I Am Go(o)d, You Are Go(o)d, We Are All Go(o)d.

Going back to the ol’ Negativland stax for today’s title, though I’ve paraphrased it to keep it au courant with my having finished Walter Benn Michaels’s The Shape of the Signifier. I already presented some of the arguments of the book, but those were more tied to nerdy, ivory towery stuff (hence the post’s filing under snobbery). Today, I want to compare the arguments of the last part of the book with the world around us today, specifically on the heels of the release of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States’s report. I haven’t read the report, nor will I, but I have been paying attention to how it has been playing in the media. And last night, on CNN, at the start of News Night, Aaron Brown played for us what he thought were the most important parts of the commission report: security lapses at the airports and details about what happened inside the planes. It’s how the latter were phrased that made the connection to Michaels, and specifically left a huge question mark about how Michaels can say (or what he means by saying) that we live in a post-ideological age where there are no disagreements, only differences. CNN, for example, in choosing what to put onscreen, still made the conflict during September 11th a conflict of beliefs, not of neutral differences.

The portion of News Night that touched upon the actual flights on September 11th began with the story that Flight 93′s cockpit was never breached by the passengers after the hijacking. Aaron Brown had portions of the flight recorder put up on screen, and that included “Roll it!”—presumably in reference to smashing the drink cart into the cockpit door. He then adopted an even more somber tone, and described the flight’s final second. Onscreen, he quoted from the report that the pilot can be heard saying “Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest.” The hijackers are heard saying “Allah is the greatest!” at another moment on the record—the moment recorded in the AP article quoted above.

Next, Brown moved to the discussion of “boxcutters,” which only came up once, in the telephone conversation between Ted Olson and his wife.

Brown closed his segment on the flights with a description of the final conversation on Flight 175 between Lee Hanson and his son, Peter, who was aboard the flight. Note, of course, that Flight 175 went down before 93, so Brown and his producers did not order their segment chronologically. Instead, in their ordering they made a political claim to strike at Michaels’s amplification of the Fukuyaman “postideological” moment in which we live. Still, here’s the conversation between the Hansons, on page 8 of the report, and 25 of the .pdf:

It’s getting bad, Dad—A stewardess was stabbed—They seem to have knives and Mace—They said they have a bomb—It’s getting very bad on the plane—Passengers are throwing up and getting sick—The plane is making jerky movements—I don’t think the pilot is flying the plane—I think we are going down—I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building—Don’t worry, Dad—If it happens, it’ll be very fast—My God, my God.

The report continues with its own bit of, how shall we say, cinematic flourish (and note the simultaneity of experience, that Benedict Anderson argues is crucial for nationalism):

The call ended abruptly. Lee Hanson had heard a woman scream just before it cut off. He turned on a television, and in her home so did Louise Sweeney. Both then saw the second aircraft hit the World Trade Center.

Brown focussed his discussion of Flight 175 on the conversation between the Hansons. However, CNN changed the text quoted above. “My God, my God.” became “My God. My God.” CNN had bookended their segment on the terrorist strikes with “Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest.” at the beginning and “My God. My God.” at the end. I threw a book at the television when I saw this. I, of course, didn’t know that CNN had changed the punctuation to make the connection even clearer (and they may not have, in fairness to them—I remember two sentences). But what CNN accomplishes by this bookending the precise opposite of what Michaels argues is the result of our current posthistoricist moment.

Terrorism is not an ideology or an identity, it is a tactic, Michaels tells us early in The Shape of the Signifier. Hence, the War on Terror makes sense in our current era. The End of History guarantees that ideological squabbles are over, and capitalism won. Since believing in something means you must believe it’s true. Hence, different beliefs are not true, and there is conflict, since there is an effort to spread truth. If you believe that communism is the best way to go, you must necessarily be in conflict with capitalists. But once there are only capitalists, then belief does not matter. It’s so universal to be irrelevant. What we now have is dfferences in subject position—differences of identity. We speak different languages, play by different rules, etc. And, this is maybe Michaels’s questionable point, we respect and relish the difference. This is certainly the tenet of multiculturalism, but how multicultural are we, in 2004?

