Where to From Here?^[1]

Daniel Ross

Speaking is an act that moves in the direction from present to future, and it is in the spirit implied by this formal characteristic that I want to say something today.

I

In spite of appearances the 20^th century was one of political agreement. Despite a hundred years of hot and cold wars, the conclusion remains unavoidable: democracy is the unsurpassable horizon of our time. This makes no sense if it refers only to representative parliamentarism, but is undeniable if we attend to what the word “democracy” actually says: the 20^th century was one of consensus—among liberals, nationalists, Marxists, anarchists, communists, socialists, and human rights advocates—that politics means the right of the people to determine its own existence. Even National Socialism claimed its authority flowed from the direct mutual communication between Führer and people. And democracy continues to be this unsurpassable horizon into the 21^st century, even though recent times have also witnessed the return of the repressed—the return, that is, of theocratic politics, both Christian and Islamic.

This consensus emerged out of the age of politics—a few hundred years old. By this I mean the rise of politics as the question of the people: that is, the question for the people, that they must direct themselves to ask; and the question of the nature of the people, whether national, racial, proletarian, or universally human. “Democracy” and “politics” have become so entwined that it is impossible to speak of one without implying the other. While many concede the age of politics and democracy is relatively recent, few admit what this also implies: that this age could end. But if this ever came to pass, if democracy or even politics should cease to be the overarching authorizing symbol for human action, this change will have already been accomplished before people become aware of it.

II

The direction of certain trends has in the last few decades become obvious. Most important is the relentless expansion and intensification of “globalization”—not only the penetration of capital into new markets, but the ever-increasing planetary integration of capital and technology. Globalization is a worldwide process, but this description tends to conceal that it is always a kind of war, a matter of struggle. Second, neoliberalism—the politico-economic strategy of globalization—is ever more firmly embedded in governmental practice around the world. Third, evidence that the global biological environment is substantially and negatively affected by human activity continues to be gathered. Fourth, in spite of the way this situation has unfolded, what is archaically called “the Left” has in the developed world found itself increasingly and paradoxically unable to resist these processes. Indeed, in the last few decades the Left has suffered a major decline in numbers and influence. Furthermore, even though they generally opposed those regimes within the Soviet orbit, it has become clear in hindsight that the Soviet Union functioned as an enabling symbol for the Western Left. And that its disappearance has left a vacuum.

One might think the consequence of these unsettling trends, for those unsettled by them, would be renewed effort to reflect upon and undo this decline. But although no doubt anxiety looms just below the surface, this has largely been repressed for fear of what it seems to imply: the death of hope. Leftist political theory has become enfeebled partly by the absence of a “model,” that is, by the fact that people may know very well what they are against, but are unable to articulate what, finally, they are for. Perhaps the days of models are over, but political ends are lodestars that guide action. How true this is has only become clear with today’s atrophy of political ends. But there is as little capacity to formulate effective political means. Beyond reactive reformism and anachronistic revolutionary daydreams the inability to enact or even imagine effective oppositional strategies is manifest. Compared with the successes of neoliberals, neoconservatives, and fundamentalists, the Left does not exist.

What is remarkable is the capacity not to notice this failure to exist. The Left is chained to a comforting hope that if they just keep plugging away at the dream, the public must sooner or later hear the call and awake. This addiction is fed by denial—the seemingly infinite capacity to project their own limited experience upon the world in general, a world that has already condemned them to the invisibility of shadows.

The first step to overcoming addiction is admitting you have a problem. What is lacking in this situation is an adequate grasp of the situation. It is a question of understanding the main game of power. The main game is not the geopolitical manoeuvring conducted through war and diplomacy. It is not even the immense economic heft of multinational corporations, although of course it is this too. For those concerned with globalization, neoliberalism, and environmental destruction, for those concerned with the question of democracy’s future, the true enemy is, I want to suggest, our experience—that is, the experience of the Western citizen today. The nature of contemporary experience is, by far, the greatest obstacle to any kind of social transformation and to any substantial change in global direction.

The Left has forgotten what fundamentalists and neoconservatives know, that today’s true battleground is collective experience. But, on the other hand, fundamentalists and neoconservatives, despite what they seem to espouse, have missed the second step in overcoming addiction: to recognize a power higher than themselves—not God, but the strength of globalization—that prevents them from reshaping the planet in their image. That is, fundamentalists and neoconservatives founder because they misinterpret the ills of contemporary life. Only a political thought that emerges out of a more adequate diagnosis of contemporary experience will have any capacity for prognosis—that is, have any idea what could be strategic or effective, let alone any idea, more fundamentally, of “what is to be done.”

