On Getting Past Yes to Number One
by Frances Ferguson
The current situation—the
specter of war between the United States and Iraq—has a way of
foregrounding questions of bellicose recklessness and problems of
international justice that tend to cast our more usual activities into
the shade. The massiveness of the scale on which war can now be
waged—and can be waged by being continually threatened—tends to make
other concerns look small in comparison. The ongoing sense that the war
is impending and has been impending for months upon months causes at
least me to discover that there are many things for which I have no
appetite. I watch very little of the nightly news broadcasts on the
major American networks; I read increasingly little of the newspapers;
I turn off Bush’s State of the Union speech in the middle of one of his
sentences. I cannot claim that I like this way of living, in which I
feel that I am constantly remiss, failing in my duty as a citizen to
sift and evaluate information and opinion. What I feel, of course, is
the difficulty of imagining a way of actually doing something that
would be useful. Demonstrations and petitions have their effects or, at
least, their consolations; but Critical
Inquiry has, partially through the timing of its forum, prompted
me to worry again about questions of choice and agency.
I have, in the first place, been brooding on a
paradox of the modern news system—that we are told more and more about
situations that we can do less and less to influence. Not much more
than two hundred years ago, a “very young gentleman at Paris”
(Chames-Jean-François de Pont) wrote to Edmund Burke (on 4
November 1789) to ask his opinion of the French Revolution and received
a reply that took the form of a letter but went on to become more than
three hundred typeset pages by the time Burke rounded out his “answer.”
Yet the most painful part of the very lopsided exchange was that Burke,
in the final paragraphs of his response, essentially suggested that he
should never have bothered if he had really been trying to influence
Pont’s views. While saying, “I have told you candidly my sentiments,”
he continued, “I think they are not likely to alter yours. I do not
know that they ought. You are young; you cannot guide, but must follow
the fortune of your country.”1
Burke’s remark has long disturbed me
with its brilliant and grotesque logic, with its insistence that a
citizen should, in the process of being elaborately informed of at
least one side of a question, also be told that he or she has been told
to pay attention and hurry up, only to be told to wait, that she or he
would be called on later, that he or she would be called on never.
As Niklas Luhmann argues in The Reality of the Mass
Media, we are well past a time in which it is possible to think that
distributing more information more widely will lead to a story like the
one we have told ourselves about Vietnam—that television coverage
destroyed America’s appetite for war.2
Both information and opinion
have been disabled by multiplication, as seemed bizarrely apparent in
the New York Times’s recent editorial reveling in a blizzard that had
“brought the East Coast to a near-standstill.” Even the Times seemed to
be acknowledging the irrelevance of the information and opinion that
it, however inadequately, distributes: “The powerful snowstorm . . . .
was an event that had nothing to do with human will. . . . [It]
overshadowed the war against terrorism and the escalating crisis with
Iraq[,] . . . and replaced [free-floating dread] by free-floating
flurries.” The storm created a time in which “to slow down and
remember, once again, that human life can be lived only within the
frame of nature.”3
The Times’s moral of the weather—that we should
acknowledge the power of nature—isn’t, I think, particularly apt, but
the editorial’s paean to a storm that interrupted the sense of infinite
busy attentiveness to the world is instructive. A storm that made
people pause in their searches for more duct tape and plastic sheeting
in response to the recent advisory from Tom Ridge in Homeland Security
had the effect, if only temporarily, of creating a space in which to
ask different questions from those that the administration has
ceaselessly been posing. For the Bush administration has, from the time
of the September 11 assaults on the World Trade Center, treated the
terrorist threat as a threat to “our Amuhruhcan way of life” and has
acted as though a way of life could be thought of as a system that
could be isolated and defined as if it were almost a patentable
product.
If the Bush administration’s way of hypostatizing
our way of life seems like a parody of the claims that Ian Hunter has
made about the centrality of security to the production of
nation-states in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we
should not merely note that resemblance but also examine the
implications of that gesture.4
For the peculiarity of the Bush
administration’s war on terror has been its constant willingness to
depict its own citizenry as virtually powerless, to terrorize its own
people with regular bulletins that heighten the alert and intensify the
color coding of fear, to make us feel the reliance of life and what
Giorgio Agamben has called “bare life” on the systematic structures of
our society.5
But what is it that our way of life is giving us? It
would be tempting to say that nothing much is happening, that there is
merely a great deal of talk. Yet the importance of our current
predicament is that it underscores the significance of the theoretical
debates about the relationship between speech and action that come out
of J. L. Austin’s essays on speech acts, with their resonance for
speech and, indeed, for information. Austin’s well-known discussion of
performatives focuses on two features of this particular kind of speech
act: “A. they do not ‘describe’ or `report’ or constate anything at
all, are not ‘true or false’; and B. the uttering of the sentence is,
or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally
be described as, or as ‘just,’ saying something.”6
Saying is—“or is a
part of”—doing in Austin’s performatives in ways that are instructive
not just in terms of grand theory but also with regard to practice. For
if the possibility of a performative’s being efficacious (or “happy,”
as Austin puts it) does not rest on its being true or false in the way
that a report on inventories of missiles or poison gases or biological
weapons might be, it relies unusually heavily on an appreciation of
language as a cultural project and joint effort. Performatives, that
is, can only perform if they are not made by fiat. They betoken aspects
of a way of life so fully operative that even abbreviated utterances
can activate them, so that the “I do” said in a marriage ceremony
stands in for a wealth of customary and bureaucratic procedures that
count as what Austin describes as “circumstances” that are
“appropriate.” Because no one can make such circumstances appropriate
through sheer dint of individual effort, performatives emblematize the
work that individual utterances can do. Performatives, that is, both
show individual utterances in their immediate and local productivity
and serve as indices to a depth and breadth of a common world.
