The use of the term ‘terrorism’ itself exacerbates these aspects through highlighting the fear and the terror which all acts of violence create. ‘Terrorism’ and ‘terror’ carry with them such overwhelming moral revulsion that complex questions of causation, which must eventually be addressed, are neatly averted. The description of these events, for example, as ‘terrorist acts against all freedom-loving people everywhere in the world’ is an effective closure. There is no way in to negotiate this statement, it allows us no possibility of analysis, no means of understanding what is a far more complex reality. From this stems the continuing declamation of those who seek some recognition of causative factors, by crudely equating this with condoning the attacks.

The language of ‘terrorism’ which has become so commonplace recently, is essentially unsatisfying for all of these reasons. ‘A cliché in search of a meaning’ in Christopher Hitchens’ view, a debasement of language, destructive of understanding. There is no doubt that the key term ‘terrorism’ is vague, impossible to define and imbued with unstated assumptions of morality and of legitimacy. In some respects the use of the terminology tells us more about the speaking position of those using it than it does about the events being described by it. It is somehow surreal to watch the various news bulletins with backdrops saying ‘WAR AGAINST TERROR’ or ‘WAR ON TERROR’ — it is just not a possible construction because, on any reading, war is terror. But the linguistic and political imprecision surrounding the very notion of ‘the war on terror’ contains within it the seeds for its unending expansion internationally — like a hydra, of the many heads of which the alleged culprit Osama Bin Laden is but one. In this way, the language of ‘terrorism’ functions closer to pathology than to politics, as in the description of the perpetrators of these recent attacks as having ‘an evil hatred of modernity’. Once again, the crucial question of causation has been answered in the description itself; it lies in the realm of the psychopathic, not the material. Yet these difficult questions are precisely what must be asked and are precisely what we must feel able to ask. Without them we cannot devise an appropriate response.

It is not uncommon in our history for a crisis in security to slide into an authoritarianism in which the space for acceptable political discourse and action becomes delimited, perhaps even proscribed. This can arise from several quarters, most overtly from institutional changes to security powers which I want to discuss shortly, but also from more generalised attempts to create an internal cohesion (as is currently occurring in America) through the denial of popular legitimacy to expressions of dissent from it. We have seen in recent weeks for instance, the dismissal of journalists in America who were critical of their president’s actions, examples of racial violence, religious violence and incitement and the reduction of ‘Islam’ to ‘terrorism’ — and this despite the self-description of the campaign as ‘a fight for freedom’.

I have been astonished at the ease with which established political and legal protections, central to any notion of the rule of law, have over the last few weeks been thrown out the window like dust, thereby undermining the very structures we are seeking to protect. Not least are the once sacrosanct notions of trial by jury, innocent until proven guilty and equality before the law, which have all, in one swoop, been dispensed with in the conduct of this ‘war on terror’. This bizarre dichotomy has left many wondering exactly what it is we are trying to protect. In such a climate, demands for increased security measures, even those which cut across established legal and political protections, may be accepted, even welcomed. It was with unseemly haste therefore, that the Attorney-General Daryl Williams announced, within weeks of the attacks, proposals for a major restructuring and expansion of ASIO’s powers.

When the Labor Prime Minister Ben Chifley established ASIO in 1949, he did so with great reluctance and under political duress in an intense Cold War atmosphere. Chifley intended that ASIO would confine its activities within the narrow bounds of defence-related activities rather than the pervasive security surveillance of domestic political activities. As John Burton, Chifley’s Departmental Head, described it:

Every step was taken to ensure against the development of a situation in which there would be throughout the community ‘spies, pimps and informers’.

To this end Chifley appointed a judge, Justice Reed from the South Australian Supreme Court, as the first Director-General of ASIO. This concern to make the protection of civil and political liberties paramount in ASIO’s operations lasted barely a year when, with the election of Robert Menzies as Prime Minister, Reed was replaced by the former head of military intelligence Brigadier Charles Spry. This marked the beginning of ASIO’s widespread approach to political surveillance which lasted until a series of revelations of its excesses in the mid-1970s led to tighter controls.

Over the Cold War dominated decades which followed, ASIO’s surveillance activities strayed into areas which would now appear faintly ludicrous were their protection not so central to the maintenance of a healthy and diverse political sphere. We now know that ASIO meticulously retained files on church meetings for peace, on the New Housewives Association, the Fellowship of Australian Writers, anti-war campaigners and on countless Labor Party politicians including Don Dunstan, Jim Cairns and Lionel Murphy. ASIO’s records reveal a marked politicisation in its understanding of the key term of the time — ‘subversion’. Of greater significance and damage to those unwittingly placed under surveillance were ASIO links with key sections of the media which provided a means of publishing highly damaging and frequently spurious intelligence gossip about key political figures. This was revealed through Justice Hope’s Royal Commission in 1977, and was the one aspect of ASIO’s activities which Hope criticised roundly.

Nevertheless, ASIO did maintain a formal distinction between its surveillance activities and the law enforcement focus of state police forces. To do otherwise — to allow those who collect intelligence to also be those who initiate prosecutions — would be to criminalise those on whom such intelligence is maintained (in secret, without review, with no knowledge of its source, its veracity nor its purpose). The Howard Government’s proposals establish a new orthodoxy in ASIO’s activities. For the first time in its history, ASIO will be able to move directly into law enforcement. According to an AAP news report, ASIO’s agents will be able to detain and question ‘terrorist suspects’ for forty-eight hours without charge. Even more alarming is the Attorney-General’s proposal that ASIO agents will be able ‘to question people not themselves suspected of terrorist activity‘ about their knowledge, not of terrorist activity, but of ‘politically motivated violence’. Already these extreme measures, argued for on the basis of the extreme case of terrorism, have broadened into the far-reaching notion of ‘politically motivated violence’. Failure to answer questions will result in five years imprisonment. The new powers proposed by the Attorney-General include specified offences of terrorism subject to life imprisonment. Again, these offences are broadly defined, including ‘threats of violent attacks intended to advance a political cause … which endanger Commonwealth interests’. Clearly, anti-globalisation, anti-waterfront reform — indeed almost all protests — readily fall within this catch-all terminology.

The imprecision over the language of ‘terrorism’ and its application, leads to concerns that counter-terrorist security measures will be broadly targetted in ways that are neither appropriate nor efficient, ways that may impinge upon legitimate political agitation and dissent. Historically, such concerns are not misplaced. It is in some ways fitting that we are gathered here at the Arena Centre almost exactly fifty years since the final defeat of Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ several attempts to pass the Communist Party Dissolution Act (1950) which would have outlawed political organisations by executive decree, at a time of presumed international and national crisis against the then scourge of communism. I commend to you the recently released collection, edited by Paul Strangio and Peter Love, Arguing the Cold War, which reassesses this time and this extraordinary Bill, and the referendum which followed its invalidation by the High Court of Australia, which has somehow slipped through the critical gaze of history.

It is instructive to look back at this time, which reveals much of what remains an ongoing security concern to limit acceptable political behaviour, to limit democratic practice. Specifically, the Communist Party Dissolution Act allowed for an executive finding of guilt not found since the days of the Star Chamber, reversed the onus of proof and removed even trial by jury in these matters. As Labor Leader Ben Chifley argued in Parliament:

[The Bill] strikes at the very heart of justice. It opens the door for the liar, the perjurer and the pimp to make charges and damn men’s reputations and to do so in secret without having either to substantiate or prove any charges they might make.

In all of these aspects the Communist Party Dissolution Act did away with established protections before the law, the ‘great principles of justice’ as the former High Court Justice Lionel Murphy called them, which had been developed over generations, not as obstacles to conviction but as a means of achieving justice. Such fundamental denials of freedom of political association and natural justice were unprecedented anywhere in the Western world during peace-time with the exception, as Justice Michael Kirby has pointed out, of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the provisions of whose Suppression of Communism Act (1950) it drew upon freely.

Following the passage of the Act by Parliament, ten unions challenged its constitutionality before the High Court led by the Deputy Leader of the Labor Party, Dr H.V. Evatt. Evatt, the first elected President of the United Nations General Assembly, a ‘libertarian warrior’ in Justice Michael Kirby’s description, believed passionately that this Act was not only unconstitutional but profoundly anti-democratic. In a 6:1 decision, Chief Justice Latham dissenting, the High Court ruled in Evatt’s favour. It was a judgement which continues to protect all of us from the arbitrary abuse of executive power. Professor George Williams has described it as ‘truly an “epochal” decision, probably the most important ever rendered by the Court’ which confirmed that the High Court was ‘not prepared to see its judicial functions usurped by Parliament’. The separation of powers, the established legal protections of trial by jury, the presumption of innocence, and of course judicial review itself, are surely all there precisely because they protect citizens and our civil liberties from arbitrary executive power. The civil liberties concerns were clear in the Justices’ questions during the course of the case: Justice Williams asked:

Does this mean that Parliament could say that the existence of John Smith, an ordinary citizen, is a menace to the security of Australia and require that he be shot at dawn?

Justice Kitto, also during argument:

You cannot have punishment that is preventive. You can’t remove his tongue to stop him speaking against you. That is wide open to a totalitarian state.

Following his failure at the High Court, Menzies then turned to the only avenue remaining to him — a referendum to amend the Constitution itself. As the opinion polls showed a gradual shift away from an initial 73 per cent support for the proposal, Evatt maintained an equal determination to defeat it. That Evatt succeeded, by the smallest of percentages, has been described by Justice Michael Kirby as ‘Evatt’s greatest contribution to liberty in his own country’, demanding as it undoubtedly did, ‘the sacrifice of personal ambition to the defence of basic constitutional rights’. For Evatt’s final victory with the defeat of the referendum also ensure his and the Australian Labor Party’s electoral defeat for years to come. Yet Evatt anticipated and was willing to accept this outcome in the name of what he saw as a more insistent need:

I regard the result as more important than half a dozen general elections. The consequences of a mistaken vote in an election verdict can be retrieved. But an error of judgement in this constitutional alteration would tend to destroy the whole democratic fabric of justice and liberty.

Today we face a different type of threat to civil liberties, less momentous, thanks to Evatt’s insistence on the unconstitutionality of the powers to proscribe organisations, but nonetheless significant. Nor do we have amongst our current political leaders a unique intellect such as Evatt’s, not only able but also willing to sacrifice personal ambition for political and legal principle. Yet, in my view, the gradual, subtle shift towards a universalised surveillance is critical. An indication of the breadth which ASIO gives to its interpretation of its ‘special powers’ can be gauged from the ‘Church of Scientology’ case in 1983. The Church sued the Director-General of ASIO, arguing that the organisation had continued to characterise the Church as a security risk, as subversive; that it and its members were subject to surveillance and intelligence collection even after ASIO had determined that it was not in fact a security risk, thereby constituting an improper use of ASIO’s powers. The judgement is breathtaking. A majority of the justices found that ASIO was not bound to cease to obtain intelligence about an individual even if it had been established that the individual was not a security risk — accepting the argument put by ASIO’s counsel that an individual’s future activities may render presently innocuous behaviour ‘relevant to security’. In the words of the Australian Law Journal, ‘on this analysis no one in Australia would be exempt from surveillance by ASIO’.

Justice Lionel Murphy, of course, dissented. In his minority judgement, Murphy noted:

Characteristically, from time to time they [security organisations] exceed, and misuse, their powers. The expectation that they will do so, creates a climate of apprehension and an inhibition of lawful political activity even at the highest levels of government.

Surveillance on this scale allows ultimately for the pre-emptive control of political conflict and dissent, which may or may not protect individual citizens but which certainly protects the state itself. Justice Dixon noted precisely this tendency of the state to protect itself through an executive superseding of democratic institutional power, in his powerful judgement in the Communist Party Dissolution case:

History, and not only ancient history, shows that in countries where democratic institutions have been unconstitutionally superseded, it has been done not seldom by those holding the executive power. Forms of government may need protection from dangers likely to arise from within the institutions to be protected … [T]he power to legislate for the protection of an existing form of government ought not to be based on a conception … adequate only to assist those holding power to resist or suppress obstruction or opposition or attempts to displace them or the form of government they defend.

The Italian theorist Luigi Bonanate has suggested that ‘a society acquainted with terrorism is a blocked one’; that ‘terrorism unmasks a democracy which is only formal’. If we are able to consider that terrorism stems from a failure of democratic practice, from an absence of a political space beyond a narrow margin of permissible action, then perhaps what is needed is not yet more constraints on effective political participation but a more inclusive politics, not less democracy but more. The current climate of crisis and uncertainty does not inspire such political reflection, nor encourage such outcomes. Our challenge now is to hold steadfastly to our civic traditions, to the rule of law, to equality before the law; and to defend the rights of suspects even in the face of such assaults. Above all, we need to encourage a healthy dynamism and a welcome diversity in Australian politics.

Jenny Hocking is Head of the National Key Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University.

Aeneas was praying and holding on the altar
When the prophetess started to speak: ‘Blood relations of Gods,
Trojan, son of Anchises, the way down to Avernus is easy.
Day and night black Pluto’s door stands open.
But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air,
This is the real task and the real undertaking.’

