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Murder in the Simulacrum: Bin Laden, Unbelievable Deaths and Depictions of Legal Exceptionality by Binoy Kampmark

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Murder in the Simulacrum: Bin Laden, Unbelievable Deaths and Depictions of Legal Exceptionality

 Read original article at: C Theory
Binoy Kampmark

 

Yes, the Cathars held the material world to be evil and bad, created by demons. At the same time, they put their faith in God, the holy and the possibility of perfection.
- Jean Baudrillard, Der Spiegel Interview, 2002.

The enemy is our own question embodied
And he will hound us, and we will hound him to the same end
- Theodor Däubler

A Time Magazine issue released immediately after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, shows the figure of the al Qaeda leader with a red cross marked on his face. Erasure, liquidation, a figure expunged. The magazine issue strikes a note of triumphalism — the United States had finally gotten its man in the preferred state: dead. But this was no conventional death. Nothing regarding bin Laden’s deaths (for he has died several times) has been ‘conventional’. From the moment the Twin Towers were attacked on September 11, 2011 and assimilated into the symbolic language of apocalyptic terrorism, the entire ‘war’ (itself necessarily a questionable state) became an image, be it through the terrorist response itself, or the reaction of the security state. The execution he was administered was not the equivalent of a head on a stake outside the Tower of London. Nor did it resemble the display of the Anabaptist Jan Bockelson’s remains, exhibited in cages hung from St. Lambert’s Church, Münster in 1536 as a reminder of what happens to those who challenge a powerful order. It was a digitalised public execution that was filmed, programmed, and streamed live to the White House. The only thing missing in the images of a stunned Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and fellow grim faces in the situation room were the mandatory additions viewers bring to see a film: buckets of popcorn, super sized soft drinks. Pizza, however, was provided.

The very execution was engineered in circumstances of controlled deception. From the moment of its planning, the mission to kill bin Laden was concealed from both ally and foe alike. The Pakistani authorities may well have been kept in the dark till the penultimate assault on the military compound harbouring the leader. [1] Left reeling, the Foreign Ministry could only claim that the information American forces had obtained had come from their offices. “It is important to highlight that taking advantage of much superior and technological assets, [the] CIA exploited the intelligence leads given by us to identify and reach Osama bin Laden.” [2] That he had already been declared dead on numerous occasions prior to his killing on May 1 also showed on the one hand the irrelevance of the revelation, and on the other, the dangers to the credibility of the US security forces. What is proposed here is a detailed examination of that death, its meaning, its relevance, and its representation in the broader technological scape of modern war and its intersections with justice. How can the digitised murder of a designated terrorist be framed within the context of modern justice?
The exceptional death

Within a democratic context, or to be more exact, in a context where the rule of law is said to apply, doctrines of exceptionality have been carved out. [3] Legal purgatory is the site in history in which revisions, modifications and abridgments can be made to a subject’s rights to reflect the nature of that emergency and the threat. This “state of exception” is a juridical-political category where illegality and legality blur before the justification of emergency. [4] The nature of such an approach is reflected by legalistic arguments put forth by advocates of torture who have effectively enhanced its use in a discursive manner precisely because expectations in terms of security can no longer be “mapped”. [5] States can, in that sense, deal in the currency of torture, the erosion of the subject’s will [6]. The global manhunt for an exceptional terrorist, extraordinary rendition or illegal interventions are based not, as theorists M. Hardt and A. Egri explain, “on a priori framework, moral or legal, but only a posteriori, based on its results.” [7]

Bin Laden effectively became a constituted species of homo sacer, a figure who follows a trend in many societies where various offenders are privileged by labels of exceptionalism that allow for their eradication. For “here was an object called by this solemn adjective, homo sacer, which might be violated without any nefas [deadly crime]: a man whom anyone might slay with impunity.” [8] Bin Laden, like his followers, were the exceptions that had to be targeted in a global war, all of them “like ticking time bombs, set to go off without warning.” There could be no waiting before “perils” as they drew closer. [9]

Students of the evolution of that term find that “sacer” was rendered exceptional from the idea of the sacred — the sacrum — beings or entities considered to be the property of a deity. The killing with impunity of a designated homo sacer was an atavistic throwback in which such a figure is considered an object of taboo, a being to be disposed of without legal penalty. Biologically, such a subject remains human, but legally, he exists as a non-person who can be struck down and killed. Such a being is “cursed and consecrated at the same moment.” [10]

 

Read rest of article at C Theory

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures in the School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning, RMIT University, Melbourne.

