Steven Johnston — Obama's Tragic Equanimity

Steven Johnston

is the author of American Dionysia: Violence, Tragedy, and Democratic Politics.

Barack Obama has delivered many superb speeches in his national political career. A gifted orator when inspired, Obama can stir and spur others. Obama’s address to the nation from the Oval Office on December 6, 2015, following the slaughter in San Bernardino, California, may not have moved many citizens, but for that very reason I would suggest it was perhaps the most important speech, even the best speech, he has made as president. As Republican presidential candidates compete with one another to corner the political market on mindless machismo in response to terrorism—with Ted Cruz the apparent winner by insisting that he would order the Defense Department to carpet-bomb the Islamic State into submission—Obama remains preternaturally cool, calm, and composed. When under fire, the world’s most powerful nation-state needs self-possession in those who govern. Ironically, this sensibility seems to frustrate even those well-disposed to Obama. Frank Bruni, sounding eerily similar to David Brooks slandering John Kerry in the 2004 election, “question[s] the intensity of Barack Obama’s focus on the Islamic State and the terrorist threat,” insisting that “we didn’t see quite the passion that this moment demands or quite the strength that a fearful country craves.” Bruni, alas, is too focused on dissecting the fearful bigotry of Donald Trump to notice, let alone admit, his own undue fear of the “barbarians” at the gate.

What was remarkable about Obama’s speech—and about his presidency as a whole—was its utter lack of ressentiment. This is a president with every reason to be furious. The Islamic State is a murderous force that could not have come into being if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had not indulged the neo-conservative fantasy of regime change in Iraq. The blood on their hands knows no apparent end or limit. But he has refused to single them out and hold them responsible for what they have wrought. Obama not only declined to prosecute them for their various crimes against the Constitution and humanity when he first took office. Despite their horrific legacy, he effectively assumes unqualified responsibility for the Islamic State and asks Congress to join him by authorizing the use of military force against it. If Congress really believes that the United States is at war with the Islamic State—which individual members can’t say often enough—then it’s time to prove it with something other than rants and raves.

Obama addressed the nation on December 6 and offered the American people a lesson in “tragedy.” This kind of political education is precisely what many Americans gripped by fear and panic do not want right now, but it may be exactly what is needed. It can provide necessary distance which, not to be confused with indifference, is critical so we don’t blindly make matters worse—not despite but because of actions we take. The tragedy to which Obama referred is not (just) that fourteen people “were brutally murdered.” The tragedy is that the United States, as I mentioned, created the circumstances that made it possible for the Islamic State to emerge and nothing we do can rewrite the past or lessen our culpability. The tragedy is that the Islamic State has “turned to less complicated acts of violence like the mass shootings that are all too common” in the United States, which means that while we can defend ourselves (and can do more to defend ourselves), we will never be able to provide a foolproof guarantee that more terrorist attacks won’t take place. We have engendered that kind of hatred. The tragedy is that Obama must insist, whether it’s credible or not, that the United States will overcome terrorism, destroy the Islamic State, and ultimately prevail “by being strong and smart, resilient and relentless, and by drawing upon every aspect of American power.” Yet to prevail here means that the Islamic State cannot and will not be destroyed by American military power. To privilege a resort to arms is self-defeating and self-destructive: “We should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria. That’s what groups like [the Islamic State] want. They know they can’t defeat us on the battlefield. [Islamic State] fighters were part of the insurgency that we faced in Iraq. But they also know that if we occupy foreign lands, they can maintain insurgencies for years, killing thousands of our troops, draining our resources, and using our presence to draw new recruits.”

Unlike Jeb Bush, Obama knows that the Islamic State cannot “destroy Western civilization.” The tragedy is that the United States has mortal enemies that wish it deadly harm and there is nothing that we can do to eliminate existential enmity and the nihilistic violence it inspires. The world is not ontologically or politically predisposed in America’s favor. The tragedy is that the best we can do is contain and control the Islamic State, a necessarily modest policy that is already showing signs of success in Iraq, which also means that the Islamic State has already made plans and preparations for its strategic retreat to Libya—when the time comes. And should it be driven from Libya in a few years, under a different president, no doubt it will relocate elsewhere. The drive to eliminate evil actors altogether from the world cannot be redeemed. The tragedy is that successful terrorist attacks in the United States do not mean that the Islamic State is not being effectively countered. The tragedy is that it means that the United States is again experiencing the kind of violence that much of the rest of the world experiences routinely—and for which the United States is often responsible.