This phenomenological-sounding imperative does not oppose thinking about structure, system, or capital. On the contrary, any thought that measures up to the question of experience today will be nothing other than an account of the way in which system and capital are inseparable from experience. The very possibility of a market, for instance, is conditional upon a certain character of experience. But “ideology” and “alienation,” insofar as these are intended as theoretical concepts rather than merely general notions, are no longer sufficient for this understanding, if they ever were.

Now I am totally prepared to concede the possibility that nothing can alter our current direction. Intellectual honesty requires the concession of this as a possibility. Perhaps, as Kurt Vonnegut recently claimed, things have been left until too late in the game.^[2] If so, if there is no future for democracy, then the dissatisfied have a choice: to keep pursuing the same pointless, quixotic strategies out of pure resentment; or to abandon the idea that there is an enemy to be defeated through political action. If that’s all there is, then let’s keep dancing. But if any other possibilities remain, they will only emerge from a thought and a practice that grapple with contemporary experience, in order to enact a new form of life.

The character of contemporary experience is complex, and I hope I can be forgiven for only taking a few small steps in this direction tonight. But we can immediately say, by way of example, that in contemporary Australia “democratic experience” refers to Australian Idol at least as much as it does to federal parliament. This is shown, first of all, by the difference between mandatory voting and voting as a telephonic consumer item, to be purchased early and often. Unlike much Australian politics, Australian Idol depends on, and creates, the desire to participate, and does so on a massive scale.

Experience, as intentional (in phenomenological terms), is always a matter of desire, of care. In the case of Australian Idol, the viewer cares enough to contribute to a hopefully satisfying outcome, even if they simultaneously experience the contrived character of this very desire. This artificiality may provoke cynicism or disgust but Australian Idol creates desire in spite of this. If Australian politics likewise generates cynicism and disgust this is surpassed only by indifference. In the United States the appearance of political desire, political care, is greater, but this appearance is largely the effect of the enormous amounts of capital and effort expended in marketing politics, concealing the utterly hollow core of democratic experience there too.

III

It is often argued that some nations or peoples are not ready for democracy, or not yet capable of it. Those opposing such an argument usually say, with justification, that this is normally only a pretext for some externally imposed authoritarianism, and that, on the contrary, all humanity shares the potential for democracy. Nevertheless let’s permit ourselves to take a look at the meaning of such an idea.

The Papua New Guinea constitution is a legacy left to the inhabitants after the 1975 withdrawal of the Australian colonial power. Unlike the constitutions of some Pacific islands it makes little concession to indigenous forms of decision-making, such as those grounded in tribal or chiefly authority. Some would say that these indigenous forms are more truly democratic—in the sense of consultative and participatory—than the representative systems imposed over them. Others would say that the traditional ways are variously authoritarian, exclusionary, patriarchal, and theocratic. In any case the 1975 PNG Constitution is an instrument for instituting the Westminster system more or less as it is implemented in developed nations.

Nevertheless the democratic character of PNG politics has frequently been questioned. Reasons for this include the fact political parties coalesce and dissolve with alarming frequency and, more importantly, with little relation to the electorate.^[3] Furthermore, the political system, it has been argued, is overshadowed by a cargo cult mentality common to both electors and elected, and what decides alliances and governments is treasure promised or obtained.

Such reasons provoke the thought that in PNG democracy exists only as a masquerade. Rather than judging this question, however, I will offer one example of PNG political practice. After the 2002 election nine losing candidates together called upon ex-Prime Minister Sir Rabbie Namiliu to resign. Did they allege corruption? In a way, yes, but of a singular kind. They claimed Sir Rabbie interfered with the counting of the ballots, a run of the mill accusation in many democracies. But what these nine candidates specifically alleged was that he used magical powers to cause “invisible objects” to tamper with ballot papers.^[4]

Now a situation where invisible objects magically interfere with ballot papers during the count is a situation parliamentary democracy is a priori incapable of coping with. No law can successfully defend against such interference. No monitoring can ensure the legitimacy of an election where invisible powers may be at work. This might not say much about whether democratic potential is a human universal. But it does say something about the idea of representative democracy itself. Formal democracies, based on rules and laws, are always also, without ever explicitly needing to state it, grounded in presuppositions about what kinds of experience are possible and what aren’t, about what the nature of the world is, and about what the nature of the experience of the world is.