‘The Golden Bough’, from Virgil’s Aeneid,
trans. Seamus Heaney, in Opened Ground: Poems 1966-96

Demons of yesteryear

As Brendan O’Leary has pointed out in an earlier contribution to OpenDemocracy (18 September), one of the key features of 11 September is that no-one claimed responsibility for the atrocities. They were an ontological statement, rather than propaganda of the deed for a particular nation, or an oppressed class. The world was meant to stand revealed by them: ‘reality’ perceived as God’s ultimate struggle against Satan, exemplified by the martyr-hijackers. In such a cosmic fantasmagoria, a new world war is nothing. The bigger the Satan, the harder will he eventually fall. The perpetrators must have calculated they could hardly fail, in a society already so strongly inclined towards belief in UFOs, moral absolutes and the Christian version of ‘fundamentalism’.

Yet fail they will, for perfectly mundane (and of course profane) reasons having little to do with the atavistic theology of either side. O’Leary is surely right to call for normality: ‘Be normal … think about being normal as a way of standing up for yourself and your values’. Keep your head, in other words. The object of the criminals was socio-cultural decapitation. They will not be allowed to get away with it.

But one should also observe how the silence O’Leary underlines is connected to another absentee from the excitable massed choruses of post-11 September: nationalism, as an attribute of the motivation of the terrorist enemy. In my view the two silences are intimately related. In fact it is possible to argue that one explains the other. The atrocities in New York and Washingtom can also be seen as standing for a new strain of nationalism — an ‘ethno-cosmic’ liberation movement, as it were, so grandiloquent in its goal as to require no apology or explanation. No ‘responsibility’ need be claimed for the Creator’s will: it has simply to be made manifest. However, over-reach also implies futility: blood relations ‘of Gods’ do not exist, and no actual nation is either divine or ‘chosen’.

Less than a decade ago, most ills of humanity and of the coming century were being laid at the door of a more conventional ‘nationalism’. Bosnias were seen coming everywhere, unless Reason (in the Atlantic-Trademark sense) prevailed. Rationality was then thought to be taking up a new logo — ‘globalisation’ — while selfish ethnicity was perceived as getting in its way. For years, no op-ed page was complete without this daily dose of spectral anarchy and pandemonium.

Now the tune has abruptly altered. I suspect most people would be quite happy to have the demons of yesteryear back, rather than these Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There was plenty of real anarchy and pandemonium in the 1990s, as the post-Cold war thaw got under way. It would be shameful to excuse or exonerate any of the ensuing disasters. However, a decade later, it should be acknowledged that many of these disasters have either been resolved, or are on the way towards an answer. The fact is (for example) that at the end of an awful ten years, Milosevic is in gaol in The Hague, while Mladic and Karadzic are on the run in the hills of Serb Bosnia; democratic peace of a sort seems to be holding in Northern Ireland; East Timor is independent; democratic South Africa may be on the way to becoming the continent’s first great success story; Iran is evolving steadily away from the theocracy of the 1980s — and so on.

Exit to the underworld

Actual democratic nationalism leads to actual solutions, in other words, even if these are clumsy, painful and approximate. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ was a particularly noxious side-effect of that kind. Terroristic actions were often involved, and the cumulative ‘body-count’ far exceeded that of 11 September. But none of it meant ‘the end of the world’. An abyss separates it from 11 September, which was intended to signal just that. Humanity was being called through ‘Black Pluto’s door’ into an antique Underworld of theocratic absolutes and paranoid finality. The saintly criminals were seeking to provoke a ‘War against Terrorism’, which would inevitably employ counter-terrorism as one of its tactics, thus setting up an indefinite spiral of outrages. God’s will can then emerge from the ruins. It would be a pity to oblige them.

As Virgil’s prophetess said, strip-cartoon apocalypse is the easy bit: for that, her dark door does indeed stand ever open. The information technology linked to globalisation makes it more visible, and even more ‘inviting’ (at least in the sense of imaginable). It encourages an inebriation of the collective soul, much in evidence right after the events. The harder part is finding one’s way back into the ‘upper air’ of normality, where the majority can reassert their non-apocalyptic visions of the future.

Yet I doubt if this will prove so difficult. It is simply not the case that any mysterious ‘Clash of Civilisations’ is at work behind this crisis, rooted in immemorially divergent values or world-views. I suspect that something more like the exact opposite may be true. These hooligans of the Absolute were compelled to act because they (or those behind them) know that there is, in the ‘globalising’ world, a steadily advancing majority against fundamentalist or spirit-world politics. Unless they strike now, it will soon be too late. The genesis of 11 September lay in mounting despair, rather than conviction of real political or social victory.

The crux of their dilemma lies in the Middle East. This is the zone in which secular nationalism has worked least well, for a particular combination of social and longer-range historical reasons. The inverse of that failure has been that a pre-modern religious Weltanschauung got promoted into the breach: Islam, linked in collective recollection to a distant era of Arab conquest and supremacy, became the stand-in for both democracy and a positive form of civic nationalism. The fall-back upon this ersatz concoction has been a misfortune for the Muslim faith as well as the rest of us, the infidels. It promised earthly Heaven to the former and humiliating defeat for the latter. Neither delusion has the slightest chance of realisation. But they have already generated vast mayhem on their way to failure.

In his moving account of The Arab Predicament (1992) Fouad Ajami concludes bitterly that:

It is easy to judge but hard to understand the ghosts with which people and societies battle, the wounds and memories that drive them to do what they do … The renaissance of civilizations is used as a weapon because so many in the Muslim world and the Third World as a whole feel they live in a world constructed and maintained by others.

Nation-states have been the main instrument of the real battle, and in the last quarter of the twentieth century democratic nationalism has become its commanding credo. These are the effective means by which people and societies are coming to live in a world ‘constructed and maintained’ by themselves. Civic globalisation stands for the achievement and consolidation of that movement, not for its dissolution.

By far the best overview of its impact upon the Middle East is the one given by Roger Owen in State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Middle East (2000). Owen’s study originally came out in 1992, but his second edition contains a new closing section on ‘The Remaking of the Middle Eastern Environment after the Gulf War’. This makes it startlingly clear why the Wahhabites and al-Qa’eda had to undertake some highly visible counter-action: they are on the retreat everywhere — even in the Afghan redoubt and the Saudi-Arabian citadel. He observes:

In a global economy with a well-educated middle class and virtually open access to information from abroad, it does not seem likely that (the region’s) stick and carrot approach to political management can be maintained indefinitely. Sooner or later, issues which have always been implicit in both religious and secular discourse will be made increasingly explicit. These include notions of citizenship, the rule of law, religious toleration and a regime legitimacy that comes not from appeals to security, ideology or achievement but from popular representation and a consensus among the nation at large.

All this is death and anathema to God-struck super-nationalists like Osama bin Laden. However, the influence of such ideas might be stayed, or even turned, if a suitably aggressive Western crusade could be provoked — a palpably Satanic onslaught which might drive the emergent middle class back into the fundamentalist fold. I agree with Fred Halliday’s account of US imperialism: compared to its European predecessors, muddled (and sometimes well-meaning) hesitancy has been its keynote, rather than the Captain America portrayed in so many left-wing diatribes (Observer, 16 September, ‘No Man is an Island’). This must have worried the Islamicists too. Their foe was falling down on the job, and needed some stiffening. Would a few thousand deaths in the heartland do the trick?

In short, the murderous onslaught of 11 September was aimed most significantly at the people of the Middle East themselves. The American and other victims in New York and Washington were made sacrificial lambs for a reconquest of Muslim opinion. From Nigeria to Indonesia, the latter accounts for something like a third of the world. Particularly in the United Kingdom, people are familiar with the concept of ‘democratic deficit’. But there is also such a thing as ‘nationalism-deficit’ — and this same part of the world has suffered from a devastating combination of both. Mundane if mistaken calculation suggested to the perpetrators that big numbers could compensate for these structural failings. Properly led, might they not still ‘bring down’ Godless capitalism, via prolonged and brutal struggle? After all, Muslim insurgency had witnessed Godless communism collapsing in the 1980s (and played a minor part in its fall).

It beats me why anyone should expect anything better from a character like Osama bin Laden. He may look like old images of Jesus Christ, but is the seventeenth son of a crooked construction tycoon. No-one who has encountered him saw a hawk of the desert — rather, a soft-handed fixer and couch ideologist. His slaughter funds flowed from an odious version of Arabian state-fostered capitalism, not from Heaven’s will. Presumably the unfortunates who committed suicide on 11 September believed in the Heavenly vision; whether their backers and organisers did, only time will show — and I presume this would be best shown in a court-room, before the steady gaze of humanity at large. Dubious acts of vengeance in remote corners of Asia will not achieve it. What we do know is that the ‘counter-crusaders’ want to restore or impose conservative theocracy, male-authoritarian hierarchy, the supposed warrior-virtues of antiquity, and sharia law.

Retracing the steps

The great, liberating thaw of modernity will never be turned back by such acts of despair. Another interesting contribution to OpenDemocracy’s debate described the affirmation of American nationalism which has followed 11 September. John Down drove from San Francisco to Los Angeles, reflecting as he travelled on the ‘civic religion’ of a stricken country, and its response to ‘violation by an unseen evil’. I am ashamed to see how bargain-basement anti-Americanism has surfaced in some analyses; but what accounts like Down’s reveal is surely a kind of grandeur — a solidity and humanity of outraged reaction, made up of new vulnerability, determination, and a sense of everyday sacredness. He does end up fearful of the immense power behind such displays, in case it ‘leads the US further down the path of retribution that may well sow the seeds of a future terrorism’.

But since he wrote, these fears have not materialised, though of course they still could. A powerful response was in order after 11 September. It is needed here as it was after the Srebrenica massacre, or after Pinochet’s murderous coup in Chile a quarter of a century ago. However, very many voices have insisted, in the United States itself as well as amongst its allies, that justice is the only true response. After all, it has come (or is coming) in these other two cases. To strike back at once is a natural impulse. But it is surely more important that justice should be inexorable, final, and public. No preposterous ‘War against Terrorism’ could achieve anything like this. It will do little but cast all the proverbial black cats into one indiscriminate bag in a darkened room, and (as Down dreads) provoke further atrocities.

What the extra-American world must fear is not rhetoric of US nationalism but the debility of the American civil state. The constitution linked to their ‘civic religion’ is a crumbling anachronism, as last year’s Presidential election demonstrated. Some sense of proportion must be retained here, I agree: Old Glory is less of an archaism than the United Kingdom, for instance, or the nostalgic debris of Saudi fundamentalism. Still, both George W. Bush’s position and his Texan machismo depend upon it, and might in the event of further disasters attempt to prop themselves up by mobilising appeals to the holy-smoke Christian conservatism which it also embodies.

This is another reason why defence of the positive side of ‘globalisation’ should not be an American prerogative. In an early contribution to the Open Democracy forum David Held called for a new international body dealing with terrorist outrages, ‘modelled on the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals’ and under UN control (14 September). The idea has been amplified by a further essay with Mary Kaldor, ‘New War, New Justice’ (27 September). They argue that this new body should be ‘an International Court (where) the terrorists must be treated as criminals and not military adversaries’.

In one sense, few would dissent while thinking of this example of ‘terrorism’. But we already have International Tribunals like The Hague, which could surely be adapted to the case at issue. The trouble is that any sweeping new formula takes us straight back to the black cats in the dark room. For instance, would the US Air Force’s mistaken strike at a Sudanese medical laboratory have qualified for a Court appearance? Should the Real IRA bombers of Omagh go there, rather than to courts in Dublin or Belfast? What about the Palestinian human bombs who preceded the 11 September atrocities? And the Israeli counter-terror meted out in retaliation? Tempting as the concept of a single new institutional riposte undoubtedly is, it may be over-influenced by the climate of the moment — the feeling that ‘September 11th is a defining moment for humankind’, as Held originally wrote.

But it was not. A miserable old world near the end of its tether was hitting back, using new technology to amplify a brazenly antediluvian message. The new world — currently paraphrased as Held and Kaldor’s ‘globalisation’ — should not think in terms of short-cuts and overpowering ripostes. Time is on its side, recession or not. That is, the combined forces of development, democracy and secular nationhood are on its side — much more evidently than over the decades of Cold War which concluded in the 1980s.

For example, as far as the mundane configuration behind these bombings are concerned, every news reader and TV viewer over the entire globe has known for decades what the ‘real problem’ is: Palestine. The general malaise of the Middle East, and by extension of other Muslim-majority polities, has been consistently focussed on and envenomed by the incurable abcess of the Israeli–PLO conflict. The Arab failures Fouad Ajami mourns, and the ‘general tone of bitterness and despair’ described by Owen, have in practice constantly returned to and fed off this particularly disgraceful stalemate. There have been of course plenty of other big regional problems as well: the Iran–Iraq war, Kuwait, Kurdistan, the Sudanese civil war, and now the downfall of the Afghan state. But none with the staying power and sheer ideological resonance of the Palestinian war.

It represents an impasse of nationalisms, to which the sole solution will be the formation of a viable, secular and democratic Palestinian state. American power has both imposed and fuelled the conflict, and yet has shrunk from imposing the solution (out of the motives Fred Halliday describes). Yet such an advance was overwhelmingly in its own long-term interest, as well as that of Palestinian Arabs and everyone else (except the Holy Warriors). Had it been achieved sooner, it is doubtful whether the September assaults would ever have happened. Nobody wants a new world order regulated by a US gendarme, but there are other ways of achieving peace. What is at issue here is a poisonous remnant of the old world order, festering on into the more liberal age of globalisation. An acceptable nation-state remains the only way forward.

