by Mark Greif
The old philosophies of aesthetics were based on the experience of a single drama, going back to Aristotle’s pity and fear in the witnessing of just one tragedy. Tragedies were presented in small clusters on a special festival day at a rare time of the year. We do not now encounter dramas on designated days of the year. The old aesthetics increasingly slip away when it is not one, or a few, doctors’ dramas we watch once a year, but five thousand episodes of a hundred dramas over the course of a lifetime, amid ten thousand other renderings of dramas of equally strong experience; not one representation of a beheading but the same one run a hundred times, followed by a thousand other atrocities themselves rerun. The scale of drama can become a training in how not to relate the strong emotions of representations back to your own experience, not so that they unnerve or paralyze you, while you still learn to fashion your own experiences in the narrative manner and style of dramatic representations.
Then, too, with the change of scale, more of our strictly personal experiences are likely to be experienced simultaneously with outer dramas, whether “fiction” or “news.” The screens continue to proliferate. Televisions play silently with closed captions in the restaurants where I go to dinner. (I remember they used to be only in bars.) They play with sound in the waiting rooms for visitors to the hospital; they play in the waiting rooms for emergency patients. One played in the garage where I had a flat tire repaired, where I saw the drama of a Florida man shot by air marshals. A wide-screen played by the men’s changing rooms at Macy’s. Flat-screens are on the machines at the gym and on the elevators in office buildings. Airport terminals are full of televised news, and it follows you to the screens on the backs of the seats on planes. Screens are promised on the subway, where the public rationale will be that they will only show news (to justify the remaining minutes of paid advertising)—the drama of the necessary news, which so mendaciously justifies all other drama. A few offices may have TVs on the work floor, where they are redundant, since the drama comes through on the work space itself, the screen of the computer. When I read my e-mail on Yahoo, it is accompanied by headlines of distant events, fifty-six killed, a hundred killed; video clips from movies; ads for the dating sites that will find me a new mate and reconstruct my own life as drama.
Happiness has wound up in an ideology of the need for experiences. Very well. This is our “health” and our quest. But is this happiness-by-experience itself then regulated and moderated by the constant chatter of strong represented experiences, whose effect is not, finally, to stimulate strong experience in their viewers, but to make up some hybrid of temporary relaxation and persistent desire? Does the total aesthetic environment, that is, become anaesthetic as well as aesthetic? We know its advertisements channel desire toward particular products—and don’t much mind. That’s just advertising. Its dramas also create and channel desire. Suppose those dramas were capable of a paradoxical, anaesthetic attenuation or deferral of all this desire, to the point where desire could be mobilized ceaselessly without pain to the viewer and without personality destruction. This would forestall the conversion to anti-experience—never causing the full and radical crisis that might occur to an unhabituated and unanaesthetized individual, facing all of these dramas and horrors and strong renderings and commercial demands and new needs as single instances, for the first and only time.
I want to think this is partly right; then the system, and its perilousness, make sense. The trouble then would be that for some people the drama-induced anaesthetic might wear off. Their form of experiential illness would represent a breakthrough, in other words, of aesthetic events to their original, singular effects—so that they disturb the person who is supposed to be protected, soothed, and regulated, as if he were now encountering each instance singly, at full strength.
If individuals in our society are afflicted suddenly with the inability to take represented experiences in a ceaseless flow, but instead undergo each and every event as if it were happening to them—as if fiction were real, and the real (the news networks’ medical horrors, beheadings, thousands of deaths) doubly real, because publicly attested to and simultaneously experienced as somehow one’s own—then no wonder they withdraw. If they feel every outside representation, from however far away it comes, as if it belonged to the context of their private lives and individual drama, then no wonder they tremble. And they may in part have been asked to feel things that way—by a system of representations that doesn’t truly believe, or wish, that anyone will.
(“If one had to be taught by fictions,” said Epictetus, “I, for my part, should wish for such a fiction as would enable me to live henceforth in peace of mind and free from perturbation. What you on your part wish for is for you yourselves to consider.”)
I see: Severed heads. The Extra Value Meal. Kohl-gray eyelids. A holiday sale at Kohl’s. Red seeping between the fingers of the gloved hand that presses the wound. “Can you save him, Doctor?” The room of the renovated house, done in red. The kids are grateful for their playroom. The bad guy falls down, shot. The detectives get shot. The new Lexus is available for lease. On CNN, with a downed helicopter in the background, a peaceful field of reeds waves in the foreground. One after another the reeds are bent, broken, by boot treads advancing with the camera. The cameraman, as savior, locates the surviving American airman. He shoots him dead. It was a terrorist video. They run it again. Scenes from ads: sales, roads, ordinary calm shopping, daily life. Tarpaulined bodies in the street. The blue of the sky advertises the new car’s color. Whatever you could suffer will have been recorded in the suffering of someone else. Red Lobster holds a shrimp festival. Clorox gets out blood. Advil stops pain fast. Some of us are going to need something stronger.