India Is Burning: How Rapid Growth Is Destroying Its Environment and Future

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Akash Kapur

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This post is adapted from Akash Kapur’s India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (Riverhead Books).

From The Atlantic

India Is Burning: How Rapid Growth Is Destroying Its Environment and Future

When I first moved back to India, in the winter of 2003, after more than a decade in America, I never thought I would live in the countryside. My wife and I had been living in New York; we liked the energy, the nightlife and variety, of a big city.

We quickly discovered, though, that Indian cities were unlivable–crowded and noisy and polluted, they were no place to raise a family. So we decided to stay, with our two boys, in the countryside outside the South Indian town of Pondicherry, the area where I had grown up.

We liked our new life. The countryside had its rhythms; it made us feel safe, far from the chaos of urban India.

Summers were dry and quiet, with a hot wind that emptied roads and public spaces. Winters were wet and then cool, monsoon downpours followed by a clear, clean light.

The familiarity, the predictability, were comforting. Everything else in India was moving so fast; in the countryside, seasons at least stayed constant.

Then one April the summer wind brought with it an unfamiliar guest: the smell of burning plastic. It started on a Sunday afternoon, a hint of bitterness, like something rotten in the air. I barely noticed. A couple days later my wife woke me in the middle of the night and said something was burning. This time the bitterness was unmistakable, a chemical taste in my mouth, a trail of roughness along my constricted throat.

My older son woke up, vomiting. We nursed him through the night. We told ourselves it was a stomach bug, something he’d eaten. But he’d eaten what we had all eaten, and as we stayed up with him, wiped his vomit and rubbed his stomach, comforted him, promised him it was nothing, it would pass, we couldn’t shake the terrible feeling that it was in fact something very real–that he’d been poisoned by the air.

•       •       •       •       •
The smell invaded our house throughout the following weeks and months. It came from a landfill south of my home, Pondicherry’s main garbage dump. Every day, almost 400 tons of garbage–plastic bags and shoes and rubber tires and batteries mixed with rotting fruit and meat–were carried there by tractors, and thrown in putrefying piles that emanated combustible methane gas.

The landfill was far from my house. It was almost two miles away. It had been there for over a decade, but I had never noticed it. Now, with Pondicherry growing, its residents getting richer, buying more, discarding more, the dump had swollen.

Over the years, hundreds of thousands of tons of garbage had built up. The dump was running out of space. The fires, some man-made, some the result of spontaneous combustion, were getting bigger. The smoke was getting thicker, and traveling farther.

To me and my wife, the situation was bewildering. For so long, we had told ourselves that we were happy with the bargain we had made by choosing to live in rural India. We had decided to raise our children in a place where the water was drinkable, and the skies clear at night. Now the world was crowding in. I was told that the dump was emitting furans and dioxins and other toxic chemicals. I was told that these poisons could lead to cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular and respiratory disease. And I was told, too, that children, with their undeveloped immune systems, were most susceptible.

What were responsible parents to do? We talked a lot about moving. “But to where?” my wife would ask. The landfills were everywhere, smoking heaps outside (and sometimes inside) cities, along highways, in fields and forests.

India produced some 100 million tons of municipal waste every year. According to the OECD, only 60% of this waste was even collected. A far smaller (almost nonexistent) amount was recycled. The garbage just piled up–and rotted, and smoldered, and polluted the air and water.

Sometimes, when I drove along highways lined with blazing garbage, when I passed through remote villages shrouded in smoke, it seemed like there wasn’t a safe corner in the country. India, I began to feel, was burning.

•       •       •       •       •
India was burning–and, in a similar way, it was eroding, melting, drying, silting up, suffocating. Across the country, rivers and lakes and glaciers were disappearing, underground aquifers being depleted, air quality declining, beaches being swept away.