Some would take this example as saying something about the relation between democracy and rationality, or democracy and the progress of reason—to conclude, on that basis, that democracy, or our kind of democracy, is appropriate for us but not so appropriate for them. I have no interest in such conclusions, however, first of all because even though democracy involves reasoning, it is not a search for truth, but a way of organizing the expression of collective desire, leading toward the possibility of decision. Secondly, such conclusions are too sure that “our” experience continues to be suited to the systems of political expression currently in use, too sure that the “democracy” of Western nations has not itself become an even greater masquerade.

What I intend by this example is to show that the notion of democracy implicitly raises experience, individual and collective, as a question. One thinks of what Nietzsche called the “morality of custom,” that millennia-long labor and violence humanity perpetrates upon itself to become calculable and reliable, and therefore able to make political promises.^[5] This suggests that the question of democratic potential is a question of culture. I would prefer, however, to avoid the word “culture,” because it is a concept that in its familiarity tends to obscure rather than reveal. Bernard Stiegler offers another way in. I should mention that Stiegler also takes a starring role in The Ister, a film I take the opportunity of recommending to you without reservation.^[6]

IV

Before dealing with Stiegler’s theories, I want to take note of the way he opens his book, To Love, To Love Oneself, To Love Ourselves.^[7] Stiegler begins with a dedication to those who voted for the French National Front, to whom, in his words, “I feel close.”^[8] He feels close to them because National Front voters suffer, and they cause him to suffer, in his distance and separation from them. But not only in his distance and separation, that is, not only in his difference from them. It is also that he suffers with them from that which makes them suffer. That which makes them suffer makes him suffer too, differently. Stiegler’s dedication seems to be saying that, however distanced he is from National Front voters, they are, at least, sufferers, and that this exposes that they do, in fact, desire, that is, care. Stiegler here shows an uncommon sensitivity to the interface of politics and experience.

Stiegler is concerned with the process of individuation. In The Ister Stiegler explains the way in which being human is essentially a matter of adoption. He offers himself as an example. He has a German name, his ancestors were German, and he is, therefore, tied to this German past. Part of his facticity, part of the becoming of who he is, comes from this German past. At the same time he was born in France. And, therefore, not only German but French history is also part of this becoming, by adoption. The past, for Stiegler, whether French or German (or Greek or American), is not something simply natural or true, but always, necessarily, a matter of adoption.

This adoption means there is no I that is not part of a we, a group. “Being part of,” however, is not only a matter of belonging, but is something technical. Adoption is possible because human beings can transmit memory between generations. As Stiegler puts it, humans die but their histories remain.^[9] Custom, tradition, philosophy, science: all these are made possible by the techniques that transmit memory between generations. The important point is not that this belonging to a we is artificial or unnatural. What matters is that it is a process of becoming, of becoming the individual I am constantly on the way toward. That is, it is not that I am an individual, but that I am constantly in the course of my individuation.

What is true of the I, however, is equally true of the we. It is not that France exists, Germany exists, Australia exists, and that therefore there are the French, the Germans, and the Australians. All these groups have an essentially fictive origin, a beginning in a decision or a myth that is always only on the way to becoming true retrospectively and fabulously. In Australia this fictive moment is partly settlement, partly Eureka stockade, partly federation, partly Gallipoli. Borders change, peoples change, but this is not the same as saying that the group, the we, does not exist. It exists as becoming, as the process of its own individuation.

The I essentially adopts its past and its group, or groups. But, equally, the we is nothing but its composite Is. I and we are engaged in a process of mutual becoming. Between them, then, there must be a medium. Language, say. As a child, I adopt the language I learn to speak. This ties me to the group of those with whom I speak, but equally to those to whom I may never speak. The language, the medium, is the means for the individuation of the I, but also for the individuation of the we. At the same time language, and all the other media of adoption and transmission, are engaged in their own process of unfolding, engaged in their own individuation. I, we, and medium are not separate objects, to be grasped and studied in isolation. Rather, all three are only insofar as they are becoming, insofar as they are all necessary and connected parts of the processes of individuation.

