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Pictures From Afar:
Shooting the Middle East
Mahmut Mutman
Middle Easterners get much of their information through
their
senses of smell and touch, which require a close approach; Americans rely
primarily on visual information, backing up in order to see an intelligent
picture.
--San Francisco Chronicle, January 13, 1990
Now dark with shadows, now beaming forth an excess of light as it waits to be
disposed in new landscapes. In hollow, in lack or excess, man would perceive
and
receive nothing except from his own eye.
--Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover,
1991
Introduction
The recent war in the Gulf once again demonstrated the strong association
between Western
interests and world peace. [1] The U.S. invasion of Panama
received the same legal
response and official condemnation from the United Nations as did Iraq's
occupation of Kuwait.
However, the former action received remarkably little public criticism.
Perhaps this is why very
few people are actually familiar with the U.N. resolutions in the case of
Panama. On December 23,
1989, just eight months before the official U.N. condemnation of Iraq which
was passionately
supported by the U.S., the same government vetoed a U.N. Security Council
resolution
condemning the invasion of Panama. Six days later, on December 29, the
U.N. General Assembly
issued another resolution demanding the withdrawal of the "U.S. armed
invasion forces from
Panama" and calling the invasion a "flagrant violation of international law
and of the independence,
sovereignty and territorial integrity of states" (Chomsky 20). However, in
what is called the
international public sphere, nobody has accused the U.S. of "nefarious
aggression,"
"monstrosity," or "blood thirstiness"[2]--those signifiers of an imperial,
primitive, despotic and
(by definition) illegitimate and irrational desire to eat up small and
defenseless countries. On the
contrary, the media and the respectable public seemed unanimously to agree
that the United States
is the only power capable of enforcing international law against such
aggression. The Gulf war's
legitimacy was a case of severe amnesia.
I have two aims in this paper. The first is to look at some of the significations,
discourses and
images in the media during the war: the "legitimation process" as it is called
in the sociological
literature. By the notion of legitimacy, I understand something more than a
relationship of consent
between the ruler and the ruled. Although what I am going to say necessarily
addresses the
question of popular consent to a certain extent, by "legitimation" I understand
the way that a
position is constructed as legitimate by the subject who takes such a position,
hence the very
process of the production of the subject itself. My second aim is to
produce analyses,
arguments and debates around a cluster of texts and significations concerned
with the recent war.
Orientalism
The association between Western interests and world peace demonstrated
that the "world" is not
just a place where we happen to be, nor a just place, but it is a world that is
already worlded
by power, already coded into the grand narrative of the West. The
worlding of the East, and
the Middle East in particular, was studied by Edward Said in his monumental
work,
Orientalism. By criticizing a narrow reading of Orientalism as simply
consisting of
Orientalist books, Said's argument referred to a larger text, a relational web
in which the
necessarily forgotten discourse of Orientalism was placed. He called attention
to all those other
institutions (not only universities and research institutes, but also colonial
institutions, media, the
economy) to which Orientalism essentially contributed, and to other texts
(geography, history,
sociology, literature) which it made possible by writing itself on their margins.
In Said's
definition, Orientalism is not simply a name for an academic field or a system
of ideas but an
historically specific discursive move that makes "an epistemological
and ontological
distinction between the West and East" (2, 12-13). Orientalism is thus the
production or inscription
of places and directions, a "worlding" in Gayatri Spivak's terms. [3]
Orientalism is hegemonic not simply because it is a dominant idea to which
people consent, but
because it is a signifying force that is multiplied and reproduced in
different texts and
contexts to such a degree that it is not even recognizable as a separate entity; it
is elaborated
in the Gramscian sense and diffused in the culture at large. Elaboration
means that the marking
of the Orient as Other occurs on multiple levels (academic, political,
epistemological, literary,
cultural, moral), and that it is dispersed and continuous. When we think of
this dissemination of
Orientalism in culture at large, Said's work appears as truly archaeological in
Foucault's sense, for
it discovers an "Orientalist layer" in the production of the Western
Subject, or "Man," the
subject of humanism. In other words, if several different places are
homogenized under the sign of
the Orient, such a homogenization does not inscribe the Orient only; its
inscription centers the West
as the privileged or dominant pole of an epistemological and ontological
opposition. This is exactly
how Orientalist discourse is related to the Western hegemonic
investment and the
colonial/imperial apparatus of power that embodies it. The West
constitutes itself as
universal and sovereign subject by marking the different as Other, and by
thus dissimulating its
forceful appropriation of peoples, lands and resources. Such a dissimulation
is the symbolic
violence of Orientalism as knowledge or truth of the Orient.
The quotation with which I opened this article is a banal media version of the
epistemological and
ontological distinction between the West and East, or the centering of the
Western Self.
What is important is the speed with which such stereotypes came to
surface during the war.
The reason why we have to go back to Said's analysis in the face of such a
blatant instance of
racism is precisely to see that it is not as banal as it may seem. Such a banality
will always be
denied and fixed by the epistemological and ontological measures of the
larger imperial and
humanist project of coding and decoding cultures, knowing, understanding
and liberating others.
This is the true meaning of elaboration. To give another everyday
example: although we
now criticize a discourse called Orientalism in an emergent discipline or field
called "Cultural
Studies," we tend to forget that those whom we criticize (media, politicians,
writers, other
academics like ourselves) no longer even use the word "Orient."[4] This is
because the "world" is
already coded into the grand narrative of the West. This is the factual
result of Orientalism
which the United Nations empirically demonstrated in its practice, by legally
sanctioning a violator
to act as the law enforcer against another violator.
Crisis
The energy question is never seen as an issue in international trade, but
rather as a question of
national security in the U.S. and Europe. In this context, Simon
Bromley defines oil as a
"strategic commodity" (American Hegemony 82-84), and James
O'Connor explains in
detail how essential oil is for the contemporary capitalist economy (1-17). It is
important for the
production of capital, value and surplus value, and the circulation of capital
in general. For
O'Connor, there is "no capitalism without oil." How did oil assume the
important place it occupies
in the capitalist world economy today?
Although oil was discovered in the U.S. during the early nineteenth century,
it was in the 1920s
that demand really took off. Competition centered on the Middle East, a
region controlled by the
British and French colonial powers until the end of the World War II
(Bromley, American
Hegemony 89). The U.S. was interested in Middle Eastern oil because its
production cost was
extremely low, but control over the region remained in the hands of the
British colonial empire
(39).[5] The U.S. took control of the area only after the war, when it became
the hegemonic power
of global capitalism. What needs to be stressed from the perspective of
"colonial discourse studies"
is the historical connection between decolonization and oil. The U.S.
hegemonic project was
different from the old territorial imperialism. Although I cannot go into
detail here, I will briefly
summarize Simon Bromley's analysis of this hegemonic project, with
particular emphasis on the
relation between oil and decolonization.
In the new U.S. hegemonic project, decolonization was expected to lead to a
system of nation-
states united by a world market. Removal of the European political zones
would displace the
politically sanctioned, closed economic circuits and would open these regions
to penetration by
internationally mobile productive capital. An essential element of the
project was the
transnationalization of U.S. capital. The breakup of old political units and the
reproduction on an
enlarged scale of the economic space of oligopolistic competition would lead
to an expansion of the
scope of the world market. [6] The new program was very different from the
program of territorial
imperialism; in the new hegemonic project, the exercise of self-determination
was necessary in
order to enter into the design of a global market order. [7] The regulation of
the world market would
be achieved through the international hegemony of the dollar, trade
liberalization and the U.S.
control over international oil. The political and ideological aspects of this
strategy were the military
unity of the capitalist world (NATO) and a strong anti-communist discourse.
To be sure,
decolonization was not created by the new hegemonic project. On the
contrary, there would be no
decolonization without the resistance struggles of the peoples of the
colonized countries and the
national liberation movements that they established. The defeat of the fascist-
imperialist project was
another important factor. But the process of decolonization did not occur
outside the new project
aimed to capture and articulate it.
Within the framework of this new hegemonic model, oil played a crucial
role. Oil became a
"strategic commodity" with the Truman doctrine/Marshall Plan which
embodied the project
(Bromley, American Hegemony 82). Middle Eastern oil was
controlled by U.S.
transnational capital in the form of major oil companies (called "majors" in
the literature of political
economy). As the Cold War made intercapitalist unity vis-a-vis
communism necessary,
there was also the urgent need to reconstruct post-war Europe. Western
Europe and Japan became
strategically and economically dependent on the U.S. Coal was replaced by oil.
Low cost oil
supplied to Europe and Japan by the "majors" was central to the post-war
capitalist boom. The
restructuring of industry in Europe and Japan required a massive demand for
oil.
