Angry Public Rhetorics: Global Relations and Emotion in the Wake of 9/11

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Foreword Celeste Condit’s book is a remarkable study that crosses a number of disciplinary boundaries. As such, it stands poised to make a broad contribution to an international studies field that stretches far beyond the disciplinary confines of political science. Here we have an extremely well-established scholar of rhetoric and communication taking up an issue—the role of emotions in global political life—that has recently captured the social-scientific imagination of a number of international studies scholars, but rarely from an angle that foregrounds rhetoric. But Condit’s argument goes far beyond a simple assertion that rhetoric “matters” in politics; on the contrary, her conception of political rhetoric affords her the opportunity to integrate and synthesize insights from neurophysiology, discursive psychology, sociology, and semiotics in developing an original account of how and why anger becomes a force in political life. And that account in turn informs her detailed studies of three exemplary figures—Bush, bin Laden, and Sontag—who tapped and activated that angry rhetoric as part of their general strategies for producing political change. So this is methodologically a configurational book, to be sure: the explanatory work is done by combinations of elements in particular cases, and there is no need for an overarching claim that angry rhetoric does this or that “in general” because its effects are always local and contingent. Situated at the interstices of different academic disciplines, Condit configures a diverse variety of literatures to give her the tools she needs to construct the explanations she constructs. This means that she speaks to a variety of audiences, and can perhaps provide a conduit through which those audiences might start to speak more openly with one another. In addition, the Page x →overall theoretical perspective Condit provides is one that focuses on and foregrounds the connections drawn and forged between diverse elements of material and symbolic objects: angry rhetoric “works” politically to the extent that it is able to yoke together symbols that themselves activate and are intertwined with neurophysical responses that work at a level other than that of deliberative reason. So the focus here is on the active, creative processes through which meanings are made and worlds are stabilized. The book is thus of very broad appeal across the multidisciplinary field of international studies, and concretely illustrates the explanatory richness that is available to us once we focus more on concrete problems and puzzles, and less on disciplinary canons in theory or methodology. I am delighted to be able to present Condit’s study to the world as part of the Configurations series. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson Series Editor, Configurations

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Acknowledgments To write, rewrite, and re-rewrite something novel and complex is an emotionally difficult task to stick with. Academics usually thank their spouses or lifemates last, but I must thank Bruce Railsback above all for his incredible faith in me, his fairness in our lives, and the richness he has brought to my thoughts and experiences. He repeatedly makes me feel like the luckiest person on the planet. I thank also the faculty and students in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia for their responses to the slow evolution of this work over the years; by providing a tolerant intellectual home they have enabled me to keep at this work. I thank also the reviewers and respondents associated with the National Communication Association who challenged me about this work, and thereby made it what it has become. It is a special delight to see my recent advisees, including Jamie Landau, Sally Spalding, and Emily Winderman, spinning off and exploring issues of affect and emotion in their own ways. I thank Hillary Palmer for checking the quotations in the chapter on Osama bin Laden. I thank Patrick Thaddeus Jackson for taking a chance on this project and for spending thoughtful time trying to adapt it to the audience he has been trying to build for his series at the University of Michigan Press. The project was also greatly improved by two anonymous reviewers, by Ken Zagacki’s generous and thoughtful responses, and by John Raymond’s painstaking effort and professional skill in copy-editing the manuscript. I thank all those involved at the University of Michigan Press in the long series of handoffs that have made this nobody’s project and lots of people’s project. All of your efforts are essential to making books happen, and I am grateful for your work and goodwill on behalf of this one.

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Introduction On September 11, 2001, a small network of angry men killed people from over 90 nations in a stunning attack on two citadels of global power: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, respective symbolic headquarters of global capitalism and of the planet’s most powerful military. As their violent strike has reverberated through the years, a variety of instructive explanations have been offered for the causes of “9/11.” Political analysts and academic authors have attributed the tide of events to factors ranging from the neocolonialism of the United States to the weakness of the United States, from the empty heart of global capitalism to the insufficient penetration of capitalism, from the obdurate racism of “the West” to the obdurate qualities of nomadic peoples.1 In these various accounts, the anger justifying the actions of most of the agents involved has most often been ignored or treated as epiphenomenal. The participants in the violence are depicted as being angry because of the nationalist, economic, cultural, or other large-scale structures in which they find themselves. The anger itself is dismissed as a fleeting, individual-level consequence, rather than as a causative social agent in its own right. As William Long and Peter Brecke have argued, however, to dismiss emotion is to ignore factors that shape international conflict.2 Drawing on recent work about the social force of emotion from multiple disciplines, this book shows why anger was not epiphenomenal to the way in which 9/11 has unfolded into the world’s patterns, and it offers a template for attending to anger in considering geopolitical futures. There is ample evidence to conclude that shared public anger co-orients peoples and tends to direct their actions and resources along particular Page 2 →paths. While these pathways are shaped by numerous forces—including cultural traditions, ideologies, histories, and sedimented patterns of resource distributions—they are also substantively shaped by the distinctive set of characteristics that are constitutive of “being angry together” as a pervasive social phenomenon. This analysis will show how the events of 9/11 took the form they did in some substantial part because people are prone to share anger in particular circumstances, and those co-oriented by such discourse are predisposed to particular kinds of collective behaviors. The discourse of 9/11 is not unique in this regard. As Lester Olson has observed, “Anger has abiding relevance today in an extraordinary range of rhetoric and public address.”3 The pervasiveness of collective anger and the sharing of that anger in human histories across many conditions, cultures, and ideologies should lead us to attend closely to the dynamics of the public discourses that constitute and circulate such shared emotion. “Rigorous analysis of emotion” is not exactly an oxymoron, but it offers challenges. All of us have emotional defenses against looking too closely at how passion shapes our own understandings and commitments. The mind-body dualism that permeates our common sense, and that has been reinforced by rigorous philosophy and theory for centuries, conveniently separates “reason” from “emotions” and allows us to privilege the symbolic as separate from the embodied dimensions of human being. To understand emotion sufficiently for addressing the global challenges that face us requires replacing that hierarchical dualism. As chapter 1 will explore, the need to transcend dualism has been widely recognized, but the dominant approaches employ the strategy of reduction. A richer approach is gained from the strategy of proliferation, which increases the number of categories involved in emotion from various dualistic pairs (especially social/individual and cultural /biological) to at least four (appraisal, action tendencies, subjective experiences, and neurophysiological activations). As chapter 2 demonstrates, such a strategy redescribes emotions as being formed through multiple inputs, each of which already includes individual, cultural, social, and even evolutionary histories, always deeply enmeshed in interactions with each other. The theory of emotion offered enables an alternative to the stale debate about whether emotions are universal and discrete or radically particular to culture and context. It assembles the evidence amassed by advocates of both perspectives to produce a view of emotions as sets of fuzzy components, something like probabilistically bounded densities or clouds, which Page 3 →are connected to each other by variably strong linkages (chemical,

mechanical, electric, and symbolic). Some linkages are more ready-to-hand in the kinds of interactions that many human cultures face. Complexes formed by those linkages tend to be recognizable across cultures, even if they are manifested in ways that are culturally distinct, and even if there is no mandate that they be “universal” (i.e., appear in all cultures). Rhetorics that align with such complexes tend to be more broadly resonant than rhetorics that do not. Chapter 2 also provides a response to what Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker called the “key challenge” for furthering studies of emotion in international relations: “to theorize the processes through which individual emotions become collective and political.”4 Again employing proliferation, rather than reduction to either individual or social, the theory notes that emotions are individual, social, and sometimes also collective. Emotions are embodied in individuals, as affect theory has recently emphasized, and as other research I will note has evidenced. As multiple humanists have insisted, these embodiments are social, not only because they are products of social experiences and symbol systems, but also because emotions for humans are social signals that guide interactions at the interpersonal level. But, also, some emotions are collective or political. Scholars such as Todd Hall, Brent Sasley, Andrew Ross, Jonathan Mercer, and Neta Crawford have been exploring the role of human emotion in nation-state action, and scholars including Guobin Yang, Erin Rand, James Jasper, and Lester Olson have been examining how nonstate collectives such as social movements enact emotion.5 Collective or political emotion in the sense I am trying to demarcate is aroused when leaders or other parties seek to take action in the name of and using the resources of a group. As such, although both collective emotion and interpersonal-level emotion are social, collective emotion is distinguished by greater demands of spatiotemporal coordination as well as by orientation toward specific actions that are greater than the sum of the parts of individual actions. Such emotion at the level of polities or other large groups also seems generally to require the sharing of a collective identity. Not only are there formal methodological challenges in addressing collective emotion (addressed in chapter 3), there are also emotional challenges for scholars. Our own emotions always seem right to us. Nonetheless, giving rigorous attention to the workings of collective emotion is most productive when it enables us to rethink our own emotional responses,Page 4 → since most of us seem already to be well equipped at least to discount or decry the emotions of others.6 The advantage in attending to emotion more closely is not to choose (our) reason over (their) emotion, or vice versa; it is not to decide between “anger is bad” and “anger is good.” Instead, understanding the lineaments of an emotion such as anger focuses our attention on what anger can and can’t do, and it alerts us to where anger is most likely to go wrong and how we might make it go “more right” for us. The analysis of anger that will be offered in chapter 3 suggests that collective anger toggles between two modes. Angry rhetoric focused on the behavior of other agents who are perceived as affiliates or group members acts as a call for the adjudication of resource distributions or interactions according to shared group norms. The behavior of the agent who has putatively violated the group norms is attacked, but the endgame is the restoration of the parties to normatively guided interactions. In contrast, angry rhetoric directed at the behavior of agents who are not perceived as in-group members is focused on rallying the in-group to attack the out-group. Both versions of anger feature a common set of “appraisal cues”: (1) negative events have occurred that (2) result from the blameworthy actions of others, and (3) one has a reasonably high likelihood of controlling the others’ behavior, and (4) a relatively high certainty about the events and their causes. Both versions of anger also involve what have been called “action tendencies”: heightened energy, approach orientation, and a proclivity for cognitive narrowing, that is, promoting a way of thinking/speaking that relies on rote procedures rather than the search for novel information or deep processing. This mode of cognition encourages stereotyping, and it manifests excessive optimism. While both out-group and in-group directed anger involve these elements, out-group-oriented angry rhetoric isn’t focused on restoring the behaviors of the community’s members to shared normative grounds. Instead, its message to the outsiders it attacks is threat-based. Its telos is not to restore interaction but to eliminate the threat of the other. The three rhetorics that receive close examination in chapters 4 through 6—by Osama bin Laden, President

George W. Bush, and Susan Sontag—illustrate how the toggling back and forth between in-group based rhetorics and out-group based rhetorics is compelling across multiple cultures and ideologies. The point is not, however, that any of these leaders is culpable for their failure to provide desirable rhetorics about the global conditions surrounding 9/11. Rather, a central goal of this book is to provide a Page 5 →deep immersion in the ways in which the script that results from the functions, appraisal cues, and action tendencies for human anger itself creates an impasse for the normative adjudication of disputes in the global arena. The peoples of the world currently do not experience themselves as affiliates, and they do not share normative systems. In such a context, no one’s anger can serve the function of normative adjudication of resources at the global level. Unfortunately, as the passionate circulation of the rhetorics of the three leaders analyzed in these chapters indicates, we nonetheless are predisposed to feel that it can. If only we could “be heard,” then others would accede to our just demands for alternate allocations of resources. Careful examination of prominent rhetorics circulated about 9/11 shows why this sense is misleading, regardless of the ideological position from which we come to it. Anger in our present global context, however well intended, can only rally a narrow group to attack an Other. Rather than simply escalating our anger routines, to forward global redistribution currently requires working to build up senses of global affiliation and collectively developing—not importing or imposing—a shared set of global norms. The complexities of such a goal are addressed in chapter 7. A second guidance that emerges from this analysis is the value of greater attention to the recurrent places at which the various embodied and symbolic resources that contribute to the circulation of scripts for angry rhetoric tend to run us off the rails. The functions, appraisal cues, and action tendencies of anger are constituted and circulated in human collectivities through symbolic interactions. Consequently, collective anger tends to take specific forms influenced by the fundamental structures of language, which chapter 1 summarizes as including essentialism and binarism and as cohered in a narrative form. Because any successful script for public anger must coalesce diverse action tendencies into a narrative more compelling than those offered by other public contestants, anger scripts that circulate with great resonance tend to feature certain problematic features at intense levels. The most common script for public anger thus tends to look like this: (1) they (an absolutely antagonistic agent, identified as a long-standing enemy),7 (2) 0acted to cause serious harm (serious in terms of the normative claim being made),8 (3) to us (the model protagonist), Page 6 →(4) in violation of crucial social norms (or morals), (5) so we must attack!9 Given the distinctive merger of physiological arousals with linguistic structuration, the most resonant versions of this script tend to promote essentialism, binarism, rote thinking, excessive optimism, stereotyping, and attack orientations. These tendencies manifest themselves in angry rhetoric regardless of one’s ideology or position, as the three case studies will show. However, these tendencies tend to serve particular goals and modes of relationship more and less well. This claim stands in contrast to Drew Westen’s encouragement for progressives to take out and deploy the emotional pages of the political regressive’s playbook for emotion.10 It may be unfortunate that the proclivities of anger (and perhaps other emotions) make an easier fit with the goals and ideologies of conservatives or regressives than with those of progressives, but if that is the case, ignoring the difference will not serve progressive ends. This does not mean that progressives must give up on their angry calls for justice, but it does mean that they typically will benefit from more careful scrutiny of the reflex portraits of the antagonists and protagonists that their calls are prone to assemble, from assessments of the extent to which the norms they have depicted are broadly shared, and from attention to the likely resonance of the harms as they have described them. While it may always feel gratifying to rally the committed and to threaten the abstract and distant evil enemy, actually achieving justice may require a more ably assembled rhetoric.

