Contents of spoon-archives/bataille.archive/papers/Banality_of_Carnage.txt
The Heterogeneity of the Terrorist Right: Oklahoma City and the Banality of
Carnage
...compared to everyday life, heterogeneous existence can be
represented as something other, as incommensurate, by charging
these words with the positive value they have in affective
experience.[1]
Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up
against the scum, the filth...[2]
In the hours and days immediately following the Oklahoma City bombing the
American media directed its suspicion at a familiar cast of public enemies:
Islamic terrorists, Branch Davidian cultists, deranged loners. It seemed
certain that the homicidal will behind this horrendous act of killing could
only belong to some element radically external to our own national
community: either a foreign agent operating from without or a pathological
element working from within. As the identities and affiliations of the
perpetrator(s) came to light, however, it became clear that the authors of
the massacre could not be placed among our well rehearsed roster of
international btes noire, nor any of our domestic oddball fringes, but
instead revealed a new terrorist element playing right in the ideological
back yards of the country's most reassuring national narratives. It was from
the banal heartland of the midwest -- a region which in the American
national self image is frequently inscribed with a replenishing nostalgic
innocence -- that the agent of this carnage operated. "Americans don't do
things like this to Americans" one bystander at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal
Building was recorded as saying upon hearing the news of Timothy McVeigh's
arrest.[3]
Since the bombing, media focus on right wing networks and vigilante groups
has brought an unusual twist to our regular repertoire of national paranoiac
attractions. The rigorous coverage of a clandestine mesh of fringe groups
connecting militant libertarians, White supremacists and regional
separatists, Neo Nazi and assorted "hate" groups, whose insidious
communication through rural gossip circles, national networks and even
cyberspace has drawn increasing public fascination. During recent years, the
term "hate" itself has been buzzphrased for a demonic though quite concrete
quasi-interest group whose advocates appear at a surprising range of
occasions from rock concerts and suburban neighborhoods to the senatorial
political arena. The imaginary space of the new kitchen-table hatred is
fetishistically etched out in repeated news reports of the bombing,
diagramming the various farmhouses, barns and rural facilities used by the
militia groups. America's favorite tropes of national innocence have emerged
as the seed-bed of an giddy new carnage.
And who can be surprised that the facade of rural serenity and folk wisdom
only conceals the romantic kitsch and anxious ennui of the countryside? But
still the image of a unique transformation from the scene of a wholesome
rural populace to the obscene site of wholesale slaughter presents a
fetishistic media spectacle. Like the smoldering Branch Davidian compound in
Waco, the image of the gutted Federal building where one hundred sixty-seven
people died in an explosion that destroyed ten buildings and damaged another
337, composes a surface upon which a complex and deeply rooted national
desire is grafted under the pretext of an objective coverage of events or
the conspicuous display of public mourning[4]. One thinks in particular of
the image of the flag, draped like a bandaid over the ruptured edifice: the
carnage of the battlefield redeemed as it is stamped with the national
emblem, like the flag at Io jima. The bombing story depicts an inversion of
aesthetic forms which resonates deeply with ideologies of nationhood in
general. The story of the local boy turned right wing terrorist-patriot
expresses a tense coupling of polar extremes linking banality with
apocalypse -- a disturbing accord between kitsch and death whose function
Saul Friedlander traces through various forms of Western 20th Century
nationhood and particularly the Nazi nationalist aesthetic.[5] Briefly, I
would like to summarize some insights into the mechanisms that operate
within the strange fascination expressed in this media phenomenon by
relating a theoretical sketch drawn by Georges Bataille in his 1933 essay:
The Psychological Structure of Fascism. In his paper Bataille attempts an
interpretation of the recent electoral victories of the Nazi party where the
political play of aesthetic properties reveals an reversability that is seen
to wield enormous power and to draw a strange investment from every strata
of society.
