[Felix Hoenikker]

Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear
5:4 | © 2002 Judith Butler

· The left response to the war currently waged in Afghanistan has run into serious problems in part because the explanations that the left has provided to the question, "why do they hate us so much?" have been dismissed as so many exonerations of the acts of terror themselves. This does not need to be the case. I think we can see, however, how moralistic anti-intellectual trends coupled with a distrust of the left as so many self-flagellating first world elites has produced a situation in which our very capacity to think about the grounds and causes of the current global conflict is considered impermissible. The cry that "there is no excuse for September 11th" has become a means by which to stifle any serious public discussion of how U.S. foreign policy has helped to create a world in which such acts of terror are possible. We see this most dramatically in the suspension of any attempt to offer balanced reporting on the international conflict, the refusal to include important critiques of the U.S. military effort by Arundhati Roy (The Guardian, 9/29/01) and others within the mainstream U.S. press, the unprecedented suspension of civil liberties for illegal immigrants and suspected terrorists, the use of the flag as an ambiguous sign of solidarity with those lost on September 11th and with the current war, as if the sympathy with the one translates, in a single symbolic stroke, into support for the latter. The raw public mockery of the peace movement, the characterization of anti-war demonstrations as anachronistic or nostalgic, work to produce a consensus of public opinion that profoundly marginalizes anti-war sentiment and analysis, putting into question in a very strong way the very value of dissent as part of contemporary U.S. democratic culture.
· The articulation of this hegemony takes place in part through producing a consensus on what certain terms will mean, how they can be used, and what lines of solidarity are implicitly drawn through this use. We reserve "acts of terror" for events such as the September 11th attacks on the U.S., distinguishing these acts of violence from those that might be justified through foreign policy decisions or public declarations of war. On the other hand, these terrorist acts are construed as "declarations of war" by the Bush administration, which then positions the military response as a justified act of self-defense. In the meantime, there is ambiguity introduced by the very use of the term "terrorist" which is then exploited by various powers at war with independence movements of various kinds. The term "terrorist" is used, for instance, by the Israeli state to describe any and all Palestinian acts of violence, but none of its own. The term is also used by Putin to describe the Chechen struggle for independence, which then casts its own acts of violence against this province as justified acts of national self-defense. The U.S., by using the term, positions itself exclusively as the sudden and indisputable victim of violence, and there is no doubt that it has suffered violence, terrible violence.
· The point I would like to underscore here is that a frame for understanding violence emerges in tandem with the experience, and that the frame works both to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inquiries, and to function as a moral justification for retaliation. It seems crucial to attend to this frame, since it decides, in a forceful way, what we can hear, whether a view will be taken as explanation or as exoneration, whether we can hear the difference, and abide by it.
· There is as well a narrative dimension to this explanatory framework. In the U.S., we start the story by invoking a first-person narrative point of view, and tell what happened on September 11th. And it is that date, and the unexpected and fully terrible experience of violence that propels the narrative. If someone tries to start the story earlier, there are only a few narrative options. We can narrate, for instance, what Mohammed Atta's family life was like, whether he was teased for looking like a girl, where he congregated in Hamburg, and what led, psychologically, to the moment in which he piloted the plane into the World Trade Center. Or what was bin Laden's break from his family, and why is he so mad? That kind of story is interesting to a degree, because it suggests that there is a personal pathology at work. It works as a plausible and engaging narrative in part because it resituates agency in terms of a subject, something we can understand, something which accords with our idea of personal responsibility, or with the theory of charismatic leadership that was popularized with Mussolini and Hitler in WWII. And this is easier to hear than that a network of individuals dispersed across the globe conjured and implemented this action in various ways. If there is a network, there must be a leader, a subject who is finally responsible for what others do. Perhaps we can hear, in a limited way, about the way in which the Al-Qaida group makes use of Islamic doctrine, and we want to know, to shore up our liberal framework, that they do not represent the religion of Islam, and that the vast majority of Muslims do not condone them. Al-Qaida can be "the subject," but do we ask where this comes from? Isolating the individuals involved absolves us of the necessity of coming up with a broader explanation for events. Though we are perhaps perplexed by why there is not a greater public repudiation by Muslim leaders (though many organizations have done that), we cannot quite understand why it might be difficult for Muslim leaders to join publicly with the U.S. on this issue even as they condemn quite clearly the acts of violence.