The rise of a radical Arab nationalism and the foundation of the state of Israel
complicated the U.S.
hegemonic project, but did not change its basic outlines. The U.S. managed to
fight against Arab
radical nationalism on the one hand, and control Middle Eastern oil on the
other. In this, the so-
called "twin pillar" policy played a key role. Instead of a direct military
presence, close alliances
with two Muslim countries, Saudi Arabia in the peninsula and Iran in the
Gulf (in addition to the
other two allies Israel and Turkey), helped the U.S. to exercise considerable
power and control in
the region. Iran and Saudi Arabia thus became dependent on U.S. military
power (Halliday 71-
74). With the withdrawal of Britain from the emirates, these newly
independent small countries,
too, would become dependent on the U.S. To give a sense of the scale of this
control, it would be
enough to mention the agreement reached between the consortium formed
by the "seven sisters"
(seven big oil companies, five of which are American) and the Shah's new
government in 1954,
about a year after the overthrow of Mosaddeq's nationalist government.
According to this
agreement, the profits of the Iranian oil were shared 50-50 between the
Iranian government and the
consortium, and all major decisions were left to the Consortium.
This post-war hegemonic system in the region continued without major
interruption until the 1973-
74 oil crisis. The oil crisis came as a reaction by producer states against the
unilateral reduction of
"posted" or tax-reference prices of crude oil by metropolitan countries
(Bromley American
Hegemony 121-123). The resolution of the oil crisis meant a reunification
of the world market
and a consolidation of the nation-state system. But it also meant some loss of
control for the U.S.
It was in this particular conjuncture that "Islam" suddenly appeared as an
image in the Western
media. We can make the connection to the cultural text here. Edward Said
writes:
It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that before the
sudden OPEC price rises in early 1974, "Islam" as such scarcely figured either
in
the culture or in the media. One saw and heard of Arabs and Iranians, of
Pakistanis
and Turks, rarely of Muslims. But the dramatically higher cost of imported oil
soon
became associated in the public mind with a cluster of unpleasant things:
American
dependence on imported oil (which was usually referred to as "being at the
mercy
of foreign oil producers"); the apprehension that intransigence was being
communicated from the Persian Gulf region to individual Americans; above
all a
signal--as if from a new, hitherto unidentified force-- saying that energy was
no
longer "ours" for the taking. Words like "monopoly," "cartel," and "block"
thereafter achieved a remarkably sudden if selective currency, although very
rarely
did anyone speak of the small group of American multinationals as a cartel, a
designation reserved for the OPEC members. Mainly, though, it now seemed
that
with the new pressure on the economy, an equally new cultural and political
situation was at hand. (33-34)
This new cultural and political situation imposed its own rule in the form of
bringing the image
of Islam into the American media. With the appearance of rich and
influential Arab politicians
and sheikhs everywhere, Muslims suddenly became the news. By an
adaptation of Orientalist
discourse to the crisis, this new enemy "Other" was seen as inversely equal
and opposite to "us."
Order was opposed to chaos, civilization to backwardness, dynamism and
democracy to despotism
and stagnation. The only possible way of talking about Islam seemed to be this
oppositional or
confrontational way.
In Covering Islam, Said showed that in this new media discourse,
Islam was constructed
as an "image" that had immediate and unrestrained meanings. In accordance
with the Orientalist
rule of homogenization, speaking of Islam meant eliminating space and time.
Islam became, in
Said's words, "an object so immediate as to make any mediation or
qualifications applied to it seem
mere supererogatory fussiness" (39). There was also a highly moral tone to
this new anti-Islamic
discourse. Any resistance that came from the Middle East was considered as
religious, not civil or
political. Said also stressed that electronic mass media has a unique capacity to
bring "trouble
spots" into the lives of Americans. Islam was turned into a part of their
everyday lives, but
it was presented, at the same time, as something deeply alien to them
(39).[8]
I will not follow this story further into the Iranian revolution, the
fundamentalist regime and
subsequent events such as the hostage crisis and the Rushdie Affair. Let me
turn back to
Bromley's economic analysis in order to complete the story:
... after the majors lost direct control in the mid-1970s, this
(hegemonic) role came to depend on the connections established to the Gulf
producers and especially to Saudi Arabia. Regional stability and the integrity
of the
Gulf states is simply a vital base for U.S. power in the international system.
("Crisis in the Gulf" 13)
This is why the U.S. intervention was not simply about protecting oil, but it
was about maintaining
U.S. hegemony on a global scale. The integrity of the Gulf States is vital to the
base of U.S.
power in the region (Bromley, "Crisis in the Gulf" 13). Any threat to their
integrity is regarded as a
direct challenge to the U.S. By occupying Kuwait, the Iraqi government
constituted precisely such
a challenge. As many others have argued, this was also the most appropriate
occasion for the U.S.
to project its hegemony in the post-Cold War period. Generally speaking, the
so-called national
security state's credibility had been in question for a long time. The defeat in
Vietnam was not
assuaged by small victories such as those in Grenada and Panama. Most
important of all was a
new, post-Cold War international conjuncture. There seemed to be a need to
re-arrange the
international relations and balances in the Middle East and in the world.[9]
The Bush administration also had a domestic incentive in making the
specific decision to go to war
(a kind of action beyond the international sanctions against Iraq). In a careful
analysis of the early
period of the crisis, Jon Wiener has shown that George Bush made up his
mind at the end of
October, after the Congressional campaign--that is to say, after learning about
his low public
approval in the opinion polls (Wiener 75-76).
After a detailed discussion of two different theories of war, the economic
theory which emphasizes
the importance of the control of Gulf oil and oil revenues, and the political
theory which stresses
the exigencies of the Middle East and the imperatives of the national security
state, O'Connor
reaches the following conclusion:
Oil and U.S. power, the nature of the economy and U.S.
foreign policy, are at stake, as is the leading role of the military industrial
complex.
Oil can now be seen as the means to economic and imperialistic ends. Politics,
the
Pentagon and military-industrial complex, and the banking system are in
their own
ways means to the end of oil. Threaten oil and you threaten the national
security
state and U.S. "credibility." Threaten the Pentagon and the military-industrial
complex and you threaten oil. Economics and politics thus collapse into an
almost impenetrable black hole. (6)[10] [Emphasis added]
In what follows I will read this "almost impenetrable black hole" as a
metaphor for the crisis of the
Western Subject whose subject-position is constructed by practices
such as Orientalism. I
am referring to the sovereign and supreme white male seen on TV every day
during the Gulf
Crisis, always firm, always in control, President Bush, Mr. Baker, Dan Rather.
(I should
nevertheless specify that I am not referring to the male subject only. As my
argument will make
clear, there are subject-positions available for both male and female Western
subjects in the
discourse of the war.) The system of subject-formation which I will discuss
here can be described
as one which produces "black holes." The Gulf Crisis itself can be
considered as a
metaphor of this system of subject-formation: the "Gulf" is the "trouble spot"
in metropolitan
society's everyday life that Edward Said mentions. I will now examine a set of
images and
representations, and then make an overall evaluation in which I want to
show the media's strategic
function.
Master's Women, Other Women
In this section, I want to focus on the representation of the Arab woman in
the war. I approach this
representation within a problematic of sexual difference, which is, as a
problematic of difference,
always in articulation with other systems and codes (economic, political,
ethnic, etc.).
In his discussion of the problematic of sexuality as it operated in the Gulf
War, Abouali
Farmanfarmaian develops a comprehensive analysis of the U.S. national
fantasy (1-29).[11] He
argues that the narrative of war can be read as a national fantasy of
brotherhood built around the
problem of castration. The castration anxiety introduced with the defeat in
Vietnam "could only be
soothed by an open and overwhelming display of prowess in the Gulf" (2). [12]
A fantasy machine
was thus built around the stories of rape, looting, infanticide and torture of
Kuwaities by Iraqis;
Bush talked about the "rape of Kuwait," others about the Middle East as a
"culture of rape." [13]
Stereotypes such as the Oriental Other's savage sexuality were set in motion
in full force.
According to Farmanfarmaian, in this sexual(ized) economy of racial
difference, for the white
male, castrating the Oriental Other is a means of escaping his own castration.
However, the
paradoxical result of his sexualization of the world (the myths of the
black rapist, savage
sexuality of the Oriental), is his own castration, more fear of inadequacy, more
black holes
(Farmanfarmaian 13-14).
Farmanfarmaian shows that the Gulf war was concerned with a recovery of
lost virility, a war and
a desire that arose out of a sense of lack (12-19).[14] Iraq's attempt to redraw
colonially
established borders implied a sense of impotence, an inability to control
(Farmanfarmaian 15).
