Solutions/Fixations: a transformation. Davin Heckman

Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.

Sun Tzu, "Chapter 1: Laying Plans," The Art of War, translated by Lionel Giles, 500BC [1910]: § 17.

<1> As I write from the heartland, in a small rural town in Northwest Ohio, the world, with the help of my government, is undergoing a process of reorganization.

<2> This has been going on for some time. Media and its various material incarnations have stumbled around the world and back, layering it with new meanings, creating new sites of production. Rays of feedback, echoes, have coated the world with a many-layered web of meaning.

<3> Globalization, growing out of its long an unhappy childhood, had become everyone's favorite drinking buddy: tossing back a few drinks with us and making us laugh with his silly antics -- an off-color joke here, a shameful romantic encounter there, maybe an ill-placed burp or fart. But one day something happened. And suddenly everything got so serious. He got kicked out of the bar. He broke some windows. He puked behind a dumpster. He woke up in jail. Suddenly, he is not so fun to be around. He only wants to drink and fight. Globalization, once our jolly, postmodern pal, quickly became a terror. His witty sarcasm has been replaced by the still-ironic but much less amusing regime of menacing doublespeak [1]. The petty acts of vandalism, once considered a reflection of a puerile fun or a lack of coordination, have been replaced by vicious acts of malice and intimidation tactics. When made fun of, he used to chuckle and come back with an undercutting taunt. Now he says things like, "I'll kick your ass" or "You talkin' to me?" And he can back it up.

<4> Constantly teetering on the brink of recession, in fear of layoffs and budget cuts, suddenly it seems that the party is over. And I don't mean in some simple post-dotcom bubble-bursting sort of way. The United States, under the leadership of George W. Bush, is going to annihilate those who stand against it. In an Orwellian twist, the phrase all men are created equal is being validated [2]. Not through the warmth of a global embrace, but through some wordplay and lots of bombs, only "equals" will be left standing. As President Bush explained in his "Axis of Evil" speech, "all nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation's security." Finally, we can stop kidding ourselves about being nice and get about the true business of globalization -- taking what we want, when we want, because we are good, and the good must never lose the upper hand. And now the whole world lives under the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive strikes. By some cruel turn of events the "just" in "just war" got conflated with the one in "just do it," and we've been kicking ass ever since. But I guess the President always did have a tricky time with vocabulary.

<5> The semantics of the war on terror are especially interesting. Since terrorists do not exist as agents of a foreign "government," terrorists can only be defined by their attitude towards the United States. If we choose to attack or imprison these human beings, they immediately become "enemy combatants." Under this system of reorganization, even "humanitarian" aid becomes just another weapon in the arsenal:

The U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan was described as a "cooperative combat and civil affairs operation" that was part humanitarian, part military.

"We're assessing villages to determine their needs for wells, schools, roads, irrigation systems and medical clinics while simultaneously demonstrating our ability to hinder the enemy's movement and apply pressure whenever and wherever we choose," Davis said. (Associated Press)

In the previous passage, we can hear the echoes of Sun Tzu's words, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. It really should come as no surprise, when we watch Fox, MSNBC, or CNN, that we are constantly at war, when we fly around the world bombing people, but especially when we are sitting down on the couch in our living room. Once the missiles and drones have been equipped with eyes and can fly towards their targets like the camera in a pumped up episode of Cops, or once journalists find themselves embedded in the latest version of Survivor: Iraq, we become participants, "combatants," if you'd prefer (because everybody knows that they only make reality shows because people like to watch them) [3]. To quote Deleuze and Guattari:

The factors that make State war total war are closely connected to capitalism: it has to do with the investment of constant capital and equipment, industry, and the war economy, and the investment of variable capital in the population in its physical and mental aspects (both as warmaker and as victim of war). Total war is not only a war of annihilation but arises when annihilation takes as its "center" not only the enemy army, or the enemy State, but the entire population and its economy. (421)

<6> After postmodernism 1.0, with all of its giddy feelings of rootlesness, irony, indeterminacy, and effete meaninglessness, postmodernism 2.0 comes in roaring like a beast. Sarcastic, cruel, bitterly ironic, but more than happy to dish out a strong sense of purpose, even if that purpose is devoid of meaning. As discussed in the all but forgotten book Robopaths (1972), Lewis Yablonsky predicted the coming catastrophe of civilization: Humanistic roles have "certain specified rights, duties, and obligations" and demand that subjects use their creative impulses to provide social solutions to problems; while robot roles have "limited range for humanistic expression, spontaneity, creativity, and compassionate action" (19).