The current issue of New Left Review (No. 10, July–August) is devoted mainly to Palestine, and Perry Anderson’s ‘Scurrying Towards Bethlehem’ is still another overview and set of proposals for Palestinian nationhood. Writing not long before the September attacks, Anderson concluded that ‘The dismal political history of the Arab world over the last half century gives little reason for thinking (a solution) is likely in the short-run’. He saw small chance then of the Bush Presidency shifting its stance, or of ‘the larger submission of the Middle East’ ceasing to prolong the West Bank paralysis. But since 11 September, something of a new start has been forced. Colin Powell’s State Department has found it intolerable to preside over another round of the interminable feud, while simultaneously struggling to concert its new anti-terrorist strategy. Is there no hope at all of this in turn leading to a more permanent answer?

The general point here is that a meaningful response to Holy Terror lies upon this plane: real undertakings in the upper air of a nation-state world, which is still striving for traditional goals upon the more fluid and ‘liberating’ terrain of the global market-place. As for the latter, the solid will go on melting into air, and bear the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour away with it. Its single unconscionable freedom — Free Trade, however naked and shameless — will continue to nestle, settle and establish connections everywhere, creating still more massive and colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together, and despite itself enforcing the social and political constitutions required by the new empire of civil society. But the true ‘sorcerer of modernity’ conjures up the power of future worlds, not the nether worlds of antique faith and superstition.

Tom Nairn is Professor of Nationalism and Cultural Diversity at RMIT. His most recent book is After Britain.

Words failed onlookers in the moments immediately following the attacks. Footage showed hundreds of stunned, mute and dust-covered New Yorkers. The scenes were disturbingly familiar — many eyewitnesses were reminded of a movie set, yet another Towering Inferno. While these disaster-film images were too easily absorbed, their implications defied immediate description.

This was remedied in typically blunderbuss style by President George W. Bush, who broke off a primary school lesson to announce that his government would investigate ‘to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.’ This statement suggested that the culprits were not merely a few disparate individuals, but ‘folks’, or even its homophonous ‘Volk’, implying a unified, coherent grouping of people. Significant elements of the American public took this as a cue for directing anger towards specific nationalities, ethnicities and religious affiliations. The days following 11 September saw an upsurge in attacks on Muslims and even Sikhs, compelling Bush to speak from a mosque calling for restraint.

Without being able to pinpoint a culprit or motive, Bush identified these events as attacks on freedom by advocates of evil and terror. The massively ambitious aim of this new war was to ‘rid the world of evil’. Bush quoted apocalyptically from Psalm 23, while former president Bill Clinton also identified ‘evil forces’ as the perpetrators. This Old Testament rhetoric was rapidly adopted by the international media. Immediately under its masthead, the Age dramatically proclaimed a scenario of ‘Good versus evil’. The military buildup around Afghanistan has been given the remarkably biblical name ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ (formerly the even less tolerable ‘Operation Infinite Justice’), both names betraying anxiety over the status of future retaliation. No location or method is suggested in these labels (as in ‘Desert Storm’). Instead, they gesture towards a precariousness of objective and uncertainty of duration.

In this rhetoric, evil is embodied by rogue individuals. Remove the villains and evil ceases to be. Osama bin Laden was quickly singled out, though persuasive evidence of this connection is yet to be made public, despite claims by Tony Blair and Alexander Downer of its existence. Bush seems to imagine himself as leading an oversized moral rabbiting expedition. ‘We will smoke Osama out’, he declared, ‘and get him running’. Another twist upon the same theme was Bush’s sheriff-like declaration that bin Laden was ‘wanted, dead or alive’. Bush is clearly more comfortable inhabiting the moral universe of the Wild West than the complex, demanding sphere of international diplomacy.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has contributed a vivid array of organic metaphors to this new verbal war. In the days following the attack we heard that terrorist networks needed to be uprooted and destroyed. The villains became unwanted weeds who should be removed forever from the garden of goodness. The terrorists operated in ‘cells’ that should be excised, like cancerous growths. Powell and his colleagues believe the coming conflict will be a dirty, muddy business. Soldiers will be struggling against other soldiers and inhospitable terrain. Despite repeated assertions of the novelty of the present situation, such possibilities sound disturbingly familiar.

Gone is the euphemistic high-tech military language of the last dozen years — of surgical strikes, smart bombs, pin-point accuracy and minimal collateral damage. Military campaigns in the Persian Gulf and Balkans saw the rise of a disembodied rhetoric of engagement, where precision technology took the place of messy hand-to-hand fighting. Talk of star wars missile defence shields has been replaced by Star Wars rhetoric of virtuous Jedi knight-figures taking on the dark side. Acknowledgements are being made that the billions spent on whizz-bang surveillance gadgets has been misdirected. Calls are being made for increased ‘human intelligence’ in the place of such solecisms as ‘digital intelligence’ and ‘military intelligence’.

In a stunning rhetorical move, Bush extended the threat to Muslims in general by announcing that the new war was a ‘crusade’, echoing the call of some Taliban extremists for a Jihad. To call this comment inflammatory is an understatement. A crusade, in this context, cannot be separated from the historical attempt by Christians to expel Muslims from the Holy Land. Not only has the language of Bush and his sidekicks often seemed ill-considered, but it has also been thoroughly unmemorable. We are yet to hear a ‘fight them on the beaches’ speech, or a phrase as pithy as Churchill’s claim that never ‘was so much owed by so many to so few’. Bush’s rhetoric has operated at the least demanding, most elementary possible level, entirely lacking substantial political ideas, such as anti-totalitarianism or a defence of egalitarian principles. It aims not to cohere a population around meaningful political goals, but instead functions as a child-like fantasy of eliminating baddies and banishing monsters. Tony Blair has contributed a mood of moral seriousness, repeatedly intoning upon the ‘utmost gravity’ of the situation, though his discourse too falls into reductive invocations of evil.

Formal political dissent in the United States has been almost entirely absent, with the single senator who called for restraint subsequently receiving death threats. Democratic processes fail when public exchange is discouraged and political leaders display unanimity. Informed, critical perspectives become invisible and discouraged when the United States asserts that the only options are being with us or against us. It is no coincidence that this contraction of public debate is being accompanied by previously unthinkable constraints on civil liberties. Independent thinking and genuine dialogue have been the first casualties in the new shadow fighting.

While Bush continues to conjure a sufficiently nefarious villain, missiles begin flying towards Afghan civilians. I suspect a chasm will gradually emerge between Bush’s condescending, simplistic political language, and the enormous suffering that such a frenzied demonisation will produce in Afghanistan. The hollowness of this political rhetoric is likely to fail over time, as the burden grows of drawn-out military action. I doubt that such B-movie language of good against evil can sustain the necessary force of persuasion as soldiers arrive back home in body bags.

At no other time has a war existed at such a crucially linguistic level. The precise shape of this rhetoric matters enormously, as it literally defines the otherwise unknown enemy. Unfortunately, the simplified and moralistic language of response has so far only stirred up anti-Muslim feeling and calls for immediate bombing. As the United States confronts the difficulties of military retaliation, the rhetoric of description needs to gesture towards deeper understanding. If a reasoned and appropriate response is to emerge to these horrific attacks, the first critical conflict is the war of words.

Douglas McQueen-Thomson is Assistant Editor of Arena Magazine.

The challenge carried in the attack on the United States is cultural rather than economic — it is a challenge to a way of life and a realm of assumptions that support the high-tech economy. The innocence and glitter of the high-tech supported media lifestyle has suffered a terrible blow. The loss of confidence evident all around the developed world is not a loss of confidence in the economy. It is primarily a loss of confidence in the inviolability of a high-tech way of life and it is this that will have profound economic effects. In this respect the crisis can be seen as one of a distinctive type that opens the door to a future of new possibilities. Some are especially bleak, but there are positive possibilities here too.

None of the basic elements of the high-tech economy that have taken shape since the computer and communications revolution of twenty years ago are directly affected by this crisis. The global financial system, the transformation of productive activity by computerisation, the potential of internet-based e-commerce, or the longer term potential of bio-technology: taken in their own right none of these processes, with the possible exception of e-commerce, are under threat. All offer ways of producing that are stunningly productive. The well-known collapse of the dot com bubble related to over-exuberance towards the possibilities of e-commerce and a serious underestimation of the problems of stabilising consumption through such abstract means. But a phase of over-exuberance is one thing. E-commerce is still likely to re-emerge with a new vigour in one form or another. The main crisis a high-tech economy now faces lies elsewhere.

High-tech economies are rather special in the way they, unlike their modern predecessor, combine cultural assumptions and economy. A high-tech economy assumes, for example, that a self that is radically mobile, open to re-construction and largely self-referential can be formed to complement an orientation towards consumption. These cultural assumptions actually amplify the implications of such an attack. All of the above elements of the high-tech economy are situated within assumptions like these that are much more problematic than the economy proper. It is largely, if not exclusively, at this level that one must assess the significance of the crisis.

The shock of 11 September was a massive blow against the innocence, the apparent political and cultural neutrality, of such constructions. It has pierced a process of reality construction that had become so self-referential that it sustained a fantasy that the ‘common sense’ of the media-based lifestyle could not be challenged. Confidence that these highly individualistic lifestyles were the wave of the future was a foundation stone for the high-tech economy. Now they have been shown to be especially fragile. While it is wrong to see the crisis as one of the West versus Islam, it is one that implies a challenge to the culture of the high-tech society. In that sense the crisis is an expression of a cultural conflict, one that arises out of the cultural impoverishment that for very large numbers of people is the other side of high-tech development.

There are, of course, other more immediately economic effects of the shock which seem open to straightforward economic analysis. Yet many of these also conceal assumptions about the high-tech reconstruction of social life. Take the crisis in the airline industry and tourism. Their prospects are inseparable from assumptions about radical mobility, promoted by the process of globalisation. Will these reassert themselves after a settling down period or does the challenge go deeper? Certainly their prospects are not very positive in the light of a new type of war. The risk associated with air travel is now very much higher. The likelihood of being hijacked is not especially high, but the chances of survival if hijacked are now about zero, as planes will be shot down in the United States. In this way the war upon terrorism is absolutely negative for any general economic recovery. No doubt that there will be significant productivity losses due to the need to handle widespread uncertainty about security in the new environment.

It is widely agreed that the US economy was on the brink of recession before 11 September. This had little to do with a basic challenge to the assumptions of the high-tech economy and more to do with its internal workings, having over-stretched itself in the boom and bubble especially related to the internet, e-commerce and high-tech generally. It would be astonishing if the economy did not now succumb. This is not to deny that confidence may recover some of its vibrancy. The re-assertion of ‘normality’ could be expected as an aspect of a very powerful on-going cultural process. But with the fragility of global lifestyles revealed, any confidence about the high-tech way will be deeply qualified.

One area of the new economy appears to be especially vulnerable in the circumstances of the outbreak of this cultural conflict. In specialist circles it is well known how, over a period of twenty years, the whole sphere of insurance, futures and risk has grown exponentially to play a central role in the functioning of the world financial system.

This growth has been premised on developments in the evaluation of risk whereby risk is said to be able to be given an objective measurement. Complex mathematical algorithms are employed using powerful computers and it is these processes that have supported the immense growth of hedge funds and the future markets generally. These markets are based on options to buy or sell assets rather than holding assets in their own right. This leverage allows the control of assets by investing only a small proportion of their actual value.

The growth of the sector has been such that it could easily overwhelm the power of a central bank, even one as large as the United States Federal Reserve. Size is one thing. The other factor, so critical at this time, is the way the sector depends on the objective measurement of risk. Such a measurement is probabilistic, it must rely on assumptions about the risk environment, ruling out certain possibilities and allowing for others. The degree to which assumptions of risk can have a devastating effect on profits and losses was illustrated recently by the loss of $3 billion by a mortgage subsidiary of the National Bank. In this case the subsidiary relied on software that had risk assumptions built into it relating to the movement of interest rates. The sudden and sustained fall in rates in the United States over a period of ten months since late 2000 was sufficient to break through the risk assumptions of this organisation and literally brought it to its end.

If the falls in official interest rates are sufficient to invalidate the assumptions of at least parts of this sector of risk management, what can one say about the exceptional attack on the United States? Shocks have always played a role in economic crises. One need only go back to the oil price shocks of the 1970s to see how the economy can be thrown into turmoil and serious recession. Now a sector built on massive calculations of risk all of a sudden finds that its assumptions no longer have any basis.

The consequences of this are not necessarily immediate. The vast network of transactions that make up the futures or derivatives markets, where risk is offloaded to other players who then offload again, allows significant time lapses before the situation becomes clear.

Calculation of risk occurs within the economy as such. It proceeds by means of assumptions that measure the risk of situations changing. What cannot be predicted for purposes of day-to-day transactions is the singular event, like an earthquake. We have just experienced an earthquake, although this one is not from the realm of nature. It is a culture war and as such it is all the more disconcerting. With a shock of this scale no one knows how the world of risk management will bear up. But there should be no doubt that the road is downhill. It could be quite steep, and a shock in its own right.

The larger question is how to rebuild economies that are not so tied to a high-tech way of life. For the moment very few people are asking the question, but soon enough it will be firmly on the agenda. How else can we construct a stable future?

