The United States' approach to engineering a war on Iraq signifies a giant
leap towards establishing absolute sovereignty over the world. The Donald
Rumsfeld memo, as reported in the New York Times on October 14, states
that once a national interest has been identified, "U.S. leadership should
make a judgment as to when diplomacy has failed and act forcefully, early,
during the precrisis period, to try to alter the behavior of others and to
prevent the conflict. If that fails, be willing and prepared to act decisively
to use the force necessary to prevail, plus some" (NYT, 10/14/02, p.
A9). In other words, if we can't get what we want by persuasion and
negotiation, we'll take it by force. This is a formula for absolute
control.
Not content with being the world's policeman, the Bush administration seems
to be claiming the unilateral right to legislate, judge, and execute global
law and order. Congress has now abdicated its constitutional responsibilities
by voting the President carte blanche to proceed at will. The Justice
Department would like to try even American citizens as enemy combatants in
military tribunals rather than in open courts of law. The net effect,
then, is that global sovereignty is being seized by the imperial presidency.
We are supposed to believe that this expansion of American power is required
by the rise of terrorism. But what if terrorism is the result of the
expansion of American power? Let's think philosophically about the dynamics
of power.
The architects of the emerging American Empire are thinking along the lines
of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes was writing in England at the time of civil
war between the Catholic Monarchy, which represented the landed traditional
aristocracy, and Oliver Cromwell's Protestants, who represented the
rising merchant and business classes. But Hobbes was less interested
in who was right than in what could put an end to war. War, he thought,
was the natural condition of mankind. Left to our own devices, none
of us is safe from being invaded and robbed by others. We can live in
peace only by giving up our autonomy and submitting to the rule of a sovereign
who will maintain law and order. Hobbes thought a sovereign could produce
order only if it had absolute authority to make and enforce the law, since
any division of its authority would produce dissension and violence.
So we should all agree in advance that whatever the sovereign does is done
by our consent. The sovereign's will is our will. Dissension and
rebellion are unjust because they violate our implicit contract to obey the
sovereign.
This looks a lot like the kind of total authority the Bush administration
is claiming to have in the world. You might wonder, When did the
rest of the world agree to make the US government its absolute sovereign,
the universal world legislator, judge and enforcer? But Hobbes
does not require any actual agreement among the subjects. It is rational
to agree to the absolute rule of a sovereign, so you must have agreed
to it. Unless, of course, you are irrational, and then you have no say
in the matter. Further, since the sovereign should be the one
with the greatest power to maintain law and order, it is only reasonable that everyone ought to submit to the
only military superpower left on the face of the planet. The basic logic
of Hobbes' political theory, applied to international relations, is that the
road to peace is surrender to the nation best equipped for war. And that would
be us.
Friedrich Nietzsche, a couple of hundred years later, takes an even tougher
approach. Hobbes thought absolute power was legitimate because it was founded
on an implicit contract. The state always already has our consent no
matter what it does. But for Nietzsche, political power neither needs
nor asks for consent. The state, he says, begins with conquest
by a people
organized for war and with the ability to organize.
[This beast] unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps
tremendously superior in numbers but still formless and nomad. This
is after all how the "state" began on earth: [And as for a contract?]
He who can command, he who is by nature "master," he who is violent
in act and bearing -- what has he to do with contracts! (Genealogy of Morals,
II, 17)
Political power, then, is simply the exercise of that will-to-power which,
for Nietzsche, animates all living things.
But unlike Hobbes, Nietzsche asks What happens to the people who have been
conquered? They also have a will-to-power, a thirst for freedom that is made
stronger by their oppression. People on the short end of the power relation,
whose lives are governed by others, seethe with resentment. Nietzsche
thought most of this resentment was turned inwards, against ourselves, to
create guilt and religions of guilt. But resentment is also directed
outwards, against the oppressor. Is that the real answer to the question
"Why do they hate us?" Perhaps the American Empire so controls
and limits the lives of Palestinians, Saudis, Egyptians, that many of them
can't help but wish to see us fall. So Hobbes's vision of peace through
absolute power comes to grief when the losers of the struggle refuse their
consent, and find new ways to get some of their own back.