If one does not aspire to progressive activism, but rather to academic analysis, the lessons are similar if differently oriented. Understanding angry public rhetoric as predisposed to follow a particular script highlights both a fuller set of components for analysis and the points where distortions that are crippling in terms of either ethics or effectiveness are likely to result from the demands for cohering the narrative. Many of the points about 9/11 that appear in the following analysis, especially those about President Bush, have been made before. Comparing the president’s rhetoric to the anger script offered here contributes to these discussions by showing how these otherwise isolated critical observations cohere and by providing an explanation for the resonances among the American press and public that enabled the president to inflict a quixotic but deadly campaign upon the world.11 Page 7 →While the present analysis focuses on global relations, this theory of anger inevitably has implications for the role of collective anger within nation-state communities as well. Rather than urging either the condemnation of anger or its celebration, the theory enhances the potential to explain the scope of success experienced by different social movements, most of which rely heavily on anger. For example, the success of the civil rights movement of the 1950s–1970s in the United States is attributable to numerous factors, but according to the model of collective anger’s functioning offered here, it was also facilitated by Martin Luther King Jr.’s emphasis on affiliation across racial lines and his heavy emphasis on shared norms. Notably, King was very explicit about the “redemptive” goal in his rhetoric. He rigorously adhered to a version of the anger script in which the community was called to redress its deviations from its shared norms.12 He did not have to convince all whites to share that affiliation and to act on the norms of freedom and legal justice, but his script was broad enough in affiliation, resonant enough in norms, and narrow enough in demands to gain the assent of the right mix of Americans to enable some changes in public schools, voting rights, public accommodations, and so on. As many have lamented, more recent efforts to expand from procedural or legal equality toward what is sometimes called substantive or economic equality have been less successful. In some sense, the greater demands of these later movements may be sufficient to explain their stalled success, but there might also be value in applying the template developed here to the rhetorics being used to promulgate those goals. Although a thorough analysis is a separate project, at least some recent scripts deny shared affiliations and define justice in ways that are not broadly shared (i.e., as numeric economic equality of outcomes, as opposed to other widely held views, such as understandings of fairness based in “what you earn” or “God has chosen you”). At least some such scripts depict whites as out-groups to blacks (or other minorities) and therefore enact not a restorative narrative, but an out-group oriented narrative. Such out-group based angry rhetorics can have desired effects: most notably, they can be effective at rallying preaffiliated group members, because of the approach oriented and activating tendencies of anger (as compared, for example, to sorrow).13 However, if one’s goal requires democratically based action by substantial majorities, then rallying in-group members by projecting majorities as out-groups may be less likely to succeed than other strategies.14 While a progressive might not want to give up Page 8 →on the commitment to justice defined as economic equality, attending to the template might suggest alternatives to trying to convert someone to a norm that they do not currently share while casting them as an out-group or evil party. My point is not to make any definitive assertions about specific rhetorics other than those I attend to carefully on the global scene, but rather to point toward the kind of analysis that is opened up by positing an account of emotion as provisionally and partially separable from ideology. Such an orientation provides a place for reflecting on how one articulates one’s ideology in relationship to others that is not available if one’s ideology is a self-contained totality. Positing such a platform for reflective self-critique would be dismal if it did not enable one to craft better rhetorics. Fortunately, the kinds of faults to which our emotions predispose us tend to be reparable. For example, in the case of economic rhetorics oriented to attacking members of one’s polis, the template enables recrafting one’s depiction of the antagonists from the binary-based, rote defaults to more correction-oriented visions.15 To take another recurrently salient example, using the template to analyze angry “populist” appeals might show how the breadth of their resonance turns out to depend on precisely how the “populace” is depicted, not just on the truth of the claim that one or another kind of justice has been

violated. As chapter 7 will suggest, another option that is opened by attention to the dynamics of shared emotion is the deployment of other emotional appeals, especially those with action tendencies that engage the search for information or expand imaginative cognition—such as sorrow, sadness, and even some kinds of happiness. Such emotions may be more appropriate to the task of changing normative commitments than is anger, when such change is the requisite task at hand. Anger’s excessive optimism may make it difficult to recognize that our passionately felt values are not as widely shared as we might feel they should be. A key value of the template is its encouragement to attend to that question (among specific others). Our anger in such challenging cases remains valuable, because it motivates us to act, but the action needed is not necessarily the broad public sharing of our anger as it comes raging up in us, formed as it is by the essentializing and binarizing forces of language in interaction with orientations to attack, and resistant as it is to novel cognition. Out of respect for the complexities and challenges involved in understandingPage 9 → collective anger, the general theory and the template for anger offered here have been developed in transductive observation and analysis—that is, back-and-forth between inductive and deductive approaches—of the existing academic literatures and key texts surrounding “9/11.” Readers with preferences for induction will want to begin with the case studies rather than with the theoretical materials and circle back to theoretical chapters where questions about underlying assumptions arise. Chapters 4 through 6 deploy the template summarized above to illustrate the fruitfulness of the perspective by offering a deep exploration of the angry public rhetorics of three pivotal leaders, Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, and Susan Sontag. Osama bin Laden is an obvious choice. He was not only an architect of the specific attacks, but also the leader who, through his angry rhetorics, rallied the perpetrators to pursue a shared purpose on the global stage. President George W. Bush also presents an obvious candidate. He was responsible for selecting the course of the response to the attacks by the United States, and he amplified and sifted the congealed diffuse global outrage at the attacks into a cold, isolated American rage. By contrast, Susan Sontag was not the leader of any organized political group. Rather, she represents the set of cultural elites who claimed special knowledge, progressive political goals, and who had the freedom from institutional constraints that should have enabled them to provide productive alternative rhetorics that could coalesce a more productive response to 9/11 in light of those goals and that knowledge. As the “grand dame” of “the last century’s unapologetically grand intellectuals,”16 Sontag’s prominence among left-leaning intellectuals alone would make her a leading candidate to represent a set of rhetorical choices that were also articulated by other highly visible intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and Ward Churchill. It was Sontag’s short essay in the New Yorker, however, that received by far the most vociferous and widest response among all such advocates (as will be documented in chapter 6). Because of its substantial circulation, Sontag’s rhetoric thus provides not only a representative case but also the most important enactment of public anger after 9/11 articulated from the ideology and positionality of the intellectual left. Bin Laden, Bush, and Sontag provide particularly informative cases for such an exploration precisely because they were in so many ways fundamentally different people, with different ideologies and goals, placed in dramatically different social positions. Bin Laden was a devout male raised Page 10 →in a particular Muslim sect, trained in engineering and business, from a polygamous family enculturated in the Arabic Mideast. His social position at the time of the attack was as an exile from his home nation, Saudi Arabia, but he nonetheless identified deeply with a vision of his homeland. He sought to use his wealth and organizational skills to deploy strategic violence in order to reestablish a 9th-century model of governance with his brethren to control millions of people’s daily lives across a vast swath of territory. George W. Bush was bin Laden’s most powerful respondent. A monogamously married, reborn Christian, he was arguably an anti-intellectual, in spite of his graduation from an elite college in the northeastern United States. Bush’s enculturation might best be encapsulated by his enthusiastic role as the owner of a Texas professional sports team. He had a uniquely influential position as the president of a superpower. His voice would be heard

around the globe, and his actions could dictate life or death at many scales. Finally, Susan Sontag was the atheistic daughter of a relatively well-off Г©migrГ© Russian Jew. Divorced and bi /homosexual, she attended and valued elite American schools from “the left coast”—Hollywood to Chicago—but she identified with the international art-intellectual scene symbolized by the adoption of Paris as a cultural home. She sought fame and influence through novels, nonfiction writing, and other verbally based activism.17 She was recognized among Western intellectuals as “one of the most influential critics of her generation.”18 The analyses of the rhetorics used by these three would-be global leaders will point up the ways in which language’s binary, totalizing, and dramatistic tendencies merge with anger’s body-based proclivities toward narrow-minded rote and stereotypical thought, attack, and optimism. In all three cases, this merger produced rhetorics that, though peopled by different agents and moral or normative warrants, were remarkably similar in the structure of their scripts, both in their dramatic frames and in their tendency toward absolutism, purification, narrowness of affiliation, and warping of the moral warrants toward (sub)group-interest. Shaped by anger’s proclivities, none of these rhetorics could achieve the global adjudications for which they called. If one were interested in the psychology of human anger, or a conventional “great person” version of history, one might ask whether the angry rhetorics of bin Laden, Sontag, and Bush served them well as individuals. Page 11 →If the function of anger for individuals is to protect one’s social status, as Aristotle long ago indicated,19 then angry rhetorics were arguably good choices for each of these individuals. They all began life with relative privilege, but each garnered unique global attention and status, at least in part through their anger displays. If one’s focus is not on leaders as individuals, however, then one asks instead how and why particular rhetorics offered by leaders circulate in ways that can be more fully explained by one theory rather than others. Such attention to the rhetorics of public leaders is viewed as irrelevant or uninteresting by those who hail from two different perspectives that are commonly held. First, many people believe that “rhetoric”—most simply defined as public discourse—is not to be trusted. Since public leaders routinely lie, misrepresent their motives, or do not really know their own motives in any full and reliable sense, then public rhetoric is a screen or a hoax, rather than a reliable indicator of motive. This view mistakes the mind of the leader as the central causative force of social action. Whatever the personal motives of a leader, leaders move publics to actions (or quiescence) by providing discourses (including nonverbal threats) that are adequately motivating to publics, or at least to sufficiently placed members of those publics.20 The question is not what “really” moves a leader, but rather what motivates the public to support or acquiesce to the collective actions articulated by leaders. The shared grounds of motivation are found in the discourses that circulate among publics: motivations that have resonance with the right audiences circulate widely among them; motivations that do not have such resonance do not. Some scholars have taken these insights to the opposite extreme. Observing that the dynamics of discursive circulation mean that publics make leaders—and, typically, having a distaste for hierarchy—they conclude that attention to the rhetorics of successful or focal leaders should be discarded in favor of the study of “vernacular” or everyday rhetorics or “maps” of mass media entertainment, news, or other programming.21 While all of those other discourses certainly merit attention, any individual piece of such discourse is less potentially impactful than any equivalent portion of discourse articulated by a leader. Leaders occupy particularly influential places in the circulatory networks of public discourse. They almost always are people or teams of people who have a history of success in articulating various interests and agents together through skillful use of discourse. Page 12 →Official leaders (e.g., presidents and prime ministers, but also collectively, congresspersons and justices) in addition have access to levers of power that no ordinary person can wield. Consequently, one should by all means study the rhetorics of those who do not have social power, but one should by no means conclude that an interest in justice constitutes a reason to discount the importance of attending to the publicly motivating discourses of those who speak from places that amplify the impact of their words in

shaping collective action. To attend to the ways in which anger is shared to create and sustain global conflicts such as 9/11, as this book does, is also not to deny the utility of the many critiques that have been published of the ideologies that are used to legitimize and defend violence and neoimperialism. Critical scholars from multiple disciplines have now offered detailed arguments about the problematic nature of the term “terrorism,”22 about the relations of global economics to terrorism,23 about the threats to civil liberties involved in the security discourses terrorism has enhanced,24 about the way in which the counterdiscourses “othered” Muslims and Arabs,25 about the role of women or gender,26 and about the role of discourse or the media in promoting and shaping various aspects of these discourses.27 The missing ingredient is an analysis of the public support for these problematic rhetorics. Anna M. Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling, for example, have provided a trenchant analysis of the similar use by Osama bin Laden and President George W. Bush of what they call “mirror strategies of imperial politics.”28 They identify rhetorics used by both of these world leaders that demonize an Evil Other, hypermasculinize the state/caliphate, and assign hyperfeminized roles to non-elites in order to sustain the privilege of elites. Their analysis emphasizes and decries how these rhetorics justify/require violence that inflicts its heavy price on “those at the margins of the world’s politics.”29 Yet, because they focus on the motivations of elites, their description does not provide much of an account of why those who are affected by the violence would passionately support their own oppression.30 The takeaway offered by Agathangelou and Ling is to tell their academic audiences, yet once again, to do what critically oriented humanists have been doing for decades: “scrutinize structures of privilege,” “(re)consider visions of security and insecurity,” “challenge” elite privilege.31 While attention to such ideological (power/knowledge) frames is an important agenda, it is not all that needs to be done. Scholars need also to explain Page 13 →the powerful forces that block such reconsiderations and challenges, leading so many people to endorse we/they accounts and what Agathangelou and Ling call the “script(s of) these worldmaking operas, awing us into a mournful silence that alchemizes, over time, into a righteous, murderous rage.”32 The present work asks you to join in the emotionally and intellectually difficult task of building these understandings so that we may better counter these forces.

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Chapter 1 An Onto-Epistemological Integration of Symbolic and Biological Being To build a theory of emotion that integrates symbolic and physiological elements on firm academic ground requires reworking the onto-epistemological foundations from which most scholars—on both the humanistic and nonhumanistic sides—operate. Given that there have now been scores of insightful analyses of emotion in political arenas that have attended to emotion solely as if it were discourse,1 many have asked why should we trouble ourselves about the role of the body, and especially of the body conceived under the sign of “biology”?2 A broad answer has already been inaugurated by others: if the biological contributions to human emotion make substantive and consequential differences to political emotion that are additional to those of cultural or individual histories, then one gives up theoretical power, which is also to say, potential political efficacy, if one ignores those forces.3 The specific answer offered through the analyses of 9/11 is that, without giving both symbolics and biology its due, we fail to understand that the deficiencies in the rhetorics shared by bin Laden, Bush, and even Sontag were not assignable to some adjustment one could make to their ideologies (i.e., their commitments to a more-or-less coherent symbolic structure), but to the deployment of the predispositional resources of anger as a means to rally global audiences to address normatively based grievances in the existing affiliative conditions. Attending to what might and might not be the biologically based proclivities of an emotion such as anger—rather than merely dismissing them via an ode to reason, or its rebel grandchild, Page 16 →culture—also turns out to require that we take seriously that discourse itself is deeply structured; it is not solely the product of contingent cultural conditions. Such considerations are blocked at the very base of academic foundations, which assign physical, biological, and symbolic phenomena to discrete and incommensurable realms.

Understanding Human Political Action Requires a Biosymbolic Frame In 2009, Debra Hawhee’s brilliant book on Moving Bodies observed that Kenneth Burke’s prescient observation that humans should be defined as “symbol-using animals” has not received the canonical enshrinement that it deserves.4 Given the long-standing, if now widely lamented, “mind/body dualism” of academic theories,5 it requires a fundamental ontological shift to understand “the life of the mind” and the “biological body” as commensurable.6 Two major academic streams—“the new humanists” and the “new materialists”—have sought to provide such a reunification by integrating human studies more directly with studies of other matter in the universe. Rather than giving due attention to both the nature of symbolic action and the character of biological processes, each of these approaches instead seek unification by the reduction of one type of force to the other. Led by E. O. Wilson’s theory of “consilience,” scholars dubbed the “New Humanists” by John Brockman present theories in which human social behavior is reduced to biology or physical geography or genes.7 While scholars such as Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker have added important insights about human social behavior that any social theory ought to incorporate, they also leave unexplained the workings of the symbolic systems that are so distinctively important to human beings. By describing human discourse as just “babble” (Wilson’s term), they presume that it can be ignored.8 Thereby, they dismiss a major explanatory variable in any human behavior, especially at the political level. The reductions offered by (most) of the New Materialists are an odd mirror of the New Humanists. Instead of proclaiming humans to be nothing more than animals varying by their geographical niche, the New Materialists proclaim atoms and machines to be just like humans.9 Karen Barad provides a clear example when she writes, “feeling, desiring and experiencing are not singular characteristics or capacities of human consciousness. Page 17 →Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.”10 Such an approach represents an ethical collapse, notwithstanding the often front-and-center professions of ethical intent.11 Like the New

Humanists, these theorists ignore the distinctive role of the symbolic in creating what has been called agency, interaction, and identity, and therefore the ability to pass ethical judgments at all.12 These are not the only options. Integration of phenomena that are tightly inter-infused but also based in different time scales and qualitatively different dispositions is better achieved by a deliberate strategy of proliferation-inrelation than by reduction. Bruce Railsback and I have recommended an onto-epistemological stance we labeled “transilience” (rather than E. O. Wilson’s “consilience”) for recognizing the leaps that both signify gaps and simultaneously connect the movement across those gaps, among physical, biological, and symbolic modes of being.13 While the following addresses physical being first, for adult humans there is no “physical” being that is not comprehended through symbolic means, at least partially, and therefore always consequentially. I address physical being first because it is simpler in form than biological or symbolic being. It seems clearest to build up the complex from the simpler. I also address each of these forms in a simplified writing style. Instead of consistently writing “that which we call physical” or “the assemblage that can temporarily and partially and fuzzily be denoted as вЂwork’,” I just write “physical” and “work” (using the scare quotes only at the most strategic spots). While there would be advantages to the greater precision of constantly making provisionalism explicit, it would also further exacerbate the challenges of reading the already complicated theoretical formulation being offered. I therefore hereby announce my reliance on the reader’s ability to decode such symbolic assemblages in an appropriately provisional manner, rather than repeatedly enunciating this provisionalism and fuzziness with each noun and verb in the text.

