of self-righteous vindication that would wind up being even more destructive. I felt isolated in my concerns, which were much more about our government than about the terrorists.” As Hedda feared, this theme of violent innocence was manifested in the Bush administration's adoption of an attitude of righteous entitlement to aggressive retaliatory tactics that risked an ever-expanding war whose product would be the manufacture of thousands of new terrorists who also experience violent innocence in their conviction that the United States is a mortal enemy they must destroy. The recourse to violent innocence as a strategy to deal with the destabilizing effects of the terrorist attacks was framed by aspects of hegemonic ideology that have informed this country's relationship to the rest of the world for centuries. Most U.S. citizens understand foreign policy through the government's ideological lens as it is monotonously transmitted and reiterated through the corporate-owned media and the host of other institutions through which circulate, as Gramsci showed, hegemonic notions and practices that are felt to be the shared common sense of the social order. Citizens were thus receptive to their government's self-representation of violent innocence based on the denial of U.S. expansionist policies that long predated 9/11. While we were in fact victims of hateful violence, the immediate conclusion of our innocent victimization and the assumption that the terrorists were motivated by envy—of our goodness, our freedoms, our material achievements—inhibited citizens‘ capacity to think about how U.S. policies in the Middle East and Asia may have been an important source of terrorist hatred, about which we might be able to do something constructive. In this regard, a poster carried by participants in antiwar marches ironically asked a significant question regarding a motive for the invasion of Iraq. It read: ‘How did our oil get under their sand?!‘ The grandiosity in the attitude satirized in the poster has a long tradition in this country‘s estimation of its superior institutions and values that are the foundation of U.S. foreign policy. Many citizens endorsed, however unknowingly, the ideological assumptions underlying the war on terror and its aggressive foreign and domestic policies. They identified with and thus gave consensual support to hegemonic depictions of this country's invasion and occupation of Iraq as a force for democracy, liberty, and justice. War was the culturally acceptable response to the terrorist attacks because the government could rely on a historical reservoir of racism and neocolonial sentiments that has driven U.S. foreign policy Discursive threat construction about terrorism manipulates Americans to fear the undefined terrorist Other and causes them to support the national security state that carries out dehumanization and violenceLaMothe, 11 – Professor, Pastoral Care and Counseling, Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology (Ryan, “Obsession for National Security and the Rise of the National Security State-Industry: A Pastoral-Psychological Analysis,” Pastoral Psychology, Vol. 61, No. 6, February, 34-35)//SY Since 9/11, the ideas of national security and the war on terror are deeply embedded in the minds of most Americans. President Bush and administration officials, with remarkable consistency and coordination, coined terms such as the axis of evil (North Korea, Iran, and Iraq), preventive war, the war on terror, and the smoking gun of a mushroom cloud to channel and harness the anxiety and fear of the American public toward supporting two wars, torture, the Guantanamo prison, secret prisons abroad, and the Patriot Act. What is interesting and deeply problematic about the proliferation of the term “war on terror” is the absence of a defined enemy to be defeated, which gives rise to a perpetual war (Bacevich 2010; Chomsky 2010; Vidal 2002). Where before the Soviet Union provided a clear circumscribed enemy, now any person, group, or country can fall under the amorphous banner of terrorist. Terrorism and terrorists are terms that provide an unprecedented emotional plasticity in political discourse. Indeed, terrorists are the best kind of enemy if one is seeking to keep the idea of national security alive and malleable in the psyche of the American public. The idea of national security and attending metaphors have served to motivate leaders and citizens alike to support massive military and intelligence spending, as well as an aggressive foreign policy that has had very concrete and frequently devastating consequences, along with accidental beneficial results. Following WWII the result of the employment of the phrase “national security” led to an incredible expansion of government entities, ushering in the “age of the National Security State” (Bacevich 2010, p.35). 34 Pastoral Psychol (2012) 61:31–46 Concern for national security, in other words, led to a number of government agencies and military branches that focused primarily on combating the prevalence of external and internal threats and, in particular, Communist threats. Allen Dulles of the new spy organization, CIA, Air Force general Curtis Lemay at the Strategic Air Command (SAC), J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, Robert McNamara the Secretary of Defense, General Westmoreland and many other leaders all played various roles in heightening anxiety about the threat of Communism to the survival not only of the U.S. but Western democracies as well. Clearly, the Soviet Union was involved in making nuclear warheads and delivery systems, but, as Bacevich (2010, 2011) noted, many of the claims made by U.S. political, military, and intelligence leaders were greatly exaggerated, often deliberately, to pursue personal, national (e.g., economic and political expansion and control), agency (e.g., more funding), and military goals. A consequence of the emergence of the National Security State was the rise of what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. In his Farewell Address, Eisenhower said, Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.2 Certainly, Eisenhower did not use the