For 6 weeks in early 1991, Iraq was bombed by the US. For those in the US, this could only be, first and foremost, a media event that was (with rare exceptions) strangely devoid of political debate -- and also devoid of the war stories that would have fueled it, since there was no "front." Indeed, the media managed to render itself the war story, the media event. This was accomplished by insulating, disguising, and distancing the (already distant) bombing, displacing it through amplification of marginal details (e.g. Tel Aviv scenes, missile technologies, and families-of-servicemen interviews), and masking it through censorship. The bombing of Iraq remained an ellipsis, a background to military reportage which often had the aura of promotional hype at a global military trade fair.
Yet the bombing evinced a ferocity unparalleled in modern times. The tonnage of explosive dropped was the equivalent of seven Hiroshima-size bombs. In spite of the censorship, it should have become obvious, because of the number of sorties routinely reported per day, the tonnage of ordnance dropped, the arbitrarity of targets, the fact of carpet bombing, and the US government's repudiation of diplomatic possibilities, that something was wrong. And strangely, the effect was that vocal opposition became numb, a yellow ribbon ("support our troops") movement emerged that shut off rather than opened debate, and many supporters of the bombing welcomed the censorship, some even calling for more. Media promotion, self-censorship, and resignational silence are not the usual concomitants to crisis events -- and especially not in the wake of the massive protests that initially opposed the bombing; there was, however, something very familiar about them.
When the anomalous appears familiar, it suggests that some
fundamental structure, central to the way a society thinks, is
unfolding. What this structure might be is the focus of this chapter.
It would have been comforting if certain central motifs in the
journalistic and presidential text of this bombing had simply been
contradictory, and familiar as such. But the motifs of the bombing
seemed to escape that level of banality, revealing a more secret,
disquieting sense of technical evil, or destiny. The question I want to
ask is not only what made support for this bombing possible, but what
made it permissible; however anomalous, what gave it its ethical
propriety? What I will be analysing here is the structure of that
permissibility at the level of social conceptualization within the US,
in order to US that structure for paradigmatic analysis of the global
political economy that saw this bombing as necessary. In the local
context of this chapter, I will examine (1) the use of the name "Saddam
Hussein", 2) the slogan that it is "our" "job" to stop Hussein; and 3)
what it might signify (discursively, rather than politically) that he
remained in power after the proclamation of victory.
The Problem
There are at least three levels of nested contradictions in the public text of this bombing. The first, at the extant political level, is the contradiction between the US's stated intentions and its military practice. The second is between that contradiction and the political arbitrarity of US policy, its absence of principle, its endless and empty explanation, entitled "The Gulf War."[1] And the third is between that second contradiction and a noisy endorsement of it that clamored for greater silence. This last contains the question of the bombing's permissibility for this society.
Let us look at these in order. We do not have to specify how many people died, though it is in the hundreds of thousands.[2] It was known from the beginning that the US was carpet bombing Iraq, to an extent that, over the 6 weeks, could not fail to decimate Iraq's culture and social infrastructure. Major cities and towns were destroyed. It has since been revealed that, when ground operations started, Iraqi soldiers in trenches were simply bulldozed, buried alive, apparently including many who sought to surrender.[3] A machine was unleashed on a people (with whom the US had "no conflict") that has condemned that people to famine, disease, and to extended physical, social, and emotional dislocation. The political contradictions are obvious. If Hussein, whose name bore the brunt of US government reproaches, had offended the world, why was the populace, which does not make military policy, to pay? If Hussein was a dictator, as his constant vilification suggested, not only are those held in his thrall not helped by being killed, but he is strengthened by their decimation. One cannot become a liberatory force through mass murder. There is no way to tone down this notion. This was obvious during the bombing; yet its supporters, by the very existence of their support, signified that it had to be done.
Second, it is not simply a question of Hussein's regime, or Kuwaiti sovereignty, as stated by the government. Hussein was a run-of-the-mill dictator, the kind the US State Department has always been adept at manipulating. And as with Latin American caudillos, the US could have dealt diplomatically with Hussein, having previously armed and supported him against Iran, as a way of readjusting the Middle East balance of power.[4] Similarly, Kuwaiti sovereignty could not have been the issue. The US has often ignored or negated national sovereignty, as in Guatemala, Grenada, or Panama; Israel, moreover, remains undisturbed for having occupied Gaza and the West Bank. And finally, no principle has been suggested for preferring one dictator (the Kuwaiti emir) over another (Hussein) in Kuwait.
