"Magic of the State?"

Michael Taussig

George Bush comes to NYC today. Will he wear a mask?

I see people clapping the police, the firemen, and the construction workers along the West Side Highway down at Christopher Street and outside St. Vincent's Hospital. They have American flags and crudely lettered cardboard signs saying "We Love You," and "The Bravest." There is a feeling of carnival in the air and the cars honk back. Foucault is famous for his idea of bio-power, that the modern state is dedicated not to punishment or violence but to life, that it practices a sort of manipulative altruism. Don't think of the hangman. Think of the fireman. An older wisdom than Foucault's has long maintained that war is the health of the state. A professor of history on NPR says he is encouraged that this will put an end to criticism of the police in NYC. Dawn of a new era.Down below 14th Street the smell can be acrid and your eyes may itch but the grocers have their flowers for sale and people sit in bars and restaurants and seem relaxed and happy while people stick "missing" foto-portraits to the walls and the WTC smolders. Anti-monument indeed. "Pancaked," they say. Today's NYT has a letter urging a memorial monument — the empty space where stood the WTC. The President urges us to pray. He is absorbing the enormous power of the dead whose spirits are otherwise uncontainable. He says this is the first war of the 21st century. Fighting terrorism will be the focus of his administration. "We will lead the world to victory," he says. The world!

The flag is everywhere but nobody seems to have much of a handle on how to ritualize the event. Grieving is massively complicated by the hate and sinking fear that reactionary political agendas are in the ascendant. It is staggering to hear sane people talking of killing innocent people in massive amounts in the Middle East as revenge — "to stop terrorism."

A strange sense of "imagined community" is being forged before our eyes and inside our psyches. What do you do if you don't feel part of it or are repulsed by it? Susan Stanberg talks on NPR of "the weapon of patriotism," in "disrepute the past decades," now bursting forth, and you can hear the choking in her voice. She loves "these simple things' such as a flag and a song. The things "we" learnt in grade school. What really is this "community," you must be asking yourself as a budding anthropologist. Durkheim's social fact, his collective representation, "society" as God. Birth of a nation. Birth of a discipline.

On 100th St and Riverside there is in the early evening a wailing coming from inside of the earth. Or so it seems. It is a young woman chanting while playing a small organ, rocking back and forth as she chants. It is marvelous. I should have started class the same way on Wednesday. What was I thinking? In front of her by a monument are a few picked flowers and carefully written signs. One consists of two stanzas of Dante's Inferno: Canto 23 from The Inferno, and Canto 23 from Paradise. Another lists America's war dead; I remember Gettysburg, Korea, and Vietnam on the rather short list.

Over at Columbia a large brown strip of paper has been laid down in front of Low Library for people to write on. It is full of statements about God and America. There seems not the slightest awareness of how perilous the world has become at this moment, of how a floundering and incompetent President could plunge us into a crazy war that could never be "won" and would curtail civil liberty in the US as well as propel the US further along the policies of hate, division into rich and poor, racism, and destruction of the environment.

However, down at Washington they are not scribbling sentimental banalities on strips of brown paper. They are converting those scribbles into another emotional currency. "The American people made a judgment— we are at war," Secretary Colin Powell said Thursday, and this was the theme picked up later that day by President Bush. What sort of war would that be? We already have one War, the War Against Drugs, which eroded civil liberties in a devastating fashion as well as boosting the street price of cocaine and heroin. The Defense Department is confident it will get more than ample funds. Their budget allocation is safe and will receive substantial additional funding; around midnight I hear that up to 50,000 reservists are being called up, something LBJ hesitated to do for Vietnam. A Vietnam Vet calls in to NPR talk radio and says he feels a whole lot more certain about this war than Vietnam. What sort of war would that be? How does a state fight terrorism — fight a handful of people in some sense sustained by world-wide resentment towards the US? "An eye for an eye," says an NPR "senior correspondent" who advocates nuclear attack. While Bush and aides talk of ending states that harbor terrorists.

But what is war? A war means armed conflict between states or, as we have come to know full well during the 20th century, guerrilla and counter-guerrilla warfare, and more recently as in Latin America, "low-intensity warfare." Deleuze and Guattari make an equation between terrorism and nomadism, terrorism and the war machine. Fair enough. They say the war machine is external to the state apparatus. Fair enough. Then they complicate this by saying the war machine, in its "externality," is part of the state, like a foreign body or a heterogenous component, reminding me of the poet Gary Snyder many years ago equating the CIA with "primitive" hunters and gatherers. Terrorist attacks do not simply strengthen the stately power of the state, meaning authoritarianism. Terrorist attacks also augment the nomadic war machine character of the state, and that is the nature of the new type of "war" to which we can look forward.

Nietzsche saw this as a core feature of the state where he says "Prisons make men hard and cold. The mere sight of judicial procedures prevents the criminal from feeling bad about his act because he sees the same kind of action practiced in the service of justice and given approval, practiced with good conscience: like spying, duping, bribing, setting traps, the whole wily skills of the policeman and prosecutor, as well as the most thorough robbery, violence, slander, imprisonment, torture and murder, carried out without even having emotion as an excuse."1

What is crucial — and difficult to express — in Nietzsche and Deleuze is what I call "the Nervous System" or play on order and disorder; in a word, using your nomadic war machine to create some sanity, invent an ability to grieve that makes sense, and be politically sensitive at the same time — in the face of a state apparatus whose own war machine has been so vastly strengthened by terrorism. Anthropology is implicitly as much a creative enterprise as it is a clinical study of, for example, "the magic of the state." The urge to create an "anti-monument" is testimony to that.

George Bush comes to NYC today. Will he wear a mask?

[Michael Taussig is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University.]

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, translated by Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1994, p.59