Now
Available from
CounterPunch for Only $11.50 (S/H Included)
Today's
Stories
January 3 / 4, 2004
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
January 3 / 4, 2004
Robert
Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia
Responses
to 9/11 and the American Aftermath
By WALTER A. DAVIS
The power of an historical Event-an Event such
as the Nazi death camps, Hiroshima, or the destruction of the
World Trade Center-lies in its ability (1) to expose the bankruptcy
of our most cherished beliefs and ideological guarantees while
(2)forcing us to think in radically new ways. That is why the
dominant response to historical trauma is the attempt to find
a way to restore the guarantees and thereby limit the impact
of the Event by picturing it as aberration or temporary departure
from values and beliefs that can always be recovered because
they constitute something essentialistic or universal about "human
nature" that history can disrupt but not destroy.
An Event is traumatic because it suggests
that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it
and moves in directions that have nothing to do with our most
cherished beliefs and values. Events put us as subjects (and
as thinkers) in a traumatic relationship to ourselves and our
world. A hole at the center of the psyche and the socius is
revealed. Ideologists rush to fill the void and restore the guarantees.
The possibility implicit in the Event is thereby denied. A radical
task beckons: to break with the system of guarantees all the
way down the line. 9-11 and its aftermath constitute an Event
because that is precisely the task they impose on us.
In two previous essays published in these
pages (Counterpunch Jan. 6, 2002
and September 06, 2003) I outlined
the beginnings of such an effort. (Those essays derive from
the theory of history I developed in Deracination:
Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (SUNY
P, 2001.) My purpose was diagnostic, with no attempt to offer
a solution to, and thereby foreclose, the tragic condition I
described. My purpose now is to advance that problematic through
a critical study of other works that have been written about
9-11. As I'll try to show, for all their differences, they share
a common error: the superimposition upon the Event of a guarantee
that the Event shattered. Such is the inherent problem of thinking
about history. History outdistances the frameworks we impose
on it to render it intelligible. Those systems however define
the very possibility of intelligibility by establishing the philosophic
assumptions apart from which thought appears impossible and life
devoid of meaning. The critique of discourses is thus a necessary
step toward sustaining a true radicalism. To be radical is, as
Marx asserts, to go to the roots, but the only way to get there
is by exposing the pull of the guarantees. A correct appropriation
of our situation only emerges through a systematic knowledge
of the ways in which we blind ourselves to it. Such will be
the effort of the series of critical essays initiated here.
Our study begins appropriately with Robert
Jay Lifton's Superpower
Syndrome:America's Apocalyptic Confrontation With the World
(Nation Books, 2003). We all owe a great debt to Robert Jay
Lifton. In a remarkable series of books, he has studied the most
horrifying events of the past century. Death is, indeed, Lifton's
subject and in the tradition of his mentor Erik Eikson, he has
brought to that study a spirit that is courageous, compassionate,
and deeply humane. Lifton has often been the conscience of his
society, especially in his work on Hiroshima, My Lai, and with
Vietnam veterans.
Psychohistory in Lifton's hands isn't
the reductive game of explaining Nazism (say) in terms of Hitler's
relationship to his mother. It is an effort to comprehend collective
traumas in terms of a psychological paradigm that affirms the
continuity of life, the quest for "symbolic immortality,"
and the power of the "self" (or what Lifton now calls
"the protean self") to overcome fragmentation and the
disorders of the time through an open and tolerant appreciation
of ambiguity and limitations and an ability to change in ways
that are creative and finally transformative. Such is the grand
system of guarantees in which Lifton casts his willingness to
address what he sees as the apocalyptic currents of the present.
It is this system of guarantees that makes his analysis so appealing
to most liberal Americans and for that reason so dangerous.