John Hinkson is an Arena Publications Editor.

In the US capital a national cathedral, technically Episcopalian, sits close by the heart of the secular state. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the twin towers it was the site of a cultural mobilisation.

Everyone was there. In the very early morning, Australian time, the service was relayed by the BBC. It commenced by those present joining in a deeply resonant hymn:

O God our help in ages past
Our hope for years to come
Our shelter from the stormy blast
And our eternal home.

In the first half of the service there were readings by Jewish, Muslim and Christian figures. The cultural diversity of the United States was being actively recognised as mourning was grafted to combative resolution. All that was set within the generous spirit of the universal ideals which those great religions can invoke.

In this context these human ideals spoke to self-recognition. That is, to the self-understanding of a people who, believing that they live by these values, were now reaching out for a sense of common purpose which could sustain them in a protracted struggle. They were people who, taking for granted that this was a simple matter of the violation of their way of life, cried out for justice.

As the service ended and religious devotion receded before a return to the mundane world, those present joined again, this time in a hymn whose role was predominantly secular. With the same fervour as they appealed to the God of their ‘eternal home’, they now intoned ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. It was penned in 1861, during the American civil war, its author being inspired by the sight of soldiers at drill.

So much for a certain fusion of religious commitment, cultural diversity and state policies directed towards the mobilisation of the will and conscience of the nation.

In the more mundane world of imperial power, its complement is the rhetoric of freedom. This rhetoric taps back into the notion of freedom of conscience, which is so central to a universalising ethic. But in the Bush version, freedom of choice is the main accent. The choices, moreover, are material ones: choices in the market, consumption choices, all set within a crudely materialist vision of life and ratified by the rhetoric of democracy. But about that, there is no real choice on offer. The issue of how we are to be governed, to what ends, and with what consequences for the other peoples of the world, is yet to move to the centre of public conscience. Ideal values sanctify a wider culture of crude materialism and self-gratification which ignores its consequences in the wider world.

After the break-up of colonialism, after fifty years of Cold War, the nations which see themselves as developed, along with transnational corporations and global networks of high-tech and financial personnel, have consolidated a new inequality. More significantly, that inequality carries with it a deeper impoverishment of ways of living among both rich and poor.

It calls us to an order of life which has nothing in common with the framing values of the great religions or the generous humanism of certain secular currents in modernity. It proclaims their values, yet via the freedom of conscience, free choice in the market place and thimble illusion, it actually undermines them.

In the developed heartlands, masses of people are deeply confused and increasingly desperate. Many turn to the needle, a few to the bomb. Among the ‘less developed’ societies the situation is more urgently tragic. It is not merely that many millions are in dire want or ravaged by epidemics for which the only remedies are at ruling market prices. Whole economies, with their traditional ways of life, are being sucked dry by the exploitative ravages of one particular version of globalisation. That is to say, this present version of globalisation is structured to the advantage of the new rich, set within the new economy.

Equally important is the way in which life is conducted within newly ascendant social forms; these, by lending a distant and abstract quality to the fate of others, reinforce the certitudes that bind the new elites to their own primarily secular version of fundamentalism.

George Bush is probably only half right. A ‘war’ could go on for many years. But what kind of war will this be? When the small numbers he seeks to exterminate merge with whole populations, just where is the enemy? What will be the target? If a high-tech onslaught is directed against a whole population which cannot hit back in the same mode, would that be an act of war? Wouldn’t massacre be a more apt description? And would others, fearing the same fate, be likely to hit back by every possible means?

The problem with descriptions like ‘war’ and ‘terrorism’ is that they focus attention only on the surface phenomena of world politics and global change. They obscure the vast transition taking place in the ways of life of peoples all over the world. The world of intellectually grounded high tech, and of image-mediated sociality at a distance is reaching out to absorb and undermine an older world of labour, community and mutual presence. Within this epochal transformation the forms of conflict also change. War begins to transmute into massacre; the sense of outraged oppression can readily move on towards cataclysmic acts of terror against civilian populations.

The crucial issue is to begin to clarify and act within a perspective which challenges both fundamentalisms. We need an approach that challenges the dominance of the universal market as it now reaches out to transform every sphere of life. Similarly, it is an approach which challenges its counterpart: the bitterly outraged way of understanding which, because it invests itself in a just God, can act with a total self-righteousness which excludes any deeper reflection. It is this response which feeds the epithets ‘terrorist’ and ‘fanactic’, so that the labels help to obscure the underlying social transformation and the new roots of ignorance and oppression.

This transformation cannot be reduced to the interplay of economic interests. These interests should be seen as secondary, in spite of their enormous pull and pressure, both in the reconstruction of work and in extending the reach of the global market.

While this whole process of the re-ordering of social life is widely understood as the triumph of capitalism, it is also a shift in the priority of different forms of social life: of different ways of being present to and absent from others. It is a shift in the social bond, mediated in the first instance by the given powers of our species — to touch, to see and to speak with others in the flesh; in the second instance, as mediated by abstract technologies, the remaking of our very being, whether by the chip, the gene or the technological reconstruction of life more generally, we pass over into a world of mere interconnection.

These are issues which go far beyond conventional notions of class, status and power as the elements of social structures. They point to the ways in which the power of the intellect, expressed in abstract ways of addressing both the material and social world, are displacing the work of the hand and our immediate presence to each other, in the flesh.

In the short run this accelerating shift in the mode of human existence is often outside the realm of the public imagination. Within the corporate world, among the intellectually trained personnel, and within the realm of government, it is as if the basic arrangements of modernity have remained unchanged. They appear merely to have been supercharged so that the world of capital has now directly encompassed the work of the intellect. It is even as if a universalised mode of being is in prospect. The promise is that limitations of consumption, of gender, even of mortality can be overcome, if not quite today then by way of a treadmill of tomorrows.

This basic transition could not proceed without a radical shift in the social role of intellectual work. The predominance of the technosciences and their direct incorporation by commodity exchange is the central feature in the universalising outreach market. Throughout the modern period it expanded within and was limited to a degree by encompassing values. At first by Christian values; later they were joined by the humanist currents which branched out from Christian orthodoxies. Yet now, as the market reframes every sphere of life, previous boundaries are erased. Embedded as life is in the assumptions of a universal market, there is no ready place for a different perspective to stand.

Instead, perhaps for a whole generation to come, a new fetishism is set in place. It is a fundamentalism that carries a transcendental attitude and practice both secular and radically imperative. It presents itself to its carriers everywhere as inevitable, yet increasingly it stirs an inarticulate malaise. Just what does the future hold for our children and for us?

This sense of foreboding arises from the new reality in which, far more than ever before, life is carried on at two levels. On the one hand there is the world of the intellectually related practice, carried on at a distance. It is a world which celebrates its own ascendancy and has only the most limited insight into that other ‘less developed’ world with which it co-exists and from which it seeks to take its departure.

How long will it take to bring these issues into the realm of active public discussion? Is it conceivable that one generation will be sufficient time for the public conscience to respond to the challenge which now faces us as a species? The United States may have been the specific target of this attack, but the whole way of living that the market spawns is at issue.

After modernity the role of religion is a far more residual aspect of such a way of life. While it speaks with the voice of a universal ethic, it does not actively address the root cause, in our times, of the violation of that ethic — the greed, the individualism, the proclivity to treat our fellow beings as objects integral with the structure and mode of operation of a market. The recent gathering at the national cathedral in Washington was a case in point. Its essence was to join the precepts of a universal ethic to the battle hymn of the republic of greed. Yet the citizens of the United States, even some of its leaders, are far from seeing or intending this conjunction. Within their immediate circles of life they are insulated from the broader consequences of their way of life. They have yet to pause and ask themselves whether, in some way, they may have contributed to the onslaught which has wounded them so deeply. When that time comes, recognition of the harsh reality of the republic of greed will be the real test of their deeper values.

The over-riding impulse to now wage war should not, however, obscure the fact that for millennia,the great religions have been a primary source of efforts to interpret our being and to generalise ethical norms which might guide common life. Although compromised through history by their conjunction with the powers, in general terms they signify the need for institutions which can stand back from the pressures of everyday life and call people to an interpretive overview.

They are an expression of the role of the interpretive, as distinct from the technoscientific intellectual in his or her relation to the pulse of everyday life. For the present the latter is captive to a market-driven fundamentalism.

The humanities, meanwhile, are both under intense pressure within their institutions and characteristically driven by the narrowing impulse of the career, rather than by ‘the calling’ to contribute to an overview.

Yet the resources to call for a different way forward than the strike and counter-strike of fundamentalism, remain strong. Given a build-up of demand from an insistent public, yes, a ‘peace movement’ in the immediate circumstances is an urgent first step. But more than that is required. The United Nations as currently corralled by the United States will not do. What is needed is a movement with roots in every country among the many millions of people ready to stand up and act for truth and reconciliation. This will require exceptional dedication and prolonged endeavour. The interchange which embraced the elementally opposed groupings in post-apartheid South Africa is something of a model. Any passage to a shared truth, then on to reconciliation and even to justice as well would be long and difficult. Yet the minimum demand must be that the two fundamentalisms sit down among the growing number of responsible people. That is to say, citizens of every country who see that for the common good, the wider understanding of the roots of the new inequality is the urgent problem.

The world of extended interchange and interconnection has been an indispensable feature of every civilisation, just as the parochial worlds of direct presence in which people conduct much of their daily lives have been. When the relation between these forms of life is undergoing a basic change, public awareness is slow to respond to the need for radically new perspectives. Now, when the tragedy and the suddenness of the twin towers has awakened people to what could become their common fate, the time remains to think and to act differently.

Geoff Sharp is Arena Publications General Editor.

‘In Genoa, we have seen the end of political mediation between institutions and movements’, wrote Luca Casarina in Il Manifesto. Casarina, spokesperson of the north-eastern social centres and part of the Genoa Social Forum, was referring to talks held prior to the protests between the GSF and the government, after which it was assumed that the police would not use extreme, let alone lethal, force. Afterwards, around thirty protesters were in intensive care, and one was dead. Throughout Europe, both before and after the protests, people were hunted down and arrested, or simply beaten, on suspicion of being part of the anti-G8 demonstrations. Casarina later described those talks as a ‘trap’ — the mirage of a space in which negotiations on the limits of engagement might occur and bind the participants, the existence of, as he terms it, a ‘pact’. In announcing the end of mediation, Casarina could (perhaps should) have been speaking of a moment that has occurred at each successive anti-summit protest since the J18 protests against the G8 Summit in 1998. The phrase ‘since Genoa’ signals ‘the end of mediation’ made irrefutable, experienced as a shared event — even as it was a long time, perhaps a century, in the making.

Civil society

In another register, the end of mediation is also the end of ‘civil society’, where ‘civil society’ is defined as the terrain upon which the relations between the state and ‘its’ populations are mediated through various institutional forms: unions, parties, and so on. But mediation, in order to be other than simulation presupposes an effectively sovereign state; one that is capable of mediating between and irreducible to the institutions of ‘civil society’ — hence the motif of the state as ‘umpire’. A sovereign state is one which stands above and outside the divisions of ‘civil society’, composed in turn of fixed, caste-like identities — and for a time, capital and labour composed as identities — whom the sovereign bestows with privileges, or not. In other words, a sovereign state has its subjects. It is monarchical in form and derivation: power is organised hierarchically. This ‘over and above’ capital, then, is the precondition of civil society and thereby the possibility of mediation.

Today there is much talk about ‘the decline of sovereignty’, of the supposed inability of the (nation-)state to counter the interests of something called global capital, as if there is no other way for the (nation-)state to exist and exert its power other than in a sovereign fashion, above all (and) outside of capital, as a distinct subject. This supposes that the absence of sovereign power is the absence of state power per se.

The reverse is the case. The decline of sovereignty implies a state that is emphatically repressive and whose power proceeds and is organised immanently, as morality rather than politics. This is why, for instance, in Genoa, Seattle and Melbourne, any reputed negotiations between protesters and the state could never arrive at something like a ‘pact’, but were a prelude to the use of batons, tear gas and bullets. To put it another way: the ‘social pact’ gives way to ‘mutual obligation’ — a one-way, moralising edict that seeks to re-establish immanent control (i.e. self-policing) of dissent while licensing state violence as virtuous.

The republican state takes its cue from the emergence of the ‘free labourer’ and the techniques of control that are adequate to it, such as the internalisation of the command to work as an ‘ethic’. There is no such thing as a fully accomplished form of the republican state — it is unstable, oscillating between sovereignty and democracy, or majestic sovereignty and announcements of the ‘sovereignty’ of ‘the people’. Its juridical constituents are, initially, subjects without subjection and, increasingly, citizens inscribed with rights and duties. The economic analogue of citizenship is none other than the commodity, where equality and difference are expressed in quantitative terms. Citizenship relegates qualitative differences to the private realm of ‘taste’, just as the market does.

Simulations

Attempts to revive sovereignty, mediation and the institutions of civil society, in the absence of their ability to deliver something like an actual ‘pact’, results in a decidedly one-sided restoration. The power of the sovereign to be above the law becomes the sovereign exemption as norm, in other words, the abolition of the rule of law. (Hence the conduct of border policing, the camps and migration policy generally). Attempts at mediation between institutions and movements give effect only to control and the re-emergence of mediation in a ghoulish manner.

