The Deictic of mediated violence:
Public Intellectuals, Journalism and some Problems of Pronoun-ciation*
Chapter Three in Nossek, H., Sreberny, A. and Sonwalkar, P., eds., Media and Political Violence, Hampton Press, 2007
Annabelle Sreberny
The extension of the nation-state system is said to be one of the key processes of globalization (Giddens, 1990). The “nation and the state are each other’s projects” (Appadurai, 1990), and contemporary manifestations of national belonging - from flags to anthems, invented traditions and symbols (Hobsbaum and Ranger, 1983), sporting events and political rituals - have become banal signifiers of a taken-for-granted but always re-asserted national identity.
One of the most obvious yet often unremarked modes in which this national positioning is established is through the routine deixis of mediated address, the “little words” (Billig, 1995:11) like “we” and “us” that invite readers and viewers into a shared position1. Deixis is a form of rhetorical pointing that anchors sentences to certain aspects of their contexts of utterance. For example, ‘now’ refers to the time of the utterance; ‘here’ to its place, while pronouns (‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’) ground the sentence in the immediacy of the speaker and the addressee. (Harre, 1991) Billig (1995: 94) suggests the importance of being “linguistically microscopic”:
“The crucial words of banal nationalism are often smallest: ‘we’, ‘this’ and ‘here’, which are the words of linguistic ‘deixis’ ...Beyond conscious awareness, like the hum of distant traffic, this deixis of little words makes the world of nations familiar, even homely” .
As an obvious example, “We, the people” as a foundational slogan of America doesn’t need to define itself or the limits of its inclusivity: it is pre-known.
That media maintain and naturalise nationalist consciousness is well understood (Billig, 1995:10). One of the most obvious forms of nation-building content can be found in the undisguised nationalism of broadcast sports commentary when all attempts at objective positioning collapse. But a more diffuse invocation of the nation runs through much media output. As Billig argues, (1995: 11) “all the papers, whether tabloid or quality (sic), and whether left- or right wing, address their readers as members of the nation”. Such a process seems to occur in every nation, and is not just a manifestation of the British media; in the main, media “present news in ways that take for granted the existence of a world of nations” (ibid). When such language is used to refer to the audience, presumably playing again on the basis of a pre-given national identification, the audience may well not be physically present but exists as “imagined” (Hartley, 1992; echoing Anderson’s notion of the nation itself as an “imagined community”).
Discourse manifests power relations on the ground, what Billig refers to as “syntax of hegemony”. That can be found within nationalist discourse when a particular version of the language becomes privileged as “the” national language”, or when a specific locale (the capital) or specific interests (a political party) speak in the name of all, in “the national interest”. A form of linguistic and political metonymy takes place, where a part claims to represent the whole. 2
Going beyond a banal nationalism, deixis can also privilege a more global set of power relations and political rhetoric may well seek to address a more global “we”. This is a further level of movement that sees a national “we” - or a modern, Western “we” - becoming elided with a more totalising, universalising position; “ ‘our’ particular interests can appear as the interests of universal reason” (Billig,1995: 88). Political language can function in this way. For example, Bush’s rhetorical trope “whoever is not with us, is with the terrorists” implies an “us” which is not just Americans but rather the “coalition of the willing” or even “the entire free world” in which, by implication, terrorists have no place. Media language also makes such claims. For example, the television presented Jonathan Dimbleby in a BBC programme ostensibly examining the causes of terrorism (October /November 2004) started by claiming that “the events of 9/11 shocked and outraged us all; and everyone else”. The “us” in the sentence seems to refer to the British audience. The claim of “everyone else” is clearly far too big, because it presumably cannot by definition include the terrorists themselves nor the growing numbers of people that Dimbleby proceeds to find and present to “us”, the British viewers, who have sympathy with the broad political position exemplified by al Qaeda.