The numbers were astounding. According to a government report I read, almost half of India’s land suffered from some kind of erosion. Seventy percent of its surface water was polluted. Earlier this year, a study conducted by Yale and Columbia universities concluded that India had the worst air quality in the world.

In the weeks and months after the garbage first started blowing into my living room, I came to see this terrible environmental toll as a form of collateral damage: it was the price the country was paying for its rapid growth, for a model of development that elevated prosperity above all else.

For years, India had been skeptical of environmentalists and their concerns. In 1972, Indira Gandhi, then the country’s  prime minister, attended the first United Nations Conference on the environment, in Stockholm, and announced that poverty was the worst form of pollution.

It was a formulation that stuck. People I know who were involved in India’s latent environmental movement during the 70s and 80s remember an uphill struggle. They were accused of elitism, and of being insensitive to the plight of the poor.

Environmentalists like to say that their cause needn’t have a developmental cost, that environmentalism is a win-win proposition. That’s not always true: sometimes, tough choices are required. Tradeoffs have to be made. This is true everywhere in the world (think of the United States’ reluctance to impose a carbon tax for fear that it will stifle jobs), but perhaps especially in a poor country like India.

Increasingly, though, I’ve found myself thinking that after two decades of economic reforms, after a boom that has lifted millions from poverty, India has reached a stage in its growth where Indira Gandhi’s old formulation is breaking down.

Today, economic development and environmentalism are no longer mutually exclusive. Experts estimate that, if it were quantified, the cost of environmental damage in India would shave anywhere from 2.5 to 4 percent off GDP. The nation’s emerging environmental calamity threatens to overshadow–and undermine–its phenomenal growth.

•       •       •       •       •
On a cloudy day in November, I took a trip to the beach. It was a twenty-minute drive from my home, a sandy stretch of coconut trees and fishing villages that lined the South Indian coast. I had been going to that beach since I was a boy. I had gone swimming there with my friends, and I had gone fishing in catamarans with local fishermen.

Now, I wasn’t going for a swim, or to fish. I was going because I had heard that large stretches of the beach were being swept away, disappearing into the ocean. Some years ago, the town of Pondicherry, farther down the coast, had built a new harbor. This harbor was supposed to spur development in the area. There was some debate about whether it had done that, but the harbor had indisputably blocked replenishing sand flows carried by currents from the south. Now the beach was starved of nourishment–another victim of the nation’s single-minded quest for development.

I went to the fishing village of Chinnamudaliarchavadi. It was a village I knew well, but I was shocked by what I saw.  A stretch of sand that had once extended for at least a hundred meters was now reduced to a strip of no more than ten or fifteen meters. Trees were uprooted, and fences and compound walls were breached. At least one electricity pole had come down. Houses sat precariously above the waters; some, I was told, had already been swallowed.

Many villagers had moved away, left behind their thatch huts and gone inland, in search of higher ground. They weren’t only leaving their homes behind; they were abandoning their livelihoods (and the livelihoods, too, of their parents and grandparents).

In a hut at the edge of the village, perched above the ocean, I met a widowed mother of two boys. Her name was M. Valli. She told me that every night, at high tide, the waters seeped into the single room of her hut where she tried to sleep with her children. The sound of the waves, she said, was “like an earthquake.”

She showed me her hut. It was tiny, cramped, with only a bare minimum of possessions: a kerosene stove, a cardboard calendar on the wall, a couple pillows on the floor. She said the erosion was destroying her livelihood. She used to buy fish from fishermen and sell them in the local market; now, with the waters advancing, growing increasingly rougher and changing course every day, the catch was down, almost non-existent.

As I was leaving Valli’s hut, one of her friends beseeched me to write about their plight. “If this continues,” she said, “we’re all going to die.”

I walked farther up the coast. I sat on the sand, what was left of it, and I thought of just how little remained of the beach I had known as a boy.

So much was being swept away. So much was being destroyed. I knew it was part of the compact of modern India: In with the new, out with the old, all in the name of progress.

I welcomed the progress. But all the destruction seemed a heavy price to pay.