V

That individuation is a process of adoption, that it is somehow technical, means it has its own history, its own changing conditions. What concerns Stiegler is how the processes of individuation today are different to what they were yesterday. Tools and language are followed by the inventions of writing, the printing press, radio, cinema, television.^[10] Technology and science were in earlier centuries an element of “culture.” Today, however, technoscience (which is still individuated) has achieved a scale and momentum that means it has detached itself from all the other systems of collective individuation, which are left always reacting to what constantly overtakes them. Stiegler is concerned with what today has gone awry in these processes. The word he uses to describe one important aspect of what has gone wrong is “synchronization.”

Individuation can occur over centuries or millennia, in almost undetectable ways. But the history that spans the distance from flint axe to television is the history of the expanding capacity to transmit meaning to larger and larger masses of people more and more efficiently. This culminates in today’s reality where, during the opening ceremony of the Olympic games, hundreds of millions of people across the planet are simultaneously able to witness the same “live” event. This is an enormously powerful co-ordination of human experience. The meaning of the synchronized experience of those who witnessed September 11 unfold live on screen is still playing itself out. But even when it is not the Olympics or September 11, even when we just sit down to watch Oprah, a mass synchronization is occurring. A century earlier Oswald Spengler already noticed the synchronizing effect of the rise of the newspaper, which resulted in, as he puts it, a “caricature of freedom of thought.”^[11] But the synchronization possible today has no precedent.

Now I said before that individuation is a matter of adoption. But adoption is not only a matter of adopting the past (my French or German or Australian past). It is equally a matter of adopting the new. In that sense, adoption means as much as consumption. And what synchronization means is the increasing organization of consumption, the creation of the mass desire to adopt the new. A camera phone, for instance, or a whitening toothpaste.^[12] If millions watch the Olympics, after all, this is only made possible by the potential for generating advertising revenue. And this potential stems from what synchronization makes possible—mass marketing, which means the mass co-ordination of desire and, therefore, of consumption. That humanity is open to this co-ordination emerges from the very same characteristic that individuates us—the potential for adoption, for becoming. And this co-ordination of consumption, in turn, permits economies of scale in production.

The objection is obvious. Is not individuation by definition different for everybody so that, even if we all watch the same TV program at the same time, each person’s experience is unique? Having an experience in common does not make us identical. No doubt. But phenomenology also tells us something else. It says there is no such thing as raw sensation, no experience, that is, that does not involve the active work of experiencing. And that means all experience involves an interaction between the experiences I have previously had and the experience I am having right now. When I sit down to watch TV I am the person I have become thus far, through the experiences I have had so far. So, though millions receive the very same signal I do, their experience is not identical to my own. Right from the beginning experience is a product of how our individual stock of gathered experience interacts with what is received.

It is only with the invention of recording that we see the degree to which this is true.^[13] Take a symphony, for example. Before sound recording it was possible to hear a symphony more than once, but each time was necessarily a unique performance. After the invention of sound recording it becomes possible to hear the identical signal again and again. What this has made clear is that each time we listen to a recording the experience is different. We attend to different aspects. This possibility of attending comes from the fact that experience is always intending toward the world. A selection occurs—I notice the violins, say. The criterion for this selection is what individuates me: my previous experiences and memories; who I have been up until this moment I am living now.

Stiegler, then, is not simply saying that because millions watch Oprah at the same time they are therefore sharing an identical experience, and become the same person. Individuation means the opposite. But it is not just that each person experiences differently, but that we experience differently because we have led different lives, because we are individuated. Fundamentalism, for example, can be understood as a symptom of the process of globalization, but it is still individuated: it is still this fundamentalism, based on this book rather than that; still connected to the singular history of this book; the history of its interpretation, across centuries, in theory and practice. But if everyone tends to watch the same programs all the time then gradually their memories converge and narrow. Our individuations increasingly resemble each other, and thus, when we watch TV, that in us which does the selecting will also tend to converge.