And so, PR companies are hired by the World Economic Forum (and the G8) to demand that protesters ‘not use violence’ while the government drafts a bill that would legalise the use of the military in situations of civil conflict (and the Carabinieri shoot to kill). Interestingly, the Dutch police are organising an international conference entitled, ‘Global Civil Society, Maintaining Public Order’ at which police from Australia, the US and Europe will — it is advertised — sit down with invited ‘representatives’ of ‘the global civil society’ to plan what is required to maintain global order. This is how ‘civil society’ exists today: as an invitation-only simulation in the service of ‘law and order’.

Exodus

Struggle by no means disappears merely because long-standing figurations do. It reappears in ways that are more adequate, or simply as experiments in new ways of effectiveness. In a situation which promises only repression what is at stake is the displacement of the question of figuration (the fixed form of the subject as a discrete entity) by the question of mobility and of escape. The question of ‘who’ is replaced by the question of ‘how’ or, as graffiti on Crown Casino declared, ‘How we struggle is the struggle’.

These new possibilities were manifested during the S11 events in Melbourne. Far from being a simple doctrinal difference during S11 between the Leninists of the Alliance (since reformed into the Socialist Alliance for electoral purposes) and others in the Autonomous Web of Liberation, the difference between ‘who’ and ‘how’ was always based on the prior question of composition and determined by it. The former tried to accomplish a passage from Keatingesque corporatism to sovereignty, a recombination of the Many (redefined as discrete subjectivities) into the One, chiefly through the drafting of programmes and demands. The latter maintained a strict indifference to doctrinal disputes that might give effect to the assertion of univocality, of hierarchy and therefore of the possibility of mediation. ‘Dessert capital, dessert the state’ was much more than an incitement to cream-pie the powerful. Organisational forms, strategies also, are not a matter of planning or the force of will, but of composition — organisational forms are passages from this point.

Globalisation

There is no ‘anti-globalisation movement’ that assembled to protest at S11 (or at the other summit protests) — no movement, singular; and barely anything resembling a movement that is anti-globalist in political perspective. Instead there were different networks, groups and sometimes just groups of friends who gathered to protest for various, often contrary, reasons. Moreover, the ‘anti-globalisation movement’ was a fiction assembled on the terrain of mediation. Whether announced by determined anti-globalist lobbyists such as the International Forum on Globalisation, or repeated by archaic opportunists such as the International Socialist Organisation, the ‘anti-globalisation’ label was a necessary moment in asserting that one was at the helm of said movement and could therefore speak (to the media) and mediate on its behalf. Without a label that made it seem as if there was one set of aims shared by protesters, any claims to mediation would fall flat. The lobbyists would not be granted a seat at the table, as it were; and the Leninists could not assert their claim to be the vanguard of something that, prior to S11, they had related to only in its most mediated (or better: televisual) forms.

It should be no surprise, then, that some are confused by the fact that the no border networks emerged in Australia at S11. When Paul James writes, in response to three articles which seek to critique the very notion and practice of migration controls, that he agrees with ‘the anti-globalist critique of capitalism’, and wishes to ‘turn that critique back on the no border advocates’, I admit to being a little confused as to his assumption that either Maksimovic (Arena Magazine No. 52), Bhuta and Costello (Arena Magazine No. 53) or my piece in the ‘Rogue States’ reader is anti-globalist. He could not have been more mistaken.

As regards form, if not always content, the anti-summit protests were globalised and globalising protests, occurring on the terrain of a global circulation of struggles and precepts that is unprecedented in scope and magnitude. Moreover, pro-migration actions have always been a significant part of the anti-summit protests, at both anti-WEF protests (in 1999 in the EU and Melbourne in 2000), and at both anti-G8 protests (J18 in 1998 and Genoa in 2001). The exception to this is Seattle and the anti-WTO protests, where it was more a case of the overwhelming resources brought to bear, with the alliance between Ralph Nader and Patrick Buchanan given more credit than the politics of the anti-sweatshop and anti-third world debt campaigners without whom there would have been no blockade. But this should be a source of amusement rather than an uncritical repetition. Why would anyone in the US complain about the supposed decline of ‘American sovereignty’? For my part, I have never been persuaded that a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of the nation is not an updated version of national socialism, reconfigured in the manner of Patrick Buchanan (or Pauline Hanson) as a multicultural defence of the inherent separateness of authentic ‘cultures’ — that is as an upbeat global apartheid.

Civilisation

‘Civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’ are two sides of the same construct, the vocabulary of an initial encounter and conflict between empires and what remained ‘outside’ but was in the process of being colonised by them. In time, this distinction was replaced by that of ‘third’ and ‘first’ worlds, no longer an outside of empires but a geopolitical distinction created by a bipolar war that was proxied onto and constitutive of the ‘third world’. This war was, in the main, conducted over the seizure and flows of a globally produced surplus. Here, the ‘third world’ becomes characterised by a permanent state of war, a ‘barbarism’ that was the necessary and inseparable counterpart of civilisation. The civilisation of the ‘first world’ was funded on the basis of this distinction, allowing for an increasing level of debt and the deferral of debt repayments so as to fund the results of mediation, of civil society.

But today, the distinction between ‘third’ and ‘first’ worlds has been traversed by decades of struggle marked by the globalisation of nation-states as a prelude to the enclosure of land and an accompanying, unprecedented flight from the ‘third’ to the ‘first’ world. In other words, the distinction was traversed by the globalisation of wage labour, where capital was subsequently globalised not as a subject, but as an intrinsic element of sociality, as the means by which people are related to each other and to life itself.

Fortresses

What is usually defined as the globalisation of capital (which in institutional terms consists of the first tentative formation of only some of the apparatuses of a global state) is a response to this globalisation of labour that was unleashed by the end of the Cold War. Since 1989, there have been attempts to secure a level of political, military, juridical and, not least, moral authority that corresponds to, and is capable of delimiting and conditioning the movements of people. In particular, this is a question of ensuring that people move only as labour, as commodities on the world (labour) market; and by implication that if they do not they are ‘excluded’ as ‘surplus populations’. So, far from being a mere instance of hypocrisy, the paradoxical deregulation of capital movements and the re-regulation of the movements of people since the early 1990s is an abiding mark of the peculiarity of the commodity called labour-power. This is why, contrary to a rather naive view of border controls, the border is both porous and exclusionary at the same time. Likewise immigration controls recreate the segmentations of the global labour market in the face of a globalised proletariat that, unlike every other commodity, strives toward equality as a political rather than a merely quantifiable concept. Likewise, they reinstate the principle that movement must be the movement of commodities (or capital), conducted as tourism, ‘guest work’ and the like. In this, the boundaries of citizenship serve to actively create the lowest rungs of the labour market as well as to establish the concentration camps where those deemed ‘surplus’ to production are relegated, whether in Australia or in Pakistan, and always treated as deserters. Today, it is a stark choice, but hardly an abstract one: either open the borders or resort to more lethal, exceptional means to halt the movements of people as human beings.

Neo-liberalism does not have a vision of a borderless world. It has a vision of a world that is capitalist, where borders exist or do not at those points where they are necessary. If Microsoft deploys images of a borderless world, it does so in order to take up desires that already exist, with a twist: the concealment of bodies. Therefore, fortresses are the order of the day — from ‘Fortress Australia’ to the barbed wire citadels of the various summit meetings. What is at stake here is whether or not bodies might be arranged or move as something other than factors of production or commodities in circulation, as something more and other than things. ‘Since Genoa’, and ‘since the Tampa’. Now this is the question.

Angela Mitropoulos is a Melbourne-based writer and activist.

Americans have long watched from a distance as living persons have been terror-bombed in towns such as Beirut, Belfast, and Nairobi, or in Hiroshima (1945), Hanoi and Haiphong (1972), Tripoli (1986), Baghdad (1991), Basra (1999) and Belgrade (1999). However, this time it has come home with a vengeance. Just listing a few of the cases brings home the issue in a second way. All of the instances listed from Hiroshima to Belgrade involved US forces conducting acts of terror from a distance against a US-defined evil Other. In all cases the US government knew that civilians would probably die, and in all cases they argued that it was simply necessary.

If news commentary and letters to the paper are anything to go by, even by mentioning the fact that the United States has itself acted as purveyor of terror, I will be immediately taken out of context and wrongly assumed to be saying that the 11 September attack was the deserved outcome of a history that goes back decades. Not so. Nobody deserves to be terrorised. Rather, my sympathy lies with the thousands of demonstrators who marched through New York City on the weekend after the terror, concerned about the plans of the US government.

What I am saying, firstly, is that nothing excuses acts of barbarism, but secondly, that barbarism knows no boundaries of proclaimed good and evil. As George W. Bush declares war on a network nobody is sure was involved, and as the missiles begin to hit Afghanistan, it is possible that the terror we have already experienced will be repeated and repeated across the globe. Afghanistan may be only the beginning. The obscenely named Operation Infinite Justice opened the possibility of self-confirming, escalating hostilities from both sides. That it has hastily been renamed Operation Enduring Freedom underscores the Nineteen Eighty-Four Ministry-of-Love-style use of language. This is not a comic-tragic naming in the way the strategic invasion in 1983 of peaceful little Grenada by a handful of Ronald Reagan’s crack troops was called Operation Urgent Fury. This time, unless the current direction changes radically, it will involve the tragic undermining of freedom — perhaps with a glimmer of positive rethinking of US policy towards Israel and Palestine.

Operation Enduring Freedom opens the possibility of a globally continuous state-of-war in which the enemy is both abstract entity (terrorism) and particularised ‘evil’ Other (bin Laden, with new figures of evil named as the situation unfolds). We find ourselves in a ‘post-war’ condition where the enemy no longer carries the status of national sovereignty or national territory; where the targets are defined on the run and the theatre of operation can be named without justifying evidence; where the state-at-war can rename the terms and conditions of a post-liberal society of hyper-surveillance; and where fine risk assessment and increased insecurity are two sides of the same coin.

Despite this real possibility of a horrific new kind of postnational state of war, it has supposedly become unpatriotic to doubt that American military action is both necessary and just. The rubbish that has been reported in the press is extraordinary.

Why, at a time when war seems to be going beyond old-fashioned nation-state conflict, is criticism defined in nationalist terms as un-American, or even un-Australian? Understanding the mainstream response to the attacks takes us deep into the heart of Middle America. On Saturday night, one week after the attack, the world watched as Hollywood and MTV mourned the tragic loss of life that occurred in attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon. The program, a telethon fundraiser entitled America: A Tribute to Heroes, was broadcast to 210 countries. Tom Hanks, boy-next-door and star of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster war movie Saving Private Ryan, opened the evening in a low-key manner. He named the brave souls who reacted to the hijacking of Flight 93 and intoned their last words, ‘We’re going to have to do something’. Celine Dion sang ‘God Bless America’. The evening ended with the now iconic video-image of the US flag flying silently over the debris of the collapsed towers. No commentary. No introductions. No credits. It was almost moving.

I wanted to mourn, but throughout the entire program there was not an off-key note, not an unscripted moment that called for self-reflection about the consequences of massing a war machine to strike at an unverified enemy. Perhaps my response is unfair given that it was a ‘tribute’, but unfortunately the unease was confirmed at every turn by the words of the mourners. Clint Eastwood, affecting the same expression he wore in In the Line of Fire (1993) spoke with gravelly intensity about ‘ultimate triumph’:

It was the twenty-first century’s day of infamy. It was a day that will live in the annals of courage and patriotism. Tonight we pay tribute to those who were lost and those who survived the fire and the fate that rained down upon them, and the heroes at ground zero who had life and death wear an indelible badge of honour. We celebrate not only them, but all our fellow Americans, for the intended victims of this attack were not just on the planes, and at the Pentagon, the World Trade Centre. They were wherever else they roam the sky. The targets were not just the symbols of America but they were the spirit of America. And the intended victims were all three-hundred million of us. The terrorists foresaw a nation fearful, doubtful, ready to retreat. Oh, they left us wounded, but renewed in strength. And we’ll stand and will not yield. The terrorists who wanted three hundred million victims, instead are going to get three hundred million heroes, three hundred million Americans with broken hearts, unbreakable hopes for our country and our future. In the conflict that’s come upon us, we’re determined as our parents and our grandparents were before us to win through the ultimate triumph — so help us God.

By a generalising shift, expressed first in the words of US politicians, it becomes an attack on all of us, an attack upon civilisation. Doubt has become unpatriotic because the nation of America feels that any disloyalty begets social disintegration. This is the response of an insecure nation undergoing change. In this context, only clichéd reversions to the Manichean Cold War rhetoric of the kind ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’ seem adequate to the momentousness of the new situation. America: A Tribute to Heroes, Clint Eastwood’s set-piece and Celine Dion’s rousing and sentimental rendition of ‘God Bless America’ take us into the fears of mainstream American culture. They also take us back to an earlier filmic attempt to understand a different war — the film Deer Hunter (1978): the war, Vietnam. The last scene of Michael Cimino’s film closes on a few friends in a small Pennsylvania town pub trying to make sense of their ravaged lives. In wan unison, but growing in volume, they sing ‘God Bless America’. The final scene is stopped in freeze-frame as they raise their glasses in hope. As the video cover says, ‘it’s more than a requiem for their dead comrades; it’s an anthem for a living American tradition of making mistakes, rueing them and starting afresh’. America, the land of the brave and the free, having forgotten the lessons of that war, redefines itself yet again as the land of transcendent promise.