—
I don’t know why anyone cracks, and the reasons, each time, will be different, deep, and personal. The aesthetic presentations, which seem to be everywhere, as dramas, playing out the strongest experiences—which others can receive in a manner relaxed or blasé—become intolerable. If there was indeed something formerly anaesthetic about this ceaseless flow of strong sensations, then it has just worn off, worn off for oneself alone as it often seems, and it is terrifying. The baffled sufferer can’t understand what has happened to him.
So he tries to recover the anaesthetic. He may try first the double-dealing strategies, those that add experience in some modalities and preserve you from it in others: alcohol, sex, or another kind of plunge. There are the horrible depressions, ambiguous and painful. There is medicine. There are organized practices and systems, from Buddhism through the many traditions of the East, from Epicureanism and Stoicism back to the origins of the West. Each stands ready to be retrofitted for today. There is organized religion. There is staying in your house and never coming out.
There is also the dream of an alternate aesthetic, of a world in which aestheticized experience worked only on things that were ordinary, local, small, repetitive, and recalcitrant, on things that really did happen to most of us in the everyday. This would imply a challenge to drama as we know it. Would it be too much to ask for books in which there is no conflict and no disaster but mere daily occurrences, strung together by the calm being who notices them; television shows on which people sit around silently noticing one another, watch sunsets, type, chat, cook meals without teaching the viewer how, and go about their business in the dull but reassuring knowledge that nothing is going to be very different than the day before? Could there be repetition in a state of grace? Could there be “aesthetic” representation, for those for whom the worldly anaesthetic had worn off, while the systematic ideologies seemed too inhuman and restrictive? Could people live a life in the garden, in our world with its many technologies?
What would remain would not be drama, or “experience,” but life. Perhaps there is a way back to life, in people’s tentative steps in the interstices of this world, if they cannot live on its grid. Circling life from the cluttered outside, one asks its meaning again and again. How to get back to it: by aest
heticizing everything, as before, to explode the questing aesthetic? By anaesthetic efforts, as imagined in this essay, to cut down experiences to neutral occurrences incapable of being made over as drama? Meaning starts to seem a perverse thing to ask for, when what we are really asking is what life is when it is not already made over in forms of quest or deferral. Could this life be reached—unmediated? Would there be anything there when we found it?
[2006]
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* Aestheticism and perfectionism work by putting experience under the control of the active individual, teaching him to make rare experience always and from anything. Aestheticism teaches its practitioners to find rarity or beauty in any object or event; perfectionism finds moral reflections upon the observer in the same sources. They turn even banal or ugly things into objects of singular aesthetic interest or into moral examples that would encourage the constant transformation and appreciation of the self, thus exploding the quest for experience by putting it always at hand.
VII
MOGADISHU, BAGHDAD, TROY, OR HEROES WITHOUT WAR
Early this year, on March 31, 2004, two SUVs carrying American contractors for Blackwater Security Consulting drove into an ambush in Fallujah. Four were shot dead. All were ex-military men, at least two from the US special forces. Insurgents had staged the ambush. A local crowd mutilated the bodies. Cheering and chanting “Fallujah is the graveyard of Americans”—some holding up computer-printed signs that said the same thing—the locals did the opposite of burying them. They burnt the bodies with gasoline. They beat and tore them. One body was tied with a yellow rope and dragged behind a car down a main street. Another was hauled by the legs by a group of teenagers. Two bodies were tied and hung from a green iron bridge that spans the Euphrates River
Deaths by ambush occur every day now in Iraq. The Saddam Hussein regime lost a three-week war to the overwhelming force of the United States, in which our military conquered a nation of twenty-four million people, slightly larger in land mass than California, and left behind a partly relieved, partly dismayed population, who have since given birth to a variety of resistance factions.
The mutilations were unusual, though. The violation of dead bodies is against Islamic law. The dead are to be buried as soon as possible. Other American dead whose bodies were lost during the war were buried by locals.
The incident led to a massive and bloody US Marine offensive in Fallujah in the month of April, which we tried to understand from what we could read in our newspapers and the fragmentary footage on the television. We were told that clerics had ruled that the mutilations were an offense against Islam, and yet a Marine officer reported that a videotape of the mutilations was still selling well in many Fallujah shops.
History works by analogies. Eleven years earlier, a similar set of mutilations occurred in Mogadishu, Somalia. After a firefight with Somali militias, the bodies of three US soldiers—again, from the special forces—were captured by a local crowd. These American corpses were tied by hands or feet; one was splayed over a wheelbarrow. They were mutilated by dragging, in the dusty city streets.
The Mogadishu populace, too, adhered to Islam, and the mutilations were not sanctioned by religion. Saudi Arabian troops, stationed in Mogadishu, witnessed what local crowds were doing to the captured American bodies, and were appalled. “If he is dead, why are you doing this?” they shouted.
A last analogy. Three millennia earlier, the origins of our Western way of war unfolded in the battles between Greek and Trojan warriors on the plains of Troy. Homer recorded and embellished their story in the Iliad. A feature of their way of fighting was the mutilation of the bodies of heroes. Achilles defeated Hector, killing him. And we know, from book 22, what he did next, defiling the body by dragging its head in the dust: “Piercing the tendons, ankle to heel behind both feet, / he knotted straps of rawhide through them both, / lashed them to his chariot…And a thick cloud of dust rose up from the man [he] dragged.”
