Introduction
Cultural Resistance, 9/11, and the War on Terror: Sensible Interventions probes the cultural legacies of the terrorist attacks in America on 11 September 2001 and the ensuing war on terror; it does so through the theme of cultural resistance by critically assessing a collection of popular artifacts that rearticulate the political meanings, affects, and visualizations of the catastrophe and subsequent US military campaigns. The catastrophe merits continual academic curiosity and commitment, given so many of our current global political tensions ā the ascendency of scattered incidents of Islamist terror, the resurgence of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, the refrain of a clash of cultures and values between Islam and the West, as heard during the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe, and finally, the anti-Muslim rhetoric during the 2016 US election ā could all trace their lineage back to the attacks in 2001. This book returns to those watershed events in New York City, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, but reflects upon them differently and goes beyond by conjoining 9/11 (as the events are now commonly known) and oppositional practices to examine the attacksā enduring repercussions. Simultaneously, it investigates the intersecting ways that culture has been deployed as resistance in the post-9/11 context by documenting a collection of objects from the field of popular culture, including a political hip hop album, a television situation comedy, a best-selling novel, and studio photographs. This study distils their oppositionality, exploring them at the confluence of aesthetic forms, political ardor, and commercial circulation; it details how these case studies are interlinked to post-catastrophe particularities and previous oppositional strategies, cultural theories, and relevant social contexts.
The domain of popular culture has sustained wide-ranging effects from the attacks, but it has also been, in a strange way, galvanized as well. As Stuart Croft has argued, the meaning of the attacks, as well as their political reverberations and consequences, is āproduced and reproducedā by both political elites and producers of popular culture. āWithout understanding what has occurred in America, at the level of popular culture, its meaning and impact, it is not possible to fully comprehend the American crisis discourse that is the āwar on terrorāā (Croft 2006: 1). Popular culture not only represented the attacks through its myriad of creative expressions, but they also impacted how the dead were remembered and commemorated (Simpson 2006) and solidified a hegemonic meaning that brought an understanding of the catastrophe (Croft 2006: 10). Scanning through the profusion of popular American cultural objects related to 9/11, especially those produced in the immediate years after the catastrophe, one can quickly see that, whether they merely contain fleeting 9/11 references or actually portray the catastrophe as their primary theme, these cultural responses (including films, television dramas, documentaries, political cartoons, music, and video games) generally adhere to several conventional themes and functions: first, to eulogize the firefighters, other emergency workers, and the victims through the prisms of heroism and patriotism; second, to create immediacy with both imagined and real descriptions of panic and fears inside the towers and the hijacked planes; third, to enable acts of mourning while providing healing and catharsis through personal accounts by survivors and victimsā families. This category also includes the numerous fiction and nonfiction works that chronicle how the attacks have altered personal lives. Fourth, these cultural expressions seek to explain, inform, and entertain by detailing the inner workings of globalized terrorism, al-Qaeda, anti-terrorism efforts, and later the war on terror, articulating the effects of new security concerns and creating what some scholars have identified as popular geopolitics (Dodds 2015) and even tabloid geopolitics (Debrix 2008). And finally, popular cultural products also critique the former Bush administrationās war on terror, post-9/11 paranoia, and threats to civil liberties among other woes.
As the years passed, more critical projects appeared; cultural responses that deviate from these main classifications emerged, countering the conventional grid of trauma, immediacy, and eulogy. The scholarship on 9/11 and terrorism have yet to assertively and thoroughly consider these expressions, which might share some of the antagonistic vehemence with those works in the last category of critique, but they also exhibit something more. Four such objects serve as the fount of curiosity for this book: the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the hip hop album Sonic Jihad, the Canadian television situation comedy Little Mosque on the Prairie (hereafter shortened as Little Mosque), and the collection of studio photographs entitled Taliban. Because of their diverging genres, media, themes, and circulation, their value as oppositional practices is diminished, operating somewhat inconspicuously in isolation. They might serve as āthe points, knots, or focuses of resistanceā, to use Michel Foucaultās imagery (1998: 96), that are scattered over the field of 9/11 objects. Though heterogeneous and independent on their own, these four objects are mutually reinforcing, converging on the same targets, tactics, and themes at times, and dispersing to confront other issues. Taken together, their potential as critical artistic interventions becomes prominent; they jointly formulate an intricate conceptualization and expression of resistance with their array of tactics, targets, aims, and even blind spots, creating a new angle to consider the events of 9/11, the war on terror, and their continual effects, one that blurs established visions of patriotism and grief.