Farmanfarmaian's account of the articulation of sexual, racial and cultural
difference is an
important contribution to the more mainstream social scientific accounts of
the crisis of the
national security state. It offers an historical and analytic explanation of what
the national security
state might look like on the level of the unconscious inscription of its subject
position. [15]
Farmanfarmaian argues that the war was fought for the ideal "white
woman," and points to the
way that "family" and "white woman" are coded in the war. Against
optimistic arguments on the
participation of women in the military, he carefully stresses that:
The participation of women in the war does little to
overturn
arguments centering on virility. In connecting the nation, manhood and
family, the
much-lauded participation of women, rather than castrating the army,
appeared as
the much-needed link that would familialize the military. With (white)
women
demanding a share of everything, "a militarised world order needs women to
find
rewards in a militarised femininity." The military needs to become a family
in order
for the nation to remain one. Thus not only is the military no longer
dominated by
single men, but more than ever we saw images of wives and husbands as
soldiers.
(23)
He also stresses the associative link between "domestic" and "Third World"
Others. [16][16] He writes:
The ability of the American consciousness to move fluidly
and
ignorantly between its racial and sexual constructs is illustrated by a Los
Angeles
Police Department officer, who, in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating
by the
LAPD, smoothly lumped together two looming threats: "Saddam Hussein
scared
the shit out of us with chemical weapons and even though ... he didn't use
the gas,
we still made him to pay the price. Same with Rodney King." A black man in
Los
Angeles and a Arab ruler several thousand miles away differ only in terms of
the
weapons they use and the weapons used against them; the threat they
represent is
similar. (12)
It is in such a context that the absence of Arab Americans' voices in the media
becomes important
(with the exception of F. Ajami who had a pro-war position). [17] As Arab
Americans, their
resemblance to European American in terms of language and even perhaps
general cultural manners
is a possibility of the weakening of the antagonistic structuring of the
world between "us"
and "them." One could find several similar examples of this "reductionist"
strategy. On the more
analytic side of the coin however, we might be taking a risk in stressing the
equivalence between
Saddam Hussein and Rodney King. In order to prevent an over-investment
in the very economy of
sameness that we criticize, it seems important to me to note that the Arab, the
African-American or
the African are the same from the perspective of the castrating/castrated
white male colonizer,
and from that perspective, they do not exist in any real sense; they are
no more than a
fantasmatic object. On the other hand, differences do not mean a taken-for-
granted plurality. For
instance, as Farmanfarmaian himself carefully notes, the physical presence of
African Americans in
the army "does not automatically overturn the arguments about White
boundaries and fantasies of
White consciousness" (24).
However, there is a tendency in Farmanfarmaian's text to construct a
historically fixed narrative in
the place of a problematic of sexual difference. This is the mythical narrative
of the black rapist. By
providing us with an historical account of the production of this myth,
Farmanfarmaian shows that
the sexual and political economies are never separate from each other. The
white woman/black
rapist narrative was produced as a result of the transition from a mode of
exploration to a mode of
administration in the history of colonialism. The new governmental mode of
colonialism requiring
a dissolution of the colonial harem and the arrival of white women to the
colony, placed the white
family at the center of European society, and produced a strictly divided space,
the colonial city (5-
8). The colonial administrator developed an obsession with the self-
reproduction of the white
family, hence an anxiety to protect the white woman and the myth of the
black rapist. Although
Farmanfarmaian carefully stresses that there are differences (the situation was
not exactly the same
in the East where it was more of an erotic adventure for the European man,
while the "Oriental
despot" is considered to be licentious and violent in his sexuality, etc.), he
does not follow them,
for, understandably, he has a different concern: to demonstrate that the same
narrative worked in
the war.
The place of the native woman, however, remains rather limited in this
account. Farmanfarmaian
writes that, while the white woman was attributed beauty, delicacy and
perfection, in contrast, the
native woman was assigned chores. This is surely a fact, but also the "affective
value" of female
native servant's work must have been much more complicated than her
(binary) legal status. More
important, in the war, the metaphor of rape was used for Kuwait, and
it was not the white
woman, but Oriental women who had to be "saved" from the
Oriental savages. In other
words, the ideal is (of course) the white woman, but a single focus on the
ideal of white woman,
as the desire of "white warrior," might imply a rather straightforward account
of desire, desirability
and value. Farmanfarmaian writes that "I limit my arguments to the ideal of
White womanhood as
it relates to this war and as it has emerged out of the above-mentioned
historical forces" (19). But if
the ideal of white womanhood is an ideal, i.e., proposed as
"universal," a sublimated
value, [18] then the question of limits is not in the outside world (some "part"
of the facts) but
inside of his own account:
The protection laws and rape scares that permeated empire
were
not in relation to a real threat. But it was precisely the fabrication of a threat
which
served to define the boundaries of Whiteness. White womanhood could only
be,
and indeed was, sanctified in contrast to a transgressive Other, in
other
words, the native rapist and the promiscuous native woman. If the
myth of
the Other Rapist fades White womanhood as an ideal collapses, and vice-
versa.
(Farmanfarmaian 7) [last emphasis added]
But what happens to the "promiscuous native woman," if she is also part of
the mythical
construction of the ideal of White womanhood? According to
Farmanfarmaian, since the focus has
been on the racially-superior ideal of White woman, she is simply forgotten:
Historically, then "rape" as such has been constituted as a
threat
only in relation to white women. The word itself does not, in common
consciousness and usage, signify the rape of nonwhite women since such
rapes
have never been made the center of attention; on the contrary, the rape of
black
women has consistently been condoned, denied, disregarded. Thus, in
the
context of the Gulf war--particularly so soon after the New York jogger trials--
the
word rape, without any specific referents, triggered fears which could only be
connected to the constructs of black rapist/white woman. Calculated or not, it
was,
as was shown above, the concentration on this particular fear that mobilized
the
American public behind the war effort. (8) [emphasis added]
It would indeed be sufficient to use the word "rape" in such a context. But
more important, if the
rape and "nonwhite woman" are not associated in the public mind, this is
not simply
because the white woman is considered racially superior and gets more
attention, but because,
as a result of such and other similar racist and sexist beliefs, the rape of
"nonwhite" woman has
historically been considered permissible. It is important to note that
Farmanfarmaian chooses
to focus on the myth of white woman/black rapist, instead of focusing on
what he himself
describes, in the context of the sexualization of the colonized, as "the
continued and consistent
assault on black women by constructing them as promiscuous initiators of
any sexual act" (13).
This choice is interesting, especially if we think that in the same context he
refers to Malek
Alloula's study of the Algerian postcards sent by the French soldiers
(Alloula). Alloula's
study shows not only Algerian woman's construction is as the
"promiscuous initiator of
any sexual act," but also, and much more importantly in the context of a war
in the Middle
East, the strange association between the veil and the Western man's
sexual fantasies.
I am certainly not arguing that the myth of black rapist/white woman is
not important or was
not important in the war, but one has every reason to think that Alloula
provides a similar and
much more convenient model to think about the recent war's discourse,
fantasy and imagery in
terms of sexuality. Indeed, Fanon already pointed to the significance of the
veil in the context of
French colonization in Algeria: conquering Algeria was identical to
conquering its woman,
unveiling her (35-67). In this sense, Farmanfarmaian's account really becomes
an account of an
American myth in America rather than in the neo-colonial context.
If, as Farmanfarmaian
suggests, Saddam Hussein was unconsciously seen as identical to a black
rapist, the one who is
protected or liberated was the other woman.
Such an identification in the context of the recent war might be important.
Because, within the
textual problematic of Orientalism, the U.S. occupies a "strategic location" in
Said's sense: "an
author-position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes
about." [19] The U.S.
government and media can also be seen as authors writing the text of their
own intervention. When
the Muslim woman is identified as the object of a strategy, [20] there is the
opportunity to construct
a language of liberation, progressive influence, etc. I am drawing attention to
this language not
simply because it is obviously politically profitable, but because such political
profit is even more
complex than it seems. For instance, the strategic choice of Muslim woman
probably gives the
middle class Western women a sense of being liberated and a feeling
of obvious
superiority compared to the women in the hands of those despotic Orientals.
The Western Self
which Orientalism constructs is Man, but, in the larger and complex
hegemonic project, Western
woman has a role to play, because what is at stake in this project of subject-
formation is also the
construction of her "Self."[21]
In other words, the Muslim woman was one of the strategic "signs" which
were "worth marking"
during the crisis. Another was surely Islam, but it, too, was often mediated
through woman. Yet
another strategic sign was Saddam Hussein himself, but I will consider this
later. First, I want to
look at the way the Arab woman is marked during the war. My purpose here
is to understand the
specificity of the American global hegemonic project. Can we understand this
project with models
based on the early colonial period, or post-colonial metropolitan context, or
the context of Nazi
discourse?