In effect, US retaliation for Kuwait must have been founded on different (unstated, unrevealed) grounds. And if we are to understand the structure of what stands on the unrevealed, then we must carefully disclose them. What has been revealed is that Kuwait had promulgated policies inimical to Iraqi interests.[5] For the US to tell Iraq that it had no stake in how Iraq settled its differences with Kuwait (given a certain level of economic complicity in Kuwait's policies), and then to launch this ferocious attack, could be interpreted as a massive "sting" operation against Iraq. But then, the thought that the US had to "stop Hussein" becomes unintelligible, appearing both arbitrary, and a conceit. Yet a popular enthusiasm was generated, seemingly by means of this very unintelligibility. If the first contradiction makes the bombing appear criminal,[6] the second leaves us no way of articulating what has happened.
The third contradiction is between the conceptual silence represented by the second contradiction, and the popular support for the bombing. The conceptual silence was enhanced by a real silence: this consisted both of an imposed official censorship, and an unofficial blackout of oppositional events in the news. For the mainstream media and the nation's political leadership not to resist censorship is tantamount to accepting autocratic rule. Again, sections of the "yellow ribbon" support movement at times actually called for more censorship of news than that already in effect.[7] Of course, what got (and gets) silenced is precisely what needed (and needs) to be discussed politically. In particular, the questions of whose oil, whose land, whose blood, and whose interests were being arrogated, remained undebated in the public/media sphere once the bombing commenced. The implication is that support for the bombing embraced an absence of sense or rationale; it posited a residence in silence for itself as both a condition of support and as a granting of permissibility. This aspect of the situation raises the central question of this analysis. What, in our socio-cultural-political thinking, made this possible?
There are standard terms, such as patriotism, nationalism, political apathy, racism, or militarism, that have traditionally been used to explain such situations, and they were used by the left and the right to explain different rationales or responses to the bombing; but this time they are inadequate. If such terms are used by humanists to explain the inhuman or the politically criminal (or by patriots or racists to name a higher good for themselves than humanism or humane order), we still have to explain why it is that these terms constitute "traditional explanations," or why they are relevant. As explanations, they name political positions, rather than the group identities from which they arise within a tradition (as, for instance, Chicano nationalism, or the racism of white opposition to it). As traditions, they are what generate issues, rather than manifest political positions within and subsequent to the issues generated. It is their appearance in the bombing/text of Iraq that requires explanation. I will suggest certain aspects of this as I proceed.
On three levels -- censorship, unintelligibility, and residence in silence -- information was rejected. Two questions present themselves. The first is, what did constitute political information (the substance of debate that quelled debate) in this situation? And second, what does it mean that information was actively rejected? What was the threat involved?
To address these questions, let me shift the discourse to the metaphor structure used by the government, and hence by the media. The strikes against Iraq were called "surgical." And in the hiatus between surgical naming and the actuality of carpet bombing, it was the name that stuck (through use). It is the nature of the media that their terms become the language of event, and thus of actuality. We see this in the faddish idioms and tones of voice that are adopted from TV programs, and sweep the country. And though much of media imagery concerned machinery and technology, its mode of presentation often employed a medical metaphor. It was in this vein that Pres. Bush proclaimed the end of the Vietnam syndrome as if it were a disease from which the nation needed to recover. And we can extend this metaphor to other aspects of the situation. Surgical or not, the operation was anti-septic. Pilots bombed from miles high, encountering less than token resistance. The infantry walked into Iraq and Kuwait and merely bulldozed, burned, or dynamited the trenches and bunkers full of the military dead (and living). In a sense, almost no one got there hands dirty.
