AFFIRMATIVE REACTION

New Formations of White MasculinityBy HAMILTON CARROLL

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4929-7

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................................................1PART I 9-11/24-7 Affective Time and the War on Terror...........................................................271 Jack Bauer's Extraordinary Rendition: Neoliberal Melodrama and the Ethics of Torture............................49PART II EMBODYING DIFFERENCE Whiteness, Class, and the Postindustrial Subject...................................773 Men's Soaps: Automotive Television Programming and Contemporary Working-Class Masculinities.....................101PART III DADDY'S HOME Family Melodrama and the Fictions of State................................................1315 The Fighting Irish: Ethnic Whiteness and Million Dollar Baby....................................................1576 Romancing the Nation: Family Melodrama and the Sentimental Logics of Neoliberalism..............................181Notes.............................................................................................................201Bibliography......................................................................................................213

Chapter One

JACK BAUER'S EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION

Neoliberal Melodrama and the Ethics of Torture

The important thing here to understand is that the people that are at Guantánamo are bad people. I mean, these are terrorists for the most part. VICE PRESIDENT RICHARD CHENEY

At the very moment when it would like to give lessons in democracy to different traditions and cultures, the political culture of the West does not realize that it has entirely lost its canon. GEORGIO AGAMBEN, State of Exception

THE FOX TV DRAMA 24 conjoins the privatization of citizen responsibility produced under neoliberalism to the state of exception invoked by the Bush administration in its response to the putative threat of global terrorism: the War on Terrorism after the attacks on September 11, 2001. The show's hero, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), is a sovereign figure and its plots are melodramas of state and family. The show's focus on individual responsibility and domestic melodrama effects a regulatory state fiction that negotiates the transformations of citizenship under neoliberalism and the sovereign paradigms of the War on Terror. It reproduces traditional forms of American heroism that are then transformed in relation to the dictates of neoliberal forms of capitalist accumulation. In its frequent evocation of extralegal processes of abduction, rendition, execution, and torture, 24 instantiates a cultural representation of the suspension of law through which the Bush administration fomented a state of exception that has held both U.S. citizens and the world hostage since September 11.

In its updating of masculine identity, which it routes through exceptionalist forms of patriotism and heroic masculinity, 24 provides a cultural instantiation of the exemplary neoliberal citizen. The events of September 11 and their aftermath have produced a set of conditions for the transformations of the relationship between the subject and the state under which the forms of self-regulation and governance required by neoliberal capital are cited as the proper response to global terrorism. While it is important therefore to understand how the Bush administration's responses to the events of September 11 altered the geopolitical landscape, it is equally important to understand how those responses fit into a longer history of the transformations of politics and capital in contemporary society. The War on Terror provided the Bush administration with the rationale for a series of domestic and global projects that predate the events from which they ostensibly stem. With a production history that likewise predates the events of September 11, 24 serves as a generative site for the working-through of these interconnections and differences. Examining the relationship between neoliberal subjectivity, sovereignty, and masculinity allows the irruptions and continuities to become visible and allows for a more nuanced interpretation of not only the links between the nationalist project of the War on Terror and the market imperatives of neoliberalism, but also of the links between cultural production and what Georgio Agamben calls the "political culture of the West."

The show is set in the Los Angeles branch of a fictional Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU). In each season Jack Bauer and the other CTU operatives attempt to thwart an increasingly complicated series of terrorist plots against the United States. The plot of the first season revolves around the attempted assassination of presidential candidate David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) on the day of the California Democratic presidential primary. This assassination attempt is part of a larger plot to exact revenge for a covert U.S. military operation carried out in the Balkans some years before, in which Palmer and Bauer were key actors. As part of their convoluted plan to assassinate Palmer and ruin Bauer, the terrorists kidnap Bauer's daughter, Kimberly (Elisha Cuthbert), and threaten to kill her if Bauer does not assist them. In the season finale Nina Myers (Sarah Clarke), a coworker with whom Bauer had an affair, is revealed to be a terrorist and kills Bauer's wife, Teri (Lisa Hope). The primary plotline of the show's second season—written and produced after September 11—revolves around the attempt of a group of terrorists led by Syed Ali (Francesco Quinn) to detonate a nuclear bomb (over) Los Angeles. The season also includes an attempt by the vice president, Jim Prescott (Alan Dale), who is in collusion with a group of powerful business leaders, to seize the presidency by way of the 25th Amendment.

