Diagnosing Rage

Two trends in postbellum American history seem particularly salient to this historical moment: (i.) the surge of radical politics, especially far-right radical politics, in the aftermath of war and (ii.) the concomitance of great technological advancement and popular social unrest. The best account of the former comes in historian Kathleen Belew’s Bring The War Home, an excellent history of the white power movement in the late twentieth century. She argues that each major military conflict of the last century and a half has engendered a climate of violence and instability at home that galvanized — or culminated in — coherent extremist movements. (Early iterations of the Ku Klux Klan followed the Civil War, World War I, and the Korean War; its later formations and linked paramilitary movements arose in the wake of Vietnam.)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of 9/11. I was eight when the towers fell — maybe too young to responsibly empathize with the emotional and political magnitude of the event, but old enough to at least recognize its gravity, and (more critically) to remember how different American life was before it. If we are to accept Belew’s sociological understanding of “war,” as an epoch and crucible of ambient violence felt most deeply and consequentially at home, it seems responsible to describe 9/11 as my generation’s war. (The ongoing and shamefully neglected conflict in Afghanistan, the longest military engagement in U.S. history, would not qualify, precisely because it has been neglected.) Richard Grusin would likely agree. He argues that the unprecedented trauma of 9/11 impelled U.S. media to “premeditate possible futures” — to sustain a baseline of tenable panic in the popular psyche in order to prepare the psyche for similar shocks forthcoming. (He cites the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded terrorist warning system; a more recent example might be the disproportionate attention directed at the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria in the summer of 2014, which placed particular emphasis on the group’s documentation of grisly executions.) I find it tough to consider this affective climate and not see the obvious genealogical links to the culture of rage that incubated much of the popular support for Trump’s presidential candidacy in 2016, especially the wave of nihilistic violence that coalesced under the nominal umbrella of the “alt-right.” (For a quick but thorough history of that movement, see Matthew Lyons’ Ctrl-Alt-Delete.)

But, as someone astutely asked in class today, to what extent is this moment actually indebted to 9/11 understood as a cultural creation-event? Psychologists speak of the “saliency bias”: the human tendency to comprehend the world — or erect memories — around isolated points or events that are visceral or otherwise significant, at the expense of considering the broader trends and contexts around those events that might explain them in less sensational or interesting terms. Which is to ask: if we choose to attribute the civil instability of this moment to the new means by which it is mediated, is it responsible to blame the psychosis of 9/11 for this paradigm shift in mediation? Or are there broader, perhaps more mundane forces at hand? 9/11 is a ready historical marker — again, saliency bias — but the (ugh) “digital revolution” was at least a decade underway in September 2001, and I imagine that, had I more space, we could find historical examples proving that the media’s tendency to premeditate the future was at the very least incipient prior to the attacks.

I’m of the opinion that a good portion of the blame rests with the technology. (I do not at all refute the collective affective import of 9/11, but, as a crude thought experiment: to what extent would 9/11 have been 9/11 if the attacks predated cable news?) Mark Hansen moves towards this approach in his essay on “ubiquitous computing,” albeit with a certain breathlessness that I find naïve. Hansen celebrates the advent of the digital because it both allows and begets a sensory mode with greater fidelity to how our brains actually work. (I suspect this might be a somewhat cursory reading.) Pre-digital media debased our conception of the world by relying on the “restrictive frame” of the visual; digital media, in its discreet omnipresence, “impact[s] the sensing brain microtemporally,” smoothing the seam between the observer of the world and her subject. (This new mode of sensation, with its overdue respect for temporal realm, seems to be the target of the tactical media described by Rita Raley.) And if the process of sensation is now more effortless and/or productive, the functional significance of the ego or self — the active observer in question — is suddenly no longer as imperative. “The seeming omnipresence of mobile networked media devices changes the nature of physical embodiment and identity — changes the relationship of proximity, closeness, or intimacy to embodiment.” (99)

I suppose my biggest gripe with Hansen’s supposition is that in his enthrallment with this “qualitative shift in the economy of sensation, he fails or is reluctant to actually appraise the affective consequences of this shift. He seems to envision a certain cyborgian eudaimonia — one that crumbles (I think) when forced to answer to the rage and dysphoria endemic to — and, some social psychologists would venture, caused by — a life online.