The Politics of Everyday Fear. - book reviews

ArtForum, Summer, 1994 by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

"but who are they?" --a wino inquires "them you know," --she replies-- "the enchilada-hunters fumiga-latinos shooting at their own fears & their fears Tlatoani overlap with our dreams."

--Guillermo Gomez Pena, "Califas,"

Fear is a timely object of study. In a climate as fear-drenched and terrorizing as contemporary America's, imagine the relevance of a university degree conferred entirely for the study of the politics, pedagogy, and philosophy of fear. The issues raised by the subject are complex, foremost among them what exactly fear is--emotion, sensation, raw experience, philosophy, public policy, commodity? The two books under review explore this varied interpretive terrain.

Violent Persuasions: The Politics and Imagery of Terrorism is a powerfully edited collection of pieces by theorists, artists, scholars, activists, and policy makers originally brought together in a symposium and art exhibition held in 1992 at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore to discuss the politics and imagery of America's favorite misinforming (and devastating) ruse: "terrorism." The volume succeeds in deftly combining art (from images by Mel Chin and Daniel Martinez to Chris Bratton and Annie Goldson's discussion of their four-part video documentary Counterterror) with essays and discussion of great theoretical insight and grace (exemplified by Maurice Berger's exploration of the intricate traumatizing effect of visual terrorism, which opens the anthology). At one point, ex-attorney general and prolific author Ramsey Clark outlines terrorism's disingenuous meaning: "The things that create the greatest terror in the world are rarely called by the word terrorism or perceived as terrorism." Clark's statement is amply corroborated in the variety of case studies included in the book, notably Ward Churchill's detailed and informative presentation of the U.S. government's unnamed policy of domestic terrorism directed at the American Indian Movement (AIM) beginning in the early 1970s. The volume concludes with an afterword, "Women and Children First--Terrorism on the Home Front," by Nina Felshin (exhibition cocurator), a focus not included in the initial symposia and exhibition because "acts of governments rather than individuals" were the organizers' concern. Margaret Randall was the only initial participant who, in her vigorous elaboration of shared territory between state torture and domestic abuse in the politics of memory, refused this arbitrary drawing of terrorism's boundaries.

While Violent Persuasions manages to be both theoretically sophisticated and meticulously concrete, The Politics of Everyday Fear catapults one into a world of dense abstraction. Editor Brian Massumi's introduction, framing the volume of essays, asserts capitalism's key role in the circulation of fear within and through us: "In a sense we have become our fear." Buying it, shopping because of it (as elaborated in Rhonda Lieberman's essay "Shopping Disorders"): for Massumi it is capital's commodifying fury that orchestrates "the politics of everyday fear." Yet the most appealing part of the book is the noncohesive collection of testimonies included in it: Todd Haynes' script for Poison, Gregory Whitehead's "The Forensic Theater: Memory Plays for the Postmortem Condition," fiction by Kathy Acker, Leslie Dick's meditation on the skull of Charlotte Corday, as well as testimony from Charles Manson and Hitler. Steven Shaviro's welcome re-analysis of David Cronenberg's films as agents of the viscerality of the body peculiar to capitalism, as well as Guillermo Gomez Pena's "Califas," a poetic reimagination of a "borderless future" (fashioned from a performance), are worth the entire book. The eclectic mix works even though fear becomes so abstract in some of the analyses that the significance of the "everyday" in the title is lost.

One turns the pages of this book moved by the power of Gomez Pena's extraordinary political imagination and magical imagery in "Califas," only to be plunged headlong into the online text of the Chicago Liberty Net, an affiliate of the Aryan Nations Liberty Net. It is a ferocious juxtaposition, necessary because fear is disorienting. Yet fear as sensation is only too familiar; the fresh contribution of the scholars and artists involved with the production of these two books is their critical engagement with a subject the nature of which has traditionally hindered the possibility of such inquiry.

Thyrza Nichols Goodeve is a writer who lives in Vermont. She is working on a book on memory and the Gothic in modern American culture.