October 31, 2006
AFFLICTED POWERS
The State, the Spectacle and September 11
[This is an extract from ‘Afflicted Powers’, a pamphlet amplifying the themes of the broadside ‘Neither Their War Nor Their Peace’, prepared for the San Francisco anti-war marches of February–March 2003...Involved in the writing of the present essay were Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts.]
The modern state, we would argue, has come to need weak citizenship. It depends more and more on maintaining an impoverished and hygienized public realm, in which only the ghosts of an older, more idiosyncratic civil society live on. It has adjusted profoundly to its economic master’s requirement for a thinned, unobstructed social texture, made up of loosely attached consumer subjects, each locked in its plastic work-station and nuclearized family of four. Weak citizenship, but for that very reason the object of the state’s constant, anxious attention—an unstoppable barrage of idiot fashions and panics and image-motifs, all aimed at sewing the citizen back (unobtrusively, ‘individually’) into a deadly simulacrum of community.
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A tension exists—let us put it mildly—between the dispersal and vacuity of the public sphere, which is necessary to the maintenance of ‘consumer society’, and those stronger allegiances and identifications which the state must call on, repeatedly, if it is to maintain the dependencies that feed the consumer beast. Weak citizens grow too soon tired of wars and occupations. To this long-term dilemma is now added another. A state that lives more and more in and through a regime of the image does not know what to do when, for a moment, it dies by the same lights. It does not matter that ‘economically’ or ‘geopolitically’ the death may be an illusion. Spectacularly it was real. And image-death—image-defeat—is not a condition this state can endure. ‘There now exists a threat,’ to quote Runciman again, ‘which makes some states feel more vulnerable than their subjects.’
more: http://newleftreview.org/A2506
[photo google/ Bush campaigning 2004?]