Within Lifton's oeuvre Superpower
Syndrome is not a particularly good book. Much of it is
hasty and undeveloped. Lifton's stated goal is to help us understand
Bush's "war on terror" as an alarming development of
what he terms "superpower syndrome, " which may be
defined as the desire of the United States to unilaterally impose
its will on the entire world in order to attain Omnipotence,
absolute control over history and thereby an exorcism of all
our fears of vulnerability. There is much that can be said on
behalf of this thesis. Unfortunately Superpower Syndrome
presents it in a rambling and oblique way. We are more than
halfway through the book before we turn to America, the Bush
administration, and superpower syndrome. As preface to that
subject, we get a cook's tour of apocalyptic contagion:
a rambling and diffuse consideration of various apocalyptic
movements including Nazism, Mao's China, Aum Shinrikyo in Japan,
McVeigh and the Turner Diaries, bin Laden and the terrorist dynamic
sweeping the Middle East. None of what Lifton says here is particularly
new-his point being that terrorism derives from the fanaticism
of the apocalyptic belief that mass destruction alone will
purify and renew one's world by bringing a cataclysmic end to
History through a complete transformation of the existing order.
The apocalyptic imagination is characterized by paranoid and
grandiose ideation and wedded to the lure of martyrdom as what
binds individuals to the extreme acts taken in the name of ridding
the world of evil.
No one is immune from this contagion.
We were drawn into it once before, when we bombed Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and we are in danger of giving in to it again. (Note
the assumption here (of which more shortly) that the source
of evil is outside us and our participation in it a momentary
aberration. Such is the context in which Lifton, more than halfway
through the book, approaches the Bush Administration as the American
equivalent of the "evangelical apocalypticism" of Bin
Laden and other fanatics. The second half of the book is devoted
to developing this unexceptional thesis. As Lifton points out,
all the policies of the Bush Administration-foreign and domestic
make perfect sense as an unchecked expression of the imperative
that defines superpower syndrome: the need to attain "exclusive
control" over everything that threatens the megalomaniacal
drive for omnipotence and the assurance that it alone brings.
Thereby the humiliation and the vulnerability experienced on
9-11 is exorcised. The Amerikan apocalypse will issue in a new
world order.
As a primer for a mass audience seeking
a quick handle on terrorism and the evangelical dreams of the
Bush administration all of this is useful. There's nothing new
here, nothing striking, nor does Lifton develop any of his points
in depth. One will not find here the kind of complex and nuanced
sociological and historical understanding of fundamentalism developed
in Almond, Appleby, and Sivan's Strong Religion ( itself
a one volume summary of a five volume study). Nor will one find
the kind of in-depth study of the apocalyptic psyche that one
finds in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, a book that has
again become required reading for any psychohistorian who wants
to understand the present. Reading Superpower Syndrome
I often wondered what function the discussion of The Turner Diaries
or Aum Shinrikyo or Mao's China had in a book purportedly devoted
to an analysis of a Syndrome that can only describe one nation
in the world until I realized that this long detour is absolutely
essential to Lifton's purpose for three reasons: (1) it enables
him to imply that the primary source of disorder lies outside
us, (2) that the Bush administration is a temporary aberration
and not representative of the American character, and therefore
(3) that we can regain "our moral compass" by reaffirming
our faith in traditional liberal verities.
The procedure of the book is thus a necessary
function of the system of guarantees that have informed Lifton's
oeuvre. Everything is grounded for Lifton in the ontological
guarantee supposedly provided by biology. As he outlines it
in one of his finest books-The Broken Connection-we come
into the world with an innate self endowed with an indestructible
desire to experience the continuity of life as a meaningful
process that is capped by the quest for symbolic immortality.
Indeed, accordingly to Lifton "there is evidence that by
the time of birth the quest is well under way." Biological
essentialism thus grounds a psychological paradigm that enables
Lifton to view the horrors of history through the lens provided
by a transcendent humanistic vision. Briefly, the paradigm asserts
that there is a creative, life-affirming continuity to collective
life. This continuity can be broken but it cannot be destroyed.
As Lifton puts it in the grandest reach of his thesis, there
is "a humane symbolization of immortality inherent in the
collective life of culture and history." That being so,
traumatic events can disrupt humanistic ideals, but they cannot
affect their prior ontological assurance in what Lifton calls
the "self." ("Self" is the code word American
psychology uses to reassure us regarding the "essence"
of what used to be called "human nature." That concept
is, moreover, the most powerful myth that has yet been devised
for denying the force of History.