One of the useful, if crude, functions of binary formulations such as “us and them” is the projection of everything bad on to the “other”. This is also a very early kind of individual response to ambivalent feelings, usefully analysed by the post-Kleinian school of Object Relations where the self is seen as foundationally constituted through imaginative encounters with the other (Klein, 1957). Intersubjective understanding is built in the baby’s experiential, affective encounters with the (m)other, generating powerful feelings of love and hate that are managed only by splitting them off from the self and reducing them to good or bad objects -- the bad mother, bad breast, paranoid-schizoid position. With good enough (m)othering, a more mature position, that of the depressive, develops in which bad parts of the self are reintegrated, clearer boundaries are established between self and other, and a richer, more ambivalent and more adult understanding is reached.
Trauma can produce a regression to the earlier psychological position. To paraphrase Winnicott (1971:114), trauma implies a break in life’s continuity, so that primitive defences organise to defend against a repetition of ‘unthinkable anxiety’ or a return of the acute confusion that might disintegrate the nascent ego structure. Thus, one response to trauma might be regression to an earlier less integrated psychological stage. The paranoid-schizoid defences include excessive splitting, omnipotent thinking and denial. All hostility/badness is offloaded on to the other. Bush’s early political rhetoric readily invites such a reading as can the US government and media’s refusal to have any sense of the global anger and political hurt that might have led to September 11 and the difficulty of even entertaining the question “why do they hate us?” or seeing this as a political motivated act
From a more sociological perspective, Norbert Elias recognised that the content and definition, of a “we” may change over an individual lifetime, through the individual life-process:
"one's sense of personal identity is closely connected with the 'we' and 'they' relationships of one's group, and with one's position within those units of which one speaks as 'we' and 'they". Yet the pronouns do not always refer to the same people. The figurations to which they currently refer can change in the course of a lifetime, just as any person does himself. This is true not only of all people considered separately, but of all groups and even of all societies. Their members universally say 'we' of themselves and ‘they’ of other people, but they may say 'we' and 'they' of different people as time goes by" (Elias, “What is Sociology” p.128, quoted by Mennell 1992:265).
For Elias, identity is awareness of belonging to a group but this awareness changes over time as increasing social interdependence produces more complex layers of we-image in people's habitus; hence "habitus and identification, being related to group membership, are always - and in the modern world where people belong to groups within groups within groups - multilayered" (Mennell 1994, p. 177).
The spatial metaphor of the “inside-outside also functions within international relations theory, in relation to the nation-state system (Walker, 1993). 9-11 mobilised this structure in two ways. One was the peculiar nature of the actors, the “terrorists”, who could not be readily configured within the nation-state system and whose use of violence and implied politics posed a challenge to the very nature of that system. This of course produced the confusion about how to name the response to the event, given that “war” can only be declared against a state; later on, it ‘allowed’ the US to fudge the Geneva Convention in terms of treatment of prisoners. The second way was in the instant synecdochic collapse of the entire world, or the global system, into America as its heart. Thus, for example, an attack on the U.S. was also an attack on ‘us’ in Britain, as Blair rapidly suggested, or on the “entire free world” (wherever/whatever that is).
There was yet a third moment of deictic usage - beyond the syntactic hegemony of the national or the global - which both echoed but also complicated these first two forms (a sedimented nationalism and a globally-extending universalism). It reflected a moment of collective uncertainty where the deictic categories make new and unclear claims or try to (re-)establish commonality and cultural closeness when this appeared to be threatened or ruptured. I intend to use responses to 9/11 in select pieces of British press content to explore this third position which manifested neither a simple sedimented nationalism nor a syntactic hegemony but a crisis of identity and invocation of emergent collective identifications in response to the events.
Different kinds of distance:
Media popularisers such as Cairncross (???) have triumphantly proclaimed the “death of distance” brought about by the fall in cost and the increase in capacity of all forms of communication over long distances. But many critical media scholars and social analysts have revealed a harsher reality, the immovability of the news audience in relation to events far away, to death at a distance. The literature on international news and audience reactions to that has been filled with metaphors of “compassion fatigue” (Moeller, 1999), “states of denial” (Cohen, 2001) and a general lack of concern about “distant suffering” (Boltanski, 1999)
But for the most part, the news violence rarely happens to ‘us’, the Western media audience. This supposition was challenged by the Balkans conflict, ominously close to the Western European “us” but also the locale where many different fault lines of othering can be brought into play. Many Western urban locales (e.g. Belfast, London, Madrid) have experienced sporadic political violence. But clearly the event that shattered the illusion of Westerners as “distant” from the victims of violent politics experienced as news events was 9-11, watched by a global television audience of millions. One of the central outcomes of September 11 was to draw a line, not in sand but in many minds, between “us” and “them” and to establish the crude binaries of “syntactic hegemony” supported by political rhetoric and media compliance which supported military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, and continue to threaten Iran and other countries. But the first responses were more open, more ambivalent and harder to read. Here then are some crucial issues of pronoun-ciation.
