Critique of Charismatic Violence

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia precipitated the development of a new lexicon for exceptional violence. "Enemy combatant," "indefinite detention," "enhanced interrogation," "high value targets," "black sites," "extraordinary rendition," "predator drones," and "hellfire missiles" are but a small representative sample of the novel phraseology invented in the wake of the attacks to describe the bellicose praxis of the U.S.' "war on terror." Though this novel lexicon early comprised the avant-garde of the Bush administration's rhetoric of retaliation, little work was required to integrate the language and its attendant practices into the more overt grammar of "preemptive" warfare codified in the United States National Security Strategy of 2002 (colloquially, the "Bush Doctrine") and executed in Iraq. One decade and several extralegal "limited kinetic operations" later, President Barack Obama—who campaigned on a pledge to dissolve the regime of secrecy and coercion represented by Bush-era "counterterrorism"—routinely supplements the new war lexicon with ever more expansive interpretations of executive prerogative. Continuation of the most far-reaching of these new extensions of power—the until recently secret drone-assassination program that resulted in the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen in Yemen in September of 2011—is all but assured now by the confluence of enhanced measures against transparency and bi-partisan political approval (Wilson and Cohen 2012). Meanwhile, the next stage in the evolution of "post-9/11" warfare threatens to be of the "preventive" kind with Iran (Greenwald 2012).

The new war lexicon is one symptom of the unprecedented expansion of executive power following the attacks of September 11. Such executive power was accompanied immediately by the development of a new vehicle for its manufacture and delivery, a sprawling executive bureaucracy that, early on, Vice President Dick Cheney referred to as the "dark side" of the new war and which journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin have called "Top Secret America" (2010). According to Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America comprises some 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies that individually work on "programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States." This massive bureaucracy is populated by a workforce of over 854,000 civil servants with top-secret security clearances, inclusive of janitorial staff. Its agency locations occupy a total of over 17 million square feet of U.S. real estate, in spaces ranging from a three billion dollar techno-fortress in Maryland to commercial suites in small-town industrial malls across the suburban U.S. Its activities include domestic wiretapping, international e-mail monitoring, and myriad other forms of cultivating "intelligence" under the aegis of "national security." The whole of this sprawling apparatus—close to one million personnel, Yottabytes¹ of server space for storing endless streams of domestic and international "intelligence," and the paramilitary technologies required to mobilize these elements against those deemed the enemy—falls within the administrative purview of the executive branch of U.S. government.

Hidden in plain sight: a sprawling bureaucracy designed to justify and deliver military violence—clothed in the new war lexicon—to the world. How might one critique this massive network of violence that has become so enmeshed in our contemporary geo-socio-political reality? Is there any hope for reversing the expansion of executive violence in the current political climate, in which the President enjoys minimal resistance to his most egregious uses of violence? How does exceptional violence become routine? Answers to these broad and difficult questions, derived as they are from the disorientingly vast and hyper-accelerated retrenchment of our current political situation, are best won through the broad strokes of what Slavoj Žižek calls "systemic" critique. For Žižek, looking squarely at interpersonal or subjective violences (e.g., torture, drone strikes), drawn as we may be by their gruesome and immediate appeal, distorts the critic's broader field of vision. For a fuller picture, one must pull one's critical focus back several steps to reveal the deep, objective structures that undergird the spectacular manifestations of everyday, subjective violence (Žižek 2008, 1-2). Immediately...