The Rhetoric of Terror

Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror

Marc Redfield

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780823231249, 9780823231232
• eBook ISBN: 9780823231256
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did symbolic as well as literal damage. A trace of this cultural shock echoes in the American idiom "9/11": a bare name-date conveying both a trauma (the unspeakable happened then) and a claim on our knowledge. In the first of the two interlinked essays making up The Rhetoric of Terror, Marc Redfield proposes the notion of "virtual trauma" to describe the cultural wound that this name-date both deflects and relays. Virtual trauma describes the shock of an event at once terribly real and utterly mediated. In consequence, a tormented self-reflexivity has tended to characterize representations of 9/11 in texts, discussions, and films, such as World Trade Center and United 93.In the second half of the book, Redfield examines the historical and philosophical infrastructure of the notion of "war on terror." Redfield argues that the declaration of war on terror is the exemplary postmodern sovereign speech act: it unleashes war as terror and terror as war, while remaining a crazed, even in a certain sense fictional performative utterance. Only a pseudosovereign—the executive officer of the world's superpower—could have declared this absolute, phantasmatic, yet terribly damaging war. Though politicized terror and absolute war have their roots in the French Revolution and the emergence of the modern nation-state, Redfield suggests that the idea of a war on terror relays the complex, spectral afterlife of sovereignty in an era of biopower, global capital, and telecommunication.A moving, wide-ranging, and rigorous meditation on the cultural tragedy of our era, The Rhetoric of Terror also unfolds as an act of mourning for Jacques Derrida. Derrida's groundbreaking philosophical analysis of iterability—iterability as the exposure to repetition with a difference elsewhere that makes all technics, signification, and psychic life possible—helps us understand why questions of mediation and aesthetics so rapidly become so fraught in our culture; why efforts to repress our essential political, psychic, and ontological vulnerability generate recursive spasms of violence; why ethical living-together involves uninsurable acts of hospitality. The Rhetoric of Terror closes with an affirmation of eirenic cosmopolitanism.

PART I
Virtual Trauma

… unterm
Datum des Nimmermenschtags im September

… under the date of Nevermansday in September
—PAUL CELAN, “Huhediblu”

ALTHOUGH NO EVENT releases its full historical dimensions to those who endure it, the fact that the terrorist attacks of September 11 left a mark on ordinary language offers a hint of their historical force. A society of spectacle is necessarily an intensely if narrowly verbal society, and it is not just as an array of images but above all as a name that “September 11 “has become part of everyday American cultural life. The photographs and video recordings remain on call in the archive, forever ready to reappear in the media or to be accessed via the Internet, but far more available, endlessly and unavoidably available, whether for purposes of quotidian communication or political manipulation, are the keywords themselves: the name-date, “September 11 “or “9/11,” and, shadowing it, an atomic-era military idiom, “ground zero,” turned toponym. Speakers of American English can no more evade these newly minted proper names than they can the metaphysically and historically overburdened phrase “war on terror,” which, in the name of “September 11, “has provided the official gloss for so many acts of U.S. state violence since the fall of 2001.¹ More localized linguistic fallout from the attacks also exists, and may or may not turn out to hold interest for cultural analysts or historians.² But no cultural study of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath, whatever the methodology or emphasis, can afford to ignore the rhetorical and political work performed by this event’s loomingly proper names—particularly the name-date itself, for which no synonyms exist and which anchors all talk and all analysis of “september 11” to a powerful, haunting catachresis.