It is a tendential argument. The greater the degree of synchrony, the longer the period of time over which this occurs, the more it becomes not only a matter of one shared experience. The memories brought to bear in this experience will also be in common. With this asymptotic convergence, each individual experience of the present becomes more like everyone else’s. Television tends, that is, to make you conform to an average.^[14] This implies a loss of freedom, which always means—as Stiegler puts it (echoing Spengler)—“a loss of the freedom to think.”^[15]

This is, in fact, the slow process of the destruction of individuation, for both I and we. If technics is the possibility of memory, it is also the possibility of forgetting, and today’s synchronization is the exponential intensification of this possibility. This is shown, for example, in the forgetting of ritual, which is, after all, a medium of individuation. Rituals of cooking, eating, making clothes, dancing, birth, and death, simply disappear. What is thereby forgotten are ways of being an individual, being a collective. What we fail to inherit, what we cease to adopt, seldom returns. This is not a question of nostalgia, but of recognizing a tendency. It is easy, as this process unfolds, to not perceive anything is lost or forgotten, to think the new merely replaces the obsolete, without cost. This delusion is made possible by the character of the process itself, and by the fact that in each case some consumer object is immediately there to replace the supposedly obsolescent.

In this way I and we are dissolved into a general they. This violence against the I and the we produces subtle and not so subtle unintended consequences. The destruction of individuation means the tendential destruction of my very existence. It is this tendency that makes today’s democracy a masquerade, that means elections are largely an effect of capital and marketing, divorced from life. The violent assault upon individuation is one crucial meaning of globalization, and especially of globalization’s future.

Loneliness, boredom, and idiocy abound. These are symptoms of, in Stiegler’s terms, the loss of “primordial narcissism.”^[16] The destruction of individuation means the destruction of the capacity, individually and collectively, for self-love. Narcissism, for Stiegler, is not just a symptom of the egotism produced by contemporary capitalism; it is, more fundamentally, the necessity for I and we to have a sense of existence, of being individual, of mattering. And this loss of individual and collective narcissism, this loss of a sense and a love of self, opens a pathway to transgression, to those violent acts by which one tries desperately to re-discover or, rather, to assert one’s existence, individually and collectively. This, today, is visible everywhere.

VI

In the remaining time I want to give two examples of the power and impotence of synchronization, of its meaning for political experience. Both exemplify the violence against individuation, and the consequences of this violence. Both come out of Iraq. The first is the scandal over Abu Ghraib. Understanding the scale of this scandal means understanding that no testimony from prisoners or guards would have mattered. Only because photographs were broadcast on TV could it be the event it became.

What is torture? It is not merely one person inflicting pain upon another. If I wound someone in battle, legally this is explicitly not torture, even if my intention is to cause suffering. The ordinary conduct of war is exempt from being considered torture. The entire legal discourse on torture could be seen as an attempt to assert and establish this boundary, less to prevent torture than to make war permissible. Torture, then, is caught in all the contradictions involved in the idea of the “laws of war.” The attempts by the Bush Administration to define torture out of existence are, more than anything else, an attempt to re-define the battlefield of the War on Terror as wide enough to include Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo if not the whole world, and thereby to define what occurs in such places as merely the permissible work of war.

Legally, the definition of torture depends upon the circumstances in which pain is inflicted. Specifically, torture is not an end in itself. Rather, it is conduct perpetrated against somebody for another end, for the end of acquiring information or exacting compliance. What makes torture impermissible is that it is painful conduct imposed on somebody already captured or in custody. Once captured, once off the battlefield, according to the laws of war, I have rights, and that includes not only the right to be spared suffering, but the right not to communicate with my captors.

Torture, then, is a form of communication, an act of communication that intends to provoke correspondence. When I torture, I am saying you must speak or act in a certain way, and that if you do, I may stop torturing you. A systematic use of torture is cybernetic, a system for sending and receiving information. But it is not abstract, a mere exchange of packets of meaning. It does not leave those involved untouched. Rather, it involves its participants in the whole of their being as embodied beings, and it operates through the medium of trauma.

VII

Today it is common to speak of both physical and psychological trauma, and the latter is usually understood by analogy with the former. Psychic trauma, that is, is usually explained with an image of the mind as a bordered object, just as the body is bordered by its skin. Raw sensation passes through the surface of the mind on its way to deeper consciousness. It is imagined that in quotidian experience the mind filters perception, the mind’s surface functioning as a protective gatekeeper that “copes” with raw sensation by admitting or excluding it.

In psychological trauma, however, the magnitude of a particular experience is too great, causing it to break through the protective psychic “skin” to “flood” consciousness in an uncontrolled and damaging way. The violence of psychic trauma is thus of sensations forcefully penetrating and damaging our psychic being. The “flood” of intense raw sensation induces shockwaves that continue to be felt and to affect us long after the experience itself.