In addition to its elaborate plotlines 24 is notable for its form. As the show's name suggests, each season consists of twenty-four hour-long episodes taking place over a single day. The action unfolds in real time, even taking into account the elapsed time of commercial breaks. The producers of the show utilize a variety of structural devices to keep the viewer constantly aware of its real-time nature. Commercial breaks are book-ended by an onscreen digital clock that counts down the number of seconds before and after each break, supplemented by the sound effect of an analog clock ticking off seconds. All the telephones at CTU Headquarters have the same ringtone, and the sound of ringing phones is foregrounded in the audio mix. Action taking place in different locations is often shown in split screen, with as many as six events displayed simultaneously. These formal and structural manipulations contribute significantly not only to the show's appeal for viewers—and to their sense of its originality—but also to the affective responses 24 evokes.

"Sure, If You Have a Warrant": 24's Sovereign Paradigms

I got into acting to avoid politics and so I can remain in a fantasy world, and you guys are kind of bringing me out of it. MARY LYNN RAJSKUB, who plays CTU Technician Chloe O'Brien on the show 24

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows. VICE PRESIDENT RICHARD CHENEY

The show 24 situates the actions of its protagonist and hero in relation to the complex transformations of sovereignty and citizenship under neoliberalism and the War on Terror. In each season Bauer's relationship with CTU is fraught with complications. He has been suspended, under investigation, incarcerated, unemployed, in hiding, undercover, or, at the beginning of season 6, imprisoned in a Chinese torture camp. As a figure who is frequently both a state functionary—an employee of CTU—and a rogue agent, Bauer inhabits a liminal position in relationship to the legal system. It is his status as at once both inside and outside the law that enables him to be an effective agent. Arguably, then, Bauer is merely an example of the traditional models of masculinist heroic action that are so pervasive in American culture. Even as 24 updates them for the neoliberal state, the narratives of American heroic invincibility that it presents rely on common tropes of heroism and valor. As such, Bauer is an example of the outlaw and official hero that Robert B. Ray describes as one of the organizing myths of American culture. While traditional American mythologies offer myriad examples of these competing figures of heroism, they are often joined by a third, composite type that Ray calls the "reluctant hero," who is drawn to action by outside forces. The reluctant hero is often a family man who must weigh the consequences of public action on private life. Jack Bauer is just such a man, drawn against his will into a conflict not of his own choosing. By mobilizing traditional tropes of masculinist heroism 24 produces the self-regulating neoliberal subject as hero.

In the figure of Jack Bauer 24 illustrates the transformations of U.S. citizenship after September 11 and yokes those transformations to traditional models of American exceptionalism and heroic action. In so doing the show makes legible and, more importantly, palatable the changes it charts. The actions of the Bush administration are made normal by situating them in relation to traditional forms of U.S. belonging. In "The Global Homeland State: Bush's Biopolitical Settlement," Donald E. Pease suggests that, through legislation such as the Homeland Security Act, in the aftermath of September 11 the Bush administration effected a "mass denationalization" under which the citizenry has been "dislocate[ed] from the national imaginary through which their everyday life practices become recognizably 'American.'" In this transformation the population has become an "unprotected biological formation whose collective vitality must be administered and safeguarded against weapons of biological terrorism." As the example of 24 suggests, this "mass denationalization" takes place, almost paradoxically, through the manipulation of the very national narratives it disrupts. The exemplary forms of citizenship 24 evinces rely on a spectacle of hyperpatriotism through which the citizenry willingly abdicates its civil liberties in the name of national security, thereby negating the very values of liberty and possessive individualism the nation putatively embodies.

In its capitulation to this climate of fear 24 suggests at once the post–September 11 transformations in the United States from democracy to continuous state of exception, the forms of self-governance and self-regulation required of the citizenry under neoliberalism, and the profound connections between the two. Arguing that it usually takes six weeks to establish effective undercover status, Bauer has the lead witness in a federal case brought to CTU (illegally) and then shoots and beheads him in order to present his head as a trophy to the leader of a criminal organization he must infiltrate. "You want to find the bomb?" he asks his superior, who expresses concern at his methods. "This is what it's gonna take. That's the problem with people like you, George, you want results but you're not willing to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.... I'm going to need a hacksaw." The Bush administration's post–September 11 actions, Judith Butler suggests, have produced "a new exercise of state sovereignty" that requires both a suspension of the law and "an elaboration of administrative bureaucracies in which officials now not only decide who will be tried, and who will be detained, but also have ultimate say over whether someone may be detained indefinitely or not." The show brings together the "new exercise of state sovereignty" Butler describes with a traditional representation of American heroism that renders the state of exception legible by situating the exception within traditional ideologies of heroism and masculine action. The state sovereignty Bauer manifests is masked by the normalizing logics of heroic action. It is in the subtle reiterations of sovereignty that the power of the state of exception lies. The suspension of law that Bauer's actions exemplify is easily recoded within the paradigm of heroic action in which the heroic figure stands outside the law in order to ensure that justice is carried out. That contemporary forms of extralegal action produce sovereignty rather than justice is a phenomenon that is easily missed.

