that daddy is dead!
Music: Basement Jaxx: Kish Kash (2003)
I just resubmitted the "Father Trouble" essay, after many troubled days of work. It's at the point where I think it's done, but I'm not sure, and I can endlessly tinker and so on and I worry that endlessly tinkering will unravel the whole thing into a messy heap of senseless claims and jargon. At this point, I think it's just better to enlist the services of Oedipus (blinded, of course): I need a daddy to approve or spank, and at this point, either is welcome.
Regardless, it just feels good to check something off the list: done! School begins today, class begins on Thursday. Tomorrow is another stressful day of "getting-my-life-in-order" meetings, and all of this is mediated by the mold remediation efforts of Instar Services. My neighbor just called, again, but I ignored it: she wants me to snap my fingers and make it all go away. Gee, I wish I could. I hope when I am 87 that I have more patience and empathy than my neighbor.
DJ Smokehouse Brown and I are going to inaugurate our last day of freedom by drinking bourbon and watching Bob Larson exorcize demons on Dr. Phil this evening. That should be fun!
I need to get outside and exercise before it rains; meanwhile, here's a slightly modified conclusion to "Father Trouble."
Concluding Remarks: Cruising Bush
Americans love their masters not simply in spite of their frailties but because of them.
---Joan Copjec (1994, p. 149)
In this essay I have argued that War of the Worlds tacitly promulgates an ideology of paternal sovereignty through its negotiation of the father figure. Insofar as (1) War of the Worlds deliberately recalls the events of September 11, 2001; and (2) negotiates trauma by restaging the subjective integration of the paternal metaphor, the film directly intervenes and participates in contemporary social and political realities. Socially the film restages the Oedipal process whereby a child becomes a subject by accepting the father as a representative of the authority of the symbolic world. To show how this is the case, I rehearsed Lacan's refiguring the Oedipal rivalry in terms of the primal horde and the dead father-not the story of sexual differentiation that is usually associated with Freud's theories. The spectator's affective response to the film is in part explained by the way in which the film restages the subject's introduction to the social world by integrating the paternal metaphor.
On the basis of this psychosocial labor, however, the film also mediates contemporary political discourse in two ways. First, like most of Spielberg's widely watched films, War of the Worlds reflects current anxieties about the decline of the father figure in the United States and the consequent fantasy of the erosion of the nuclear family. Related to this cultural commentary, however, is a second, more disturbing ideological work: the film works to transfer the feelings of intimacy engendered for a representative of the symbolic father (e.g., infantile feelings of the spectator about a father figure) to the figure of the paternal sovereign-from the social sphere of familial life to the political domain of the State. As Lacan shows us, because the symbolic father is ultimately an operation or function and not a person, Ray's doubling as father and sovereign is simply a matter of figural substitution at the level of fantasy. The affective economy set into motion by War of the Worlds, however, is the very same economy that underwrites all contemporary discourse. Consequently, I have suggested that the film, however unwittingly, is a pedagogy of dictatorship. War of the Worlds recreates the kinds of feelings of helplessness, longing, and love that are the preconditions of paternal sovereignty. I want to close by briefly suggesting the affective economy of the film is the same one that underwrote the years-long paternal regime of George W. Bush.
Of course, at this point I trust it is no surprise to readers that the analysis of War of the Worlds offered thus far is also a commentary on the Bush II administration.1 Although this essay advances an analysis of War of the Worlds, the critique is meant to detail how all cultural productions-not simply so-called news, presidential speeches, political talk shows, newspaper columns, and so on-participate in the affective economy of the political. Of course, as a story about fathers and an obvious restaging of the trauma of Nine-eleven, it is difficult to read War of the Worlds outside of the context of the United States government's post-Nine-eleven policies, policies which, until recently, were widely supported by US citizens. Although psychoanalytic theory has its limitations, it is particularly useful for explaining the influence of affect in contemporary life; the social and political function of the symbolic father helps us to explain how War of the Worlds can be understood as a reflection of the very same affective preconditions that led to the support of a "real life" paternal sovereign for two terms of office.
As a number of scholars have commented, the conception of the sovereign as (1) the one who can assert the state of exception, and as (2) the one who decides what is and is not valuable life in the name of protection is easily illustrated by contemporary political and legal events.2 In War of the Worlds no political sovereign steps forward in the name of the symbolic father after the alien attacks. Shortly after Nine-eleven on September 14, 2001, however, George W. Bush toured "ground zero" and visited firefighters in a highly publicized attempt reconstitute his authority:
During his visit he stood atop the hulk of a New York City fire engine, which was partially buried in the rubble, and addressed a group of construction workers. One of the workers yelled, "We can't hear you." To that, Bush responded, "I hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon!" ("43rd President," 2004, para. 25)
After Nine-eleven the Bush II administration has repeatedly declared that the country is in a state of emergency (or in a "war on terror") and has asserted that many of the controversial practices of the military and other government bodies (e.g., wire tapping, torture, and so on) are exceptions to the rule of law.3 In recent memory the most familiar assertion of paternal sovereignty in the Schmittian vein was George W. Bush's "military order" on November 13, 2001 that authorized the indefinite detention of suspected "terrorists" at prison camps in Guantánamo Bay (Agamben, 2005, pp. 3-4).