A Transilient Perspective The Newtonian vision of matter emphasized the concept of “work.” To move mass out of its existing trajectories required the application of novel force. In contrast to older, common sense notions that the world was static, and that therefore human work imparted motion to inert things, Page 18 →this important version of materialism produced a definition of matter that attended to the inherently dynamic nature of being. The fundamental insight that material systems always have trajectories, and that work must always initiate changes in movement from objects that always were already involved in force relations (e.g., friction and gravity), was not only enormously useful for producing a wealth of mechanical products, but this conceptual pairing of matter /movement also provided the basis for the integration of the study of biological entities (which were already understood as “not inert”) with the rest of the physical universe. With further developments, this account of the material relatedness of all being also laid the basis for the refutation of all kinds of idealisms, which posit that important movements in the universe could be “spirited” into action without work of this physical kind. This still-stunning counter to our common sense was not overturned by Albert Einstein or quantum mechanics. There remain crucial differences between the ways in which the movement of energy/matter at the quantum level and the movement of energy/matter at the scale relevant to most decision-making among animals is best characterized. Hence, New Materialists err when they claim to use quantum mechanical theories to explain everything at every scale (a move at least as errant as efforts to try to use mechanical scale accounts at the quantum scale). Nonetheless, our understanding of the physical universe was elaborated and deepened in important ways by quantum mechanics. The post-Newtonian vision of matter explored temporality and orientation more deeply, and ultimately produced an understanding of being as energy/matter/time. Implicit in this vision was a rewriting of the form/matter distinction (which Aristotle had labored to articulate and which had been a taken-for-granted of much applied Newtonian mechanics). On the new account, there was not a thing called matter that was then poured into different forms. Rather, the relational dynamics of energetically constituted matter simultaneously constituted their form. Thus, metals have innately different forms than inert gases because the movements of electrons in different patterns of electron shell configurations constitute different kinds of relationships. But the “form”

of a metal is not something added onto a formless “substance” that “is” the metal. To assume that a metal only “takes form” after the smithy pounds it is to confuse the form of an “object” (understood in terms of human purposes imposed on a particular aliquot of the metal) with the metal’s form as a particular metal Page 19 →(which is the product of the kinds of relationships among its arrangements of electron potentials and includes, e.g., its pliability). Every speck of metal in the universe has form, even before a smithy creates a particular object, which might be said to have its own form, qua a planned human object. This vision of the relational constitution of formal variation as inherent to energy/matter/time as necessarily “configured” in what we call “physical being” runs in parallel with a central concept from the humanities. The classical cannon of rhetorical theory held that dispositio (or “organization”) was a key component in the character and impact of rhetorical texts. Relational orderings matter: “I ate the lion” is not “the lion ate me” or, a racially explicit statement in the genre of “black comedian’s rap” is not the same statement when it appears in the genre of political campaign rhetoric. But more fundamentally, contemporary theories show that linguistic form is not simply the product of the wordsmithing of a particular sentence or essay: language—as a set of potentials arrayed in dispersed matter—is itself constituted by a dynamic network of forms. Structuralism identified these forms as a series of historically developed relationships among words and other semiotic elements (elaborated in the final section of this chapter). Poststructuralism emphasized the dynamism and indefiniteness of the formal relationships among words. But the assumption that the forms of words can be abstracted out of their relationships with energy/matter/time is grounded in a confusion of levels of analysis similar to that attending the idea that the smithy gives a form to a metal (or a sculptor gives a new object form to a hunk of marble). Just because words can be articulated in vocal vibrations, pen and ink, or Play-Doh, doesn’t mean that there is not a web of energy/matter/time relationships that constitute their form of being qua symbols independent of the work of any particular word-smithy producing a particular sentence in a particular medium (e.g., oral, written, secondary orality).14 The fundamental relationships of form in symbol systems are different from those of physical matter not so arranged (even though they are also dependent upon and constrained in some ways by the properties of the specific physical matter in which they are arranged in any given instance, which always, to date, includes biological arrangements). Both post-Newtonian natural science and the rhetorical canon’s highlighting of dispositio suggest that forms are specific relational patterns among matter that are essential to the production of particular characteristics among energy/matter with a given form of being. Forms are not somethingPage 20 → “added on” to a preexisting matter that already has its fundamental characteristics set independent of the form attributed by the human sculptor. Rather, forms are relationships among energy/matter of particular types that only come together to produce a particular mode of being with particular characteristics as some particular form. On this model, one can identify particular ways in which energy/matter comes together to produce different kinds of characteristics. In describing these characteristics I will attend especially to the different forms of causality that are entailed by three different modes of being, and some methodological implications. While it is possible to identify more than the three modes or levels of form I will treat here,15 attending to three is sufficient to demonstrate the use of proliferation to break the binarism of prior treatments, and more than enough complexity for the moment, so I draw your attention to the triad of metaforms: physical, biological, and symbolic. The ultimate goal is to understand how the biological and the symbolic can produce a kind of human effect-range called public emotion that is susceptible to theoretically guided empirical observation and influence, albeit under different parameters of investigation than the model developed by classical physics.

The Physical Mode of Being Physical being is currently understood as energy/matter in temporal relation. The properties of energy/matter appear to be sensitive to scale. That is to say that when the units of agglomeration of energy/matter are close in size to each other and to the scale of measurement devices,16 their observable characteristics are different (“Newtonian”) from when the units of agglomeration of energy/matter are highly disparate in size to each

other and dramatically smaller than the directly observable scale of measurement (“quantum mechanical”).17 However, even given that relatively dramatic set of scale-based differences, there are some distinctive features of the physical level of being. This appears to arise from the apparent determination of the particular forms of energy/matter by the potential interactional properties of a relatively small number of entity types (quarks, muons, leptons, and so forth) that combine in a relatively small number of ways to produce a relatively small number of types of atoms (118 is a pittance comparedPage 21 → to social complexity; there are that many kinds of breakfast foods at your grocer and there are over 6,000 living languages). Though trying to understand physical being has been dazzlingly difficult for our species, its relative “chunkability” into a small number of component types has made it the fastest-moving research terrain at the nonquantum scale. This simplicity and the resultant success has contributed to the well-grounded and functional belief (i.e., theoretical description) that physics at the agglomerative scale to which we are accustomed (Newtonian mechanics) is predictable and relatively determinable. Hence it appears to us as “deterministic, ” even if we now apply the caveat that this “determinism” is “probabilistic,” and that it can in particular configurations be “nonlinear” and hence effectively impossible to predict. Nonetheless, at the scales most of us directly encounter, physical being acts as deterministic and matter appears with properties that our perceptual apparatus and our symbolic systems enable us to quantify/specify such as inert/volatile, solid/liquid /gas, hot/cold, moving/stationary (albeit relative to our own frame), with specifiable acceleration, and so forth. The combination of success at the research level and the calibration of our common sense to this level made this the “go to” model for understanding being for 200 years or so among academics.

The Biological Mode of Being One can use the terminologies developed to describe physical being to explain biological entities. The fascinating study of biochemistry has revealed the relationships of atoms to the properties of living. Our complex neural systems are traceable to ion channels and the movements of simple chemicals such as calcium.18 One can characterize the flight of eagles in terms of Bernoulli effects and vectors of force and movement. Nonetheless, one cannot fully and parsimoniously describe biological being using physicalist vocabularies and methods. If all one can say about an eagle is to describe the proportion of its body that is liquid, its temperature, and the speed of its flight, one has an impoverished set of descriptions that can only describe the features that a raptor shares with something like a comet. Since comets don’t evolve and hunt, there are dimensions of “raptors” that one does not understand if one has access only to physical Page 22 →level vocabularies. Moreover, one can predict the behavior of a comet with physicalist vocabularies, but one cannot predict the behavior of biological entities sufficiently with such tools. One cannot, for example, use the physicalist vocabulary to predict that “the eagle will now dive to catch its prey.” The concepts of “dive” and “prey” have already built into them a notion of intention; lacking such concepts, a physicist observing a comet and an eagle has no basis on which to predict that the latter will not maintain its course on the same principles as the former. One cannot even “in theory” posit a physicalist vocabulary sufficient to make such a prediction by taking in all of the variables involved in the physical relations in the brain and musculature of the eagle because “in theory” presumes an omniscient being that violates the laws of physics by having the capacity to access subcomponents about which there is insufficient time and means to gather data. The complexity of the form of the eagle moves (in terms of the internal relationships of the physical particles) with too great a speed for any external material entity to predict its change of course based solely on the state of the molecules of which it is composed. If one has to call in an omniscient being of infinitely rapid speed of calculation, an entity that violates the laws of physics, then one’s “theory” is a fiction, not a theory at all. Note that a projected “super-supercomputer” of the future is simply a different kind of omniscient being, both because the capacities to calculate at the necessary speed do not currently exist and as a “hypothetical” exist only in the fictional register, but also because it would be impossible to measure the eagle’s nervous system in sufficient detail without perturbing it in order to get the data for such a computer to process.

It is for such reasons that biology has progressed, as described by the great biologist Ernst Mayr, by adding functionalist vocabularies to the repertoire of explanation.19 Some natural scientists have been nervous about talking about functions, because function talk is polysemic: functionalist vocabularies are also used to describe humanly intended actions.20 But biologically speaking, functions do not require conscious choice, nor an “unconscious” in the psychoanalytic sense. To ascribe a function to some arrangement of matter does require assuming that there is a locus of identity operating to produce a particular effect. But the “identity” is not an autonomous and isolated individual with a stable, permanent, and always-identical being, but rather it is a form that maintains self-similarity through a chain of replication of specific arrangements of particular types Page 23 →of physical materials. Talk about a biological component’s function (i.e., the heart’s function is to pump blood) is always within that larger frame that treats long-term replication of a form as “the” function that defines biological being as such. Functionalist vocabularies are useful and desirable descriptors for matter organized in the form of biological being precisely because they can take into account information from the long time scales that have been embedded in any plant or animal by its role in this chain of replication. Using goal-oriented notions such as “intention” and “prey” allows the projection of that past as a basis for action in the present. This doesn’t exclude physical level accounts, but rather incorporates and extends them. Unlike a cue ball, whose long-term history (e.g., how many times it has been sunk in pocket “X”) is irrelevant to the trajectory it will take upon contact with a physical force, a plant or animal’s reaction to the same stimulus is dependent on its history (how many times the horse has seen a bicycle on the trail in front of it, how well it is trained, what its particular “personality” is, all determine how much the passing bicycle will alter its trajectory). Of course, there are physical accumulations in the body of the horse that correspond to that deep history, but that does not mean “in real theory” one can use those accumulations to account for the changes in trajectory based on the physical data (though one can certainly postulate a “fanciful” theory that projects such an account; as argued above, it is more efficient and practical and “realistic” to project based on the higherlevel data that summarize that history). This same kind of accounting operates at the species level, where advantages for the functional goal of self-replication explain more fully why a horse and a mountain lion might react to a passing bicyclist in the different ranges of ways they do.21 Together with the concept of functionality, this broadening of the time frame involved in causal accounting makes it possible to describe biological forms as not simply deterministic (after the fashion of physical being), but rather as opportunistic. Specific environmental configurations constitute the “opportunity” for specific forms to replicate (as well as to survive individually). But as evolution proceeds, organisms develop greater capacities to control the environment to make opportunities (they become “opportunistic” by taking opportunities from the environment to make opportunities). The most obvious leap in this direction is the cell wall, but sexual reproduction is probably another. The ciliated channels of coelenterates are another example (as compared to barnacles, for example). By Page 24 →the time one gets to moving animals, this opportunistic quality is multidimensional and enormously complex. At the biological level, “opportunism” does not require conscious decision processes. The term merely attends to the variable repertoire of responses that plants and animals are able to deploy in a fashion that accounts for more-than-the-immediate-and-local physical interaction, a capability that is unlike the movement of matter not biologically arranged. This doesn’t mean that the physical level action is irrelevant: the cell wall responds deterministically to the chemical that bumps up against it. It doesn’t act opportunistically to decide whether to admit the chemical or not. Nonetheless, through time, and as part of the larger entity that the cell wall participates in forming, the cell wall is itself rebuilt in ways that “take advantage” of different environmental conditions. “Take advantage” in the biological sense means simply to re-form in a fashion that has served the function of self-replication. The enlarged temporal frame and complexity of the organization of biological beings require thinking about causation in terms of a concept such as “opportunism” without discarding the notion of determinism at the lower levels.22 Thus, both those who tout “mechanistic” visions of biology and those who refuse to engage biology because of its supposed “determinism” are deeply wrong. Biological beings do not simply operate

