Unknowing the 'War on Terror'

The Pleasures of Risk

Tina Managhan

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351048583
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Terrorism

This book offers new insights into the excesses and uncanniness of the 'War on Terror' via an engagement with the pleasures of risk.

Engaging with the unconscious, the excess, the uncanny and the spectacular dimensions of the 'War on Terror' – as made evident, for example, in the 2012 London Olympic Games and the 2013 manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers – leads this book to probe the so-called order of things that has made this war intelligible in both mainstream and critical approaches to Security Studies and International Relations. Specifically, this book brings to light and theorizes the obscene pleasures of the 'War on Terror' and its supplementary precautionary risk logic. Coming to grips with this (i.e., the pleasures of risk), ultimately via an engagement with critical psychoanalytic theory, leads this book to argue that we may be other than we think we are within critical International Relations (IR) traditions. Furthermore, albeit without discounting the madness, if not desolation, of the present (extending from the 'War on Terror' to the politics of Brexit and Donald Trump), it suggests there may be some relief in that yet.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies, critical security studies, political theory and International Relations broadly.

1
The ‘War on Terror’ is weird

An introduction

Rupture

As one of my colleagues so aptly expressed it, “The War on Terror is weird.”¹ This book engages with ‘this’ – the excesses and uncanniness of this war. In so doing, it reflects upon the ways that the ‘War on Terror,’ as a set of practices premised upon risk, exceeds any seeming objectivity or, as I will argue throughout, exceeds the dominant critical frameworks we have available to make sense. This book engages with the excesses of the ‘War on Terror’ from the perspective of rupture – i.e., it engages with the cultural unconscious, the spectacular and the uncanny and shows how these disturb not only official but also critical accounts of the ‘War on Terror.’ Following Michel Foucault (a scholar to whom this author is deeply indebted), this book queries ‘the order of things’ that has made this war intelligible and enabled our critiques of it.² It also probes the limits of these critiques and critical International Relations scholarship more generally. While the ‘War on Terror’ may be receding from the forefront of consciousness in the wake of Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump, an analysis of the ‘War on Terror’s’ excesses and uncanniness – particularly evident in the form of its ‘pleasures’ – can shed insight on these events, too. Indeed, by engaging with the war’s pleasures (that is, the pleasures of risk) and drawing psychoanalytic insights from Lacanian-inspired critical social theory, this book will argue that we may be other than who we think we are or, at least, who we have long been imagined to be within critical International Relations traditions. Furthermore, and without discounting the madness of the present, it will suggest there may be some relief in that yet.

The theme of rupture is central throughout this book insofar as it is concerned with the ways in which ‘events’ can challenge our frameworks for making sense of the world and, with it, our worlds. In David Campbell’s (1998, 6) highly acclaimed Writing Security, he wrote that “the world exists independently of language, but we can never know that (beyond the fact of its assertion).” Campbell’s (1998, 6) point is that we can never know or access what Lacan might call the Real because the social, political, historical and material world “is literally inconceivable outside of language and our traditions of interpretation.” My concern is with those moments when our traditions of interpretation falter or, more to the point, when events and/or encounters with our world or others within it disrupt our ordinary forms of symbolization (Stavrakakis 1999, 84–85). In Jacques Lacan’s language, my concern is when the Real returns with the result that we do not simply question a particular representation of a group or event, but our world unravels (even if momentarily, even if just a bit). The Real here refers to what remains outside of our field of representation and what is impossible to symbolize (Stavrakakis 2007, 45) – although we may approach it in our dreams, art and even psychotherapy. Of course, the Real is always there, running under and alongside our constructed realities, albeit often below the threshold of consciousness. My concern is when the Real ‘bursts forth’ and manifests – not, of course, as the Thing-In-Itself (some incontrovertible truth), but as that which destabilizes or ruptures our symbolic universe and, indeed, the order of things (Žižek 2006, 65). In this latter sense, says Slavoj Žižek (1989, 192), the Real “is a shock of a contingent encounter which disrupts the automatic circulation of the symbolic mechanism; a grain of sand preventing its smooth functioning; a traumatic encounter which ruins the balance of the symbolic universe of the subject.”

This book is about those uncanny moments when, in Freudian (2003, 132) terms, something that should have remained hidden (at least within the terms of our present realities) comes to light³ – revealing, for Lacan, the fantasy structure of our worlds and the forever disorder of things. Arguably, the events of September 11 constituted one such moment, and the resultant ‘War on Terror’ generated many moments to follow. This chapter will begin by restoring something of the event-ness to the events of 9/11 prior to their insertion within culturally intelligible frameworks of meaning – recalling, in Tony Blair’s (2001) words, the day “the kaleidoscope was shaken.” It will do this by recalling the contours of the symbolic order that preceded it and against which the possibility of the events of that day could be known but not imagined or, alternatively, could be imagined but only within the confines of fiction. The result was that as we stayed glued to our television sets, compulsively watching the planes crash into the Twin Towers (again and again), it was unclear what was the fantasy – what we were seeing or the world that preceded it. The chapter will then turn its attention to the ‘War on Terror.’ If, in Žižek’s (2002, 47) terms, the ‘War on Terror’ was the conservative attempt to put the symbolic coordinates of our world back together again, it failed. While, as Žižek suggests, it enabled the hegemonic American ideology to “go back to its basics, to re-assert its basic ideological coordinates against the antiglobalist and other critical temptations,” it also brought to light the cracks in the symbolic order and, with it, cracks in our academic frameworks. That is the argument of this book, and the latter portion of this chapter will point to the excesses and uncanniness of this war – the grains of sand that have prevented the smooth functioning of our academic frameworks and, with it, the order of things. It will also outline how this argument will be unpacked in the chapters to follow.