Against Pinker’s Violence by Ben Laws

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Steven Pinker

Against Pinker’s Violence

Steven Pinker
The Better Angels of our Nature
London: Allen Lane, 2011

Read original at C Theory
Ben Laws

 

In his book, Better Angels of our Nature, Steven Pinker attends to the topic of violence. He predicts that his thesis might cause shock, anger, disbelief and incredulity from his readers, arguing that statistically and scientifically, levels of violence in the modern world are at far lower-levels than they were decades, centuries and millennia ago — he observes that the trends can be seen at all three levels.

He claims his ideas should not be understood as the trumpet call for progress (and an eventual end point of violence) but rather as the culmination of quantifiable research that proves certain psychological functions have prevailed in certain kinds of environments which have, in turn, led to a noticeable decline in violence. A quotation from Pinker’s final chapter ‘On Angel’s Wings’ is set-out below, it effectively summarises his stance:

The forces of modernity — reason, science, humanism, individual rights — have not, of course, pushed steadily in one direction; nor will they ever bring about a utopia or end the frictions and hurts that come with being human. But on top of all the benefits that modernity has brought us in health, experience, and knowledge, we can add its role in the reduction of violence. [1]

How can we think about the topic of violence clearly? How are we to interpret violence in the present and how can we relate this to a conception of history? Pinker understands modern life as a ‘period that by the standards of history is blessed by unprecedented levels of peaceful coexistence.’ He reveals something about his understanding of history by asking ‘how are we to understand the natural state of life when our species first emerged and the processes of history began?’[2] It follows that his account of violence will begin with the birth of our species — but what is included and what is omitted throughout Pinker’s history? This is a question that will pervade this reading of Pinker. Another is the definition of violence, which is pivotal to his narrative. A final question is the understanding of truth(s), or rather the production of a certain kind of knowledge that enables and facilitates his discourse.

Absence

What is striking about a book dedicated to explaining the developments of violence across time is that is does not begin with any kind of formal definition — there is a clear absence in fact. It is implicitly assumed that we the reader know exactly what constitutes a violent act. Pinker references a number of historical trends, events and literary sources that suggest the past was a remarkably vicious and brutal time to have lived — the Greeks, Romans, the Hebrew bible and early Christendom all feature to support this. But at no point does he extrapolate what kind of violence he is attempting to locate.


A Blade that Cuts Both Ways

‘But profound as psychology is, it’s a knife that cuts both ways’ [3]

Pinker subscribes to a certain voice of ‘Truth’, namely one which flights the steady decline of violence over time. Yet, if we take a ‘perspectivist’ stance in relation to matters of truth would it not be possible to argue the direct inverse of Pinker’s historical narrative of violence? Have we in fact become even more violent over time? Each interpretation could invest a certain stake in ‘truth’ as something fixed and valid — and yet, each view could be considered misguided.

What would this alternative history look like? It could be equally as systematic; it could be equally scientific, full of ‘reasoned’ argument and as enchanted with modernity, as Pinker’s thesis. It could start by stating that in fact the devils of our nature have outmanoeuvred the angels. As evidenced by the multiple atrocities of the 20th century — the only century where the world’s great powers declared war on each other, twice. It is estimated that over 70 million combatants were armed and sent to fight in the First World War, and new advancements in technology allowed massive losses of life on an unprecedented scale. Some twenty years later, World War II signalled the biggest conflict (in terms of death toll) to be historically recorded — and what separates it from other great historical wars is the sheer concentration of deaths (estimates of 60 million are common) in the space of only 6 years. Mines, bombs, nuclear warfare, increasingly accurate projectiles, gas and chemicals, jets and apaches effectively created an expanded spectrum of ways to inflict death from a greater distance.

