:: Monday, January 27, 2003 ::

Terry Eagleton On Terrorism:

The "ism" on the end of "terrorism" suggests that you can make a philosophy out of frightening people. Most "isms" are abstract, but this one is alarmingly concrete. It is as though you can convert rage into an agenda, or build a programme out of pure resentment. Terrorism is the kind of politics which seeks not to turn despair into hope, but to draw its power from despair as such. What you are left with, after all the grand programmes and policies, is your fury. The less programmes and policies can assuage that fury, the more they stoke it, until despair becomes more powerful a force than any strategy for success. Some kinds of terrorism have achieved success. From the Kenyan Mau Mau to the Algerian FLN and onwards, liberation movements dubbed "terrorist" by their enemies have unseated colonial rule. Yet there is also an older vein of terrorism, associated with late 19th-century cults of Romantic-anarchist violence, which is a kind of anti-politics. This, indeed, is the only form of politics which accepts from the outset that it can't win. Since it can't realistically hope to bring the system to its knees, it settles for harassing it, knocking off bits of it, rubbing its nose in its own obdurately unkillable presence.

With the advent of modern technology, this militant defeatism has dramatically altered. The more powerful your enemy grows, the easier it is to ensnare him in his own strength and bring him toppling to the earth. If terrorism finds strength in its own weakness, it does so by sniffing out the weakness latent in the enemy's strength. For terrorism to go both global and technological means that it now has a chance of victory on the very terms of its antagonists. It might now be able to level cities rather than embassies. From a traditionalist terrorist viewpoint, this streamlined, made-over, satellite-phone friendly brand of terrorism is in danger of missing the point. For "pure" terrorism is not just an assault on your enemy's hotels, nightclubs and office blocks; it is an assault on meaning as such. In this sense, it is less a philosophy than an anti-philosophy.

Radicals acknowledge that they share a set of meanings with their conservative opponents. Without this, there would be no quarrel between them. If I think patriarchy is a pernicious system, and you think it is a small town in upstate New York, we are not conflicting. For the classical terrorist to confess that any consensus is possible is already to have capitulated to the system. Meaningful behaviour the system can take; what it can't stomach is sheer meaninglessness. So the point is to fashion events so outrageous, so unspeakably aimless and gratuitous, that they shatter the mind and shake meaning to its roots. Or, perhaps, events whose meaning can be understood only in retrospect, looking back from the other side of some currently unimaginable change. In this, the "pure" terrorist is the terrible twin of the more infantile wing of the avant-garde. Infantile avant-gardism won't create works of art, even revolutionary ones, since these the middle classes can always assimilate. In fact, before too long they will be installing them in the lobbies of their corporate headquarters. Instead, you must manufacture gestures, happenings, arbitrary events too fleeting even to be consumed. You must also remember that the deepest creativity lies in destruction, as everyone under the age of five is especially aware. Few things are more fulfilling than putting your foot through something. The nihilist is the supreme artist.

For Freud, who was writing at about the time that these ideas were being hatched, this is the obscene pleasure of the death drive, which seduces us into taking delight in the process of self-destruction. If we can't rival the creativity of God himself, we can at least hijack some of his divine power by destroying what he has brought into existence. By returning creation to the nothingness from which it came, we become a kind of demonic parody of the Almighty. Like God, the terrorist is everywhere and nowhere. Some terror is pragmatic; some is indifferent to practical outcomes; some of it mixes the two. Al-Qaida, Eta and the IRA have specific goals in mind. Those who think these terrorists are in it just for sadistic kicks are the kind of rightwingers for whom any fundamental criticism of the west is so inconceivable that it can only be a symptom of insanity. This is why the tabloid press has to portray the IRA as gorillas rather than guerrillas, even though the British government is aware that their actions are rational enough. Rational here means not reasonable, but fitting appropriate means to your ends, even when the ends in question may be immoral ones.

Terrorism blends political calculation with sheer aimless, symbolic expressions of visceral hatred and desperation. In this, too, it resembles the work of art, which, as Immanuel Kant observed, is a kind of "purposiveness without purpose". Art fits means to ends; but the work of art itself is gloriously pointless. What makes the terrorist most invulnerable is embracing his own destruction, not just dismembering others. On this theory, which one can find in fascism too, as long as you still fear death you are in thrall to the petty suburban logic of the living. By actively accepting your death, like the suicide bomber, you free yourself from it. In turning your own death into a weapon, you force a point out of the ultimately pointless. As well as being a way of killing a lot more people, your death becomes a symbolic statement that the way you are living is even more dire than non-existence. You also make the point that there is one thing stronger than death, namely your anger. In this sense, the suicide bomber is a grisly parody of the tragic hero, who overcomes his or her death by freely submitting to it. It is just that tragic heroes don't usually take quite so many innocent lives with them into eternity. To live with your eyes fixed steadfastly on your own death is to live your life as a sort of eternity, and thus, once more, as a work of art. It insulates you from history, chance, change, progress. You are swaddled from all that smacks of mere flesh and blood. For both the terrorist and the elitist artist, the mindless masses are bound by biology - by birth, growth, decay and death. You, by contrast, exist in some shadowy no man's land between life and death, scornful of both. It is a sterile, exultant existence, at once the last word in freedom and the final despair. And it is this that Bush and Blair think they can root out with their rockets.


:: Conrad Barwa 7:52 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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