This understanding of psychic trauma by analogy with physical trauma, however, may do more to conceal than to reveal its true character. Instead of thinking about psychic trauma through an essentially spatial metaphor we would do better to understand it temporally.

When we receive sensation this is never “raw” data, but always immediately involved with the work of interpretation. It is not that there is a barrier, a mental skin, through which perception passes on its way to consciousness. Rather all experience immediately involves our own perceptual activity, the work of comprehension, selection, assimilation.

What is trauma, then, if not the forceful rupturing of psychic skin? The work of perceptual activity consists in comprehending experience, in grasping experience, on the basis of what we have already experienced—that is, either as something familiar, something assimilable to the flow of remembered experience, or else as something new or strange. When the unfamiliar happens, something not found in my stock of previous experience, a different kind of work must be accomplished, accommodating the new and unfamiliar. This possibility of accepting and grasping new experience is the human capacity for novelty.

It is not that traumatic experiences, then, rupture our protective psychic barrier. Rather, they are experiences so difficult to assimilate that there is a significant delay in accommodating the shock of the new. It is a question of time. The traumatic event, if it can be accommodated, cannot be accommodated immediately or quickly. The work of comprehending and sorting experience continues long after the event. And thus the traumatic event is finally incorporated as ordinary memory, if it ever is, much later than a merely novel experience.

Such an understanding of trauma does not see it as “raw.” If I place a loaded gun at your head, there is the potential for psychic trauma. The awareness of the possibility of imminent death excites the mind, forcing it to try and grasp a situation that is more than merely unfamiliar. A gun at your head places you in a position to perceive the opening of the black hole of the end of experience. It tends to force upon the imagination the imminent possibility of the end of experience. Yet the difficulty of accommodating this means you may not even comprehend your own perceptions or their significance, and thus the experience may reverberate across your future memory as trauma.

Psychic trauma always involves interpretation. A revolver at my head means nothing unless I grasp what a gun is and the potential it contains. It is not the raw sensation that is traumatic, but the perception of the significance of that fact. And it is just possible that the twelfth time one undergoes such an experience, it becomes a dramatic but non-traumatic event, because the experience, just as potentially fatal, is nevertheless somewhat familiar and assimilable.

Even the experience of direct physical torture may vary depending upon the previous course of my life. The body has the capacity to be trained to endure physical extremes, through the discipline of repetition. Marathon runners, for instance, train the body to function in situations where it ordinarily responds to halt that functioning. This potential to discipline one’s reaction to physical sensation shows that even the experience of physical pain or injury is not raw but accommodated in particular ways. This capacity for discipline shows that mind and body are not as distinguishable as the distinction between physical and psychical trauma suggests. The overall perceptual apparatus of the human being, let us say, always works on experience, even where that experience is violent or damaging.

VIII

Torture is communication between torturer and tortured. Trauma is experience that cannot be quickly or easily accommodated into the stock of previous experience. What this amounts to is that between torturer and victim a language is unfolding itself. It is not a language of “equal” partners, obviously. This is not an ideal speech situation. Yet without presupposing the possibility of being understood, torture is impossible. The victim must see or presume the gun is loaded for it to function as a sign with the capacity to induce psychic trauma. Torture victims must grasp that the pain they feel is telling them something more than just their body is suffering. For torture to be effective, the victim must understand a demand is being made.

But, surprisingly, this means the torturer must understand the victim. What is remarkable about Abu Ghraib is the degree to which this fact was grasped by the perpetrators. Torture—the inducement of trauma to acquire information or exact compliance—is not the same for everyone. With this in mind techniques for inducing trauma were devised for Abu Ghraib specific to the victims. Techniques of humiliation or degradation were invented with the thought that for these people, for these Muslims, such experiences are inassimilable to their understanding and experience of masculinity, inassimilable to the way in which they have been individuated. Tossing a copy of the Koran into a toilet, for instance. Many forms of torture may be widely if not universally effective, but the point is that effort and imagination were expended in the invention of techniques based on the thought that these people will find this experience intolerable. And this indicates the recognition that what is at stake is the unfolding of a mutual language. It is not only a question of forcing the victim to comprehend what I am doing. It also involves my effort to understand the language of the victim.

