Warring Opinions: An Investigation into the Sublime Aesthetic Narratives of Contemporary Warfare A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Melissa Vera Licht IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Thomas Pepper August, 2010 Copyright Melissa Vera Licht 2010 Acknowledgments Thank you to my grandfather, Jack Fox, for telling his war stories, even though they are not easy to repeat. Thank you to my advisor, Thomas Pepper, for his invaluable thought, attention, advice, and encouragement, and to the members of my committee, Cesare Casarino, John Mowitt, Jochen Schulte-Sasse, and Tom Augst, for the courses and questions that shaped my thinking, and for their patience throughout this process. Thank you to Eric Daigre for helping me to work even though he wasn’t sure why I wanted to work on what seemed such a strange, violent, and depressing set of texts. Thank you to Courtney Helgoe and Gretchen Gasterland-Gustafsson for being completely sure I could write a dissertation. i Abstract This project uses aesthetic concepts of the sublime as critical categories for exploring opinions and subjective responses to war as they are presented in selected soldiers’ memoirs, literary theory, films, and public affairs–from World War I to the (ongoing) Gulf War. Representations of sublime force as well as sublime sacrifice and idealism permeate even “objective” journalistic accounts of warfare and inform the perspectives through which we engage with war in thought and feeling. The project argues that “opinion” is not merely a rationally measurable statistical phenomenon but an aesthetic problematic through which we experience ourselves in relation to the world. Soldiers’ memoirs and public discourses narrate the trauma of war and express opinions that swing between and simultaneously uphold radically different positions: war as a sublime communal endeavor versus war as the destruction of social meaning. These opposing opinions reflect different aesthetic and narrative strategies: different ways of representing one’s position in the world and of managing overpowering forces and emotions. Opinion itself is built and supported through our emotional narratives of sublime antagonism and/or sublime interest in the social world. The critical thought of Hannah Arendt, J. Glenn Gray, Paul de Man, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Immanuel Kant are central to the analysis of sources throughout the project. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments...i Abstract...ii Introduction...1 Chapter 1: War’s Sublime...16 An Aesthetic Subject...19 Violence in the Sublime...22 Sublimely Patterned Memoirs: Storm of Steel and A Rumor of War...31 Ecstasy and Transcendental Reason: Reflections on the Sublime and the Soldier...47 Irresistible Appeals?...58 A Mechanical Sublime–Overlord: D-Day, June 6, 1944...60 Notre Musique: Hell-War/Paradise-Peace, Shot/Counter-shot...70 Chapter 2: War Passions...77 Understanding Violence Philosophically: Gray and Arendt Reflect on Civil Society...83 Anthony Swofford: Jarhead...100 David Bellavia: House to House, Passion to Passion...116 Colby Buzzell: Killing Time in Iraq...127 Camillo Mejía’s Road...149 Chapter 3: Warring Opinions...162 Opinion as Common Sense and Communication in Dark Times...162 Walter Benjamin and War Memoirs: Sublime Narration...175 Fields of Force: The Reporter and the Meaning of War...192 Negative Absolutes and Sublime Potential...222 Conclusion- Tortured Standards and the Art of Common Sense: The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal and Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure...247 Works Cited...285 iii Introduction Caught up in the whirlwind of wartime, one-sidedly informed, without distance from the great transformations that have already occurred or that are beginning to, and without a glimmer of the future taking shape, we ourselves lose our bearings with respect to the significance of impressions that crowd in on us as well as to the values of the judgments we form. Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” as translated by Samuel Weber in Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking You hate it... but your eyes do not. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried This project began with two related aesthetic experiences. First was the sight of the collapse of the World Trade Towers, which I heard about on the radio and was later stunned to see endlessly replaying on television. Second came crowds protesting the invasion of Iraq; these were the largest crowds I had ever seen and walked with for a political purpose. But I didn’t think about the aesthetic dimension of these experiences at first. I was thinking about what people were thinking, and about the opinions that were manifested in the images they produced. So, I researched public opinion. The tense opposition between patriotic unification and patriotic dissidence within the public field in first years after the September 11 event seemed to turn on opinion, yet I had difficulty uncovering ideas that adequately described the situation. The significance of opinion has passed through many historical permutations with regard to its strength or weakness as a form of knowledge, its private or public character, its servitude or challenge to the state, its visible performance or statistical measurement. Plato recognized it as a power less complete than knowledge but more complete than ignorance, participating in both being and non- 1 being, and not adequate to support action. For my inquiry, Hannah Arendt’s reinterpretation of opinion’s ancient significance, asserted after its status has risen and collapsed (and after the status of knowledge itself has also shifted), will prove important. The gradually developed link between opinion and particular collective spatial contexts is also central. Montaigne observed and questioned the cultural fact that a given “truth” can be “delimited by mountains and [become] a lie on the other side of those mountains.”1 His critique led toward the importance the term gained in the philosophy of Locke, Hume, and Rousseau, where opinion took on the status of a moral truth and law capable of challenging restrictive state governments and religious dogma, and potentially founding more equitable and just relations between people. Habermas has traced the political significance of opinion in its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century character as rational discourse on matters of knowledge, politics, religion, and morality in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. This text also traces the dissolution of opinion’s public and rational integrity through the rise of consumer capitalism and commercial media. Under these conditions opinion loses its validity as a foundation for rational deliberation between individuals and moves toward its modern appearance in polarized positions that are passively consumed as mass-produced information. Opinion 1 My quotation comes from Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion–Our Social Skin (68). Her text offers an account of historical formulations of opinion that influences the brief contextualization I offer here. First published in 1980 in Germany, The Spiral of Silence presents her research on opinion as linked to perceptions of aggressive attitudes in the social sphere. Affects of fear and anxiety caused by these perceptions point toward defensive stances that mark our political opinions with irrational passion rather than clear judgment. In response to the negative emotion of fear, she claims that oppositional minorities tend to fall silent. She uses the figure of skin to suggest an immediacy of perception that lacks the “clarity” associated with vision and “insight.” 2 has become, as Foucault notes in his “What is Enlightenment?” not a matter of open questions, but of pre-determined formulas. Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, published in 1922, demonstrates the impoverished view of opinion that has been dominant throughout the twentieth century. He argues that individuals in contemporary society are incapable of assimilating the complexity of their world into coherent vision or rational judgments. Faced with the “great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality,” we form and re-impose emotionally charged “pictures” onto the chaotic scenes of external reality to create a sense of order. Because we impose pictures on reality in any case, it would be efficient, Lippman reasons, if an elite agency were to shape and distribute these, and in so doing, organize society’s unruly masses into a stable form. Lippmann’s “pragmatic” approach turns on a vision of a threateningly vast social field filled with turbulent masses. In the desire to stabilize individual, and thus collective, perceptions against this threatening disorder, which resembles the mathematical as well as dynamic forms of the Kantian sublime, he proposes a program for separating and sustaining an orderly, harmonic relation between perception, thought, and reality–a relation Kant associates with the beautiful. His plan to manage our mental pictures by manufacturing consent brings together aesthetic and political goals, constituting an aesthetic ideology. This political project carries an unmistakable reactionary elitism. The political imposition of ruling interests’ “knowledge” on the social world is only very thinly veiled, and its clarity makes the underlying aesthetic character of this imposed harmony easier to miss. Lippmann’s term “manufacture of 3 consent” is coined in a chapter titled “Leaders and the Rank and