During the period of crisis, we have heard, watched and read numerous
accounts of the situation of
women in Muslim and Arab countries. Her rights and well-being were taken
as the measure
of the backwardness of Islamic or Arabic culture. We saw almost every
day the image of a
veiled woman. These images were mobilized by a neo-Orientalist discourse,
always accompanied
by a fixed story line that transformed American presence into a progressive
mission in a foreign
and backward land of Oriental despots. The veil was a constant obsession and
a proof of the
darkness and backwardness of the culture. A report from Time
magazine is a typical
example:
The modernization and enrichment of Saudi life produced
by the
oil-price boom of the 70s and 80s may one day look like a mere twitch
compared
with the convulsions to come.... Ripping the veil off their closely shrouded
ties
with the U.S., the Saudis offered their territory as the base for the greatest
concentration of American troops since the Vietnam war. A land that forbids
women to drive, to travel unaccompanied, to wear Western garb or to
expose
anything more than a scant flash of eyes and cheekbones is now host to
thousands of rifle-toting, jeep-driving female G. I.s clad in fatigues. [emphasis
added]
If oil is a strategic commodity of global capitalism, the Muslim
woman, as the measure of
progress and democracy, emerges as the strategic target-subject of neo-
Orientalist
discourse of the New World Order. A political value is extracted from the
representation of her
(strategically useful) identity as oppressed/woman. [22] Donna Pryzbylowicz
and Abdul
JanMohamed referred to a moral surplus gained in the recent war,
overcoming the moral
deficit produced by the unsuccessful Vietnam war (Pryzbylowicz and
JanMohamed).
To this, we may add political and even future economic surpluses. Muslim
woman stands where the political, the economic and the cultural "values"
meet: her
culturally specific embodiment is the commodity that is exchanged with other
commodities. During
the war, these (mostly middle class) Saudi women were constructed as ready
at any moment for
"liberation," as we see in a photo in Time magazine: two veiled, dark
silhouettes hold
colorful Benetton shirts in their hands, already burning with desire to
consume,
tohave "looks."
Let me also draw attention to two possible limits of my argument: first, I am
talking about middle
class women in Saudi Arabia, or in the "economically developed parts" of the
Third World, though
I am also suggesting a more general project. Secondly, the veil as a dress could
also be a
commodity. Indeed, there is quite a "proliferated" market for veils in every
Muslim country. Let
me also add that I do not mean that these woman are not oppressed by the
feudal and semi-feudal
structures of Saudi Arabian society (a feudalism that is reinforced and
reproduced by the place of
Saudi Arabia in the global capitalist division of labor). For instance, we also
read stories of street
demonstrations by a group of Saudi women. I simply draw attention to the
fact that their struggle is
captured and articulated by a specific project--hence the complexity of such
struggles.
However, the place which these women occupy in the imaginary constructed
by the media is more
complicated. Gender-coding within the strategic domain is not easy and
straightforward. Figure 1
stresses the contrast between the sunny background which is a marketplace
and the woman's
veiled dark silhouette. It is a scene that is inscribed as "natural" (in other
words, as "uninscribed")
in photo-graphic space. This is the space, we should now remember, in which
one "backs up in
order to see an intelligent picture." If the quote from the San Francisco
Chronicle (which contrasted
Middle Easterners' way of getting information through smell and touch with
the Westerners' way
of getting information through visual sense) is a condensed, packaged,
consumable elaboration of
the grand narrative of evolution, this picture manifests its black
hole. [23][23] As a Time
magazine headline put it: "the eyes have it: as surveillance strengthens
the embargo, the U.S.
wonders what to do next." No one is sure.
The veiled woman in Figure 1 is different from the Algerian women studied
by Malek Alloula. In
these postcards, the relationship with the Algerian woman was romanticized,
eroticized and
sexualized; she was constructed as "licentious other," belonging to an "Other"
space where she
was imprisoned by the Oriental despot. But, she was or would be accessible,
and would be
appropriated once that space was liberated/colonized. In these postcards, she
was unveiled, often
half-naked (Alloula). [24][24] During the war however, there was a strong
emphasis on the
darkness of the veil. What is common to both contexts however is
the desire to open the
veil, to reveal what is behind it. [25]
How can we interpret this excessive darkness of the veil, the desire to
emphasize its darkness, to
make it darker, in the context of the recent war? Timothy Mitchell argued
that in the nineteenth
century, Orientalism constituted the world as exhibition (Mitchell). We can
define the twentieth or
the late twentieth century neo-orientalism (that of CNN and Time
and Newsweek
magazines) as the world as image, or better, world as
simulacrum. In this
luminous Orientalism, life is light, which is immediately coded and framed
as image, and death
becomes identical to the absence of an image. (Here, the notion of image
should also be taken in its
advertising sense, in the sense of "having an image.") The veiled woman in
the picture, with her
dark, faceless presence and her hood, is an embodiment of death in this
luminous space. Is it
possible to see the specificity of her life and her embodiment in this space of
images and simulacra,
of obsession with life as seeing and light? In this picture taken in the
historically specific
conjuncture of the Gulf War, she is a black hole. What is "seen" through this
black hole of
castration, the excessive darkness, is a fantasmatic object of desire,
and certainly
not the Arab woman's (culturally specific) embodiment. [26] But still it is a
desire for her. Here,
rather than simply accepting the grand narrative of progress, or the language
of liberation, we
should read woman as the site of an ambiguity and undecidability whose
complex inscription
always requires the other woman.
"Saddam"
Now I want to examine a series of images which are all Saddam Hussein faces
in close-up
(Figures 2, 3, 4, 5). We know the significance of Hussein's face from the war
rhetoric, it is
the face that should not be saved. Now we understand why: as we see in
these pictures,
Saddam's face has to be veiled. We can read these pictures as a
demonstration of the
structural role that sexual difference plays in the signification of cultural
difference. It is possible to
say that Saddam Hussein's face appears as veiled, when her face is no longer
available (when
Kuwait is no longer available, when there is a black hole). Is the formula of
fetishism applicable
here? Freud defined fetishism as a mechanism of "disavowal," i.e., the
displaced persistence of a
belief despite the contrary perception. [27] "We know that he is not a woman
but nevertheless..."
the tabloid story is always consumed as just a story (Ella Shohat writes): "The
cover of a
National Examiner (March 12) featured 'Saddam Hussein's Bizarre
Sex Life: A Recent
CIA Report Reveals' with an image of Hussein the crossdresser in a mini
skirt" (13)
(emphasis added). With Saddam Hussein, we have not left woman. Indeed, it
would not be an
exaggeration to say that during the war, the woman was everywhere, as the
veil, as the metaphor
of truth, and as the truth.[28]]
As a moment of otherness, the moment of fetishism is also a moment of
ambiguity and
displacement. During the crisis, the media kept asking one question
every night in the
news, in every single TV program: "what is in Saddam's mind?" We
are of course
reminded of the question which Freud articulated: what does woman want?
Slavoj Zizek argues
that racism is also determined by the Freudian and Lacanian libidinal
economy. As an example he
mentions the question that was asked about Jesse Jackson in the 1988
elections: what does Jesse
Jackson want? [29] According to Zizek, this question is related to the structure
of racist fantasy: the
other's actions are always suspected of being guided by a hidden motive. The
point, therefore,
becomes to know his hidden desires, his hidden plans, his hidden weapons.
The whole of Iraq
was (is still) covered with a huge veil. The media, the experts and the
inspectors were never
tired of searching for plans, plants, weapons--remember those cold faces on
television, always in
control and always pointing to their little black holes on photos and maps!
Following Lacan, Zizek
argues that it is this assumption of the Other's hidden surplus
enjoyment that keeps racist
fantasy going (Has he got it? He has got it!) Let us also remember that one
fundamental argument
for the war was to stop Saddam Hussein, not just to liberate Kuwait.
Here are a few
descriptions of this new villain: "Armed and audacious, Saddam Hussein
takes Kuwait--and no
one knows how to stop him," "Iraq's dictator seems to be capable of
doing anything
to get his way," "Ruthless Saddam Hussein seizes tiny Kuwait--and
no one is sure where
his ambition will end," "Just how far will Saddam Hussein's lust
for power carry
him?," "No one can be very sure, what if any message will derail his
ruthless drive to be
the paramount power in the Persian Gulf?" "Of course Saddam has more
in his mind than
money" (Time [August 13, 1990]).
But why the obsession with Hussein's face? His face is veiled, we see
his eyes,
he is looking at us. Time correspondent Dan Goodgame wrote:
"on meeting him, a
visitor was first struck by his eyes, crackling with alertness and at the same
time cold and
remorseless as snake eyes on the side of dice. They are the eyes of a killer"
(Time [August
13, 1990]). According to Lacan, who provides us with a psychoanalytic theory
of the subject, the
fantasy space is constituted by the split between the eye and the
gaze. [30] The subject can
see another person's eyes or his eyes in the mirror, but can not see the gaze,
i.e., the place from
which he is looked at or the place from which he would look at himself to be
able to have himself
before himself. He therefore assumes the gaze in the field of the
Other. The gaze assumed
in the field of the Other is called "stain" by Lacan: "that which always escapes
from the grasp of
that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as
consciousness." [31] Saddam
Hussein's gaze is an embodiment of this no-thing or black hole of the
luminous, enlightened
subject, i.e., the necessary possibility of a place from where one is looked at,
caught in the act. It
is also the object petit a, i.e., the source of enjoyment or jouissance of
the subject. [32]
The notion of Saddam Hussein's demonization is therefore not sufficient,
because what is at stake
is much more, and much more complex. Hussein's look signifies a
reversal of the Western
imperial subject's own control, an "always already possible" possibility of his
own failure. This
reversal of the utopia of the rational, scientific eye is the backward, all-seeing,
omnipotent,
Oriental-despotic evil-eye which controls everything, and from which the
Western subject extracts
an immense amount of political profit to compensate his failures (recession,
public approval).
