Accumulating Insecurity: Violence and Dispossession in the Making of Everyday Life

6 Spectacle of Terror, Spectacle of Security

141 CHAPTER SIX Spectacle of Terror, Spectacle of Security Nicholas De Genova In his “Address to the Nation” on the evening of September 11, 2001, and persistently reiterated thereafter, George W. Bush enunciated the self-congratulatory litany by which we were to understand that “the terrorists” were obsessed with “America” and targeted it because it is “the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.” Soon this claim was embellished with the contention that “these people can’t stand freedom; they hate our values; they hate what America stands for” (Bush 2001a). The events of September 11, 2001, enabled the Bush administration and the full mass-mediated panoply of spectacular public discourse to repeatedly and extravagantly insist to the world that “everything changed”; indeed, that nothing would ever be the same again (De Genova , n.d.). In the years following these events, there has indisputably been a radical and rigorous material and practical overhaul of the U.S. sociopolitical order, predicated upon precisely this elaborate scaffolding of distinctly metaphysical premises, propositions, and inferences about “terror” and its changeling , counterterror, which were now purportedly engaged in nothing less than a total global war, without limit, without borders, and apparently without end. That the Homeland Security State, by its own account, entails “the most extensive reorganization of the federal government in the past fifty years,” according to the National Strategy for Homeland Security, is merely the material and practical verification of the more decisive strategic reconfiguration, which has proclaimed: “The U.S. government has no greater mission” than “securing the American homeland . . . from terrorist attacks,” a new mandate that has furthermore been confirmed as “a permanent mission” (usohs 2002, vii, 1, 4). The ascendancy of the Homeland Security State therefore signals a momentous new and ongoing process of state formation in the United States (De Genova 2007). 142 • NICHOLAS DE GENOVA Indeed, in its essentials, this metaphysics of antiterrorism has in fact been reiterated and reanimated under the presidency of Barack Obama. In the Obama administration’s National Security Strategy, we are reminded that the events of September 11, 2001, revealed “the dark side of this globalized world” and authorized “fighting a war against a far-reaching network of hatred and violence” (White House 2010, 1, 4; see also De Genova 2010b). SECURITIZING EVERYDAY LIFE However, in the face of this new “war”—this monumental struggle against evil itself, in Bush’s phrase—the commander-in-chief’s injunctions to the citizenry from the outset were consistently and remarkably quotidian. “Americans are asking: What is expected of us?” Bush ventriloquized, with the immediate reply , “I ask you to live your lives, and hug your children” (Bush 2001f, September 20, 2001). He went on to list a series of other modest, even pedestrian, requests : do not single out anyone for “unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith”; make charitable donations for the victims of the attacks; cooperate with the fbi; be patient with delays and inconveniences caused by more stringent security measures, for a very long time to come; continue to “participate” confidently in the U.S. economy; and pray for the victims, for the military, and “for our great country.” In short, leave the war in the hands of the experts (including the prosecution/persecution of suspected enemies [see De Genova 2007]), submit to the authority of the antiterrorist security state, combine religious devotion with nationalist and militaristic acquiescence , work hard, spend money without inhibitions, and above all, just “live your lives”—which is to say, conform to the dreary lifeless conventions of an already alienated everyday life. The demand for a dutiful and docile (and now, patriotic, even heroic) submission to the terrifyingly mundane business-as-usual of alienated labor and joyless consumption has to be recognized as the covert yet resplendently overt “truth” of the spectacle of terror, the antiterrorist regime of the new Homeland Security State, and its official “state of emergency” (promulgated by Bush on September 14, 2001, and never subsequently discontinued; see De Genova 2010b). The spectacle of “terrorism,” however, electrified the overall sense that the everyday—if consistently disappointing, universally dissatisfying, and in general, excruciatingly boring—was now to become a sign that could trigger both a nostalgia for a putatively “lost” sense of safety and comfort, and a permanent if ineluctable sense of being imperiled by an elusive menace. Baudrillard notes incisively: Spectacle of Terror and...