These names reiterate the trauma to which they point, and a close reading of them will help us approach the difficult question of how and why September 11 registers as a cultural trauma. That the attacks inflicted a shock of historical scale seems clear, but the shape and scope of this wound is not. The pain and damage suffered by survivors, victims, and the relatives and friends of victims of this atrocity is, of course, unquestionable: such suffering demands infinite respect and not, except in the privacy of the clinic, analysis. But if we try to conceive of trauma on a cultural level, things become more ambiguous, above all in the case of the 9/11 attacks. They were not of a society-threatening scale (as warfare, genocide, famine, or natural cataclysm have been for so many human societies), and the literal damage they did to the military and commercial orders symbolized by the Pentagon and the World Trade Center was minuscule. It is, of course, as symbolic acts of violence that they claim culturally traumatic status. But even here the symptoms are complex. In targeting and in one case destroying two prominent architectural symbols of a superpower, the terrorists do indeed seem to have managed to do some local damage to the process of symbolization itself. Their violence would thus have produced a “silence that is not mere mutism but intricately related to representation,” to recall one of Dominick LaCapra’s reflections on historical trauma (in this case, the Shoah).³ Trauma involves blockage: an inability to mourn, to move from repetition to working through. It is certainly plausible that hyperbolic commemorative efforts such as those on display in “9/11 discourse” (as I shall call it) are in fact testimonials to blockage; for that matter it is plausible that a public sphere as saturated by consumerist and military interests as that of the present-day United States has no viable mechanisms for effective public grieving. Yet to say this is also to say that in such a context the very notion of cultural trauma becomes somewhat spectral and uncertain. Wherever one looks in 9/11 discourse, trauma and the warding off of trauma blur into each other, as the event disappears into its own mediation. All traumatic events arguably do this, but, as many have commented, there is something particularly virtual and hyperreal about the central “9/11” event—the World Trade Center catastrophe. To those not immediately threatened by it, this disastrous spectacle could seem at the time at once horrifically present and strangely unreal—“;like a movie,” as the saying went, another phrase I want to examine in detail—and years later this feeling of spectral pressure has only grown stronger. We have witnessed, on the one hand, a constant remembering and rememorializing of September 11 in publications and media events, political sloganeering, security controls, etc.; on the other hand—but is it an other hand?—such an avalanche of sickening images and narratives parading by under the banner of America’s “war on terror”—Afghanistan, Guantánamo, Baghram, Abu Ghraib, the ongoing slaughter in Iraq—that the spectacular horror of 9/11 can sometimes seem strangely wan and distant on the horizon, nearly buried under the mounting wreckage. The event called September 11 or 9/11 was as real as death, but its traumatic force seems nonetheless inseparable from a certain ghostliness, not just because the attacks did more than merely literal damage (that would be true of any event causing cultural trauma) but because the symbolic damage done itself seems spectral—not unreal by any means, but not simply real” either.

In what follows I shall be working my way toward a notion of virtual trauma by exploring a few of the ways in which images, videos, and televised transmissions made the destruction of planes and buildings and the killing of nearly three thousand people into “September 11, The name-date itself, I suggest, stages a double movement of inscription and effacement such that an act of naming becomes isomorphic with the structure of traumatic damage, on the one hand, and with the workings of technical reproducibility and mass mediation, on the other. I shall be drawing at a few crucial points on writings by two authors, Jacques Derrida and Susan Son-tag, who both in their very different ways invested a lifetime in thinking about mediation, wounding, and mourning. Derrida’s work in particular—which attends so relentlessly to paradoxes of singularity, iterability, and the event; to the pressure of virtuality upon presence; and to the deep structures of teletechnological being-in-the-world—can help us understand both the rhetorical power of the name “September 11, and the ways in which this name registers a trauma of mediation and transmission.⁴ As a hypermediated event, September 11 makes legible modern society’s formidably ambivalent relationship to the representational technologies that saturate it, and thus the question of what’s in a name leads rapidly—indeed, in principle, immediately—to questions about the aesthetics and politics of mediation.

