Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Hyvrinen, Matti, Anu Korhonen, and Juri Mykknen, eds. 2006. The travelling concept of narrative. Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
(COLLeGIUM) http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/e-series/volumes/volume
_1/index.htm.
Carver, Terrell, and Matti Hyvrinen, eds. 1997. Interpreting the political:
New methodologies. London and New York: Routledge.
2007047880
vii
ix
Contributors
xi
25
41
61
83
97
113
129
Contents
vi
Contents
147
165
185
207
12 Terrorized by Sound?
Foucault on Terror, Resistance, and Sonorous Art
Lauri Siisiinen
225
Index
243
45
45
47
47
51
53
54
76
Table 8.1
150
Table 8.2
155
The idea for this book grew out of a small symposium, Arts and Terror, held
at the University of Jyvskyl, Finland, in May 2006. The arrangement of the
symposium became possible thanks to the Academy of Finland, and its new
Centre for Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change. The centre has three research teams; one of them is Politics and the Arts, the organizer
of the symposium. We thank all of the participants of the symposium for the
enduring discussions and enthusiasm that helped to launch the work for this
volume. Moreover, the existence of the international Politics and the Arts
group, now a standing group of the European Consortium for Political
Research (ECPR), helped greatly in getting in touch with the people interested in the hybrid area of terror and the arts.
As in every work of this nature, the editing process is one that owes many
thanks to those individuals who enable it. We are particularly grateful to the
research team coordinator Anitta Kananen (University of Jyvskyl, Finland),
not only for practical arrangements of the event, but also for all kinds of help
during the editorial process. Moreover, Professor Michael Shapiro (University
of Hawaii, United States) was of great help at a decisive moment in the publication process. Another key person is Peggy Heller (University of Kings
College, Halifax, Canada), who jumped in to help as a coeditor, commentator, and consultant whenever and wherever this was needed; Kati Thors at the
Copyshop in Espoo has freely given of her time and expertise in all things
technical; Annikki Harris (University of Helsinki Language Services) has
cooperated at the office, providing Lisa Muszynski with the requisite freedom
to work on this project almost continuously, while our families have borne
the brunt of the systematic neglect that such focus entails. Special thanks to
those nearest and dearest who have the patience to endure us to the end:
Tuula H. and Peter, Johann, and Annie M.
Matti Hyvrinen and Lisa Muszynski
Tampere and Helsinki
Contributors
Contributors
xii
xiii
Contributors
INTRODUCTION
his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the
viaduct. . . . There was awful openness of it, something wed not seen, the
single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among
us all (33).
The falling act may well be redescribed in terms suggested by Dominick
LaCapra (2001, 2004) as acting out, repeating the moment of terror. The act,
in its awful openness, seems to be the exact opposite of DeLillos carefully
mediated discourse; a highly disturbing and disturbed artistic way of
approaching terror and trauma. The jumps were as painful to the artist,
David Janiak, himself, and he died at age thirty-nine, apparently of natural
causes (220). Because of his acts, he had been arrested at various times for
criminal trespass, reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct (220). We
have here an artist taking high risks, transgressing many boundaries, but at
the same time reproducing the original scene of trauma with minimal distance from it. Moreover, this is highly suggestive of the repetitive artworks of
certain Israeli artists exposed to suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,
recounted in this volume in Chapter 2 by Dana Arieli-Horowitz. David
Janiak, as indeed some of the real-life Israeli artists as well, may be accused of
not properly taking the reactions of the traumatized audience into account.
But is this power of provocation not something that the arts are working with
constantly? There is a trace of Dadaism in the act, in the sense that Kia
Lindroos writes about in Chapter 3, Janiak ostensibly having a clear intention, as Lindroos observes regarding Dada, to create a scandal and inspire
public indignation.
Yet the figure of the Falling Man is only one element among many other
aspects of repetition in DeLillos novel. A group of children withdraw repeatedly from the adults to a room with binoculars, in order to watch if and
when the next plane will hit the towers, insisting that the towers were not yet
entirely collapsed. Keith, the man who survived, delves more and more into
the repetitive and controlled world of professional poker after having lost a
friend he used to play poker with, and so on. Yet paradoxically, Keith, who
was estranged from his wife Lianne and almost entirely incapable of
expressing his inner concerns before the events of 9/11, now had occasional
moments of closeness with Lianne between his poker playing sprees.
Perhaps the most compelling singular element of the novel is its ending.
