between flawed identities, but assumes to possess the key to becoming exempt from these flaws. The social space is also the place where language operates by creating signifiers of individuality and by conditioning the interactions between individuals who take hold of signifiers in order to achieve a role in the social fabric.
The Subject (the social subject) = Lacan explains that the social world (thus language) contains individuals in such a way that they cannot identify themselves (recognize themselves as potentially possessing an identity) outside of language and the social space. Even the most authentic individuals still define their authenticity within a framework that offers them the signifiers for their identities.
Territory = I use this term to designate both a physical territory to which identities are attached, and territories that have become abstract but are still territories because identities are attached to them. What this means is that violence and conflict arise in the name of an identity (national, racial, ideological, material, and so on). People defend a territory because they identify with it: they believe that it will help them retrieve the space of wholeness from which they have fallen.
CHAPTER ONE
The Fall from Territory
Human interactions—whether interactions between individuals, or cultural and social groups—have a strong tendency to suffer from an essential problem: identity, or the “I,” matters more than how we live together and how we share the world’s resources. Human beings appear unable to do away with the conflictual nature of relationality, no matter what the grounds of their interaction. Even now, in an age of democratic liberalism assumed as the peak of civilization, the early 21st century has already been witnessing several waves of intolerance and bloodshed that are largely attributable to cultural, religious, political, and economical tensions.
The emphasis on difference and acceptance in the global context has been the mainstream discourse of the West for a long time—until recently, that is. Phrases such as “affirmative action,” “global community,” and “minority support” were quite commonplace at the end of the 20th Century. Though they never went away in the early 21st Century, the September 11 events ushered us into the new millennium and, with them, a reluctance to embrace difference developed, as I will explain bellow; the first black presidency also triggered a counter-reaction of rejecting diversity, which gave momentum to Donald Trump’s followers and led to his election. Also, the destabilization of the Middle East through several wars and the rise of ISIS led to a wave of protectionist nationalism in the West, especially more recently, with the flood of Syrian refugees who fled to Western countries over several years. In spite of all these unfortunate dynamics, the majority of people in Western cultures still wish to do away with the oppressiveness of metaphysical centers and embrace multiculturalism, while continuing to celebrate the fact that ultimate truths have been deconstructed in the age of postmodern thought. This only proves that the movement away from absolutist thought must forge on.
To return to the numerous criticisms of postmodernism, the underlying dissatisfaction with the loss of grounding that deconstruction and postmodernism imply are a symptom of how uncomfortable such a loss can truly make those accustomed to certainties, which explains why many people are “tired” (should we read “scared”?) of political correctness and tolerance. In his notorious critique of postmodern theory, Terry Eagleton complains that discourse stopped being “about something for somebody,” while it makes “language itself one’s cherished object,”1 which he calls language’s ultimate act of narcissism. Fredric Jameson claims in a quite similar fashion that postmodernism’s insistence on language distracts from historicity and throws the contemporary world into an aesthetic mode that emerges “as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity.”2 Again, such critics fail to see the connection between modernist and postmodernist de-centering of power, which has been at work since the end of the 19th century, and the actual changes that have taken place in the world in the last century: successes of women rights movements, of affirmative action in education, and many others, whose momentum cannot really be stopped today by some dramatic (and hasty, desperate, ineffective) executive actions coming from the White House.
Right after the attack on the Twin Towers on September 2001, journalist Edward Rothstein, and many others, hurried to explain the attack as one of the many negative effects of postmodern globalization and decentralization of Western power. Unlike Jameson and Eagleton, who demanded more social involvement on the part of “theory,” Rothstein’s criticism saw in postmodern thought a reflection of the dissolution of power, which allows the cultural “Other” to take a more active role in the world; according to Rothstein, this Other needs to be contained, not coddled. He believes that globalization (the merger between the world’s cultures and economies) should only take place along with a return of foundationalism and the reinstatement of the West as the upholder of “truth.”3 This is precisely the approach of Donald Trump’s White House, running counter to some of the global progress that has already been made, in an attempt to resurrect the past that is most likely doomed to fail (though it can certainly have a big impact on the world).
After September 11th 2001, several wars followed. What they triggered was, expectedly, a war of words as well. Very divergent opinions in relation to terrorism and America’s response to it were, and to this day are being voiced. In 2003, the Iraq war had a lot of supporters (many regretting that support after a few years), and many a flag were displayed in front of people’s houses. Others protested against the wars, particularly the one in Iraq, pretty much going against the discourse established by the media and politicians at the onset of the war. What that hegemonic discourse seemed to suggest was that the violence of the Middle East’s reaction to globalization confirmed the need for a more brutal enforcement of Western hegemony in the world. The justification of such a mentality as Rothstein’s and other journalists’ and commentators’ was, at the time, that the spirit of freedom endorsed by the market had come under attack.
In reinstating the West (particularly the US) as holding the key to effective globalization, globalization was thrown back into historicity by being revealed more overtly as continuous with the Western history of power. One aspect to the larger problem of silencing critiques of the West’s global agenda was the attack on poststructuralist theory. Purging globalization of the decentralized “theory” that interfered with its effectiveness made it easier to justify the wars against Middle Eastern nations. William Spanos, a Vietnam scholar, immediately made the connection between the emerging wars at the dawn of the 21st century and America’s other wars, particularly Vietnam. He suggested that, aside from the economic and political rationale behind all American wars, there is also an ontological principle of “Truth” that informs liberal/capitalist societies.4 That was part of the celebratory discourse that accompanied the new wars: it was the justification for the return of Truth that was celebrated in the wars with Afghanistan and Iraq that began in 2002 and 2003.
A closer look at Rothstein’s commentary sheds light on this renewed call for ontological truth and imperial “clarity” regarding America’s errand in the global wilderness, to use Spanos’ terms. It is a good starting point for an analysis of the stakes involved in identity (particularly American identity) and its tendency to territorialize that which participates in its formation. Globalism can be seen as a stage where America is continuously forging its identity, in competition with other identities.
Within two weeks of the terrorist attacks in 2001, The New York Times published an article by Rothstein, in which he in effect expressed relief that terrorism gave new justification for America to act as an imperialistic world power. He gave voice to what seemed to be in the mind of many Americans, given the haste with which many people embraced the idea of a war with Afghanistan and Iraq, following the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001.5