like clock-like mechanisms that endlessly execute only a single tick-tock, regardless of surrounding conditions. The import of the distinction between matter in the physical and biological forms is illustrated by the different role of “prediction” in biology and physics.23 Not only, as argued above, does one need to use biological level information to predict the opportunistic movements of a biological being, but also the parameters for prediction are looser than in at least much of physics. The simpler the organisms, situations, and outcomes, the better one’s predictions with regard to the field of biology.24 Nonetheless, biological studies have illustrated well that the ability to explain phenomena is useful even in the absence of physics-like prediction about the behavior of individual entities. Such explanations allow humans to intervene in biological organisms by targeting isolable components linked with functional-level characteristics (whether breeding programs, insertions of base pairs into DNA strands, or behavior changing stimuli). Given the opportunistic quality of biologically formed phenomena, the biological components of human emotions should thus be understood as Page 25 →opportunistic signaling devices. Like other biological characteristics, they are not identical, uniform responses solely to immediate conditions, but neither are they infinitely plastic, because they are grounded in their physical properties as well as their biological lineage. Attending to the biological level of human emotions therefore has the widely unrecognized advantage of grounding the sociality of human emotions in something more than unexplainable cultural happenstance. Because humans are, as a matter of biological necessity, an obligately social species (we cannot survive as humans without the contributions of other humans), to attend to the biological aspects of human emotion makes it mandatory to attend to the social functions of emotions. “Self-similar replication” among humans includes replication of the social unit, not merely the individual, and so the divide between biology and culture is less clear than the division of academics among disciplines might make it appear. The obligately social character of human beings also makes the debate about group evolution as illogical as a debate that took a cancer cell as the model of replication for a body. Imagine claiming that the cell was the only active unit of replication because cells could act independently of the self-replication interests of the body in cancer!25 The self-replication of cancer cells has a very limited time horizon precisely because they do not serve the self-replication of the larger organism of which they are a component. Such isolates therefore cannot be taken as models for self-replication or evolution. Similarly, the idealized rugged individual might survive outside a human social unit for a while, but the completely asocial individual is doomed to non-self-replication, and very few humans could survive without any of the goods or assistance of other humans. A self-replicating social unit made up solely of asocial humans is an impossibility for the long term. One simply must account for the survival of social entities rather than subcomponents if one wishes to account for the long-term survival (i.e., “evolution”) of any obligately social species. Thus, it is conceptually errant to align “biology” against “the social” in the case of humans. With regard to emotion, this explains why human emotions are not solely internal or individual level signals. The classic example for explaining the evolutionary function of emotions is to point out that fear enables the individual organism to respond rapidly to danger. This is true of many animals with complex nervous systems (including humans). But anger, compassion, and even sorrow are not directed solely at activating the individual to respond to the environment. They are inherently social level Page 26 →signals. Compassion is obviously a social level phenomenon, but even sorrow is directed as much outward as inward. My tears are a signal to you to change your behavior: to help me or to desist in your action. The curl of the mouth in disgust alerts others to avoid a potentially toxic entity. As chapter 3 will further establish, anger entails threat to others or a call for normative adjudication of behaviors. The concept of biological function not only mandates attention to the complex interaction of different levels of living beings (gene, cell, body, group), it also complicates physicalist notions of “cause and effect.” Because any isolable (never “isolated”) component of a biological system tends to be pleiotropic (having multiple simultaneous functions for any given nexus of energy/matter), one should always expect that the functions of such components are not fully described if described as singulars. Rather, they typically are better described as a cluster of related potentials. In accord with this model, for example, a synthesis of existing studies

indicates that the cluster of functions within human anger includes a toggling among threat, direct punishment, rallying to collective action, and social adjudication of the violations of norms. Because biological components can be the “cause” of many outcomes simultaneously, the methodological approaches to understanding cause-effect relationships at the biological level must be expanded to include more options than offered in classic physics. And the stretching doesn’t end there. Additional vocabularies and tools are needed when biological forms develop the distinctive social feature of symbolic communication.

The Symbolic Mode of Being Biological beings seem to have a tendency to develop communication capacities.26 In terms of biological functions, communication capacities facilitate sexual congress as well as mitigate the costs of competitions for resources; one can Wahoo! instead of actually tearing each other apart.27 Among other advantages, communication enhances access to resources through cooperation and protection: a wolf pack can bring down a prey that an individual wolf cannot; a human group can protect each other from the wolf pack. Many species of many sizes have communication mechanisms that are relatively complex (e.g., bees, whales, birds, wolves). As best as we have been able to determine, human beings appear to have—farPage 27 → and away—the most complex communication systems among animals on earth (to both good and ill effect).28 The complexity of these systems enables humans to cooperate to substantially and variably and progressively alter environments. Human communication systems enable these properties because they employ not merely icons (picture-like representations) or signs (representations tied on a one-to-one basis with discrete and stable objects or sets of objects), but symbol systems, which means they include grammars and variable meanings for tokens that are determined by prior and different usages and by the structural relationship among these tokens. Symbol systems are fully material. They do not draw from or exist on some mysterious transcendental plane beyond the physical universe. There is no communication if there are no light rays or sound waves or bumps that impact some animal’s sensory apparatuses, which are processed by species-shaped, culture-shaped, but individually embodied neural networks (and biochemical profiles). In human beings (and to some extent in other organisms; birds, for example), this involves dedicated decoding sections in brains that seem to relate the unique components of these perceptual signals (e.g., stored “vocabularies” that have fuzzy but template-like structures).29 Although the symbolic apparatus must at some time receive symbolic input from outside the body, this apparatus can be run within bodies with at least partial and temporary independence from such external inputs. Indeed, it seems that many if not most people are almost incapable of turning off a little verbal performer who runs incessantly in their heads, sometimes commenting on what is going on around the person but often fuming about the past or daydreaming about a future. This little speaker is sometimes misidentified as “the soul” or “the self” or “the conscience”; interestingly, in that regard, the silencing of that fractured monologue is a key goal of many forms of meditation.30 It also appears that symbolic operations run subconsciously, while one sleeps, or even while one’s attention is otherwise focused. The symbolic is constituted as a field of action, loosely and diffusely bounded in time and space simultaneously by a self-similar biological body and a broader linguistic or cultural group. This field of action is not “outside” of physical or biological reality, but it adds to the immediate local physical and biological reality an additional dimensionality that enables the creation of novel images and symbols. A symbolically equipped body can generate a creature never seen (the jack-alope), a story never Page 28 →lived (Cinderella), or a machine never made (the bumpalator—a reverse tattooer that adds semipermanent colored bumpules to your skin; you heard it here first!). This creative capacity is typically called “ideation” (fair enough), but at least since Plato it has been mistaken for something that exists in a nonmaterial plane (not correct). Ideation exists, literally inside our heads, but by way of symbolic processes that are, as a matter of fact and necessity, socially distributed and circulated.31 That level of complexity may explain why we have had such difficulty as a species getting the concept of “idea” right. That description engages the debate over whether “ideas” are necessarily symbolic. That debate has been

misconstrued as a debate over whether we can “think” without words. Many animals think without words (or even without externalizable icons or indexes) if by “thinking” we mean the selection of action options by brain-based processing (watch a cat choose a path along a fence). As in other animals, the human brain undergoes various kinds of processes we might call “cognition” that are additional to the activation of the symbolic centers of the brain. So “thinking” is not coterminous with the use of words. However, as will be more fully elaborated below, the engagement of the word sectors in the brain produces a distinctive kind of thinking. Using the term “ideation” for that kind of thinking is a reasonable choice, as long as one avoids slipping back and forth between the different kinds of thinking (though mathematical thought is also that kind of symbolic thinking, as is reading music).32 Being at all clear about the nature of ideation so defined is difficult, because the sectors of the brain predisposed to make words and grammars seem to be connected to generalizing templates that also predispose a kind of specific /general relationship among processes for interpreting visual images. Moreover, all these sectors are tied into the rest of the brain, so there is no such thing as “pure” symbolization. Moreover, neurons in the brain do not form discrete units of words or other generalities (or anything else, for that matter). Rather, the brain operates via activation of shifting arrays of neurons that are not self-identical, but rather somewhat different in every activation, even if also substantially overlapping, in the “family resemblance” fashion that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s metaphor for complex kinds of set relationships highlighted.33 Words—literally the string of phonemes—are tied to what we call concepts or ideas through a rough mapping to specific parts of neural networks with related contents. Thus, when you type a quotation using your short-term memory, Page 29 →you might substitute the word “avidly” for “eagerly” because both of these words have ties to related areas of the neural tangle. Or, you might change articles or reverse word orders, because the neurons repackage the specific words into different physical forms in the brain during the processes we chunk (too discretely) as decoding and recoding. Thus, “an idea” involves a relationship between an imprecisely bounded distribution of words and an imprecisely bounded tangle of neurons with specific encodings (encodings that are structured by the brain’s specific capacities and limits but also by the experiences encoded in the neurons from words, visual images, smells, movements, and so forth). This inexact linkage between word sets and what we call “ideas” create in human common sense the impression that ideas come before the words. But no “idea” actually exists separate from some imprecisely bounded set of these neural clusters. Or, if your analytical purposes make it useful to separate the “idea” from the “neural cluster,” you must define the “idea” as a diffuse set of potential relationships embodied in the (dynamics of) the tangle, not as a specific entity existing as if it were an object on a transcendent plane.34 If the diffuse potentials represented in the brain becomes concretized as a specific “idea” only at specific articulations, it is a quite different phenomenon from the pure or uniform whole imagined in the Platonic versions of “idea” that dominate common sense, some religions, and much academic scholarship. Because one only produces “an” idea out of the probability cloud in the neurons of a brain by producing a particular range of symbolic articulations from that cloud, all ideas are also social. The symbol system was learned from the society, and different symbol systems entail different probability spaces. The residents of one culture may have only three or four words for color, whereas another culture has a thousand color words. That difference enables different proclivities for members of the group to articulate the neuronal ranges in their brains: “we should paint the dwelling blue” likely has a different effect from “we should paint the dwelling teal.” This does not mean that people from both cultures can’t employ paint with the light-reflective patterns of the color “teal” (the claim of an extreme Worfian and some constructivist views), but it does mean that more work, and more symbolic work, must be done to do so. In a materialist system, that “more work” creates differences that can matter (even if only in incremental accumulations). The sharing of one’s “idea” with others in a linguistically profligate societyPage 30 → entails the diffuse decoding of one’s articulation by other humans, and in each of those brains the network of linkages among the subset of social symbols and experiences being articulated are more and less different. At the social level, there is therefore an even broader range of possibilities constituted by the “idea” than in an individual brain. The sense that an “idea” is a discrete, simple, unified thing that is merely “communicated” by

the apt selection of words is therefore a highly misleading common sense.35 Instead, “ideas” have a necessarily doubled existence as articulated/articulatable distinctions of diffuse distributions of neurons/words in both an array of individuals in a social space and in individual brains. The breadth of interpretations available in different cultures arises not merely from the numbers of words in a domain space but also from the availability and prominence of some types of words (their distributions). Thus, for example, the differences in the possibility of sharing certain ideas about emotion among publics is a result not just of the commonly alluded to fact that emotions are divided up into more or fewer categories by different linguistic groups,36 but also that some groups feature some emotions more prominently than others. A clear example is the contrast between the classic identification of amae as an important emotion in Japanese cultures as opposed to the role of schadenfreude in German cultures. It seems a bad bet to assert that no one in a Japanese culture ever experiences joy at the misfortune of others or that no one in a German culture experiences a feeling of warmth from secure dependence on another. But the distribution of those feelings is likely shifted by the accessibility of the two words in the culture, and the words’ accessibility may simultaneously be heightened by other conditions that preferentially enable one or the other feeling sets. Scholars in the tradition of the “New Humanists,” such as Pinker and Wilson, have objected to such observations and classified them as “Worfian”—that is, symbolically deterministic. Their shared agenda was to deny the creative role of symbolization in the production of “ideas,” which they treat as objects lodged in brains, but not in symbolic centers. Wilson’s approach was to show that, even though the number of color words vary by culture, they vary in a predictable order (red is added first to black and white schemes, then either yellow or green, and so forth). By showing that there is a biological order to the proliferation of colors, Wilson hoped to show that color words were biologically determined. But that insight, to the extent that it holds (and it is a partial relationship rather than an absolute one, as even Wilson had to acknowledge), doesn’t mean that the Page 31 →range of ideas produced are themselves fully and efficiently explainable biologically. Biological level phenomena are more parsimoniously (and realistically) explained by functional vocabularies and evolutionarily presumptive vocabularies, and, likewise, symbolic phenomena are more effectively explained by vocabularies that operate at the symbolic level and by cause-effect theories and methodologies that operate at that level. Wilson’s analysis successfully reminds us that color words are tied to biological level phenomena such as the structure of the eye (just as biochemistry is tied to the constraints of chemistry), but that does not mean that one can use the biological level to explain fully and parsimoniously my choice to paint my house organdy or what it feels like to say “I am sad” vs. “I am depressed.” In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker based his response to the claim that symbols should be taken as causal elements in their own right on the effect size found in empirical experiments about the impact of symbolic differences across cultures. Pinker assembled a catalogue of experiments that showed that cultures with different symbolization about related phenomena (e.g., numbers, directions) manifest different effects from each other. He dismisses this evidence, however, by complaining that, in each of the experiments, the symbolic variation produces only small differences. This does not, however, refute the claim that symbol systems matter unless you take (as he does) the strong Worfian hypothesis as the point to be refuted. The small effect sizes indeed demonstrate that it is untenable to hold that “only symbols matter.” From my experience listening to colleagues at conferences, I agree that Pinker is correct that some people in the humanities and posthumanities covertly or overtly hold such positions (probably due to their disciplinary defensiveness or a trained incapacity arising from spending all their time focusing on the differences that symbols make). However, both such “Worfian” positions and Pinker’s opposite conclusion are incorrect. The evidence shows that symbols make some difference, even in individual level, short-term experiments. In such experiments one should only expect small effect sizes, as one is carving out one tiny variable (a single word or word set, not even all the words involved) and one outcome variable. Nonetheless, although single terms make a small and important difference in life, the advantages (and perils) that symbols give a social group are even more significant in terms of the broad range of options they enable for human patterns of living. Symbolization enables the construction and sharing of novel and complex “ideas,” and the importance of symbols for human life should be attendedPage 32 → to on these grounds. You can’t fly a Piper Cub unless