Popular response accorded with our medical ideology. That is, it was
crisis oriented, coming into existence as vocal movements in response
to the bombing as accomplished fact (though opposition to the movement
of troops to Saudi Arabia had already been building when the bombing
started), as our medicine reacts to crisis rather than engage in
preventive practices.[8] Neither the peace movement
nor the
war supporters really participated politically. If the opposition was
ignored, or blacked out, the bombing's supporters relinquished their
autonomy from the very beginning -- they were presented with a fait
accompli, whose unfolding did not involve them (I will return to this
point). Thus, neither movement got its hands dirty either. Both sides
called for morally rescuing the society they live in, as a kind of
cleansing operation. "No blood for oil" is a moral injunction; "stop
Hussein" is a call to a crusade.[9]
The Text of the Bombing
What constituted information in this context? In the absence of knowledge about the extremely complicated and multiply complicitous situation that surrounded the attack on Kuwait, the name "Saddam Hussein" became information. It is not simply that he was demonized, or vilified; the exorbitant use of the name transformed it into a symbol, at once metonymic and self-referential. Each mention of the name "Saddam Hussein" by Bush, or other government leaders, or by the media, became another instance of horror, autarchy, aggression, or megalomania. There was no necessity for concrete particulars, stories, or details, nor for participation by a real person; the name's mention was sufficient to signify that an event had occurred, whose evil essence went without saying. What was not recounted found narrative enough in the name.
Thus, each use of the name "Saddam Hussein" became the production of an entire text. And as mention accumulated, each event left unrecounted, because there was no need to say it, transformed itself into the event of repeating the name itself, by anybody. The crimes of "Saddam Hussein" multiplied through reiteration of the name whose mention constituted those crimes. The name made reference to itself, as its meaning, and that meaning contained essentially the event of making reference to the name. The actually of Hussein's thought or comportment became irrelevant, since the name was no longer his. In this sense, the invasion of Kuwait came to be seen through the name, and thus not seen at all, as opposed to seeing the name (and the head of the Iraqi state whose name it was) through the invasion.
There is an underlying structure here that is more than the collapse of information into a name. As a mode of self-referentiality, it is a substitution of the name for reference which becomes generative of information without being informative. The content of the information is contained in the use of the name, in the fact of its presentation, rather than its content. If that information is designed to explain a situation, it leaves the situation unexplained, while maintaining its character, or form, as explanatory. It becomes the means whereby the event it explains is known, though that knowledge is at once cause and effect, generation and situation generated. Such self-referential and self-generative explanations are not speech acts, because they constitute a discursive structure rather than an utterance. They are not self-fulfilling prophecies because they have an immediacy, rather than a prior existence, to the situation explained. And they leave the situation unexplained, while self-referentially pretending to make sense.
This discursive structure is familiar. It is the structure of the derogatory term. A derogatory term is nothing but a name that does not refer to the other, but becomes, in its self-referentiality, a totality of information about the other. It cannot be given a meaning other than its use, while in its use, it presents itself as explaining the other. To make derogatory racial reference to someone, for instance, is to enact an event whose only meaning is given by the use of the derogatory term. Its use is an act (of denigration, of disparagement), an assault rather than a statement; and the meaning of the term comes into being only by being used in perpetrating such an event. It is circular and hermetic.
Racism and sexism not only use derogatory terms, they are structurally constituted in an analogous manner from beginning to end. In the case of racism, the arbitrary use of a continuous biological character spectrum (skin shade) to differentiate a hierarchy of discontinuous human groups transforms that spectrum itself into the explanation of the system of domination it is used to create. The explanation of what is noticed (a difference in skin color, for instance), which is what was invented to be noticed, is all that exists to create something to notice in the first place.
In a similar way, the name "Saddam Hussein" became a derogatory term. It ceased to mean the person, and came to represent the Iraqi nation. No longer an individual, yet the central figure of myriad narratives (un)told through mere mention of the name, "Saddam Hussein" became Iraq, and the people known as Iraqis became digits in the enumeration of incidents reported without detail through repeated mention of the name. To bomb them, meaning to bomb it (the name), was only to undo, to erase the reiterated name. This is what the Air Force did in decimating the Iraqi population. If the name had already erased the Iraqi people, the Iraqi people became the means of erasing the name by being themselves expunged -- Iraqi individuals literalized, in their ob-literated persons, the uncountable informations named in the uncounted uses of the name "Saddam Hussein". When children died on the streets of Basra under B-52 bombing runs, they already didn't exist. And each and every Iraqi was also a military target because the name they transliterated contained the "collateral" information "commander-in-chief."
