There is a strange paradox here between the projects of global exportation of the American way of life and national identification through the negative qualifications of external violence. Both forms of identification would like to take the place of the body, the former through the augmentation (or replacement) of self with artifact and accessory and the latter through the introduction of the wound. And both, too, have as their ultimate aspiration the extension of this body, the reproduction of it. We are engaged in spreading democracy, securing the American way of life for people the world over. At the same time We are also announcing the boundaries of our wounded body, extending to the “Civilized” world an invitation to join us in the experience of pain, and warning our enemies that they will soon meet similar forms of violence. Both forces, Brand America and the We that was attacked, are sent out into the world simultaneously, as if the exchange of goods, the exportation of choice and the mass-produced, were concomitant with an exchange of violence. But an exchange in one direction, an imperialistic exchange whereby goods and military force are exchanged for control over any and all other historical/cultural and economic narratives.
The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of PROFOUNDLY HISTORICAL time, because this is the time of economic production which transforms society continuously and from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remains the principal activity, the cyclical time which remains at the base of society nourishes the coalesced forces of TRADITION which fetter all movement. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates these vestiges on every corner of the globe. History, which until then had seemed to be only the movement of individuals of the ruling class, and thus was the history of events, is now understood as the GENERAL MOVEMENT…Thus the bourgeoisie made known to society and imposed upon it an irreversible historical time, but kept its USE from society. “There was history, but there is no more,” because the class of owners of the economy, which cannot break with ECONOMIC HISTORY, is directly threatened by all other irreversible use of time and must repress it.1
Most often this exchange is negotiated at the international level between organized governments through the univocality of currency. It is up to those governments, in turn, to educate and condition their population to participate in the irreversible, general movement of the American (Western) narrative (or way). In cases of disorganization, de-centralized power, or recalcitrance a given society or culture is initiated through the alternative means of violence, they are, in the parlance of smart bombing, surgically removed so that the rest of the body, the desirable portion, may heal, and may in turn display the wounds it has in common with its attacker.
In the case of Terrorism there is no longer a body to be operated on or destroyed. The enemy, like so many other enemies in American/Western history, has become a concept, one that can accept any number of signifiers, any number of people or movements, as its form. Which is why it is a perfect enemy. Why when one puts together Osama bin-Laden with Terrorism, or exchanges him for Saddam Hussein there is little protest. As forms, relieved of their original historical content, either of these two men can come to represent, signify, Terrorism - in the same way that radical Islam can, or the insurrectionists in present day Iraq, or anyone, for that matter, the Justice Department decides to attach the label to. The details of the attack on 9/11, the nationality of the perpetrators, the involvement of Al Quida in our proxy war with the USSR in Afghanistan during the late seventies and early eighties, the failure of the U.S. intelligence and state departments - their direct dealings with Osama bin-Ladin during the aforementioned proxy war, their issuance of passports to the men who committed the atrocity - and the negligence of the Administration to effectively deal with the threat, can all be elided if they are organized within this broad signification, Terrorism, and then brought, under this conceptual heading, into stark relief with those concepts attached to the Twin Towers (and to a lesser degree the Pentagon – in fact to such a lesser degree, because of its militaristic and imperial connotations, that it has nearly fallen off the national radar whenever September eleventh is discussed), namely those of Prosperity, Progress, American Technological Supremacy, and, by extension, Freedom (which, besides personal liberty, is dedicated to the utopian economic principles of free trade, and infinite increase). This association in turn creates a third order signification, one that further obscures and buries the historical content in the original signifiers (Osama, Al Quida, 9/11, etc.) by relieving the concept Terrorism, as it takes its place in this schema as a signifier itself, as a form, of its historical content, and leaving it to signify the destruction of the concepts embodied in the Twin Towers. Terrorism, in turn, begins to signify an attack on Freedom, an attack on the American way of life.
This same semiological movement simplified Communism, made it into a signifier so remote from its ideological history that, in effect, the teachings of Marx and Engle’s, the populist and labor movements that occurred in this country at the turn of the last century all had to yield to, and even vanish behind, the impenetrable and ahistorical surfaces of the Domino Effect and the Bomb. Like 9/11, Communism was presented to the American public as a millenary struggle, in terms of, no less than, the “End of History”. Of course, with mutually assured destruction, the use of these scare tactics, for both sides, was merely a device of domestic politics. But an effective device nonetheless, and one that has found its re-invention in September Eleventh.
It should be noted that in our current millenary conflict it is no longer History that is in danger of being destroyed, but rather, Civilization. The Battle for Civilization is merely an expression of History’s ultimate and final submission to Capital. History no longer exists, after the fall of the Soviet Empire, except as Economy, and so it would be inappropriate to draw attention to it. Civilization, on the other hand, the taming of the World by Economic History, is an unfinished project. Its announcement may signal Capital’s conquest over History, but it belies the economic necessity of continuing to project an open field, thus charting a space into which the irreversible time of Economic History can still expand.2 There is a connection here between militarism and this Civilizing process, something entailed in our understanding of space, after 9/11, as battlefield. This is perhaps a change that 9/11 did affect, but a change already in the works, one that the attack finally made expressible. And that change is this, 9/11 lifted the finality of Civilization (indefinitely delaying its achievement) by making the landscape of the Civilized, that is, the territory of the U.S. and the entire World, a battlefield in the War on Terror, a zone of combat in, more or less, a never-ending war. With the opposition to Capital, the One World of the New World Order, reduced to fringe elements (and conveniently elements willing to engage in this One World’s two favorite modes of political speech, violence and/or marginality/disappearance) it is necessary to create the illusion of exteriority. This goes back to the “play of the Same” discussed in Part II, footnote 2. This again, this battlefield of expansive, exterior space, into which irreversible time and the movement of Capital can enter and fill without exhaustion, is merely an illusion generated by the One World of Capital. Believing itself the rightful heir to History, its final sovereign, presents a problem for Capital, in that, it must be able to continue building upon its identity, replicating itself toward infinity, transcending, in effect the limitations of space, and more importantly, a space already occupied by itself.
And this is perhaps why both the neo-conservative and neo-liberal movements are unwilling to challenge the idea that the world, after 9/11, has undergone a change. It is a threat to their end game – Capital begins to look like a culprit…
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 98
This is perhaps the same exercise that Western religion engages in when they project the infinite field of heaven. They are simply doing maintenance to the finite, in order that irreversible time has some place to go, some repository that will legitimize and prove its movement.
(Photo of Mosul, Iraq, used for post production, without permission from interweb search, credited to Felipe Dana/ AP file, NBC News, Dec. 28, 2017. Please don’t sue us. Thanks)