· Our own acts of violence do not receive graphic coverage in the press, and so they remain acts that are justified in the name of self-defense, but also justified by a noble cause, namely, the rooting out of terrorism. Recently, it is reported that the Northern Alliance may have slaughtered a village: will this be investigated and, if confirmed, prosecuted as a war crime? When a bleeding child or dead body on Afghani soil emerges in the press coverage, it is not framed as part of the horror of war, but only as a critique of the military's capacity to aim its bombs right. We castigate ourselves for not aiming better, but we do not take the sign of destroyed life and decimated peoples as something for which we are responsible, or indeed understand how that decimation works to confirm the U.S. as performing atrocities. Our own acts are not considered terrorist. And there is no history of acts that is relevant to the self-understanding we form in the light of these terrible events. There is no relevant prehistory to the events of September 11th, since to begin to tell the story a different way, to ask how things came to this, is already to complicate the question of agency which, no doubt, leads to the fear of moral equivocation. In order to condemn these acts as inexcusable, absolutely wrong, in order to sustain the affective structure in which we are, on the one hand, victimized and, on the other, engaged in a righteous cause of rooting out terror, we have to start the story with the experience of violence we suffered. We have to shore up the first person point of view, and preclude from the telling accounts that might involve a decentering of the narrative "I" within the international political domain. This decentering is experienced as part of the wound that we have suffered, though, so we cannot inhabit that position. This decentering is precisely what we seek to rectify through a recentering. A narrative form emerges to compensate for the enormous narcissistic wound opened up by the public display of our physical vulnerability. Our response, accordingly, is not to enter into international coalition where we understand ourselves to be working with institutionally established routes of consensus-building. We relegate the United Nations to a second order deliberative body, and insist instead on American unilateralism. And subsequently we ask, Who is with us? Who is against us? As a result, we respond to the exposure of vulnerability with an assertion of U.S. "leadership," showing once again the contempt we have for international coalitions that are not built and led by us. Such coalitions do not conflict with U.S. supremacy, but confirm it, stoke it, insist upon it, with long-term implications for the future shape and possibility of global cooperation.
· Perhaps the question cannot be heard at all, but I would still like to ask: can we find another meaning, and another possibility, for the decentering of the first person narrative within the global framework? I do not mean that the story of being attacked should not be told. I do not mean that the story that begins with September 11th should not be told. These stories have to be told, and they are being told, despite the enormous trauma that undermines narrative capacity in these instances. But if we are to come to understand ourselves as global actors, and acting within an historically established field, and one that has other actions in play, we will need to emerge from the narrative perspective of U.S. unilateralism and, as it were, its defensive structures, to consider the ways in which our lives are profoundly implicated in the lives of others. My friends on the left joke about having lost their first world complacency. Yes, this is true. But do we now seek to restore it as a way of healing from this wound? Or do we allow the challenge to first world complacency to stand and begin to build a different politics on its basis?
· My sense is that being open to the explanations, poorly circulated as they are in the U.S., that might help us take stock of how the world has come to take this form, will involve us in a different order of responsibility. The ability to narrate ourselves not from the first person alone, but from, say, the position of the third, or to receive an account delivered in the second, can actually work to expand our understanding of the forms that global power has taken. But instead of remaining open to a consequential decentering of first-worldism, we tend to dismiss any effort at explanation, as if to explain these events would accord them rationality, as if to explain these events would involve us in a sympathetic identification with the oppressor, as if to understand these events would involve building a justificatory framework for them. Our fear of understanding a point of view belies a deeper fear that we will be taken up by it, find it is contagious, become infected in a morally perilous way by the thinking of the presumed enemy. But why do we assume this? We claim to have gone to war in order to "root out" the sources of terror, according to Bush, but do we think that finding the individuals responsible for the attacks on the U.S. will constitute having gotten to the root? Do we not imagine that the invasion of a sovereign country with a substantial Muslim population, supporting the military regime in Pakistan that actively and violently suppresses free speech, obliterating lives and villages and homes and hospitals, will not foster more adamant and widely disseminated anti-American sentiment and political organizing? Are we not, strategically speaking, interested in ameliorating this violence? Are we not, ethically speaking, obligated to stop its further dissemination, to consider our role in instigating it, and to foment and cultivate another sense of a culturally and religiously diverse global political culture?
· Part of the problem the U.S. is up against is that liberals have quietly lined up behind the war effort, and supplied in part the rationale that keeps our own violence from being labeled as terrorist. It is not just the conservative republicans who do not want to hear about "causes." The "Just war" liberal-left has also made plain that it does not want to hear from "excuseniks." This coinage, rehabilitating the cold war rhetoric about Soviet Russia, suggests that those who seek to understand how the global map arrived at this juncture through asking how, in part, the U.S. has contributed to the making of this map, are themselves, through the style of their inquiry, and the shape of their questions, complicitous with an assumed enemy. But to ask how certain political and social actions come into being, such as the recent terrorist attacks on the U.S., and even to identify a set of causes, is not the same as locating the source of responsibility for these actions or, indeed, paralyzing our capacity to make ethical judgments on what is right or wrong.