Saddam Hussein came to fulfill this function of the Other in the Western
game of ruling the world.
To be sure, he fulfilled such a function as the real person that he is,
but given the support
which was given to him in the past, he was not only a cause, but also a result,
a product. Or, to
follow Lacan: "there is cause only in something that doesn't work" (22). The
causes, the trouble
spots, the black holes are created by a system whose perverted
enjoyment is to substitute
one trouble for another: Khaddafi, Khomenei, Noriega, Hussein. In this
respect, what was
important in the war was the Middle Easterner's closeness to "us" (Hussein
in close-up), to the
imperial subject's controlling eye, and to the abstract space of coding
(petrodollars) and lifestyle
(cars). As Said already said regarding the image of Islam, it is something that
we hear about
everyday, something close, yet entirely alien (perhaps an immigrant). As
Larry King of CNN
expressed it:
The power thing is awkward for me because I still feel the
Brooklyn kid in me. But yeah, I realize the effect the show can have. I'm
aware that
I am being watched--like Bernard Shaw called in and talked to my guest,
President
Reagan, and we both realized that Saddam Hussein might be watching. That's
extraordinary to know. We're watched worldwide. (King)
A number of analysts and critics have stressed the narrative organization of
the war discourse. Of
course, what is at stake is not a simple or straightforward indoctrination (as,
for instance, in Nazi
propaganda), but rather--as the Frankfurt School also clearly saw--in the
capitalist system of
production for the market it is a matter of selling. "Saddam" sells. Stuart
Ewen writes: "In the
ratings game, the news--out of economic necessity--must be transformed into
a drama, a thriller,
an entertainment. Within such a context, the truth is defined as
that which sells"
(Ewen, quoted in Hammer and McLaren 49-50). Following Ewen, Hammer
and McLaren stress
the relation between prior mass cultural narrative and the narrative of the
war:
Especially with reference to the CNN coverage of the war, a
kindred range of films and videos dealing with war at a distance (Top
Gun, Iron
Eagle, etc.) tacitly co-ordinated the reception of many viewers to the aerial
shots of 'precision' hits through a superimposition of images and forms of
emplotment--memories from postmodern war's electronic and celluloid
Hollywood
archive--transforming the war coverage into a type of palimpsest blending the
discontinuity of war with the continuity of Western narratives about it.
(50)
This "palimpsest" can be read in Derrida's words, as "a depth without bottom,
an infinite allusion,
and a perfectly superficial exteriority: a stratification of surfaces each of whose
relation to itself,
each of whose interior, is but the implication of another similarly exposed
surface" (224). Layers
of preserved inscription constantly evoke frames of perception which are re-
written by fresh
inscriptions. If desire for war is mobilized in the model of the mass narrative
of Hollywood (the
hero Bush, the villain Saddam), [33] this should cover a vast field from
cowboy movies to cold
war spies to the genre of adventure, but one which is itself modeled on what
we might call
"colonial discourse" in broad terms. It is the "White hero vs. Other-
race/culture villain" opposition
that is traversing, and racially charging these different genres. As I shall argue
below, this narrative
structure itself is enacted politically. It is in such a field that we can pose
questions of the complex
relations between the political and the cultural, the ways these two distinct
fields feed into
each other. It is also in this sense that we can talk about a discursive space
which refers only to
itself, but perhaps hides such self-referentiality precisely because what is
simulated is always
simulated in a different field. [34]
The way this narrative works on the political level is perhaps the key to the
Law of the New World
Order, which seems to depend on the creation of Evil Third World Leaders.
In his "Thoughts on
the Late War," Fredric Jameson argued that the writer/reader of the Latin
American genre of the
great dictator novels had a repressed admiration of sadistic tyrants such as
Hitler and Stalin.
According to Jameson, this makes sense only when we think that such
leaders challenged the
United States, something only a monster would dare to do, not a well-
behaved client nation.
Jameson writes:
If nothing else, American hypocrisy marks them that
way,
for to be anti-American from our view is not a matter of healthy national
independence, but rather of evil: think of the things you would have to be the
enemy of--democracy, freedom, elections, etc., etc. Only a ruthless warlord
would
be able to assemble enough absolute power in his own hands to resist the
multiple
forms influence and coercion available to American empire and American
big
business: the narrative is thus fairly written in advance, and its moral
is not
morality but autarchy and self-determination. (146) [emphasis
added]
It is hard to disagree with Jameson that the great dictator novels were
complicit with what they
wrote about. However, by "the narrative written in advance" Jameson refers
to a more specific
global construction which has a more complex dialectic, and which is not
exhausted in the
production of moral dichotomies. In the context of this global narrative
inscription, it seems more
important to me to talk about the Western Subject's fantasy of
autonomy.
This "narrative written in advance" is written in and by the grand narrative
of the West, the so-
called "Evolution of Man." It is, in the first place, a fantasy of autonomy, and
even a fantasy of
autogenesis, a radical denial of relationality and otherness. In a recent article,
Judith Butler points
to the "fantasy of autogenesis" as a constitutive dimension of subject
production (Butler 150-165).
As an example, she gives the imperialist subject in the recent war.
The demi-god of a military subject which euphorically
engaged
the fantasy that it has with ease achieved its aims still fails to understand that
its
actions will produce effects that will far exceed its phantasmatic purview; it
thinks
that its goals were achieved in matter of weeks, but the effects of its actions
will
inaugurate violence in places and in ways that it itself can not possibly
foresee, and
which will produce a massive and violent contestation of that very
pretension.
(157)
Interestingly, the characteristics Judith Butler finds in the imperialist subject
were also attributed to
Saddam Hussein: "he fails to understand, he doesn't realize the
consequences, etc., etc." These
can be seen as the two poles of the same subject-position: Saddam Hussein the
dictator, and the
Western Subject of Reason and Democracy. The two poles share a fantasy of
complete autonomy,
the desire for a sovereign subject position. The signifier of the New World
Order is split between
the despotic, omnipotent, dangerous and evil Third World dictator and
the sovereign, i.e.,
liberal and imperial subject of the West. The point is precisely that such a
despotic, arbitrary,
transgressive power is not separate from but an essential element of the
community of democratic,
liberal, sovereign subjects. The totalitarian principle is an essential but
repressed possibility
inscribed in the subject of democracy. Such an inscription manifests itself
in foreign politics. I
am referring to a possibility that is never realized as such, or that is always
realized differently. But
still it can enable us to see the social support for the imperial subject. The
reason George Bush was
elected in 1988 is that, in a conjuncture which became increasingly sensitive
to international
politics, he gave every sign of being a decisive, tough person. He was
considered to be the type of
person who could deal with people like Khomeini or Saddam Hussein. In the
last section I want to
examine the nature of this split law of the sovereign subject.
Primitive Accumulation
The law that George Bush represents is no less transgressive than what will
be branded as
violation. It was the same U.N. which legally allowed the same U.S. (itself a
violator according to
U.N. resolutions) to enforce the law. But the contradiction that is embodied
in the very institution
of the United Nations is a functional necessity of the world order. If there is
nothing but violation,
one of the violations must have the power to sanction itself as law. [35] In our
world, the Law is
embodied by those privileged members of the U.N. who have veto power.
But what is the model of the mass narrative of Hollywood, this fascinating
hegemonic apparatus?
Could it be what Marx called primitive accumulation? In relation to the
specific character of State
violence, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue that "it is very difficult to
pinpoint this violence
because it always presents itself as preaccomplished" (A Thousand
Plateaus 447). They
refer to Marx's observation that "there is a violence that necessarily
operates through the State,
precedes the capitalist mode of production, constitutes the 'primitive
accumulation' and makes
possible the capitalist mode of production itself" (A Thousand Plateaus
447). [36] This,
however, means that primitive accumulation ("colonial plunder") is not a
stage that is accomplished
once and for all, "before" the capitalist mode of production in an
evolutionary logic. Since it is
preaccomplished, primitive accumulation or State violence (the process of
capturing bodies, land
and resources) never leaves us, it is forever accomplished. In the words of
Deleuze and Guattari:
... it is a violence that posits itself as preaccomplished, even
though it is reactivated everyday. This is a place to say it, if ever there was
one:
the mutilation is prior, pre-established. However, these analyses of
Marx
should be enlarged upon. For the fact remains that there is a primitive
accumulation
that, far from deriving from the agricultural mode of production, precedes it:
as a
general rule, there is primitive accumulation whenever an apparatus of
capture is
mounted, with that very particular kind of violence that creates or
contributes to
the creation of that which it is directed against, and thus presupposes
itself.
