Having just observed an election that reported a two to three percent margin of victory for the incumbent President we find it difficult, to say the least, to accept the conciliatory tone in which his re-election has been acknowledged. It’s no surprise to us that the unity promised, both by the President during his first campaign, and by the bumper stickers and media outlets after the attack, failed to materialize in the election results, but manifested itself instead in the further polarization of the bipartisan system. Up to this point we were beginning to see a trend toward political diversification, a fracturing of the old party line and a struggle for third and fourth parties to significantly enter the political discourse. To democracy in general, or at least brands that uphold the logic of cultural and historical reality, the emergence of these diverse voices could only have been seen as a positive, something vital for this country’s democratic survival. To reactionary forces, to a fascist1 duopoly, these remedial movements toward diversity are perceived instead as threats, something to be warned against and attacked in a daily and hourly package of scapegoating and defamation.
Both dominant parties gained a certain amount of political capital from the attack, first by rallying around a centrist position, raising up the President and the spirit of bipartisan politics to reassure the public and return them to a manageable state of panic, and then by reestablishing their charade of mutually exclusive platforms so as to galvanize their respective bases and dissuade them from switching allegiances or jumping ship to some “rogue” party. Regardless of the intention behind it, 9/11 certainly worked out well for the Democrats and Republicans, though of course some argument can be made as to which exactly faired better and handled the outcome more adeptly. Regardless of the score keeping what they both agreed upon in the end was that a simplified dialogue was much safer and that it was best to stick to a language that re-enforced the idea that it is dangerous to experiment with the current system. Now, the fact that one party is being accused of the conspicuous use of scare tactics, while the other is holding itself up as a defender against them is in our estimation completely immaterial. Both parties, in order to hold their relative positions of power have tacitly agreed in advance to participate in an identical narrative. Whether it be the Red Scare of the fifties, the Drug War, or Terrorism the instances of conflicting points of view are still circumscribed by this overall system of representation, and therefore, while they may appear to disagree, they remain interior, simply a part of one single identity.2
Americans should be used to the kind of millenary statements that abounded shortly after the attack (and continue to abound), they should recognize too that the historical narrative they have been presented as signifying their national heritage and identity has always taken the form of some phase of crisis. Pre and post September eleventh, therefore, are nearly indecipherable in this context. They reach the social consciousness, are projected as being radically different, through a confusion of extratextual and intratextual temporalities. The narrator, in this case, the media and government (primarily the Administration, but with echoes from the House and Judicial branches), relies upon historical abbreviation in order to assume a command over a text too vast and complicated to represent all-at-once. The extratextual analysis, that is the time it took for the particular vision of the world and history to undergo this process of narrative cohesion (compression), to form the story, the system of abbreviations the narrator communicates through, is elided in favor of a more convenient and seductive omniscient posture. The idea is to keep the audience within the boundaries of the narrative, keep them confined to intratextual time.3 This in turn increases control over how the message of the narrative is received, and greatly diminishes the possibility that the manipulation of that message will ever be discovered.
Speed is essential to this program of elision and re-definition.4 Signifiers have to keep moving so that the shorthand of political and economic speech will remain palatable to a public perpetually grown bored to the point of distraction. But distraction that is, of course, a welcome side effect. It is the lubricating element in a system of self-referential signs, signs whose continued disfigurement and poverty no longer register on any kind of scale of awareness. Their meanings become interchangeable, hyperreal, completely detached from all but their own self-referential system. And the American consumer of news and mass-produced goods never sees that the narrative around which they have organized their lives can no longer have any “real” relationship to meaning and content outside of the narrative itself. Questions like, why did 9/11 happen, why has some product been produced, say a plastic yard decoration, or an adjustable flagpole holder, cease to have any value in the realm of inquiry because they have lost their ability to probe beyond this circumscription. Sources outside the narrative that might attempt to comment on them are immediately discredited once they are brought inside its boundaries, their authority dismissed because of their lack of context and their blatant imposition upon the hierarchy of socially organized signs. As for sources inside the narrative, they are no longer accessible, being both the products of technology (mediation) and politics they have been reduced to unaccountable surfaces, an invisible and simultaneously proactive generality, a they that is both an unavoidable part of the modern grammar of political and media apparatuses, and a device with which all assaults (conspiratorial or otherwise) on the explication of this narrative and its etiology are repelled.5
It is important to note that up until 1984 (an auspicious date to say the least) the American Heritage Dictionary defined the word fascism as a political system and philosophy in which the government espoused and forwarded the interests of corporate cronies under the guise that they were in fact the national interests. Generally speaking some kind of national mythology (distributed through various brands of propaganda) was put in place to accomplish this deception; mythology not unlike the thousand year Reich, or the New American Century (a resurrection of the old Manifest Destiny that carried the country through its first wave of hegemonic violence). The semantic degradation necessarily required for these Orwellian campaigns to be successful should be fairly obvious. What we are interested in here is not that these campaigns persist, but that part and parcel to their propagation is this process of revision and elision whereby the language changes to fit some implicit political/economic (nationalistic) agenda. The idea that fascism can not exist in a democracy is simply a matter of how one defines and understands the word. Changing fascism’s overall shape to fit some historical conception of Nazi Germany makes it more difficult to apply to the context of the American political system, but it does not rule out its influence over how this government operates, nor how this country’s citizens are taught to view themselves as a nation.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 93
The ego is the same. The alterity or negativity interior to the ego, the interior difference, is but an appearance: an illusion, a “play of the Same,” the “mode of identification” of an ego whose essential moments are called body, possession, home, economy, etc… But this play of the same is not monotonous, is not repeated as monologue and formal tautology. As the work of identification and the concrete production of egoity, it entails a certain negativity. A finite negativity, an internal and relative modification through which the ego affects itself by itself, within its own movement of identification. Thus it alters itself toward itself within itself.