9/11

This book will begin with history’s ostensible end. When Jack Holland (2015) explored American people’s responses to watching the events of 9/11 (based on a wide array of ‘man-on-the-street’ type interviews conducted by amateur folk-lorists and social scientists for the Library of Congress’s Witness and Response collection), he remarked that the popular response was fragmented. He explained and documented that the “events seemed to fall beyond existing (cultural and linguistic) templates for understanding” (172). Ronald Bleiker and Martin Leet (2006, 721) put it thus:

A common, immediate response to the events was one of overwhelming shock: a feeling that something like this cannot possibly be happening, that it is too unreal to be true. The attack thus shattered our understanding of [reality], it interrupted the daily flow of events and confronted us with our inability to represent something that, in essence, cannot be represented, that is beyond our imagination. The result is incomprehension, pain and fear, expressing the gap between what was experienced and what can actually be apprehended by existing conceptual and descriptive means.

To understand the unintelligibility of these events is arguably to understand the intelligibility of the order that preceded it – the post-Cold War historical moment that has been alternatively referred to as the New World Order, the dawn of globalization and, somewhat prematurely, history’s end. Each of these designations belonged to a broader historical narrative of which ‘we’ (a Western ‘we’ that Chapter 2 will investigate) were a part – an intersubjective reality that was held in common. It was Francis Fukuyama (1989) who famously declared this period signified “the end of history,” insofar as he believed we had reached the zenith of mankind’s ideological evolution. Without denying that conflict in the ‘Third World’ would likely persist for years to come, he argued that ultimately all roads pointed towards “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” (1). This so-called triumph of the West referred not only to the victory of a particular politico-economic model of governance but also to “the Western idea” (1). Noting the cultural elements of this triumph, Fukuyama cited the spread of Western consumer culture and music, remarking on his experience of “Beethoven [being] piped into Japanese department stores” and “rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon and Tehran” (1).

Of course, not everyone shared Fukuyama’s view. On the right, Samuel Huntington (1993) argued that far from inciting further integration, globalization and Western triumphalism would exacerbate cultural consciousness across fundamental markers of difference, ultimately leading to clashes along civilizational rather than national lines – with the ‘West’ versus the ‘Rest’ emerging as a key fault line. On the left, not everyone cheered the ascendance of the liberal democratic model (at least in its predominant form) or its spread across the globe, citing concerns related to inequality as well as the constriction of the political that was its result. The point, lest there be any mistake, is that there is no denying that rumblings of disquiet and unease were underfoot in this brave new liberal world and from all sides of the spectrum. In Neil Young’s (1989) words, penned in his infamous “Rockin’ in the Free World,” there were “warning signs on the road ahead” – whether counted in terms of the millions, if not billions, excluded; the environmental costs; or the military underpinnings of said freedoms (also see Greene 2015). As will be discussed in Chapter 2, the historical moment was fraught with tensions and contradictions from its inception. But, with the rise of centrist parties throughout the West and threats to Western interests increasingly relegated to the periphery, there was little denying that “the free world’s” moment was here, and however much we might rattle the cage, it appeared (at least for the foreseeable future) indomitable. In the terms of International Relations theory, despite the different lenses with which we interpreted these developments, large swathes of people in the Western world (if not many beyond) shared the intersubjective and symbolic parameters of this reality.

Against this backdrop, 9/11 came as a traumatic shock. This is in spite of the fact that the events were variously prefigured in the cultural imagination. In Jean Baudrillard’s (2002, 5) words, we all “dreamt of it.” Fascinatingly, the events were foreshadowed in novels, film and Presidential Daily Briefings.⁴ Mark Salter (2008, 235) provides some rather stark examples:

Tom Clancy had predicted in 1997 an attack on the American capital using a civilian aircraft in Executive Orders, when a Japanese pilot kills the president…. [Also] The Siege (1998) directed by Edward Zwick put suicide bombers in New York City in retaliation for an American army abduction of a terrorist leader, Sheik Ahmed Bin Talal.

Žižek (2002, 16) likewise remarks on the number of blockbuster films under way (prior to 9/11) that had their release dates postponed or were shelved because they included scenes resembling the World Trade Center’s collapse (in the form of “tall buildings on fire or under attack” or “terrorist attacks”). These imaginings were not without base. As the title of a Presidential Daily Briefing circulated on August 6, 2001, the intelligence community knew that bin Laden was “Determined to Strike in U.S.” and that he might hijack planes to do so. Yet, when asked why the George W. Bush Administration did not do more to act on this intelligence, the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, said it was because she could not imagine it – leading the 9/11 Commission to conclude that the biggest failing was not one of intelligence, policing or military preparedness but one of imagination (Salter 2008, 237, 235). To this, and considering the above, Salter (2008, 235–36) added the following, rather useful, clarification: “it is not the imagination per se that was lacking, but rather the lack of convincing imaginings.”

The point is that while the events could be imagined, such imaginings were largely consigned to the space of fantasy – perhaps leading to Žižek’s (2002, 16) claim that what was most shocking about the events that day (and, indeed, most uncanny) was that “America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise.” The lines between fantasy and reality were blurred, disrupting the symbolic coordinates of our reality. As Žižek (2002, 16) explains, “[Prior to the World Trade Center collapse,] Third World horrors [were perceived] as something which was not actually part of our social reality, as something which existed (for us) as a spectral apparition on the TV screen [or the stuff of Hollywood action thrillers].” On September 11, “the image entered and shattered our reality” (Žižek 2002, 16). Holland’s (2015, 173) research corroborates this view, describing one of the prevalent themes in people’s initial responses as the perception “that the events of the day did not belong; they were somehow foreign”:

The fact that events were unfolding in America was what citizens noted was making comprehension so difficult. One interviewee noted, “I can’t believe it … it’s happening here, in the U.S. You ...