Spectacular Bodies and Political Knowledge: 9/11 Cultures and the Problem of Dissent

The problem of dissent from wars on terror, as many have noted, is the problem of dissent in especially dangerous times, when the usual national distinctions in recognizing worthiness of protection from violence are exacerbated by the 9/11 attacks and the continued fueling of fears of terrorism in the US. As a result, critics have sought to identify the conditions under which political demands for the protection of targeted others become possible in such a climate. Spectacle and visual culture, so central to the impact both of 9/11 and wars on terror, have been privileged in these inquiries, many of which pose a version of the question, in Judith Butler’s terms, of “what media will let us know and feel ... at the limits of representation as it is currently cultivated and maintained” (PL 151). At stake is recognizing in the other a fundamental human vulnerability that, in contexts of current wars on terror, can help US citizens disengage from nationally framed ways of seeing and thus “return [us] to a sense of ethical outrage . . . in the name of an Other” (150). One prominent hope is that spectacles of those within the nation, violently and lethally unmoored from expected protections on 9/11, might constitute the representations that can pressure hegemonic ways of seeing the targets of US war on terror. Rather than prompting the desire for vengeance or the yearning for protection at any cost, the experience of egregious exposure to violence within the nation could lead to ethical–political recognitions of the victims of US violence.¹

My book project, “Spectacular Bodies and Political Knowledge: 9/11 Cultures and the Problem of Dissent,” foregrounds the relation between problems and possibilities of dissent from wars on terror, on the one hand, and 9/11 representations of the US body unprotected from egregious violence, on the other. Certainly, the potential in the latter representations to produce ethical identifications with targets of US foreign wars on terror means disengaging them from nationalist “us and them” frames for seeing bodies as worthy of protection. At the same time, I argue, in the course of the last decade, representations of the 9/11 body in mortal peril animate another kind of ethical contest: between recognitions of shared vulnerability which ground dissent from state violence, and recognitions of distinctions in domestic protection by the state from the state. The latter ways of seeing hijack the former when spectators see evidence in the imperiled domestic body for their own protection by the state from the state.

These ways of seeing the body unprotected from violence within the nation become visible, and thus available for critical scrutiny, when 9/11 spectacles take their significance in the context of domestic as well as foreign wars on terror. In such contexts, these meanings betray, I argue, apprehensions of a particularly virulent version of sovereign state power, in which the state’s normative exceptional powers take precedence over all other structural modes of power and are immune to political challenges to them. Deriving from anachronistic but entrenched twentieth-century myths of naturalized US citizenship, apprehensions of being at risk from such state power have vivid symptoms in the meanings attributed to images of people falling from the towers. These figures, I argue, are arbitrarily assimilated to familiar categories for those exposed to violent state power in both national and international terms. In the archive of visual and print culture that reproduces these images over time, important critical conversations develop about the function of the body perceived as target of domestic state violence in hegemonic political imaginaries, in discourses of dissent from illegal state power, and in political hopes for democratic citizenship.

In the framing and reframing of the falling people and in the multiple visual and discursive texts that participate in the issues affiliated with them, dissent from US wars on terror is predicated on critically illuminating how the domestic body in extreme peril anchors particular state fantasies of power. As a consequence, recasting meanings for such bodies is pivotal both to the unsettling of these fantasies and...