After an extended break from writing, I thought it would be an opportune time to begin again. I am currently at the ACRE residency in Steuben, WI. For more information on that check it here:
I’m going to try to post a little bit here and there. This particular return to the blog-medium was prompted by this quote from the NYT (“G.O.P. Seizes on Mosque Issue Ahead of Elections,” 16 Aug. 2010):
‘“Ground zero is hallowed ground to Americans,” Elliott Maynard, a Republican trying to unseat Representative Nick J. Rahall II, a Democrat, in West Virginia’s Third District, said in a typical statement. “Do you think the Muslims would allow a Jewish temple or Christian church to be built in Mecca?”’
This is a statement of astounding narrow-mindedness. It is such a strange package of assumptions and unclarified prejudices that, although I’m sure my effort will go unappreciated by Mr. Maynard, I must assume the task of drawing out some questions that the quote raises.
Let’s start with hallowed ground. Before getting into the issue of what constitutes sacred territory in a contemporary Republic, I think the concept itself is actually rather self-evident within the discourse and representations of American History. Think Gettysburg Address (“we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”) What is interesting is the very un-Lincoln proposition that a mosque would somehow impinge upon this sacredness, that such sacred ground is in fact quite vulnerable to our not-so-poor “power to add or detract.” It turns out this hallowed ground does not in fact transcend our contemporary politics — it is all too dependent, it seems, on sound-byte political culture.
Turning now to the question of “hallowed ground,” this is in fact an incredibly bizarre claim to make about downtown real estate. The original towers, products of a capitalization of space which replaces place specificity with the abstract figures of square feet and their monetary value, by their symbolic destruction seem to have restored place-hood to the World Trade Center. While such tensions always exist between space and place, it is this particularly capitalized version of space and its sudden, traumatic conversion to sacred place that dramatizes the tension.
This is, oddly, Baudrillard’s argument almost exactly regarding the destruction of the towers — that terrorists, rather than subscribing to the logic of capitalist value, engaged in the “gift giving” logic of potlatch. They gave us death; we must return in kind. Baudrillard’s argument revolves around how the market activity which is global and perpetual was momentarily halted by the destruction of the towers — and it seems that this halting has in fact turned into a full retreat as far as the space of the towers themselves are concerned. The sacred has a way of eliminating profane origins, and we should not forget that, to some extent, the transformation of the towers into sacred space is within the logic of the “holy war.” Such consecration can be a powerful symbolic tool, and we should not forget that what “ground zero” is to Mr. Maynard is what Waco, Texas is to many potential domestic terrorists. Perhaps Lincoln was simply being prudent in refusing responsibility for consecrating Gettysburg — sacred places have a powerful and unpredictable effect in symbolic war.
The latter half of Mr. Maynard’s statement is much less subtle in its implications, but equally strange: “the Muslims” are suddenly an undifferentiated population; they are furthermore clearly constructed as “the enemy,” and the implication is that they are collectively responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center; and, most paradoxically, we should not allow them to build on our sacred ground because they would not allow us to do so. The passage systematically invents the enemy, identifies him as the enemy, and then exhorts us to do as the enemy does: invent and persecute an enemy. Mr. Maynard here has become the perfect mirror for holy war; he reproduces exactly the logic of his own invented nemesis. Perhaps this is inevitable — if “the Muslim” is so much a product of Mr. Maynard’s imagination, it is hardly surprising that its logic is his own.
Carl Schmitt, the most prominent legal theorist of the Third Reich, is the pole star for such discussions: construction of “the enemy” was, in his formulation, the very essence of the political act. The enemy, as opposed to the competitor, was not simply a foe with whom one struggled for position or resources, but one who was existentially different — whose very essence and existence were a threat to the polity’s way of life. Schmitt inverted Clausewitz’s dictum of war as an extension of politics — war is the telos of politics. What is so infuriating about Mr. Maynard’s comments, aside from its ignorance and prejudice, is that he has failed even on Schmitt’s terms, because he has become the enemy. Islam, as Mr. Maynard constructs it here, is not in its essence a threat to the American way of life, because by his own logic it is equivalent to the American way of life: “they” are an intolerant society of religious zealots, and so are we.