All of this bears a strong resemblance
to the essentialism of Lifton's mentor, Erik Erikson. There also
substantialism reigns: basic trust creates ego identity issuing
in the developmental process of a life-cycle devoted to generativity.
All Lifton has done is extend this paradigm (following clear
precedents in Erikson) to the collective identity and life of
nations. Thanks to this extension we can rest assured that
renewal is programmed in us far deeper than death, discontinuity,
psychic numbing, and self-fragmentation which are the great dangers
of our times. Lifton, in short, has been able to immerse himself
in the most horrifying events of the past 75 years because he
has an a priori solution to every historical trauma. Evil is
aberrant not primary. History, however painful, does not touch
us to the quick. Lifton is the compassionate witness, but he
can never become the tragic sufferer. In psychoanalytic terms,
he is unable to internalize the events he studies. For
to internalize is to take events into the places in the psyche
where no ego defenses protect us from them. To internalize is
to suffer the power of an event to eradicate a guarantee. Only
then is it possible to experience the destructive force of history
and to situate one's thinking existentially in it. In contrast,
all that madness and horror can signify for Lifton is
the need to reclaim and reaffirm the a priori system of
humanistic guarantees without which History would be unbearable
because it would impinge on the two beliefs on which Lifton's
project rests: belief in the "self" and in a continuity
of history that is progressive, quasi-Hegelian, and ultimately
messianic.
Lifton must preserve these two guarantees
because otherwise an antithetical problematic arises as the meaning
of 9-11 and its aftermath. That problematic reveals Lifton's
protean self as a last desperate effort to recycle under the
guise of flexibility, pluralistic openness, and ambiguity tolerance
a litany of liberal, humanistic commonplaces that were exposed
in their hollowness and their irrelevancy by 9-11. (In his book
devoted to the subject, The Protean Self, Lifton even
urges the postmodern credentials of this "self." Nothing
could be further from the case. The protean self is little more
than a nostalgic belief that the postmodern destruction (or deconstruction)
of the self and the system of concepts on which it depends is
a passing fashion. The protean self is a last gasp of resistance,
the self-reduction of the "self" to a rhetoric of humanistic
commonplaces.) 9-11 did not reveal that a terrible trauma followed
by psychic numbing enabled Bushian evangelism to gain a momentary
hold over us. It revealed that we were already numb. Which
is why any feeling other than revenge-such as the ability to
mourn in mature ways through the acceptance of historical loss-
proved beyond our capabilities. 9-11 revealed the prior death
or deadening of affect that Amerika had been living-under the
sign of mandatory "happiness"-for a long time. (Date
it, if you will, on 8-6-45.) But that is a story Lifton can't
tell because it reveals a radical discontinuity in history
and with it the disintegration of the essentialistic guarantees
on which his thought rests. The true story of our condition is
one Lifton must repress. One way to move toward its liberation
is by outlining a series of contrasts with Lifton. They point
the way toward how one might extend the valuable insights he
gives us into apocalypticism and superpower syndrome in the
right direction. Or, to put it another way, they offer us
ways of locating ourselves not outside or above but as subjects
of and in contemporary history.
(1) For Lifton death is always seen in
the context of guarantees that re-assure us about life and the
fundamental health of the "self." The 20th century
is thereby contained. For the one thing it should have taught
us is that nothing limits death and its power within the psyche.
The 20th century gave psychology a new imperative: to rethink
thanatos not as something opposed to life but as a force with
a prior and more powerful rootedness in the psyche. Rather than
a dualism of life and death, which assures the former of ontological
stability, we must construct a dialectical understanding of the
psyche in which the priority of death is acknowledged and life
seen as no more than the possibility of overcoming that power.
Nothing, in short, assures the continuity or persistence of
life in the psyche. Its possibility rests on nothing but the
existential situatedness of the subject within traumatic conditions
that must be internalized in ways that permanently shatters the
guarantees.
