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 real 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 apparatus 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 "innocence"
is too often a property of entitlement, or that many have never experienced America
as a land of plenty, or a place of liberty -- and that in this period
of recession, racism, and reduced rights, many fewer will. That such
representations and regulatory practices --of America, of Arabs and Muslims,
of "bravery," of the nature of democracy, of the West and the Rest--
go unchallenged even as Congress passes retroactive tax cuts for
multinationals, the Bush administration rejects an International
Criminal Court and pushes to expand the "war on terrorism" across the
world, and the Justice Department undermines the Constitutional rights
of citizens, is the ongoing crisis.
And while public service messages and politicians' statements urge
"good citizens" to recognize Arab and Muslim neighbors as "fellow
Americans," the daily proposals for new policies to "fight terrorism,"
and the thousand or more individuals being held in an eerie limbo of
anonymity, are themselves exercises in violence. This discourse --of
individual restraint matched by governmental excess-- configures the
role of the state as an avenger, meting out punishment and regulating
liberties on behalf of its populace.
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.
::
Persons who are otherwise perfectly aware of
the non-transparency of "feelings" are insisting that this particular
event demands some sort of transcendent pre- or post-political reaction,
rather than analysis or historical inquiry. But there is certainly
nothing pre- or post-political about the anti-Arab/anti-Muslim violence
or the Bush administration's declaration of war on that vague specter
called "terrorism," that thing that operates so much like "communism"
did only decades ago. Or is it because the Right is mobilizing around
the issue politically (and effectively), the Left is just meant to bask
in the purity of our mourning--? Will this win over the patriots?
Between academic blacklists and high school suspensions, between
newsmedia events splashing "America Strikes Back" across our television
screens and popular culture reproducing endless montages of picket
fences, families, and flags, the national discourse regarding 9-11 in
particular has produced a certain set of organizing images and
importantly a certain kind of ideal citizen. This ideal citizen
-a fantasy in her own right-- is defined by her passive participation in
an imagined democracy. That is, she willingly forfeits her "right" to
participate as a critical citizen in a working democracy for a
sentimental image of community and unity.
A young Asian American woman on a list-serv stated that, "Even though
I am a devout Democrat, I believe that what the nation needs now is
unity in hunting down the killers, and not dissent. I am an
American."
The statement "I am an American" is both affirmation of her
identification with the nation but also an implicit line in the sand, a
move toward exclusion. Clearly those who do not wish to affirm their
American-ness in the same manner are therefore un-American; it is a
"love it or leave it" proposal which leaves little room to critically
participate in the democratic process because somehow, the
democratic process is now understood as itself un-American.
Interestingly and pointedly, another woman on the list asked, "Do you
think that if this attack came from China or Japan, that you would be
allowed to claim America in the same way?"
To this, she had nothing to say.
Such that every sentiment is a social product, patriotisms and
nationalisms are exemplars of this phenomenon as sentimental discourses
of inclusion and exclusion. And I want to know what kinds of inclusions
and exclusions are being enacted in the name of "America."
::
In the months before 9-11 the national
public discourse was obsessed with the "hidden monster," the child gone
terribly wrong, the juvenile offender, the school shooter, the "out of
control" teenager. Forms of popular knowledge about adolescence (and in
some cases pre-adolescence) imagined young men and women as time bombs,
balanced on the precipice of anxious parenting, turbulent social forces
and savage hormones. But in the aftermath of 9-11 we are returned to the
figure of the "innocent child," either as the bright and shining future
of the nation; the nascent citizen-victim to be protected by the mighty
arms of the state; or the unintentionally "wise" commentator whose
innocence is the source of that wisdom ("out of the mouths of babes").
On one critical Sunday morning George W. Bush read the following in
his speech announcing the nighttime attacks on Afghanistan:
I recently received a touching letter that says a lot about the state
of America in these difficult times, a letter from a fourth grade girl
with a father in the military. "As much as I don't want my dad to
fight," she wrote, "I'm willing to give him to you."
This is a precious gift. The greatest she could give. This young girl
knows what America is all about. Since Sept. 11, an entire generation of
young Americans has gained new understanding of the value of freedom and
its cost and duty and its sacrifice.
