understanding bomb threats

Music: Marconi Union: Different Colours (2012)

Last week bomb threat at Texas A&M led officials to evacuate campus and cancel classes and activities for the rest of the day; just a week prior Texas State University in San Marcos evacuated three buildings in response to a bomb threat; and, of course, here at the University of Texas at Austin we were asked to evacuate campus for the same last month. Colleagues across the country, from folks at Pennsylvania State University to the Louisiana State University have reported similar stories, and I suspect there are dozens of "threats" at schools across the country that we don't hear about. What is going on? Are we witnessing an "epidemic of bomb threats," as some have worried aloud?

I think one possible answer is located in the idea of the empty threat. What seems significant, at least in our time, in respect to bomb threats on college campuses is twofold. First, these threats are on college campuses, which indexes the ripe cultural symbolism. Places of higher learning, like many religious places, are considered "safe spaces," if not sacred, and so a violation of their sanctity is meant to portend a feeling of serious gravity. That spaces of higher learning---virtual and otherwise---continue to be the most visible front of the latest battle in the culture war is not coincidental (college campuses are breeding grounds, you realize, of "radicalism"). What is "threatened" is a perceived radicalism or "liberalism" that is brainwashing students to _____________ [fill in the blank].

Second, the threats turn out to be largely empty, meaning that there is no actual weapon or bomb. There is, at the end, no anchor to warrant concern in a grounded treat to human life. Of course, the mistake is the underlying conclusion that "everything is alright, after all" insofar as the disruption of business as usual---not to mention a sense of security---is violence enough. If the damage of a "real" bomb threat is an actual violent explosion, then the damage of the "empty threat" is the disruption caused by emptiness. One is worse than the other, to be sure, but both are forms of violence.

What ties both forms of violence together is psychosis, which I do not define as a behavioral "loss of contact with reality," as does the U.S. medical community (in respect to the DSM). By psychosis, I refer more or less to the Lacanian notion that a psychotic is someone who realizes, consciously or semi-consciously, the contingency and fiction of reality in the first place---that what holds our meaningful, symbolic world together is the consensus that the emperor has not clothes, and that at some level we know he is naked, but continue our lives in meaningful ways on the assumption he is not naked. Whether or not someone making a bomb threat is psychotic is beside the point here, insofar as the threat itself is an acknowledgement of the fragility or contingency of our symbolically meaningful world. So there is no bomb? No matter: you behave as if there were.

The missing bomb is homologous to a psychotic world view.

What this increase in bomb threats demonstrates, I worry, is that our national culture---by which I mean the symbolic resources you and I share in common---as a national culture the United States is moving from a neurotic society to a psychotic one.

Let me use a dissimilar example, but one that gets at the same form of realization. Here, the idea is that no one will see a picture of my junk who can punish me; there is only admiration of my prowess:

The Weiner is gone, although reports are that he will be back to political office in a year or two. "Sexting" is now a technological mainstay that the news media are all-too-ready to hype, replete with the suggestive, blurred images in local news reports, usually of "young teens" who do not realize (it is suggested) that they know what it is they are doing. (Most of them know, I insist, what they are doing; what's different today is the attitudes toward what they are doing.)

Bomb threats and sexting both concern authority or more specifically, the perception of an absence of authority in the sense that one "might get caught" or, worse, that there are any true consequences to either. In each case, the texter or anonymous tipper operates under the assumption---conscious or unconscious---that there is no oversight for him or her.

What is common to both examples is the disappearance, erasure, or erosion of a "third thing." In each case we can imagine a paradigm person set in relationship to a meaningful object, which we could designate as "discourse": a student is set into a relation to a university; a policy maker is set in relation to a presumed "public." In a world in which sending nude photos of yourself or making bomb threats is "wrong," that third thing might be something like morality or ethics, and by extension, a government official or even Deity. Yet in these examples, this third thing---at least initially, is perceived to be absent or inconsequential. State authorities are merely kids with experience and power; deity is a fiction; and educators and school administrators are merely pundits in disguise.

As many of you know, this disappearance or erosion of the "third thing" is termed the "decline of symbolic efficiency" by Lacanian psychoanalyst and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek. Zizek is a proponent of post-Freudian, Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, he takes the term "symbolic efficiency" from anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

For Levi-Strauss, "symbolic efficiency" refers to the way communities can communicate quickly and effectively with reference to something all folks hold in common as true, certain, or likely. As political scientist Jodi Dean puts it, symbolic efficiency is a consequence of "what everybody knows." For example, most of you can follow what I'm writing here because we all share the English language and, to some extent, we share a similar affective Rosetta Stone for tone that is particular to our culture. In writing, I make references between us to a kind of third thing that mediates us and makes meaning possible.

Now, for Zizek the term "symbolic efficiency" means much more than this. He takes the term into the domain of psychoanalysis by suggesting the third thing is also an authority, and in some sense, a kind of deference to something larger---a sort of humility toward something more powerful than ourselves. From a psychoanalytic vantage, this larger, outside something is first experienced in childhood as the parent who disciplines.

Now, abstracted to a formal level, in some discourses this third thing of authority has gone under the name of "Master"---such as in Philosophy with Hegel or in certain Asian modes of thought, where the Master doubles as a teacher and a kind of internalized yet disembodied authority. For the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, this Third Thing is described as the "Big Other." In fact, for Lacan the Big Other references the symbolic domain of our experience in general, which we often experience as an external authority or limit on our desires. The Big Other is the Third Thing that, Lacan says, we often mistake as a person with the power to punish, or more to the point, with the power to say "No."

As I have followed her work, Jodi Dean has been arguing for some years that the "decline of symbolic efficiency," alternately cast as an erosion of the Big Other," is the problem of our time, and there may be no solution---political, educational, or otherwise. The problem is exacerbated by "democratainment," or proliferation of communication technologies and the subsequent sense of empowerment---symbolic omnipotence---these technologies seem to inspire in successive generations. Our mediated regimes now enlist "audiences" to co-crate our shared entertainments in such a way as to collapse producer/consumer (for example, how the "news" reports the tweets and opinions of "ordinary citizens" if it is, in fact, "news"). Moreover, this decline is not semantic, but formal and affective in character, a decline of the feeling of possible punishment and, at some level, a limit on narcissism (a tempering, baseline sense of inferiority or insecurity). We might describe this larger transformation as a sort of ascent of feelings of infantile omnipotence---that asserting something repeatedly makes it true, that one's truth (cast as an entitled "opinion") is the whole, or that the end always justifies the means.

Making a false bomb threat, either because one perceives the politics of one's university (or another university) to be distasteful, or simply because one doesn't want to take his or her midterm exam, is buoyed by the attitude that there is no "truth" or "real" or that my god and our god is not your god. Such attitudes are possibly only when we no longer share a similar sense of the symbolic, that we hold no common cultural moorings together despite our differences (the Symbolic proper). I used to say that being an academic, most especially a successful graduate student, is to labor under the suspicion that one will be "found out"---that we are all faking it. That much is neurotic. The psychotic turn is when one no longer worries about being found out, or worse, that one deserves to be found out because of her inner-greatness and righteous purchase on The Answer.