When the ceasefire order was given, the name "Saddam Hussein" stopped appearing in the media, and the war was over. If the (carpet) bombing was surgical, the cessation (of mention of the name) constituted the end of the surgery; there was nothing further to remove. The tumor, tissue, or organ to be removed was engendered as such by the decision itself to bomb. This is what it meant to "stop Hussein." "Stopping Hussein" did not mean halting the actions of a government the US had earlier aided and abetted (against Iran); it meant turning off the presentation of what was done by this name. "Stopping Hussein," as a campaign, was successful as soon as the media and government decided to stop mentioning the name. And that is why it remains essentially unquestioned, after such a ferocious attack, that he continues in power. If the goal was to "stop" (mentioning) Hussein, he had to be left alive, and in power, to be stopped.
After the bombing, the name having ceased to be information, it became again a name, and was given back to the man. But not until after it had been used to produce a certain activity whose ethics would have been unexplainable without it. We might add that it is in this context that Peter Arnett, on CNN, was labelled a traitor by some supporters of the bombing; by interviewing the head of Iraq during the bombing, he erased the information constructed for the name by returning the name to the individual whose name it was.
In the bombing/text of Iraq, we are beyond the level of the derogatory term, however. What we confront is a situation or event (or confluence of events) in a political landscape for which a political explanation functions as inherent to the event, generating it in the process of explaining it. It is a simulacrum, a representation (as explanation) of a process whose presentation (what is represented) is that explanation itself. This is self-referential on two levels: first, that the event is internal to the text that describes it and refers to it, and exists for the sake of that reference; and second, that the text, by engendering its referent, becomes its own referent by means of the event. The event becomes only a socio-political manifestation of that textual reference to itself. It is a politics structured in the form of the derogatory term.
This structure is not simply specific to the bombing/text of Iraq; it is, in fact, quite common. For example, the Arms Race: this was a politico-technical cycle in which new weaponry on one side (e.g. the A-bomb) required the other to match it (which the USSR did), which in turn was interpreted by the first side as a threat, rationalizing further development of new weaponry. A similar pattern characterized US relations with Nicaragua; armed attacks, covert actions, and economic blockades led the Nicaraguans to purchase weapons from Russia for their defense, which the US sought to use as an excuse for an invasion. Self-defense is made derogatory. Thirdly, if the US economy has been basically converted to military production (50% of all US production is now related to the military -- a form of one-crop economy -- and a factor in the transformation of the US from a creditor to a debtor nation), it is the military, and its dominating industrial base, that has driven this situation, using itself as its explanation. Finally, the opinion polls operate in this fashion, reducing issues to purely formal notions (support, agreement, satisfaction, etc.), thereby removing people with real ideas from the scene of politics by rendering them abstract formal groups, and then substituting this media activity for them. The polls thus cancel group political opinion by creating opinion that belongs to non-existent (because abstract) groups. They represent by engendering what they claim to represent, and they bring about political disrepresentation by having already been a disrepresentation. If the polls address a passive mass of opinion, by pretending that the passive mass of opinion is active, while presenting it as only a mass of opinion, they render it more passive than ever. In effect, they produce a cancellation of the political by explaining themselves as already an expression of the political.
What is exemplified here is more than self-justification; its core is the way self-referentiality becomes generative. But in addition, there is a motif of destruction, whether of life, of selfhood (racism), or of political representation; what it both reveals and (for most) hides is the pretense that realms of social destruction have a justification at all, or rationales other than themselves.[10]
A term that tropes this involuted inversion, representing as a positivity what has no substance (still within the medical metaphor), is the term "gangrene." We might name the structure which functions interiorly to the bombing/text of Iraq: socio-gangrene. Gangrene itself is the mass death of cells or tissue in a living organism, brought on by isolation of an area from blood supply, usually through the mass death of cells; cellular death both generates, and is produced by the spread of the situation known as (i.e. named) gangrene. That is, cellular death both engenders, and represents, a situation of cellular death. As a structure of political discourse, socio-gangrene reveals a similar hermeticism, self-referentiality, and circularity. Where the context is a form of internal isolation (such as military secrecy, executive discretion, white racist self-righteousness), then the condition of socio-gangrene could be said to constitute a kind of death of language (a process already noted in many quarters as the euphemization of political discourse).[11]
In this respect, another aspect of opinion polls should be noted.
