This afternoon I read an AP press article posted at Yahoo which discussed an attempt by the FBI to track down people who had checked out a biography of Osama Bin Laden at the library.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20050518/cm_usatoday/
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According to the story, someone had written a message in the margin that sounded suspiciously like support for terrorism or a terrorist threat. Someone else reading the biography reported it to the Department of Homeland security, and as might be expected, wackiness, sanctioned by the Patriot Act, ensued. Fortunately, the librarians were able to protect the privacy of the people who had checked out the book, thereby undermining this abuse of governmental powers.
More below the fold:
However, what disturbs me most about this story is not the idea of the government peeking into our private lives (though I'm deeply bothered by this). Rather, what disturbed me most was the response to the article on the part of a number of conservative posters on the message list attached to the article. Over and over again, conservative posters remarked that since 9-11 everything has changed in the United States. In short, these posters believe that such actions are warranted in light of the attack on our national soil.
This assertion, that since 9-11 everything in the United States has changed, has veritably become the core meme of the right in post-9-11 USA. The question I would like to ask is what exactly does this meme mean.
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek contends that the mark of a true event consists in a transformation in the very co-ordinates of how we think. A real event or revolution is marked by entirely new ways of asking questions, thinking about the world, and acting in the world. In our personal life, events such as this are marked by waking up one morning and seeing the world in an entirely different light. Sometimes this is referred to as "epiphany". In the sciences we think of such events as paradigm shifts. Thus, for instance, Galileo marks a paradigm shift with respect to Aristotlean/Scholastic science insofar as he inaugurates the primacy of quantitative science (measurement) over qualitative science. Similarly, Copernicus marks a paradigm shift with respect to Ptolemy insofar as he marks a shift from geocentric conceptions of planetary motion where the planets revolve around the earth, to heleocentric models of planetary motion where the earth revolves around the sun. When a real event takes place we cease to ask certain sorts of questions, and begin asking new types of questions. Our behavior and perspective with respect to the world is fundamentally transformed. Conservatives would have us believe that such an event occured with 9-11. What is the nature of this paradigm shift?
Since 9-11 there have been obvious changes in how we live our lives. Many in the United States lived in a heightened state of perpetual fear. I recall feeling shocked at record numbers of people rushing to stores to buy duct tape, plastic, and gas masks. We are at war. It is more difficult than ever to question authority. There is a paucity of dissenting voices. Similarly, a number of Americans celebrated a newfound sense of oneness, and lauded how the U.S. banned together in the form of a community in the days following the attacks on the WTC.
Yet if 9-11 was a real event in the United States, I would suggest that it is not these phenomena that mark how we've been transformed. Rather, the real transformation in the United States has been the way in which we now live in a perpetual state of emergency. Indeed, this state of emergency isn't simply a state of heightened fear that we might be attacked again, but is instead a state that has legal ramifications. In his book The State of Exception, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben develops the concept of the state of exception with respect to the legal system as it's functioned in United States policy since 9-11. The idea behind a state of exception is that of a situation in which the law must be suspended due to a state of emergency. In other words, when something catastrophic occurs, we are told that life trumps the rule of law, that we must preserve life at all costs, and that we must relinquish the rule of law.
Is not this suspension of the law the very essence of what conservatives are claiming when they say that 9-11 changed everything? In short, what the conservative is really saying when he claims that 9-11 changed everything is that we no longer live in a democratic nation, but rather exist in a state of martial law. The symptoms of this state of exception and its logic are evident everywhere. Prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are denied their right to due process and adequate legal representation. In other words, since 9-11 we have relinquished our principle belief that all humans are created equal and possess certain inalianable rights under the law. I don't care whether someone is an American or not. The logical function "all" is a universal operator, which entails that every person has these rights so long as they're human, regardless of whether they're American or not. Yet in the wake of 9-11 we've surrendered this spirit of universalism, for an unjust particularism. In doing so, we've surrendered the democratic ideal.
Similarly, under the Patriot Act, we've surrendered the rights of our own citizens, by allowing the government to conduct secret home searches, phone tappings, and to look into what books we're buying or borrowing from the library. As someone who reads a great deal of far left political philosophy and Marxist thought, I find this particularly disturbing as, no doubt, I would be seen as a potential threat to U.S. homeland security. Regardless of the fact that I have no criminal record, that I've never instigated any violence, the fact that I recently purchased, say, a biography of Che and that I read thinkers such as Foucault, Butler, Badiou, Zizek, Ranciere, Laclau, etc., or that I occasionally make reference to Mao could potentially make me suspicious in the eyes of our government. I'm hoping that they don't know who these figures are. Yet according to the logic of the state of exception, this suspicion is justified on pragmatic grounds. Given that we can take no chances where life is concerned, the administration believes that it's warranted in abusing any liberty it sees fit to abuse.
Finally, the state of exception has served as a justification for an entirely new approach to the media. On the grounds of the state of exception, the administration believes that it is justified in molding and manipulating news agencies so as to protect the United States.
When conservatives claim that everything has changed since 9-11, they are really claiming that we no longer living in a democratic system. The true essence of their claim is that the government is warranted in suspending the Constitution for pragmatic reasons. It is my belief that we must rigorously resist this meme. We must refuse to accept the idea that everything changed with 9-11, or that 9-11 calls for a state of exception. We should refuse to allow 9-11 to have this sort of ex-ceptional status within U.S. politics. What happened on 9-11 is horrific and calls for action, but it does not call for the sort of action that would undermine our Constitution. The United States is not simply a place, but is instead an idea. It is an idea of freedom and the universality and non-exceptionality of rights. When conservatives claim that everything changed with 9-11 they are confusing America with a place and are blind to its idea. It is that idea that we must protect at all costs.