September 08, 2002 The Watson Institute thanks Professor James Der Derian and the Providence Journal Bulletin for permission to reprint this article here.
At Ground Zero, across the country, and on just about every television channel, the anniversary of 911 will be marked by ceremonies of remembrance, religious services, and 24/7 programming. This is as it should be, to honor the dead, to tend to the wounded in spirit, and to recognize the need for understanding. But between our desire and our capacity to comprehend a world after 911, a vast gulf seems to have opened, and the rituals of anniversary show little sign of addressing, let alone closing it.
To bridge this abyss, between an unspeakable act and unthinkable consequences, between past terror and the present insecurities, it will take more than the reading of borrowed speeches from the past or one more looped-viewing of terrorist attack and military counter-attack. It will take more than incarcerating suspected terrorists without hearings, or preemptive military attacks for rooting out future threats. It will take more than the flurry of planned 911 TV specials. Just as 911 revolutionized the art of war, the art of comprehension must be radically transformed.
We must turn to art itself, not for art's sake, but for the sake of better understanding the unthinkable perils before and the not yet imagined possibilities after 911. Obviously art is not invulnerable to moral judgment or political opportunism; and it can certainly be reduced to entertainment faster than one can say "lLet's Roll!" But at its best it can open doors of perception, interpretation, and representation that political and moral correctness have closed shut. More important, art functions better than politics in the sensory region between our desire and our capacity to comprehend the unthinkable. Indeed, as Walter Benjamin, an astute observer of terror in interwar Europe once suggested, art can create the demand for a need we have not yet fully comprehended, a need that can only technically be achieved in a later period.
In the post-911 world, this means looking more closely and critically at how the art of war has become inseparable from the art of technology: of how terrorists used email, cell phones, flight simulators, and the internet to amass the knowledge and to coordinate the machinery that killed 3000 people and caused billions of dollars worth of damage. Of how the US military used global surveillance, networked communication, smart weapons, robotic aircraft, and rapid deployment of special forces to conduct a virtuous war (i.e., low-casualty, long-distance, good visuals). Of how the internet itself became a battlefield, between users trying to collect and disseminate differing accounts of 911, and government officials, who used 911 to apply new laws and methods for controlling information and increasing surveillance.
Art asks questions that our political leaders and media pundits seem unwilling or unable to imagine, such as how the revolution in new information technologies might be used to construct a global security that is not predicated on intrusive surveillance, preemptive attacks, or the general insecurity of others. A critical aesthetic perspective challenges the parsimonious ratio of one story per event, as opposed to the mimetic (a.k.a., 'realist') approach that purports to reflect yet works to reproduce violence in global politics the intellectual approach that dominates official thinking. Art gives us a better appreciation of how our observation of the picture makes the event real, rather than how the event makes the picture real. When accompanied by a critical imagination and a generosity of spirit, art provides not only a better picture of the possible, but also the inspiration to get there.
Beginning this Sunday, September 8, [2002] the global arts
of war have a local site: Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. Thanks to the generous support of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Watson Institute
is sponsoring a multimedia exhibition and forum on
the aesthetics, rhetorics, and politics of security and
terror in the information age. Organized by
the Institute's Information Technology, War, and Peace Project, "911+1: The Perplexities of Security"
(http://www.WatsonInstitute.org/infopeace/911+1/) is transforming this new academic building into a living cultural laboratory that will draw together the work of artists, humanists, policymakers, and social scientists in a critical dialogue about security in a drastically altered international environment. Through activities ranging from a great variety of media installations to transatlantic videoteleconferences, and from public lectures and panels to a student short-film competition, "911+1" intends to provide a stimulating forum for much-needed reflection and debate.
The event's centerpiece is a wide-ranging exhibition featuring works by more than 20 international artists in numerous media including satellite imaging, surveillance video, photography, robotic telemetry, data-veillance, and on-line hacktivism. It aims to widen the circle of public discourse and to explore how old and new media both help to constitute and interrogate the cultures of fear and safety, and global terrorism and national security. Curated by Thomas Y. Levin of Princeton University, the exhibition will be the first at the Watson Institute's new location near the center of the Brown University campus.
This is more than an advertisement. This is an invitation to something that will be hard to find elsewhere on 911: an event that is not only open and free to the public but also to interpretation.
James Der Derian teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Brown University, where he directs the Watson Institute's Information Technology, War and Peace Project (http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace), and is author of Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.
This oped first appeared on September 8, 2002, in the Providence Journal Bulletin under the title "The Art of the Art of War after 9/11."