Abstract
The book by Michael Blain offers an empirical and critical investigation of the American War on Terror. In terms of methodology, the study focuses on American political discourses combining quantitative content analysis with detailed qualitative interpretations. Its critical edge is reflected in the use of theoretical concepts like ‘biopower’ (Foucault), ‘victimage ritual’ (Burke), ‘power elite’ (Mills) and ‘empire’ (Hardt and Negri). According to the author, the American power elite can be characterized by its imperial agenda, even though the United States remains an empire in denial: George W Bush as well as Barrack Obama promoted policies of empire, while publicly denouncing any imperial ambition.
The first chapter provides an outline of the theoretical framework as well as an overview of key concepts and the contents of the following chapters. The author argues for a cultural approach to the American War on Terror, proposing a model of symbolic interaction that emphasizes the ‘cultural background’ of communication and discourse (pp. 6–8) – probably inspired by the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, with whom Blain collaborated earlier (for an analysis of the War on Terror employing an alternative concept of ‘background’ by John Searle, see Binder, 2013). Drawing on Foucault, Blain argues that modern liberalism, with its values of freedom and security, is a crucial background of the American empire and its War on Terror. ‘Terror’ enters the liberal discourse in mainly two ways: in ‘victimage rituals’, the terrorist framed as ‘villainous scapegoat’; while in research rituals, he is constructed as ‘subject/object of knowledge’ (p. 14). The former seems to be connected to a more traditional conception of sovereignty, whereas the latter is rather typical for the modern phenomenon of ‘biopower’. Nevertheless, Blain argues that both practices have to be understood as an exercise of ‘biopower’, because they are legitimized by liberal concerns for life as the subject/object of protection and surveillance.
The second chapter offers a genealogy of terrorism, linking the phenomenon to the rise of liberalism and the emerging American empire. The author describes how the meanings of terrorism changed from the French ‘revolutionary terror’ to contemporary ‘terrorism’ as emblematic threat to life and liberty. A quantitative analysis of presidential addresses and press editorials shows that during the expansion of the empire the frequency of ‘terrorism’ as well as its correlation with two key liberal terms, ‘security’ and ‘freedom’, significantly increased. According to Blain, the rhetoric and vocabulary of ‘terrorism’ served to justify military actions in the imperial interest of the power elite.
In the third chapter, the author introduces his analytical toolkit through examples from the Third Reich, the Vietnam War and a detailed interpretation of Bush’s presidential address of 20 September 2001. He employs Burke’s concept of ‘dramatism’ and ‘victimage ritual’ to show how the ‘other’ is rhetorically and discursively constructed. Victimage rituals have the double function of differentiating allies and enemies abroad as well as patriots and traitors at home. Foucault’s ‘biopolitics’ is used to account for the perverse ‘logologic’ (Burke) that allows liberal regimes to sacrifice individual lives and rights in the name of life and liberty. Finally, the author describes a problematic cycle of violence captured by the formula ‘Empire → Resistance → Victimage Ritual’ (p. 66): imperial ambitions cause resistance (‘terrorism’), which leads to victimage rituals (‘counter-terrorism’), which are used to expand the imperial agenda.
The fourth and largest chapter is the core of Blain’s analysis of the War on Terror. It starts with the historical background, the imperial exploits of the United States since 1945, which – in his view –triggered resistance and thus caused the War on Terror. Then he turns to 9/11 and its aftermath, first discussing the victimage rituals against domestic ‘traitors’, public figures from both sides of the political spectrum that dared to question the hegemonic discourse. He continues with an analysis of State of the Union speeches from 2001 through 2011 showing that the frequency of the words ‘terrorism’, ‘freedom’ and ‘security’ increased dramatically after 9/11 as well as the correlations between these words. These correlations are not only significant, but have also a specific meaning: the correlation between the ‘liberal’ terms and ‘terrorism’ is interpreted as an indicator of the ‘victimage ritual’. As villains and vocabularies change, the ‘victimage ritual’ remains fairly constant with peaks during the Iraqi insurgency and the elections in 2004 and 2006. The quantitative analysis is accompanied by qualitative interpretations that shed a light on the contextual meaning of these words. In his discussion of the different stages in the War on Terror, Blain shows how shifts in correlations can be explained by different uses of these words.
The fifth and final chapter, ‘Dangers of security’, deals with the political control of the American population (biopolitics and biopower) and ‘terrorism’ as the subject of scientific research (power/knowledge). The author argues that techniques developed in the imperial missions abroad were imported for the surveillance and control of Americans. One has to admit that the recent disclosures of the American Internet surveillance programme fit very well into this picture. The involvement of social scientists in population surveillance programmes like the Human Terrain System, the role of psychologists in the development of torture techniques and the general increase in funded research programmes and scientific literature on ‘terrorism’ are interpreted as elements of a power–knowledge complex. Yet it seems to me that this is not enough to substantiate the power/knowledge hypothesis with its strong claim that science and other forms of knowledge are constitutive of the War on Terror.
Not only is the topic of the book political, but the author himself as well. He writes from an American liberal perspective that is hard on the current democratic government. In my opinion, the political engagement of the author becomes at times problematic, particularly when it distracts from the sociological insights of his study. It should also be noted that the author employs one of the rhetoric strategies he investigates (and criticizes): the vilification of the enemy by association. His quotes of Nazi propagandists not only serve to illustrate the rhetoric strategy used by the American government in the War on Terror (‘the Nazi paradigm’, pp. 49–52), but also have the rhetorical (others may prefer ‘critical’) function of putting both regimes on a par. I don’t think that this invalidates the point of Blain’s comparison. Rather it seems to me that the ‘victimage ritual’ is part of a broader discursive phenomenon. It is part of a cultural code that is not only used by ‘evil’ politicians, but also their critics.
Probably most problematic is Blain’s ‘cycle of violence’ thesis with its origins in the political discourse of the American left. It is crucial that the ‘cycle’ starts with the American imperial aggression. This allows for the construction of an asymmetry between the active agency of the power elite and a mere reactive agency of insurgents and terrorists that is hardly justifiable on sociological grounds. In my view, the ‘cycle of violence’ is a gross oversimplification that prevents us from investigating the causes and meanings of terrorism. There are good reasons to doubt that the US military presence in the Middle East was really the ‘reason’ for Osama bin Laden’s war on America. More likely, the professional Jihadist had to look for other enemies after the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan. Why should the empire have a monopoly on the rhetoric of victimage rituals? From a Foucauldian perspective we should also take into account that terrorism might be an attractive strategy of subjectivation – particularly if we think of religious fundamentalism as a quest for authenticity (Hartman, 2002: 233). If this is the case, not only the liberal dream of breaking the cycle of violence, but also the conservative agenda to destroy the roots of terrorism will be necessarily doomed to fail.
Leaving politics aside, one could criticize the limited theoretical scope of the study. With its Durkheimian understanding of binaries, the contemporary cultural sociological analysis of public discourses (e.g. Alexander and Smith, 1993; Smith, 2005) might have provided a more fitting theoretical framework than Foucault’s discourse analysis; likewise, Girard’s (2005) prominent theory of the scapegoat could have provided a deeper understanding of victimage rituals than Burke’s dramatism. Despite such limitations, the analytical toolkit employed by the author works surprisingly well and is in itself an original contribution to the study of political discourses. After all, Blain’s book offers a theoretically grounded and empirically compelling analysis of the War on Terror. In particular, his combination of quantitative evidence and qualitative interpretation is something one would like to see more often. I would hesitate to recommend the book to someone diametrically opposed to the political convictions of the author, but I would recommend it to anyone else interested in the topic.