· No doubt there are forms of left analysis which say simply that the U.S. has reaped what it has sown. Or they say that the U.S. has brought this state of events on itself. These are, as closed explanations, simply other ways of asserting U.S. priority, and encoding U.S. omnipotence. These are also explanations that assume that these actions originate in a single subject, that the subject is not what it appears to be, that it is the U.S. who occupies the site of that subject, and that no other subjects exist or, if they exist, their agency is subordinated to our own. In other words, political paranoia of this kind is just another articulation of U.S. supremacy. Paranoia is fed by the fantasy of omnipotence, and we see this evidenced in some of the more extreme explanations of this kind, i.e. the attacks on September 11th were masterminded by the CIA or Mossad, the Israeli secret police. It is clear, though, that bin Laden did apprentice to the CIA and that the U.S. supported the Taliban since the 1990s when it was deemed strategically useful. These links are not precisely causal explanations, but they are part of an explanatory framework. They do not translate into the notion that the U.S. did these acts, but one can see how the connection becomes the occasion for the causal reduction, and a certain paranoia amplifies itself by seizing upon part of a broader explanatory picture.
· What is generally heard when these opinions are expressed is that the U.S. is the culpable agent, that it is, effectively, the author of these events, and that the U.S. is solely responsible for this global outcome. This kind of reasoning is unacceptable to the press, and to the public in general, because it seems to blame the victim in this instance. But is this the only way to hear this point of view? And is this the only form this point of view takes? It seems that being most precise about this point, and publicizing it where one can, will be crucial for any effort by the left to offer an anti-war viewpoint within contemporary public discourse.
· If we believe that to think radically about the formation of the current situation is to exculpate those who committed acts of violence, we will freeze our thinking in the name of a questionable morality. But if we paralyze our thinking in this way, we will fail morality in a different way. We will fail to take collective responsibility for a thorough understanding of the history which brings us to this juncture. We will, as a result, deprive ourselves of the very critical and historical resources we need to imagine and practice another future, one which will move beyond the current cycle of revenge.
· When President Arroyo of the Philippines on October 29th, 2001 remarked that "the best breeding ground [for terrorism] is poverty" or Arundhati Roy claims that bin Laden has been "sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid waste by America's foreign policy," something less than a strictly causal explanation is being offered. A "breeding ground" does not necessarily breed, but it can. And the "spare rib" that is said to emerge from a world laid waste by U.S. foreign policy has, by definition, emerged in a strange and alchemical fashion. It is from waste that this rib is formed, as if the bone belongs to the dead, or is itself the animation of a skeletal remain. This is not God creating Eve from the rib of Adam, life generating life, but death generating death, and through a means that is figural, not precisely causal. Indeed, both of them make use of figures -- grounds and bones -- to bespeak a kind of generation that precedes and exceeds a strictly causal frame. Both of them are pointing to conditions, not causes. A condition of terrorism can be necessary or sufficient. If it is necessary, it is a state of affairs without which terrorism cannot take hold, one which terrorism absolutely requires. If it is sufficient, its presence is enough for terrorism to take place. Conditions do not "act" in the way that individual agents do, but no agent acts without them. They are presupposed in what we do, but it would be a mistake to personify them as if they acted in the place of us. Thus, we can say, and ought to, that U.S. imperialism is a necessary condition for the attacks on the U.S., that these attacks would be impossible without the horizon of imperialism within which they occur. But to understand how U.S. imperialism figures here, we have to understand not only how it is experienced by those who understand themselves as its victims, but how it enters into their own formation as acting and deliberating subjects. This is the beginning of another kind of account. And this seems to be, for instance, what Mary Kaldor in The Nation (11/5/01, p. 16) points to when she claims that "in many of the areas where war takes place and where extreme networks pick up new recruits, becoming a criminal or joining a paramilitary group is literally the only opportunity for unemployed young men lacking formal education." What effect did the killing of an estimated 200,000 Iraqi citizens, including tens of thousands of children, and the subsequent starvation of Muslim populations, predicted by Concern, a hunger relief organization, to reach the number six million by year's end, have on Muslim views of the U.S.? Is the value of Muslim life as valuable as legibly first-world lives? Are the Palestinians accorded the status of "human" in U.S. policy and press coverage? Will those hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives lost in the last decades of strife ever receive the equivalent to the paragraph-long obituaries in the New York Times that seek to humanize -- often through nationalist and familial framing devices -- those who have been violently killed? Is our global capacity to mourn not foreclosed precisely through the failure to conceive of Muslim and Arab lives as lives?