Prior to the bombing, the polls claimed that the majority opposed a
military solution to the Kuwait situation, and favored sanctions and
diplomacy (assuming, or arrogating, nevertheless, the right to
intervene, even on a diplomatic level). The government evidently
ignored them. In so doing, it transformed the polls from what
represented opinion to the government, into something which represented
opinion to the people themselves. The polls function to inform us who
we are (rather than tell the government). But they thus foist on us an
often unrecognizable portrait, a reconstructed and abstracted identity.
There is always an element of angst, an anxiety, accompanying the
reading of poll results, which reflects this displacement of identity.
While the polls empty information of its content, they at the same time
present themselves as information that empties identity of its being;
either one rejects them as information in order to presenve one's
identity, or one trades identity for those poll results one finds
self-affirming, or to one's taste -- or both. Those who supported the
war, rather than be represented by the government, were disrepresented
by the polls, and became the political representation of the government
instead. And yellow ribbons and flags came to symbolize this inverted
representation. In this inversion, as a cancellation of politics, and
an emptying of identity, the polls function as an extant form of
gangrene.
The desire not to know
However, if this sense of angst provides a psychological insight into a primordial level of rejection of information, it does not distinguish between supporters and opponents of the bombing. The latter clamored against censorship and the blackout of their movement; the former in general embraced it. Where does the desire not to know come from? For those supporters who hailed the technological destruction inflicted on Iraq, one might ask why they would want it kept a secret, unless they knew that general awareness of the carnage would only generate opposition. In such a case, we confront abstract evil itself, wearing a human face. They admit they have no intelligible argument or rationale to give others about this self-referential destruction, but see no other place to inhabit than this gangrenous one. On the other hand, for those supporters who knew intuitively what the consequences of this bombing were, and only sought to hide this (as an unfaceable horror) from themselves, we would ask: what were they really supporting? To an extent, the discourses of nationalism, or of reverence for the president as the avatar of a sacred space of power, or of racism, could be conscripted to name what they were supporting. But then, of what is it that these discourses provide an articulation?
Let us turn the picture around, and ask not what is affirmed by censorship, but what is denied by its absence. A rejection of information bespeaks a certain fear. Not fear for one's life or health, or standard of living, but fear of a certain contamination. What would be sullied, or corrupted, by the information rejected? How is one to be contaminated by information?
When a woman is raped, many men want to know the details so that the spectral space between prurience and outrage can be filled to the brim. Such information is not feared. When a child is killed in traffic, the range of those who want to know is greatly extended, so the space of caution can be replenished. These plenitudes, for good or ill, are valued. Information always fills a space with something. If it threatens or pollutes when it fills a space, it is the nature of that space we must understand.
Let us look at the fact of carpet bombing (confirmed by the Pentagon from the first day of operations against Iraq).[12] To understand carpet bombing as an anti-population tactic is to recognize that carpet bombing cannot be discussed in surgical terms. To understand it as anti-population disrupts the curative idea. On the other hand, to call it surgical does not change its blanketing nature. Regardless of whether one feels joy or horror at it, at its name or its nature, it is the name which functions descriptively. The call for more censorship is not a call to further suppress reports of the bombing's effects on Basra, for instance, but to stop calling it carpet bombing altogether; similarly, it is a call to not report the effect of napalm by not naming napalm as a deployed weapon at all. To name these weapons is to disrupt the ability to reside within the medical metaphor.
In other words, to call the operation surgical, to relate the event in this way to medicine, becomes a moment in a particular informing of the event. To relate it to curing, to healing and health, renders it a purifying gesture, a generosity toward the world. (During the bombing, a Norwegian legislator nominated Bush for a Nobel Peace Prize, to show his appreciation or gratitude.) The destruction of countless Iraqis becomes the mode of purifying the name "Saddam Hussein," of cleansing it of the instances of crime and violation it functioned to narrate, and to become -- each Iraqi killed was a cleansing of the polluting event committed each time the name "Saddam Hussein" had been uttered. If there is a catharsis associated with this, it is incidental. What is central is that we are nurses, carefully cleaning a wound in the world. We cannot be nurses if carpet bombing and napalm cannot be, in some sense, surgical.