What is unfolded between torturer and victim, the medium they (unequally) produce together, comes to possess its own momentum, granting to both a new set of experiences to be assimilated to the stock of memory. It becomes part of the individuation of each. Torturer and tortured are witnesses to the same private and intimate scene. That they witness this scene from vastly different standpoints does not alter that between them a secret knowledge is shared and communicated. In this mutuality they become bound to one another, in spite of themselves, as long as memory lasts. They are individuated as separate Is, but also as a common we. This may be a clue to the motivation, beyond the call of duty, that leads people to torture, to enjoy torturing. Furthermore, if we accept the crystallizing and radicalizing power of physical torture on the ideas of Sayyid Qutb and Ayman Zawahiri—that is, on the intellectual progenitors of Osama bin Laden—then September 11 and its infinitely proliferating consequences can be seen in a new light, as the continuing expression of a mutual language unfolding between the fundamentalists and the infidels, partners bound to one another by the most intimate violence.

Abu Ghraib, then, is a chapter of this unfolding dialogue. But for us, for our experience, what is important about Abu Ghraib is that a private communication becomes part of public experience. Or at least seems to. We are all witnesses to the images of the events of that prison. But only to the images. To the extent such images are novel to each individual’s experience, they require processing and accommodation. To the extent they confirm our past experience they are merely assimilated. But perhaps what makes Abu Ghraib significant is the “feeling” we have all jointly witnessed something. In fact we have not. We have neither experienced nor witnessed an event of torture. All we did was watch TV.

Each person who sees a photograph on the news receives the same signal. We each experience the image in our own particular way in our own particular stream of sensation, as one more element in our individuated medium of accumulated memories. But what is imparted tends toward becoming a new common experience of the they. This is not the medium that unfolds between torturer and victim. The mass audience imagines they are placed into this private medium (through their capacity for sympathy with either or both parties), but in fact they remain outside, in the common world of synchronized, televised experience. What we see is not a lie, but it is deception, delusion. We are witnesses to nothing.

IX

Those opposing the occupation of Iraq, opposing it in violent deed, know the images from Abu Ghraib are insufficient to call the mass of Westerners to their notion of conscience. For these people, such images are further proof of the pleasure taken by America in humiliating Arabs. Some in the West will be troubled, but the secret or not so secret pleasure taken in the other’s suffering is common and predictable.

At the same time those violently opposing the occupation are aware the global communication system holds the potential to synchronize experience on a massive scale. And this means the possibility to determine the experience, the common history, of entire populations, and thus to influence the future of those populations. The capacity for a small group to have this influence is unprecedented, and is being seized upon in a new way in the fight for the future of Iraq.

What does it mean to take someone hostage, to give notice that at a specified future time they will be killed, to take a knife at the designated moment and saw their head off, to place the video imagery of this act on the internet and, within hours, to have this broadcast on television across the planet? It does not mean America will leave Iraq. It does not mean an Islamic state will emerge in Iraq. And it is not merely revenge. What does it mean to announce that something will happen, and then to carry out that action in plain view of the public? Is it an attempt to place every individual aware of this sequence into the position of victim? Or is it to make every witness of this situation responsible for it?

When South Korea goes to bed assured things are being done to secure the release of their citizen-hostage, and when they awake to find on their screens the hysterical screams of the family of the murdered victim, the goal is to force each viewer into a position of responsibility. This does not mean each will take that responsibility upon themselves in the same way or at all. Many may refuse to do so. But by opening up the gap between the announcement of a future horrific homicide and the carrying out of that act, the individual is placed into the temporality of the event. Being placed into the before and after of a murder, we are placed within a narrative, composed in the language of utmost responsibility, of the mortal fate of some body. The global communication system is being harnessed to create an experience that demands something from the audience.

In November Michael Ignatieff published an opinion in the New York Times about this series of decapitations, titled “The Terrorist as Auteur.”^[17] Ignatieff is utterly aware of the power to be derived from bringing decapitation together with the system that links video camera, internet, and global television broadcast. He is aware too of the way in which this is a mirror of Abu Ghraib. And, finally, he is aware that the sense conveyed by the decapitations is a matter of responsibility, of making clear that, as he says, “there are no innocent foreigners.” And yet, at the same time, he asks why we need to understand what is being done and why it is being done. Can we not simply draw a line, he asks, call these acts evil, and act accordingly? But, of course, everything depends on what acting accordingly means, especially as Ignatieff realizes these video killings are a lure, tempting us into the same bottomless pit. The point is that, like it or not, we cannot avoid hearing the call of responsibility, and to speak of drawing lines with the word “evil” is merely one way of responding to this call.