Barack Obama spent part of his national address suggesting “what we should not do.” He understands better than the Republicans running for his job that the United States must be careful not to betray its own values in the effort to protect the country from terrorist attack. Above all else, we must not become the enemy we oppose and fight, a problem the United States did not negotiate well during the country’s prior global struggle with the Communist Other in the Cold War. Unfortunately, it is a fate to which the United States has already succumbed—that is, long before the United States started thinking publicly about denying refugees that it helped create entry into the country. George Bush resorted to illegal war, rendition, secret gulags, and torture, all in the name of defending the so-called homeland. As I said, no one knows this descent better than Barack Obama, not only because he made a conscious choice not to prosecute the criminals that preceded him in the executive branch. Obama knows this dissolution well because, among other things, his own drone war has killed and maimed thousands of innocent civilians in a callous disregard for life and limb in the pursuit of national security and to protect our way of life. The tragedy is that we may not have become our enemy, but we are not as different from it as we would like to think either, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. The difference may or may not be small, but it is still significant and that is what Barack Obama tried to tell the nation on December 6, especially when he implored us to “make sure we never forget what makes us exceptional.” The tragedy is that it doesn’t look like very many were listening—or capable of hearing.

Too Hard to Keep

Alexander Keller Hirsch is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He can be reached at ahirsch@alaska.edu.

Since 2010, the artist Jason Lazarus has been collecting and curating photographs deemed “too hard to keep” by their owners. The growing archive of images contributes to what he calls a “repository of photographs, photo-objects, and digital files” that are, for whatever reason, considered “too painful to live with any longer.” This is a public receptacle for excessive affect, a place where we can deposit material objects charged with the aura of a feeling that is, as Lazarus writes, “too difficult to hold on to, but too meaningful to destroy.”

A brilliant project. But this phrase—“too hard to keep, but too meaningful to destroy”—may be misleading. The “but” is too quick. It might be that some of these pictures are too meaningful to destroy because they are too hard to keep. One must jettison the relic of a memory if it betokens a grief that is overwhelming enough. But, precisely because that grief is so overwhelming, one must take care not to obliterate its artifact, for doing so would threaten a source of meaning and intensified aliveness.

As Kaja Silverman puts it, “A photograph is the umbilical cord connecting us to what we have loved and lost, to what is gone because we failed to save it, or to what might have been, but now will never be.” The Too Hard to Keep archive is flush with photographs that index such a loss. But it also calls attention to the impasses faced by those who inhabit an afterness where it is not only loss that is at stake, but also the loss of loss itself. Lazarus requires that the owners of photographs “truly part” with the images they donate to his project. He accepts digital copies only on condition that other digital copies be deleted: “If you’re going to part with it—part with it, then what you’re seeing hastraction… It is the remnant of the decision to relinquish the image from theirarchive into a public archive.”

Lazarus’ exhibitions are, in this sense, intensely political. Though most of the images depict subjects and themes that are sometimes considered too intimate, or perhaps too quotidian, to be political—the most common motifs include people, open landscapes, pets, death beds, sun sets, erotic connections, empty rooms—indeed, with Too Hard to Keep, it is precisely this ordinary intimacy that becomes a patent source of political experience. The exhibitions summon into a public domain the pain of those who have suffered private loss by inviting witness-spectators to the gallery. By doing so, they reflect a mise-en-scène of grief that builds a felicitous connection between strangers. A demos is assembled at the site of an aesthetic object that beams forth what is too hard to keep, and too meaningful to destroy.

One of the photographs, a black and white taken in what must be the early 1970s, pictures a crowd of a dozen or so friends posing for a group shot. Everyone is smiling and joking around. One man is sitting on another man’s shoulders, dragging on a cigarette. Beneath them a dog is climbing into a woman’s lap.

Everything appears normal, but for the lower right hand corner, where one of the persons originally pictured has had their shape cut out. They have been deleted, and replaced with the trace of a blank white empty space. The effect is disquieting. In an effort to censor a portion of the photograph, the owner has attempted to purge the image of someone, presumably the source of some wounding or loss. But, tragically, as with all cases of censorship, the eye is drawn to what is repressed. Hardly spirited away, the entire photograph becomes about the cut out and, by extension, the person who is no longer there but whose spectral remainder continues to haunt the image as the presence of an absence.

