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After the event: Don DeLillo's White Noise and September 11 narratives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2009

RICHARD DEVETAK
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Abstract

In this article I enquire into the conceptualisation and construction of the event, a topic much neglected in International Relations, but one which has become increasingly central to recent debates in continental philosophy. I juxtapose the fictional event depicted in Don DeLillo's brilliant novel, White Noise, with the non-fictional event of September 11. I suggest that apprehending any kind of socially or politically significant event, depends on narrative. To take the argument further, I argue that narrative is a crucial device by which we moderns (and postmoderns) actually experience such events and social reality.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 795 - 815
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2009

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References

1 Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. Stephen Halliwell (London: Duckworth, 1987) and The Politics, trans T. A. Sinclair and Trevor J. Sinclair (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992).

2 Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), p. 4.

3 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

4 François Furet, ‘From Narrative History to Problem-Oriented History’, in Geoffrey Roberts (ed.), The History and Narrative Reader (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 270.

5 Ibid.

6 The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Authorised Edition, (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2004), see pp. xv, 339 on the importance of narrative, and p. 340 on the historical reconstruction.

7 David Campbell, ‘Time is Broken: The Return of the Past in the Response to September 11’, Theory and Event, 5:4 (2002), §5.

8 Roland Bleiker, ‘Retracing and Redrawing the Boundaries of Events: Postmodern Interferences with International Theory’, Alternatives, 23 (1998), pp. 471–97 and p. 480.

9 Hidemi Suganami, On the Causes of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 145–7.

10 David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 34.

11 Among the works on literature that I have benefited greatly from reading are: J. Hillis Miller, On Literature (London: Routledge, 2002), and ‘Narrative’, in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds), Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Simon Critchley, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (London: Routledge, 2005). The exchange between Gerard Holden and Roland Bleiker was also very illuminating. Gerard Holden, ‘World Literature and World Politics: In Search of a Research Agenda’, Global Society, 17:3 (2003), pp. 229–52; Roland Bleiker, ‘Learning from Art: A Reply to Holden's “World Literature and World Politics”’, Global Society, 17:4 (2003), pp. 415–28. Also excellent is Bleiker's ‘The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory’, Millennium, 30:3 (2001), pp. 509–33.

12 Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Picador, 1984).

13 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 534.

14 Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983); Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), and Anne Norton, Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

15 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, pp. 124–5.

16 Norton, Republic of Signs, p. 25.

17 DeLillo, White Noise, pp. 100, 155, 241.

18 J. Peter Euben, Platonic Noise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 66.

19 Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage, 1994), p. 15.

20 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 12.

21 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 12. When quoting direct speech from the novel, I retain DeLillo's double quotation marks and dispense with single quotation marks.

22 Ibid., p. 13.

23 Euben, Platonic Noise, p. 163.

24 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 139.

25 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).

26 The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 20. FAA stands for the Federal Aviation Administration. NEADS stands for Northeast Air Defense Sector, one of the three sectors under North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).

27 Quoted in Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-Terrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 30.

28 The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 35.

29 Ibid., p. 40.

30 Thomas Keenan, ‘Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television)’, PMLA, 117:1 (2002), p. 113.

31 Ibid., pp. 113–4.

32 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 129.

33 Ibid., p. 120.

34 Michael J. Shapiro, ‘Textualizing Global Politics’, in James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro (eds), International / Intertextual Relations: Postmodern readings of World Politics (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989), p. 11.

35 DeLillo, White Noise, pp. 135, 128.

36 Ibid., p. 110.

37 Ibid., p. 111.

38 Ibid., pp. 111, 113.

39 Ibid., p. 117.

40 Paul Patton, ‘The World Seen from Within: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Events’, Theory and Event, 1:1 (1997), §10.

41 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

42 Patton, ‘The World Seen from Within’, §13.

43 Ibid., §20.

44 DeLillo, White Noise, pp. 120, 153.

45 Patton, ‘The World Seen from Within’, §7.

46 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 174.

47 Ibid., p. 150.

48 Ibid., p. 151.

49 Ibid., p. 111.

50 Ibid., p. 116.

51 Ibid., p. 125.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid., p. 126.

54 Ibid., p. 162.

55 James Rosenau and Mary Durfee, Thinking Theory Thoroughly: Coherent Approaches to an Incoherent World (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1995), p. 3.

56 Ronald Krebs and Jennifer Lobasz, ‘Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony, Coercion, and the Road to War in Iraq’, Security Studies, 16:3 (2007), pp. 409–451 at p. 413.

57 George W. Bush, ‘Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People’, 20 September 2001. Available at {http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/print/20010920-8.html}

58 Jonathan Schell, A Hole in the World: An Unfolding Story of War, Protest and the New American Order (New York: Nathan Books, 2004), ch. 1.

59 Paul Kelly, ‘The American Ascendancy’, The Weekend Australian, 15–16 December 2001.

60 Jacques Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides – A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 96.

61 Jenny Edkins, ‘Forget Trauma? Responses to September 11’, International Relations, 16:2 (2002), pp. 243–56 at p. 246.

62 Quoted in Campbell, ‘Time is Broken’, §1.

63 ‘Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People’.

64 Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), p. 62.