This anecdote, which concludes his
speech, is quite clear about its message. Bush's (and his
speechwriters') use of a female child to represent "what American is all
about" harnesses a political agenda to the sentimental image of the
infantile citizen. This ideological flourish operates on several levels.
First, it constructs the family as the source of national
strength and reproduces a gendered, heteronormative hierarchy of
"good citizenship." A number of familiar icons constitute ideal types in
this drama of nationalist domesticity: the masculine citizen-soldier,
the patriotic wife and mother, and the properly reproductive family. In
this instance, the female child who gives her daddy to the state is the
model for the wife or mother who gives her husband or son to the state -- as a
feminine citizen this is imagined as the greatest civic duty she can
perform.
Second, this anecdote affirms that the threat to the innocence of
"our" children is located somewhere "out there," in which the enemy is
the Other of the nation-state. Of course, violence of all kinds happens
in the "home" nation -- whether welfare reform or domestic violence,
racial profiling or hate crimes. There are many children in the United
States who are never figured as innocent enough to warrant
protection, and quite a few who are criminalized (according to race and
class) before they even reach adolescence. And admittedly, I wondered if
this "dutiful" fourth-grader (if she's not a figment of a speechwriter's
imagination) might not want her father out of her home, or her life, for
reasons other than patriotism.
Third, this discourse mobilizes the figure of the giving child as the
prepolitical manifestation of political love. That is, while her
willingness to give her daddy to the state is commended as the proper
expression of national duty, this "sacrifice" is simultaneously figured
as non-ideological, as an authentic, emotional instinct rather
than a hegemonic narrative naturalized by the imagined innocence of a
child. This also is a fantasy of the nation as an ahistorical phenomenon
and patriotism as a natural inclination. A child is supposedly the most
"natural" creature (or "lil' citizen") of all, and her sentiments are
imagined to be unadulterated by impurities -- such as politics or a
critical knowledge of U.S. foreign policy.
Fourth, the young girl is understood as a model of proper
citizenship, in which the citizen surrenders power and responsibility to
the state. Because she cannot or will not act on her own
behalf, she designates the state as her proxy and protector. She gives
up her right to participate as a critical citizen in a nominal democracy
(or as a child, having been denied this right) in the name of duty and
sacrifice, allowed agency (noted in her effort to communicate with the
President and to sacrifice her father) only long enough for her to give
it away to the state. This gesture becomes justification for the
suspension of civil liberties, the suppression of dissent, et cetera,
because it can be said that she asked for it.
The story is not incidental -- the young fourth-grader is the subject
through which power is relayed, and a certain sentimental narrative of
national belonging is generated. The appropriate citizen is an infantile
one -- stripped of adult privileges (e.g., civic participation in a
critical democracy) and assigned a passive, dependent role in relation
to the nation-state. Back talk, it is implied, are not to be tolerated.
We are to refuse debate or dissent because Daddy told us
so.
Of course there are "other" children being figured in this imaginary,
and other things to consider -- multiple uses of innocence can operate
in complex and contradictory ways. For instance, U.S. media images of
armed Arab children may mobilize a different set of representations than
George Bush's newly created Fund for Afghan Children (vicious Third
World savages versus primitive Third World victims), but the seeming
incoherence of these two narratives does not fundamentally disrupt the
power to portray an image of "America" as righteous nation and otherwise
render the issue of war responsibility ambiguous.
::
It is this ideal of a naive nationalism that makes it possible for
the New York Times to print color photographs of undulating
flags against clear blue skies, or miniatures clutched in solemn
reflection, above a series of articles about increasing anti-Arab and
anti-Muslim violence. Perhaps it does not occur to the Times that not a few
flag-wavers might be perpetrators of such violence, or that the
mythically imagined ideals and privileges of citizenship encoded into
the U.S. flag have historically functioned as a veil or even a rallying
cry for exclusion, and that for some readers this lay-out and its
juxtapositions might feel threatening, or horrific, or ironic. And when
this is acknowledged, the violence is not necessarily understood as a
directed expression of patriotism (produced by both institutions and
ideologies), but a sort of instinctual, individual reaction to national
trauma.