Another picture in the collection appears to be self-conscious about this. The photograph features a woman who is raising her hand to shield herself from being photographed. The corner of her face is glimpsed, as is a curtain of hair clinging to her jaw line, but her face is otherwise obscured. The backdrop, a shock of over exposed green flora, brightens the image, as it shapes and lends dimension to the aegis of her hand.  The owner of the photograph need not edit the image, the woman is already censoring herself. And yet, one wonders whether this attempt to self-erase is itself a part of why the photograph is too hard to keep and too meaningful to destroy.

Lazarus’ submissions are received anonymously, and without explanation, and the images, when exhibited, are displayed without reference or description. The effect is powerful. The viewer cannot help but imagine what makes this empty landscape too hard to keep, or what renders that person’s image too painful to live with. The result is that the art nearly becomes the story we tell ourselves about what happened.

We recognize, of course, that the story we tell cannot possibly encompass the reality behind the images, even if some pictures invite more or less accurate educated guesses. Whatever the distance between fiction and reality, the story we tell reflects the irrepressible desire to craft narrative around an unsettling and furtive object. Great art, Theodor Adorno once wrote, depicts something that we do not and cannot know. He might have added that, in part, what makes such art resonant is that its audience must try, and then generatively fail, to come to terms with it through storytelling.

In this way, Too Hard to Keep suggests an interesting avenue for reckoning with afterness. Instead of placing the emphasis on punishing perpetrators, or capacitating victims through forgiveness, Too Hard to Keep hones in on the role of the witness. In the standard literature, witnessing is often described as a mode of observation, whereby a bystander sees an event unfold, and then later bears testimony to this experience. But with Lazarus’ project witnesses cannot see the event. The photographs offer evidence of something beyond our ken.

And the exhibitions are hardly Truth and Reconciliation hearings. The TRC in South Africa, for instance, invited victims, perpetrators, and witnesses alike to enter into a public sphere and share stories about past suffering such that, A) The truth of atrocity could become official record, and B) Rituals of mass forgiveness could set restorative justice in motion. But with Too Hard to Keep, the goal is manifestly not to be released from resentment through forgiveness. Indeed, the very premise of the collection is that these images represent a source of pain that is too meaningful to neutralize through reconciliation. And rather than focus on delivering an accurate portrayal of what we have observed, witness-spectators are instead acutely aware that their testimony will largely be fantasy.  

“God,” writes Samuel Beckett in Watt, “is a witness who cannot be sworn.” In part, God cannot be sworn as a witness because in vowing to bear truthful testimony He swears an oath to Himself—He promises to tell the “whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” An exercise in tautology. With Too Hard to Keep we are also cast as witnesses who cannot be sworn, though not because the authority of our testimony is rooted in a redundant promise to ourselves. Rather, our inability to be sworn is due to the fact that we cannot offer testimony to an event that remains crucially hidden from us.

Remarkably, in the case of Too Hard to Keep, this invisibility of the event, and the accompanying lack of an ability to tell the truth about it, is precisely what gives witnessing its power. In part, this power is located in the affinity that is struck between witness-spectators and owner-victims in the political space of the gallery.

But unlike most other genres of affinity, this one is not quite grounded in empathy. If empathy is like sharing in and responding to another person’s pain because one knows it and has experienced it before, then the feeling nurtures a shared horizon of understanding anchored in memory. With Too Hard to Keep, however, witnesses cannot develop empathy for the photograph owners, because it is unclear what the loss is, and as such it is uncertain whether one too has taken part in it. Instead, the affinity that connects witnesses and owners stems from what I call inverse empathy: a tenderness toward the suffering of the other that is rooted in a creative imagining of what may have been. This inverse case foregrounds conviviality not in a collective public memory, but rather in a shared imaginable.  The emphasis lies not with the truth of what clearly happened, but rather with the fantasy of what might have taken place, and with the stories witnesses tell about this imaginable past.  

A photograph is “in no way a presence,” Roland Barthes tells us; rather, “its reality is that of the having-been-there.” But with Too Hard to Keep, we bear explicit witness to our own having not been there. Peering into these images, it feels as though we have been transformed into a tragic chorus -- the witnessing body par excellence -- but one that has arrived too late to the scene of loss. This is an analogue to Franz Kafka’s parable about the tardy messiah who arrives too late to tender redemption, except that in this case our belatedness turns out to be helpful, actually. Indeed, it provides the precondition for inverse empathy. Only late witnesses need imagine.