(447) [last emphasis added]
Deleuze and Guattari name this particular violence, characterized by the
creation of what it is
directed against, "lawful violence." If the Gulf War is an instance of
preaccomplished violence,
Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait can be considered as what Deleuze
and Guattari call
"crime." They define this as another form of violence: "a violence of illegality
that consists in
taking possession of something to which one has no 'right,' in capturing
something one does not
have a 'right' to capture" (A Thousand Plateaus 448). Given the U.N.
resolutions about
the U.S. invasion of Panama, is the U.S. action not criminal violence as well?
But there is a law
that is preaccomplished, already accomplished before this crime is committed.
If, as Foucault
shows, the modern punishment system punishes the criminal rather than
the crime; if, in other
words, the criminal is Other (somebody different from us, somebody with a
different psyche and
constitution, on the other side of a strict line), then such a position can best be
fulfilled by all the
Others of grand ideological narratives such as racism, orientalism, or class
narrative (the
subproletariat). [37] What matters is the power to construct, the power to
inscribe reality,
events, facts--the power to create that which you are acting against. The
preaccomplished
nature of lawful violence works in the capacity to sanction violence as law,
which is to inscribe
what is criminal. (Butler gives a parallel example from the language of war:
Colin Powell's
description of the sending of missiles as "the delivery of an ordinance"
"figures an act of violence
as an act of law" [157].)[38]
We should ask then: against whom is this violence directed? Against Saddam
Hussein the dictator?
The aim of lawful violence is not to exercise violence itself, but rather to
capture people or to
appropriate land and resources (primitive accumulation). Since Hussein was
not captured, we
perhaps need to ask who was. In the immediate aftermath of the liberation of
Kuwait, the Kuwaiti
police captured immigrant Palestinian workers who were suspected of
collaborating with the Iraqi
military during the occupation. These Palestinians appeared a couple of times
on TV; there was
some discussion and some worry about their possible fate; and then they
disappeared. I want to
argue that they were, in a strange way, the real targets, however unimportant
they may have
seemed.
At this point, however, we need to turn back to Saddam Hussein's face.
Everything that I have
said about it so far presupposes the argument that this face is made or
produced.
In their approach to questions of semiotics and subjectivity, Deleuze and
Guattari refer to a
"desiring machine" which appears at the intersection of "significance"
(signification in their
terminology) and "subjectification." This machine produces faces, though it is
itself not a face, but
a "white wall/black hole system." They call it the "abstract machine of
faciality:"
Concrete faces can not be assumed to come ready made.
They
are engendered by an abstract machine of faciality
(visagéité),
which produces them at the same time as it gives the signifier its white wall
and
subjectivity its black hole. Thus the black hole/white wall system is, to begin
with,
not a face, but the abstract machine that produces faces according to the
changeable
combinations of its cogwheels. Do not expect the abstract machine to resemble
what
it produces, or will produce. (A Thousand Plateaus 168)
Therefore we should not assume that the Palestinians have come there ready
made (which is why
Jameson's point about the narrative written in advance remains
problematical without further
analysis). Is this not a question of language, a question of where to speak from
and how? Because
"it is absurd to believe that language as such can convey a message. A
language is always
embedded in the faces that announce its statements and ballast them in
relation to the signifiers in
progress and subjects concerned. Choices are guided by faces, elements are
organized around
faces" (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 179). Palestinians, Arabs
were facialized,
given the face of Saddam Hussein, which was itself produced by a distribution
of black holes on
the white screen of the hyper-real electronic media (which connected itself to
the infamous abstract
machine of faciality). [39]
According to Deleuze and Guattari, facialization does not simply mean the
production of a face but
also the "overcoding" of the body by the face: "an operation worthy of Doctor
Moreau: horrible
and magnificent. Hand, breast, stomach, penis and vagina, thigh, leg and foot,
all come to be
facialized. Fetishism, erotomania, etc., are inseparable from these processes of
facialization" (A
Thousand Plateaus 170). We may read Hussein's feminization as the
facialization of the Arab
woman's body. But what triggers this machine? Deleuze and Guattari write:
... the maternal power operating through the face during nursing; the
passional
power operating through the face of the loved one, even in caresses; the
political
power operating through the face of the leader (streamers, icons and
photographs),
even in mass actions; the power of the film operating through the face of the
star
and the close-up; the power of television. It is not the individuality of the face
that
counts but the efficacy of the ciphering it makes possible, and in what cases it
makes it possible. This is an affair not of ideology but of economy and the
organization of power (pouvoir). We are certainly not saying that the face, the
power of the face (la puissance du visage), engenders and explains social
power
(pouvoir). Certain assemblages of power (pouvoir) require the production of a
face,
others do not. (A Thousand Plateaus 175).
If only certain assemblages of power require the production of a face,
then we should not
be asking who is Saddam Hussein, but of what is his face made. It is
made of so many
powers/faces: the maternal power (mother's face), the power of the film (the
face of the star, the
face of the villain), the political power (the face of the President, Stormin'
Norman, Hussein's
other face on the walls of Baghdad), the passional power (the tearful, proud
loved ones left
behind), the power of television (TV faces, Dan Rather, Ted Kopple, Larry
King, or when you
switch it off, the TV's other, dark face in your room), the face of the magazine,
etc. All these faces
run into a white wall/black hole system, making lines, dots, circles, pipelines,
holes, spaces,
curves, drawing, writing, inscribing one face, the face on the surface of the
palimpsest, repressing
and stratifying other surfaces, other faces: "Saddam, the Butcher of Baghdad,
with his snake eyes,
the New Hitler!" [40]
It was certainly a power operation, and his face was all over the U.S. (and
Europe), circulating in
society: TV showed a group of young white males who turned over and
kicked an old
American car on which they drew Saddam Hussein faces (the face of the
car); there was a
Saddam Hussein voodoo doll sold in chain drugstores--he had a brutal,
malicious face. Again TV
showed people who did shooting exercise on Hussein's face (somebody said it
helped to release
the tension)--is there a face without shooting? Hussein never spoke, not even
a word, he did not
seem to mind words, indeed he just stood there. The only thing he said was:
"this will be the
mother of all battles," which proved that he did not even know how to speak,
unlike Hitler (who
spoke a lot on the radio). He was kissed and hugged by a lot of males, he
looked at us, and smiled
with his snake eyes. Hussein--constructed as the agenda--was the facialization
of Palestinians and
Arabs. His face articulated the silence of their voices; it gave their speech a
certain accent even
before they spoke. In this way, lawful violence presupposes itself by creating
that which it is used
against, preexisting its own use. It inscribes the name and makes the face (It's
an Oriental! It's an
Arab! It's a Jew, It's a lunatic!) which dissimulates its own horrific violence:
The State can in this way say that the violence is "primal,"
that
is simply a natural phenomenon the responsibility for which does not lie
with the
state, which uses violence only against the violent, against "criminals"--
against
primitives, against nomads--in order that peace may reign. (Deleuze and
Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus 448)
Such is the grand narrative of oil, Orientalism, in so far as the Middle East is
concerned. By these
techniques human bodies are captured, facialized and made to do what they
are assumed to be
capable of: to produce more than what is necessary for their subsistence. The
ironies surrounding
the war--the violator U.S. as the police, the U.S. at war against a regime it had
supported against
the fundamentalist Iranian regime--all these demonstrate the West's power
to do what it wants to
do. The faces and images are interchangeable and absolutely necessary in this
new order. (I do not
say they are easily substitutable.) What is at stake now is a "neo-orientalism"
or neo-colonial
discourse in which lawful violence against created Third World
criminal/dictators is an essential
element of the cultural and political writing of global capitalism.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I will refer to two different articles, one by Barbara Harlow, the
other by Gayatri
Spivak. In a discussion of the literary articulations of decolonization and
partition, Harlow refers to
the Palestinian novelist, Ghassan Kanafani's, work. Kanafani's first novel,
Men in the
Sun, is the story of three poor Palestinian refugees who try to enter
Kuwait from Iraq in order
to find work in that oil-rich country. Harlow writes:
... after having been bartered, bargained over and
overcharged
by the Iraqi brokers and traders in Palestinian labor, (they) meet Abul
Khaizuran.