· Giuliani's response to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal's remarks on October 11th in New York raises this question of the acceptability of critical discourse emphatically. The Prince came with a ten million dollar check in hand for the World Trade Center relief effort and expressed at the same time horror and moral condemnation of the attacks on the World Trade Center and asked that "the U.S. take a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause." Forbes.com (on 10/11/01) reported Giuliani's refusal of the check this way:
While in New York, Alwaleed said, "Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek. " At a news conference, Giuliani said, "Not only are those statements wrong, they are part of the problem. There is no moral equivalent to this attack. There is no justification for it," the mayor said. "The people who did it lost any right to ask for justification for it when they slaughtered four or five thousand innocent people, and to suggest that there is any justification for it only invites this happening in the future.'' The Saudi prince, the sixth richest man in the world, did say he condemned terrorism, and he expressed his condolences for the more than 5,000 people killed when hijacked jets slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
· In a television report that same day, Giuliani announced that Alwaleed's views were "absolutely wrong." I would suggest that it was not possible to hear both of these views at the same time because the framework for hearing presumes that the one view nullifies the other, so either the claim of grief or the offer of help are considered disingenuous. Or what is heard is that the failure of the U.S. to offer a balanced approach to the Palestinian cause provides a justification for the attacks. Alwaleed is clear, and was subsequently clear in a New York Times editorial, that he did not think that the U.S. policy failure, which he deems true, to honor the Palestinian cause justifies the attacks. But he did think that long-term U.S.-Arab relations would be improved were the U.S. to develop a more balanced approach. It makes sense to assume that bettering those relations might well lead to less conducive grounds for Islamic extremism. The Bush administration itself, in its own way, attests to this belief by pursuing the possibility of a Palestinian state. But here the two views could not be heard together, and it has to do with the word "slaughter," the utterability of the word "slaughter" in the context of saying that Israelis have slaughtered and do slaughter Palestinians, and in large numbers.
· Like "terrorist," "slaughter" is a word that, within the hegemonic grammar, should be reserved for unjustified acts of violence against first-world nations, if I understand the grammar correctly. Giuliani hears this as a discourse of justification, since he believes that slaughter justifies military self-defense. He calls the statements "absolutely untrue," I presume, not because he disputes that there have been deaths on the Palestinian side, and that the Israelis are responsible for them, but because "slaughter" as the name for those deaths implies an equivalence with the deaths of the World Trade Center victims. It seems, though, that we are not supposed to say that both groups of people have been "slaughtered" since that implies a "moral equivalence," meaning, I suppose, that the slaughtering of one group is as bad as the slaughtering of the next, and that both, according to his framework, would be entitled to self-defense as a result.
· Although the Prince subsequently undermined his credibility when he betrayed anti-Semitic beliefs, claiming that "Jewish pressure" was behind Giuliani's refusal of the check, he nevertheless initiated an utterance and a formulation that has value on its own. Why is it that these two sets of deaths are not viewed as equally horrible? And to what extent has the very refusal to apprehend Palestinian deaths as "slaughter" produced an immeasurable rage on the part of Arabs who seek some legitimate recognition and resolution for this continuing state of violence? One does not need to enter into the dreary business of quantifying and comparing oppressions to understand what the Prince meant to say, and subsequently said, namely, that the U.S. needs to think about how its own political investments and practices help to create a world of enormous rage and violence. This is not to say that the acts of violence perpetrated on Sept. 11th were the "fault" of the U.S., and it does not exonerate those who committed them. One way to read what the Prince had to say was that the acts of terror were unequivocally wrong, and that the U.S. might also be able to intervene more productively in global politics to produce conditions in which this response to U.S. imperialism becomes less likely. This is not the same as holding the U.S. exclusively responsible for the violence done within its borders, but it does ask the U.S. to assume a different kind of responsibility for producing more egalitarian global conditions for equality, sovereignty, and the egalitarian redistribution of resources.
· Similarly, the New York Times (11/02/01) describes Arundhati Roy's critique of U.S. imperialism as "anti-U.S.," implying that any position that seeks to reevaluate critically U.S. foreign policy in light of Sept. 11th and the ensuing war is anti-U.S. or, indeed, complicitous with the presumed enemy. This is tantamount to the suppression of dissent, and the nationalist refusal to consider the merits of criticisms developed from other parts of the globe. The treatment is unfair. Her condemnation of bin Laden is clear, but she is willing to ask how he was formed. To condemn the violence and to ask how it came about are surely two separate questions, but they need to be posed in tandem, held in juxtaposition, reconciled within a broader analysis. Under contemporary strictures on public discourse, however, this kind of dual thinking cannot be heard: it is dismissed as contradictory or disingenuous, and Roy herself is treated as a diva or a cult figure, rather than listened to as a political critic with a wide moral compass.
