Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Go Ahead, Ask Me About My Dissertation, or, Of History, Movies, and Nuculur Bombs: An Essaylet

SO THERE I AM, GETTING PROGRESSIVELY DRUNKER in SideTrack, chatting with a cellist at the CSO who's insisting on buying me a drink even though I really don't want him to be hitting on me. And he asks me about my research.

A dangerous gambit, this dissertation-questioning is a sort of last-ditch effort to entice a grad student into bed with you. It could misfire seriously. He could actually start talking about his dissertation. He's drunk—it could get long and complicated. You might not understand. You might not care. But now you've done it, you have to feign interest and comprehension as he fires off multisyllabic words in increasing rapidity in one of the more inappropriate places and times for such a monologue: 1am at a glitzy gay bar full of A-list queers with perfect bodies and perfect wardrobes. And this guy won't shut up.

But there I am, taking the bait hooklineandsinker, not able to resist the research question in my weakened, mildly inebriated state. So I find myself, a few minutes later, rattling off the names of movies that are, according to my still mostly intuitive rubric, "contemporary American realism." They are:Syriana, Babel, Jarhead. Oh, and, some older titles, too: Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now, oh, yeah, and Platoon.

And he asks a question that hadn't occurred to me. "Do you have any films that aren't war movies?" Well, yes. Of course. Like.... what? I can't think of any. (Which is dumb, because (a) Babel and Syriana aren't really war films, and (b) I certainly have films that are definitely not war films, and I am even writing about one of them at the moment—Scanner Darkly. Others are, off the top of my head: Crash, Shortcuts,Timecode, Shortbus, Blow. But for some reason, I can't seem conjure these up at this very moment.)

This is an unexpected turn of events; a serious question, one that shows he's listening and understanding. Maybe I've misread the situation. Maybe he really is interested in my research? Or maybe he's just asking a question that doesn't require understanding of my babbling about history and bodies, just some semi-serious film viewing in the last 20 years. Or maybe he's just enjoying the incongruity of having this conversation in one of the more vapid places in Chicago. Who knows, but there's something to the question. It hadn't hit me before. I know there are a bunch of war movies that fall under my rubric of "affective realism," but it crystallizes in my head at that moment: the war film has a privileged relation to realism in the American imagination.

AND THEN, 36 HOURS LATER, give or take, this article about nuclear terrorism and Sam Nunn and the Nuclear Threat Initiative appears in the New York Times Magazine. (Read it; it's great and it's scary and it's important.) The journalistic prose of course casts this as a story about Sam Nunn, sneaking ideas into the newspaper format only through the backdoor of biography. But articulated in this story is a way of thinking about the current foreign policy... uh... difficulties—and how we got into them—that brings to light some really crucial insights about history, terrorism, politics, military force,neoconservatism, and the American media.

But I don't want to get ahead of myself. This story, buried somewhere in the middle, recasts the history of how we ended up in the war in Iraq and not, say, protecting and diffusing nuclear sites and nuclear fuel.Condi Rice says that we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. This much we all know. But Donald Rumsfeld also thinks that the wonkish reaction to that image—make it harder for terrorists, governments, everybody in the world to get their hands on fissile material—is a "wimpy" thing for the Defense Department to be doing. The United States Military should be out invading countries and not doing paperwork and guard duty at old Soviet military facilities in Kazakhstan.

Sure, there's this neocons are from Mars, policy wonks are from Venus aspect to this story. (Which unwittingly casts the bureaucrats as lovers. ::shudder::) But there's another way of thinking this, which I'm sure I'm not the first to come up with.

The neoconservative version of history and the world is something like: Wars are what make history go round. It's a version of history packed full of events, heroic deeds like Bringing Democracy To The Middle East and Projecting Freedom Into The World and Forcing Anglo-American Liberal Capitalism Down The Throats Of Third World Economies Not Prepared For Such Cutthroat Competition In The Globalized Marketplace. Actually, this last one is really interesting, not just because it's the longest. FAALCDTTOTWENPFSCCITGM fails when it does in large part because the event—the liberalization of markets in developing economies—isn't matched by a process of ongoing management in those economies.

The Neocons are in the Do Something camp of how the world works. History is a series of deeds done by greater and lesser men [sic]. This is the kind of history GWB appeals to when he says that "posterity will be the judge of that." (Except he's not nearly so articulate.) He's the decider-in-chief, the decider-doer whose tenure in the West Wing will be remembered primarily for a bunch of really fucking stupiddecidings and doings.

Of course, those of us with more historical sense in our pinky fingers than that man has anywhere in his body or cabinet knows (including Paul Krugman, whence this idea) will really understand that the failure of the Second Bush Dynasty is the evisceration of the civil service. The bureaucracy dies, and with it Ongoing Management. DonRumsfeld thinks nuclear cleanup in Russia is wimpy; and the Bush administration replaces competent career civil service employees with political hacks, who are not so much incompetent as whose competence rests on an understanding of the Event—the decision as a threshold, a moment in time, with ramifications. They are ignorant of Ongoing Maintenance, which I capitalize only for dramatic effect, which is—dare I mention His Name—what Foucault teaches us the primary task of government and its proxy institutions since the birth of liberal democracy in the 18th century—or rather, even, since Machiavelli.