Journalism after September 11: Emotion and Attachment?
Journalists were severely challenged in their ability to impose sense on the event, resorting often to simple narrative formats. The manner in which the event took over the airwaves and dominated the papers in itself signified massive crisis and a new hierarchy of significance that downplayed on-going conflicts. The event’s sheer scale and surprise prompted a breakdown of the usual journalistic frameworks and a scramble for interpretation. How could journalists help interpret the event if the experts could not agree? How could audiences think about this event? For a moment, the event was represented as a massive global trauma implicating everyone. The event seemed to demand, and quickly spawned, new or renewed genres of writing: the eyewitness account; the final messages to and the tearful stories of those left behind. Thyere were instant expert opinions and rapid cod histories. The everyday, taken-for-granted norms of journalism were shaken, in rushed opinion and emotion, and an affective public sphere evolved. The balance seemed to shift between the ordinary work of journalism and a kind of extraordinary writing that people seemed to need to write and others to read -- writing as catharsis, writing trauma out of ourselves, trauma talk.
In Britain, it seemed as though there was awareness, at least in parts of the liberal media, about the problem of Islamophobia, a new range of voices was invited onto television and radio discussion programmes and into the pages of the press. Many programmes worked hard to find speakers from Muslim communities and solicit the opinions of Muslims including, in March 2002, a wide-ranging series of television programmes Muslim and British produced for Channel Four.
The Guardian and its Sunday sister The Observer have a long history of publishing both regular columns but also occasional think-pieces by writers who are not part of its regular staff and which contribute to a lively public debate about controversial matters. This media space is one of the few available to public intellectuals to articulate a range of positions. It is key to my regular readership of these papers and, anecdotally, true for many others. Starting immediately after September 11, articles were published from a range of well-known and respected writers and commentators, some filed from New York or taken from US newspapers and others posted from further a field. The list of authors included Martin Wollacott, Saskia Sassen, Ian McEwan, Simon Schama, Rana Kabbani, Ian Buruma, Arundhati Roy, Christopher Hitchins, Anne Karpf, Caryl Philips, Salman Rushdie, Blake Morrison, Ahdaf Souief, Ziauddin Sardar, Polly Toynbee, Gary Younge, Yusuf Islam, Edward Said, Pete Hamill, Katie Roiphe, Larry Elliot, Darryl Pinkney, and others. Constructed not as experts on Islam, terrorism or military ordinance, they were regarded as independent writers and thinkers voicing personal, often emotional, responses. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said of this writing “some of it is raw, some controversial, some prescient, some overtaken by subsequent information or events”. Source?
This was affective writing within serious newspapers in Britain, a culture less inclined to overt expressions of emotion than the US (although the emotional public reactions to the death of Diana triggered interesting public debate; see Blackman and Walkerdine 2000). This was not regular column material, nor written by regular columnists, but this writing deserves serious consideration for a number of reasons. These public intellectuals – serious, thoughtful, critical, creative - do not represent the voices of hegemony, but they do show how the process of hegemony is internalised. In their rapidly written and emotionally expressive form, these voices reflect something of the collective unconscious, of the anxieties and mistrust as well as the shared understandings and attachments that sudden trauma summons up. They thus revealed something of “ourselves”, but just which selves is what I want to tease out.