<7> We are engaged in conducting a sort of Turing Test between the savage and the civilized:

The definition of citizenship is freeing itself from gender-, race-, and class-based criteria and becoming an issue of competent participation in what some philosophers call a discourse community but what most of us would just label a meaningful conversation. The communication need not be speech or writing, as Helen Keller proved, but there must be communication for political participation. This perspective helps us think about cyborg citizenship just as it has helped define intelligence through the Turing test. (Gray 22)

The line between the valid subject and the in-valid is reflected in one's ability to play by our rules. Rights ultimately come down to an issue of whether or not we recognize "others" as one of "us." Maybe it has always been this way, but for the first time this despotic brutality has become an unashamed part of normal "democracy" and "freedom." To quote Georgio Agamben: "The importance of this constitutive nexus between the state of exception and the concentration camp cannot be overestimated for a correct understanding of the nature of the camp" (168). In other words, the state of exception, of falling outside of legal and moral consideration, is the space of the concentration camp. It may be difficult to recognize without barbed wire and watchtowers, but in its subtlety and ubiquity it must be understood as a refinement and fruition of totalitarian methods to make the camp and those who are placed inside it truly exempt from access to outrage.

<8> At the center of daily life, there is no longer any law beyond the principle of conformity (politicians call it being "pragmatic"). It would seem that the most optimistic political hopes of the social constructionists have been taken to heart by the mechanisms of the State: culture is arbitrary, truth is consensus. In discussing "the uncanny" [unheimlich], Heidegger suggested that "Anxiety reveals the nothing" (101). In the words of Kathleen McConnell, "It seems to me that 9-11 came not as a shock but as a relief to most Americans as we were again certain of our social roles." After so many years of not knowing what to believe, the State has returned to fix things, to solve our problems. But in place of the grand narratives of the totalitarianism of days past, this final "solution" comes to dissolve us and everything around us like grains of salt in a swirling glass of water. Shiftless, shapeless, and fluid we are subsumed into a mindless unity. We know much less than we did before, but we are coming to be convinced that we are right, regardless.

What Can We Do?

<9> The project of fixing our political system is an unwieldy one for those of us with a theoretical bent. "Fixing," in a sense, is a project of arriving at a solution that will automate the process of government and provide a solid basis for the production of uniform results. Political theory can result in the McDonaldization of everyday life -- a distribution system for the mass delivery of reliable and uniform product. Theorists often imagine they can construct an airtight system of delivering reliable politics to people the world round. But do we really want a world that works automatically?

<10> This issue of Reconstruction offers little in the way of fixing problems, but plenty in the way of critiquing attempts to automate war, media, opinion, democracy, culture and life to produce predictable outcomes -- all attempts to dominate the world. Postmodernism trumpeted the death of "grand narratives," but now we are quickly finding out that they have come back as ghosts, this time hard to see, harder to believe in, difficult to capture, and, perhaps, impossible to kill. Yet, we are called to do the impossible, to pick up our pens and pencils or pots and pans and make the world a better place.

Works Cited

Agamben, Georgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995 [1998].

"Al Qaeda suspect declared 'enemy combatant,'" CNN.com, June 24, 2003. <http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/06/23/qatar.combatant/>

Associated Press, "U.S. launches new Afghan operation," MSNBC, June 21, 2003. <http://www.msnbc.com/news/929746.asp>

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Gray, Chris Hables. 2001. Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age. New York: Routledge.

Hediegger, Martin. "What Is Metaphysics?" Trans. David Farrell Krell. Basic Writings. Editor David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1977 [1993]. 93-110.

McConnell, Kathleen. Personal Correspondence.

Sun Tzu, "Chapter 1: Laying Plans," The Art of War, translated by Lionel Giles, 500BC [1910]. <http://www.kimsoft.com/polwar.htm>

Yablonsky, Lewis. Robopaths. New York, HY: Viking Press, 1972.

Notes

[1] Two of many blatant examples of this doublespeak are the declarations of victory of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both wars have been "won" but neither has "ended." Rather than end the wars, the U.S. government has decided to keep them open so that prisoners can remain in prison. Since Bush declared victory on May 1, 2003, on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln, many U.S. soldiers have been killed, suggesting that it won't be long before the post-victory "peacetime" proves more violent than war itself. [^]

[2] In recent events, a Qatari man in the United States with a visa, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, was declared a "combatant" and yanked out of criminal court so that he could be denied counsel, subjected to interrogation, and held without any charges under the authority of the United States military. The justification for this modification of our legal system is that al-Marri had made phone calls to a terrorist fund-raising group and thus presents a threat to national security. Earlier this year, "dirty bomb" suspect and American citizen, Jose Padilla was also transferred out of the criminal court system. "Al Qaeda suspect declared 'enemy combatant,'" CNN.com, June 24, 2003. <http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/06/23/qatar.combatant/> [^]

[3] For a more detailed discussion of "smart bombs" and machines that can see, read Paul Virilio's The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. [^]