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“Fahrenheit 9/11 and the ‘Demands’ of Media and Cultural Pedagogy”

Rich Cante

Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies

Department of Communication Studies

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In-Progress Draft Delivered at Rhetoric, Politics, Ethics Conference

“Anachronicles of Terror” Panel

Ghent University, Belgium

23 April 2005

Preliminaries:

1. Please understand that this is very much a work-in-progress, since I’m just completing a totally separate book manuscript.

2. Later this summer, it should become the first article—though an unusually textually focused (and somewhat narrowly focused) one—from a much broader, distinct book-length project about Ethics and Recent Critical Theory in general, with particular attention to issues related to ‘sexuality.’

3. To explain the use of Italian-Americanish (semi-)neologisms here, I also need to say upfront that the below is beginning to explore linguistic and conceptual connections between “stupidity” as a form of ethical relationality, Italian-Americans (given the lower Manhattan connection as well as certain autobiographical ones), fatness, Michael Moore and Lila Lipscomb (a subject of Fahrenheit 9/11, who lost a son in Iraq after professionally urging Michigan High Schoolers, including her own kids, to join the military as a good financial option), 9/11/01 as event, the lingering problems of populist aestheticism in the U.S., and whatever’s left of “historicity” for the time being.

I.

He is entombed by layers and layers and layers of phantasy. Nonetheless, he’s still on the loose. The father.

My father. His father. Which father? Il padre. Il Papa even. Il padrone?

Forget ethics. Is this about responsibility? Forget rhetoric. Is this about the truth? (That is the old quip, right? That rhetoric is philosophy sans all the questions about truth.) Forget politics. Can I forget politics?

Can I forget fairness even?

Is this fair?

Do I get to ask this? Do I get to get away with asking this: There is so much more to be asked? Can I get away from asking this?

Is there anything else for me to ask?

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II.

In her profoundly dumb and brilliant 2002 book Stupidity, Avital Ronell maps various registers of ethical anxiety—that is, various sectors of the world—into which stupidity, in her very carefully chosen words, throws us.

“If ignorance holds out some hope that you can get to know it,” Ronell writes, “not so stupidity.”

The particular throwness of stupidity relates precisely to the degree to which it is UNCALLED FOR, ever reopening a quasi-caesura of ethical relationality.

“Where politics intersects with ethics, the question emerges of where to draw the line, if there is one, of responsibility…To be what it is, responsibility must always be excessive, beyond bounds, viewed as strictly unaccomplished …[THAT IS, FORMALLY UNACCOMPLISHED—RC]… the stupid, idiotic, puerile, slow-burn destruction of ethical being that, to my mind, can never be grounded in certitude or education or lucidity or prescriptive obeisance (Ronell, Stupidity, 19).

Which brings me back yet again, perhaps inevitably and/or impossibly, to the father.

Ronell writes:

Stupidity is an engagement—offering only “faithful” renditions of the past”—a condition of war to which those who are not stupid turn a blind eye: they fail to see the devastation wrought by the blind pilots of the stupid revolution, a permanent revolution. IT HAS BEEN FROM THE START A POLITICAL PROBLEM HAILING FROM THE FATHER. [Emphasis mine.] Incapable of renewing or overcoming, the stupid subject has low oedipal energy: he has held onto the ideas, the relics and dogmas transmitted in his youth by his father. Unwilling to have surpassed and suppressed that father, the stupid one stays on the side of death: his head, limited and dead, reflects a heart equally dead, small. Those who are allied with stupidity fight with patriotic fervor for preserving the inherited legacy of their forefathers, deploying all possible weapons of malice and stupidity to ward off the enemies of ancestral rights. Thus every new discovery robs the stupid of their certainty, peace and pride, destroying the edifice of their knowledge and arming them with rage against the innovator.”

I will imagine myself no innovator. I long for what Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit might call a mostly “non-interpretive” relation to Ronell and to stupidity in general, whatever the odds against that. For there remains, after all, what Ronell calls “the unavoidable challenge to thinking the depressing conjunction of stupidity and politics—a conjunction that remains to this day irrefutable.” And I long for precisely the opposite vis-à-vis Moore and his film: since it seems so clear there’s so little that’s intelligently and usefully articulable about it, especially now.

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III.

Christopher Hitchens. I can’t believe I now cite Christopher Hitchens, to boot! But his was perhaps the most stupidly eloquent appraisal of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. “It’s crap,” he said again and again on the chatter-head forums like Charlie Rose’s television show. Though he did add this in print: “It’s a sinister exercise in moral frivolity.”