Another element that makes this writing worthy of attention is that the collective outpouring of grief and fear reversed the usual pattern of indifference. Part of the deep shock of 9-11 was that “we” had become the object of violence, not its perpetrator. In this case, instead of indifference, there was over-identification, with British media coverage showing an instant identification with New Yorkers. Many international writers and commentators were somehow merged with Americans in a cultural geography of attachment. This is partly an effect of America as the global universal, an indication of the internalization of a steady drip-feed of hegemonic values. In Britain, there was also a deep sense of cultural proximity, ‘our’ familiar and much loved New York of the movies, television, tourism, Americans as people very like ‘us’. Then there was the sheer unexpectedness of the event, and the attendant difficulty in understanding it, as well as a generalized anxiety by big city-dwellers that they could be next. All of this fostered an unusually emotive response to this event in many places, which was clearly expressed through these articles.
What is intriguing about this material are its repetitive themes. The texts abound with notions of collective identity at the same time that there is confusion about the collectivity, its nature and whom it encompasses. There seems to be also confusion about the audience, about whom one was writing for, and why one was writing, confusion about who ‘we’ are. At issue, then, in these writings is the almost visceral, unthought-of, unquestioned location of some of these authors, the semi-conscious groupishness that lurk in their minds, and thus perhaps in ‘ours’.
Issues of Pronoun-ciation: Who Do “We” Think “We” Are?
What follows is a detailed commentary on three texts. These stood out from a plethora of pieces for the most sustained and repeated use of deictic signifiers that were taken to be transparent and meaningful to the middle-class British readership being addressed.
The first two are by well-known British writers, white and middle-class. Martin Amis is the author of many novels including The Information and London Fields; a recent autobiography Experience and a collection of writing, The War against Cliché. He published an article on September 18
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4259170,00.html) entitled “Letter from London”, immediately invoking some far-off unnamed recipient, presumably the US itself, playing with Alistair Cook’s familiar “Letter from America”. Amis started with the change brought about by the second plane. Before that, it was simply “the worst aviation disaster in history”. But the second plane “galvanised with malice, and wholly alien, meant the end of everything”. And he continued: “for us, its glint was the world flash of a coming future”. Who are this “us”? City-dwellers? Britons? Westerners, thus eliding the invitation of the title? Amis then recounted in detail the events of the morning, over-stating the perpetrators’ intentionality as did so many of the early commentators, by underscoring that the global real-time media audience was planned and the perpetrators knew the twin towers would implode. Since he was not there, he appropriated the experience of “my wife’s sister” who stood on Fifth Avenue and Eleventh Street at 8. 58 a.m. under the flight path of one of the planes, and cut back to another “we”, a presumed modern city-dweller or aeroplane-spotting nerd: “We have all watched aeroplanes approach, or seem to approach a large building. We tense ourselves as the supposed impact nears, even though we are sure that this is a parallax illusion, and that the plane will cruise grandly on”.
The twin towers “flail and kick” as they came down and Amis talked of the “demented sophistication” of the suicide killers who belonged in a different psychic category: “Clearly, they have contempt for life. Equally clearly they have contempt for death.” “We should know our enemy”. Here the division was not complicated, a simple binary echoing that of Bush. These people are quite unlike “us”, who implicitly both love life and revere death. The stereotype of the callous Oriental who devalues life lurks dangerously close, and the body counts against the West are too easily forgotten in both the political rhetoric and Amis’s commentary.
Then Amis slipped back to a British “we”: American parents will feel their inability to protect their children, “but we will also feel it”. So while the event was over there, in America, its impact shattered British parental illusions about their abilities to protect their children. We share your fate. He then allowed himself imaginings of even worse scenarios, involving biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The slip back into binary processing summons up our own paranoid tendencies. He talked of how difficult it would be for Americans to realise that they are hated, since “being right and being good support the American self to an almost tautologous degree” and an adaptation of national character is needed. This sounded like the criticism of a close friend, as perhaps only a Brit can say to a Yank, the patronising hierarchy of colonialism.
