Violent Subjects and Rhetorical Cartography in the Age of the Terror Wars

Heather Ashley Hayes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137480989
• eBook ISBN: 9781137480996
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This work examines violence in the age of the terror wars with an eye toward the technologies of governance that create, facilitate, and circulate that violence. In performing a rhetorical cartography that explores the rise of the US armed drone program as well as moments of resistive violence that occurred during the Arab Spring directed at generating a counter-hegemony by Muslim populations, the author argues that the problem of the global terror wars is best addressed by a rhetorical understanding of the ways that governments, as well as individual subjects, turn to violence as a response to, or product of, the post September 11th terror society. When political examinations of terrorism are facilitated through understandings of discourse, clearer maps emerge of how violence functions to offer mechanisms by which governing bodies, and their subjects, evaluate the success or failure of the "War on Terror." This book will be of interest to public policymakers and informed general readers as well as students and scholars in the fields of rhetoric, political theory, critical geography, US foreign relations/policy, war and peace studies, and cultural studies.

 

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Heather Ashley HayesViolent Subjects and Rhetorical Cartography in the Age of the Terror WarsRhetoric, Politics and Society10.1057/978-1-137-48099-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introducing Rhetoricoviolence

Heather Ashley Hayes¹

(1)

Rhetoric Studies, Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, USA

End Abstract

Aptly timed to coincide with the most frenzied period of the US presidential election campaigns of 2004, 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden and one of his prominent lieutenants, Ayman al-Zawahiri, announced the proposition of a truce for countries that ceased attacking Muslims around the world. The video message was broadcast on pan-Arab television stations Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya on 15 April 2004:

So I present to them this peace proposal, which is essentially a commitment to cease operations against any state that pledges not to attack a Muslim or interfere in their affairs, including the American conspiracy against the great Islamic world. This peace can be renewed at the end of a government’s term and at the beginning of a new one, with the consent of both sides. It will come into effect on the departure of its last soldier from our lands, and it is available for a period of three months from the day this statement is broadcast.¹

Historian Faisel Devji argues that while the offer of such a truce from bin Laden was “rightly dismissed as media rhetoric in the West,” by “taking the trouble to reject bin Laden’s offer formally, European governments lent his words a degree of credibility and even a kind of nameless reality.”² He goes on to describe the new type of discourse that al-Qaeda generated with its truce proposal: “While it used the language of traditional politics…it was a truce that had lost one kind of political meaning without having gained another. It was as if such everyday terms had come to serve as the bridge to a new, and yet unknown politics that took for its arena the globe in its entirety.”³ Devji, among other voices, echoes a provocative conclusion I want to draw attention to: that al-Qaeda’s proposition of peace on 15 April 2004 represented a new, and in some ways still yet unknown, set of political discourses and meanings. These discourses, “bereft of institutional features like negotiation, arbitration, and contractual guarantees,”⁴ complicate the process by which the Western “war on terror” is now comprehended. In fact, as Devji points out, when Spain withdrew its troops from Iraq in the aftermath of bin Laden’s message and in the wake of the election of an anti-war government after the Madrid bombings of March 2004, their actions were widely read as an acceptance of bin Laden’s conditions. Politically, the discourse functioned to suggest a refiguring of technologies of power, yet was never openly acknowledged as such by any major audience member. As such, the quaint dismissal of bin Laden’s peace offering as “media rhetoric” in the West is understandable on one front yet, I argue, untenable as a means to examine this moment precisely because it pits the “rhetorical” and the “materiality” or “reality” of the moment against each other.

As one of many examples of language used in the terror wars since 11 September 2001 (9/11), the media analysis of bin Laden’s discourse here deserves additional comment because the US media argued, almost singularly, that the peace proposal was a veiled way to imply more violence rather than promote peace. In other words, the statement bin Laden issued was “mere rhetoric” and the West was able to “see through” the rhetoric to get to the “reality”: bin Laden veiling a threat against the West, yet again. If, as Devji argues, the peace offering bin Laden sent to the West was dismissible there precisely because it was “simply rhetorical,” the inference remains that no material effect (or, the opposite material effect) was expected to follow from the video communiqué. Of particular interest for me is the tendency to see bin Laden’s offer as “mere rhetoric.” This reductionism of rhetorical study in thinking through a political problem, an implied dismissal of rhetoric as impotent, is not that unusual in the West. Hillary Clinton, during the primary months of February and March 2008, clearly delineated the difference between herself and candidate Barack Obama, “There’s a big difference between us—speeches versus solutions, talk versus action…Speeches don’t put food on the table. Speeches don’t fill up your tank, or fill your prescription, or do anything about that stack of bills that keeps you up at night.”⁵