For the Bush administration law became what Michel Foucault calls a tactic: "With government, it is a question not of imposing law on men but of disposing things: that is, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics—to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such-and-such ends may be achieved." The Bush administration's adherence to the law functions in just such a way, and it is not hard, as Butler suggests, to see the "instrumental uses to which the law is put in the present situation." The administration has produced a spectacle of the law. Claiming a strict adherence to the letter of the law while flagrantly breaking or ignoring numerous actual laws, the administration uses the law as a tactic in its ongoing pursuit of executive power, and the spectacle of sovereignty inaugurates the state of exception that suspends the law behind which it inaugurates itself. As such, sovereignty is exercised in what Butler calls the "self-allocation of legal prerogative." It is therefore in the very relationship between the administration's adherence to some laws and its suspension of others that the sovereign and the state of exception lie. The suspension of law, Butler writes, "produces sovereignty in its action and as its effect." The precise relationship between the law and the state of exception under the Bush administration is complex and often contradictory, however.

While the Bush administration flaunted its contempt for international law and the United Nations, it also went to great lengths to prove the legality of certain positions. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, for example, first rose to prominence when his "Torture Memo" to President Bush of 25 January 2001 became public. Timothy Brennan and Keya Ganguly argue that the administration's continuous attempts to provide legal precedent for its unlawful acts belie the claim of a renewed state of exception and sovereign power: "[President Bush] has sought not to suspend the law but vigorously to observe its letter, enlisting allies within the judicial system to deploy legal briefs on behalf of his favored interpretations. At the same time, he has been in open violation of the law, including the constitution. He is not therefore sovereign and above the law but, in practical terms, a criminal; and these are not versions of the same thing.... Naked power and the law have worked together in complementary rather than contradictory fashion." The authors dismiss the concept of sovereignty because Bush has attempted to prove the legality of his every move, but this underplays the intricate nature of the relationship between sovereignty and governmentality, or what the authors themselves call "naked power and the law." If, as Foucault suggests, law has become a tactic of government, then the administration's adherence to some laws, and the extent to which it has gone to show that adherence, offers further evidence that the law has come to serve as a means rather than an end. The Bush administration is less interested in upholding the law than in maintaining power. That power is manifest most clearly in the very spaces in which the law is suspended. "Sovereignty," Butler argues, "is reintroduced in the very acts by which [the] state suspends law, or contorts law to its own uses." Using the events of September 11 as a rationale, the Bush administration produced the affective conditions for a totalizing state of exception.

It is of course in the state of exception that functionaries, what Butler calls the "newly invigorated subjects of managerial power," become sovereign. In the figure of Jack Bauer the state functionary becomes sovereign hero. Frequently acting outside the law, Bauer embodies the sovereign subject produced under the state of exception. Pease claims that "in order to protect the rule of law ... the state declared itself the occupant of a position that was not subject to the rules it must protect." Bauer is a sovereign subject who stands outside the law in order to ensure that it is upheld. Acting from necessity and in times of great duress, he presents an image of sovereignty that belies the subordination of ethical concerns and human rights at the heart of the War on Terror.

The ethical imperative that endows Bauer with the autonomy to act within the state of exception as an autonomous subject unconstrained by normal rules situates him as a sovereign subject with the right to decide what constitutes a legal subject. For Agamben, the state of exception is "that temporary suspension of the rule of law that is revealed instead to constitute the fundamental structure of the legal system itself." In an episode from the first season Bauer complains to a policewoman whom he has recruited to help him apprehend a suspect, "I wish you hadn't called for backup." "Why?" she asks. "Because cops have to play by the rules and I may have to break a few with this guy." Minutes later, immediately after the policewoman has been shot and killed, Bauer tells a police chief, "Please forget about the damn chain of command. I need to see this man now. Just for a few minutes." Slavoj Zizek suggests of 24 that, "while [the CTU agents] continue to act on behalf of the legal power, their acts are no longer constrained by the law." In the figure of Jack Bauer 24 provides a model of heroic behavior that belies the erosions of civil society it claims to protect.

Butler argues that contemporary sovereignty is "animated by an aggressive nostalgia [that] reanimates a spectral sovereignty within the field of governmentality." Since September 11, however, Bush has arrogated to himself an increasingly shadowy and complicated series of sovereign powers. This authority is yoked to the construction of a reinvigorated masculinist prerogative in which the War on Terror provides the raison d'être for the recuperated forms of nostalgic masculine authority. If, as Wendy Brown writes, governmentality names the moment in which the "homology between family and polity dissolved," the War on Terror resolves that homology and situates heroic action as the patriotic defense of both the home and the homeland.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from AFFIRMATIVE REACTIONby HAMILTON CARROLL Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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