In our own day, Michel Foucault has shown how modern power is exercised institutionally
-- by police, prisons, the military, hospitals, schools, the work place, churches,
welfare agencies, and so on. Power is projected by means of technology,
architecture, methods of surveillance, techniques of evaluation and record-keeping,
forms of discipline and organization -- all the various ways in which corporations
and government agencies control us and keep track of us.
American corporate and state power extends these forms of control over the
entire globe and into every corner of our lives. Foucault's image of the Panopticon
helps us understand this. The Panopticon was a 19th Century
design for a prison in which every inmate would be visible at all times to
a guard in a central tower. It's an image of total visibility and total
control. Today the cyber-eye of the panopticon is everywhere.
Everywhere we go, our transactions in stores, libraries, and websites leave
electronic traces and our presence is recorded by cameras in malls and city
streets. The Patriot act gives government agencies easier access to all this.
The US military uses eyes in the sky to watch the world, and it has weapons
that can be delivered at the press of a button -- all to protect "the
flow of our commerce and the defense of our common interests," as President
Bush said well before 9/11. American corporate power also extends its
reach everywhere around the globe, controlling and exploiting labor, resources,
land, and culture. American economic, cultural, and military power seeps
into every pore of human existence. There is no prior consent, only
manufactured consent.
But like Nietzsche, Foucault does not think people subjected to all this
power just lie down and take it. Wherever there is power, there
is resistance. He says, "At the very heart of the power relationship,
and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence
of freedom."
There has never been a structure of power as wide and deep and visible as
US corporate and military power. The human spirit has never been so
overwhelmed by a structure of power. There has never been such a target,
such a provocation of resentment and resistance. Could this be the key
to understanding terrorism and in particular September 11? In The Spirit of
TerrorismJean Baudrillard argues that
Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a
global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination
as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double
agent.: It is at the very heart of this culture which combats it.
What we are seeing in terrorism is "the global superpower" in a
sense destroying itself, committing suicide in a blaze of glory. For
it is that superpower which, by its unbearable power, has fomented all this
violence which is endemic throughout the world..
Terrorism, for Baudrillard, does not come from outside the system, but from
deep within it. "This is not," he writes, "a clash of
civilizations, or religions, and it reaches far beyond Islam and America."
It's represented that way "in order to create the delusion of a visible
confrontation and a solution based on force. There is, indeed, a fundamental
antagonism here, but one which points past the spectre of America ...and the
spectre of Islam, to triumphant globalization battling against itself" .
How does the system contain the seeds of its own destruction? It's
because "no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any power that
has become hegemonic to this degree" "Even those who share
in the advantages of that [global] order have this malicious desire in their
hearts." There is a universal "allergy," Baudrillard
claims, "to any definitive order, to any definitive power," and
the two towers of the World Trade Center were perfect embodiments …
of that definitive order". "The universal attraction"
of disaster movies, " which is on a par with pornography, shows that
acting-out is never very far away, the impulse to reject any system growing
all the stronger as it approaches perfection or omnipotence".
This is terror against terror -- there is no longer any
ideology behind it. We are far beyond ideology and politics now.
No ideology, no cause, can account for the energy which fuels terror.
As global capitalism extends its network of power over all our lives, resistance
and resentment are reduced to a sheer will to destroy. With the disappearance
of the Empire's last visible alternative, the Soviet Bloc, the will to resist
now retreats into small cells that hide in the crevasses of Empire.
Is there any hope? For Baudrillard, apparently not.
War is certainly not a solution, since it merely offers
a rehash of the past, with the same deluge of military forces, bogus information,
senseless bombardment, emotive and deceitful language, technological deployment
and brainwashing.
But Baudrillard sees no other remedy either. Empire and Terrorism are
two sides of the same coin, two symptoms of the same disease.
But even if we accept his analysis, we can work to prove Baudrillard wrong
about our prospects. The remedy lies in democratic alternatives to Empire.
The cycle of domination and resentment, Empire and terror can be relieved
only when the people of the planet can make lives for themselves, rather than
having their labor and their resources used as raw materials for global capitalism.
This is a remedy that cannot come from Empire, but only from grass roots movements
working to build places to work and live outside and against Empire. We must
build cooperatively, close to the ground, dwellings that do not provoke
the wish for their destruction.