A little more wordy was the New York Press’s capsule review of the film. The New York Press is a free local Village Voice knock-off that I one day picked up in the East Village in the summer of 2004—the very same supposedly “recently-historically alternative bohemian” neighborhood (this was across avenue B too!) where, a few years before, some of us couldn’t have been more shocked to see American flags flying in the weeks after September 11th 2001.

Manna for anti-Bush liberals who embrace Michael Moore’s highly biased cheap

shots, thinking his movies make up for the failures of the mainstream news media. Moore is in way over his head, trying to turn the undeniable mess of Bush’s Iraq invasion into partisan comedy. The movie demonstrates that the double whammy of 9/11 and the war in Iraq has so rattled modern moral conscience that American self-hatred is the new documentary mode.

Self-hatred? What is apparently being referenced here is the tetrahedron—or at least that (how many sides does a tetrahedron have again?)— of ostensible “stupidity” that structures this text. This is most obviously and most banally related Bush himself of course, with all those assertions that sometimes even approach a Koan-like state of what can seem like enlightened poetry. About Iraq, he says in Moore’s film: “Of course they are not happy they are occupied. But I wouldn’t be happy if I were occupied either.” But also, there is Moore himself, on some level identifying with Bush as his doppelganger, as the double of his thought, the other fool—as one of my students very adeptly recently pointed out. The second fool who continually issues the key word of polemic according to Walter Benjamin: “No.”

[Cf. the ending of Moore’s film in particular, with Bush’s odd “fool me twice, don’t get fooled again” accidental (?) mixing of metaphors, Moore’s closing assertion that at that moment—for once—he agreed with the Prez, and the subsequent use of yet more rock-and roll (Neil Young) over the closing credits.]

In fact, Moore’s appeal to the (of course manufactured) realm of the commonsensical, and the obvious, perhaps naturally approaches what he represents as the administration’s own aims and operations. In the sequence about the Fresno peace activist group who have been unknowingly infiltrated by the local police, for instance—a sequence that “argues” against the Patriot Act—the film emphasizes the fact that they eat cookies and wear tie-dyes and speak “mildly” to one another, as well as to the camera. “Do these people look guilty to you?,” Moore asks his viewer, implying that if innocence is self-evident so, it would seem, might be its opposites. Being LEFT (as opposed to RIGHT), so to speak, thus gets inscribed as a publicly visible, though paradoxically essentially private. moral stance: precisely one constant complaint of American and European radical politics since the 1960s. The childlike innocence in which Moore cloaks his own voice-over narration of the film—“Was it all just a dream?” being the opening line, recalling the wide-eyed nostalgic wonder of childhood viewings of The Wizard of Oz—of course only compounds this problem about “observation” in general.

But filing out the tetrahedron of “idiocy” here is Lila Lipscomb herself. She, in the typical manner of Moore’s somewhat “anti-liberal humanist” use of his subjects in his other films, is presented tearfully uttering such lines about her soldier son who was killed in Iraq as “I want him to be alive…but I can’t make him alive.” (Remember that she’s a jobs officer in Flint who has already admitted in the film to encouraging locals to join the military as a career option, including two of her own children.) This last is a line that, to paraphrase something my friend and colleague Angelo Restivo once said, at least potentially reduces feeling-in-history to the moral/aesthetic sentimentality of the daytime television talk show: overweight people talking tearily about “getting your life back on track” and other notions of that sort. Though here’s there’s a supplemental clause of negation (…”but I can’t make him alive”) that only further redoubles the phantasmatics of the initial wish. Which leaves us, in sum, at least at the quadruple.

But additionally—and perhaps finally, especially given American pragmatism and the unfortunate but still-not-gone influence of the somewhat arcane idea of “effects” on all writing about moving-image textuality—there is Moore‘s audience. In the passages back and forth between incompetence and something else (stupidity, imbecility, let’s mark it with these terms tentatively) that are textually recorded and recoded in this case, it’s the correspondences between truth-telling buffoon/fool, king, wronged subject, and witness that now appear perhaps most analytically troublesome here. From the dispersion of the pedagogical/not-quite-pedagogical scene that opens the film (Bush “reading” My Pet Goat)—with the not-quite-teacher/not-quite-learner that is Bush at the not-quite-center of things—Moore, Lipscomb, and their “audience” get relayed into a prismatic set of complications about what a text is and what a text does. That is, about the value of aesthetics as opposed to the value of textual “effectivity” and, by implication, historicity. (Believe it or not, Moore stated on camera at the Cannes film festival—and this is included on the DVD’s “supplemental materials” section—that his intention is ultimately just “to make good films.” If they help change things too, great). Prismatic dispersions about the limits of aesthetic populism, in other words—as well as those of other forms of populism, limits already at play in Moore’s critique of the liberal humanist assumptions of the 70s political documentary project: a critique that has been controversial since his early film Roger and Me. Which is nothing to necessarily shake a stick at, even at risk of potentially seeming “callous.”

