Dec 01 2009
The Second as Farce
So I was watching this guy give a speech today, about like Afghanistan and stuff? Yeah.
Is anyone else just tired of caring about all this? Yes, I know, I have the luxury to be tired of caring, but really. Here’s what I know about Afghanistan: not much. And, quite frankly, meh. It seems to be some face saving way to throw a punch before you get the hell out of there. I’m just tired of it, not in a “Hell no!” way of being sick and tired, but more in a “Do whatever, dude” way of being just fucking exhausted. I did say to she that the only way Obama comes out of this looking good is if – say – sometime in June 2010, he gets to announce that Osama bin Laden has been captured. Of course, that’s fairly minor stuff, in the big scheme of things, but this is all symbolic economy now.
Oh yeah. One other thing I know about Afghanistan: it’s not Vietnam. The usual suspects on the left are coming out of the woodwork with the usual historical analogies. Something else I’m tired of, but I’ve been tired of that for a long time. Their nonsense is always dressed up in some quasi-smart clothing, quoting Santayana about forgetting history and the like. It’s tedious. And usually wrong. The flip side to Santayana is that those who never forget their history are doomed to never see historical difference. The dress-up left, carrying on like a sophomore who half read Thucydides. It’s embarrassing. I was always partial to Marx on this point: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. The details are unimportant; what he’s saying is that historical knowledge has to be paired with an capacity for perceiving singularity. It’s a lesson that the Nostalgists of the Gulf of Tonkin would do well to remember.
But really. I’m tired.
Well said.
I did catch the tail end of an NPR interview today with the guy who wrote Three Cups of Tea in which he claimed that the US military didn’t get Afganistan before but does know what to do now. So maybe it’s not just face saving after all. Or maybe not.
I’m not tired of caring about it (because life goes on, and so does death, violence, oppression, and resistance), but yes, I am tired of being asked to care about it the way the American government and the multinational media conglomerates want me to care about it… and I guess that’s what you really meant anyway. The argument the TV networks seem to want to make is that “Obama hasn’t saved us all from ourselves yet, so this proves he’s not as great as everyone thought he’d be. See, see, the Democrats are not Jesus afterall, so let’s vote back in the Republicans.”
And I take your statement that you don’t know too much about Afghanistan to be making a point about how the big media companies really almost go out of their way to keep us uninformed about what they’re supposed to be informing us about. After eight years of this war, you’d think we’d all know something, but we don’t. Sometimes I suspect that it’s precisely because I don’t read the newspaper that I am more informed about what’s really going on in the world than my friends who do read it. (And TV networks, geez, forget about it.) A quick glance through wikipedia’s entry on Afghanistan is probably more informative than all of the New York Times articles about it put together. And I’m fine with that. I hear people whining about the sad state of newspapers today, but I’m like, “hey, newspapers were never all that good, who cares? Fuck ‘em. Let’s invest in wikipedia.”
But actually, I don’t know squat. As K’Naan raps it, every man who knows a thing knows that he knows not a damn damn thing at all.
But I agree with you 100% about the historical comparisons. All aging hippies comparing this to Vietnam are too lazy to learn the singularity of Afghanistan’s history. Meanwhile, considering the title of your blog post, have you had a chance to take a gander at Zizek’s new book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce that came out of few months ago? Most of it just says stuff that you have already said a bunch of times on this blog about the housing market and stock market — and I think your analysis is better than his — but some of the book may interest you, including its point about now being the time (kairos) to pop a cap in capitalism’s ass.
I find myself feeling the same as you: Do whatever, dude.
It almost brings to mind the words this guy I know once used (in a totally different context): “Far be it from me to interrupt a man as he whistles past the graveyard.”
Chuck: Glad to see you back, and not totally alienated by my rampant rub-it-inism.
Steve has provided – as always – a very generous reading of my post that manages to portray me as something other than completely apathetic about the whole thing, so I’ll thank him for that by not disputing it.
There was an interesting article in the NY Times Week in Review this past Sunday titled “The War in Pashtunistan,” the thesis being that the problem area is not really a nation state issue, since the Pashtuns straddle the Afghan-Pakistani border. Now, years ago when I was much more the theory wonk, I would say “Ta-da, see! The nation state is an anachronism. QED.” Of course, I’d be arrogantly wrong, since we all know the nation state is not going anywhere, but the “Pashtunistan” designation certainly points up the problems that its semi-waning causes both conceptually and in practice. In the case of Pashtunistan, it’s even more pronounced, since you have two conditions that demonstrate the insufficiency of state thinking. In the first place, you have al Qaeda, which is – like Heideggerian dread – everywhere and nowhere; we all know (because we never cease being told) that it is a “network” (indeed, a “shadowy network”) not confined to a state, and that it has become even more dispersed and virtual since the initial invasion of the safe haven. But we also know that it’s there in Pashtunistan, the “epicenter of violent extremism,” and etc. Placed and unplaced, both physically located and distributed, like me right now as I write this on to the database. Second, you have the Pashtuns themselves, who, according to the article, do not recognize the border (arbitrarily drawn, the Times kindly informs us, by a British diplomat in 1893) and never will. On the other side, what was telling was Obama’s insistence on portraying the escalation in global terms, justifying it based on international authority and support – NATO, the UN, the whole world was with us, we’re told; it’s not even a nation state action, really.
Hardt and Negri begin “Commonwealth” with a simple thesis: remember all that shit we said in 2000 and you thought we were wrong because of the Bush administration? Well, it turns out we were right after all, and the Bush administration was a failed coup d’etat on Empire, an attempt to reassert unilateral authority of a single nation state on the emerging structure of Empire. QED. One could offer the shift back to the War in Pashtunistan (and, incidentally, the full text of Obama’s speech) as Exhibit #1 in this argument, and be no worse for wear. It seems to stand up. More on this later. The interesting thing here, for me, is the parallelism. Where Maffesoli speaks of the “time of the tribes” (a return to something that was always already there, if deemphasized), he’s generally referring to the emergence of tribalesque relationships in contemporary urban (and virtual) space. But al Qaeda as the virtual threat and Pashtunistan as the physical tribal location are of a piece both with each other and with the “new tribalism” of the urban bourgeoisie (it’s not a mistake that the Italian Autonomist movement had its “Metropolitan Indians”). The Bushies, in any case, would seem a small and rather ineffective speed bump in that general tendency.