· So is there a way, in Roy's terms, to understand bin Laden as "born" from the rib of U.S. imperialism (allowing that he is born from several possible historical sources), one of which is, crucially, U.S. imperialism, without claiming that U.S. imperialism is solely responsible for his actions, or those of his ostensible network? To answer this question, we need to distinguish, provisionally, between individual and collective responsibility. But then we need to situate individual responsibility in light of its collective conditions. Those who commit acts of violence are surely responsible for them; they are not dupes or mechanisms of an impersonal social force, but agents with responsibility. On the other hand, these individuals are formed, and we would be making a mistake if we reduced their actions to purely self-generated acts of will or symptoms of individual pathology or "evil." Both the discourse of individualism and of moralism (understood as the moment in which morality exhausts itself in public acts of denunciation) assume that the individual is the first link in a causal chain that forms the meaning of accountability. But to take the self-generated acts of the individual as our point of departure in moral reasoning is precisely to foreclose the possibility of questioning what kind of world gives rise to such individuals. And what is this process of "giving rise"? What social conditions help to form the very ways that choice and deliberation proceed? Where and how can such subject formations be contravened? How is it that radical violence becomes an option, comes to appear as the only viable option for some, under some global conditions? And against what conditions of violation do they respond? And with what resources?
· To ask these questions is not to say that the conditions are at fault rather than the individual. But it is to rethink the relation between conditions and acts. Our acts are not self-generated, but conditioned. But we are acted upon and acting, and our "responsibility" lies in the juncture between the two. What can I do with the conditions that form me? What do they constrain me to do? What can I do to transform them? Being acted upon is not fully continuous with acting, and in this way the forces that act upon us are not finally responsible for what we do. In a certain way, and paradoxically, our responsibility is heightened once we have been subjected to the violence of others. We are acted upon, violently, and it appears that our capacity to set our own course at such instances is fully undermined. But only once we have suffered that violence are we compelled, ethically, to ask how we will respond to violent injury. What role will we assume in the historical relay of violence, who will we become in the response, and will we be furthering or impeding violence by virtue of the response that we make? To respond to violence with violence may well seem "justified," but is it finally a responsible solution? Similarly, moralistic denunciation provides immediate gratification, and even has the effect of temporarily cleansing the speaker of all proximity to guilt through the act of self-righteous denunciation itself. But is this the same as responsibility, understood as taking stock of our world, and participating in its social transformation in such a way that non-violent, cooperative, egalitarian international relations remain the guiding ideal?
· We ask these latter questions not to exonerate the individuals who commit violence, but to take a different sort of responsibility for the global conditions of justice. As a result, it makes sense to follow two courses of action at once: it is surely important to find those who planned and implemented the violence, and to hold them accountable according to international war crimes standards and in international courts of law, regardless of our skepticism about such institutions (skepticism can furnish grounds for reform). In pursuing a wayward military solution, the U.S. now perpetrates and displays its own violence, offering a breeding ground for new waves of young Muslims to join terrorist organizations. This is poor thinking, strategically and morally. Ignoring its image as the hated enemy for many in the region, the U.S. has effectively responded to the violence done against it by consolidating its reputation as a militaristic power with no respect for lives outside of the first world. That we now respond with more violence is taken as "further proof" that the U.S. has violent and anti-sovereign designs on the region. To remember the lessons of Aeschylus and refuse this cycle of revenge in the name of justice means not only to seek legal redress for wrongs done, but to take stock of how the world has become formed in this way precisely in order to form it anew, and in the direction of non-violence.
· Our collective responsibility not merely as a nation, but as part of an international community based on a commitment to equality and non-violent cooperation, requires that we ask how these conditions came about, and to endeavor to recreate social and political conditions on more sustaining grounds. This means, in part, hearing beyond what we are able to hear. And it means as well being open to narration that decenters us from our supremacy, in both its right and left wing forms. Can we hear at once that there were precedents for these events, and to know that it is urgent that we know them, learn from them, alter them, and that the events are not justified by virtue of this history and that the events are not understandable without this history? Only then do we reach the disposition to get to the "root" of violence, and begin to offer another vision of the future than that which perpetuates violence in the name of denying it, offering instead names for things that restrain us from thinking and acting radically and well about global options.

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987); Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990); Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (1993); The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997); Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), and Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000).