November 19, 2001, 2:59 p.m.
From the first part of my MRR review of
The New Intifada: Resisting Israel's Apartheid, edited by Roane
Carey
.
In his essay "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Walter Benjamin
wrote, "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of
emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must
attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.
Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real
state of emergency." When Benjamin urged his cohort of critical leftist
intellectuals to generate a crisis of political contest, he was
responding to the outrages of fascism in the early part of the twentieth
century but also to the violence of what Lauren Berlant calls "hygienic
governmentality." She describes this as, "a ruling bloc's dramatic
attempt to maintain its hegemony by asserting that an abject population
threatens the common good and must be rigorously governed and monitored
by all sectors of society." She continues:
Especially horrifying are the ways the ruling bloc solicits mass
support for such "governing": by using abjected populations as exemplary
of all obstacles to national life; by wielding images and narratives of
a threatened "good life" that a putative "we" have known; by promising
relief from the struggles of the present through a felicitous image of a
national future; and by claiming that, because the stability of the core
image is the foundation of the narratives that characterize an intimate
and secure national society, the nation must at all costs protect this
image of a way of life, even against the happiness of some of its own
citizens.
In the aftermath of September 11, these means of maintaining and disciplining
the US populace are perhaps more obvious (and more entrenched),
but they also reveal that the state of emergency --not this crisis
of America "under attack" but the hegemony of state violence against its
citizens and non-citizens-- has been with us for many years. The apparatuses
of national culture mobilizes the comic-book politics of George W.
Bush to manufacture a set of "core national values" and an "appropriate" response
-- "America Under Attack," "America Strikes Back," "America:
Open For Business." The imagined innocence of US citizens prior
to the attacks and the "American way of life" are cited as victims
in this war, never mind that many have never experienced America as
a land of plenty, or a place of liberty -- and that in this period of
recession, continued racism, and reduced rights, many fewer will. That such
representations --of America, of Arabs and Muslims, of "bravery," of the
nature of democracy-- go unchallenged even as Congress passes
retroactive tax cuts for multinationals, the Bush administration rejects
an International Criminal Court and the Justice Department undermines
the Constitutional rights of citizens is the ongoing crisis. This state
of emergency and these conditions are not an aberration but the
foundation of the U.S. nation-state and its domestic and foreign policy.