[***ANECDOTE ABOUT FILMIC DOCUMENTARY FORM: I SHOWED SILVERLAKE LIFE, A VERY GRAPHIC “POLICTICAL INTERVENTIONIST VIDEO DIARY” ABOUT A GAY COUPLE DYING OF AIDS TO MY UNDERGRADS AT CHAPEL HILL A FEW YEARS AGO. SOME OF THEM HAD A SORT OF PUNKILY HOSTILE RESPONSE THAT I SEE AS MORE THAN JUST SIMPLE POSTURING, AND AS SORT OF REFRESHING IN A VERY ODD AND SOMEWHAT SURPRISING WAY: “WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT THEM SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY ARE DYING OF AIDS?” “I DON’T PARTICULARLY LIKE, OR CARE ABOUT, MOST OF THE PEOPLE I MEET IN THE COURSE OF MY EVERYDAY LIFE—WHATEVER TERRIBLE THINGS THEY ARE ALL STRUGGLING WITH.” ETC., ETC.. THEY WERE ESSENTIALLY SAYING THAT THE CAMERA’S “LIBERAL HUMANIST GAZE” IN POST-SEVENTIES AMERICAN INDEPENDENT DOCUMENTARY IS THE WORST KIND OF “CORPORATE SHAM” THERE IS—ENFORCED COMPASSSION, SOMETHING LIKE THE FEELING COMMISSIONED BY ONE OF THOSE AWKWARD SEMI-PARTIES THROWN AT AN OFFICE FOR SOMEONE’S RETIREMENT OR BIRTHDAY OR SOMETHING. (CF. ABOUT SCHMIDT.) AND THIS, I SHOULD POINT OUT, WAS EVEN BEFORE THE CURRENT REALITY TV CRAZE BECAME FULL-BLOWN IN THE U.S.***]

But add it up and it doesn’t compute, because this aspect of Moore’s oeuvre is mostly repressed, it seems, as it comes into play in F 9/11: at least in the Lila Lipscomb sequences, and at least as this text has been generally discussed. So what do we take from this? Do we argue for or against a Brechtian sort of anti-humanist distantiation in documentary—especially documentary that presents itself as particularly “urgent” and “current.” And how and why argue for or against that? Not that old binary again...

What is the problem here? The problem seems partly to be that a basic Marxist political analysis—one that is, in the enigmatic last instance, economic—has become impossible to articulate without seeming “conspiratorial” and very, very “reductive.” But that’s not quite a general problem either, since this could all of course be blamed on Moore: on what could be called, once again, his “pragmatism.” Blamed on the way this text does and does not return us to the realm of the aesthetic, is and isn’t willing to allow for that return. For it clearly both short-circuits that return (largely through its invocations of “rock and roll”) and continually interrupts its myriad circuits of possibility (through, of course, the basic institution of facticity, if even a blatantly “ironic” form of this that is something like that to which Reinhart Kosseleck has eloquently referred as “the fiction of the (f)actual.”

IV.

Is a text(e) a vote? Is a vote a text(e)? The dream through which those two or three things did and did not converge, as well as diverge, in F9/11, in other words, is as much an effect of the post- 50s American moving-image documentary legacy as it is of Moore’s own authorial “intentions.” (Intention being word I use here, to whatever extent this usage must seem defiant and even idiotic, to include everything beyond the realm of consciousness too; that is, beyond the realm of both intention itself and, more generally, that of effects.)

At the level of the spectator(s), then, what can one say? Browsing obsessively through the “user reviews” on moviephone.com of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, I saw so many assertions that were very similar to those that seem to characterize one very important and prevalent (at the time of the film’s release in the U.S.) brand of F 9/11’s incorporated spectator that I started to get really upset: “Yes it’s gruesome, but it’s the TRUTH.“ “Yes it gave that woman in Kansas a heart attack, but what she was seeing was what HAPPENED.” “I myself haven’t seen it. But my sister did, and it changed her life. Therefore, highly recommended!!!”

How suspicious of me are you, with my seemingly old-fashioned appeals to taste, judgment, and my own fictions of level-headedness? My own elisions or inclusions of the most “elitist” sorts of complexities about what the truth is, indeed what truth-in-general is—if this does in fact constitute elisions or (re)inclusions?