It is significant that Vietnam is the one war that cannot be named at this time. The concept of the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ originally referred to the pathology of a nation that believed itself to have lost the war out of weakness of will. However, in the years since that war, the concept, if remembered, has taken on a new reality. Rather than it being pathological to be obsessed by weakness, it is now necessary never to be weak. It has been renamed in terms of what has long been called ‘American exceptionalism’. Richard Nixon wrote an entire book claiming that America really won the war — it lost the peace, he said. And dozens of popular cultural moments in the meantime have confirmed this sense. During the TWA hostage crisis in 1985, President Reagan quipped into the microphone during a sound test that ‘… after seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do next time’. Life and fictional renditions intermingle. In these times, when the rules of war are being rewritten, the mainstream American sense of its own exceptionalism is continuous with the past. There are lots of counter-examples to these themes, but it can be argued that they continue to dominate mainstream thinking and practice. One continuing theme involves a ‘mythical tribute’ to the regeneration of peace through violence. It is the peace that always comes after the conflict, like the freeze-frame at the end of Deer Hunter or Three Kings. From the Indian wars, the War of Independence to Vietnam and Kosovo, ‘peace’ is always the backgrounded but transcendental moment that links the community of fate across time. A second theme is the essential virtue of acting to defend Truth, Infinite Justice and the (American) Way. Defence always requires action. Despite the failings (or heroism) of any one particular individual or institution in the United States, or even of the state itself, there is always an active figure of redemption. President Bush knows that he might be making a mistake in the particularities of his actions, but (connecting the two themes) given that an outsider has cut across the peace of the community of fate, he has no choice but to act. He will be forgiven for acting wrongly, but not for acquiescing to an outsider’s attack on American soil.

This brings us to a third theme, the ambiguity of an abiding sense of home soil and the projection of a frontier that has no boundaries. Having its roots in an expansionist ideology called the doctrine of Manifest Destiny first proclaimed in 1845, American national interest has long been defined in terms that treated extensions of its frontier as part of its civilising mission. With the first two themes we can, for example, rewrite them with Australian examples from Gallipoli to the doctrine of ‘forward defence’. However, with this third theme of sacred soil/extended frontier the United States has an accentuated fear of the unbounded movements of others that goes beyond the fears that even mainstream Australia has evinced recently over the Tampa refugee crisis. The old domino theory and the necessity of defending the world against communists in Vietnam, was reborn against drug runners in Panama, against Arab expansionists in Iraq, and now against terrorists in Afghanistan. Australia follows the United States into crusades (sorry, I should not use that term ‘crusades’ any more). By contrast the government feels that it simply has to be there. Notwithstanding the occasional recurrences of American ‘isolationism’, the norm is for US leaders to feel an overriding pressure to act in the world.

One way of carrying this baggage of the past into the new global disorder has been to project violence from a distance. The US war-machine has increasingly been remade around weapons of mass projection. The only lesson learned from Vietnam was not to get so many young compatriots killed and wounded: 58,000 Americans dead and 300,000 wounded. We should also remember that over one million Vietnamese died. Working forwards from the bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, weapons of mass projection are defended as increasingly calibrated responses, precisely targeted, and directed as much against infrastructure as against personnel. Many Americans know from the long-term effects in Iraq and Kosovo that people continue to die long after the projection of terror has stopped; however the political decision-makers equally know that the destruction of ways of life is quickly submerged in the complexity of immediate events.

With the attack on New York and Washington, cultures and structures continuous with the past have been overlaid by something new. The United States has been attacked by a group of people who apparently have no home and no name. Moreover, they are persons prepared to put their bodies on the line. It means that the abstract war-machine projecting power from a distance will not in itself work. In one respect the coming war means going back to days of Vietnam when Americans too died in embodied combat. In other respects, as I have been concerned to say, we are in new and changing territory. Despite all the facile suggestions that Bush has shown intelligence and restraint — mostly because he does not know what to do as winter comes to Afghanistan and it becomes obvious that a cruise-missile solution will not work — we face a ‘war’ of secret missions closed even to the managed scrutiny of the world’s media, a combination of strategic abstract strikes and brutal embodied incursions. In their pretensions at least, they make up a totalising campaign that reneges on prior concerns about either Just War proportionality or the rights of those who have not been proven guilty.

A positive future will entail rethinking the mechanisms of global justice, including an international court of law and UN peace-keeping forces. It will entail nation-states rethinking their responsibility to the world. And it will entail a basic questioning of the culture of abstract global ‘peace’ that has brought us so much misery.

Paul James is an Arena Journal editor.

The massive support for Bush has generally been understood as having a historical precedent in the sense that ‘US citizens always unite in times of war’. Putting aside debates about what kind of war this really is, it is important to recognise the potential dangers that lie behind this apparent unity. To state it bluntly, the principle of democracy said to be under siege from terrorism is itself rapidly being undermined in the United States. Since the attacks the already narrow space in US politics for liberal or dissenting thought has been further reduced through various devices. Firstly, through the lack of critical scrutiny by the mainstream media of the actions and statements of the US government. Secondly, in the work of conservative thinkers who have used the tragedy to attack both Left traditions in the United States and contemporary anti-globalisation forces. Thirdly, the attempt to counter terrorism by strengthening governmental surveillance and arrest powers to unthinkable levels. Importantly, the way the United States as a state is seeking legitimation through the notion of ‘security’ also works to enact a depoliticisation of the state itself.

John Leonard was largely accurate when he described the shortcomings of the US media’s representation of the war on terrorism as the ‘lack of any meaningful dissent from the tom-toms’. Certainly, there has been no shortage of gung-ho advocates for Bush’s war. On the Fox news channel Bill O’Reilly pleaded for the US government to ‘bomb the Afghan infrastructure back to rubble’, and also called for Iraq and Libya to be bombed for good measure. But more depressing than such aggressive posturing is the almost complete lack of critical distance shown by the mainstream US media. On the David Letterman Show, legendary CBS news anchorman Dan Rather said of Bush: ‘[He’s] the president, he makes the decisions … wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where. And he’ll make the call’. With sentiments like this, and Dan Rather is merely representative, there is no need for the government to impose the kind of media restrictions used in the Gulf War.

This lack of space for dissent makes it easy for the political Right to attack those who have dared to question US policy. Under the conditions established by the almost uniform media coverage of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath, even the mildest call for debate can be pilloried as ‘anti-American’. For instance, David Horowitz in ‘Bin Laden’s American Blood Brothers’ (salon.com) denounces the entire critical left tradition as simply a ‘privileged radical’s view of America — their facile defamation of our country’s power and wealth, their ready appeasement of our mortal enemies …’ He goes on to blame the Left for enabling the recent terrorism to manifest itself. Hence it was ‘liberal self-hatred masquerading as a concern for human rights [which] was the primary reason why it was so easy for a complicated and lethal attack to be planned and carried out without coming to the attention of American intelligence agencies’.

Similarly, a wide-ranging piece in the New Republic by Peter Beinhart manages to indict everyone — from French farmer and activist Jose Bove, to Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s new book Empire — for creating the conditions which led to terrorism. Beinhart calls for a halt to planned anti-globalisation demonstrations in Washington, and argues the time has come for the anti-globalisation movement to choose sides. ‘[D]omestic political dissent is [now] immoral without a prior statement of national solidarity.’

Such statements echo Bush’s ‘with us or against us’ speech. They effectively close the democratic practices they purport to protect. Even mild questions, such as concerns about repeating the mistakes of the past — as when Dick Cheney suggests putting on the payroll ‘the dark side’ of humanity in order to fight terrorism — are ruled out within a discourse that subsumes all criticism under a call for national unity.

The lack of critical dissent within the mainstream media has also helped create the ground for a different kind of assault on democracy, the creation of laws which grant enormous surveillance and arrest powers to law enforcement agencies. The Combatting of Terrorism Act currently being fast-tracked through both houses of government gives the executive branch the power to engage in warfare without the need to obtain congressional approval, which as Joel Skoussen argues, creates powers ‘which the founders of this nation would have vigorously rejected’. Compare the entire year it took to pass Clinton’s anti-terrorism bill after the 1988 bombing of US embassies in East Africa to the present legislation, which may be passed within a few weeks of the attack on the WTC. Other aspects of this legislation relax the restrictions on obtaining access to private e-mail and internet use, and expand the conditions where wiretapping is legally acceptable. In addition, non-US citizens suspected of involvement with terrorist activities will be able to be detained without a court order.

It is unlikely that any of the new laws being proposed would have prevented the acts of 11 September. Certainly, if passed they will restrict the civil liberties of those residing in the United States. But there is another potential consequence: in expanding legal/governmental power to new levels, the government may well provoke the activity of terrorist groups within the United States. The militia and anti-government groups that rose to such prominence in the 1990s may gain increased membership as the things they oppose — big government and the loss of civil liberties — are strengthened in an attempt to prevent foreign terrorism.

The Bush administration’s pledge to ensure the nation’s security has larger implications for state democracy beyond these specific instances. Extending the logic of the ‘war on terrorism’ and considering the support from other Western nations, we arrive at a situation where security becomes the basic principle of state activity and the primary criterion of political legitimation. This has the potential to create an endless cycle where security and terrorism form a symbiotic relationship, each legitimising the other (‘infinite justice’). Furthermore, as Giorgio Agamben has noted, and as we have already seen, the notion of security is predicated on a state of exception — that of the state which must be secured. Constituting this exception enacts the depoliticisation of society, and is anathema to democracy, rather than consistent with it.

Simon Cooper is an Arena Publications editor.

The area behind the Taman Fatahgilla saw the worst riots and looting during the spree of May 14th after the deposition of Soeharto, back in mid 1998. The burnt out buildings sit right behind the square. I am looking directly out onto the Taman now. There is not a tourist in sight. These many months after the deposition, I have still been told to be very cautious here; anxiety already taxies towards me without a meter; it accompanies any foreigner who is cocky enough to set foot in a cab, or who thinks for a foolish or two moment that there should have been heroines in Conrad novels. The possibilities for a girl’s own annual in this town are remote. There has been a successful market for kidnapping sweaty foreigners…but the trade usually confines itself to business men reeking of old spice and aramis, brandishing suitcases that hold little else than a cellular phone.

Café Batavia is an elegant desolation, layered in white linen, polished timber and a staff with nothing to do. The whole place is scented with the traces of colonial evacuations. It had its time long ago and now nobody comes to scent the past. It could be the set for Red Dust or Casablanca; but the extras haven’t turned up. Oh wise extras! It is so hot I have to wipe a moustache of sweat from my face in order to navigate a Koffie Aroma. It has taken me about ten minutes to order it in faltering bahasa. In the gloom a lone caucasian man, absolutely enormous, sits a mile away consuming a vast yum cha, a blur of colour spinning past his gob on a lazy susan. The Chinese speaking giant is in emerald green, the same colour as the birdcage covers that float above me in a field of crinolines. The wooden ceiling is strangely silent; a sleeping aviary. Three tiny Indonesian women eat with him, and one older Indonesian man. Their hands move deftly over the wheel as it picks up speed. They are eating like they are running out of time. I drink and drip in the same way.

I look out to the heat and the light and when my eyes return to the inside, the white shirts of the staff fluoresce and die.

Out in the square, the dream is running amok.

Amuck, as a word, came down to English differently, like many things, too many to imagine, let alone count. The original spelling derived from the Indonesian dialect spoken about the port of Batavia, which still survives in the language and songs of the port. It was originally spelt A-m-o-k. But by the time the first and second traders had cruised back into British and Dutch ports, it had transmogrified into A-m-u-c-k.

Lifting a fine cup of something narcotic to your lips, pause for a moment and consider how this might have occurred.

These vowels and consonants were sensitive to cold. They were entirely stunned by the cooling of air over the larynx, as trading ships passed through the warmer seas of the Indian Ocean and on to the chill hem of the Atlantic. In this way the ‘o’ of amok came to sound less like the hollow knock of wood inside bamboo, than the low curtsey of a ‘u’ , ullulated in the back of Dutch and English palates.

This is one simple fable of origin that you might set against a hundred others. But as this one smells sweet and dangerous, I will tell it, whether it be true or not. What is true to say, is that in the beginning there was that problem of presuming things would always come down to English, as if this was as right and natural as filling ships’ hulls with spice and mineral money, and going to the trouble of moving them half a globe away on strung webs of longitude. The Dutch, as we have been taught, went to Asia to produce and buy at low prices, certain goods which yielded enormous profits in Europe. Chinese porcelain, for instance, could not be made in Europe, as the use of kaolin, or china clay was not yet known. European cloves and nutmeg, and also pepper, were so exclusive, that at the beginning of the seventeenth century, you could buy a large house for a small sack of cloves. That’s one hundred and fifty tubes of tooth paste, two hundred and twenty apple pies, one hundred gallons of mulled wine and the queasy smell of a million dental surgeries.