Now, of course we realize that this begs the question, can the government, in its current form, be conceived using the language of psychology. Clearly it is a sprawling, abstract entity, a man-made invention that is as difficult to grasp as it is to administer effectively. However, since it is laid out roughly as though it were a human body, complete with its bureaucratic limbs, ideological core, and central brain trust, we can only assume that there is an analogy to be exploited here. What is a democratic government if not a super-organism; a mass man? And how else should its brain be designed and described if not through the prism of macro-psychology. Sure, one could argue that the government’s operation is a sociological phenomenon, but as our current understanding of its behavior is framed, we are not directed so much to the interplay of the individuals comprising the whole, but to the overall performance, as if the government were a sentient, self-reliant entity, a kind of abstract individual. One that, we believe, seeks ultimately to re-enforce its identity as a representative body, and thus is confined to mimicking the psychological drama of the average ego-conscience in its day-to-day attempt to define self, to set its identity.
Susan Stewart, On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, p. 10
With these complex disjunctions between different experiences of temporality, the narrative voice and, consequently, the time of the narration reach for transcendence…The omniscient narrator works to disguise the temporality of his or her own voice, to assume an all-at-onceness and all-knowingness that is seductive to the reader, for that position of omniscience presumably will be available to the reader once he or she reaches the novel’s closure.
This is a strategy of media news coverage, certainly one could argue that a temporality unfolds in the Breaking news, Update format, but now with 24-hour coverage and the news crawler a continual sense of spontaneous omniscience can be evoked. Sources, the extraneous senses, the intimate feelers of the organization are assumed to be out there collecting information in a field no longer subject to the time and space of normal experience. The information just appears on the screen, detached from its historical origins, made a brand of divination as much as journalism, its sources secret or remote, unintelligible to an audience still awaiting narrative closure and their promised participation – This too is how the Administration presents itself in intelligence briefings, the temporality of collection, investigation and apprehension is completely kept secret, giving them, like in the case of WMD’s in Iraq, the appearance of infallible omniscience. The reader of the pre-emptive war narrative was limited to this compression of information, seduced into thinking that the President and his cabinet were projecting the kernel of some mythic perception handed secretly to them by this nation’s intelligence agencies (and in the current President’s case, by God Himself). A great many of the American people trusted this narrative, forgetting other, competing historical narratives that outlined the past eleven years of sanctions, UN weapons inspections and declining Iraqi military strength, because they believed that at the closure of the military campaign, Operation Iraqi Freedom, they would become privy to, and come in contact with this “position of omniscience” that the Administration had been guaranteeing them.
Karl Capek, The Insect Play (And so on ad infinitum), Act III
Chief engineer of the Ants: The master of Time will be master of all! …Speed is the master of Time.
Second engineer: The taming of time-
Chief engineer: He who commands speed will rule over time.
Stewart, Ibid. p. 8
The product of technology is not a function of a mutual context of making and use. It works to make invisible the labor that produced it, to appear as its own object, and thus to be self-perpetuating. Both the electric toaster and Finnegans Wake turn their makers into absent and invisible fictions.
The makers of news, of products and law have subjected themselves to the systems and apparatuses of media programming, corporate and governmental hierarchy. They have organized their activity in a way that is mechanical and therefore anonymous, wholly at the mercy of the self-perpetuating movement of information technology, capitalism and geo-politics. The they that the public would seek to hold accountable in instances of misinformation, environmental degradation, corruption and conspiracy turns out to be the very thing that is unknowable, which cannot be grasped unless it is in the act of committing oneself to what the system would deem psychosis. It is by means of this they that the public, the investigator, the social critic is turned into a weapon of self-destruction.