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To Transitory Peace Sean Cubitt International Journal of Cultural Studies 2002; 5; 11 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ics.sagepub.com

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ARTICLE

INTERNATIONAL journal of CULTURAL studies Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi Volume 5(1): 11–19 [1367-8779(200203)5:1; 11–19; 022133]

To transitory peace ●

Sean Cubitt University of Waikato

● Cultural studies increasingly looks across boundaries. This article looks at definitions of peace from a cultural studies perspective, suggesting that binary oppositions governing such fields as peace and war, individual and society, tradition and modernity offer few grounds for progress towards peace. The article suggests instead that the utopian principle of hope can be recruited for a culture of peace based on the surrender to difference, at a subjective and dialogic level. ●

ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

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binarism

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communication

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mediation

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peace

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utopianism

The time for action is over. Now is the time for talk. The events of 11 September 2001 – those impossible, spectacular images of the Twin Towers, the courage of the passengers over Pennsylvania, the daring of a raid, however brutal to the civilians aboard the craft, on the heart of US military power in Washington DC. Everyone will have their stories. I was on the road between Belfast and Coleraine in the six counties of Northern Ireland (a circumlocution betraying the conflict there), travelling through Ulster Defence Association territory – Union Jacks aloft over red, white and blue kerbstones, murals of balaclava-masked gunmen. The car radio brought the news. I wanted to see the pictures. And the images, when I saw them, on the hotel’s CNN feed, didn’t disappoint. Against the vast, sun-befuddled sweep of the Derry coast, piled with cumulus against blues of a million tones from sea to hills to sky, the


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I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 5(1)

TV showed the tungsten New York sky, the rage of red and orange flame at impact – ineffable, sublime. Contemporary theory, and particularly contemporary cultural and media studies, has played fast and loose with the concept of the sublime: the beyond of communication, the outside of history. For both ideological players with the greatest stakes in interpreting this uninterpretable clarity, sublimity – revenge without end, ‘infinite justice’, the act of God – has been recruited to the cause of war. The unspeakably vile, the unnameably holy, converge in a single mediation. Abject and sublime reveal themselves as merely a binary opposition, two sides of a single coin, and that coin, in either case, belongs no longer to Caesar but to God. Against that, we should surely range the humanism of rational secularism? But the secular world has shown itself as unwilling to speak to the religious as the religious is to speak with the secular. Rational and irrational, they too stand ranged against each other, incapable of dialogue. Making peace has then the burden of making dialogue. In the age of info-war, that dialogue must be global. It must therefore be mediated, in the sense that it must take part in the capabilities offered by networked communications to extend dialogue way beyond the posturing of diplomatic elites (even though there is no universal suffrage in cyberspace). New media environments allow us to think about hard peace, peace with edge, peace that has to do with the possibility of a global commons, a global public sphere. But despite Habermas’ own attempts to square the circle (Habermas, 2001), Habermasian communicative rationality cannot comprehend the necessity for dialogue between non-Eurocentric discourses. Info-culture demands thinking other than in the rational–irrational binary. Peace, like the information zone, is post-rational. To demand peace is to demand a new mode of thinking, a new mode of becoming, a new mode of communication, community and common sense. The concept of peace proposed in Kant’s To Perpetual Peace is the juridical conception that underpinned the formation of the League of Nations and the United Nations (see Hardt and Negri, 2000: 3–21). This concept depends on a positive content for peace (harmony, concord), which in turn depends on its obverse (war, dissonance, discord). One possible alternative to Kant is the dialectical turn of utopian thought in the mid-20th century towards the concept of the immanent: that which exists, but not-yet. Not-yet existence is determined by its negativity rather than positively (Adorno, 1973; Bloch, 1986). A second possibility is the Temporary Autonomous Zone proposed in 1991 by the anarchist Hakim Bey: the TAZ has as its concept the ephemerality of concord in a specific geographically and temporally distinct field or zone, an island in the storm, like the pirate enclaves of the 18th-century Caribbean, Free Derry or Barcelona under POUM – or the rave party. Bey denies the claim that no one can be free unless all are free, because it debars anyone from experiencing freedom. Without that experience, there can be