Bataille: Heterogeneous and Homogenous Elements
Bataille's essay provides a theory of the dynamic between "homogenous" and
the "heterogeneous" elements of society whose antagonism expresses the
opposition of two poles: unified social order and the reconciliation of
social elements on one sided, and the sublime, sovereign, disordered or
maddened differentiation of unassimilable elements on the other. Moreover,
this second class of elements is itself divided along another dualism
marking high against low, attraction against repulsion. Heterogeneous
elements represent such factions as the monarch, the fascist leader and the
military chief, but they also constitute the "untouchable", the degenerate,
the corrupting influence, the unemployed mob. Thus the banal homogeneity of
society -- characterized by the activity of daily life -- operates between
the double heterogeneity of abject repulsion and sublime attraction -- the
two inactivities of the transcendent beyond and excremental refuse.[6] What
Bataille points out, and what constitutes the political relevance of the
strange interest in McVeigh's terrorism, is the immanent reversibility of
opposed heterogeneous elements into each other through the terrorist act
where the spectacle of slaughter is transformed into a redemptive moment of
ecstatic glory. For Bataille, such an aesthetic transformation is at the
root of the surprising successes of the emerging Nazi party, whose appeal to
Germany's dejected masses signaled redemption from the despondency of
idleness and unemployment through the widespread assimilation of a
quasi-military culture and an unruly sadistic policing practice. Bataille
writes:
This process [of identification with a militant leader] is the
intermediary through which disgusting slaughter is radically
transformed into its opposite, glory -- namely, into pure and
intense attraction.[7]
For Bataille, the manner in which the heterogeneous and homogenous elements
make recourse to each other provides the beginnings for a broad political
critique in which the radical agent of the heterogeneous-- the unthinkable
element acting through unthinkable gestures -- invokes the underlying
desires for homogeneity and conformity in the general society. Bataille's
consummate figure in this respect is the fascist leader as messianic
upstart, who commands both divine national destiny and ruthless state
violence from the banal position of the man of common, even lowly origin,
who is freely elective of his own supremacy and right to dictate. The
relevance of Bataille's scheme to our own situation becomes clear as we
understand the media fallout from the Oklahoma City bombing as an investment
of this spectacle of radical transformation where the emblems of the
national commonplace give way to heterogeneous elements which flicker in
their reversibility between the repulsion of an unthinkable carnage to the
attraction of an equally unthinkable glory. This reversibility derives from
the mediation of an actor: a unique new social agent whose pathological
status invokes the radical imbrication of banality and death.
Slaughter, as an inert result, is ignoble; but shifted onto the social
action that caused it, the ignoble heterogeneous value thus established
becomes noble (the action of killing and nobility are association by
indefectible historical ties): all it takes is for the action to affirm
itself effectively as such, to assume freely the imperative form that
constitutes it.[8]
In the moment of transformation from the ordinary citizen to the elective
militant, the pole of ordered social cohesion meets the extremities of
radical rupture and the shock of death. Their unity is attained in the
character who exercises one in the name of the other: the radical terrorist
actor whose atrocities invoke the preservation of local life against the
incursions of some infectious pathology (in this case the bureaucracies of
the Federal government). The binding moment comes in an act of violent and
sometimes mad repudiation of such pathologies where the actor himself is set
apart from the slow pace of the disintegrating herd, and signals a relation
to a transcendent, heterogeneous element in the form of a morbid beyond. The
irrational terrorist act, under the sign of a reactionary ideological
program, joins together the everyday social element of mundane popular life
with the sublime element of an moment that escapes the restrictive horizon
of the thought of the social present. The unthinkable carnage of the
slaughter is fused with the over-thought patterns of everyday life in a
single sovereign act which expresses the opposition of the macabre to the
banal in the same moment that it resolves them in a single redemptive
agency. The irrational refutation of bureaucracy, the very stuff of
rationality, confirms the autonomy of the terrorist act as a mad,
irrational, self-vindicating will whose property it is to issue imperatives,
not conform to them: an element beyond the law-governed patterns and
activities of everyday life.
Agency and the Elective Militia
In social psychology, this imperative [militant] action generally appears as
the characteristic of action; in other words, every affirmed social action
necessarily takes the unified psychological form of sovereignty; every lower
form, every ignominy, being by definition passive, is transformed into its
opposite by the simple fact of a transition to action. [9]
The structure of the banal social homogeneity faced with the unassimilable
sublime of a heterogeneous element -- which is itself transformed from
repulsion to attraction and back through the violent refusals of an
imperative agent -- is particularly clear in the case of Oklahoma City where
militancy itself is an elective measure. The formation of the people's
militia places the subjective, voluntaristic imperative of a sovereign
refusal at the core of its structure. By their very nature, militias operate
in excess of the standard institutional safeguards of social order provided
by military and federal bureaucracies, and testify to a direct connection
with the immanent conditions and real security needs of the population (in
much the same way that fascists opposed the terms of modern nationhood
through the invocation of a deeper historical claim to the essence of a
people). The elective character of the militia inscribes the binary between
the authenticity of the populace and the decadent spread of a decomposed and
decomposing passive foreign element.[10]
For the terrorist radical, the sublime recovery of agency has more than
simply an instrumental importance for the preservation of a popular
character: it is agency itself which is at stake as a creeping (lower)
heterogeneity slowly dismembers and emasculates its host population.