65 Ibid., p. 37.

66 Cynthia Weber, Imagining America at War: Morality, Politics, and Film (London: Routledge, 2006), ch. 1.

67 ‘Remarks by the President after Two Planes Crash into World Trade Center’, Emma Booker Elementary School, Sarasota, Florida, September 11, 2001. Available at {http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911.html}

68 The 9/11 Commission Report, p. 35.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid., pp. 288–9.

71 Krebs and Lobasz, Fixing the Meaning', p. 413; Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism, p. 29.

72 Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism, p. 29.

73 Ibid., p. 38.

74 Cited in Ibid., p. 39.

75 ANZUS stands for Australia, New Zealand and US, an alliance formed in 1951.

76 George W. Bush, ‘Remarks by the President in His Address to the Nation’, 11 September 2001. Available at {http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html}.

77 George W. Bush, ‘President Delivers State of the Union Address’, 29 January 2002. Available at {http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html}. Also see George W. Bush, ‘Remarks by the President Upon Arrival’, 16 September 2001 for an example of such references. Available at {http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916-2.html}.

78 Peter Singer, The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2004).

79 Cited in Renee Jeffery, 'Review Article: Beyond Banality? Ethical Responses to Evil in Post-September 11 International Relations, International Affairs, 81:4 (2005), pp. 175–186 at p. 180.

80 Singer, The President of Good and Evil, p. 2.

81 Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), p. 3.

82 Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity’, p. 86.

83 Ibid.

84 Edkins is cited in Campbell, ‘Time is Broken’, §1.

85 Campbell, ‘Time is Broken’, §1.

86 Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity’, p. 90.

87 Ibid.

88 On the errors associated with declaring a war on terror, see Michael Howard, ‘What's in a name? How to Fight Terrorism’, Foreign Affairs, 81:1 (2002), pp. 8–13.

89 Cited in Woodward, Bush at War, p. 43.

90 For the terrorists, according to President Bush, ‘[t]here are no rules’. See George W. Bush, ‘Guard and Reserves “Define Spirit of America”’, 17 September 2001. Available at {http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010917-3.html}

91 Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Nicholas Rengger, ‘Apocalypse Now? Continuities or Disjunctions in World Politics After 9/11’, International Affairs, 82:3 (2006), pp. 539–52.

92 Campbell, ‘Time is Broken’, §17.

93 Ibid., §12.

94 Arundhati Roy, The Algebra of Infinite Justice (London: Flamingo, 2002), p. 207.

95 For a devastating critique of Elshtain see Anthony Burke, ‘Against the New Internationalism’, Ethics and International Affairs, 19:2 (2005), pp. 73–89. See also Elshtain's feeble and ill-tempered response, ‘Against the New Utopianism’, Ethics and International Affairs, 19:2 (2005), pp. 91–6.

96 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2004), pp. 12–3.

97 With the exception of a few conspiracy theorists.

98 Elshtain, Just War, p. 11.

99 Ibid., p. 14–16.

100 Ibid., p. 15.

101 Ibid., p. 9.

102 Elshtain deals with Camus' story on, pp.11–12.

103 I say ‘quasi-Manichaean’ because, as Richard Bernstein points out, ‘the original Manichaeans believed that God is coeternal with Satan. Consequently, there can be no final victory over evil’. Richard Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Religion and Politics Since 9/11 (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), p. 48.

104 On plot and story see amongst others, Richard Kearney, On Stories (London: Routledge, 2002), ch. 11; J. Hillis Miller, ‘Narrative’, in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds), Critical terms for Literary Study (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1995); and Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), ch. 2, Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), ch. 1.

105 Euben, Platonic Noise, p. 79.

106 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 305.

107 Ibid., pp. 312, 84.

108 Ibid., p. 294.

109 Michel de Montaigne, Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 390.

110 Ibid., p. 1239.

111 Euben, Platonic Noise, p. 146.

112 DeLillo, White Noise, p. 315.

113 Ibid., p. 193.

114 Ibid., p. 311.

115 Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 230. Also see Lawrence Freedman, ‘War in Iraq: Selling the Threat’, Survival, 46:2 (2004), pp. 7–49 at p. 16.

116 For judicious accounts of the fanciful catalogue of claims made to rationalise war against Iraq, see Freedman, ‘War in Iraq’, Halper and Clarke, America Alone, ch. 7, Alex Danchev, ‘The Reckoning: Official Inquiries and the Iraq War’, Intelligence and National Security, 19:3 (2004), pp. 436–66, and Seymour M. Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), Part V.

117 Woodward, Bush at War, p. 53.

118 Lance Morrow, ‘The Case for Rage’, Time, 13 September 2001.

119 Howard, ‘What's in a Name?’, p. 9. Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker, ‘Emotions in the War on Terror’, in Alex J. Bellamy, Roland Bleiker, Sara E. Davies and Richard Devetak (eds), Security and the War on Terror (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 61.

120 Michael V. Ure, ‘Stoic Comedians: Nietzsche and Freud on the Art of Arranging One's Humours’, Nietzsche-Studien, 34, (2005), pp. 186–216 at 191.

121 Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Trans. Robin Campbell (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2004), letter XVIII.

122 Adam Roberts, ‘The “War on Terror” in Historical Perspective’, Survival, 47:2 (2005), pp. 101–30, at p. 118.