With regard to temporality, the novel resists conventional narrative progressionthe insistence on various forms of repetition being one form of this
resistanceand instead creates a loop by ending just a moment before everything began. At the end, Keith is back in Manhattan, at his office, right after
the attack and working his way down through the corridor, seeing his dead
friend. This ending may be read in at least two different, yet interconnected
ways. Whatever life and vitality had returned to Keiths life with Lianne and
his son, the traumatic moment of the collapsing towers and the smell of
death is there, and will always be there, whatever the cure. The experience is
not only in the past, but it persists in the present, and continues on into the
future. The temporary loop, in this sense, protects the novel from an overly
straightforward closure and moral elevation. Nonetheless, the ending may
also be seen, in all of its remaining horror, in a slightly more optimistic light.
After all, Keith is now revisiting the traumatic scenery; he is at least capable
of remembering, observing the details, seeing the man falling. The loop
remains, there is no fixed meaning or resolution of the consequences of the
event, yet the beginning is no longer an invisible, untouchable darkness.
Jonathan Safran Foer (2005) does something analogous by foregrounding
the traumatic reactions and disturbed world of a nine-year-old boy who had
lost his father in the terrorist attack on Manhattan. The experimental narration of the boys partly psychotic world is connected thematically to Kuisma
Korhonens discussion on Georges Perecs work in Chapter 6. The boys world
is even more sanitized of public, political maneuverings, and hectic nationalism that followed the events than even Keiths world in DeLillos novel,
thereby creating space for the artistic processing of the experience. Both of
these novels systematically reject the nationalistic frame of the events of 9/11,
thus interrupting the vicious circle of aggression and retaliation, as Olivia
Guaraldo observes in Chapter 11. In so doing, they, of course, simultaneously bracket all such sweepingly broad, totalizing theories and explanations
of the attack that Peggy Heller discusses critically in Chapter 4.
Rushdies World of Terror
Salman Rushdies Shalimar the Clown (2005) chooses an entirely different
strategy than either DeLillo or Foer, and approaches the political and
national aspects of terror, terrorism, and violence directly. But in order to do
this in a properly non-nationalist way, he locates his characters within a complex and changing, multinational setting, letting go of the nation-state as a
naturalized frame for the novel. One of his key characters, Maximilian Ophuls
(a name borrowed from the German Jewish film director, who emigrated to
the United States via France), begins his political career in the French
Resistance during the Nazi occupation. After the war, he moves to the United
States to become U.S. ambassador to India, but is forced to retire due to a
womanizing scandal. Later he leads U.S. classified operations in Afghanistan
and Pakistan and, because of this assignment, he is effective in the creation
troops in Kashmir but the pogroms of the pandits was not prevented, why
was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters
or relief or even register their names, why was that . . . The ministers of the
government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote
one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants
whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that (296; 1 lakh=
100,000 in the Indian numbering system).
For the reader, this step from the grimly outlined story-world to authorial
indictment appears emotionally and surprisingly well grounded, while the
entire gravity of war crimes and terror had become so weighty that the open
charge feels almost like a relief: someone is out there to protest the cruelties,
including the reader as a secondary witness. A bit laterafter an accounting
of the brutalities enacted by both parties, that is, the fundamentalists and the
Indian armythe narrator stops for a moment to reflect upon the situation
by observing, There are things that must be looked at indirectly because
they would blind you if you looked them in the face, like the fire of the sun
(309). This is one of the enduring concerns about how far the arts can, or
any account for that matter, go in terms of describingor performing, in
Janiks casehorror without becoming part of that same horror, a theme
which is addressed further in this volume, especially in Chapters 5, 6, and 7.
Moreover, it can become an issue pivoting upon that of the dignity of the victim, as Frank Mller writes in Chapter 1, If victims are humiliated and
abused in front of the camera for the purpose of the production of images,
then the viewer, by watching these images, becomes an accomplice of the
perpetrators.
Rushdies well-trained, internationally experienced, callous and well-connected terrorists seem to render some of their predecessors of no more than
two decades ago very amateurish indeed, as in Doris Lessings (1985) The
Good Terrorist and Paul Austers Leviathan (1992). Lessings homespun, leftist
terrorists remain nearly comically shabby figures, in spite of the tragic consequences of their operations. Perhaps we now tend to think that Lessing was a
bit too optimistic about the harmlessness of the terrorist drive, by not giving
us access to their more professional endeavors. In any case, the strictly realistic mode of her novel is arguably more adequate for the narration of the
youths everyday activities than of the terror itself, which curiously becomes
virtually normalized by the conventional narrative form, becoming just one
occasion among many others. Random deaths do not signify anything in particular to the activists, at least nothing that a quote from Lenin and a competent rationalization could not wipe away. In consequence, what we obviously
witness is exactly the early days of killing idle emotions, in order to be able to
kill without any emotions. Alice, the female protagonist, muses upon the situation after the killings: After all, if publicity was the aim, then they had certainly achieved that! And Faye? But comrades knew their lives were at risk,
the moment they undertook this sort of thing, decided to become terrorists (452).