This book contributes to ongoing debates on 9/11 on three separate fronts relating to historiography, themes, and theory: first, it adds to the accretion of 9/11 scholarship by tracing the eventsā lingering cultural legacies in global politics; second, it moves discussions about popular cultureās engagement with the attacks beyond the established themes of trauma, commemoration, and patriotism by focusing on cultural objects that manifest oppositionality; third, it links this oppositionality to the broader category of cultural resistance and proposes a new disruptive force, described as sensible interventions, which serves as the subtitle of the book. This analytical term refers to the realm of the sensible, a concept introduced by the French theorist Jacques RanciĆØre. This book appropriates his theoretical framework and displaces it to the events of 9/11 and the war on terror, thus inserting some of his best-known ideas, such as the distribution of the sensible and dissensus, into a historically specific context and demonstrating their relevance for popular culture expressions which lie outside his analytical orbit. Consequently, the book yields a tangential but timely contribution to the growing scholarship on RanciĆØreās theoretical thoughts. In short, it establishes a nexus between 9/11, the politics of resistance, and the sensible, which will all be unpacked below.
Politics and aesthetics: 9/11 and the sensible paradigm
By foregrounding creative and artistic endeavors ā literature, music, television program, and photography ā and fastening them to post-9/11 politics and practices of resistance is also to step into the quagmire that is the tumultuous relationship between politics and aesthetics. Are the arts only a supplementary element in oppositional movements,1 or as Boris Groys asks: āDoes art hold any power of its ownā¦?ā (2008: 12). One might enliven this question by posing a prior concern: can popular culture be so hastily equated with art? And how do popular-culture artifacts negotiate the similar tensions between direct activism and artistic virtuosity? Indeed, both fields can point to past histories, aesthetic practices, and circulation/distribution systems, and yet, both are also āfluid and heterogeneousā, routinely crisscrossing multiple spheres (Bennett 2012: 8) in our contemporary postmodern culture. Any demarcation between high/fine arts and popular culture or entertainment is bound to be burdened with disclaimers; it is, therefore, more constructive to locate objects through their specificities such as aesthetic approaches, authorial context, production, circulation, and intended audience. Such particularities will be elaborated for each of the objects under scrutiny as the book progresses; it can already be noted here that the four objects operate through popular and familiar (if not well-loved) genres and feature conventional themes and formulas that are often readily and easily legible and relatable. They possess a broad, if not easy, appeal. They are enmeshed in market mechanisms, syndication, global circulation, and television ratings, serving as mass-culture and mass-commodified objects and enjoying broader reception and public reach. For two of the objects explored, there is certainly a quantitative dimension to their categorization as popular culture, but that index is not the sole defining qualification. Overall, these attributes jointly make their defiance ā in themes, intent, posture, or affect ā all the more provocative.
To address this politics and aesthetics nexus, or more accurately, to complicate this knotted relationship between politics and aesthetics even further, the 9/11, resistance, and popular culture triangle is extended by a fourth component, that of Jacques RanciĆØreās theoretical work on the sensible. The qualifier āsensibleā in the bookās subtitle signals RanciĆØreās presence in this study, as the word is echoic of his particular way of theorizing politics through his best-known concept, the distribution of the sensible (le partage du sensible). His arguments will be charted fully in the next chapter, but for now the notion of the sensible can be inaugurated by understanding its relationship to the word aesthetics itself. The description of aesthetics in RanciĆØreās system of thought can be understood in two ways: first, he uses the term narrowly, referring to the aesthetic regime of art, which is a specific system for defining and considering art and for addressing the evolution of artās relationship to life. This is in line with a more common application of the concept relating to art, artistic taste, and beauty. Indeed, RanciĆØre often discusses his ideas through traditional art and art exhibition practices. For the second application, which is also more general and lies at the heart of this book, aesthetic is conceptualized along the wordās own Greek origin aisthÄta, or perceptible things. It concerns the more far-reaching field of perception. As he elaborates in The Politics of Aesthetics, this aesthetics can be seen as
the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.