When I explained the thesis like this to a member of my cohort, he burst into laughter. “We respect difference?” he asked, sarcastically. Michaels argues that the War on Terror allows us to be at war against a tactic. And, since we’re at war against a tactic that is not connected to any sort of ideology (look at how many groups have used terrorism, and how varied their political ideologies are) or state, we can ignore why they do what they do. In fact, the Bush Administration is proud of the fact that they do not give a shit about the ideology of a terrorist. This has to be tested empirically, still, since Bush has yet to put the screws on any terrorist organisations (basically at all), but that’s what he says. Furthermore, Michaels points out, our ideologically-blind War on Terror puts us into alliances with groups that share only a similar revulsion to terrorism (at least in rhetoric). Ideology does not matter when we decide to be buddies with Pakistan. Only the unified hate of a tactic does.

But the Bush Administration also turns a blind eye to questions of identity regarding terrorists. We don’t care who they are. If we did, we would note things like their nation of origin and change our policy to reflect that. We don’t. We only care about their tactics, and that is why they are our enemies.

So if that’s the case, then, why the CNN dichotomy above of Allah:Terrorists::God:American Victims? CNN’s casting the difference this way makes a statement about beliefs—an ideological conflict. Terrorists thank Allah as they crash a plane. Americans pray to God as they’re taken down in a plane. Hence, we must be at war. We must teach the world that God is good and Allah is bad. That people who pray to (believe in) God do not commit acts of terror, but people who pray to (believe in) Allah do. Even though it’s the same god, with the same roots in the Old Testament, we insist on the difference in names to constantly mark the other, to be reminded that we, Americans, do not believe in terrorism. But if we’re living in a post-ideological, post-belief world, then why the hell does it matter? But, clearly, it does.

Furthermore, why is there a recent flurry of interest in 3,000-word screeds against Syrians? Syrians are not Americans. They are not white. They are not Protestants. They are different. But different in a bad way. We do not respect their difference. We do not embrace it. We mark them culturally as different, and then make a conflict decision based on them—they are here to combat us. They are doing a dry run of a terrorist bombing. They must be, because that is what their culture does. The author of the original screed had no idea what the Syrians believed. She was afraid for her life because of who they were—because of their identity.

These examples suggest that Terrorism is not a tactic, at least not popularly. Popularly, terrorism is connected (still) to the belief of Islam and the cultural identity/position of Arab/Middle-Easterner. In this case, the War on Terror is no longer a posthistoricist war against a tactic, (as conflict no longer exists). It is, instead, a cover for a good, old-fashioned kind of war against states (that have Arabs/Middle-Easterners) and based on beliefs (Islam, or, in the case of Iraq, a sort of perverted socialism). I still do not know how to account, in Michaels’s terms, for this discrepancy.

In part, this could be an issue of scope of Michaels’s book. He’s clearly writing it as a critique of leftist intellectuals, who are bogged down in identitarian games (I grant that I am, too, and that it angers me). Leftist intellectuals will not make the mistakes above. They will not suggest that Islam and Middle East are necessary conditions for terrorism. But why make the turn to the War on Terror, then? Is Michaels trying not to show the folly of the War, which all leftist intellectuals probably already know, and is, rather, using the War on Terror to beat up on deconstruction and New Historicism? That seems to be the case.

So now I wonder if perhaps Michaels is arguing for two tiers of history—for a certain class, history is over and there are no more ideological squabbles. But in order to keep inequality in place, another class needs to be fed a certain level of conflict, in order to distract them and keep them off the streets. That is, everyone who knows, knows that capitalism won, and there’s nothing that can change that now. All that’s left for the left is to chip away at inequality. But the people who don’t know—let them keep thinking that we’re in a struggle, still, between truth (God) and falsehood (Allah), not between differences we respect.