Drawn from the Greek rhetorike, the term “rhetoric” was originally conceived of as persuasive speech. Plato infamously denounced rhetoric as most effective in “matters of persuasion and belief rather, not the result of teaching and learning.”⁶ Aristotle elevated it to an artistic form in his lengthy treatise Rhetoric. Kenneth Burke extended these understandings with seminal works including “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle,” A Grammar of Motives, and Language as Symbolic Action. According to Burke, (wo)man is a “symbol using, misusing, and abusing animal.”⁷ As a result, rhetoric became best understood as symbolic action. By the 1980s, however, Michael Calvin McGee claimed that discourse should be understood as “material rather than merely representational of mental and empirical phenomena.”⁸ McGee went on to complicate the understanding of rhetoric as only language, and of rhetoric as inextricably bound to the idea of speech persuasion. Dana L. Cloud and Joshua Gunn describe the ways in which McGee’s conception of rhetoric is material: “the idea of ‘the text’ as persistent and residual, coupled with the contextualization of the rhetorical artifact as part of the broader construction of social relations.”⁹ It is this understanding of rhetoric, a materialist conception, that this book argues for as a means of making sense of the current conjuncture I call “the terror wars.” This is in some ways a chronological distinction, marked by the post-9/11 quest found in Western technologies of governance to control a global socio-political problem found most commonly under the umbrella of the moniker “terrorism.” This is also, however, a discursive distinction, as Devji alludes to above. In this sense:

Governments have to regularise and institutionalise the practice of war, especially when it appears likely to last for many years…The process of inducing consent—of normalising the practice of war—therefore requires more than just propaganda or ‘public diplomacy’: it actually requires the construction of a whole new language, or a kind of public narrative…it requires the remaking of the world and the creation of a new and unquestioned reality in which the application of state violence appears normal and reasonable.¹⁰

This remaking of the world I see as primarily a rhetorical task, before it can be understood as a political, military, or industrial one.

The purpose of this book is then, in one sense, patently academic. In introducing a new category of rhetorical circulation, which I term “rhetoricoviolence,” I intend to complicate the dismissal of rhetoric as outside of materiality. Additionally, I argue that approaches to the connection between rhetoric and violence that center on rhetoric as the master term meaning something akin to “speech”—which constitutes much of the scholarship in rhetorical studies on this matter—underappreciate the possibility available with an expansion of our understanding of this relationship. Instead of asking how, when, or why rhetoric promotes or discourages violence, I suggest that instead our question should be: In what ways is violence wholly rhetorical?

As a result of this departure question, this work is, in another set of vitally important ways, fiercely political. In interrogating the reasons that a category of “rhetoricoviolence” may be helpful in understanding our current political conjuncture within the age of the terror wars, this monograph closely interrogates a set of political conclusions. In doing so, the book argues (I hope spiritedly) for a rhetorical lens as a central component of any work that seeks to make sense of the global moment involving evocations of, responses to, and discourses around the set of objects currently understood as “terrorism.” It performs this task in the hope that by offering the possibility for new categories of subjectivity within this moment, new resistive avenues for change are also possible.

Rhetoricoviolence, as a category, necessarily requires clarification. Here, I offer three parameters that will see elaboration in chapter two. First, the category involves moments that are violent, drawing from some theoretical interventions that will be further clarified in chapter four. Second, the violent moments that rhetoricoviolence constellates are recognized as rhetorical; they are acts dependent upon symbols and grounded in commonly understood elements of rhetoric including timeliness (kairos), contingency, and context. Third, these violent moments might be understood as either constituent (by the people) or constituted (by the state) modes of violence.¹¹ This final characteristic is helpful when turning to questions of inclusion within or exclusion from the newly formed category of rhetoricoviolence. Categorically, rhetoricoviolence should be activated as a means of understanding social and political moments when violence and rhetoric circulate together, articulated as a framed unit. As the book proceeds, I will argue that three modes of materiality mark the primary conditions of possibility for mobilizing rhetoricoviolence to understand ways in which new rhetorical situations and subjects are generated: the body, space/place, and technology.