1. SEPTEMBER 11

What does it signify that a date has become a name? Name-dating in general tends to be a modern phenomenon, associable with what Benedict Anderson calls the “homogeneous empty time” of the nation-state and with the performative declaration of independence that brings a modern (and especially a postcolonial) state into being.⁵ Despite their proximity to such sovereign performatives, however, name-dates tend to be unofficial names (legally, “the Fourth of July” is “Independence Day,” and “le 14 juillet” is “la Fête Nationale”). Certainly in the case of “September 11” no official speech act was involved: the name-date rose like foam from the churning of the mass media in the days immediately following the attacks and has since become, to my knowledge, the only available term for these attacks worldwide, though American usage has its peculiarities. Elsewhere in the world the name-date often acquires an explanatory tag that makes for a less melodramatic synecdoche: “the attacks of 11 September 2001”; die Anschläge vom 11. September; etc. But where American or American-inflected English is being spoken, the name-date “September 11” usually surfaces in its purity—no descriptive supplement, no year—and then reduces further to numerical representation: 9/11. Rendered numerically, the term becomes an even more sharply American idiom, for it depends on and makes rhetorical capital out of the U.S. convention of citing the month before the day in numerical dating: “11/9” would not pack the rhythmic punch that the double-trochee hammer-blows of “9/11” do. (William Blake’s poem “The Tyger” offers English literature’s most famous example of this kind of hypnotic trochaic rhythm.) In most of the United States and Canada, the numbers 9–1-1 have the further subliminal force of composing the telephone number for emergency help: this triple digit, since its adoption in 1968, has been drilled into the consciousnesses of most inhabitants of the American landmass north of Mexico.⁶ Indeed, presumably because of the homology between this number and the American way of writing a date, in 1987 President Reagan proclaimed septemper 11 to be “9–1-1 Emergency Telephone Number Day.” (How much of this was known by the planners of the 9/11 attacks is uncertain: obsessed though they were with the symbolism of their violence, they do not seem to have granted particular importance to the date of their operation.⁷) From 1987 to 2001, “9–1-1 Day” was celebrated in modest ways in many communities in the United States as a way to promote safety awareness; after the attacks, “9–1-1 Day” was dropped from the official calendar. On October 25, 2001, the U.S. Congress dubbed septemper 11a “National Day of Prayer and Remembrance,” and on September 4, 2002, President Bush changed this sober if unmemorable appellation to Patriot Day” (a name that implicitly forbids mourning, while covering with yet one more shovelful of cultural forgetfulness the 316 victims of the attacks who were not U.S. citizens).

None of these official christenings, however, has made much of a dent in public consciousness, and the odds are good that they never will. The name-date “September 11 “has too much rhetorical power. This power stems from its blankness, its empty formality as inscription: an emptiness that works in at least two contradictory ways. On the one hand, like “the Fourth of July” or any other sort of name-date, “September 11 “presupposes and demands knowledge: “September 11”—the year understood, the attacks understood. Imperatively and imperialistically, the empty date suggests itself as a zero point, the ground of a quasi-theological turn or conversion: everything changed that day, as the U.S. mainstream media so often tells itself. A new history begins here, at this calendrical ground zero: previous September 11s disappear into that zero, from the bureau-cratically trivial (“9–1-1 Day”) to the historical and tragic (September 11, 1973, the date of Salvador Allende’s overthrow in a U.S.-backed coup that ushered in one of the worst reigns of terror in the twentieth century). The phrase “September 11 “presents itself as a constative, if deictic, description (it was that very day) that simultaneously unfolds as a performative, an imperial command (you shall have no other September 11s should you mention others, they will be secondary to this absolute, toxic punctum: if you wish, say, to refer to Chile, you will have to speak of “the other September 11.⁸ This performative force, in other words, cannot be distinguished from political, cultural, technological, military, and socioeconomic force. The formal minimalism of the name-date would be nugatory in its effects were it not for the name-date’s endless repetition as a mantra within a consumer culture within which all other dates, times, places, acts, or meanings melt into air. Before or after September 11, 2001, very few U.S. citizens could have been counted on to know, for example (and it is an exemplary example), what septemper 11 means in Chilean history. The naked phrase “September 11 “rhetorically reper-forms that ignorance, and the global hegemony of American media and culture imposes the sign of that erasure worldwide. And each time we now say “September 11,” we repeat, however momentarily or provisionally, this act of effacement and presupposition. The name-date cannot be mentioned without being used, even if one’s intent, as here, is analytical and critical.

