[Nettime-bold] Jameson & Rorty on recent events

[Harsh Kapoor <aiindex@mnet.fr>]

London Review of Books
 From Volume 23 Number 19 | cover date 4 October 2001

Fredric Jameson
North Carolina
I have been reluctant to comment on the recent 'events' because the 
event in question, as history, is incomplete and one can even say 
that it has not yet fully happened.
Obviously there are immediate comments one can make, in particular on 
the nauseating media reception, whose cheap pathos seemed 
unconsciously dictated by a White House intent on smothering the 
situation in sentiment in order to demonstrate the undemonstrable: 
namely, that 'Americans are united as never before since Pearl 
Harbor.' I suppose this means that they are united by the fear of 
saying anything that contradicts this completely spurious media 
consensus.
Historical events, however, are not punctual, but extend in a before 
and after of time which only gradually reveal themselves. It has, to 
be sure, been pointed out that the Americans created bin Laden during 
the Cold War (and in particular during the Soviet war in 
Afghanistan), and that this is therefore a textbook example of 
dialectical reversal. But the seeds of the event are buried deeper 
than that. They are to be found in the wholesale massacres of the 
Left systematically encouraged and directed by the Americans in an 
even earlier period. The physical extermination of the Iraqi and the 
Indonesian Communist Parties, although now historically repressed and 
forgotten, were crimes as abominable as any contemporary genocide. It 
is, however, only now that the results are working their way out into 
actuality, for the resultant absence of any Left alternative means 
that popular revolt and resistance in the Third World have nowhere to 
go but into religious and 'fundamentalist' forms.
As for the future, no one (presumably including our own Government) 
has any idea what the promised and threatened 'war on terrorism' 
might look like. But until we know that, we can have no satisfactory 
picture of the 'events' we imagine to have taken place on a single 
day in September. Despite this uncertainty, however, it is permitted 
to feel that the future holds nothing good for either side.

=====

Richard Rorty
Virginia
As the historian David Kennedy has remarked, terrorism is different 
from, and worse than, war. Wars have aims that might someday be 
achieved, thus bringing about an end to hostilities, but terrorism 
has no such aims. The object of terror is terror.
Still, our grandchildren will probably, for lack of a better term, 
use 'war' to describe the threat hanging over them, the situation 
that requires them to live in a garrison state: a nation in which 
everybody is accustomed to people in uniform roaring in, closing down 
buildings and public spaces, and arresting suspicious-looking people, 
without advance warning. They will probably think that Oceania has 
always been at war with Eastasia, and that it always will be. The 
idea of war and peace as alternating states may seem as irrelevant as 
Orwell suspected it might.
Most American intellectuals who spoke to the media about the 
terrorist attacks wondered anxiously whether the West would be able 
to put itself on a war footing without eroding the liberties of its 
citizens - without endangering the right to privacy and the right to 
dissent. Maybe Orwell's pessimism about this ability will turn out to 
be justified. But maybe it will not. There were plenty of violations 
of civil liberties in Britain and America during the two world wars, 
but the institutions of constitutional democracy remained in place. 
With luck, maybe we can hang onto them.
I cannot help thinking - though I greatly dislike the thought - that 
the chances of doing so may be a bit better in Europe than in the US. 
Jerry Falwell's suggestion that the terrorist attacks may be 
attributable to God's anger at America's toleration of gays and 
lesbians, and to the activities of the American Civil Liberties 
Union, struck a chord in a sizable percentage of my fellow-citizens. 
So I hope that Europe may set the US a good example by keeping civil 
liberties intact, even if these murderous high-tech attacks become 
more frequent, and take place in more and more countries.

-- 


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