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Cubitt ● To transitory peace

no concept of freedom, and without the concept, there can be no means or motivation for pursuing it. Likewise, peace may be experienced in small moments. These moments are valuable not only emotionally but conceptually. Without them universal peace remains unimaginable. Against both conceptions we might raise Nietzsche’s thesis, restored to legitimacy by Foucault in the 1960s (Foucault, 1977) and thematized by Virilio (Virilio and Lottringer, 1997) and Kittler (1997) in the 1990s, that existence itself is perpetual war. The concept of society as war is legible in Marx’s concept of class warfare in ‘pre-historical’ societies (that is, all societies that actually exist and have existed). In a similar antipathetic vein lies the Malthusian thesis of limited resources, still a premise of both right-wing and certain Green politics. Against this we can argue: a) population increase is at its greatest in poor societies; b) the global market depends on mass destruction of wealth; and c) the problem is not poverty but excessive consumption. On the basis of these theses and counter-theses, and especially in the circumstances of the ‘war on terror’, announced by the US and its allies, the following thesis suggests itself: peace is conditional on adequate wealth. It follows that peace is conditional on the eradication of excessive wealth. The enemy of peace is wealth, not poverty. The problem is neither poverty nor wealth but the difference between them, the difference between excess and need, and centrally the difference rather than its terms. If we wish to understand the roots of conflict and the possibilities for peace we must confront the concept of difference. Peace may be defined as the acceptance and celebration of difference. What is the purpose of war? It is to secure victory. What distinguishes victory is that it has a content – the vanquishing of an enemy. Surrender, by contrast, has no content. Peace depends not on victory but on surrender. For example, the antagonists at the Quebec summit of the Market of the Americas can surrender to one another, the rich governments agreeing to open their borders to migration in return for free trade. Then they have every reason to ensure that economic factors do not drive the poor into their wealthy neighbourhoods, a thesis already (if inadequately) functional in the US/UN aid drops into northern Afghanistan during October 2001. If we add this to the definition offered previously we get the statement: Peace is surrender to difference. The radical difference of the other is incomprehensible. It is not simply a binary opposition, it is the principle on which opposition is founded. Despite the loss of religious faith in the overdeveloped world, the cardinal virtues – faith, charity and hope – still seem to authorize a discourse of peace. Not only jihad, but the legitimate governments of the UK and the US lay claim to religious morality as the foundation of a purportedly ethical foreign policy. Yet faith, clearly, is a source of conflict when it assumes to itself universal truth. This is true not only of religious faith but of the juridical philosophy underlying the UN and international law, that the legal and


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the ethical are synonymous, as occurs in human rights discourses and in the military exercise of global policing. Faith – in divine revelation or in human nature – must define itself as universal, or it is not faith. Peace then arises from a culture of doubt, something perhaps akin to the paradoxical birth of enlightenment rationality in the Cartesian project of methodical doubt. War hurts the poor more than the rich. It is the world’s poorest countries that experience least peace. This is because, as Castells shows (1996: 115–36), the global markets exclude certain territories that do not have the infrastructure to join the financial and information markets that lead it. Thus aid becomes the only source of wealth, and control of the state the essential tool in appropriating both for a family, a dynasty or an ethnic group. Civil wars conducted with the aim of securing the drip of aid become, as a result, a permanent way of life. Thus charity can be a source of conflict. More specifically, under existing circumstances, and in a culture in which television is banned or out of reach, aid packages are, and are seen as, media for the dissemination of propaganda. In this instance, by propaganda I intend to raise the spectre of the Catholic Church’s division devoted to ‘propaganda fidei’, the propagation of the faith (see Hartley, 1992: 51–5). The propaganda of aid is a dissemination of a belief system, and it is open to the same rejection as both more (missiles) and less (Voice of America) clumsy attempts at persuasion. Of the cardinal virtues, only hope pertains to utopianism. Utopia may be defined as a future that has no content. If it had a content defined in the present, it would not be different from the present, and therefore would lose the immanence of the Not-Yet. A five-year plan extends the powers of the present to determine the course of the future: utopian hope opens up the possibility of radical difference. Thus the celebration of difference in peace is hopeful but without faith or charity. It has no assurance of the future, only hope for its difference from the present. That difference must be immanent: it must exist in the present as that which does not yet exist, but which is possible. In other words, the future exists as a potential of the present. The existence of peace is then not as a being (‘Peace is . . .’) but virtual (‘Peace might be . . .’). It exists as hope, as that which is wished for but also as a concept without a content, because content would make it exist as a being and so determine the future as a continuation of the conflictual present. Refining the definition: peace is the celebration of difference in the hope of unforeseen change. Peace is then characterized by change, not stasis. Victory is a goaloriented, contentful plan. Peace is unplanned, without content and without goal. It should be clear from this that peace is not the opposite of conflict. On the contrary, peace is conflict, if by conflict we mean difference. Faith and charity, as practised in the global sphere, are goal-oriented activities that seek victory over difference. Peace embraces difference in the spirit of hope. It therefore implies a change in the current juridical visions of world peace