THE EASIEST PLACE TO SEE this disjuncture is perhaps the invasion of Iraq. Everywhere in the media, the Bush administration is cast as rocking the invasion and blowing the occupation. Rummy and Cheneyet. al . were up for the invasion-as-event: Mission Accomplished! the banners yell in summer of 2003, coming up on four years ago. But what they failed to realize, goes the standard story in the media, is the enormouslyunsexy task of maintaining the peace, reconstructing the country, occupying its streets, protecting its museum. This unsexy business has duly turned out to be not such a wimpy affair, in part because the State Department—the foreign policy apparatus usually tasked with such ongoing maintenance—was deeply and evenvirtuosically ignored in what has become known as the runup to the war.

But what is at stake here is deeper than this. It's not just a question of making sure military operations have proper followup—although in terms of practical effects, that would be a damn good start. And here is where my overwrought introduction about war movies comes back.

Realism is, of course, the privileged aesthetic genre for representing, revisiting, reconstructing, and even living history. In contemporary America, we consume history primarily in three ways: the news; popular-press nonfiction books; and realist novels and movies. I'm going to leave the first two to the side for the moment, and wax academic about this last category.

WAR, PARTICULARLY IN CERTAIN FORMS of the American popular imagination, is about Heroic Deeds. Saving Private Ryan is the epitome of this category. It's about the Everyday Heroism of Ordinary Soldiers. Even in a more sophisticated film like Apocalypse Now, the horrors of Vietnam are cast as a series of horrific deeds, events. Where it begins to open is that the film thinks these events against the backdrop of something like a situation (think the meaning of the word as it's used either inCNN's The Situation Room or, more interestingly, as in the term "situation comedy"), a fabric of ongoing hell that prepares and conditions the actions that unfold onscreen as a series of discrete events. The hell of the war, what makes it awful in its virtuosity is not just that they play Wagner when attacking Vietnamese villages (something that apparently did indeed happen in Vietnam and isn't a conceit of Coppola), but the very imaginability of the motivations and particulars for the air raid on the village: Charlie Don't Surf and Flight of the Valkyries.

Yet what Jarhead teaches us is that war is boring, or, at least, can be. A place of ongoing maintenance, of anxiety rather than terror, or of protracted terror, not terror-as-event (9/11), but terror-as-the-fabric-of-existence. War as the historical event par excellence, is in fact not one of the punctual event, the one-off happening, the dramatic affect. Instead, it is as an ongoing process of management—management of life and death, management of anxiety and terror and other affects, management of bodies and training and psyches and lives and media and appearances and shit and sand and everything else. It is perhaps particularly apparent for the warJarhead takes on, the first gulf war, the thing that Baudrillard could tell us didn't happen. But as Zizek points out, this fabric of management is precisely the condition of globalized capitalism. For him, perversely, the very eventfulness of 9/11 was spurious. In 2007 as well as 2001 and very possibly since the End of History and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, Nothing Happens. Only false consciousness sees events. Everything is ongoing management.

WHAT'S CONSERVATIVE ABOUT NEOCONSERVATISM is that it still thinks of history and politics as events, even when it almost understands all these as processes or situations. (I'm not sure that liberalism à la the American left is that different; it does have a greater sense of trust in the ongoing management parts of government.) The very concept of spin gets there; spin keeps an event open, to the point almost of losing its eventfulness. That is to say: insofar as the meaning, structure, and even content of an event are open to revision, reinterpretation, and even sheer invention, the event loses its punctual nature, it's no longer locatable in a point in time, but instead emerges as a new situation, something to be managed. And yet, what spin does, in its obsession with events, is keep thinking about—or, at least, figuring—history as comprising events, events which are open, certainly, but are events nonetheless.

In fact, what spin does is exploit the openness of reality in some very bizarre ways. Terrorism, in order to function, has to be diffuse in its effects—you never know when or where it's going to strike. Terror in this sense cannot but be a situation, a particular fabric of existence. It's interesting to note, following David Simpson following GiorgioAgamben following others that terror was original a policy of the state—a situation to be managed, the object of bureaucracy. The sheer horror of the holocaust lay not only in the sheer scale of it, but also in the fact of its industrialization and institutionalization. The state extermination of population requires isolating that population by bureaucratic means, constituting it as an object of government management.

In some sense, the most appropriate response to 9/11 would have been to constitute terrorism as a situation and therefore as an object of ongoing management. The outrage expressed, for example, in Fahrenheit 9/11 about the one cop taking care of the entire Oregon shore, or about the money not being spent on port security, or the profound disinterest the Bush administration has demonstrated inunsexy projects like nuclear nonproliferation and fissile material security—this outrage is symptomatic. It is, in fact, not an outrage about particular actions taken or not taken, but the failure of the current government to properly constitute "security" and "terrorism" as situations rather than events. In fact, the movement at work in the rhetorical sleight of hand "9/11 = terrorism" allows Tony Snowet. al . to treat terrorism as an event, and therefore as an object of spin—an open event, not an open situation. What 9/11 meant becomes x, whatever x needs to be in the present moment. It cannot gain too much specificity as an historical event, insofar as explaining the particularity of the situation, giving it the density and weight of a properly historical occurrence would sap its power to be deployed as a catch-all situation. The event 9/11 lends a particulartemporality and urgency to the situation of terrorism.