you have a massive repertoire of symbolic options available that have enabled the invention of airplanes (and so much before and beside that). To say that it is the plane that produces that wonderful and distinctive experience of “flying” and not the symbol “flying” is to focus at the short-term level. The experience of “flying” is only possible for those who live in societies with the symbolic repertoire that enables the production and operation of planes. That is an empirical fact. There has never been a society that invented planes that had a vocabulary of only 2,000–3,000 words. Equity requires highlighting that this does not mean that the people in cultures with more words are smarter than others. Individuals who speak languages with massive vocabularies do not know all those words (most of the readers of this manuscript and I do not know a tenth of the words necessary to build an airplane). And there is no necessary moral or other opprobrium assignable to the kind of creativity at the social level that is granted by any given vocabulary set; the vocabularies that enable the creation of airplanes also enable the dropping of atomic bombs. However, it is empirically the case that symbol systems provide the imaginative and cooperative resources to create novel kinds of objects and life patterns, even as those objects and life patterns become instantiated in individual bodies by both the experience of those life patterns and by the symbols that are physiologically and fantastically part and parcel of those experiences. To review, ideas should be understood as probability clouds that exist simultaneously—and necessarily so—as distributed potentialities among neuronal relationships in the brain and in the distributions of symbols and through a social group (dynamic distributions in both brains and in external media such as books, film, music, video). Those probability clouds are condensed in discrete ways at particular times and places via symbolization, but that condensation simultaneously opens up a new set of probabilities, because symbol systems are themselves diffuse probabilistic distributions among distributed socially imbued bodies (which can be understood theoretically as refocusing poststructuralist insights on construction rather than deconstruction). Thus—though words are discrete, and ideas are necessarily linked to symbolization—ideas are fuzzy rather than discrete. The circulation of words and ideas among people expands this fuzziness both through the impacts the circulatory systems of human communication have upon the words and by the variations among the human brains that house the words and sets of words. Page 33 →Symbol systems affect human life at all these levels: the availability of articulations to the individuals, the precise character of the experience for the individual, the availability of a range of articulations at the social level, the degree of shared “comprehension” or cohesion of experience in the personal, technical, or public sphere.37 Cumulatively, these effects are substantial. They make the differences between the construction of an “information/industrial” society and a pastoral society, and also the range of life experiences within those societies. Nonetheless, they do this without leaving behind the biological components that make possible human experiences, and so those biological elements also continue to play a role in the way humans in information /industrial societies feel emotion. This means that both difference (manifested primarily at the cultural level) and similarity (manifested at both the cultural and biological levels) are relevant to understanding human being. This diffuse, multipotential character of symbol systems has methodological implications for the study of human social life. The character of symbolization adds to the deterministic/probabilistic form of causality we recognize in physical matter, and to the opportunistic/functional form of causality we should recognize in biological matter, a third type of causality: the “fantastic.” “Fantastic” things have a material existence in the realm of symbolically shared ideas and may come to exert substantial existence by reordering vast swaths of human technological and interactive potentials. Unicorns have only the former kind of quality. Scientific formula such as E=mc2 and what have been called “ideographs” (value terms that warrant collective behavior in a given political milieu) also have the latter kind of material existence. The unicorn, the return of manufacturing jobs, and the conspiracy theory are all fantastic ideas. The term “fantasy” is usually employed to refer only to ideas of the former type, but applying the term to the latter type of entities highlights the character of the symbolic action involved. Although scientists like to insist that E=mc2 exists as a natural law outside its formulation by the symbolic labor of a group of physicists (headlined by Einstein), and some political theorists like to insist that “liberty!” is a god-given or natural law, the analysis above shows why such claims are fundamentally incorrect. E=mc2 and liberty! both symbolically condense important relationships that “really exist” in the world,38 but they only exist in the concrete form of “laws” because they are articulated as symbols. They

should thus be appreciated for their fantastic quality, and understood and assessed accordingly. Page 34 →To illustrate with regard to the emotion of anger, organizing a group of people to pursue the fantastic relationship of “justice” in the international arena is a qualitatively different act, in important ways, from the opportunistic act of a tribe of chimpanzees rallying itself to stomp to death an isolated member of another troop, even though the latter tendency bleeds into the human symbolic pursuit of “justice” and must be accounted for in describing human anger as well. International justice as an idea requires and is enabled by a symbolic system that is grounded in embodied emotional experiences of social sharing and advantage (as with the chimpanzees), but it also requires the construction of the idea of a global “we” and a notion of “justice” that are proving to require symbolic resources that have so far not been shareable with all of the peoples of the globe. These features of social living for “symbol-using animals”39 require methodologies that (1) attend to both biological inputs and symbolic ones, and (2) interpret causation at least in part in terms of the options that are opened by a particular discourse, rather than solely in terms of the specific effects that are traceable to that opening of options at any given time. The former element is alien to the trend of human studies at the public level in the 20th century, though the 21st century has seen some progress. This manuscript seeks to add a specific illustration of how such work is informative and feasible. The second element is widely executed in humanistic scholarship that shows how various discourses open some options, but not others (especially with regard to race, class, sexuality, disability, and so forth). This kind of analysis necessarily and appropriately dwells primarily at the level of the symbol. But there are two shifts in such analyses that are necessitated by the understanding of humans as symbol users and animals. First, as argued above, one should seek both for commonalities or regularities and for distinctiveness. This combination has been split into competing academic tribes, and the split has been justified based on projected political effects. The search for commonalities has been stigmatized as conservative, and the appreciation of difference has been valorized as progressive, but that dichotomization is errant. The search for “differences” has its political utilities, but if there are only differences among humans, then that will be politically unhappy because it will mean we are not capable of cooperation across whatever groups one is essentializing as different. The difference perspective, when taken as the totality of knowledge about people and groups, can only offer a competitive perspective, even if that essentializationPage 35 → is papered over by intense moral righteousness and professions of peace (which therefore covertly translate as “our tribe’s version of peace”). However, the search for uniformity does not provide an appropriate alternative, both because differences are empirically evident and important to human potentials, and because the singular focus on commonality has its well-recognized political risks (typically overtly producing “the dominant” as the ideal). Given the harms of either perspective understood as a totality, the more desirable option can be described as a rigorous assessment of the range of differences and similarities among symbolic configurations. This option can be defended as most desirable on linguistic grounds, because “splitting” and “lumping” are both crucial linguistic capacities. Attempting to specify the range of similarities and divergences is also the best option on empirical grounds, since differences and commonalities have been readily identified by scholars in the respective camps (although each camp has formulas for ignoring and denying the evidence offered by the other). Finally, the attention to ranges is best politically, because recognizing human differences within a range of shareable values and concerns produces the possibility of a polity.40 The analysis of commonalities and differences implies assessments. If there is only difference, then assessment is not possible: positions are incommensurable. If there is only commonality, then there is nothing to assess: there is only what is. The fecund production of new (“fantastic”) options through symbolic systems, however, makes assessment necessary. Not all options can be enacted; choices must be made. Critique is one step in choice making. It reveals the limitations of the criticized set of options. But choice requires comparing options, not merely showing the faults of options. Therefore, someone must and will exercise judgment. Although there are factors that have discouraged academics from exercising judgment,41 the merit of academically framed judgments is that the academic space for communication may require a level of explicitness—and therefore collective

reflection—that adds value to the judgment processes in the public realm. However, precisely because such processes of judgments make evident weaknesses and strengths, it is also useful to take the turn that several scholars have recently advocated to extend observations about symbolic resources to include as a scholarly activity the offering of potential additional options along with assessments of options.42 To move from the relatively simple task of “causal explanation” described in the terms of physical being to the variegated and multilevel task Page 36 →of “causation” understood as the recognition of the creation of options, the assessment of those options, and even the contribution of novel options requires more than baby steps. In the face of such complexity, it is not surprising that a wealth of scholars have concluded that what they are doing is discarding “causation” as a hopeless concept in the humanities. But such scholarship typically simply reimports causation under other terms, especially if the goal is explanation or understanding, but also in mere condemnation or lament (“neoliberalism constitutes oppression” assumes the causal force of a discourse). What humanists typically have been objecting to is the use of inappropriate notions of causation that do not capture the nature of the material characteristics of symbolized phenomena. The theory of causation that has been offered to this point in this chapter was built upon an understanding of the form (“structure”/ “structuration”) of language that was developed in the twentieth century. The chapter closes with a description of the structural dynamics of language that grounded this macrolevel theory because these microlevel dynamics play a causal role in collective emotion and its role in social action.

Fundamental Elements of Language’s Structuration One of the key contributions of the 20th century to humanity’s self-understanding was the identification of a set of structures that underlie human language. Several scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries had laid the groundwork for attending to language not as a conveyer belt for ideas but rather as a material process that contributed effects of its own to human social life.43 The 20th century theorists, by identifying durable structures in the language in which “ideas” always appeared, showed the activity of language per se in the process of ideation. Different theorists or philosophers developed the implications of the discovery of these structures, and therefore of language’s material impact on humans, with what Kenneth Burke might have called different attitudes.44 For scholars developing a specific tradition (e.g., Burkean, Derridean, Lacanian), the attitudes are as important as the structures they identified. For present purposes, it is nonetheless fruitful to cumulate across these differences to notice that, for all their differences, these scholars recurrently identified three fundamental forms as constitutive of language: binaries, essentialization/totalization, and narrative. Page 37 →First, philosophers and theorists as diverse as Ferdinand de Saussure, Alfred Korzybski, Jacques Derrida, and Kenneth Burke observed that language has a binary foundation. “Up” is defined by its relationship to “down” at least as much as it is defined by its relationship to a real, fixed, or objectively specifiable physical orientation (a point vivified by space travel).45 This binary structure pervades language at all levels. Not only is today understood in opposition to tomorrow, but, as Derrida emphasized, the fundamental concepts of philosophy (presence) were comprehensible only in relationship to their opposites (absence). Although most terms have more than one binary opposite (today is opposed to both tomorrow and yesterday), the structure of the language rests on the cumulation of binary oppositions, and so the underlying binaries remain formative, even when one can array a series (black/white, then black/white vs. color, then red/black or red/white, or green/other colors, and so forth). Korzybski lamented this binary foundation. He recommended that the pernicious and misleading influence of the copula “is” should be overcome by constant consciousness of abstracting and by specifically marking nonidentity.46 In contrast, Burke framed the binary as a fabulously fecund resource: the Negative invents the particular potentials of the positivity of language, even as the Negative itself was always dependent on a prior /simultaneous positivity constituted through a temporizing of essence.47 Derrida changed the frame from “structure” to “structuration” by emphasizing the inevitable “presence” in “absence” recognizable not as a strict and fixed binary self-present in an immediate time-space, but as chains of difference and deferral that are not boundable by essence or by objectively specifiable context.48

Regardless of the variations, the understanding of language as a set of processes that functioned through binarization, and that therefore exerted forces related to those structuring processes, had been thoroughly treated in multiple academic disciplines by the end of the 20th century. A second feature of language that gained substantial recognition in that century was the way in which language prodded one toward what Burke sometimes called “perfection” but others have called essentialism or absolutism or have represented as a totalistic drive.49 Put more simply than any of these theorists might have it, a nonsymbolizing animal (say, a squirrel), does not rhapsodize about the perfect walnut. Yes, the squirrel might choose some nuts as better than others, but no evidence indicates that squirrels congregate to cogitate about producing, procuring, or even Page 38 →imagining the perfect walnut.50 Perfection, totality, or the absolute is a construction of symbolic action. Good and better can exist in a pragmatic, a-linguistic sense. For example, we can perform behavioral tests that show there are nuts squirrels like—a defensible operational definition of “good” in a non-symbolizing creature. We can perform behavioral tests that show there are particular nuts that squirrels prefer to other particular nuts—a defensible operational definition of “better.” But we can’t perform behavioral tests that show what would be the best possible walnut, because we can never have, empirically, the best possible walnut at hand.51 “The best” in that sense is a distinctive product of symbolic action. Language produces the conceptualization of a perfect or best: the absolute realization of an essence. Because symbolic systems enable the making present of other times and spaces, including times, spaces, and conditions that have not (yet, really) happened (the perfect society!), they create a kind of supraempirical set of possibilities that can exist in symbolic forms, but are not substantially reproducible in analogical forms at other scales. Because of the combinatorial and extrapolative possibilities of symbol systems, the superlative stands in language as the ever-open, infinite “end” point or horizon of most if not all conceivable comparative categorizations. Good, better, best. Big, bigger, infinite. Small, smaller, infinitesimal. Errant, bad, Evil. This drive toward essence or totality rests on language’s deployment of discrete units (words, numbers, emoticons, ideograms) to relate human action to the mostly nondiscrete realms of the physical and biological. All languages create discrete units. Phonemes artificially mark a flow of sounds into separate, iterable units. But the phenomena in the physical, biological, and social world to which these discrete units are related are not discrete. They are continuous: Where does “the mountain” begin and end? What is the “edge” of the galaxy? When do you have “freedom”? What are the boundaries among bacterial species? Consequently, symbolization processes chop up the world into units that do not exist “in the world.” This structural feature of language has causal implications of the “options” type (in spite of Zeno’s paradox, which points to the mismatch between the discreteness of symbolized conceptions and the continuousness of nonsymbolized matter). Chopping up lines into measurement systems enables the creation of precision tools. However, the false/fantastic discreteness imposed by language also has more inherently problematic consequences. Vast amounts of academic ink have been deployed to counter this tendency in particular arenas, for example to emphasize the ways in which Page 39 →various pseudodiscrete linguistic categories either distort the realities they purport to convey (e.g., “women are weaker than men”) or construct rigidly narrow possibilities for humans (e.g., “heteronormativity”). The discrete character of words can be mitigated by the combinatorial nature of language-in-use. These combinatorial possibilities are evident in mathematics, with its ever increasing set of possibilities, built on the simple logic of counting (and therefore on addition and subtraction), but extending through algebraic rules, probabilistic reasoning, and the complex relations of area, time, and change in change (differential equations) to matrices and structural equation modeling (to name only a smattering familiar on my own limited exposure). In natural language, the regulative rules of the combination process have included sentence-level grammars and conversational rules. More importantly, for the purposes of political analysis of discourse, is the third structural feature of natural language: the apparently human-wide tendency to construct supra-sentence-level discourses within a structure that Burke, Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Vladimir Propp, Claude LГ©vi-Strauss, and dozens of others have described as narrative, dramatistic, or dramaturgical frames.52 When we speak and write, most humans who are not deliberately trained to other structures (e.g., to symbolic logic or mathematics or hypothesis-testing)53

spontaneously cast the flux of the world as an “agent” doing an “act” (though these may be inherently pluralized and differently emphasized in different grammars). As Burke argued, the fullest general potential of this dramatistic frame produces accounts where agents do acts, for purposes, in scenes, with tools or agencies.54 Language offers us the categories and combinatorial proclivities of such “dramatic” frames as the predispositional formula for interacting with others or articulating our experiences and thereby describing and prescribing the world around us.55 To observe that the existence and functioning of symbol systems are fundamentally the product of these structuration processes does not warrant the conclusion that human symbol systems necessarily always manifest specific qualities (e.g., not all speech is maximally, or even highly, absolutist). Although humans sometimes strive to produce such closed systems (e.g., symbolic logic), the complexity of human natural language creates the basis for exceeding its own basic forms. The fundamental properties that structure language can be and are routinely exceeded through the complex layerings of discourse. For example, by piling binaries upon binaries upon binaries, complex hierarchies are produced that may manifest Page 40 →or encourage gradational or proliferative rather than polarizing properties. An expert’s analysis may choose to trace out the internal working of the binary structuration, but it is itself reductive to claim that the reductive binary or binaries identified as involved in the system constitute the “essence” and causal source of the discourse or its effects. The discourse is both the binaries and the novel product resulting from their layerings. The very existence of complex mathematics shows the ability of humans to add something more to their modes of discourse than is preferred by what Burke calls the dramatistic grammar of motives.56 Though mathematics is necessarily communicated among humans embedded in more-or-less cryptic dramatistic forms, calculus abstracts out as much of the drama as it can, deliberately so. Its distinctive utilities are precisely a product of its ability to offer a different set of structural possibilities for symbol sets. Mathematics is also a good example because it illustrates the work involved in building, learning, and sharing structures that are not those predispositional to humans as symbol users. The resistance to the alien nature of mathematical structures or to the work involved in mastering these different structures, or both, manifests as a “math phobia” that is more common than not. The broad and important dynamics of cultural variation across linguistic groups also provides testimony indicating that the structural foundations of language do not operate to produce a closed and narrow range of effectivities. Nonetheless, the structuration of language in /through/by narrative, the drive toward essentialization, and the “negative” or “absence” that is deferral/difference are readily available defaults for activation by emotional arousals.57 It takes less work to move along with these predispositions than it does to push along other lines. Human symbol systems thus have both fundamental structuration dynamics that enable and perhaps predispositionally encourage particular possibilities and a level of complexity that enables us to exceed those possibilities through work. Both of those dimensions are crucial for the way in which discourse provides a constraining force in human life, but one that allows us the primary (perhaps only) mode for exerting something like choice about our futures. As the case of anger will illustrate, the activation of particular emotions intensifies particular structural dynamics of language; anger preferentially coheres with and therefore activates absolutism, and vice versa; this may contrast with compassion, which seems to activate a mode of affiliative identification or dependency, or both, that requires Page 41 →and facilitates multiplication of perspectives and hence vocabularies, tendencies that run counter to absolutism. Before moving to the application of these theoretical insights to public emotion, it is necessary to stipulate that the identification of these structural features of language should not be conflated with the claim that these structural features form the essence of language or of communication. Such an overclaiming is at the root of the serious errors of some structuralist and poststructuralist theories as they became dominant in the humanities at the close of the 20th century. A full theory of language also requires grounding language in human uses (as initiated by Wittgenstein), a theory of reference (though not the centralizing of reference, to which structuralism appropriately reacted), as well as theories of other dimensions of language such as grammar and aesthetics. These other elements form taken-for-granted assumptions of the analysis that follows, even as the insights about the

commonalities in the structure of language enable a theory that explains the commonalities and differences within public emotional discourse as a product not simply of a variable discourse and a fixed biology, but rather of variations and commonalities within discourse as they intersect with diffusely bounded biological predispositions.