This Palestinian, once a political leader in the community, agrees to transport
the
three refugees across the border in the empty water tank of the truck he drives
for a
Kuwaiti merchant. The fate of the three migrant workers of Men in the
Sun,
silently suffocated in their water tank while the truck driver listens to the
obscene jokes of the Kuwaiti border guards, is well-known, even legend, in
Palestinian litero-political history, and the question posed by Abul Khaizuran
at the
story's end has long resounded through that history: "Why didn't they bang
the
walls of the tank? Why? Why? Why?" Kanafani's story was written prior to
the
formation of an organized, independent, Palestinian national resistance, and
the
narrative critique that it elaborates across Arab borders and through its
fractured plot
and interrupted characterizations, addresses both a wanting Palestinian
leadership
and the trading in the Palestinian cause by existing Arab regimes. Those
emergent
Palestinian democratic aspirations to national liberation and self-
determination of the
early 1960s, still spurned today by regimes but become popular and exemplary
throughout the Arab world and around the globe, were threatened with
extinction
once again, and again on the Iraq--Kuwait border, not in an empty water tank
but
over disputed burning oil fields. (Harlow 104)
The three Palestinians who could not bang the walls of that tank while
crossing the border illegally
were the victims of an already accomplished, lawful violence. Their
stories, their faces
were made "across borders, through fractured plots, interrupted
characterizations, under the threat
of extinction."
My second example comes from Gayatri Spivak. In her reading of Salman
Rushdie's Satanic
Verses (both the "text" and the "event"), Spivak refers to the case of
Shahbano, a Muslim
Indian woman who went to the Supreme Court to demand an allowance
from her divorced
husband, but, following a political conflict between the Muslim minority and
the Indian
government, denounced the Supreme Court judgment in her favor against
Muslim law, and went
back to her community by reclaiming her religious identity (Spivak, "Reading
the Satanic Verses"
41-60).[41] In India, Shahbano became an occasion for the creation of a Muslim
collective agency,
which would also influence Rushdie's fate. But she was easily forgotten.
Spivak finds in
Shahbano the difficult case of a notion of "agency" that can not depend on
free will. She compares
Shahbano's disappearance with the rise of Khomenei's "monolithic face, this
construct, with the
piercing eyes under the iconic turban." In conclusion, she writes:
... whenever they bring out the Ayatollah, remember the
face
that does not come together on the screen, remember Shahbano. She is quite
discontinuous with Salman Rushdie's fate as it is being organized on many
levels.... When the very well-known face is brought out, remember the face
that
you have not seen, the face that has disappeared from view, remember
Shahbano.
(Spivak, "Reading the Satanic Verses" 60)
Certainly these are different cases. Still, in a similar way, I would like to
suggest that, whenever
they bring out Saddam Hussein, we should remember the immigrant
Palestinians in Kuwait, the
Palestinians in the occupied territories, whose fate is, generally speaking, a
metaphor for all
subaltern Arab and Muslim peoples--especially those in the Middle East--
who, because of oil, have
been the victims of a severe humiliation, oppression, and exploitation. These
peoples are produced
in the images of their bloodiest leaders, no more than the reverse images of
those who produce
them.
As conditions such as the recent war force us to speak in the discursive mode
of ideology-critique,
we should also remember that what is behind or before the face is not always
a true identity, but
often a captured body in resistance. We should turn the facialization of those
bodies into a moment
of questioning the production of our own "faces," our own "selves," a
moment of questioning the
complexities and complicities of our being in the world. We should
turn our bodies into
the "probe-heads" which Deleuze and Guattari demand and turn that
moment of horrific violence
into a moment of re-searching and re-making the connections that we have
to the people who live
and die elsewhere.
(Note: As I am making the last revisions on this paper, Saddam Hussein's
face is raised again ...
July 28, 1992. Will it be a farce this time?)
Notes
1. I would like to thank Stephen Heath and Victor Burgin for their useful
suggestions and
comments on earlier versions of this paper, and Jim Clifford and Meyda
Yegenoglu for their
editorial comments and suggestions. Back to main text
2. The people who use such words against the U. S. invasion of Panama are
normally
regarded as extremists. Back to main text
3. "As far as I understand it, the notion of textuality should be related to the
notion of the worlding
of a world on a supposedly uninscribed territory. When I say this, I am
thinking basically about
the imperialist project which had to assume that the earth that it
territorialized was in fact previously
uninscribed. So then a world, on a simple level of cartography inscribed what
was presumed to be
uninscribed. Now this worlding actually is also a texting, textualizing, a
making into art, making
into an object to be understood" (Spivak, Post-Colonial Critic 1).
Back to main text
4. Except in the oldest institutions of colonialism such as the British "School
of Oriental and
African Studies." Back to main text
5. Production costs were low in the Middle East compared to both U. S. and
Latin America. The
leasing costs in Texas, especially, were much higher than the costs of
concessions overseas
(Bromley, American Hegemony 90-99). Back to main text
6. Bromley also refers to Arrighi, especially pp. 92-98 (American
Hegemony).Back to main text
7. Communist-led national liberation movements (Korea, Vietnam,
Cambodia) complicated this
project. Back to main text
8. Stephen Heath writes: "Days, hours, minutes, seconds, television is time
and motion study in
practice, assembly line quantification for maximum efficiency. Hence the
potential panic around
time, the endlessly repeated dramatization of doing things in the quickest
time; as in game shows,
that staple of television--who can do this the quickest, answer the fastest, time
always in jeopardy.
The liveliness of television--whether real or fictive (liveliness as a prime
imaginary of television)--
also has its significance here, that of a constant immediacy, TV today, now,
this minute" (278).
Could it be the case that this everyday time of TV, this institutional form, is
itself responsible not
only for the collapse of temporality, but also a concomitant process of creation
of black
holes on a white screen? (Arabs, blacks, criminals, trouble spots, dark
zones, inner cities--
think of the variety and popularity of "cop docu-dramas," or "rescue docu-
dramas.") Back to main text
9. For further analyses, see Amin and Wallerstein. Amin emphasizes
imperialist rivalry and
different U. S. hegemonic projects ("maritime" and "coalitionist"). Both
authors think that the
Third World is an important area of conflict in the present
conjuncture. Back to main text
10. As O'Connor explains, the fact that oil is priced in dollars helps it
maintain its position as the
world's reserve currency. He adds to this general principle the conjunctural
questions of capital
shortage and decreasing exports in the U. S., which made the petrodollars an
urgent issue for U.
S. finances, and global financial stability by implication. Back to main text
11. Another interesting account of national fantasy can be found in Jochen
Schulte-Sasse and
Linda Schulte-Sasse. Back to main text
12. For the connection between the Vietnam and Gulf wars, see also the
interesting analysis by
Pryzbylowicz and JanMohamed. See also articles by Rowe, by Correll, and by
Gibson in the same
issue of Cultural Critique. See also Jameson.Back to main text
13. See also Jeffords.Back to main text
14. Farmanfarmaian also talks about the way the so-called cultural attributes
of peoples were
distributed in the colonial period. In this "international division of
attributes," "the label of rape
only sticks to the racial other" (4). Back to main text
15. Since it is also one of Farmanfarmaian's main references, I should refer to
Thweliet's
psychological analysis of German fascist soldiers, Male Fantasies.
Another important
work in this context is of course, Alloula's study of the postcards sent by
French soldiers in
Algeria, Colonial Harem. Back to main text
16. John Brown Childs provides similar examples, with the purpose of
drawing attention to the
cinematic-televisual subtext of war imagery (Hollywood movies, cop docu-
dramas, news, "white
cops controlling dark dangerous things"). His most fascinating example is a U.
S. Marine Corps
General briefing reporters on the successful rescue of an American pilot
behind Iraqi lines: "We
went 40 miles inside Indian country and got him out." See J. B. Childs "Notes
on the Gulf War."
The "Indian" here is an embodiment of the Other which exists in the
fantasmatic universe of the
white male subject. For the relations between war and cinema, see Virilio,
War and Cinema.
Back to main text
17. As far as I was able to follow, Edward Said spoke twice on the public radio
and appeared once
on public TV, although Arab American views were not specifically and
visibly brought into public. Back to main text
18. It is in this context, for instance, that Farmanfarmaian needs to make a
distinction in a footnote:
"Where I use 'white' with a small w, it functions as an adjective referring to
particular individuals
or groups. Used with a capital W it denotes the construct of Whiteness in
which racially nonwhite
individuals may participate" (25, note 10). Farmanfarmaian further explains
that Whiteness or
White consciousness includes not only whites but all those who accept the
same notions which
have been built around Whiteness. I think this opposition between
"constructed vs. empirical,"
which is hard to avoid for all of us, is precisely the source of the
problem. I believe such
oppositions implies our difficulty to see the real itself as a text, a network,
a web. For
instance, the white woman is not constructed only against the black rapist, but
also as opposed to
the promiscuous native woman, as different from the backward native
woman, as different from
the white man, as bourgeois, or middle class or working class. Rather than
conceiving identity as a
complex product, we often fall back into the oppositional logics that we
criticize. The ideal white
woman is a complex product. In other words, her ideality can be
deconstructed only by showing
how complex her production is. Back to main text
19. Said defines Orientalism's strategic formation as "the relationship
between texts and
the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres acquire
mass, density and
referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large"
and strategic location
as "the author's position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he
writes about"
(20). Back to main text
20. For the definition of strategy, see Michel de Certeau: "I call a strategy
the calculation
(or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a
subject with will and
power (a business, a city, an army, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It
postulates a place
that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which
relations with an
exteriority composed of targets and threats (customers or competitors,
enemies, the
country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be
managed" (35-36).
