Toward a Theory of Disappearing Identities:
The Global War on Terror and the Living Dead
Speed facilitates the decoding of the human genome and the possibility of an other humanity, a humanity which is no longer the one we know. It is now no longer a question of the extra-terrestrial, but of the extra-human.
Paul Virilio, Crepuscular Dawn [1]
It started as rioting. But right from the beginning you knew this was different. Because it was happening in small villages, market towns. And then it wasn’t on the TV any more. It was in the street outside. It was coming in through your windows. It was a virus. An infection. You didn’t need a doctor to tell you that. It was the blood. It was something in the blood.
28 Days Later [2]
Introduction
Depicting the opposite side’s forces has never been identified by clean, straightforward boundaries. Arbitrary and constantly shifting, these boundaries have functioned to separate “us” from “them,” the heroes from the villains. This division seems especially exacerbated during times of war and conflict. In an effort to legitimize and justify violent action or aggression the media is de facto assigned the task of defining an otherwise nebulous and complex group of people by what the heroes are supposedly not: evil, calculating, untrustworthy. Yet, with the events of 9/11 and the inevitable aftermath, a break seems to have taken place. Instead of the vengeful “Other” who lacks speech and agency, the Global War on Terror has gone one step further to introduce a new “Other”—undefinable, unthinking, unfeeling. As the media’s coverage of the war seems to indicate, the most effective way to eliminate empathy for our enemies is by dehumanizing them and delegitimizing their very existence. By rejecting and denying the new enemy’s “humanness,” we extinguish their cogito, their spirit. All that remains is the living dead: bodies, but no souls.
These new unfeeling, unthinking, indiscriminate killers of all that is “human” (made to be synonymous with “good”) appear at a time when, as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld might have said, we are faced with known unknowns. However, these “unknowns” are no more than violent mutations of our own actions. Just as we have constructed our identities by determining what we are and are not, we have also filled the empty shells of our enemy’s bodies with a discourse seeped in the unknown and the unknowable. Our new “Other” seems to be no more than a revisited childhood nightmare: the zombie. For, even if the “Other” of the past could not speak, no one doubted his ability to think, to reason, to rationalize. Thus, the face of this new enemy is clouded by what we depict as blind and boundless hatred. In the Global War on Terror, terrorist jihadists have been represented as little more than brainwashed, unfeeling, inhumane killers. What are they but empty vessels filled with hateful ideology, targeting American and Western “values”? The terrorist zombie is merely one step beyond the zombie of our movie imagination: lacking thought and feeling, sense and sensibility, always already the sum but with no cogito—unreasonable and incapable of being reasoned with.
Perhaps fiction is not so far-removed from reality anymore. Our enemies have risen and struck back as terrorist jihadists, closely resembling swarms of flesh-eating zombies. We are unsuccessfully floundering in the fight against this new enemy as we seek out the root of the problem, the head of the group, the mastermind behind the attack. Increasingly, the Global War on Terror begins to play out more and more like a bad zombie movie: an ongoing battle between good and evil, where evil has no beginning and no end. And we have not yet figured out how to contain and eliminate the threat: how do we destroy something we ourselves have made unknown and foreign to us? With a dispersed center and origin, what tools are left but instilling evil into the vast unknown? How do we fight an enemy that is rhizomatic, decentralized, networked? When our enemy no longer plays by our established, dictated and upheld rules? And what will this hold for the future? Will we eventually be forced to accept the fate of our own death? Our own re-birth as the new zombified “Other”?
If indeed this new decentralized enemy is leaving American foreign policy scrambling to fight an enemy it cannot understand, then dehumanizing and delegitimizing the zombie/“Other” is no longer enough. Our unknown thrives in an increasingly virtual world, masking itself behind multi-media: in the forms of photographs, videos, interfaces, all carefully and conscientiously selected to produce certain realities and truths. Thus, identifying who we fight will become as important and increasingly difficult to distinguish from what we fight. The image is not enough as we look beyond accepted identities and beyond emptied and re-filled human vessels toward a reconsideration of ourselves and our own identities.
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