But the smell from the hulls was sure. Mapped and rounded. Giant cloves, nutty coffees, cinammon bark the size of tree trunks, large leaf teas and an endless abacus of peppercorns gave the ship its ballast, and all this kept dry by thin creaking belts of mahoganny. Sacks of kaolin had been mined to make small and delicate pottery; one half of the ship was packed with porcelain flour, fine as meringue dust. The officials on board were busy dreaming of hundreds of thin saucers rimmed with gold and celadon; the pouring of elixirs that would beget a long culture of rattling and stirring.

But coming back down to the English. It’s like a staircase, this ‘coming back down‘ thing. All the treads and risers of so-called linguistic inevitability. The lazy archeologies of the sound shift. But the idea of ‘coming back down‘ was a terrible assumption in itself. You might just as well have said: coffee and cloves came back down (or sailed back up) to the Northern Hemisphere differently, as if the action of temperature and shrieking wildlife, the exchange of promissory notes and the occasional descriptions of poets somehow ameliorated everything; made the huge shifting of resources appear as (un)natural and inevitable as an etymological shift.

Who can prove if flavour, words (or history for that matter) are really alterable by cold and the rhymes of a poet over time?………No-one really can……all we get to do is percolate the changes, without ever being able to guarantee the brew. Only occasionally will someone bother to think about the grains that got left behind in the boat.

We do know that coffee, for example, caused a great shock amongst pre-caffeinated society, catching fast in pale and trembly epiglottises, used to centuries of blandness. Such was the shock, that the imbiber seized upon stray granules as the most delicious irritation. One shot of coffee and words would tumble from mouths like pearls, as if they had been long and slow to form. Predictably, churches and newspapers initially condemned the stuff; preachers and landowners were the ones who usually did the talking…now, after two nips of the stuff, everyone was speaking up, breaking the silence, seizing the pulpit…and the force that drove them was not always a lucid one. Some feared that coffee, in particular would bring on the sort of revolution that only kings and princes could imagine.

The women in particular had been entirely sped up. By the drug, you see. And this speeding; this gentle agitation was important in itself, even if the new caffeinated trances pre-dated a great deal of writing on the subject of women speaking up and reflecting upon their dreams and lives. Formerly, in well to do houses at least, drugs had been the province of the men. But the men who had paid for the coffee now put down their newspapers in dismay. It was true to say that pineapples and coffee had done strange things to their women folk; the effect had been triple that of the tulip bulb mania that the Dutch had endured and survived with minimal loss of life.

For example, after two coffees, and seventeen acidic slivers of pineapple, the wealthier women of the olde worlde generally began to shake and shudder inside their whalebone. They felt their temperatures rise. They wanted to speak. To hold forth. To run amuck. To smell the pepperdur exude from working armpits in the fields. There were even some unsigned adventuresses who wanted to feel the day press and steam them down like a laundress, until their own fair skins jellied and blistered and needed to be cooled and soothed with banana leaf. In secret, they read the maps that were locked away in drawers, exhausting their husbands with their subtle geographical quizzing.

Amuck, in this sense, was a boon for proto-feminism. As were coffee, kaolin, cloves. The catalystic, cataclysmic fragrances of amok.

Clearly, amok was and is a variable phenomenon. The offficials of the European spice cartels ran amok and took what they wanted to. The memory of how they ran amok and what in the first place had chartered them on a course to amok, quickly faded, until memory itself had run amok and thence become a museum to amuck. Within the halls of industry, all violence, all greed had been forgotten or entered in the ledger as business. Bonded slaves were used on Javanese Nutmeg plantations up until the 1920′s but no-one remembers this now.

All we have been left with is a vague, inconsequential shaking of spice grinders over custard and whipped cream; a vague dusting at the back of the brain, something to do with the wordless knowledge that such a fragrance could never have originated out of the same soil that seeded juniper and holly. Custard was garnished with clove and nutmeg, and the nose and mind, for an instant, with the scent of worlds beyond. But over time, spiceworld became a sort of long term PR for a cloven amnesia.

In 1663 the word ‘amok’ was set into dictionaries as the idea of ‘a frenzied Malay.’ By 1672 this had given way to the notion of running amuck, i.e.’to run viciously in a frenzied quest for blood.’ In 1689, Pope recorded politely over coffee, that he was ‘too discreet to run amuck and tilt at all I meet.’ And Dryden chattily records the social type, who ‘runs an Indian muck at all he meets.’

In this way, the passage between amok and amuck came down to English; outwardly it appeared seamless and sociable. Inwardly, it ran amok with its own racist projections. And this is only one word, reinvented to conceal the linguistic layercake of centuries. The English seem to have been better than the Dutch at these swift concealments. But the Dutch, for example, still use the phrase, ‘It is as expensive as pepper’. Or, ‘het is Peperdur‘. Back in the seventeenth century, a small sack of clothes bought a narrow four story house in the port of Rotterdam. So traces can be found. Traces that contain the map and the mire, the hull the heyst; the word, heated or cooled according to the political recipe best served.

But as the dream suddenly re-enters the square, it seems the word has changed again. There is the scent of something else, something seldom bottled or set inside a hull for export. I drop my silver spoon and it clatters to the floor. The big man is up and the lazy susan arrested by the fine darting hands of the women. If food was roulette, this is it. But the round day, spinning away from easy consumption, has itself become a game; the women are its sudden dice. The women are Chinese Indonesian. The green man, who seems to be the part owner, ushers them out a back way. No-one is concerned with a caucasion woman, dipping her pen into a well of fear. The birds in the covered cages are awake and shrieking. A waiter is yanking off the cloths at speed, as if enlisting a small, feathered battallion to his aid.

And I have spilt the coffee. It stains the linen and seeps through to the floor boards. The Chinese waitress has been hidden in the cellar; but a boy still brings me some toast. A green feather floats softly down.

Outside in the square handmade weapons are being lifted up into a hot sail of sky. The policemen stand idly by, clove cigarettes between their fingers. The staff watch without moving. Then, there is a faint dusting at the back of my brain. I am in a frenzy, a frenzied caucasian, who needs to quickly find a halfway decent cab that will be able to get in and around the violence and secret me away to Kebayoran Baru, to the illusions of a guard’s hut and a ten foot concrete wall. I think, abstractedly: Queen Beatrix of Holland, the richest woman in the world, does she keep a cache of the first cinammon under her bed. Is it kept in a porcelain pot? Is the palace made of porcelain too? At what point do the guards become too well paid to dream of a perfect future? Is it true or false that they shoot peppercorns at the drug runners who arrive at the port of Amsterdam.

I tilt, I tilt at the staff, a frenzied caucasian; I beg them to get me the best cab they can. one with a meter and a driver who doesn’t dream. I tilt as hard and hysterically as I can. They look at me doubtfully. The fragments of shared language have suddenly fallen away; but all the meanings rise up; residual, different. Can we ever really know each other away from a context of food and drink? The theft and redemption of it. Its control and release. The language given over centuries to this very control and release?

In Indonesia the crisis price of rice is still more than sticky. And we still shift around the issues of sticky-by-implication, wondering what sort of speech to use.

There are long patches of sweat on my back and under my arms. Fear rattles in the throats of cups. Naivety suddenly seems to be a caffeinated, cloven thing.

‘ Please! A cab, a good cab if you can! Silakan Bu, Taksi bagus, sekarang!’

‘But, Ibu, you haven’t finished your coffee’, one of the girls says, in impeccable English, sweet as spice.

Silakan Ibu, kopi anda, belum minum minum!

Amanda Johnson teaches in the Department of English at the University of Melbourne

All that has now changed magnificently. Today, depression has become recognised as a key social problem now and for the future. Across the OECD, public health campaigns strive to increase awareness of the condition as an illness, to urge people to know the symptoms, to not feel shame about presenting to a GP or psychiatrist with the condition. Narratives of depression — from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation to Kay Redfield Jamieson’s An Unquiet Mind — were joined by depression subplots in mainstream TV shows such as Party of Five. In Australia, the focus on health initatives targetted five areas, one of which was depression, and this was followed up by the launch of Jeff Kennett’s mental health initiative on the area. Newspapers began to run series — such as the recent five-day extravaganza in the Age — which explored the phenomenon from all angles, and with impressive degrees of sophistication on issues such as psychotherapy versus drugs, depression and self-definition, and so on.

Suddenly it seemed everyone could quote the WHO observation — made in its Global Burden of Disease study — that depression was set to become a leading public health burden of developed countries by the year 2020. Everyone knew someone who was on Prozac, or one of the dozen or so other new generation anti-depressants. Everyone could talk about serotonin, the mysterious brain chemical that seemed to be running the show.

Indeed, as the nineties wore on, the new hyper-awareness of depression became alarming in itself. As the Prozac wave crested, it seemed as if every second person was on the drug, if only for a few months. Passages in people’s lives that would have hitherto been classed as being ‘down in the dumps’ were self-medicalised, and GPs reported many cases of people turning up and specifically requesting the drug. That the drug was helpful for many people whose depression could not be alleviated by psychotherapy alone — people whose neurochemistry had become ‘stuck’ — and for many hitherto intractable problems, such as high-repetitive obsessive-compulsive disorder (repeated hand-washing and the like), was not contested. What was in doubt was the many people who reported improvement for minor depressions that the drug was never intended to alleviate, and those who reported feeling ‘better than well’. The latter were from a depressive sub-group classed in the official manual as ‘dysphoric’ — those who had a persistent ‘endogenous’ unhappiness: one that was unrelated to external events. Many of these people — who had hitherto been regarded as substantially untreatable — responded ‘well’ to Prozac, and became substantially brighter. Many psychiatrists found this disturbing, since the definition of dysphoria as a medical condition was already controversial. Was it indeed a pathology, or simply one feature of the ecology of personalities that made up a complex society? What was being medicalised in a modernised US was a sort of personality type that would have been seen as appropriately ‘serious’ or possessed of ‘gravitas’ in another culture — such as a Scandinavian or Calvinist one. The capacity of Prozac to transform personality confounded the easy divisions that had hitherto been made between normal and pathological mood states. New anti-depressants came to market and it was realised that they treated different aspects of the overall state known as ‘depression’. Some were then marketed as a cure for ‘social phobia’ — the overwhelming hypersensitivity to negative aspects of social encounters. Many believed that such a targetting had less to do with a concerted attack on disease x or y than it did with the need to pseudo-differentiate products in a crowded market.

Yet as the prospect of a new and challenging relationship between psychiatric drugs and humanity was opening up — one in which it would be possible to shape one’s mood and personality by the use of different drugs in different combinations — the backlash began. Prozac was accused of being a contributing factor in a number of murders and suicides — charges which manufacturer Eli Lilly successfully defeated in court, or settled out of it. That the drug could tip a small number of users into sudden moods of suicidality had been acknowledged in original studies and was a documented side effect. Nevertheless the hype about the drug as a wonder substance with no drawbacks had drowned out persistent and increasing reports of frequent and widespread side effects — anxiety attacks, jitters, excess energy, sexual dysfunction and many others. By 1997 studies were beginning to show that the drug induced tolerance — meaning that discontinuation would create withdrawal effects and that increase of dosage might become necessary. In retrospect of course this is a bit of a no-brainer, so to speak — it should be obvious that any externalisation of a self-regulating system like neurotransmitters will make those drugs part of the whole system. Anyone regularly using anti-depressants is to some degree a chemical cyborg.

Yet such was the cultural desire for a ‘magic bullet’ that would blow away the blues that these obvious features of any medication were forgotten. Despite the bitter lesson of tranquilisers — the last magic bullet, and far more harmful than anti-depressants — the belief in an existential free lunch had become widespread.

In vain did psychotherapists point out that cognitive-behavioural psychotherapy (CBT) — in which the client is encouraged to gradually reflect on and change negative mental frameworks and assumptions — was found to be as effective as chemicals in the treatment of depression, and that the use of CBT with medication greatly diminished many of the emotive side-effects, such as increased anger. Not only was the cultural bias tilted towards chemicals, but the economic structure of the health industry made it difficult for people to get CBT — or any sort of psychotherapy — even if they wanted it. The vast majority of people presenting with depression would be treated by a GP and no other specialist, and the bulk-billed GP’s average consultation time is adjudicated at around 10 minutes. The increasing numbers of people presenting for depression began to wear many GPs down emotionally — the last thing many were willing or able to do was to ask people to open up further.

The state of play by the end of the 1990s was better in some respects — people were increasingly capable of identifying themselves as depressed and in need of assistance — but worse in others. The public health approach to the issue had constructed depression as a sort of emotional RSI, an inevitable by-product of contemporary living. The implicit assumption was that fundamental conditions of everyday life should remain unreflected upon, and the condition isolated and treated as an individual occurrence. While this was now more sophisticated than purely physical medicalisation — the literature now speaks of depression as a ‘biopsychosocial’ problem, and identifies issues such as social isolation, stress, and so on — it foreclosed inquiry into the meaning of an increase in depression as a social phenomenon.

Furthermore, a shift in the process of self-understanding had begun to occur, with people’s reading of themselves as ‘systematic’ beings — rather than as selves or souls — starting to become a dominant mode by which behaviour is interpreted. This was not a new phenomenon of course — everyone learns to recognise the effects upon themselves of, say, drunkenness, and to distinguish between their ‘intrinsic’ and chemically induced emotions — and this sort of self-understanding is vital within a limited scope. But to give oneself over to this sort of thinking about one’s whole personality is to make it impossible to interpret any given emotion as a meaningful event? Angry? That’s a rush of adrenalin. Stressed, nervous, hunched, tired — your cortisol is out of whack. Feeling low? No, you’re serotonin deficient.