Yet that performative persistence or excess also gives criticism its chance. If, on the one hand, the formal emptiness of the phrase “September 11 “imposes knowledge and amnesia, knowledge as amnesia—a memory projected against the ground zero of a hyperbolic forgetting—on the other hand, this same formal emptiness registers and even loudly proclaims a trauma, a wound beyond words: an inability to say what this violence, this spectacle, this “everything changing,” means. A name-date like “the Fourth of July” commemorates a felicitous (if complex) speech act possessing relatively obvious consequences; but the name-date “September 11 “gestures toward obscurity. If American usage, in its minimalism, hints that “September 11 or “9/11 “signifies more than “the attacks” per se, what is this more?The sheer iteration of a date thus performs not just an imperious and quasi-theological act of erasure and inscription but also, at the same time, a stutter, a gasp of incomprehension. Derrida, in his interview with Giovanna Borradori on October 22, 2001, suggested that the imperative to speak of “9/11 “was inseparable from a nagging incomprehension:

Who or what gives us this threatening order (others would already say this terrorizing if not terrorist imperative): name, repeat, rename “septemper 11,” “le 11 septembre,” even when you do not yet know what you are saying and are not yet thinking what you refer to in this way…. What remains “infinite” in this wound, is that we do not know what it is and so do not know how to describe, identify, or even name it.⁹

Derrida went on to make that assertion more concrete. The event” signaled by the name-date resists comprehension and the work of mourning both insofar as it is felt as a threat to the global and manifold work of accreditation performed by American power and as a threat that has not yet arrived. The first point stresses the mutual inseparability of economic, military, technical, and discursive orders within the “world order” that “since the ‘end of the Cold War’. . .in its relative and precarious stability, depends largely on the solidity and reliability, on the credit of American power…. Hence, to destabilize this superpower, which plays at least the “role” of the guardian of the prevailing world order, is to risk destabilizing the entire world, including the declared enemies of the United States” (93). This destabilization extends to “the system of interpretation, the axiomatic, logic, rhetoric, concepts, and evaluations that are supposed to allow one to comprehend and to explain something like ‘September 11 “(ibid.). Derrida’s second point is that this rent in the global web of accreditation is also a temporal wound, for to the extent that the event is traumatic, it has in a sense not yet fully arrived and is never present to itself: “There is traumatism with no possible work of mourning when the evil comes from the possibility to come of the worst, from the repetition to come—though worse” (97). If one knew, Derrida proposes, that “September 11 “would never happen again, then the horror of the attacks could be named, understood, historicized, and put to rest; insofar as the attacks produce trauma, they do so as figures of a threat to come, from the future.

This futural inflection of trauma may also be read in the name-date—the month-day minus the year. When we add the year, we fix the date in calendrical history; when we omit it we obtain the vibrant urgency of a date that recurs, that insists on its recurrence. Let us stay with Derrida’s thought a little longer, for the paradox of the date recurs frequently in his work as a version of his great theme of singularity and iterability, particularly in Shibboleth (1986), his short book on Paul Celan. The date names the one time, the finite event that happens once, only once—and yet to name this once, to be readable as a date, the date must efface its singularity, split itself and repeat itself elsewhere. “How can one date what does not repeat if dating also calls for some form of return, if it recalls in the readability of a repetition? But how can one date anything other than that which never repeats itself?”¹⁰ To be itself, the date must efface the singularity of which it speaks. A date thus finds itself “carried away, transported,” in becoming itself:

A date marks itself and becomes readable only in freeing itself from the singularity that it nonetheless recalls. It is readable in its ideality; its body becomes an ideal object: always the same, through the different experiences that point to or constitute it, objective, guaranteed by codes. This ideality carries forgetting into memory, but it is the memory of forgetting itself, the truth of forgetting. (35)

Which is also to say that the date is of and for the future: “The date is a future anterior: it gives the time one assigns to anniversaries to come” (25). A date is always already moving beyond itself, a movement that is also the mark of its finitude: its essential forgettability. It is of the essence of a date that its significance can be perverted or forgotten. To name an event “September 11 “is to make the event into its own memorial, always-already memorized, at least in part (U.S. schoolchildren of the future, learning the event as its date, will only need to add the year), but also its own annulment. If all proper names, as Derrida has often noted, bear death within them—their essence being to survive their referent, to be iterable elsewhere, past the life to which they refer—the name-date exacerbates this predicament, reconsigning itself to self-forgetfulness with every commemorative iteration.

The name-date “September 11 “draws its power from this vibrantly contradictory motion away from and toward its referent. At one and the same time it commemorates and preserves a past event ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Spectral Life and the Rhetoric of Terror
• Part I. Virtual Trauma
• Part II. War on Terror
• Notes
• Index