Agamben argues that these more recent, post-Nine-eleven assertions of sovereignty are problematic---indeed, dire---for two reasons. First, they reflect a dark view of human nature as fundamentally dangerous or "evil," which contributes the dehumanization and destruction of others as "terrorists."4 War of the Worlds' many traumatic scenes-most especially the brutal carjacking and the murder of Ogilvy-reflect this view; as wave after wave of the "evil" alien Other decimates throngs of humans, the spectator is made to yearn more strongly for their decimation as well. Although the aggressive feelings inspired by the film concern either computer generated monsters or over-acting extras, these are the same feelings that have been cultivated in Bush's post Nine-eleven speechcraft: feelings of survival and vengeance. Second, such assertions of sovereignty are symptomatic of a troubling political trend first noted by Walter Benjamin in the wake of the first total war and in the shadow of the second: "the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule," meaning that the norm has collapsed into the exception, thereby tempting atrocity (Benjamin, 2003, p. 392). When a paternal sovereign asserts a continual and never-ending state of exception, argues Agamben, "when the state of emergency becomes the rule," as War of the Worlds demonstrates so well, then "the political system transforms into an apparatus of death" (2006, para. 29). When the state of emergency becomes the rule, an individual has claimed the power of the dead father, someone has asserted that s/he not only represents the law, but has become the law. Such is the deadly lie of paternal sovereignty in the contemporary world.
Fortunately, War of the Worlds may also serve as a warning. Whatever one's personal, political beliefs, it is clear that the international community thinks that George W. Bush has abused his sovereign power in the so-called war on terror. In a 2006 poll conducted last November by the British newspaper The Guardian, the United States is "now seen as a threat to world peace by its closest neighbors and allies" (Glover, 2006, para. 1).5 The poll report concludes that "British voters see George Bush as a greater danger to world peace than either North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, or the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad" (Glover, 2006, para. 2). These opinions are not new, since the descriptions of Bush as a "dictator" and "demagogue" surfaced long before public attitudes about the war in Iraq began to sour significantly in 2005; criticisms of his cowboy, go-it-alone style of foreign policy were widely known before the 2004 election. In light of these blunt criticisms of the president, the question many have asked is "why?" Why was a leader roundly criticized as dictatorial, hardheaded, and intellectually limited re-elected to office? Although Bush's popularity has finally dwindled as a consequence of the failures in Iraq, why did people so fervently support the leadership and policies of George W. Bush?
Many pollsters and scholars have responded to the "why?" question by arguing that a large part of the answer is Bush's "war on terror."6 Echoing the opinion of a number of commentators and scholars, Peter Hart, a well-known public opinion research analyst, argues that the threat of terrorism decisively won Bush the election in 2004. What few have discussed, however, is the affective economy set into motion by the "war on terror" and the central role of Bush as a father figure who inspires feelings of love: as Freud said of group leaders in general, Bush's continued success among a certain public has to do with his ability to refashion the superego such that previously impermissible acts-such as torture, wars of aggression, phone-tapping, and so on-become permissible as a consequence of a new, exceptional state of affairs. In Bush's case, however, the model cannot be said to resemble the more recent, historical past. Whereas strong, dictatorial leaders of the World War II era represent a flawless sovereign, a political creature of absolute autonomy impervious to critique, even those few who continue to support Bush today are cognizant of his many shortcomings. The persistence of Bush is only explained by the way in which he inspires love in spite of his impotence, by the way in which feelings for a strong father have been transferred onto a dictator, and in this sense the arc of the Bush presidency closely models that of War of the Worlds' plot: Like Ray, the Bush presidency began with the theme of "deadbeat"; Bush's meteoric rise to popularity was a direct consequence of Nine-eleven and the feelings of desperation and impending catastrophe catalyzed by the death of thousands. War of the Worlds not only replicates the feelings of Nine-eleven, but also uncannily tracks the narrative trajectory of George W. Bush's rise to popularity as a paternal sovereign. Such a homology implicates what Lacanian critic Joan Copjec has termed the "unvermögender Other"-the impotent father or daddy without means-as more central to the patriarchal sovereign of contemporary American political fantasy than Freud's ideal, unassailable dictator. The reason the spectator falls in love with Tom Cruise's character in War of the Worlds is because Ray protects his children and comes to adopt the position of the symbolic father, the supreme protector and legislator, despite innumerable shortcomings and failures.7 Similarly, our sitting president was party to the same fantasy, moving from "bad" father toward the achievement of good parenting ("when it's time to protect his people, George is a great dad!"). If one wants to understand why George W. Bush garnered support as a paternal sovereign, she needs to see War of the Worlds and reflect on what she feels about Ray.
Notes
1 So, too, is [reference delete for the purposes of blind review]. This essay is intended as a counterpart.
2 Moreover, Alan Wolfe argues that " Schmitt's way of thinking about politics pervades the contemporary zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has flourished, often in ways so prescient as to be eerie" (Wolfe, 2004, para. 7).
3 The many legal transgressions of the United States government are detailed in the most recent report issued by the United Nations. See United Nations Economic and Social Council, Commission on Human Rights, Situation of Detainees at Guantanamo Bay, 62 sess., 15 February 2006. Doc. E.CN.4.2006.120.
4 For Hobbes, human "evil" reduced to what we might term survival instincts-the animality of human being. For Schmitt, the fundamental "evilness" of human being is neither our animality nor our capacity to do harm to others, but rather, a fundamental tendency to scapegoat the other, or to define "us" in distinction to "them," that which Jacques Derrida terms "logocentrism." In politics, this is the irreducible logic of "friend" and "enemy" central to Schmitt's concept of the political (1996, esp. pp. 25-37). For a sustained critique of this logic at work outside of the political, see Richard Kearney's work (2003).
5 Julian Glover, "British Believe Bush is More Dangerous Than Kim Jong-il, The Guardian (3 November 2006); available http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1938434,00.html accessed 4 November 2006, par. 1.
6 For a good overview of the answers given, see James E. Campbell's study (2005, pp. 219-241).
7 Arguably, another reason is because, after numerous controversial statements and appearances promoting the film, in the public eye, Tom Cruise is a hopelessly misguided Scientologist.