It is the last of these conditions that has become so visible, and a shorthand for the spirit of the age. People such as Tom Peters, the management guru who authored In Search of Excellence, talk of themselves as serotonin-deficient, thus turning their existential state into a physical condition — a piece of bad luck, over which he has triumphed. That the fluid, unstable, chaotic structures that he advocates for corporations and society might have something to do with his ‘deficiency’ is not explored. More critically, the UK social psychologist Oliver James talks of a ‘serotonin-deficient’ society, pointing out that people would appear to be somewhat less happy overall than they were in 1950. James’s aim is to document the way in which many features of social life which maintained people’s baseline level of contentment — social closeness, more manual labour as a component of work — have been diminished, leading to higher levels of base dissatisfaction. Much of his criticism is directed towards the enthusiastic and unquestioning adoption of hi-tech solutions by the ‘third way’ Blair government. Nevertheless the formulation of ‘serotonin deficient’ is inherently technocratic, since the frequent response may be to ‘fix’ the serotonin levels as an act independent of any contextual life change.

Art critic Robert Hughes told everyone who interviewed him at the time of the release of American Visions, his mammoth book on American art, of the depressive collapse he had suffered prior to the composition of the book, and the manner in which he used anti-depressants (and CBT) to jack himself out of it. True, in earlier times he might have used something more dangerous and damaging, such as amphetamines, or the vast amounts of coffee that Balzac drank in order to churn out work for publishers, but such substances have more of an immediate and noticeable impact — the side effects are more noticeable and a separation between self and substance more easily established. In Hughes’s case the irony of using a chemical to make meaningful a project that should have been inherently meaningful — the deep contemplation of art — seems to have been bypassed. Any question that the depression may have been bound up with the project, and indicative of a need for deeper reflection, was lost. What, one might ask, is so visionary about art if chemical alteration is required to contemplate it? What meaning does it, or anything have?

The point being ignored here — and in the public health approach to depression — is that shifting the definition of one’s mood from being ‘miserable’ to being ‘depressed’ has become a category shift, in which two competing versions of human being are ranged against each other. In some cases this may be unquestionably and absolutely valid — a hypoglycemia sufferer may fall into a sudden and major depression due entirely to a drop in blood-sugar levels, and with no external existential causes. Interpreting one’s world in the light of one’s mood in such a case would clearly be disastrous and in error.

Yet such cases are comparatively rare in the vast swathe of people complaining of depression — and often used to avoid contemplation of existential causes. Most people who have fallen into a persistent state of bleakness and inability to feel pleasure may well have fallen into a state of depression that has a specific chemical correlative — that is to say their serotonin/adrenalin levels may no longer be responsive to good events in their life. (The analogy would be that of a motor falling below a certain rpm and stalling). On the other hand, they may be in a persistent circle of what cognitive-behavioural therapists called ‘crooked’ or ‘rigid’ thinking that leads them to think of their situation as hopeless and moves them towards the state of ‘learned helplessness’ that the psychologist Marvin Seligman defined as a root condition of depression. Or they may have childhood trauma, or a genetic predisposition, or any combination of these.

The core fact is that to invite someone to recategorise themselves as ‘depressed’ is to ask them to recategorise themselves from subjecthood to objecthood. In other words the response to a condition whose principle characteristic is the absence of meaning is to have the person redefine themselves as a thing, as a point of relationship between different systems — social, chemical, linguistic, etc.

This criticism has been made before, by writers such as R.D. Laing and the anti-psychiatric movement in the 1960s. But much of that work came to be seen as no longer useful due to the excessive claims that it made for a totally humanistic approach that had no biological component. The later tendency of such writers to sometimes celebrate ‘schizophrenia’ as an excessively sane response to insane social conditions was also taken up by its opponents. Despite the fact that Laing and others never ceased to insist that mental illness was frequently a tormenting condition that was in need of alleviation, the general reaction to all things sixties that set in in the late seventies swept any form of critical psychiatry into the tidybin of history. Increased findings of possible evidence of a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia — the jewel in the crown of psychiatry — gave medical and systemic models a crucial increase in legitimacy. Although many of the insights of Laing and others into the ‘politics of experience’ were incorporated into diagnosis and the practice of the psychotherapeutic session, the broader criticism of diagnosis as a political and social act was forgotten.

In the rush to establish depression as a social problem to be recognised and addressed, the surrender of full personhood has been encouraged for a variety of reasons, credible and otherwise. Pundits such as Lewis Wolpert, author of the book and TV series Malignant Sadness, have mounted substantial campaigns to frame depression as an ‘illness’, ostensibly to relieve the sense of shame felt by those who see it as individual weakness and failure. The line is that it can ‘happen to anyone’ and that it is important to pass through the experience as efficiently as possible — to cut it out of one’s life as one would remove a diseased appendix from the body. Such an approach locks in easily to a ‘human capital’ approach to self, especially in the intellectually trained professions where the minimum level of cognition and focus required for effective performance may be higher than in other spheres. The intellectually trained worker is thus a valuable piece of equipment whose continued functioning must be ensured at all costs. Increasingly businesses have become aware of the need for a flexible approach to depression and stress, largely because they’ve been losing too many highly trained and experienced staff. The intellectual property lawyer who bails out to open a muffin shop, the IT genius who takes off to ride around Australia … twenty years ago ‘burn out’ was largely restricted to professions such as advertising and social work, where the work practice entailed free-form creative and emotional responses being channelled into specific and routinised tasks. Increasingly the management of the psychological mechanisms of individual workers has become a vital task in managing the production process and business has sought to incorporate the therapeutic model into human capital management. In 1999, for example, the Business Council of Great Britain devoted much of its lobbying budget and campaigning time to persuading the government to retain tax deductible status for stress counselling and psychotherapy for work-related issues, both for the individual employee and the company providing them. Mental health had become as significant an economic issue as trade union legislation, tax regimes and the like.

The current Australian initiative is in the same mode. There was an initial fuss when it was discovered that major pharmaceutical corporations were possibly to be involved in the funding of the inquiry — in the same way that they’re involved in the funding of numerous conference and research programs across the psychiatric field, often as not focussed on the relative efficacy of chemical and non-chemical treatments — and this link was severed. Nevertheless, the personnel of the inquiry will predispose it to models of depression which are systemic and non-contextual, rather than those which have an existential and social-historical perspective. Aside from athlete Nova Peris-Kneebone and actor Garry McDonald — the latter there due to his much publicised breakdown — the personnel of the initiative is tilted towards the medical and the psychiatric. There is no philosopher, no social theorist or sociologist, no historian to give a more reflective and wide-ranging consideration of the multidimensional social phenomenon.

Whatever more immediate commercial motives some of the participants in the initiative may have, there is no doubt of the sincerity of the majority of its participants in their desire to address the issue. Yet it is precisely because their thinking about the issue is constrained within the ‘biopsychosocial’ model — depression as social problem, rather than depression as social symptom — that such initiatives threaten to be more about increasingly sophisticated processes of social control, rather than liberation. Any genuine inquiry into the complex social phenomenon known as ‘depression’ would generate a degree of reflection on social life that would question the widest possible range of assumptions.

For if there were to be any short answer to the question of the causes of the ‘depression epidemic’ the answer would be ‘just about everything’. Many of the particular features of contemporary life in information-industrial societies serve to take human beings out of their comfort zone, from sunlight deprivation to lack of muscular exercise to the increase in periods of isolation throughout the day. The neurobiological mood maintenance system evolved to predispose humans to seek out these things, and contemporary life has removed them. Closed systems of meaning — religion being the primary example — that framed life and gave a sense of imminent presence to its most chaotic aspects — have collapsed under the impact of the scientific world view. Without such legitimating overviews — and in the absence of a ‘heroic’ style left movement which would give meaning to struggle — poverty and social exclusion have come to be seen as mere and total deprivation, an unameliorable helplessness and denial of the pleasures and powers of a consumer society. The extension of the market into every aspect of life has drained everyday life of much of its particular and sensual character …

One could go on with this, but there is little need. The particular critiques of contemporary life have been widespread and generally known since the 1960s, yet they’ve received the ‘Chesterton’ treatment — found difficult and not tried, honoured more in the breach than the observance. To read a book like Earth in the Balance — Al Gore’s passionate plea for a sustainable world and its trenchant and detailed critique of instrumental rationality, you would think that the Frankfurt School had finally found their political champion — were you not aware of Gore’s record as an unfailing agent of US corporate power across the globe. The shelves of self-help books take for granted the cultural problem of the collapse of religion and the rich structures of tradition, yet authorise the belief that such meanings can be rediscovered by the use of the particular artifacts and atomised rituals of such practices. In other words it is the limitations of the tradition of classical sociology — including Marxism, and the critique it offered — that now stand in the way of the cultural dilemma of which the ‘depression epidemic’ is the harbinger.

Depression may look like an individual predicament, but this is clearly the surface structure of a deeper event — the collapse of social meaning within the depressed person. That can and does occur in most cultures. All cultures, even the most myth-girdled of kinship societies, have some concept of something like depression or spiritual disturbance — often rendered as someone ‘not being in their right head’ or a similar sort of phrase.

What may be new now is that the collapse is occuring both within and without, for larger numbers of people. If people are increasingly less bound up in each other — in networks of obligation, co-operation, familial relation — and less bound up with specific meaningful places and things, then the burden of making a meaningful world falls back wholly on the self, who is obliged to be the point at which a whole world is held together. This is now taken as second nature by most people, and an era in which one was defined largely by class, church, nation, association, order, brotherhood and so on falls away. The oft-heard phrase — ‘only you know what’s right for you’ — is a measure of this attitude, and of the contradiction it carries within it. If the only thing that makes the meaningful world for person X is that person X has chosen it from the remorseless stream of images, persons and possibilities that characterise contemporary life, then person X is caught in a process of diminishing returns. In such a precarious existential situation, the slightest stumble — a lost job, a failed relationship, the normal disappointments of everyday life — can precipitate a fall into the abyss.

The contemporary person has less of a ‘ground’ to them, and when they fall they’re more likely to fall for ever. Hence the newest and most numerous victims of the ‘depression epidemic’ are those whose selves are under construction — pre-adolescents of the ten-to-twelve-year-old range, for whom a number of anti-depressants are now manufactured in orange and lemon flavours. This is the substructure of depression as a social form, and why adversity and difficulty increasingly present themselves to people not as hardship, or as ill-fortune, or as oppression, or as woe, but as partial or total subjective collapse and shutdown.

Furthermore, the cultural cycle can be a vicious one. As more people commit themselves to the chemical technology of anti-depressants or the social technology of psychotherapy, the degree to which encounters between persons are actual encounters between situated, authentic people responding to their present world diminishes. The sense that the other may not be a present person, but a chemically transformed series of reactions adds to the general sense of social non-meaning. Once again, this is something that people understand as part of the round of social life with more visible drugs, à la the expression ‘it’s the beer talking’. The idea that psychotherapy is a ‘social technology’ is less well understood. Clearly some forms of therapy open people up to a more real and authentic relation to the world. Others — such as neurolinguistic programming (NLP) — rely on changing people’s behaviour in order to adjust them socially, without opening out to a less circumscribed relationship to the world. In that respect, the division between chemical and social techniques for social adjustment can be seen as partial. They are both processes for putting the world ‘in brackets’ as a way of dealing with problems of meaning associated with it.

The number of people for whom this process is necessary has been vastly overstated — in a social debate about depression in which every aspect of the condition has been thoroughly worked over, except that of a widespread and growing feeling of meaninglessness.

Marxist approaches — from the visionary social analysis of the 1844 Manuscripts through the sixties works of Marcuse and Fromm — have emphasised that the subjective ‘alienation’ felt by many people is an expression of the ‘objective’ alienation — of labour and self — that occurs within capitalism. But the hope that a society in which alienated labour has been replaced by free life activity will have substantially solved problems of personhood and meaning is a hope based on the assumption of a ‘whole’ human being who will leap, entire and of herself, from the alienated shell of the distorted and crushed personalities produced by capitalism. In fact a post-scarcity communist society would find the creation of meaningful frameworks of social and psychological life one of its major challenges. Marxist social critics rightly accuse psychotherapy of adjusting real human beings to an unalienated world. Yet the Marxist critique too — one that has become a staple of mainstream Sunday colour magazine treatments of such issues — fails to go deeply enough into the way our selfhood is put together by deep, abiding and irreplaceable forms of obligation and social connection. These social forms could not be maintained within a society whose sole maxim was that ‘the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all’.

Such rarefied discussion might seem abstruse in the face of this ‘biopsychosocial’ phenomenon. But if the WHO figures are correct and depression is trending upward in all postmodernising societies, then that discussion cannot be avoided forever. The scattered and fragmented social phenomenon of depression will become a, perhaps the, major social phenomenon to be addressed. Just as the natural world became the ‘environment’ in the 1960s — at the point when it was on the way to ceasing to be any sort of environment capable of sustaining life — so the ‘inner nature’ of social and psychological life will become the focus of sustained social attention when it is starting to become unsustainable on a wide scale. Like salinity carried in a river system, the problem of social meaning in a culture of hyperindividualism and disconnection deposits grain by grain until one day it is suddenly clear that the land has become salt.