In today's Observer, there's a long excerpt from Andrew Anthony's new book, The Fall-Out: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence. As it happens, I'm reading the book at the moment; I received a copy on Friday, thought I'd take a look at the first chapter, and was well and truly hooked by it.
Though the Observer excerpt contains material from that first chapter, it doesn't include the author's dissection of a passage by Fredric Jameson reacting to 9/11. I somehow managed to miss this 'dialectical' gem at the time (you can read it here), but it is characteristic of some left reaction to 9/11, albeit with its own special and repugnant quality. This is from pages 14-15 of The Fall-Out:
'I have been reluctant to comment on the recent "events",' Jameson opened in characteristically lofty fashion, 'because the event in question, as history, is incomplete and one can even say that it has not yet fully happened.' Well, I remember thinking, it's certainly happened for the many thousands who were dead. The 'event' was unlikely to get any more complete for them. 'Obviously,' he continued, 'there are immediate comments one can make, in particular on the nauseating media reception, whose cheap pathos seemed unconsciously dictated by a White House intent on smothering the situation in sentiment in order to demonstrate the undemonstrable: namely, that "Americans are united as never before since Pearl Harbor."'Jameson prides himself on his critique of postmodernism but could there be a more nauseating illustration of the warped priorities of postmodern thinking? All things considered, it wasn't the mass murder that was cause for distress but instead its media coverage. After the customary impeachment of American foreign policy, Jameson concluded with a breathtaking example of what, to use his own language, might be termed 'dialectical reversal'.
'As for the future, no one (presumably including our own Government) has any idea what the promised and threatened "war on terrorism" might look like. But until we know that, we can have no satisfactory picture of the "events" we imagine to have taken place on a single day in September. Despite this uncertainty, however, it is permitted to feel that the future holds nothing good for either side.'
In two metaphysical swoops, Jameson had upended the twin towers of sequential truth: cause and effect. We cannot describe what has taken place, he seemed to say, until we see what the response is to it. Yes, you may think - or 'imagine' - your daughter was flown into a skyscraper but that's just an interpretation of 'events' that cannot be verified - or presumably dismissed - until we have seen the reaction it may provoke at some unknown point in the future. We can't acknowledge a crime, as it were, until its punishment has been delivered. Hold on a moment, I recall thinking as I reread the passage to make sure I hadn't missed something, what is this self-hatred doing to our powers of reason? Into what moral quicksand had intellectual obfuscation led us? And how sinister was that 'permitted'?