Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present

by W.J. Thomas Mitchell

The  phrase “War on Terror” has quietly been retired from official usage, but it persists in the American psyche, and our understanding of it is hardly complete. Nor will it be, W. J. T Mitchell argues, without a grasp of the images that it spawned, and that spawned it.

Exploring the role of verbal and visual images in the War on Terror, Mitchell finds a conflict whose shaky metaphoric and imaginary conception has created its own reality. At the same time, Mitchell locates in the concept of clones and cloning an anxiety about new forms of image-making that has amplified the political effects of the War on Terror. Cloning and terror, he argues, share an uncanny structural resemblance, shuttling back and forth between imaginary and real, metaphoric and literal manifestations. In Mitchell’s startling analysis, cloning terror emerges as the inevitable metaphor for the way in which the War on Terror has not only helped recruit more fighters to the jihadist cause but undermined the American constitution with “faith-based” foreign and domestic policies.

Bringing together the hooded prisoners of Abu Ghraib with the cloned stormtroopers of the Star Wars saga, Mitchell draws attention to the figures of faceless anonymity that stalk the ever-shifting and unlocatable “fronts” of the War on Terror. A striking new investigation of the role of images from our foremost scholar of iconology, Cloning Terror will expand our understanding of the visual legacy of a new kind of war and reframe our understanding of contemporary biopower and biopolitics.

Genres: Photography, Art, Nonfiction, Art History, History, War

209 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

William J. Thomas Mitchell is a professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. Editor of the journal Critical Inquiry.

His monographs, Iconology (1986) and Picture Theory (1994), focus on media theory and visual culture. He draws on ideas from Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx to demonstrate that, essentially, we must consider pictures to be living things. His collection of essays What Do Pictures Want? (2005) won the Modern Language Association's prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize in 2005. In a recent podcast interview Mitchell traces his interest in visual culture to early work on William Blake, and his then burgeoning interest in developing a science of images. In that same interview he discusses his ongoing efforts to rethink visual culture as a form of life and in light of digital media.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know, I know, I’m somewhat prone to hyperbole and it is something I need to get over (and get over in a big way, obviously) but if I have any credibility left at all then you really do need to get hold of this book and read it. It is bloody amazing.

There was part of me, even after reading his What Do Pictures Want? that felt a bit uncomfortable with his linking cloning and terrorism. It is a bit like the cyclotron version of academic discourse – let’s run these two ideas at each other really, really quickly and smash them together so we can see what comes out the other end. But what does come out the other end when someone like Mitchell is running the idea smasher can be mind blowing.

He starts off by making the point that for much of the first year of his presidency G W Bush was obsessed, not with terrorism, but with cloning. Bush essentially saw his legacy being in stopping stem cell research. To understand this idea – and why Bush might be so focused on it – we probably need to think about the nature of images for a second. If you get a chance it is a really good idea to have a look at the documentary Ways of Seeing – I wrote a review of it here http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/..., but it is available on YouTube and it is a wonderful introduction to visual theory. A lot of Ways of Seeing is based on an essay by Walter Benjamin called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin’s idea was that prior to about the 1880s a work of art was something that was stuck on a wall somewhere and to see it you had to go to it. But with the camera and eventually colour reproduction, artworks came to you. This had a major impact on the art works (and not just in their now more general accessibility) because the reproductions were always worse than the actual original art work. I guess we have all been at a gallery and felt a painting breathe or whatever it is that paintings do when they suck all of the air out of the room and leave us gasping. Well, photographs of paintings don’t really do that. Benjamin said that each reproduction takes some of the life out of the work of art and we live in an age when reproductions are everywhere, sucking art works grey.

But for Mitchell we no longer live in the age of mechanical reproduction – or, at least, that isn’t the main focus of the world we are living in. We are moving towards a world of bio-cybernetic reproduction – which is, as he explains, ‘a synthesis of biotechnology and information science’ Page 14.

So, what does that mean? Well, Dolly the Sheep is a clone – she is an image that has been made real. She is something ‘made’ by human technology and is the ‘image’ of her mother. Both Dolly and her mother are identical – and not in the sense that a photograph is identical to a painting – not least because it is simply not – Dolly is identical not only on the surface, but right down to her DNA. Plato complained about paintings as they were merely a copy of a copy (the world we live in being a copy of the really, real world, so a painting is a copy of a copy) but here we have Dolly, which is a copy that is also ‘the original’ in a very real sense. And with genetic engineering we can expect to one day improve on the ‘original’ – and then the clone will become even better than the original.

This idea of the living image has a long history in Western thought – Narcissus, Pygmalion, the Golem, Prometheus’s dolls, Adam (and given Eve was made of his flesh, Eve was a clone of Adam and Adam was the first mother). Many creation myths involve modelled clay that god brings to life and makes human. And this goes some way to explaining the second commandment about not making graven images – images have a habit of gaining lives of their own, beyond the control even of god (think Noah’s flood or Pandora’s Box). Any wonder then that God made a general prohibition against our making of images and likewise, is it any surprise we have basically ignored this prohibition.

Except that the literal giving of life to our images – by creating clones – was a bridge too far for Bush and the Christian right. Such playing at God could not be excused on the promise of any possible medical benefits that might come from such technologies – the dangers of cloned people and other forms of human experimentation are far too dangerous and so outweigh any potential benefit.