Pinker argues that a shift towards democratic rule and increased wealth in the west has directly correlated with the decrease in violence, but John Gray counters that:

The formation of democratic nation-states was one of the principal drivers of violence of the last century, involving ethnic cleansing in inter-war Europe, post-colonial states and the post-communist Balkans. Steadily-growing prosperity may act as a kind of tranquilliser, but there is no reason to think the increase of wealth can go on indefinitely — and when it falters violence will surely return. In quite different ways, attacks on minorities and immigrants by neo-fascists in Europe, the popular demonstrations against austerity in Greece and the English riots of the past summer show the disruptive and dangerous impact of sudden economic slowdown on social peace. [4]

Pinker also references the growth and effect of globalised media outlets on our sensibilities: ‘Our cognitive faculties predispose us to believe that we live in violent times, especially when they are stoked by media that follow the watchword “If it bleeds, it leads.” [5] And the media has effectively ‘stoked fear’ with its ’round-the-clock vigils [and] documentaries in constant rotation.’ [6] Yet an alternative history might point out the omissions and selectivity of modern media coverage, in a quite different respect. We should not forget Zizek’s words that ‘properly humanitarian considerations as a rule play a less important role than cultural, ideologico-political, and economic considerations.’ [7] Zizek references a 2006 Time Magazine article entitled “The Deadliest War in the World” where over 4 million people died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from political violence over the last decade. Yet, documented though it was it garnered no sustained coverage or public sympathy — this kind of struggle is therefore too low on the humanitarian hierarchy of struggles. These omissions show that the idea of ‘globalised media’ by no means confers to accurate representation and coverage of violent events.

Rather than engaging in a dialogue between Pinker’s history and an alternative history of numbers, we benefit from rejecting both.

The Definition

What do we achieve by placing our morality and values onto the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Victorians, Byzantines, Mayans etc? Is it attempting to compare the incomparable? But, is this not, how a misguided history beings? It assumes that ‘words have kept their meaning, that desires still pointed in a single direction, and that ideas retained their logic, [and it ignores the fact that] the world of speech and desires has known invasions, struggles, plundering, disguises, ploys.’ [8] Indeed, to comprehend and interpret the ideas of a period we have to stare into the face of the singularity of individual events — without sating that tempting urge for finality, for grand themes across the evidence.

To return to violence, which Pinker does not openly define, we can intuit (roughly) from his chapters that he means physical force (murders, torture, hand-to-hand conflicts and assaults, rapes, conquests and wars) doled-out to others. Crucially, Pinker’s undefined definition and approach to violence enables his quantification of it — so that across centuries and millennia certain forms and intrusions of violence can be correlated, evaluated and (re)interpreted. It is this scientific quantification project and statistical reduction that forms the basis of his thesis. He will use graphs, charts and tables to reiterate a numbers game — all echoing decrease.

But what would it mean to be a violent Roman compared to a violent Victorian? And how can we begin to compare this to a violent modern man? To each historical period there must be a corresponding understanding and comprehension of exactly what it meant to be violent. If we look back at history through a modern lens we are destined to find horrific images at every turn: we see the alien, the depraved. For each historical age (and the hazy less-discussed boundaries in-between) we would have to resist the urge to look at violence so directly. By trying to look for answers in a straight line, we forget to turn. We reveal the all too ‘rational’ and ‘reasoned’ methods of our times. Pinker’s science — and science as a whole — is not a value free practise; the way he applies and defends his position is through the application of a science laden with his ideo-political position on the spectrum (statistics, logical argumentation, quantification and reasoning). To understand a specific period we would do better to locate those sources that surrounded, influenced and were affected by violence: perhaps we would assemble discordant fragments and a complex patchwork of effects and sociological trends. We would find that the nature of violence has not evolved on a stable or constant line. To validate such transformations our definition(s) of violence must also react and evolve in an equally intricate way.

We might be hard-pressed to find instruments of physical torture in the modern world (speaking in terms of the ‘developed’ west) and certain kinds of hand-to-hand punishment are rarer in our time. Yet it is a giant leap, though not an uncommon one, to draw overarching conclusions from such an observation. For while certain types of aggression may have decreased have we not created new forms and pathways for violence in lieu? These forms may often go beyond the realm of physicality; we need to be subtle and sensitive to these transitions, for we can be violent without causing direct physical pain.

read the rest of this article at at C Theory

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Ben Laws writes on topics related to violence, psychology, trauma and Continental Philosophy — and how these subjects inform, relate to and affect understanding of knowledge, truth and modernity.

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