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deriving from Kant’s theses on supranational law in To Perpetual Peace. It implies a disjuncture of law and ethics, with the claim that ethics, as the philosophical and political embrace of difference, is closer to aesthetics than to legislation. Peace has traditionally been attached, as a concept, to the opposition with war, and it is therefore tied to the concept of nation. The British government, for instance, in order to avoid recognizing the claims to nationhood of its opponents, always avoids calling its conflict in the North of Ireland a ‘war’. The new definition of war that is emerging in the last months of 2001 involves making war on a non-national grouping. The legal category of the nation is not, then, the only presupposition of supranational jurisprudence. The category of the person is also presupposed. What is implicit in the statement of peace as difference is awareness that the person is not a fixed category, as proposed in juridical philosophy, but a changing entity with a right not to being but to becoming. Under the circumstances in which we find ourselves at the beginning of the 21st century, becoming is the oppressed nature of humanity (and incidentally of other species, animal and mechanical). War is undertaken, between factions, nations and belief systems, in order to suppress the becoming of the other, which is the expanded form of the word difference. Peace demands the recognition of the right of any entity to become other than itself under conditions governed not by the victor (that is, by a single discourse or institution) but by the entity itself in what might be described as an act of surrender. The contemporary media militate against the autonomous becoming of communication, which is the medium through which, above all, we become. On the other hand, the materials of communication are changing in such a way that it becomes possible to think of mediation – the broadest possible range of material communications obtaining between humans and other species – as the royal road to becoming. The dominant medium of our time is electronic dataflow, and especially the electronic circulation of finance capital. Like weaponry, this medium is very ill-equipped for complex debate among the millions of inhabitants of the planet. Along with the judicial fiction of the private person, it is essential for the peace movement to target the judicial fiction of private property. The socialization of wealth is the most important step in reducing excess. It is the condition for universal participation in the emergence of the future. However, universality has a tendency to become an imposition rather than an aspiration, and besides, following the thesis of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, it is not feasible to wait for universal peace. For peace to be comprehensible, it is essential to establish islands of peace, places and durations in which the model of peace as surrender to difference can be undertaken. Levinas (1969) asks us to commence ethics as first philosophy in the faceto-face meeting with the other. Today we no longer meet face to face, or


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rather, the face-to-face relation is characteristic of the power elite, the political clique and the community of interest. Instead we must confront the otherness of the other in its mediations. Levinas proposes that we move the centre of our discourses from the third person, subject–object (I–it) relation to the second person (I–you) relation of dialogue. This is the same as the shift from representation and simulation theory (how is the world to be depicted?) to communication (how are we to speak to one another?). As a first step towards recognizing alterity, we must begin in a yet more primitive zone, the first person relationship internal to subjectivity: with that which, in us, is not ourselves. For instance, language is not mine: it is the achievement of millions. Yet it permeates me, and is the medium of my selfconsciousness. The culture I embrace embraces me, and as it changes, I change. This is a contemporary reinscription of Marx’s great dictum: people make their own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing. The plural form ‘people’ is vital here: the inward glance does not constitute me as historical agent. What it does is reveal that radical incompleteness which drives the self into sociality, and which is its constitutive environment. Unless and until I confront the non-identical inwardly, I will not confront the non-identical outwardly and be in a position to surrender to it. All of our media – pictures, sounds, gestures – are ourselves yet not ourselves, internally differentiated. If it is correct to argue that the dominant form of mediation in the 21st century is money, then the electronic flows of international finance capital form an integral part of the psychic formation of every subject entwined in it. The odd thing about money, when compared with other modes of communication such as speech, gesture or even books and CDs, is that it can be hoarded. In other words, the dominant medium of the early 21st century is better suited to blocking communication flows than instigating them. Privacy – private space, private family, private property, private thoughts – are social realizations of this trend. The private sphere has become a space for accumulation, for removing communication content from local and global flows. Habermas dates the arrival of the public/private distinction to the period of the Encyclopédie, of the coffee-houses, salons and Tischgesellschaft in the late 18th century. A study of domestic bourgeois architecture would probably give us a detailed trajectory of the materialization of the concept. Giedion, for example, in Mechanisation Takes Command (1948), traces it through the development of the water closet as an essentially private room, still a rarity for most of the world’s population. Privacy gains its ideological power not from just rewards for toil, but from shame. Foucault’s panoptic/disciplinary society (1976, 1977) makes that shame a central element of the social as a machine for controlling communicative and bodily flows. Today relations between people appear to them in the fantastic form of information. The drift from cash to information moves closer to a communicative community, somewhere beyond Habermas’ communicative