(2004: 13 and 82)
Space and time are significant as they are the conditions that determine how one is being affected by activities (Crawford 2001: 52); this is about structures that determine the ways things appear.
This second approach to aesthetics via the perceptible reflects RanciĆØreās overall idea of politics envisioned through the distribution of the sensible. What this means is that political life ā rather than its traditional and expected manifestations such as parliamentary debates, presidential campaigns, policy papers, and elections, examples that most people would immediately conjure up when speaking of politics ā has more to do, for RanciĆØre at least, with a configuration of the perceptible or sensible: it has to do with what can be seen or heard, with what it is possible to see and hear, and with whose voices count (Robson 2005: 82 and 88). RanciĆØre is fond of using the phrase āaesthetic of the politicalā because he views politics as primarily a battle about perceptible and sensible material (GuĆ©noun and Kavanagh 2000: 11). Another way to reflect on the sensible is to highlight the two definitions of the word āsenseā, as RanciĆØre himself explains: first, sense as in the realm of sensations and what is apprehended and perceived by the senses, and second, sense as in meaning and the process of making sense and establishing the coherence of something. Examining 9/11 and the war on terror through the paradigm of the sensible means approaching both at the level of sensory presentations ā corporeal-affective encounters reflecting ways of perceiving and being affected by the events of 9/11 and the war on terror ā and at the level of meaning and signification, as well as the interplay between the two senses when a cultural object breaches the coherent and determinate connection between sense and sense. The book investigates how the four case studies challenge and push the boundaries of multiple post-9/11 sensible orders, and demonstrates the possibilities of sensible dimensions as a different approach to post-9/11 politics and resistance. This study shifts the scenes of opposition to the realm of the sensible, or sensorial perceptions.
In this way, my analytic concept of sensible interventions falls within the over-arching category that is known as cultural resistance, but it also deviates as it possesses its own particular focal points, both for the 9/11 context and beyond. In general, cultural resistance incorporates a multiplicity of oppositional practices in terms of their forms, agents, scales, public visibility, strategies, and goals.2 The category could be loosely understood as resistant practices that occur within the realm of culture, or those that deploy aesthetic artifacts as the weapons of resistance, or view culture itself as the target of resistance. It is a broad category that is also known by many different names, which often depends on the academic discipline from which one analyzes the phenomenon: critical artistic practices, socially-engaged or politically-engaged art practices, and subversive art seem accepted terms for art historians. Cultural studies, on the other hand, speaks of creative/aesthetic dissent, consumer resistance, and cultural activism, while media studies work with well-discussed concepts such as adbusting, culture jamming, and Third Cinema. Textual resistance has a long history in literature, and has been prominent in recent decades through the popularity of post-colonial, feminist, and ethnic literatures. All these, along with the more traditional manifestations such as street protests, strikes, boycotts, Occupy movements, and computer hacking, are frequently affixed to that mammoth target and enemy: the neoliberal capitalist world order. The resistors include environmentalists, socialists, anarchists, trade unionists, and artists who are pursing various aims through a multitude of anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist/anti-globalization movements. Popular targets are the most visible symbols of global capital: multinational corporations, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and Wall Street, to name but a few.3 While many of the contemporary resistance movements were already active before 9/11,4 the terrorist attacks and the war on terror have offered global protests new impetus. For example, the war on terror carried out domestically in America and its post-9/11 anti-terrorism measures, most notably the intensification of surveillance mechanisms; racial, ethnic, and religious profiling (Ahmad 2002); and summary detentions spawned protests over the curtailment of civil liberties. Relatedly, a new front for resistance also emerged against the exercise of āsovereign powerā on the bare lives of terrorist suspects and combatants in places such as GuantĆ”namo Bay and Abu Ghraib and against these detaineesā indefinite detention.5
Sensible interventions, however, is a more focused analytical term. Deviating from other oppositional practices, my four objects introduce a drastically different target: the sensible order. Woven into these objects are preoccupations with post-9/11 visibility, audibility, and legibility; in other words, they are also fighting their battle at the sensible level, over perceptible and sensory materials. This theme of the sensible can be seen in broad terms as in a realm of the bodily and what can be perceived by the senses, as opposed to cognition and rationality. More specifically, the sensible concerns what ...