Austin’s account has been frequently cited and also,
though less frequently, misrepresented. This is not the place in which
to review the theoretical commentary on Austin, but one particular
distortion of his view deserves mention in the present circumstance. It
is the collapse of the performative into what he describes as a
subclass of the notion, the verdictive. One example will suffice. The
New Yorker recently rehearsed Stanley Fish’s retelling of the story of
Bill Klem (as a commentary on the sense of injustice that New York
Giants fans felt when the referees missed a call that would have given
the Giants one more chance to make a potentially winning kick) and
brought out the ways in which his account leans so heavily on the
notion of institutional authority to make things happen and to make
things be what they are that it obliterates all other circumstances. As
Fish has often said, he is merely glossing Klem’s “Sonny, it ain’t
nothing ‘til I call it” in saying that balls and strikes are not facts
in the world but “come into being only on the call of an umpire.”7
Fish, thus, treats the performative as if it were
largely an exercise in establishing hierarchy within groups. He offers
a narcissistic-autocratic reading of a collective speech situation that
makes the performative revolve around identifying who is boss. And the
antagonist of the happy performative is “do-overism,” which he
describes as dangerous because “there’s no logical end to it.”8 The
entire emphasis falls on the desirability to have clear-cut actions and
obviously preferred choices. Fish imagines that the cultural work that
I think Austin sees performatives as doing merely involves a series of
exercises assessing the relative power of various individuals to have
their words make things “come into being.” They are, as Judith Butler
would say, examples of the “sovereign performative” that ignore
Austin’s suggestions about “impending troubles” that develop with
verdicts that he sees as felicitous even though incorrect—the call that
stipulates the value of the action even when it is mistaken.
The problem with the hierarchical glossing of the
performative is not merely that it yields a rather naked defense of
authority by tautology (through authoritarianism) but that it
challenges the notion that balls and strikes are facts in the world
only to affirm that the value of authority is such a fact. This account
also sounds strangely familiar in the current geopolitical scene, in
which George Bush continually acts as if the United States is right
because it is “the most powerful nation in the world” and in which
Donald Rumsfeld soberly tries to deal with serious political gestures
by quoting from his rule book, telling France and Germany that they are
not powerful enough to be right and observing of volunteers who have
gone to Iraq to serve as human shields at the Baghdad South Power Plant
that “deploying human shields is not a military strategy, it’s murder,
a violation of the laws of armed conflict and a crime against humanity,
and it will be treated as such.”9
What Austin was alert to in
performatives was not the rigidity of the rules as defined by the most
powerful but the sense that one could see the power contained in
certain social institutions by comparing an official wedding ceremony
with an unofficial one. He saw that “I do,” uttered by eligible, not
currently married persons in front of a designated authority might
achieve, in seven seconds, the work that cohabitation took seven years
to accomplish. Indeed, one can imagine that it was just this alertness
to the changing value of circumstances that made Austin an effective
military consultant in World War II. The current administration, by
contrast, is so interested in trumpeting its authority to say what
people can do that it endlessly casts politics as a game in which the
good is what is number one and the evil is what is envious, hating “us”
for being as “great” as “we” are. What it has lost sight of, in its
account of the claims of the top of the heap, is the fact that the Bush
administration has inadvertently produced a fragile protective shield
for the United States. For what the administration doubtless has no way
of acknowledging is that the preemptive war opens America to much
greater danger than any external threat. Now that British and European
opinion polls report that most people see George Bush as a greater
threat to world peace than Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, our being
number one in political opprobrium offers more security than Ridge’s
people are likely to produce. With friends like us, why would an enemy
bother to attack? As Homeland Security reports a second tape from bin
Laden in recent months and describes it as yet more evidence that there
is a “high” likelihood of an attack, has any of them wondered if the
second tape were not a renewed threat but an order to stand down, a
response to the perception that the United States is a more effective
enemy to itself than any terrorist group might be?
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