However, “on the other side”, reflexively acknowledged in the phrase “the world suddenly feels bipolar”, even more fundamental change was required: “We would have to sit through a renaissance and a reformation, and then await enlightenment. And we’re not going to do that”. This proclaimed a crude and obvious Eurocentrism, with the assumption that “they” represent the entire Muslim world that needs to replicate the Western historical process. The Briton was safely camped back in “the US-led side” which doesn’t have the patience to wait for change over there. So his rhetorical “what are we to do?” is given a clear answer: “violence must come; America must have catharsis”, thus appearing both empathetic and justificatory. But “we would hope that the response will be, above all, non-escalatory”. Here, the “we” is really “he”, his own opinion which appears for the first time in the first person, a kind of Eliasian reversal. Did speaking as “I” simply feel too lonely? Was the “we” a retreat into some kind of collective security? Amis actually offered a novel idea, that the Afghanis not be bombarded with missiles but with consignments of food, a practice that was indeed followed during the Afghan war, even if the contents were ready meals for GIs and not the rice that Afghanis eat.
In the final paragraph, Amis then suggested that “our best destiny, as planetary cohabitants” is the development of “species consciousness – something over and above nationalisms, blocs, religions, ethnicities”. And Amis tried to apply this: “Thinking of the victims, the perpetrators, and the near future, I felt species grief, then species shame, then species fear”. Thus, in a literary but convoluted manner, Amis finally addressed the very nature of collectivities and what “we” all share in common, and he did so in a voice that sounded much like Elias’s civilizational reach extending over old boundaries.. To do this, Amis detoured through at least eleven ambiguous usages of “we” that suggest a profound disturbance to a clear identity position.
Deborah Moggach is also a prolific novelist whose titles include To Have and To Hold, Tulip Fever and Final Demand. Her piece (October 27th) was entitled “Cares of the world - How should individuals respond at a time of crisis?"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4286332,00.html
Yet, in her first sentence, instead of the individual “I” of the title, an uncertain groupishness was invoked: “In these strange times, we’ve all become hypochondriacs, charting our symptoms day by day”. Overly dramatic, instead of drawing this particular reader in, triggering instead the internal response “no, I have not”. In a three-page article she used “we” no less than twenty-six times (let alone “our” and other derivatives) in often vague invocations of audience segments to be inferred from the sentence or line of argument. Deixis works when it is clear, when the meanings are well-established; as with Amis, the mixed direction of pronoun use suggests the confusion of the moment.
For example, “We’re all caught up in the same narrative and we’re learning together – both about our own psyches and about things of which a few weeks ago we were entirely ignorant”. If this was supposed to invoke the nation, it presumed that “we” knew little before about Islam, or Middle East politics, thus constructing the national audience as essentially Christian and white. There was no sense of a multicultural nation.
A similar tone was struck in the next paragraph: “We’re stupefied by the bizarre nature of it all – for instance, that somebody who can’t spell penicillin can send the whole of America into panic; that even with our sophisticated media and a thousand TV channels, the one thing we can’t see is what we’re doing in Afghanistan”. Here the “Other”, the culprit whose name is not spoken, is seen as illiterate, quite opposite to his construction by Amis as a highly prescient structural engineer. But the commonality was recourse to the simple personification that helped politically drive the adventure into Afghanistan: Al Qaeda is Osama bin Laden (as Iraq is Saddam, as Iran was Khomeini). Synecdoche and personalization are common tropes of journalistic practice (see, for example, Zelizer’s 1992 detailed exposition in relationship to the Kennedy assassination); that they run so powerfully through these individual columns shows how hard it is even for the most imaginative of writers to think ‘outside the frame’. That individualized pieces of writing should echo the dominant political frames of the day is perhaps not a surprise; but ‘we’ (academics?) don’t often get a chance to see this happening so clearly.
Moggach’s theme was about “our own helplessness”, exacerbated because “we cannot identify the enemy”. This echoed arguments from within International Relations about the blinkered nature of state-centric politics (Walker,1993) : if this was not a nation acting, then what was the political animal with whom “we” had to deal?