Summary This chapter has suggested that in order to better understand the underlying factors that produce and reproduce the global violence of 9/11, one will be aided by a view of humans as biosymbolic beings. That view has been undergirded by describing a transilient onto-epistemology that posits what we call the physical, the biological, and the symbolic as different but linked modes of being that result from the relatively distinctive forms in which matter has come to be arranged. Because all three modes of being are material, they can all be investigated under “causal” rubrics. However, because of their distinctively different characteristics, their modes of interaction (and hence what one would call “causation”) are quite different. The physical world might be approachable through deterministic or at least probabilistic causal frames, but biologically organized streams of matter include historical and opportunistic characteristics that require additional modes of explanation. Similarly, symbolic modes of being are not only inherently social but also capable of productive and nonproductive fantasy. They act Page 42 →as causes by making available specific ranges of options. Not only is fantasy not structureless, but it is to variable degrees tethered to the causal forces of the physical and biological realms. Accounting for human social action is therefore unlikely to be sufficiently robust for many important purposes unless one has rubrics for investigating and for taking into account the kinds of causal interactions that are operative within and between these different modes of being. The analysis of human emotions must be central to such understandings, because the sharing of human emotions provides an enduring and crucial nexus by which symbolic and biological forces are merged to organize and direct collective action among our social, symbolizing species. Chapter 2 will show how the predominant strands of multidisciplinary research on human emotion can be drawn together utilizing this view of humans as biosymbolic beings.

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Chapter 2 Emotions as Distributions of Fuzzy Complexes One night, a group of young men stayed out late drinking. They went to a neighboring town, hollering and in general causing a ruckus. The next day, their elders heard about this and got angry and punished them. Anthropologist Catherine Lutz tells this story about an incident she observed among the Ifaluk, a people of the Micronesian Islands.1 Her version of the story sounds substantially different from the short version above because the point of her telling of the story was to emphasize the variability of human anger displays across cultures. Her version therefore describes the elders as “village chiefs” and explains that the young men were punished in a way that would seem to Lutz’s likely non-Ifaluk readers to be both severe and culturally specific (making a quantity of rope that requires a substantial amount of time). Lutz’s version also notes that local cultural norms rigidly specify a more hushed volume for speaking than in the mass cultures that the anthropologist places as comparisons. Her telling also emphasizes that intervillage relationships are of substantial concern in these islands. The moral of Lutz’s telling of the story is that emotions are culture-specific practices, and specifically that, unlike anger in “Western” cultures, anger among the Ifaluk is understood to serve social rather than individual functions. As Margaret Wetherell has detailed, Lutz is far from alone in denying the existence of anything like durable types of emotion that span cultures.2 Page 44 →In contrast to Lutz’s tale, the version of the story that began this section follows a script preferred by many psychologists: it generalizes the interaction. Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, pioneers in cross-cultural studies of emotion, are widely (but not unanimously) understood among psychologists and communication scientists as having established that there is a core group of basic emotions that share common physiological features across cultures. For example, Ekman and Friesen claimed that their studies of the link between facial expressions and core emotions in multiple cultures show that “particular facial behaviors are universally associated with particular emotions.”3 The basis for this conclusion in their culminating study is the statistically significant match of all but one of the emotions between the Fore people of New Guinea and a crosscultural comparison group. Their efforts have recently been seconded by neuropsychologists such as Katherine Vytal and Stephan Hamann, who have provided portraits of the brain activations typical of the basic emotions.4 My point in juxtaposing the two versions of the story is to justify attention to both commonality and difference. Providing two versions of the story highlights that there are patterns of interaction recognizable as anger scripts that might regulate social interactions in most if not all human cultures, even as the scripts vary in ways substantial enough to make it extremely difficult for one to behave competently in cultures different from one’s own. Lutz takes great pains to emphasize that the Ifaluk word “song” (justifiable anger) is different from Western conceptions of “anger.” But to make this argument, she must first recognize “anger” as the relevant comparison, which means that she also recognizes that there are some things that are the same about what the two words coalesce (to use her term).5 Being able to see the similarities and the differences in emotions across cultures is important to most aspirations for global political action, because “global” action implies commonality but our planet obviously harbors many diverse cultures. Neither the mechanistic account of universal “basic emotions” nor the model of emotions as no more than symbolically elaborated local practice can explain both similarity and difference. Indeed, adhering to either view requires assiduously ignoring the evidence and arguments presented by the other “side.” Fortunately, one can encompass both versions of emotion-laden human stories if one understands emotions as distributions of fuzzy complexes. Each complex features a specific suite of different and multilayered components that tend to serve important social functions through varying pathways. No component serves as origin because all are mutually activating. Page 45 →

Emotions as Distributions There are many scholars who insist that there are a core set of universal “basic” and “discrete” emotions and many who deny that claim. Rather than relying on expert opinion, which devolves to assembling a highly selective array of experts to testify on one’s side, and discounting any others,6 let us take two deep dips into representative and important pieces of research used to support the “universal basic emotions” view, followed by a quicker dive into a two-sided study. The most historically pivotal study supporting the claim that there are universal emotions was that by Ekman and Friesen mentioned above. Following a series of experiments, and responding to a series of critiques of methodology and assumptions in earlier studies, this research team asked people from an isolated cultural group to match facial images with narratives that had been previously certified as linked to specific “basic” emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust, fear). The results showed that most of the matches made by the participating members of this isolated group were no different (statistically) from those of Americans (and, as established in previous studies, other groups). Not only did this study thus claim to establish empirically that there were basic emotions, but also that it was possible to identify outwardly manifested physiological correlates of these basic emotions. Taken as a whole, the line of studies cannot be reasonably dismissed on methodological grounds.7 Various possible ways of presenting the stimuli to the participants, for example, had been tried and criticized in prior studies, and all of these different approaches yielded approximately similar results, and several increasingly isolated groups had been included. Instead, the revealing line of critique attends to the meaning of the statistical analysis. The underlying logic of this type of statistical comparison is to establish whether two samples are likely to represent “the same” or different populations. The statistical test appropriately tells us that these different peoples are—with regard to the assessment of emotions from visual stimuli—the members of the same population (i.e., humans). The conclusion that there is human commonality across these groups, however, does not warrant the conclusion that what the humans are commonly responding to is a discrete set of universal emotions. The picture displayed by their tabled data is not of uniformity, but of variable dispersion. Agreement between Western and Fore selections of facial images with the “happiness” story ranged from 86–100 percent dependingPage 46 → on the specific alternative comparisons. Agreement between the two groups was 82–87 percent with the “anger” story, 77–89 percent for “disgust,” 69–81 percent for “sadness, ” 65–71 percent for “surprise,” and 28–87 percent for “fear.” It stretches beyond credibility to claim that disagreement among a third or more of a group’s members establishes a homogeneous universal. While the populations may cohere around a center (a shared mean), both populations are dispersed. This dispersion is not like the dispersion of atoms to occupy with uniform density all of the available space in a closed box, as might be implied by the most vigorous denials of the existence of core or basic emotions. The variability is more like the dispersion of dense cumulonimbus storm clouds. Although one can’t say exactly where the cloud begins and ends, there is a spatiotemporally colocated density of particular atoms. By analogy, that is what the data say that so-called core or basic emotions are like. They are regions of greater density of X (to be defined below), somewhat shared across peoples, but they are not homogeneous blocks that are discretely bounded. Ekman and Friesen’s works were pioneering and dealt with facial signals of emotions. The same cloud-like densities can be found in more recent data about brain activation patterns in emotion. Vytal and Hamann presented distinct portraits of regions of the brain that are activated in happiness, sadness, disgust, anger, and fear.8 As their title indicates, the ability to assemble such portraits employing reasonable statistical and other methodological criteria is taken as “support for discrete neural correlates of basic emotions.” Rather than focusing on a supposedly fixed output of emotions in muscular outputs in faces (the “physio-motor” component of emotions), Vytal and Hamann locate the emotions as originating in discrete, putatively universal structures of the human brain. Like Ekman and Friesen’s analysis of facial displays of emotion, however, these portraits are better accounted for by a view that attends to distributions and that can therefore treat emotions as fuzzy networks of cloud-like clusters drawn predispositionally, but not mechanically, from broadly shared human resources. Crucially, Vytal and Hamann emphasized that they were able to produce such portraits where others had failed

because they were able to develop a technique capable of washing out the individual variation that is common among human brains. Rather than treating what is washed out as inconvenient “noise” irrelevant to emotion, however, one should treat the variabilities as characteristics of the emotion itself.9 Vytal and Hamann’s Page 47 →study, like that of Ekman and Friesen and others, shows that the nexus of biological and symbolic structures in humans seem to produce “emotion clouds” of particular types—call them basic or core emotions if you will—but these are cloud-like dispersed phenomena subject to variation rather than simply discrete cue balls subject to uniform effects in every culture and individual. Further, and importantly for the multicomponent model, the portraits of emotions that Vytal and Hamann present do not show emotions to be generated by unique parts of the brain, each dedicated to its own emotion. Rather, as they note, the uniqueness of each emotion derives from the set of brain components that it recruits. Activation of most of the component areas is shared by some varying set of different emotions, even though the specific set that is activated is unique. Further, the scans they present show only what is uniquely activated by an emotion, but this does not mean that the emotion is localized in those parts of the brain. From the genetic level up through the cardiovascular system and brain regions, living organisms are interconnected and mutually responsive (no feeling without breathing!). A computer programmed to imitate the parts of the brain that Vytal and Hamann’s profile of anger show to be differentially aroused would not produce anger-like responses; anger responses depend on many other brain regions that must go on as “background” to most or all of the emotions. Finally, such brain scans are incapable of imaging the fine-grained variations in appraisal cues that play an essential role in emotion (as discussed below). Plentiful research shows there is substantial variability in human emotions, within and between cultural groups, in a range of aspects from vocal qualities to action tendencies.10 There are identifiable patterns that recur across cultures, but those patterns don’t point to clocklike mechanisms for emotions that all humans share completely and uniformly. The full range of the evidence is best accounted for by viewing emotions not as discrete universal outputs (impinged on by statistical “noise”), but rather by describing emotions as composed through components and processes that are more like probabilistically bounded densities or clouds, which are connected by variably strong linkages (chemical, mechanical, electric, and symbolic). Because these components and their linkages grow and develop, rather than being popped out of a machine or assembled like Legos, human emotional complexes exhibit substantial pliability, though they are not infinitely plastic. I submit that rather than sorting the evidence into Page 48 →two competing sides—“pro” vs. “con” on absolutely discrete and mechanistically operating core emotions—pooling all the evidence indicates that emotions should be described as fuzzy, multidimensional complexes. There are some emotions that are something like “basic” or “core-ish,” but they aren’t discrete and each involves options rather than deterministic actions and effects. A single study that shows how good research can illustrate both elements of such a model simultaneously was completed by Jonathan Freeman and colleagues.11 Their research employed both symbolic and neuroimaging methodologies and showed that the affective responses to nonverbal dominance signals in American and Japanese cultures were different. Japanese tended to have negative and Americans positive responses. Simultaneously, however, their research showed that both American and Japanese audiences had heightened attention responses to dominance nonverbal signals as opposed to “subordination” signals.12 The symbol system developed by the culture through time could shape responses toward either a positive or negative valence, but the cue was commonly emotionally salient, which seems best accounted for by attributing it to a biological predisposition. Because humans are obligately social creatures, it seems reasonable that we have a predisposition to attend to social relations. Because language is predisposed to hierarchies (good, better, best!), our attention may be directed especially to others’ assertion of hierarchy in those relationships. Note that one can describe the latter both as an “embodied” tendency and as a symbolic one, because language is itself an embodied phenomenon. Social psychologist and discourse analyst Margaret Wetherell summed up these “both/and” or “yet /but” complexities in contemporary studies of emotion when she wrote, It seems unlikely that brains and bodies everywhere across the globe speak English and talk only of

“anger,” “fear,” “joy,” and the other basic emotions in the same ways. It also seems unlikely that over time there are no patterns at all and no sedimentation or settling effects.13

Having discredited the seesaw binary between biologically ingrained universals and symbolic particulars it will be more useful to proliferate the ingredients of public emotion as including at least four components. Page 49 →