(2) For Lifton the psyche is not defined
by excess or disorder. It's defined by normalcy, health, ego-identity,
and a natural desire for meaning that is fulfilled by development
within the life cycle. Disruption always comes, as a result,
from outside, when some catastrophic event in history violates
our "essence." (I note in passing the virtual absence
of sexuality in Lifton's thought. That suppression, on which
the ego psychology developed by Lifton's mentor Erikson and others
depends, is of a piece with the inability to understand death
from within as a force at the center of the conflicts that define
the psyche. The ego and its defenses is no more than a neurotic
structure based on a vigorous denial of inner reality.) No psychiatrist
has spent as much time studying the horrors of our late rebarbative
century than Lifton. But if death haunts Lifton's thought, it
haunts it from outside. Death is not a force within the psyche,
a power attacking it from within. It's the external event that
resists the symbolizations through which we transform and overcome
it.
(3)Belief in the self is the American
ideology. Next to surplus value the self is our most important
product: the thing we constantly proclaim and reassure ourselves
about in order to cover over the emptiness of the concept and
the void it conceals. Nothing is emptier, shallower than the
inwardness of the average Amerikan, a subjectivity composed of
nothing but the incessant mimicking of "signs" (success)
and affects (happy talk) that confer no more than a phantom
substantiality. Beneath it, the death of affect, psychic numbing,
and a collective flight from anything that causes the least
anxiety. There is nothing protean about the American character.
We are, rather, the temple of Nietzsche's last man.
(4) Discontinuity is the primary fact
of history. There is no principle in history that guarantees
progress, continuity, or renewal. Historicity, contingency,
existence are the only realities. Save bad faith-the
attempt to find some way to escape or deny them. As when we
try to picture Bush and his crowd as aberrations rather than
representative men engaged in the great work of assuring the
dead that the peace they seek will be attained only when the
world has become the haven of psychological infants. Bush is
not an aberration, he's our high-priest-a school-yard bully and
a smug prick who is incapable of nuance or restraint because
anything less that global terrorism threatens the collapse of
the born-again dependence on fundamentalist projection to deliver
the Amerikan "self" from the underlying anxiety it
incessantly denies and flees. We are the saved and the mindlessness
with which we reiterate empty articles of faith is the proof
of that fact. Eventually we'll all start each day with prayer
breakfasts hosted by Aschroft as prelude to another assault on
even a residual memory of what were once our liberties.
9-11 and its aftermath signal a crisis
for the left, the crisis we've perpetually deferred. For 9-11
also gives us an imperative-to purge ourselves of all guarantees,
especially those that suggest that we can renew ourselves by
returning to beliefs and values that have become progressively
abstract and empty of content because they no longer exist.
That's the thing about history. Everything we think and feel
is submitted to it. That's why the beginning of an answer to
"what is to be done?" emerges only when we know what
is no longer possible. Otherwise we approach history with gloves
on, refusing whatever in it we find too difficult to bear. The
tragic nature of our situation is that we've lost the
ability to exist tragically, lost the will to what Nietzsche
called "a pessimism of strength." This loss however
is different from the guarantees which have always functioned
to marginalize and then transcend the austere claims of the tragic.
This is a loss that can be reclaimed, for to constitute the
tragic is equivalent to sustaining a thinking that exists in
history by systematically refusing the pull of the guarantess
so that one can eventually know and experience all that they
make it impossible for us to know-and be.
Guarantees however come in many forms.
In my next essay I'll examine how a very different system of
guarantees operates in a thinker very different from Lifton.
Our text then will be Slavoj Zizek's Welcome to the Desert
of the Real. Thanks to Zizek's book our task will become
clearer. As Nietzsche said "the desert grows; woe to he
who harbors deserts within." Or, to put it in other terms,
our task is to get to the left of the left by exposing the guarantees
the left relies on to shield itself from what it too regards
as the Medusa--history.
Walter A. Davis
is professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University. He
is the author of Deracination:
Historiocity, Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative. He
can be reached at: davis.65@osu.edu.
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|