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rationality (and its implicit binary with the irrational-mystical ‘symbolic exchange’ of Bataille [1988] and Baudrillard [1993]). Moreover, both money and information are still defined and managed as if they described a relationship in the third person – the subject–object relation of ownership – rather than the second-person relationship between people, the relation of dialogue. To paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, information wants to be free, but is everywhere in chains. Human relations are at the brink of globalizing through networks of diaspora and shared belief. Against them are ranged 20th-century concepts of representation, 19th-century concepts of individualism, 18th-century concepts of nationhood and 17th-century concepts of divinity. As the state crumbles, and with it the legitimacy of the old republican public sphere, so privacy shrinks. As Bauman argues, the public and private collapse into one another (Bauman, 2000: 51). Surrendering privacy – the compulsory hoarding of data in the form of private property and private thoughts – is the basis for the utopian publication of intimacy. Those who, under the guise of militarism or fundamentalism, hoard knowledge under the guise of truth long for a victory that is no longer possible under the new conditions enabled by global publication via the internet. Taliban destruction of technological media is only the obverse of White House attempts to staunch the flow of information (and indeed Hollywood’s attempts to create cosmopolitan entertainment). Tradition comes into existence only as the obverse of modernity. Attempts on the one side to close down and on the other to control the channels of communication are both monopolistic, and in some degree both still theocratic. Refusal of modernity is the same as the attempt to own it: both are merely attempts to own power in an age in which it is technically impossible to do so. The act of surrender to the other which is at the base of any act of interpretation is itself a post-geographical Temporary Autonomous Zone. To establish a transitory peace in surrender to difference is a stake in the future as other than the present. Traditional and modern attempts to control mediation have resulted only in the binarism of Huntington’s infamous ‘clash of civilizations’ (1993), even before the events of 11 September – for example, in Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s refusal to allow Afghani refugees to land on Australian soil. The internet gives us a model as powerful as that of diaspora for understanding the alternative: dialogue and dialectic. To paraphrase Rick in Casablanca, there are parts of South Central LA I wouldn’t advise the Taliban to invade. Not unless they are prepared to listen.

References Adorno, Theodor (1973) Negative Dialectics (trans. E.B. Ashton). London: Routledge.


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Bataille, Georges (1988) The Accursed Share, Volume 1, Consumption (trans. Robert Hurley). New York: Zone Books. Baudrillard, Jean (1993) Symbolic Exchange and Death (trans. Ian Hamilton Grant). London: Sage. Bauman, Zygmunt (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bey, Hakim (1991) T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchism, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia. Bloch, Ernst (1986) The Principle of Hope, 3 vols (trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castells, Manuel (1996) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume 1, The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Foucault, Michel (1976) Histoire de la sexualité, 1: La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard/NRF. Foucault, Michel (1977) Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison (trans. Alan Sheridan). London: Penguin. [Originally published in 1975 as Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison. Paris: Gallimard.] Giedion, Siegfried (1948) Mechanisation Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York: Norton. Habermas, Jürgen (2001) ‘The Conflict of Beliefs: Karl Jaspers on the Clash of Cultures’, in The Liberating Power of Symbols: Philosophical Essays (trans. Peter Dews), pp. 30–45. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hartley, John (1992) ‘Regimes of Truth and the Politics of Reading: A blivit’, in John Hartley, Tele-ology: Studies in Television. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 45–63. Huntington, Samuel P. (1993) ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs 72(3): 22–49. Kant, Imanuel (1983) To Perpetual Peace and other Essays on Politics, History and Morals (trans. Ted Humphrey). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Kittler, Friedrich A. (1997) Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays (edited by and introduction by John Johnston). Amsterdam: G+B Arts International. Levinas, Emmanuel (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (trans. Alphonso Lingis). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1972) Manifesto of the Communist Party (trans. Samuel Moore). Peking: Foreign Language Press. Virilio, Paul and Sylvre Lottringer (1997 [1983]) Pure War (revised edition translated by Mark Polizotti, postscript translated by Brian O’Keefe). New York: Semiotext(e).


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● SEAN CUBITT is professor and chair of the Screen and Media Studies Department at The University of Waikato, New Zealand. He was previously professor of media arts at Liverpool John Moores University, England. His books include Timeshift: On Video Culture (Routledge, 1991), Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture (Macmillan, 1993), Digital Aesthetics (Sage Publications, 1998) and Simulation and Social Theory (Sage Publications, 2001). He is currently working on a book on special effects cinema for MIT Press. Address: Screen and Media Studies, The University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand. ● [email: [email protected]]


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