Then the day came that changed everything. 911 – the day with a number, rather than a name. There is speculation that the second plane flew into the second tower after a delay so that there would be plenty of time for film crews to be on site and ready to capture the image. You see, that is what terrorism is – it is creating images designed to demoralise the enemy. And here we had another odd link to cloning – the twin towers.

But what is disturbing is how much we use biological metaphors when talking about terrorism – terror cells, infected populations, viruses, cancer, immunising populations. He explains a metaphor from Derrida, that terrorism is an auto-immune disorder. The problem is that terrorists need to be indistinguishable from everyone around them. There was even talk by loonies that the Iraqis had received assistance from Nazi scientists so as to be able to clone Aryan suicide bombers – with perfect American accents – they would be the perfect cancer cells, totally unrecognisable as anything other than what they appeared to be. But this is, of course, the ideal terrorist group. One where it is impossible for the authorities to detect the terrorist from in amongst the average Jo Blow and Co. Just as the auto-immune system struggles to detect cancer cells – because they are identical to the bodies own cells. And they then go on their merry way cloning themselves until they kill us.

The point is that intervention is often drastic and catastrophic. And acts in the interests of either the terrorist or the cancer – depending on the metaphor we are using one for the other. We cut and burn and irradiate and do the most horrible things to bodies with cancer – and very often we end up damaging lots of healthy tissue in the process and, worse yet, in our ‘treating’ the cancer we can also help it to spread. And if there is one lesson from the war on terror, it is that we have seriously helped terror to spread.

Our culture has become obsessed with clones over the last few decades – films like Jurassic Park, Never Let Me Go, The Matrix, Star Wars Clone Wars – the list goes on and on. The point is that clones are mindless, where the head is about the only bit of a clone that you don’t actually want – they are often made for spare parts or to do our (or someone’s) dirty work (suicide bombers, that kind of thing), and so they either have identical faces or they have no face at all. They are very often hooded or covered.

And this is how we think of terrorists too. They too are capable of metastasising. They infect otherwise healthy tissue. And they are the faceless men and women, so faceless we might end up killing perfectly average people by mistake because they just happen to be running late for their train.

If the first decade of the 21st century was dominated (according to the terrorists desires) by the image of the twin towers coming down, it ended being dominated by other images that we were never intended to see. That is, in particular, the hooded man on a box with electric wires attached to his hands and his genitals. The man who was told to stay on the box or be electrocuted the moment his feet touched the floor. The man who looks disturbingly like a hooded Jesus. It is important to stop for a second and to think just why it is that of all of the endless photographs to come out of this hell hole, this particular one should become so iconic.

Images work on us in strange ways. Personally, I think this image looks more like Moses carrying his two stone tablets containing the ten commandments (and given the relationship to ‘the law’ here, this is possibly an interesting reading) – but the point is this image resonates with us because it resonates to the vibrations of so many other images and most of those images are religious and to do with the Son of God being tortured to death. The problem is that there are so few poses that work when you are torturing people – so over and over again the images coming out of Abu Ghraib where either like something from Dante’s Hell (bodies piled on bodies) or they were straight out of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (ironically enough, a film that was showing at the same time this images were released into the wilds of our nightmares).

The first response of the US government was to try to recall all of these images – there was an ‘amnesty’ from prosecution issued if the images were returned. But they were taken, in part at least, as trophy images and so getting them back wasn’t all that easy. (There is a more plausible explanation that these images were taken as part of the orders from higher up as part of the humiliation and ‘standard operating procedure’ involving the torture of these inmates) That’s the other thing about today’s world – images are so easy to take and they too can clone themselves across the internet in ways that are all too like the spread of a virus. Since covering up the images didn’t work it was time to punish some scapegoats – naturally this didn’t involve those who had ordered such behaviour or created conditions in this prison that made such practices inevitable, but rather ‘a few bad apples’ that gotten out of line and who took all of the blame. What is interesting is the invisible people here – those hooded and tortured, those from government and military agencies with real authority but smart enough to stay out of the photographs, those how pulled the strings of those doing the torturing.

Where I found this book particularly breathtaking, though, was in his discussion of the curious ‘negative’ of the Saussurian idea of the sign, the negative that terrorism and cloning bring to the sign – the inversion of the signified and the signifier. In Saussure’s linguistics a sign is made up of a signified and a signifier – a thing and a word, an image and its description. But with clones and with terrorists the thing is often something that is unimaginable – an image that is beyond our powers of imagining until it is forced (by the terrorists) into our imagination (which is the point of terrorists in the first place). And because it is impossible to imagine, it is impossible to name too. These are signs that come into our consciousness out of the unimaginable and out of the unspeakable.

Mitchell should have been a poet. Not only because he writes quite beautifully in places – in many, many places – but also because his eye for metaphor and for metonymy and for contrasts is razor sharp. I couldn’t count the number of times I was stopped in my reading of this by the sheer profundity of a comparison or a contrast he had drawn. Look, I very rarely can bring myself to read a book on a topic like this – like reading about the holocaust or reading about Irish potato famine or any other long list of horrible actions we humans are particularly fond of committing against our fellows. But this book demands to be read – not just because the images and the horrific consequences of our acting on them and how this has inflicted untold harm in the world. Nor because we where the ones who bought and paid for this and so we need to be forced to look at the consequences of our actions (and our inactions), but because these images and this discussion of these images give us a remarkable insight into what it means to be alive today in our none-too-attractive world.

[Hugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic, even if you just pick it up as a compliment to theories of reproduction of images/simulacra re: Abu Ghraib. Lovely book

[Corey · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was less theoretical and more historical/political than I was hoping.