See also Foucault (History of Sexuality 100-102). Back to main text
21. See Yegenoglu, "Supplementing the Orientalist Lack: European Ladies in
the Harem," in this
issue of Inscriptions. Back to main text
22. I am trying to think through Gayatri Spivak's complex formulation:
"Work in gendering in
principle sees the socius as an affectively coded site of exchange and surplus.
The simple
contentless moment of value as it is gender coded has historically led to the
appropriation of the
sexual differential, subtracted from, but represented as, the theoretical fiction
of sexual identity"
("Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality, Value" 227). For the
production of political
value, see also her "Reading the Satanic Verses" (52-53). Speaking of the
famous case of
Shahbano, Spivak writes: "In the sphere of the production of political value,
the mute as articulate
in the service of 'orthodoxy' (to borrow Gita Sahgal's word)--a discontinuous
naming of collective
agency in the name of the 'sacred' rather than the 'profane' (in the other
coding called 'secular,'
'national')--is more spectacularly muted because so abundantly audible"
("Reading the Satanic
Verses" 53). Back to main text
23. Here, by photographic space, I am very loosely referring to what Henri
Lefebvre calls abstract
space in his presentation of the mythical grand narrative of the visual sense
(which gained
hegemony over all the other senses by defeating them in the historical
process) (Lefebvre 285-
287). Lefebvre sees abstract space as an amalgam of three elements: geometric
(Euclidean) space,
optical space and phallic space. Abstract space is susceptible to rational
operations, it is luminous
and is a space of images, and lastly it is a space that is produced by violence,
instituted by the state
apparatus and military. I also read Lefebvre's text as an exposition of the
mythical grand narrative.
It needs to be stressed that there are other accounts. For instance, G. Deleuze
and F. Guattari have
an entirely unorthodox and incredibly complex view of the relations among
senses and the
organization of desire in different inscriptions of what they call "socius."
Their "evolutionism," if
one wants to call it that, is very different. See, especially "territorial machine,"
"barbaric machine,"
and "capitalist machine" as different organizations of desire in Anti-
Oedipus. See also
A Thousand Plateaus, Chapters 12, 13, 14. Back to main text
24. Fanon's above formulation of unveiling Algeria can be read in terms of
the body of the woman
signifying the body of the earth for the colonizer. See Fanon (35-67). See also
Yegenoglu, "Veiled
Fantasies." Back to main text
25. In these formulations, I am drawing upon Yegenoglu's "Veiled Fantasies."
Back to main text
26. For an ethnographic account of the veiled woman see Abu-Lughod.
Back to main text
27. In Freud's words: "In the situation we are considering, on the contrary, we
see that the
perception has persisted, and that a very energetic action has been undertaken
to maintain the
disavowal. It is not true that, after the child made his observation of the
woman, he has preserved
unaltered his belief that women have a phallus. He has retained that belief,
but he has also given it
up. In the conflict between the weight of the unwelcome perception and the
force of his counter-
wish, a compromise has been reached, as is only possible under the
unconscious laws of thought-
in the primary processes. Yes, in his mind the woman has got a penis,
in spite of
everything; but this penis is no longer the same as it was before" (154). Back to main text
28. Perhaps we should think of all this with the concept of "womb-envy"
which Gayatri C. Spivak
proposes (In Other Worlds 81). Back to main text
29. See Zizek (Sublime Object 114). Once more I am in agreement with
Abouali
Farmanfarmaian in so far as such connections are concerned, but what I want
to emphasize is the
difference between Jesse Jackson and Rodney King, and/or Saddam Hussein,
and/or the
immigrant Palestinian worker in Kuwait, etc. Back to main text
30. See Lacan (67-119). Back to main text
31. As Jacques Lacan puts it: "That in which the consciousness may turn back
upon itself--grasp
itself, like Valéry's Young Parque, as seeing oneself seeing oneself--represents
mere sleight of
hand. An avoidance of the function of the gaze is at work here" (74).
Back to main text
32. In a similar way, and following Slavoj Zizek's framework, Jochen Schulte-
Sasse and Linda
Schulte-Sasse argue that Saddam Hussein can be seen as a negative
embodiment of the American
national fantasy, an embodiment whose counterpart is "the flag, the president
or Stormin'
Norman." See "War, Otherness and Illusory Identifications with the State"
(91-92). I want to
emphasize the production of such "negativity."Back to main text
33. See, for instance, Shohat, Childs, and Jameson. Back to main text
34. For the notion of hyper-real, see Baudrillard. See also the interesting
analysis by Mark S.
Roberts. Back to main text
35. For a similar account of Law in the Hegelian and Lacanian problematic,
see Zizek ("Limits of
the Semiotic Approach," especially pp. 92-99). Back to main text
36. For primitive accumulation, see Marx (Capital Ch. 31). Back to main text
37. "The delinquent is also to be distinguished from the offender in that he is
not only the author of
his acts (the author responsible in terms of certain criteria of free, conscious
will), but is linked to
his offense by a whole bundle of complex threads (instincts, drives,
tendencies, character). The
penitentiary technique bears not on the relation between author and crime,
but on the criminal's
affinity with his crime. The delinquent, the strange manifestation of an
overall phenomenon of
criminality, is to be found in quasi-natural classes, each endowed with his
own characteristics and
requiring a specific treatment, what Marquet-Wasselot called in 1841 the
'ethnography of the
prisons'; 'The convicts are ... another people within the same people; with its
own habits,
instincts, morals'" (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 252-253). For the
production of the
delinquent ("the strange manifestation of an overall phenomenon of
criminality"), see 257-292.
The delinquent is a "useful" and "controlled" illegality. Foucault writes:
"Arms trafficking, the
illegal sales of alcohol in prohibition countries, or more recently drug
trafficking show a
similar functioning of this 'useful delinquency': the existence of a legal
prohibition creates around
it a field of illegal practices, which one manages to supervise, while extracting
from it an illicit
profit through elements, themselves illegal, but rendered manipulable by
their organization in
delinquency. This organization is an instrument for administering and
exploiting illegalities." (280,
emphasis added) Foucault's approach has obvious implications for the inner
cities, drug wars, and
the question of racism in the United States and other Western countries,
though precisely such
implications are lost, because Foucault belongs to the Literature Department,
and not Sociology or
Criminology. I suggest we think the same approach in the context of a
political economy of global
hegemony. I believe, this would require a much more complex approach,
given the complexities of
global political economy, class struggles in the Third World and the
exigencies of national identity.
I certainly do not claim to be doing that. Back to main text
38. Butler further argues that "it figures the missile as command, an order to
obey and is thus a
certain act of speech which not only delivers a message, i. e., get out of
Kuwait, but effectively
enforces that message through the threat of death and through death itself. Of
course, this is a
message that can never be received, for it kills its addressee, and so it is not an
ordinance at all, but
the failure of all ordinances, the refusal of a communication. And for those
who remain to read the
message, they will not read what is sometimes quite literally written on the
message" (157). But, if
this leads to "massive and violent contestation" in Butler's own words, then,
in some strange
sense, they do read the message and receive the command. I have argued
elsewhere that
fundamentalist Islam can be seen as a Western command. See my "Under the
Sign of Orientalism."
Jameson puts this paradox in a different way, in his discussion of the
imperialist notion of setting
an example: "the problem is the familiar paradox of time-travel generally;
namely, that you thereby
try to influence a future which is however itself profoundly modified by the
very act of trying to do
so, so that the putative warning is no longer valid for the new situation in
which it exists as a
bloody fact" (144). Back to main text
39. I should stress that according to Deleuze and Guattari, the face is in fact
Christ, or ordinary
White Man's face. Other races are evaluated according to their degree of
deviation from the White
Man's face. They argue that racism does not work by exclusion, by designating
someone as Other,
but "by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-
Man face" (A
Thousand Plateaus 178). As they themselves put, it however, the logic of
facialization or
Christianization requires that "there are only people who should be like us
and whose only
crime it is not to be" (178) (emphasis added). I am trying to think this
particular "crime" in
the context of primitive accumulation/lawful violence, i. e., as "the
creation of that which it
is used against" (448) (emphasis added). Back to main text
40. Many critics emphasized the pronunciation of this name, the
connotations it had: Sodom,
Satan. But this is nothing compared to the production of a face! Back to main text
41. For a detailed account of this famous case, see Pathak and Rajan. Back to main text
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