X

It is frequently claimed that those who subscribe to the most radically violent forms of Islam are motivated by hatred and contempt for modern Western society. This is usually expressed as hatred of “Western values.” But it is not particular values that are hated, but the very idea of values as such. A world where one has this value or that, this preference or that, and more particularly a world where no value is transcendent, where there are only values, is antithetical to the idea of religious truth. What is hated is the conjunction of value and desire, where values are a matter of choice, of the value we give them because of the degree to which they conform to the desires we have. To the fundamentalist this is a doctrine of sin.

The West is despised because it has produced an immensely powerful system that not only disseminates values, but invents and co-ordinates individual desire on a mass scale, all in the name of freedom, that is, of consumption. And this system is the system of mass communication. It is the system for the transmission of mass advertising, the mass delivery of experience, experience of that which we should desire. And this system for proliferating the desire to consume naturally proliferates as well the adoption of whatever values promote this desire.

At bottom, all religious objections to the contemporary world are rejections of the world produced by the global system for disseminating experience. This system infinitely homogenizes desire and, yet, is equally responsible for its infinite relativization. Any particular desire for any particular thing is legitimate, and is legitimated by the fact that others are always already succumbing to the very same desire. In place of individual responsibility before God comes the mass market of desire.

Is it not the goal of religious extremists to violently force each to take proper responsibility in the face of God, rather than in the face of what is received in common via systems of communication technology? The desire to provoke responsibility is the desire to re-individuate, or to de-synchronize. This violent transgression is an attempt to assert their existence in the face of the destruction of individuation. And it is, as well, an attempt to challenge “ours,” to force the question: “Are you truly an I and a we, or merely the Western they?” If their hatred is something more than a reaction to American deeds in the Middle East, if it has a meaning that is in some way religious, then it is a reaction in favor of each person’s religious responsibility.

And thus the very effectiveness of a strategy such as globally broadcast decapitation may be its undoing. With such strategies, with such attempts to force upon us supposedly inassimilable experience, the perpetrators risk missing that on TV in the end everything is assimilable and nothing is traumatic. Rather than making each a witness to their own responsibility, we learn to cope with more and more. The experience of watching the decapitation of a human being becomes a kind of advertisement, producing its own kind of desire.

This is not the false claim that adolescents who watch horror movies become murderers in adulthood. It is that, as an event shared simultaneously by millions, what occurs is simply the production of the next element in the unfolding medium of mass communication. For a moment each individual is placed into the temporality of one person’s singular fate. But it may be that the result is not the creation of witnesses to an execution but simply the production of another universal reference point for common experience. And, with this new shared element in our mutual language of non-communication, each becomes by degrees more violent in their capacity to accept, to ignore, to desire, as an audience, as a citizenry, that which is received by all together.

But, at the same time, it is not only that we become more violent, for this is a matter, equally, of violence against us. The synchronized transmission of “shocking” or “traumatic” imagery may have consequences but, in the end, just contributes to that destruction of individuation and responsibility that the fundamentally religious—and all of us—suffer. Fundamentalists and neoconservatives share a sense of this suffering, and respond by trying to transform collective experience. These attempts, however, necessarily fail, because they are unable to come to grips with the problem. In the age of “live” synchronization, cultural solutions always arrive too late.

The experiential consequences of the technics of synchronization force with renewed urgency the question of the being that we ourselves are, and of the future of that being. If de-individuation is an essentially technical phenomenon, then no “cultural” response, no “politicization” of the way we receive or negotiate what is transmitted, can ever lead to any transformation of experience. Cultural studies is not the god that can save us. If the technics of consumption evolves so quickly as to overtake our capacity to grasp the sense of our own existence, then our potential for having a future is eclipsed. The only recourse against this eclipse is the feeling that the suffering inherent to senseless existence is an unsustainable form of life. But whether anything other than the perpetuation of this suffering is possible, whether another kind of life can happen—it is to this question that our experience, today, directs us.

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Blackjelly review of the film: The Ister