Interestingly, Lessing points out that her activists way of life was not, in
point of fact, oriented to achieve any recognizable political objectives.
Instead, it was the good feelings of the narcissist-as-activist, spending brilliant
days in picketing and shouting at the police, getting kicks out of resisting and
escaping the police, or even getting arrested, the excitement of transgressing
the borderlines between the permissible and the forbidden, the legal and the
illegal. The sheer fact of escaping the police renders activists, in their own
imagination, as dangerous and important. Learning the allegedly sublime
pleasures of transgression, even to the point of enjoying killing people was, of
course, essential for the education of Nazi officers as well as the globe-trotting
terrorists of Rushdies novel. Crime fiction has for a long time investigated
such serial crimes as rape and murder from the perspective of the particularly
addictive and subjectivity-creating excitement generated by the transgression
of these boundaries.
Imagining with a Terrorist?
Literature has its methods of bringing fictional characters closer to the reader
than we often are able to get in normal life. The point of view, or focalization
(Genette 1980; Jahn 2007, for a more recent discussion), within a character
may be one way; letting one of the characters narrate the story is another.
Such a culturally and politically diverse, agonistic situation as the recent wave
of fundamentalist terrorism, of course, inflicts difficult challenges upon
authors. Doris Lessings expert narration, if mainly ironic and sardonic, on
the thoughts, action, and speech of her activists is based on a shared cultural
background and knowledge about leftist movements. As Manfred Jahn
reminds us, the whole modernist literature needed the background of an
emerging psychology to present the fictional streams of consciousness. But
how does this understanding work across violent cultural boundaries? John
Updike (2006), Don DeLillo (2007), and Salman Rushdie (2005) face a
much larger challenge, of course. Their attempts to let us, the readers, imagine the thoughts and emotions of contemporary terrorists are, of course, as
tricky as they are politically relevant.
However, it is again a trap to see the world divided between the Western
us and the terrorists and their supporters. As a matter of fact, John Updikes
Terrorist (2006) plays expertly with such expectations of the reader. In the
beginning, there is a sloppy Jew, an all-too-liberal white mother, seductive
and flirtatious American girls, and a widening Muslim front to support, educate, and manipulate the dedicated fighter. A great deal of the pleasures of
reading the novel comes from the sudden realization, by the end of the novel,
of an entirely different picture with nuances and a plurality of distinctions.
Mohsin Hamids The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is one of the bravest
attempts to see the whole issue from a not-so-self-evident North American
point of view. Hamids narrator, a young man coming from Pakistan to study
at Princeton (like Hamid himself ), succeeds in landing a job in a thriving
financial enterprise. It is in this line of work where economic fundamentals
need to be taken into account, and otherhuman, ecological, and whateverlesser considerations to be ignored.
A politically oriented reader may still be slightly perplexed by parts of
Hamids novel. His narrator lives in New York City and is entirely dedicated
to his work in the financial sector. As 9/11 is about to occur, he is finalizing
his first big business assignment in the Philippines, and watches the events
unfold on television. He says, I stared as oneand the otherof the twin
towers of New Yorks World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. . . .
But at that moment, my thoughts were not with the victims of the attack
death on television moves me most when it is fictitious and happens to characters with whom I have built up relationships over multiple episodesno, I
was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly
brought America to her knees (72, 73).This passage contains a few disquieting contradictions. The narrator had never before announced any reservations in his relationship with America (a term the Canadians, among many
other Americans, may find inconvenient in this context). On the other hand,
between the dashes he presents himself as a relatively nave and apolitical
reader of the media. Yet he immediately knows how to react to the figures of
destruction exclusively on the symbolic level of the event. The reading of the
situation may differ from many hegemonic versions, but it certainly concurs
with the Bush administration in one regard: by seeing the event within a
clear-cut national frame. But within this chosen nationalistic frame, celebrating America on her knees, this reading again appears helplessly nave, while
not seeing in the event itself the seeds for horrors to come as its natural consequence. Later, when the big America attacks small Afghanistan, the previously light-hearted observer is full of moral rectitude. After allowing
himself a nationalistic reading of the event, the narrator becomes a purist
after returning to New York. He states, Your countrys flag invaded New
York after the attacks; it was everywhere. Small flags stuck on toothpicks featured in the shrines; stickers of flags adorned windshields and windows; large
flags fluttered from buildings. They all seemed to proclaim: We are America
not New York, which, in my opinion, means something quite different (79).
