Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11

By Daniel J Sherman And Terry Nardin, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006, 272 pages, paperback, US$24.95. Reviewed by Adam Atkinson in the July 2006 issue.

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As Sherman and Nardin note in their introduction to Terror, Culture, Politics, of all the rhetorical, jingoistic gestures and formulas to emerge from September 11, the notion most in need of critique is that '9/11 changed everything' (p 4). Implicit, of course, is the question for whom precisely 'everything' has been altered. The United States, certainly, has discovered its vulnerability, and its security fears have impacted on the international community in numerous ways. Further, many of America's allies, including the Howard government, seem determined to follow Bush's lead in justifying a raft of 'normative changes' (p 238) in the name of a vaguely defined war against terrorism. The value of Sherman and Nardin's collection though, is not primarily its analysis of cultural, ethical, and political developments since the World Trade Center attacks, although the critiques undertaken are both thought-provoking and thorough; rather, Terror, Culture, Politics takes a balanced approach to 9/11 by also analysing the pre-existing norms and anxieties informing America's current terror culture.

Although the editors still maintain a separation of terms, one of the book's principal concerns is to investigate the relationship between the 'narrow' sense of culture -- the creative arts -- and a 'broader' understanding of culture as the 'art of living together', (p 2) a definition that subsumes both ethics and politics. Both kinds of culture (art on the one hand and politics and ethics on the other) have the power to reflect existing states of affairs, but also, more importantly, to affect change -- for better or for worse. (p 2) Terror, Culture, Politics is designed to investigate these notions side by side, to expose the origins of America's state of anxiety and where that same anxiety might be leading. Producing a cultural artefact of their own, the implicit desire of the editors and critics involved is to alter the cultural pathway revealed in their studies.

The essays are divided into two sections: 'Image/Memory', which investigates art critically engaged with 9/11; and the aptly titled 'Ethics/Politics'. The purview of the included texts is broad, taking in architectural design, commemoration, and (more interestingly, perhaps) comic books on the one hand, and investigating human rights, crisis government, national defence, and attempts to rehabilitate and clarify jihad on the other. Articles in the second section deal in original ways with the expected issues and questions, while the first section tends to eschew the obvious and popular art forms of television, film and music in favour of slightly more marginal cultural elements. Mainstream art, according to Henry Jenkins' contribution, tends to respond far more slowly to events like 9/11 than many of the art forms studied in the text. Often, once they are proven to be viable ideas, mainstream art later absorbs the rapidly developed themes of marginal culture, like comic books, for example. (p 97)

Jenkins' essay, 'Captain America Sheds His Mighty Tears', argues that comics produced not only the earliest artistic interpretations of 9/11, but also, as 'a niche medium produced by a mainstream industry', (p 69) saw the emergence of a popular and progressive critique of globalisation and American imperium. While bellicose themes of good versus evil drawn in black and white terms might be the expectation for superhero comics, such elements are largely absent post-9/11, or at the very least subdued in favour of working through the grieving process and, significantly, attempting to understand the terrorist viewpoint (the included frames of the passenger uprising on United 93 from the perspective of the hijackers are particularly striking). For Jenkins, comic books stand in sharp opposition to 'axis of evil' rhetoric and might be put to serve a positive didactic role in dampening some of the ethico-political developments outlined in the book's second section of contributions.

Elaine Scarry and William E Scheuerman's essays in particular are intended to criticise the defence and governmental policies justified by the 2001 attacks, particularly the rhetorical emphasis on the necessity of speed and expedited action. Scarry's well-known essay, 'Who Defended the Country?', updated for this publication, criticises the Bush government's response to 9/11 as hypocritical or at the very least ill-informed. The rapid centralisation of national defence into the executive arm, the shift from democratic strategies of defence to authoritarian hierarchal mode, is based on the alleged need for the government, in an age of long-range missiles and high-speed aircraft, to respond to security threats with rapidity -- within minutes. Her analysis of the facts known about Flight 77 (which crashed into the Pentagon) shows that despite, at the very least, a twenty minute warning confirming the hijacking of the flight (and an outside figure of one hour and twenty minutes), the attack could not be stopped because of the slow movement of information in a hierarchical, centralised defence structure. The democratic, decentralised defence carried out on Flight 93 within a comparable time frame (twenty-three minutes) was, on the other hand, successful and Scarry argues for a similar (and constitutional) approach to national defence: a decentralised defence force, the maintenance of Congressional approval of war, and a politically engaged citizenship.

Scarry's critique is certainly open to challenge, from both sides of the argument, but read in combination with Scheuerman's piece, 'Rethinking Crisis Government', lends value to pause in the face of rapid and often poorly informed decision making. (cf. Iraq) As Scheuerman argues, the strengthening of executive power in the name of speedy defence leads ultimately to 'monarchist conceptions of power', (p 215) at odds with everything America claims to stand for. Most of the essays, at least implicitly, suggest that the political knee-jerk responses to 9/11 are less a consequence of the event's unprecedented horror and destruction -- indeed, as Toope argues, many nations deal with such trauma on a very regular basis -- but more as an attempt to re-establish a prior state of perceived American invulnerability and power. In a certain sense, then, the events of 9/11 are read as a provocation toward dampening the American imperialist impulse. Ironically, though, the book's critique of America stops short of actually challenging American-style democracy as the pre-eminent form of government. America appears as a kind of lost utopia, buried momentarily under Bush's version of the USA, and hopefully to be resurrected by progressive elements of culture. A minor criticism, though, that detracts very little from the book's strengths as a measured response to 9/11. For Australian readers, too, Sherman and Nardin's book raises many important questions regarding our own cultural responses to September 11 and the ways in which those responses move in tandem with those discussed above. Terror, Culture, Politics spills outside its intended range of critique and its publication is both timely and of wide relevance.

Citation

• Adam Atkinson. 'Review: Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11 by Daniel J Sherman and Terry Nardin' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), July 2006. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 19 June 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Terror, Culture, Politics: 9/11 Reconsidered takes a critical look at the politics of American culture in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. The volume takes as axiomatic—and, therefore, as demanding careful scrutiny—the connection between culture as creative expression and culture in the broader sense of the beliefs, values, and habits that members of a society hold in common. Coming from a wide array of disciplines—art history, history, literature, media studies, law, and political science—the contributors ask not so much how 9/11 changed American culture but how our existing cultural patterns, in such separate but linked domains as the media, public art, and political thought, shaped our responses to it.