But the helplessness here was not really political; it was writers unable to write, Moggach admitting that she would be paralysed if she were in the middle of a writing project. Part of her problem was the ever-shifting story: “And the process of bereavement we’ve all (sic) been going through has its rhythms too: already we are different people from the stunned TV audience watching the towers explode, from the people a day later who flinched when a plane passed overhead, from the people a week later in a state of shock and sadness. We can hardly recognise those early selves, let alone the selves that preceded them and went about their daily business before September 11”. This evoked a dramatic over-identification with the events in New York. What was interesting in Moggach’s piece was that the ties that bind “us” were never articulated but presumed, a simplistic elision into Westerners, English-speakers, metropolitan city-dwellers, middle-class, white. And again, if “we” was multicultural Britain, then how sustainable was the presumption that “we” were more moved by this event than by the numerous other violent episodes happening around the world during this period?
The risks of everyday life particularly upset Moggach, and so the piece shifted gear to the personal: “we went to a cinema in Piccadilly only to find that it was full. So we changed our plans and went to another”. Here the “we” is presumably family and/or friends; again, the felt lack of need to explain is significant. There had been rumours of an attack on London, and the chance and randomness of modern life was suddenly acutely felt but almost immediately denied: “fanatics need hold no terror for us because it’s always been like this. Ultimately they are as helpless as we are. Chance can conspire against us, but it can also save our lives”. Here is a more ambiguous “us”, possibly still personal but evoking the national. Moggach entertains no political rationale for the events of 9-11, and here in the piece she erases its existence as a motivated act. Instead, acts of nature and acts of fanatics are all incoherently random. “And in these peculiar and most interesting days, perhaps there’s a comfort in that”. An odd kind of fatalism settles in, one more in tune with fundamentalist teleology than modernist sentiment, a reduction to the helplessness described in the text.
The third and last text was an editorial comment from the Observer, the Sunday twin of The Guardian, which produced a special supplement “9/11 six months on” (10 March 2002).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4286332,00.html
Again, “we” was used twelve times in a short column. The article began: “The moment the first plane hit the first tower we wanted to know: Why had this happened? What would the future bring? Who was safe?” But exactly who experienced this epistemophilic drive? All Westerners? All Britons? All Observer readers? The Observer staff? The Editor manifesting the royal “we”? Clearly the invitation was that the readers of this issue read themselves into this position.
But the column recognised the passing of time and the fading urgency of the questions. “Because the centre held. Things did not fall apart. Chaos was not unleashed upon the world” (making obvious waves toward Yeats, Achebe and the Bible.)
The powerful fear that gripped “us” in mid-September subsided. And ‘our’ world was not altered so radically:
“We are not at war. Bombs are not exploding on the streets of British cities. There is no blackout. There are no no-go zones. We go to work, we go out, we go home, we take holidays, we sleep and we eat. And when we look out of the window we can see, with our own eyes, what appears to be a simple truth. Life as we know it did not end of September 11”
This was a fascinating paragraph for a number of reasons. At the time of its writing, some two hundred Royal Marines were based in Afghanistan, a fact noted lower down on the very same page. And while perhaps not formally at war, the Western military machine was still very much involved in violent incidents inside Afghanistan. Because ‘we’ Britons were safe in our cities, that did not make the Afghans safe in theirs, and not declaring this a war, politically or discursively, allowed for weasel manoeuvres. There was also accumulating evidence that British Muslims felt less at ease than before September 11, not least because of the domestic violence and bigotry unleashed against them, yet their experience did not seem to factor into this account. From a different tack, the economic downturn, rising unemployment and the negative impact on aviation and travel from September 11 all raised doubt as to whether or not all middle-class Observer readers were in work or taking holidays. And yet there emerged an important distinction between the early rhetoric surrounding the event and a more tempered perspective now, six months later, underscored in a critical recognition of “the dramatic extension of American military might across the globe”. The “we” of Western modernists appalled at this outrage splits back into its national constituencies.
The over-easy elision of all Britons into the social and economic mores of Observer readers is harder to swallow. Indeed, further down the column, recognition was made of “subtle changes to our culture, our politics, our lifestyles” yet what these changes are was not clarified or explored. The column ended by suggesting that “the questions we (Britons? Observer journalists? Middle-class Observer readers?) were asking six months ago – about Islam, (are no readers Moslem?) security, the law, globalization, poverty, business, America, international finance – are as important now as they were then. And the answers are more important than ever”. To that one might add many other important questions, about ethical foreign policy, about new strategies for the Middle East, the global arms race, or Britain’s role in Europe vis-à-vis the United States.