Thus, to imply criminality (mass murder, e.g. as a violation of the Geneva Accords of 1948 against bombing civilian populations) is to switch discourses. To move to a juridical discourse invokes wholly different information: the commandments, for instance, or the severity of judges, the sacredness of life, the sorrow of injured or orphaned children, the hunger of those whose lives, food and friends, have burned; there are victims who must be avenged. In the medical model, where one loses a life only because one doesn't know enough, each death is a failure of a good intention. Each success, like the return of Kuwait to the emir, is a restoration of life. If something happens that looks like death, it is a mistake. To name differently is to inform differently. The juridical model calls the hospital uniform in question. The assumption that there is a uniform, a lab coat perhaps, is corrupted -- even if that lab coat is olive drab, or jungle camoflage.
If assumption is what is corrupted by information, then assumption in some sense constitutes purity. Purity attaches to the assumption, as a metaphor structure, which informs, in the sense of purveying information. To preserve that purity is to substitute the metaphor structure for the information it purveys, the coding of significations for the significations coded. In essence, that substitution is itself a purification procedure. The purification of assumption produces a purity that is already self-referential, i.e. assumed. The space that information threatens to corrupt is a space engaged in self-purification, a space that denies its own plenitude -- with a denial that marks the absence of rationale. In such a space, information pollutes by merely denying that denial, countermanding that absence, countermanding an assumption as a decision not to know.
This space imposes an imperative; its hermeticism must be accepted,
and lived in, because the world is transformed into an inside and an
outside. That is, the creation of this space means that residence in it
becomes inescapable. It is like the puritans who arrived in the New
World; they found virgin territory, meaning there was "no one else
there." In making such an assumption, they excluded those (indigenous)
others who had previously named and informed that world -- an essential
aspect of assuming residence. Assuming residence meant, for the
puritans, substituting a residence in assumption for that world, and
rendering what (who) informed it absent. Residence in assumption is a
form of conceptually assuming residence. It means to occupy a
conceptual territory, to fortify it against changes of name, to call it
"home" perhaps, to render it "virgin" territory by assuming it. It is
that for which assumption is purified. To assume residence is to reside
in those assumptions and to shun the corruption of information. Herein
lies the power of the derogatory term; it hermetically assumes itself
as information, and thrusts all information away, to a distant
elsewhere, in the name of residence in that assumption.
Purity and thought
Mary Douglas, in her book Purity and Danger,[13] relates purity and pollution in a way that is relevant here. Douglas examines a broad spectrum of anthropological studies of tribal and archaic religions. She attempts to show how "rituals of purity and impurity create unity in experience." (13) That is, purity and corruption constitute a mythos that names the boundary between order and chaos, power and lawlessness.
Power and danger configure themselves with respect to this boundary in terms of center and margin. In Douglas' account, "danger lies in transition states," those states that constitute boundaries. (116) To be at the margin, then, in transition, implies that one is dangerous, disordered, outlaw. And a return to the center from the margin brings a certain power with it, like a rite of passage. "To have been in the margin is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at the source of power." (117) For the center, this is the relevance, the indispensibility of the lawless, or the disordered; it is the only way that living in law, or order, or as residence in assumption, can know what it itself is.
This is perhaps part of the reason for the tenacity of racism, or sexism. The Other has always been used as the "exotic," which provides the conventional with its self-recognition, its identity, its imagined solidity. Conversely, a recurrent dimension of racist or sexist violence is that rationalized by the notion of retaliation. For the racist, it is a retaliation against the racialized precisely for their marginality, for the power consigned to them by a marginalization concocted for them by racism. When the Puritans landed in New England, only racism permitted them to continue to survive as Puritans, as a chosen people returned to an "empty" Eden. Without racism as their circle of fortification, they would have had to enter their new environment as free humans, representing themselves rather than have that world represent them. Their assumption of residence was already a boundary, a fortification constructed of others -- producing and re-produced by otherness.
Thus, the hermetic and self-referential structure of the bombing/text of Iraq (and, indeed, of the entire US "defense establishment") has a long tradition; this is perhaps what accounts for its familiarity. In other words, to empty the bombing/text of Iraq of data concerning its actuality becomes an essential ingredient in identity preservation, which would be an essential aspect of its "patriotism." This was something the media and the government learned from the Pentagon Papers and Watergate affairs. The political form this lesson took was the emergence of a "teflon" presidency -- that is, a presidency that is iconized, and that becomes its own rationalization as a symbol (with respect to both Congress and the people) -- an element of political gangrene. There were a multitude of forms of death contained in the way the first bomb dropped on Baghdad halted all debate in Congress.