term “complex” as a double entendre. The military-industrial complex is complex because of the deep and entangling ties between the military, corporations, and the state. It is also a complex in the sense of the social psyche supporting these entanglements. That is, the psychological complex was the growing obsession with national security. Despite Eisenhower’s warning, the military-industrial complex has mushroomed, with an impressive surge after 9/11. The growth of the military-industrial complex was broader than simply arming the U.S. U.S. companies played and play a leading role in the manufacture and sale of weapons throughout the world that are sometimes used by U.S. supported dictators (e.g., Somoza in Nicaragua; Rhee in South Korea; Armas and Fuentes in Guatemala) or used by allies to suppress or remove native groups (e.g., Israel occupation of Palestinian lands; Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war). What is important to grasp here is that the rise of the national security state and the military-industrial complex, which signified a marriage of the state to private, non-democratic economic institutions, occurred largely by consistently employing the idea and the seemingly ineluctable logic of national security to heighten anxiety and fear among U.S citizens. Heightened fear and anxiety motivated (and continues to motivate) citizens to support massive military spending and aggressive foreign policy goals and actions. Manipulation of Americans’ anxieties about survival causes them to support global interventions to eradicate the undefined terrorist OtherWeber, 2 – Paul de Man Chair, European Graduate School and Avalon Professor of Humanities, Northwestern University (Samuel, “War, Terrorism, and Spectacle, or: On Towers and Caves,” Grey Room, No. 7, Spring, 19-22, http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/pdf/1262582.pdf?acceptTC=true)//SY 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 emphasized that spectacle perpetrated the separation and isolation of individuals in a commodity society while at the same time concealing 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 what Debord described but never explicitly named: ambivalence, 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 European television strikes me as different but, unfortunately, moving in the same direction at varying speeds). 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 only by 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," the 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).9 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 that they englobe destruction, mutilation, and implosion. They must comprehend and contain 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 position that allows one to "endure" indefinitely. This is the moral of the story, whether it is called "Enduring Freedom" or "Infinite Justice." The War against Terrorism 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 in[de]finitely 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 Tora Bora and beyond, marks the will to power as a will to endure. This is the not-so-hidden religious subtext of the ostensibly secular War against Terrorism, a war that is above all a defense and an affirmation of "globalization" as the right to determine the earth as being both all-encompassing and self-contained. To rule the planet, one must survive. But to survive, one must rule. Western television (and often print) media appeal to their viewers by promising them the continued rule of such survival. "Stay with us: we'll be right back after the break." Stay with us-and survive the break; leave us and perish. 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, has had two effects. On the one hand, it heightened the anxiety of the "break" to which consumption appeals. 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 start spending again. The promise of immortality through consumption had lost much of its appeal, for the time being at least. But since just such traumatic breaks are at the origin of the compulsion to consume, the basic structure and process was not fundamentally altered. That is, as long as the putative cause of anxiety can be located in an image, confined to a site, a stage-or, rather, to multiple sites and stages, but in sequence, one following the other. This is the goal 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, Sudan, Somalia, and so on) in order then to be depicted, if possible, and destroyed. The names and faces may change. But presumably not the need that "terror" be named and given a face. 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 situated sequentially, one site after the other, not all at once. From this point on the War against Terrorism becomes a scenario that unfolds, step by step and intrinsically without end, in its effort to bring the global enemy to "infinite justice." Almost from the beginning of this war, the Bush administration asserted that the enemy was "international" in character, limited neither to one person, however important, nor to one state, however nefarious. Thus, the War against Terrorism, unlike the cold war, cannot be defined primarily as a war against a single state, the Soviet Union, or against that state's 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, North Korea, Iran, Sudan, Syria, and so on. What characterizes this policy is its continuing effort to tie terrorist networks to nation-states. It locates cause, condition, and ramifications 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.10 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 to which they can be attached, ostensibly comprehended, and, above all, removed. Schematically, the fear of death is encouraged to focus upon the vulnerability of the other, which, as enemy, is the other to be liquidated or subjugated. The viewer is encouraged to "move forward" and simultaneously to forget the past; encouraged to identify with the ostensibly invulnerable perspective of the pilotless airborne camera that registers as blips the earthbound destruction tens of thousand of feet below. Such a position seems to assure the triumph of the