To Conclude
The importance of the Amis and Moggach pieces is the sense they gave of ordinary (British) responses to events. Oddly, if each had been written in the singular personal pronoun, there would have been less to say about them. It is precisely the claims to shared experience that they made through their shifting “we”s that was problematic. Their very rawness and immediacy provided a powerful indication of the way discourses about the self and feelings are imbricated with hegemony, how political discourses are taken up in private imaginings, here made public. If regular fact-based journalism helps configure and confirm our views of the world, the Comments pages filled by writers shows the extent to which these views have been taken up. In this sense Rorty (1989) is correct to point us to a wider range of voices, including the fictional, that all partake of a conversation about the nature of politics. It is ironic that two novelists, who summon up the contingency of social life in their fictional work, inhabit a far more rigidified socioscape in their personal voices.
I recognise a contradiction between the demand for a more affective public sphere, or one that better balances head and heart in human affairs, and a quick dismissal of its content. It was positive for The Guardian to solicit and publish such writing, and indeed its Comments pages remain relatively open and discursive. The authors too took risks in publishing such raw material. Being critical about such texts is a way of taking them seriously and accepting their role in a more open universe of journalistic forms. It seems important to accept the validity of affect but also challenge its origins.
In all cases, the act of splitting off refused a relational politics. For Amis and Moggach, the “other” was fanatical, mad, “evil” but nothing to do with “us”. It seems that in times of trauma, there is a powerful need to invoke the “we”, to reclaim trust and build attachment. However, Sennett (1998: 136-8) has called it “the dangerous pronoun” and describes how the “we” of attachment to community can also become the defensive weapon for self-protection. Additionally, Elias helps to recognise the shifting “others” that a culture and individuals experience over the course of time. Both Amis and Moggach moved back and forth through a register of ‘we’ constructions, multiple yet inexplicitly articulated connections to others, neither a simple national consciousness nor always a “syntax of hegemony”, although that deictic register was certainly apparent at times.
The particular nature of 9-11 summoned up the ambivalences of the nation-state system and its difficulties in fully addressing non-state actors. Over time, also, the over-identification with America/New York gave way to a more detached and critical discussion, with different national interests and political cultures recovering their voice. Indeed, in Britain, the political environment in early spring of 2002 was one of growing anti-American sentiment, a long way from the universalization of American grief of only six months before. The Observer’s position reclaimed the British audience, albeit in a problematic construction of its own.
The discursive structuring of affect and attachment implied an ethics, what is allowed to happen to others and to us. This suggests that Baumann’s challenge remains:
“a post-modern ethics would be one that readmits the Other as a neighbour, as the close-to-hand-and-mind, into the hard core of the moral self.. an ethics that restores the autonomous moral significance of proximity; an ethics that recasts the Other as the crucial character in the process through which the moral self comes into its own” (Baumann,1993: 84)
The challenge is one of recognition. These articles suggest not only the difficulty of beginning to think of “the terrorist” in this way but, more urgently perhaps, the on-going difficulty of recognising our own neighbours, some ‘others’ who live next door, as people with whom some things are shared but who may also have different yet equally valid constructions of the world.
The voices of Amis and Moggach might be taken to represent ‘our’ British common sense that is deeply impregnated with cultural categorizations and they repeat the deeper “civilizational” divides that Western audiences have been invited to inhabit for a very long time. The doxic, toxic, truth, is that ‘we’ do think of ‘ourselves’ as different from “them” and the content of that we/they divide remains quite fixed, and post 9-11 even reinforced. 9-11 showed that both the realities, and the theorizing, around “compassion fatigue” and “states of denial” and indifference to “distant suffering” are profoundly westcentric constructions. Writing by British public intellectuals about 9-11 reveals the difficulties “we” currently experience in trying to determine the inside and the outside and the constructions used to define who “we” are and how “we” think about “them”.
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