As event, 9/11 calls for eventful responses, particularly in the registers of justice and vengeance. Terrorism as a situation, however, calls for the kind of quiet management of effective government bureaucracy. (The kind the British excel at.) And the world-historical clash of civilizations? It occurs in a wholly different register than the Bush administration can comprehend. LouisAlthusser was probably not the first to point out that historical formations have both conditions of production and conditions of reproduction. That is to say, once emergent, a situation requires forces to keep it around. Conditions of production of terrorism, 9/11-style: Madrassas and people willing to die for a certain version of jihad. Places where training can occur and radical ideologies exploited and intensified. Religious structures which Conditions of reproduction? Structural inequalities in Middle Eastern countries exacerbated by global thirst for fossil fuels, for one. Resentment over Western influences in the region. Unfathomably deep alienation on the part of nontrivial numbers of Muslim men. (Relatively) open societies in the West. The list goes on. Responses to terrorism must address both levels. The thought that terrorism can be in any way addressed by an intervention like the invasion of Iraq epically misconstrues what can and cannot be done about terrorism.

THE TEMPORALITY OF THE NEWS MEDIA is such that these ongoing processes of management are all but unrepresentable. Bush admin wonks are fond of pointing out that we don't see what doesn't happen—rightly so. (Although they certainly do love parading their "successes" as if to prove to us that, yes, they're doing something.)Ongoingness isn't news. It's something rather wholly different—it becomes the status quo against which "news" emerges, the fabric of situations. News is by definition made of events. Furthermore, the events are treated as discreet units, with the connections between themunderarticulated or not spoken at all. The situations from which these events emerge might be seen in certain kinds of investigative reporting, the kind that most journalists probably would love to engage in, but only very few get to practice—precisely because these patterns are patterns over time,synchronic and sometimes nearly invisible. Not, as news must mostly be, punctual and spectacular. It's not that the news as such is incapable of representing situations, but that ongoing management is so often drowned out by the noisiness of events—Anna Nicole's death, an astronaut in diapers (an unremarkable thought at some point in time in the space program, I'm sure), Terri Schaivo's feeding tube removed, the fall of the Berlin Wall.

GWB insists that history will judge him differently from the news media, and that is surely true. Spin is so powerful not just because it keeps events open; the news media, in its structural bias towards the event, is also susceptible to spin. Spin is the art of the management of the event as it emerges in the media. And insofar as the news is a primary point of America's contact with history, and insofar as it takes the event as its basic object, it is susceptible to spin. Furthermore, it has a structural bias against the ongoing. History, as a series of ongoing processes, and government, as a collection of institutions and quasi-institutions engaged in processes of ongoing management, exist largely in a differenttemporality than the news media's punctual eventfulness.

The Bush administration does get one thing right: it manages events as situations in spin; the news media becomes, for the various public relation apparatuses of government, an object of ongoingmanagement . It seems strange, though, that spin becomes the ongoing management—and ultimately, production—of events. In spin, the multipletemporalities of government, history, the news media, and the event come together in an uneasy "art," which nobody likes. Spin is not-quite-lying, and it is, I think, the particular ways spin keeps events open (to interpretation, to revision, to outright invention) whilereifying them as events—singular, unrepeatable, punctual—that is at the root of this discomfort.

THIS IS WHERE THE AESTHETIC TEXTS get it right over the news. Jarhead posits war as ongoing, not eventful. The event of the film never actually happens. People are always somehow caught in the middle of things, always struggling to cope with a situation. Experientially, this situation has no beginning or end, but merely a middle. 9/11 immediately changed history. By this I mean the obvious, hackneyed meaning. But also: it immediately reconstrued, revised, reinvented a pattern in the past that previously hadn't been there. The 1993 bombing snaps into a different kind of focus—as part of a pattern, no longer a forgettable aberration. Terrorism became the new situation, and we found ourselves caught up in it, already in the middle. Bush & Co. cast this as an event; and in so doing fucked us up and fucked us over. Event after event—accomplished missions, a botched occupation, a series of operations with catchy names, a troop surge—misapprehend the nature of terrorism, and the ways government knows how to respond to it.

Brian Massumi once gave a talk here at the U of C which read Donald Rumsfeld's by now famous epistemological manifesto as radically pragmatist; Rummy starts to appear as a disciple of Deleuze and Guattari. In this light, his weird, comic reading gains a new importance, though at the time it felt utterly masturbatory. It begs the question: can an institution be Deleuzian? The Bush administration needs to put down its copy of A Thousand Plateaus, and start polishing up their Foucault.