spectator over the mortality of earthbound life. The trails of the B-52s in the stratosphere high above the earth announce the demise of the Caves and the Ressurrection of the Towers. Analyzing the United States’ post-9/11 rhetoric is key to understand our relationship to the war on terror and deconstructing and stop ceding political will to the state’s militarismBiesecker, 7 – (Barbara, “No Time for Mourning: The Rhetorical Production of the Melancholic Citizen-Subject in the War on Terror,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 40, No. 1, 150-152, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25655263.pdf)//SY Zizek's definition in this essay of the melancholic's so-called lost object as "nothing but the positivization of a void or lack, a purely anamorphic entity that does not exist in itself is, of course, his theory of subjectivation and ideology writ small: always already at the core of subjectivity lies a constitutive void, the self is therefore fundamentally compensatory and ultimately delusional, and ideology is the symbolic space of self-enunciation at once inaugurated and governed by lack and always already lacking?a melancholic economy's spectral and structural effect. Contrary to what others have proscribed, the way out of the ideological enclosure is not to confront what we experience as reality but, instead, "to traverse the phantasy" that shores it up so as to come face to shadowy face with the fundamental lack, split, or antagonism around which our putative reality has been structured. In the words of Richard Boothby, whom Zizek himself approving cites, the task is "to be more profoundly claimed by the phantasy than ever, in the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with the real core of the phantasy that transcends imaging" (2002, 18). In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Zizek once again sets into motion the logic of "going through the fantasy"?"not its symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object [or symptom], by its fascinating presence, is merely filling out a lack, a void in the Other" (1989,133)?in order to pronounce not only a sweeping diagnosis of Americans', indeed the West's, cathected relation to the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon but also of the ever more bloody Israeli-Palestinian ideological deadlock. Here, I quote him twice, at some length: Who is really alive today? What if we are "really alive" only if we commit ourselves with an excessive intensity which puts us beyond "mere life"? What if, when we focus on mere survival, even if it is qualified as "having a good time", what we ultimately lose is life itself? What if the ... suicide bomber on the point of blow ing him- or herself (and others) up is, in an emphatic sense, "more alive" than the American soldier engaged in a war in front of a computer screen against an enemy hundreds of miles away, or a New York yuppie jogging along the Hudson river in order to keep his body in shape? Or, in psychoanalytic terms, what if a hysteric is truly alive in his or her permanent excessive questioning of his or her existence, while an obsessional is the very model of choosing a "life in death"? That is to say, is not the ultimate aim of his or her compulsive rituals to prevent the "thing" from happening?this "thing" being the excess of life itself? (2002, 88-89) And: The problem with Ariel Sharon is not that he is overreacting, but that he is not do ing enough, that he is not addressing the real problem?far from being a ruthless military executioner, Sharon is the model of a leader pursuing a confused politics of disoriented oscillation. The excessive Israeli military is ultimately an expression of impotence. (2002, 128) To allow the "thing" to happen and to recognize that Sharon, his hench men, and their military machine, like the emperor, have no clothes: In these and numerous other instances, Zizek points out the way in which the Real as the limit point of all subject-formation and eluding all ideological fabrication "returns as the same through diverse historicizations/symbolizations" (1989, 50). I cautiously accept Zizek's theorization of subjectivation, indeed of hegemony, as an always already failed compensatory and ideological effect and, hence, as "melancholic" through and through. Doing so, however, raises a host of difficult questions for me, not the least of which is the following: If the contingent and interminable process of collective subjectivation is set into motion and kept on the move by the irreducible gap between symbolization and the Real (for Zizek, the "fixed" coordinates of all historicization), to what are we to attribute the modulation or particularization of its forms? On my view, the short answer to that question is rhetoric?herein understood as a technology of (re)subjectivation whose constitutive but conjunctural effects contribute to the consolidation and stabilization of particular epistemological and political regimes.5 The much longer version of the answer comes in the pages to follow, pages that?as I hinted nearly at the start?tender a reading of post-9/11 patriotism as the material upshot of a carefully crafted and meticulously managed melancholic rhetoric whose distinct features are: one, the discursive transfiguration of a historical and political catastrophe into the harbinger of an epochal Act "to come" and, hence, the ubiquitous deployment of the future anterior; two, the "perfecting"?in the Burkean sense?of the aesthetics of disappear ance that structured Americans' perception of Gulf War One into the aesthetics of dematerialization that continues to structure our relationship to the ongoing "war on terror"; and, three, a visual ecology of repetition. The specific aim and accomplishment of this melancholic rhetoric, I suggest, is the formation of a public "political will" that, with considerable irony, cedes the power of the citizenry to the remilitarized state for the sake of protecting what will have been lost: namely, the democratic way of life. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.71 Mb. Share with your friends:
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