An article about some Euroamerican citizens arming themselves in the
aftermath includes statements such as this from a Mr. Phil Beckwith, "I
know just what to do with these Arab people. We have to find them, kill
them, wrap them in a pigskin and bury them. That way they will never go
to heaven."
This elaborate homicidal fantasy is not figured as a racist or
indeed, a terrorizing sentiment, even while appearing above a photograph
of a Yemeni American storeowner's shot-up shop window. Instead
Beckwith's violent sentiments are portrayed as pre-political and
non-ideological. His statement is narrowly understood as an expression
of his pain, his suffering on behalf of the nation, which is somehow
more "truthful" because he is infantalized by this discourse of naïve
nationalism as emotionally raw and politically innocent in his loving,
patriotic identification.
This ideal of the infantile citizen is a political subject created
from the suppression of critical knowledge about U.S. foreign policies,
but also from the production of certain kinds of knowledge
about patriotism and political love.
::
The limits of sentimental citizenship are clear -- what qualifies a
person as a citizen is not her ability to act in the public
sphere as a critical participant in the democratic process. Instead her
duty is located in her ability to emit certain patriotic feelings
(and of course, to shop) as the proper expression of national
collectivity. These feelings are heralded as a citizenry's best effort
to "heal the nation," and are both generated and regulated by a national
apparatus of discourses, institutions, organizations, laws,
administrative measures, celebrity statements, et cetera. It is
forcefully suggested that to feel differently is to "let the terrorists win."
The limits of such sentimental and therapeutic discourses for
political dialogue are firmly in place. A recent news program featured
angry e-mail messages from viewers suggesting that politicians who are
concerned about disappearing civil liberties would "feel differently" if
they had lost family and friends in 9-11, and that voicing such concerns
is an "invalidation" and a "betrayal" of those who died in the attacks.
Those who lost their loved ones also in the World Trade Center and
Pentagon but have publicly denounced the war in Afghanistan waged in the
names of their dead are treated as incidental, delusional, or otherwise
bearing all sorts of "unnatural" or "impure" political feelings.
Such discourses leave other analytical, historical, and critical
frameworks unexplored, and obscures the complex nexus of history and
geopolitics that has brought about these events. I want to challenge the
suggestion that raising the question of U.S. foreign policy in relation
to 9-11 and its aftermath somehow signals unrealistic, callous or
abstract leftist dogmatism. For those of us with links, ties, and/or
roots in parts of the world that have been effected by US/NATO foreign
policy in the form of military violence, the desire to interrogate the
historical and ideological conditions of US policy is hardly
intellectual detachment or "unfeeling" inquiry.
I walked into the lecture hall as the earlier class trickled away, or
orbited the professor at her desk. I put my books down on a chair while
a young white woman made an ugly face and bitterly complained to a
fellow classmate, "I know there are people here who hate America, so why
don't they go home?!"
And I suppose it never dawned on her that some of us are here
because you were there, and I wonder how many more dispossessed --
because of war, because of terror-- will arrive on America's shores
after the rains (of bullets, of bombs) wash away their sense of place,
history, and home.
And some of us knew, in any case, that home -- or America-- can also be
a space of danger.
::
There is so much more I could have said, but let this be a start.
I have been encouraged by the wealth and depth of critical
debate circulating in the various spheres of my life -- academic, punk rock, et
cetera. Thanks go to the following: the women who published the
Transnational Feminist Practices Against War statement (Paola Bacchetta,
Tina Campt, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Minoo Moallem, and Jennifer
Terry) and the others who belong to Professors for Peace; Scott Soriano
for his intelligent and detailed columns in Maximumrocknroll;
Craig Willse from makezine.org for our on-line discussions;
Derrick Cameron for sending me the cheery editorials from the UK
Guardian; J. Pearson for sharing with me his wonderful thesis on
9-11, patriotism and consumption; and Rachel Szego for her essay "Toward
Compassion." And of course Lauren Berlant, whose Queen of America
Goes to Washington City
taught me so much about sentimental citizenship.