But what kind of demos does inverse empathy convene? Not exactly one embedded in a sustained fidelity to the event. Nor is this a demos adhered to melancholia, since the event and its attendant loss are both clandestine for witnesses. Rather, this demos is attuned to the world of possibilities opened up by imagining what others’ pain might entail. As with other forms of democratic relation, this one convokes a public object -- in this case a photograph -- but that object is not like a social contract or a birth right, concepts both that name what is, or ought to be, guaranteed for members of the group. Instead, this becoming-in-relation takes shape around what is ultimately uncertain, and it is exercised through an invitation to envision who the other is, and what has happened to them. Like a will to chance in reverse, Too Hard to Keep signals a supple and precarious world held in common by citizens who enter together into a life without guarantees, except that the focus is trained on the enigmatic past, rather than the unpredictable future.

What can this do for photograph owners? Perhaps not much. Redemption may be limited for those who possess photographs that symbolize a loss that is too hard to keep and too meaningful to destroy. Friedrich Nietzsche famously argued that we ought to forget our painful past, accept life on life’s terms, embrace amor fati and move on (“I wish to be only a Yes-sayer”), such that we can be free to occupy an unfettered present. By contrast, the philosopher and Holocaust survivor Jean Améry called for a “revolt against reality,” arguing that victims ought to embrace their resentments, such that the “criminal is nailed to his deed.”

But Lazarus offers a third way: not sublime forgetfulness, but not infinite despair either. Too Hard to Keep invites photograph owners to forsake, but not erase, what cannot be kept and cannot be destroyed. And it opens an avenue for victims to invoke unwitting witnesses who can only imagine what they are seeing. Crucially, the photo has been capitulated to a demos – a tardy tragic chorus – that may not be able to fix what has been broken, but can bear witness to the trace of what remains.

Making War on Citizens at the National September 11 Museum

Steven Johnston

Neal A. Maxwell Chair in Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Service, University of Utah

The National September 11 Museum, which opened to controversy in May, functions as an affective and political continuation, even intensification of the National September 11 Memorial. It is not a freestanding institution. Philip Kennicott, architecture critic of The Washington Post, considers the Museum a “supplement” to Michael Arad’s Memorial pools, but destructively so: it “overwhelms—or more literally undermines—the dignified power of [the] memorial by inviting visitors to re-experience the events in a strangely, obsessively, narcissistically repetitious way.” This is what makes the Museum, in my judgment, a continuation of the Memorial. That is, the Museum, which is located directly beneath Ground Zero, does belowground what the Memorial does aboveground: it makes war on citizens. The Memorial creates this effect more subtly as the reflecting pools’ waterfalls mimic the collapsing towers. Here there is no debris left over; the water crashes down and disappears into a void where it is recirculated to provide the material for subsequent collapses. The Museum, on the other hand, recreates the horrors of September 11 in intimate, assaultive detail and does so primarily by targeting individuals—their memories, their experiences, their traumas. This approach to commemoration crystallizes America’s understanding of itself as an unrivaled source of right and good in the world and nothing more than an innocent victim on September 11, 2001. It thus obscures, among other things, the violence and tragedy constitutive of its imperial democracy. Nevertheless, it was precisely the institutional structures of this violence and tragedy that were attacked on September 11. To explicitly acknowledge this, of course, would be to acknowledge al-Qaeda’s success on September 11, thereby showing respect for an enemy, an act of which America, not alone among democracies, is incapable.



What, more specifically, does it mean for the National September 11 Museum to make war on citizens? The idea here is not to kill them, of course. Wars are much broader in scope and their violence assumes myriad forms. The idea is to overpower them with an awesome display of architectural and archaeological engineering, a display that perversely matches, even surpasses, al-Qaeda’s 2001 assault. It’s as if the world’s leading democracy, feeling insecure not just about its porous borders but also its very identity, needed to prove itself equal, even superior to its deadliest enemy regardless of the cost. What Terry Smith has written of the World Trade Center’s and al Qaeda’s masterminds could be said of the Museum’s: ”To attempt creation or destruction on such an immense scale requires both bombers and master-builders to view living processes in general, and social life in particular, with a high degree of abstraction. Both must undertake a radical distancing of themselves from the flesh and blood of mundane experience ‘on the ground.’” This claim might seem counter-intuitive with the Museum, given its emphasis on the individual, but it simultaneously addresses everyone and no one, hence its air of abstraction. Emanating from its own cavernous vacuum, the Museum seems determined to induce a certain emotional-political sensibility, to break the morale of visitors and any possible resistance they might offer to its impressive and appalling death-laden design itself in service of a nationalist politics. I’m tempted to say it may not even matter if anyone visits the Museum.  For the United States, it’s enough that it was built.