Federally enforced gun control laws, outside policing agents in the form of
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Fire Arms, threaten to neuter regional
autonomy, reduce it to the passive status of a lower heterogeneous element.
Thus it is the act of a violent refusal that at once redeems activity as it
constitutes itself as active. The terrorist act affirms a sense of regional
belonging and homogeneity by its elective character: unlike homogeneous
action, heterogeneous action does not have to act -- it simply is action.
Heterogeneous action, like religious ritual, like excessive or redundant
hygiene, is for its own sake, in a manner quite distinct from production and
labour, heterogeneous action is purely formal, not proscribed by another
sovereign. The terrorist act projects the sovereign, imperative act which
affirms homogeneity while it reveals the homogenous in a state of
endangerment, requiring further acts of terror or police carnage.
The terrorist hero represents the intersection of this complex web of
antagonisms: the internal homogeneity of the social whole is opposed to the
external heterogeneity of the emasculating element. Such homogeneity,
expressing the ordinary activity of a common social life, is restored,
redeemed from passivity in the sovereign, imperative act of a violent
refutation of weakening heterogeneous elements. In this way, the lower
heterogeneity of a pacifying element is negated as a higher heterogeneity
(in the act of sovereign, lawless violence) is invoked: the unthinkable
beyond, signified by a morbid, heroic act is brought against the spreading
passivity.
This pattern of a redemption from the banality of everyday life through
radical transformative violence is a common enough theme in American popular
culture. Transformative redemption in the pattern of the Christian
born-again narrative is a charged and broadly influential theme, and the
violent -- if pathological -- rupture with the everyday derives perhaps from
the wild west and the gangster myth, and finds its contemporary form in the
image of Travis from Martin Scarcese's Taxi Driver (both Travis and McVeigh
are former GI's) or more recently the homicidal pilgrimage of Mickey and
Mallorie from Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers . It would seem that an
analysis of the immanent reversibility of forms could uncover many other
political dimensions of the American media's current patterns of aesthetic
fascination.
Sam Binkley
PO Box 20202
Tompkins Square Station
New York, NY 10009 USA
phone: (212) 420 9425
email: binkley@echonyc.com
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[1] Bataille, Georges, "Psychological Structure of Fascism", from Visions of
Excess, ed. Alan Stoekl, trans. Carl R. Lovitt, (Minneapolis: Minnesota
Press, 1985) p. 137.
First published in La Critique Sociale 10 (November 1933), reprinted in
Oeuvres Compltes, edited by Denise Hollier, 1970.
This translation first published in New German Critique 16, (Winter 1979)
[2] The musings of Travis from Martin Scarcese's film Taxi Driver
[3] At the time of this writing, McVeigh is of course only a suspect in the
case: his plea is to be "not guilty", and the trial to begin later in the
year. Thus his innocence is presumed.
[4] Saul Friedlander discusses the fetishistic property of fascist artifacts
and their ability to draw investment from the most objective and morally
detached chronologers and historians. Excessive studies, exacting in detail
and precision, express a subtle fascination with the morbid and redemptive
character of fascist culture. Friedlander's critique of Hans-Jrgen
Syberberg's "Hitler, a Film from Germany" suggests such an excessive measure
of conspicuous mourning which contains more than a kernel of investment.
Friedlander, Saul, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death
trans. Thomas Weyr(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
[5] Friedlander, ibid.
[6] Bataille is of course referring here to the findings of social
anthropologists who identify the dualities of the sacred and the profane,
the pure and the impure in the societal structures of tribal communities and
persisting even in the present. Bataille: 144
[7] Bataille, p. 150
[8] Bataille, p. 150
[9] Bataille, p. 150
[10] Klaus Theweleit's extensive volumes on the psychoanalytic properties of
the fascist psyche are indispensable references for a treatment of this
question within the frame of gender and the structure of masculinities.
Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies, v. 1, v. 2 ( Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press, 1989) .
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