Components of Emotions Stretching back to Aristotle, many theorists have identified four components of emotion. Although different theorists plump for one of the four elements as the “origin” or “essential” element defining emotion, there is widespread—but not uniform—recognition of emotion as an activation that involves (1) appraisal cues, (2) neurophysiology (sometimes divided into neural vs. other physiological elements such as hormones or muscular activations to make a total of five categories), (3) subjective experience, and (4) action tendencies. Appraisal cues and action tendencies are most readily identifiable in collective emotion, and they should form the central pillars of analyses of the pathos of public rhetorics, but the other two components are involved in their more visible partners, so they deserve brief attention in an integrative theory as well. Appraisal Cues Aristotle’s Rhetoric offered the first extensively articulated theory of emotion as a social phenomenon.14 Like most contemporary humanists, his view focused primarily on what are often now called the “appraisal” conditions for the generation of an emotion. For example, he defined shame in this fashion: “Shame may be defined as pain or disturbance in regard to bad things, whether present, past, or future, which seem likely to involve us in discredit.”15 The appraisal cues in this definition include badness and the factors that might discredit the person feeling the emotion. In contemporary psychology, appraisal cues tend to be defined as individually perceived elements in an environment that suggest conditions pertinent to a particular emotion. Most humanists (or posthumanists) have attended to the textual elements in messages as appraisal cues, rather than to individual perceptions. The pioneering work on emotion by philosopher Martha Nussbaum is illustrative of the privileging of appraisal cues by humanists. She offered a “cognitive” vision of emotion and argued that the other elements—bodily reactions, action tendencies, and subjective experiences—do not provide reliable enough features to define specific emotions. Hence, she defined emotion as “a cognitive appraisal or evaluation; the idea of one’s own flourishingPage 50 → or one’s important goals and projects; and the idea of the salience of external objects as elements in one’s own scheme of goals.”16 Although other humanists may define appraisal cues with vocabularies such as ideology or language rather than as “cognitive,” the majority of analyses of emotion in posthumanistic or humanistic disciplines likewise have a primary emphasis on appraisal as the core or even only element that constitutes emotion.17 This disembodied approach to emotion has been challenged by affect theorists such as Brian Massumi, Christian Lundberg, and Erin Rand, who have described emotion as a combination of affect (pure intensity housed in the body) and symbolic factors such as ideology or a “tropological economy.”18 On such accounts, ideology captures affect and gives it specificity. There are no distinguishable variations in intensity absent such capture. Thus, though they have brought attention to the role of the body, even for most affect theorists symbolic elements remain central to defining emotion. This focus on language or other symbol systems arises in part from tradition: humanistic disciplines have long focused primarily on symbolic systems, discourses, or texts. The foregrounding of appraisal is also in part due to methodological limits that make symbols the primary markers to which one has access when studying public level phenomena.19 One can hardly do real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans or even subjective interviews of all of the differently situated actors who make up the members of a mass society or a

polity. Moreover, even analyses that attend to nonlinguistic elements, such as the work on photographs by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, or the assessments of music or sound by Lawrence Grossberg or Joshua Gunn, must be translated through a linguistic description by the analysts.20 Therefore, even if one does not believe emotion is solely symbolic or linguistic, there are practical factors that encourage academic treatments of collective emotion through descriptions of them as appraisal cues. Unfortunately, these factors also produce a tendency among the most widely admired critical studies of emotion to identify the appraisal elements as coterminous with the specific texts that they are reading, whether these are understood as ideology, language, or culture.21 Such analyses do not engage the “anger” they are reading in a text as though it were a manifestation of a phenomenon that had qualities that might be compared to other manifestations of anger. If, however, emotions are differently elaborated but commonly available routines for humans, then it should be possible to specify the appraisal cues associated with a nameable emotion Page 51 →independent of the text that one is analyzing. This separation of specific enactments from general templates would add power to analyses because it would make more evident the distinctive options selected by specific discourses, alongside the options not taken. To illustrate what a detailed and relatively general specification of appraisal cues might look like, consider the relatively complex emotion of compassion, which is not generally viewed by psychologists as a core or basic emotion, but which has been of importance to some humanists. Jennifer Goetz and colleagues have suggested that a survey of the available literature indicates that compassion is most likely to occur when five appraisals are made about the existing conditions: (1) a negative outcome is occurring, (2) for others, (3) who are deserving of help, and the observer/empathizer both (4) has the resources to help, and (5) does not have an interest in negative outcomes for the victims.22 These appraisal cues are quite broad, and as experts as disparate as Nussbaum and Ekman and Friesen agree, will be culturally shaped. Thus, what counts as “deserving of help” may more heavily depend in one culture upon whether or not the victims have otherwise been seen to be positive contributors to the broad social group, while in another culture that appraisal may depend on the perception that the harm that has befallen the victim is not attributable to their own actions or intentions.23 Regardless of such cultural specifications, if any of the components are lacking, other emotions become more likely. If the harm is to one’s self, then sadness, anger, or shame is a more likely response. If there is a perceived lack of the resources to help, then distress, anxiety, or fear are more likely. Why would such factors be the predispositional symbolic variables on which different emotions turn? Pure speculation about the intersections and divergences of biological and symbolic factors in emotion is all we have available. Given that emotions are experienced in bodies, the impact of a cue to something like a “self” seems not hard to explain. On the other hand, given that emotions are social, what counts as “self” and “other” appears to be symbolically coded and situational.24 Attention to others, as well as to one’s “self,” is also, however, necessary to an obligately social species. And attention to the relationship of one’s goals and the goals of others likewise seems to be crucial in a species that routinely must coordinate behavior, even if coordination also means mutual avoidance. Therefore, the substantial initial attention to identity in political studies of emotion has been well directed.25 Page 52 →In these perhaps biologically influenced categories of “self,” “other,” “goal,” and “resources to help” one sees an approximate match with the elements that make up narratives, or what Kenneth Burke dubbed the dramatistic pentad: agents, act, in scenes, with tools, for purposes.26 Perhaps the dramatistic pentad is first nature to humans as symbolizers because it “sums up” key survival aspects of situations for obligately social creatures. That speculation is not essential to the observation that the components of the pentad seem to shape the suites of appraisal cues that define different emotions. My theoretical model therefore employs Burke’s dramatistic template as the framework for guiding the comparison of the similarities and differences of emotions in public rhetorics, as will be illustrated in depth in the description of anger in chapter 3. This apparent match between the symbolic structures of the dramatistic pentad and the frameworks of appraisal cues that experts have identified for various emotions also prompts one to expect that other structural features of language might also be usefully attended to in examining the appraisal cues that

circulate in public emotion. The analysis below will therefore explore whether some emotions co-occur with heightened binarism, while others dampen or do not emphasize polarities (such as “we” and “they”; “all” or “none” as opposed to “many” or “some”). One might also explore whether some emotions appear with more categorical discreteness and others with more symbolic ambiguity and fluidity (such as “eliminate this absolutely” vs. “I just don’t know” or “sure, why not”). A caveat is necessary before transitioning out of the discussion of appraisal cues. In spite of the centrality of appraisal cues to many theories of emotion, there is a substantial amount of variation among experts in the description of such cues for given emotions, which means that what constitutes “the emotion” is significantly different for different analysts. This is reasonably attributable in part to the diffuse nature of emotions as fuzzy complexes. Where and how does anger shade into outrage, hate, annoyance, or contempt? Less reasonably from an academic standpoint, the sometimes substantial variation among accounts is also attributable to a tendency of those dealing with emotions to take for granted that their own common-sense use of a particular emotion word is widely shared and that the boundaries among emotions are obvious or self-evident. The failure to consult alternate disciplinary literatures will blind one to the issues entailed in focusing on some appraisal cues rather than others. Thus, for Page 53 →example, some of the hostile critique by Lauren Berlant of compassionbased public rhetoric is built on the assumption that compassion entails an attitude of superiority to another.27 In contrast, Goetz and colleagues have suggested that pity is distinguished from compassion precisely by the attitude of superiority entailed in the former and the attitude of similarity involved in the latter. It is difficult to hold a useful discussion of the public utility of “compassion” if we don’t realize that we don’t agree on something as fundamental as the appraisal elements that constitute an emotion. Alighting on fixed definitions of all emotions is an impossible and perhaps counterproductive quest if our goal is to understand culturally variable phenomena that are more like complex cloudscapes than simple cue balls, but attentive comparison of one’s definitions of a given emotion to the appraisal cues offered by others seems helpful for advancing shared understanding. Even greater challenges lie in attending to a second component of human emotions. Subjective Experiences Attention to subjective experiences of emotions is as long-standing as attention to appraisal conditions, but much less deep. Aristotle’s Rhetoric noted the subjective qualities of emotions. For example, he observed almost in passing that anger can have a pleasurable subjective component. Contemporary scholars of political discourse likewise may refer to the subjective “feelings” related to emotions,28 but they tend to be leery of resting their analyses on subjective experience. This reluctance may arise in part because we are well schooled in the difficulties involved in accessing “inner feelings,” but also from politically informed theoretical commitments to privilege “the social” over “the individual.” More practically, it is a very long way from the particular experience of masses of individuals to the shared motivations of collectives. I do not deny that the subjective experiences of emotions that individuals have in specific instances may be more than the sum of their cultural or physiological parts, or both, and that they may thus have relevance of their own to the circulation and effects of collective emotion. Neither biology nor culture is like a computer program, for which you can read the code and know how the end products arise (as emphasis on the volatility of emotions by scholars such as Erin Rand and Andrew Ross underline).29Page 54 → How people experience emotions is therefore part of the complex causal web that contributes to collective action. However, I don’t believe we know much about those relations that extends beyond commonsense observations, such as “if people were feeling fearful after 9 /11 then they were probably imagining ways to escape harm.” I will be deploying that commonsense approach to subjective experience when I use polling data and subjective reports by actors on the historical scene to assess the success leaders had in circulating their angry public rhetorics. However, because common sense is typically only partly informative, and because the task of linking subjective experience to collective action is methodologically herculean and only barely begun, I will not otherwise provide analysis of subjective experience, though I applaud those who have begun such efforts.30 The role of neurophysiological activations in emotion is similarly causally important but methodologically prohibitive and typically unnecessary to the goals of public

discourse analysis (currently, at least). Neurophysiological Activations A reasonable number of scholars studying political rhetoric have recently conceded that emotions have a bodily component. Hariman and Lucaites, for example, define emotion as “an embodied disposition to action,” and Gunn has explored the bodily efflorescence of public emotion in lively detail.31 None of these studies attends systematically to specific bodily systems that have been associated with emotion by scholars in other fields: neuronal linkages, brain regions, hormones, and muscular suites. That omission is perfectly appropriate. In studies of political rhetoric, measurements of neurophysiological activations are at best going to carry with them the artifacts of laboratory conditions. While such laboratory studies continue to be potentially informative at the theoretical level (and I have drawn on some of them in describing anger), the evidence indicating which neurophysiological states are involved in specific emotions is usually going to provide background rather than foreground to particular studies of collective emotion. Even were real-time measurements of multiple actors’ bodies possible, the pleiotropy of many biological components and the distance of collective motivations from the activation of particular brain centers, or the release of particular hormones, or the acceleration of the vagus nerve, make such measurements unlikely to be directly informative. Page 55 →Where there is clear and directly relevant information on the neurophysiology of an emotion, one should not produce an analysis that is blindly at odds with that kind of evidence. Nonetheless, as chapter 1 argued, even as one’s theoretical structure should be informed by the connection of different levels of being, one’s analysis typically is most efficient when it operates with vocabularies targeted at the specific level of the phenomenon of interest. For the purposes of some analyses, as Gunn illustrates, particular parts of the body (especially nonverbal cues) are relevant. However, in most cases, the neurophysiological components remain important primarily as the background that constitutes the more visible phenomena of action tendencies, which are of the highest consequence for political analyses of emotion. Action Tendencies The recognition of specific action tendencies that cohere with particular emotions is critical to a study of the role of emotion in collective action. If there were not different action tendencies associated with different emotions, then analysis of particular instances of public emotion could proceed simply by aligning standard ideological studies with templates for different appraisal cues for emotion. Such analyses would be more difficult than standard ideological critiques, because they would entail more careful consideration of broad potentials against the specifics of the ideology, but they would still require only skills of discourse analysis that are mostly familiar. But, as Ross has noted, this would not really be a study of emotion, for it would fail to capture “the depth, intensity, and fugitivity of emotional phenomena.”32 Ross offers one line of approach to the problem.33 The alternative approach offered here suggests that it is useful and possible to take advantage of our ability to enrich studies of specific cases by information about the theoretically/empirically derived understandings of the typical action tendencies for a particular emotion cluster. The biological body’s contribution to emotion manifests itself powerfully and most evidently in collective emotion through action tendencies, and these tendencies may work at odds with the ideological components in the appraisal process, so the challenge and opportunity of incorporating this element into analysis of emotion should not be foregone if one seeks to understand collective emotions. Page 56 →Aristotle has been credited as the first writer to ascribe specific action tendencies to specific emotions. For example, he associated the emotion of shame with the action of “shrinking”: “shame is a mental picture of disgrace, in which we shrink from the disgrace itself and not from its consequences.” Similarly, he identified kindness not just by its appraisal conditions but also by its actions: “helpfulness toward someone in need.” Aristotle also noticed that the action tendencies of emotions operated at the level of cognitional proclivities. For

example, he pointed to the tendency of approach-based emotions to feature optimistic biases: When people are feeling friendly and placable, they think one sort of thing; when they are feeling angry or hostile, they think either something totally different or the same thing with a different intensity.В .В .В . Again, if they are eager for, and have good hopes of, a thing that will be pleasant if it happens, they think that it certainly will happen and be good for them: whereas if they are indifferent or annoyed, they do not think so.34 Aristotle’s insight that different emotions bias our calculations in different ways—that is, that they influence our collective preferences for kinds of action independent of the contents of the particular argument being made—has been more fully developed in the past century. Most notably for those interested in global politics, these cognitive tendencies have been integrated into international relations through studies of threat assessment,35 and have been shown to have impacts on political preferences, specifically in regard to 9/11. For example, Melody Sadler and colleagues exposed participants to video clips related to the events of 9/11 and then asked them to write about their feelings and to fill out various preference surveys.36 They found that “sad and fearful participants expressed reservations about a strong military reaction.” In contrast, angry participants not only “endorsed an aggressive military response and rejected humanitarian efforts,” they also assigned the cause of the attacks “to the fanaticism of the terrorists and to poor U.S. security,” rejecting the idea that “U.S. foreign policy played a role in the attacks.”37 Linda Skitka and colleagues found the same result in their nationally representative telephone survey assessing the relationship between people’s feelings and their policy preferences: “anger but not fear predicted support for expanding the war beyond Afghanistan.”38 Similarly, Leonie Huddy and colleagues found that fear was Page 57 →not associated with support for aggressive military action. Their survey indicated “the minority of Americans who experienced high levels of anxiety in response to the September 11 attacks were less supportive of aggressive military action against terrorists, less approving of President Bush, and favored increased American isolationism.”39 The activation of particular portions of the brain associated with different emotions produces distinctive styles of thinking, and these styles can be of consequence for political processes and outcomes. While these are not “independent of” ideology, they are more than ideologically based. The work on action tendencies of emotions is unlikely to ever be neatly categorical and it is by no means complete, precisely because emotions are fuzzy distributions, not simple, uniform, discrete categories. Notably, tables of action tendencies created by scholars such as Lijiang Shen and Elisabeth Bigsby, Klaus Scherer and Didier Grandjean, and Ira Roseman, Cynthia Wiest, and Tamara Swartz are not fully consonant.40 To a substantial extent, the difficulty in specifying action tendencies rests in how broadly or narrowly one seeks to define an action tendency. One can identify the action tendencies of compassion abstractly as “wanting to help,” or very concretely as “touching the shoulder.” The more concrete descriptors are easier to operationalize in an experiment. However, the cases in which there may be very specific physical actions that the body is predisposed to perform in some emotional states seem likely to be relatively rare. Therefore, the more general descriptions probably better translate the extrasymbolic dimensions of bodily predispositions, which are typically diffusely bounded precisely because the human species’ evolution as a symbol user has produced such a wide range of concrete action options for fulfilling our urges. Thus, wanting to help seems to include an embodied urge toward gentle touch (or hugging) in cultures that allow that kind of contact, but it also may mean dropping a coin into a cup, or clicking a donation tab on a computer, or voting for a welfare policy, or cooking some chicken soup. While these are different specific actions, they share a recognizable trajectory as compared, for example, to running away or hitting someone. The best current definitional strategy therefore seems to be to identify a range of concrete exemplars of more abstractly defined tendencies. For those who like their boxes tidy and discrete, the messiness of action tendencies may provide an excuse for avoiding engagement with them. This, however, is a prescription for letting the perfect be the enemy of the better, and thereby foregoing potentially informative resources. Consider, Page 58 →for example, the case of compassion. If the world watches the bombing of a city and the pleas for compassionate help on behalf of and by the victims, but does not deploy troops or bombs to counter the attackers, does this mean that the people of the world are indifferent, cold, or experiencing compassion fatigue? Or does it mean that the action tendencies of

compassion are not readily compatible with the requested action of counterattack (which coheres, instead, with the motivational resources of anger)? As the analyses in the three case studies will illustrate in more depth, if one does not account for the action tendencies of specific emotions, one is likely to fail to see all of the forces that work to produce public actions of particular kinds.