Visitors enter the Museum on the same level as the Memorial. To access the Museum proper, one first takes a long descending escalator ride past one of the massive steel tridents that formed part of the World Trade Center façade. It is the first official ruin one sees, a sign both of mass murder and indestructibility. It also serves, along with the other ruins, to make a point of political pride. The towers collapsed, but total destruction was not and could not be achieved. These are exceptional artifacts. The enemy did not succeed as it might first appear. The Museum begins officially, if you will, at the bottom of the escalator. The contentious gift shop is located on this level; it contains souvenir items—coffee mugs, T-shirts, key chains, hors d’oeuvres plates—which can serve as daily reminders of horror and death.



The Museum’s inexorable descent to bedrock seven storeys below ground level, which somehow renders a sense of return to the surface and life problematic, if not quite doubtful, is reminiscent of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall on the National Mall, except this descent takes place on a much grander scale and entirely indoors. Instead of virtually walking into a tomb from outside, as in Washington, D.C., one is always already in a tomb at the National September 11 Museum. This tomb is filled with thousands and thousands of the still-unidentified remains of the day’s victims. After all, the site is both a cemetery and the official repository of the dead. The tomb is also littered with ruins and debris from the day’s attacks: an antenna from the roof of one of the towers; the motor from one of the elevators; the last steel beam to be removed from the clean-up site; a fire truck badly damaged during rescue efforts; twisted steel remnants from the floors that were struck. These substantial items look tiny in the immense surroundings of the underground tomb, which include the original slurry wall that held back the Hudson River to the west. The visitor is made to feel puny.



Puniness apparently reaches its climax next to the north Memorial pool, the bottom of which can be circumnavigated underground. Here one encounters a small information sign. It reveals that some 1,200 feet above this very spot, “hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center” and “tore a gash in the building more than 150 feet wide.” What is the visitor to do now? How is the visitor to react after reading this matter-of-fact fact? Look up and imagine the day’s terrible events, the towers suddenly collapsing above and down upon him, and winding up beneath 110 floors of compressed rubble? The inclusion on site of a composite of several floors of one of the towers flattened and fused gives one answer. It’s not enough to imagine the death of others; one must also imagine one’s own. Vulnerability, susceptibility, contingency define life here.

 

In the Museum’s Memorial Exhibition, which highlights the identities of those killed in the day’s attacks, the memorialization circle is closed. On a “Wall of Faces,” there is a portrait photograph of each and every victim. This complements the names inscribed in the Memorial directly above. On so-called touch screen tables, visitors can call up the name of any victim and learn more about her. Inside this memorial hall there is an inner chamber with benches lining the walls. The name of everyone killed is sequentially projected onto opposing walls, followed by biographical information, and, where possible, audio-visual reminiscences from family or friends. Visitors sit respectfully in the chamber and watch the alphabetical parade of names relentlessly pass by, as if afraid to leave, which would seem rude given the solemnity of the space. The attacks that are recreated by the Memorial waterfalls produce their offspring here.

 

The Memorial Exhibition aspires to pay tribute to the day’s victims. To challenge this aspiration seems almost offensive by the time you reach the Museum’s nadir, especially if you have seen the room in the Historical Exhibition which catalogues and documents those who jumped from the Towers on September 11. Still photographs capture these horrific scenes, estimated at some 50 to 200, accompanied by recollections of people who witnessed the suicides but could not look away, for that would be to abandon people (though strangers) at the worst moment of their lives. It’s a gut-wrenching alcove, one of several with a box of tissues at the ready, and with a bench just outside it so people can sit and compose themselves afterwards.

What is the point of this death-driven redundancy? Edward Rothstein speculates that the Museum “is the site of their murder. And the attention to individuality presumably highlights the scale of the terrorist crime.” It also serves, as Rothstein notes, to distract. The Museum signifies avoidance, even denial of America’s contradictory role in the world and its contributions to the circumstances that make 9/11 all too conceivable rather than unthinkable. The Museum thus contributes to the impoverishment, through privatization, of public space. Leaving the National September 11 Museum, the single, solitary brick from Osama bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad, Afghanistan, liberated by the American assassination team that eradicated him from the face of the earth, and proudly on display at bedrock, may be the Museum’s representative artifact. There are two possibilities, the brick suggests: challenge the American-led global order of things and you will be reduced to this; or, align yourself with the American-led global order of things, which also reduces you to a brick, a mere pillar of America’s global war on terror.