Whenever one compares modern war to ancient war, there is the danger that a simple continuity will be argued for, between all forms of war, across history. Warfare is not continuous, however; methods change. American commentators have already invoked the Mogadishu mutilations multiple times—in the days and months following the spectacle in Fallujah—and this analogy, in their hands, has been obscurantist. Their implication was that we were witnessing a continuity of savagery, rather than civilization; an effort to throw Americans off their mission in Iraq, rather than a reflection on the character of the American military mission itself; a manifestation of terror, irrationality, or “mob mentality,” rather than the orderly policies of war, which should be available to reason.
The purpose of the comparison should have been to ask why a repetition occurred—why a scene of the mutilation of the most visible and valuable American fighters, these special forces and elite security contractors, must be restaged compulsively each time the United States fights its contemporary ground wars. What do we know of the meaning of past warfare in which such spectacles were paramount? The answers reside in the logic of the fighting itself. I do not mean to excuse the mutilators, or say that they have become Homeric. It is American fighters who have become Homeric—a small set of our frontline fighters, who have attained a kind of value and visibility unlike that of any enemy they face, or anyone else in the recent history of modern war. Mutilation is an invisible population’s response to such power—making themselves visible the only way they know how, by entering the system of American bodies and American lives that our country counts so dear.
—
Theories of postmodern war, and recent military histories and popular battlefield narratives, make equal and opposite errors about the nature of contemporary US combat.
War theorists only care about the new. To them, everything we see is wholly unprecedented and revolutionary. Before September 11, 2001, and the three years of continuous war that have followed it, a decade or more of thought on postmodern war declared that we were coming into the presence of a new formation in the history of the world. The human body would disappear from the scene of war, and it would become a kind of video game for those people who would do the new “postmodern” killing. Paul Virilio predicted the disintegration of the personality of the warrior. Jean Baudrillard spoke of wars that didn’t take place. Michael Ignatieff analyzed “virtual war.” Edward Luttwak argued for “post-heroic war.” Even in the Pentagon—most importantly there—the generals dreamt of a revolution in military affairs, and network-centric warfare, information warfare, and a possibility of killing without risking US life, to make the loop between sensing and killing an opponent increasingly autonomous and automatic. It has partly come true.
Popular military historians promote the misconception that wars are all the same, in all times, and that contemporary US fighters, despite their technology, are actually continuous with ancient warriors. “As with Xenophon’s hoplites, the engine driving the campaign was not mechanical. Instead, it was a spirit, an unbroken code—” they write, and so on. These commentators remember the past, but they paper over the strangeness of today.
In the battles the United States has fought on the ground in the last decade, we’ve seen something different from what both the dissipation theorists and the warrior traditionalists describe. In Mogadishu; at Mazar-i-Sharif or Tora Bora; in Nasiriyah, Najaf, Baghdad, and now Fallujah, we’ve seen what had been hidden since Vietnam—the way the US military currently trains and arms its best soldiers to fight on the ground, especially in urban or unconventional surroundings. Human bodies still do the face-to-face work of killing for the United States, just as in so many spheres of the postindustrial economy small populations are still needed to do the skilled or filthy work that machines cannot reach. The military becomes reliant on a small number of frontline fighters, heavily equipped with technology, who are rewarded with a special kind of status.
And unfamiliar trappings do surround them. US soldiers wear body armor of great techn
ical ingenuity, flexible, miraculous. They fight with powerful, almost preternatural weapons, in episodes of virtuosic slaughter, until they withdraw to safety. Eyes circle overhead to guide them, superiors to whom they can appeal in times of trouble. Medicine makes more wounds repairable, so long as they are not instantly fatal. And when a military action takes a wrong turn, jeopardizing overwhelming US supremacy, or when any soldier is killed, the military may pause or even stop the operation, as if the primary goal of warfare were to preserve US lives rather than win at any cost.
The oddity of this mode of fighting isn’t quite that it marks a new formation in the history of the world, or comes unknown to us. It’s that we thought we would never see it again. We are witnessing a temporary reconvergence with an ancient bit of history, caused by technology and the superior value the United States can now afford to put on the lives of its citizens and soldiers. In contemporary US warfare, the hero returns, in the manner of the Iliad, and “hero” has here a purely technical definition. He is the lone fighter, who takes the stage amidst a sea of mere mortal beings—one of only a few other heroes who are comparable to him in abilities and significance. The hero may kill or be killed, but he is always absolutely visible and valuable; owner of a social status, among the princes, aristoi, and in the front lines, promachoi, one among the select fighters who are by their method of life hērōes.
If we can see the relation of today’s fighter to his Homeric predecessor, it will give us a window onto what is so strange in contemporary US fighting—and from that base, the new conditions will unfold that have made our situation so confusing in the “War on Terror,” the war in Afghanistan, and the war and occupation in Iraq. Only once the terms are set is it possible to understand that if postmodern conditions re-create the hero, of a sort we haven’t seen in several thousand years, the same features may prohibit what our civilization has sometimes understood as the condition of war.