Historically, anthropologically, and rhetorically, rhetoricoviolence offers a form that helps rethink violence in the context of its circulation and against the contours of the background upon which it functions. Here, circulation involves the transmission of meaning that, when understood as a socio-political-cultural phenomenon, centers on exploring “cultures of circulation.” In this sense, when rhetoric and violence circulate together, we observe “a cultural process with its own forms of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint, which are created by the interactions between specific types of circulating forms and the interpretive communities built around them.”¹² The framed unit that includes the fusion of rhetoric and violence functions as a cultural process around which interpretive communities and subjects are built. More specifically, I argue these interpretive communities allow for newly emerging rhetorical situations, and in turn, subjectivities. Chapter two will lay out the foundations of rhetorical studies with regard to understanding rhetoric as symbolic action, as well as understanding the field of rhetorical studies as one with expanding, rather than collapsing, boundaries. Specifically, the chapter will trace a number of problems of publics, subjects, and rhetoric’s role in public life through materialist claims to rhetoric, advanced by McGee, Greene, and more.

Chapter three will then introduce the idea of rhetorical cartography as an underdeveloped methodology in rhetorical studies. Rhetorical cartography serves as the book’s method predominantly because of cartography’s unique access to understanding issues of transnational circulation, as well as the possibilities this approach offers for making rhetoric a clear lens through which to understand the conjuncture of the terror wars. Since it has been underutilized in rhetorical studies, and other avenues of scholarship, the purpose of chapter three will be to build this method and explain its implications. Chapter four goes on to orient the reader to questions and theories of violence, contextualizing those theories into the book’s central aims of making new understandings of violent subjects in the global war on terror. The chapter will ultimately argue for rhetoric’s central role in thinking about violence as a cultural and political phenomenon.

Finally, chapters five through seven will segment parts of the current terror wars as a means of demonstrating the theoretical claims of the first half of the book. In closely examining the US armed personless weapons program in the terror wars (commonly known as the “drone war”) and the uprisings of the Arab Spring that occurred in Tahrir Square in 2011, the second half of the book will serve both as rhetorical criticism in the method of rhetorical cartography, and as the realization of the political and cultural implications of the terror wars with regard to violence by, and against, the state.

Rhetoric’s Path to Addressing Violence

In short, this book attempts to make sense out of a fairly basic question that I am often asked in my profession. The pejorative use of the word “rhetoric” as circulated by many speakers from historians like Devji to politicians like Clinton (for example, “mere” rhetoric as impotent to produce “real” action) begs the question: What is rhetoric? And, what is its relationship to the material world of impacts and effects, specifically in this case when it comes to acts of violence?

Early scholars in the discipline of rhetorical studies subscribed to the view taken up by Devji, that rhetoric and violence are separate from one another. Donald C. Bryant represents this early perspective most ferociously, as he argued, “Gold and guns…are certainly persuasive, and the basic motives which make them persuasive, profit and self-preservation, may enter the field of rhetoric; but applied directly to the persons to be persuaded, guns and gold belong to commerce or coercion, not to rhetoric.”¹³ Bryant began a conversation in the academic discipline of rhetorical studies about the relationship of violence to rhetoric, and took a firm position that they were outside of one another. Over time, through theoretical intervention, rhetorical criticism, and various artifact analyses, the task of rhetorical scholars since the ancient debates of Plato has been a richer understanding of words and deeds, and an exploration of how they circulate in social, political, and ethical spaces. Plato’s suggestion that rhetoric is aimed at surface adornment and, as a result, is often amoral, as noted above, provides the initial challenge to rhetorical scholars in thinking about how rhetoric and discourse move in and through social strata. As a result of this challenge, rhetorical studies—as an academic field, as well as an area of social concern—has sought to become more aptly suited to explore specific questions of power, discourse, and politics, including the relationship rhetoric may have to violence. Rhetorical scholars bristle at Devji and Clinton’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introducing Rhetoricoviolence
• 2. The Materiality of Rhetoric and Violence
• 3. Rhetorical Cartography: Mapping the Terror Wars
• 4. Violent Subjects
• 5. The Buzzing of the Drones
• 6. Mapping the Disposal of Terrorist Bodies
• 7. Occupying Tahrir: Resistance, Violence, and Political Change
• 8. The Terror Wars Drone On…Or Don’t They?
• Backmatter