Each episode tells the audience: ‘Do not mess with our machine. You will be found
out – new technology will deliver us from crime.’ Similarly, the illusionary proximity
to the networked war machine in Iraq seems to have been designed to create a
spectacle of fear, not only for the regime but for other states harboring terrorists or
terrorist ambitions. Indeed, as Andrew Marshall, discussing revolutionary
developments in war that don’t involve combat, told Wired:
There are ways of psychologically influencing the leadership of another state. I
don’t mean information warfare, but some demonstration of awesome effects,
like being able to set off impressive explosions in the sky. Like, let us show you
what we could do to you. Just visually impressing the person.
It could be argued that the Gulf War, which even ‘realists’ of International Relations
argued was an ‘unnecessary war,’
was example of such a spectacle of deterrence.
However, it can also be argued that this spectacle and performance of war also
works to reassure citizens that the society of (in)security can deliver them from the
terror of uncertainty. Such a spectacle tells us that the agents of official fear are able
to manage the terror of uncertainty, suppressing the anxiety that the war will not make
us more secure and that the state of emergency that we inhabit, the excess of
biopower, is being managed with fatalistic passivity and moral indifference to distant
suffering. In making this claim – that this (fictional) war becomes a performance and
spectacle – is not to invoke the Wag the Dog scenario, that the war is created to
distract attention from domestic problems (as if this fictional war was designed to
suppress the view that more could have been done to prevent 9/11, although this may
well play a role in the need for such a spectacle). Read from the perspective of
Bauman on the role of official fear against the terror of uncertainty, the war can be
viewed as part of a broader network of biopolitical cultural governance – that includes
the popular culture discussed in this paper – that seeks to make the state of emergency
in which we exist easier to bare, a performance of security that promises to deliver us
from the terror of uncertainty.
26
Andrew Marshall
27
See, for examples, John Mearsheimer
21
Convention