Hamids narrator here has different political and ethical standards for New
Yorkers and himself. He can be exhilarated by the symbolic fall of America,
but New Yorkers should not see the event happening to or in America. In
fact, Siri Hustvedt (2006, 124) has offered quite a different reading of the
meaning of the flags as well. Brockmeier (2008), in his study of actual
responses to the trauma of 9/11, notes that patriotic and nationalist reactions,
so popular in the media and politicsand in the rest of the countrywere
truly marginal among individual responses in New York City. Whereas
DeLillo, Ondaatje, Rushdie, and Spiegelman, among many others, systematically resist nationalist readings of terror and terrorism, Hamids position
remains problematic despite his criticism of America.
Hamids work is one of those that foreground the media representation as
a real political event. Rather uncannily, Brett Easton Ellis (1998) obliterated
the borderlines between film and the novels real-life events in his paranoid
terrorist world of Glamorama to the ultimate extent possible. Film crews in
this novel are mysteriously already ever-present and shooting raw footage
when bombs are delivered and exploded in Prada or Gucci bags. Is the narrator Victor Ward too strung out on a combination of drugs, always including
Xanax, a medication for panic attacks, to make a difference between fiction,
glamorous show life, and a vicious terrorist plan? Or do we witness a terrorist
network of top models along with their assemblage of the best brand name
productsand nearly always in front of photographers and film crewswith
its paranoid plans to create maximum havoc? Elliss terrorists combine the
glamorous public presence in front of cameras, high-quality technical expertise in camouflage, and terrorist attacks with a renouncement of empathy for
victims and an obvious enjoyment of torture. All players have double or triple
agendas, leaving Victor Ward and the reader betrayed in their search for final
clarity and closure.
This cursory review on parts of the recent literature on terror is most of all
meant to emphasize the relevance of studying the arts in the context of terror.
There are many other novels to consider, such as Ian McEwans Saturday
(2005). In his The Master of Petersburg, J. M. Coetzee (1994) revisits
Dostoyevskys classical crime scene, discussed more thoroughly by Margaret
Heller in Chapter 4 of this volume, that naturally evokes the nineteenth-century genre of literature focused on St. Petersburgoriginally brought to life
by Alexander Pushkins narrative poem The Bronze Horseman of 1833.2 There
are entire genres such as crime stories and science fiction to be examined, not
10
In a book penned over a quarter of a century ago, Marshall Berman eloquently and passionately defended The Communist Manifesto by Marx and
Engels as the first great modernist work of art (1983, 102). And like all
great books, Bermans All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of
Modernity is possibly even more compelling today than when it was first published. It is especially relevant now, when the cold war era has given way to
something that it perhaps helped to spawn in its own wake, which has now
taken its place on a global scale. Indeed, the idea of terror in our midst is
certainly not new; what is new about it is its seeming all-pervasiveness. It has
come out into the open, followed closely in its wake by a global media that
amplifies it, making it into something that is no longer occurring only on
the shabby back streets of a distant region, where it was ignored: unseen and
unheard.
Terror has, in any case, moved to the forefront of our collective consciousness. Indeed, since the dawn of the twenty-first century, it has spread to
the downtown streets of Jerusalem, Moscow, London, and New York. As
Berman observed nearly three decades ago, the thrust of modernism(s) and
the process of modernization has carried us along the crest of a wave in time
where modern mankind found itself in the midst of a great absence and
emptiness of values and yet, at the same time, a remarkable abundance of
possibilities. . . . It may turn out, then, that going back can be a way to go forward: that remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth century can give
us the vision and courage to create the modernisms of the twenty-first
(1983, 21, 36).
In the spirit of such an outlook, looking forward by looking backor
something resembling a circle of timewhat the chapters of this collection
do not attempt to do with the theme of terror and the arts is to plumb the
depths of an originating despair and emptiness that may have motivated acts
of terror, whether 150 years ago on the streets of St. Petersburg or during the
last few years on the streets of London or New York. And likewise, the
authors of this volume are not interested in examining what art and terror
may share intimately in common with one another below the surface of any
work of art. Perhaps it is DeLillos figure of David Janiak in Falling Man that
explores just such a tension, given that Janiak is not only an artist, but that he
11
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