It is interesting, frightening even, to receive news of a terror attack while you’re sitting in an airport lounge, about to board an intercontinental flight. Invariably, while you watch the horrific images on Sky News or CNN, your mind connects them with aeroplanes and crashes. Such is the legacy of 9/11.
On Friday last I started a journey from Cape Town to Vancouver via London just as the news of the Norway terrorist attacks was breaking. My colleague and I had to board our flight before the news was clear on who claimed responsibility for the attacks, the number of dead and injured or whether further attacks had occurred. (Speculation, of course, was rife that one or another extremist Islamist group was responsible for the attacks.)
Although Norway was far away, neither of us could shake an uneasy feeling about boarding a plane to London under these circumstances. Obviously, we were reminded of the fact that our initial destination was itself devastated by terrorist attacks only a few years ago. The next morning, while waiting at Heathrow to board the flight to Vancouver, the front pages of all the major newspapers were devoted to the terrorist attacks in and around Oslo. The Independentshowed a terrifying front page picture of a woman fleeing the scene of the explosion in Oslo, with her whole face and upper body covered in blood. Speculation in the press continued that the attacks were probably calculated to avenge Norway’s admittedly limited involvement in Afghanistan. It was only well after our arrival in Vancouver that the press reported on Sunday that right wing extremists were responsible.
The Norway terrorist attacks again sparked the urge to understand what appears to be incomprehensible and so I went in search of an analysis of the phenomenon by some of the thinkers I respect most. First, I discovered Jean Baudrillard’s essay entitled The Spirit of Terrorism. The title of this blog post is a quote from that essay.
For Baudrillard (writing specifically about 9/11) terrorist attacks are first and foremost true events in the sense that they come upon us unexpected, unplanned for and when we are totally unprepared for them. Baudrillard comprehends the 9/11 attacks as assaults on globalisation itself and, controversially, he blames the West (particularly in this case, America) for having “fomented all this violence which is endemic throughout the world, and hence that (unwittingly) terroristic imagination which dwell in all of us”.
Baudrillard believes that we effectively today live in a world of terror against terror: “[t]he aim is no longer even to transform the world, but (as the heresies did in their day) to radicalise the world by sacrifice”. Terrorism is for Baudrillard the dark underbelly of globalisation or, as he puts it, “triumphant globalisation battling against itself”.
Baudrillard insists over and over again that Islam is “not the embodiment of terrorism”, that it is merely a moving front along which a larger antagonism is crystallised. He describes, in truly horrifying terms, the spirit or energy of terrorism. This spirit operates according to one rule and one rule only: “[d]efy the system by a gift to which it cannot respond except by its own death and its own collapse”.
Thus, terrorism is always an attack upon the system, the status quo, in such a way that it leaves it almost entirely paralysed, collapsed, unable to respond on its won terms. In Lacan and Zizek’s terms, terrorism is the creator of a visuality or aesthetics of the Real — that which is incomprehensible and uninterpretable beyond a sheer materiality. In other words, that which we simply fail to capture through our symbolic significations in language.
Take the image of the bloody woman on the front page of The Independent. Is this not, in and of itself, an image of a material trauma (the Real) for which there can be no true comprehension. We do not understand the image, we cannot make sense out of it and it is at the very limit of description: “[w]e try retrospectively to impose some kind of meaning on it, to find some kind of interpretation. But there is none. And it is the radicality of the spectacle, the brutality of the spectacle, which alone is original and irreducible.”
The Norwegian terrorist attacks constitute a vivid, real-life example of Baudrillard’s notion of terrorism against terrorism, the man behind the attack having revealed that it was executed in resistance to the Labour Party’s ongoing ‘deconstruction’ [sic] of Norwegian culture and its ‘mass-importation’ of Muslims. Here we have, in the manner of an ironic twist, terrorism executed against terrorism’s usual suspect. For Baudrillard, terrorism does not simply follow the destructive logic (this is why there can be talk of terrorism against terrorism, the one does not destroy the other): ‘[e]verything still lies in a dual, personal relation with the opposing power. It is that power which humiliated you, so it too must be humiliated. And not merely exterminated. It has to be made to lose face. And you never achieve that by pure force and eliminating the other party: it must, rather, be targeted and wounded in a genuinely adversarial fashion’. Clearly, this was the misguided motivation of Anders Behring Breivik – to humiliate and make the Labour Party lose face over its policies and attitudes, almost as if trying to say that the blame for the deaths and injuries are to be attributed to the Party and not the terrorist.
The subsequent arrest and detention of Breivik as a response to his acts appears almost futile. The judge’s ruling that he be held in total isolation for four weeks without any access at all to the outside world and then for another four weeks with access only to his lawyer, seems inadequate and impotent as a response. But then again, the system does not deal in excessive events and irregularity – the work of the system is precisely to reduce the event-ness of the event so that what we have here is what Baudrillard calls ‘the model’s precedence over the event’ – the fact that ultimately any ‘civil’ response to the act of terrorism can only ever be incomplete and partial – whether it be war or the solitary confinement of the terrorist forever.
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