Douglas goes on. "Pollution is a particular class of danger." (118) Still within the realm of sources of power, she argues, it is what conditions authority, and renders authority purifying. But this is not a simple case of supplementarity. Authority may be constituted by "explicit spiritual power," but it stands over against a disorder, a constitution of dangerous roles that consist of "disapproved powers."
The contrast between form and surrounding non-form accounts for the distribution of symbolic and psychic powers: external symbolism upholds the explicit social structure and internal, unformed psychic powers threaten it from the non-structure. (120)
That is, pollution, and the danger of pollution, produce a complex inversion between the inside and the outside. The internal (psychic) threatens from elsewhere (from the non-structure), and it threatens the powers of the center, the social structure, which rules through external symbolism. Internal psychic power, thought itself, is thrust beyond the perimeter, as hypermarginal, polluting, disruptive of residence in assumption. And external social structure, as symbolic power, is made central, sanctified, fortified against threat.[14] It is thought, as psychic power, that stands outside social structure, outside the space of residence. If residence in assumption is pure, it is thought itself that is corrupt.
This sheds a different light on the rejection of information. It is not a rejection out of fear of confronting what one knows will be horrible, or even more metaphysically, "the horror" in this particular "heart of darkness." It is because thought itself is a threat, a pollutant, an eviction (from one's space of assumed residence). In effect, one "supports the president," "supports the troops," and avoids discussing anti-war ideas apriori, as a way of living a space that keeps pollution at bay. One "supports the President" because, as the ritualistic, it preserves identity, and thus social purity. If anything indicates that the media has grasped this, it is in the calm studied tones, and the emptied formal presentations of even highly controversial issues or extreme events.[15]
Conclusion
The obligation to defend purity, to defeat the incursions of pollution, has a far reaching dichotomizing and anti-intellectual effect. Formal logic has a certain purity because, in formal logic, thought is rule governed, instituted within an assumed space. Thought that is not deductive, thought that is informational, informed, in formation at its own creative or perceptual hands, becomes corrupting, a pollution. But this notion that thought is by nature corrupt and corrupting within a residence in assumption, raises a host of issues along this line of dichotomization.
Some of the issues which follow from the above argument, each of which could be formulated as a question, might be the following. To have the government represent one, even in its committing acts such as the massacre of Iraqis, enables one to be pure through that representation. The discursivity of its documentation, the fact of the constitution and the laws, becomes self-explanation, an antiseptic entity, free from the noisomeness of participation, and thus from acting on judgment. One can think the government mistaken, and be pure in that error precisely by the act of supporting it. And this would imply that it is not apathy that characterizes political quietism, but a residence in a certain ritualism that excludes thought. In other words, institutions are pure because they are formal; people as individuals are corrupt because they think and bleed, require dialogue and live lives at variance with one's assumptions about them.
In this sense of purity, this rejection of pollution, as a form of residence in assumption that exiles information and thought, one lives oneself as a moment in a form of gangrene. And to the extent to which we do not disorder our world, and to which we agree to live in this purity of assumption, we are gangrenous.
If this gangrene represents a hiatus between the form of a socio-logic of the US and the information that would represent its activity on the global level, a differend between identity and being, let us now look at the other side of this hiatus. What is built upon this ground, not in the sense of cause and effect, but as paradigmatic reflection on another level; and how can it be seen, using this paradigm as a lens of interpretation? In the next chpater, we shall look at the political economy iconized by the bombing of Iraq.
1. For a general overview of the commentaries and discourses on the bombing, see The Gulf War Reader, eds. Micah Sifry and Chris Cerf (New York: Random House, 1991).
2. The Jourdanian Press Agency, and the Red Crescent (the Islamic counterpart to the Red Cross), have both estimated that at least 125,000 civilians were killed. Greenpeace put the figure at 50,000. The US has estimated 150,000 Iraqi troops were killed. UNICEF, WHO, and the Red Cross all issued reports in April and May, 1991, warning that the lives of millions of Iraqis, mostly children, were in immediate jeapordy from famine, epidemic, and collapse of the social infrastructure. By the end of 1994, in the wake of the bombing and the continued U.N. embargo on Iraq, 500,000 children had perished.
3. See San Francisco Chronicle for the week of Sept. 15, 1991. Many of these facts have been brought out by the hearings conducted by Ramsey Clark, preparatory to calling for a War Crimes Tribunal.
4. See an article by Ahmad Chalabi, a London banker,
in the Wall
Street Journal, April 8, 1991.
5. Kuwait lowered its oil prices, undercutting Iraq on the oil market. It was in a position to cut oil prices because it received the greater part of its revenue from industrial investment of petrodollars, rather than from direct oil sales. On the other hand, Kuwait was Iraq's main creditor, having financed a major part of Iraq's war debt (against Iran). Yet Kuwait demanded immediate payment, rather than wait until Iraq could become solvent. Iraq interpreted these decisions as acts of economic aggression. Finally, Kuwait was drilling into Iraq's Ramaillah oil fields, using diagonal drilling methods under the border, employing an American company that had developed the technique. When Kuwait refused to negotiate these questions, and Iraq felt pushed to the wall, it went to the US; the US let it be known, on three separate occasions, that it would stand aside, whatever decision Iraq made concerning these matters. See, in particular, Peter Dale Scott, SF Chronicle, 1/2/91, p. C1. Charley Reese; Gulfwatch, Feb. 4, 1991; from The Suncoast News, Sunbelt Publ., New Port Richey, Fla. 34652. Jonathan Shewchuk; "Why Iraq Invaded Kuwait," The Student Union newspaper, Carnegie Mellon Univ. Feb. 14, 1991. Craig B. Hulot; "The White Paper," and "Hussein, Oil, cpi, S&L, and the drug war"; KC Associates, Seattle, Wash. 98133. April Glaspie's interview with Hussein is reprinted in The Gulf War Reader.
Note: Much
of the information on the bombing was collected by
student and faculty groups, private individuals, and the alternate
press, but received no attention or dissemination by the media. The
main means of dissemination was via e-mail networks. Contact PeaceNet
in SF for access to their library on documentation pertaining to the
bombing. Also, Greenpeace, and Gulfwatch.
6. According to the Geneva Convention of 1948, the use of napalm, the bombing of civilian facilities (cities, sewage treatment plants, water purification plants, roads, etc.), and the destruction of surrendering troops, or troops retreating according to agreement, constitute war crimes.
7. This is a phenomenon that remained relatively undocumented in the "responsible" major newspapers, though it received coverage in the local press. For those who were active in the movements, and attempted to engage in dialogue over the issues of this bombing, its was a commonly encountered sentiment. The blackout of anti-war movement news is also something only those active in those movements would encounter, and which all felt very deeply. Again, it is something which is, by its very nature, undocumented in the major newspapers. See references in note 5.
8. My thanks to Holly Arrow for pointing this out.
9. If this highlighting of the medical metaphor invokes in the reader a connection to Robert Jay Lifton's book, "The Nazi Doctors," I will let the meaning of that association stand in the background, and do nothing with it in my discussion.
10. It might be proper to state that the ethical
assumption of this
essay is that the destruction of cultures is wrong, as is murder, and
thus mass murder. I do not think that those who do not share these
assumptions (and there are all too many of them) will be able to follow
the reasoning in this essay.
11. See, for instance, Felix Greene; The Enemy, chap. 6. The e-mail networks carried several lists that decoded the terminologies of the bombing/text of Iraq.
12. In fact, after the bombing, the Pentagon admitted that only about 7% of its bombs had been guided, or targetable. So much for surgical bombing.
13. Douglas, Mary; Purity and Danger (London: Penguin, 1970); citations will hereafter be given in parentheses in the text.
14. This is similar to what Nietzsche describes, in "Twilight of the Idols," as the role given reason in ancient Greece, and which Socrates embodied (in Nietzsche's critique): a defense against nature and humanness.
15. This aspect of the media is well satirized in the
movie RoboCop
(directed by Verhoeven). And I remember hearing a radio announcer, in
San Francisco, 2 hours after the earthquake of Oct. 19, 1989, say
calmly: "The smoke you see rising across the bay in Oakland is from
cars burning under the collapsed Cypress structure of the Nimitz
Freeway" -- as if it were part of a travelogue.