Components Mutually Activate Action tendencies can be theoretically separated from supposed control by ideological or symbolic contents because each component of an emotion complex can activate the others. William James was a crucial figure in raising the question of the order in which emotional components were activated. He challenged the commonsense assumption that emotion was produced when appraisals produced feelings. He asked: Do moral sentiments exist that are triggered by conditions that then produce articulated judgments? Or is it, as the Enlightenment pose would prefer, that conditions produce judgments, and sentiments then should or do follow? James argued that appraisal processes were not necessarily prior to other elements of emotion. Instead, he suggested, “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be.”41 The raising of that possibility led to different schools of psychology and neuropsychology insisting that whichever element of emotion they study (whether cognition, subjective experience, or bodily action) is “first,” both in terms of temporal priority in the activation of individuals and in terms of constituting the central element for defining an emotion. The subsequent ability of each of these schools to provide credible evidence that in some instances the component they champion occurs “first” supports the alternative and broader conclusion that emotion is most fully understood, and therefore best defined, not as constituted by a single essential component, but as a complex (of appraisals, subjective experiences, Page 59 →neurobiological responses, and action tendencies), any of which can activate the other components in the complex.42 Therefore, as contemporary humanists have been repeatedly emphasizing, appraisal or discursive characterizations of injustice can stimulate a group of people to feel angry, but also, as Cicero and other contagion theorists such as Teresa Brennan have coached, displaying nonverbal signs of an emotion can be crucial to making an emotion contagious, and this can encourage a group of people to interpret a situation as fitting the appraisal cues of the situation.43 Today, we also have evidence that stimulating parts of the brain can induce emotions (or, consider the yogi’s training for tranquility, regardless of the appraisal conditions of the surrounding world). And behavioral psychological experience indicates that subjective experience (ruminations on past fear or pain) can stimulate present fear, anxiety, pain, and so forth.44 This view of the components of emotions as mutually activating also allows the possibility that all elements that are typically involved in the complex of a given emotion might not be intensely activated enough to be observed in every particular case. To support a claim that a particular emotion is involved merely requires the manifestation of a substantial subset of the features that make the emotion distinguishable from other related emotions. Scholars studying emotion have relied heavily on comparison among emotions, though this is not always a straightforward matter, both because of cultural variability and because of innate complexity. Above, I analogized emotions to “clouds” to emphasize their diffuse boundaries. One can profitably expand the metaphor by observing that these diffuse clumps tend to come in clusters or families. For example, there is a density of interacting appraisals/activations/feelings/ actions related to what English speakers tend to call anger, and this clump is more closely related to what we call hate or ire than it is to surprise, hope, or awe, and other cultures will clump these variations somewhat differently. Two emotions can be related by different elements of different components. Thus, disgust and anger are typically seen to share in the appraisal of “valence” of their affect (they are both negative), while fear and sorrow are typically understood as related in their “withdrawal” action tendencies.45 These overlaps mean that a multidimensional depiction of emotions as complexes formed of partially overlapping components would not produce a picture of discrete clumps, like isolated cumulous clouds on a fair summer day,

but rather one of those very interesting cloudscapes where a Page 60 →fountain from a massive cumulonimbus spikes through some dense, high cirrus at one edge of the sky, while fading into low-level streaks of stratus at the other horizon. This vision enables one to understand why different cultures may be able to carve out different activation patterns, even as there are identifiable predispositions within and across cultures to some level of similarity for at least specific metaclusters, especially those that English identifies as fear, anger, happiness, sadness, and perhaps disgust.46 The mutually activating nature and clustered character of emotions has consequences for political discourse. The overlap among clusters may provide a pivotal nexus for shifting public emotions from one to another part of the cluster or between clusters. For example, fear and anger are both negatively valenced emotions. Fear seems more likely to occur when there are high levels of uncertainty about the source of the conditions or about one’s ability to act to control them, whereas anger is more likely to be aroused when there is perceived high certainty, especially about one’s ability to control the threatening condition.47 A leader facing a fearful audience would, in that case, need primarily to switch the level of confidence of the group in their collective efficacy in order to shift their feelings from fear (with its action tendency of individualizing withdrawal) to anger (with its collectivizing urge toward attack). While scholars focusing on the “ecological” or “systemic” nature of rhetoric have productively encouraged rhetorical scholars to see “more than” a rhetor’s strategic goals and actions,48 if one seeks to enable deliberate social change, one cannot take “more than” as “instead of.” Any theory of rhetoric consistent with the goal of deliberate social change must also attend to the spaces where rhetorical options can be exercised. A theory that attends to the multidimensional inputs to shared public emotion and the different points of access to shifting systemic, contextual, or situational configurations is more productive to that end than a theory that attends only to a singular dimension, or than a theory that asserts that a single component is necessarily the “origin” of all emotion. Viewing emotions as fuzzy complexes with mutually activating components thus enables additions to affect theory. When theorists such as Brian Massumi and Teresa Brennan separated physiological elements of affect from symbolic ones, assigning the term “affect” to something like the former and “emotion” to the symbolized affect,49 this was a productive move. They highlighted the utility of attending to extrasymbolic components of emotion. Such theories, however, tend to view affect as an undifferentiatedPage 61 → “intensity” or “energy” or “jouissance.” In Christian Lundberg’s account, for example, jouissance provides the activating energy for emotions, but it is only the “tropological economy” that differentiates the emotional responses of different groups (to different texts). In Catherine Chaput’s analysis, affect is an energy produced in the complex reiterations of a system, but it is summable as “neoliberalism,” an ideology.50 For these theorists, there is no general quality to affect other than the actions of a specific system. In effect, this reduces accounts of emotion back to each selectively bounded group’s history of symbolic use.51 These theories recognize nothing like difference among affective elements that feed specific qualities into the social circulatory system. As fruitful as these pioneering affect theories have been, one gains additional utilities by recognizing that affects arise within particular bodily circuits that are predisposed toward particular mutual activations, importantly including action tendencies. However, this does not reduce emotions to “individual” level phenomena, because emotions are social signals that have social functions.

Functions and Goals of Emotion: A Re-Evolutionary Account There has been extensive attention to the problems of vocabularies and theories that identify “social functions.” Critiques of such vocabularies correctly highlight that talking about social functions cannot legitimately presume that there are a class of outcomes that are necessarily produced by any given set of social practices. “Functions” of social systems are not like “functions” of watches; they are not deliberately designed, nor are they singular. With those cautions in mind, it is nonetheless reasonable to talk about social functions in the sense that there are some tasks that all cultures must accomplish if they are to endure beyond a generation. An exhaustive list isn’t possible, but enabling members to feed themselves and providing modes of relational interaction that are not usually fatal are two examples.

Most theorists who attend to emotion at the social level presume that the emotion routines that manifest themselves in cultures serve important social functions. The majority of these functional accounts can be lumped into two categories. Studies in the first category describe social emotions as serving either to maintain or disrupt the power of dominant elites. For example, John Lucaites and James McDaniel, Barbara Biesecker, and Karen Page 62 →Engle explore public mourning utilizing distinctly different theoretical premises, but they similarly conclude that the public sharing of grief serves to help powerful groups maintain their advantage over others.52 On the other side of the ledger, scholars such as Guobin Yang, Lester Olson, and Marcyrose Chvasta have argued that the experience of shared emotion by nondominant elites has helped such groups to disrupt the power of elites.53 Whether focusing on dominant or nondominant groups, most humanistic studies thus might be said to emphasize the “distributional” functions of the circulation of emotion. They presume that the social sharing of particular kinds of emotions influences who has various kinds of power or resources. The second group of scholars might be said to incorporate this view, but expand it. Studies by scholars influenced by evolutionary theories have attended more explicitly to theorizing the social functions of emotions. Like the humanists, these theorists manifest the core concept that the social sharing of emotion is related to controlling the distribution of resources. However, in stepping back from specific emotions and specific historical contexts, they ask a broader question than “what does this emotional sharing do here?” They ask instead, “Why do human groups tend to circulate emotion in ways that regulate resource distribution?” The answer these theorists give, whether studying compassion or anger or shame/guilt or disgust, is that an obligately social species requires means of regulating interactions and distributing resources that are collectively produced, gathered, or maintained. The sharing of (some) emotions has evolved as an effective and relatively low-cost way to fill that bill. The term “evolution” is a flash point for disagreement among many competing groups (religion vs. science, humanities vs. biologists, individualist vs. collectivist psychologists, and so on). So, let us approach the meaning of “evolution” cautiously. Let us start by assuming that biological evolutionists and historians share a platform of observation. “Evolved” can mean, therefore, “developed through time” on either biological or cultural scales and platforms. One might well believe that, as a matter of historical fact, cultures do not survive long if they do not develop (i.e., “culturally evolve”) emotional response sets for distributing resources. On this view, emotions might not be conveyed through what biologists view as the hereditary mechanisms of DNA. Rather, they are built anew into each new generation through the culture’s mechanisms for training. This view of cultural evolution appears to be held implicitly by most Page 63 →anthropologists who study emotion and by many historians and cultural scholars as well. It would account for most of the findings I will refer to about anger below. Consequently, if the biological view of evolution is toxic for you, you can simply apply the historical version. Both versions should sensitize one to the need to attend to the specific qualities of materially sedimented emotional suites when selecting modes for social change. One might call that perspective “reevolutionary” to emphasize the constant mutual remaking of culture by biology and biology by culture. Whether one considers biological factors as relevant or not, it is possible and valuable to integrate social and individual loci into theories of collective emotion.

Political Emotion Is a Social-Individual Phenomenon As the introduction noted, Hutchison and Bleiker identified the theorization of the linkages between individual emotion and collective and political emotion as key to furthering studies of emotion in international relations.54 Their focus on the need for integration transcends an earlier, multidisciplinary tendency to insist that emotions should be understood as either individual and embodied or as social. For example, one of the most influential pioneers in studies of social emotion, the anthropologist Catherine Lutz, argued that emotions should be viewed as an “index of social relationships” rather than as a natural, universal psychobiological phenomenon.55 She described them as “an ideological practice” rather than as feelings that people have.56 She thus defined emotions as “a way of talking about the intensely meaningful as that is culturally defined, socially enacted, and personally articulated.”57 She left open a space for emotion as a word that might “link” the “mental and the physical,” but the physical or experiential would not form part of her analysis, because she

insisted that emotion is “preeminently cultural,” and she pitted the positing of “things beneath the skin” as a “rather than” to discourse.58 Perspectives that presume that one cannot take the social level of analysis seriously unless one denies or neglects the individual level have been and continue to be prominent in many disciplinary spaces.59 It should, however, no longer feel necessary to defend the proposition that emotions are “social” by pitting them in an either/or battle against the discipline of psychology’s focus on emotions at the individual level.60 The Page 64 →arguments that emotions are always (also) culturally shaped are definitive. This case has perhaps been most fully developed by Margaret Wetherell. Her broad survey of multidisciplinary literatures supports a view of emotions as multimodal, interweaving “various peaks and troughs of diverse modes of the semiotic, the material, and the natural.”61 Like the anthropologist Lutz’s analysis, however, Wetherell’s integration culminates in attention to what might be called the politics of daily life, rather than political action at the level of states or other collectivities. Attending to collective action and its diverse influences on governance and institutions introduces additional meanings of “the social.” In realms of collective political action, to say that emotion is socially formed is not merely to say that the diverse and daily influences of “society” shape the emotional vocabularies, display rules, cues, and subjective experiences of individuals. It is also to identify the ways in which the circulation of shared discourse in particular moments, in response to particular shareable stimuli, and with particular emotive contents, organizes shared resources and behavior toward collectively authorized actions (war, welfare, environmental remediation, road-building, schools, for example, as well as enforced prohibitions).62 Many scholars have been joining Jonathan Mercer in insisting that group-level emotion is powerful, pervasive, and irreducible to individuals, even though it has a locus in individuals.63 Todd Hall and Andrew Ross’s summary draws together, expands, and delineates two relatively long-standing traditions attending to emotion.64 The first set of approaches are often called “contagion” theories. Extending back to Cicero and Quintilian, rhetorical theorists who have studied human emotion have observed that emotion was conveyed by speakers to audiences in political contexts in substantial part by a leader’s display of that emotion.65 Humans often seem to take on the emotions that others are displaying merely because they are in the presence of such a properly executed display. Across time, “contagion” theories have appeared in multiple ways, levels and sources, ranging from neuroimaging experiments, to explorations of mirror neurons in the brain, to more speculative cultural studies.66 Recent work has begun to explore how contagion processes operate in media such as the Internet.67 The second major widely recognized mechanism by which individually embodied emotions become social is through language and other semiotic forms. Because human emotions are shared in part through language, specific emotions can be “cultivated” or “manipulated” (to reverberate Hall and Ross’s terms) in ways that support particular political goals through Page 65 →the circulation of portraits of the world that favor sets of appraisal cues related to one emotional cloud rather than others. On this view, emotion may always be at least partially located in individual bodies, but those emotions become distinctive as political forces when orchestrated toward collective action through deliberate encouragement of particular shared emotions in particular times and spaces. Collective emotion in this sense is more than simply the sum of the emotional predispositions of individuals for three reasons: (1) it requires collective identities; (2) it necessitates the enunciation of motivating affects focused around collective action; (3) the circulatory systems that are the media and other social structures unevenly amplify the feelings of different individuals or groups. Both theorists of rhetoric and of international relations studying emotion have focused on the role of identity formation in the construction of “state” or political emotion. Brent Sasley has summarized much of the underlying social scientific support for the view that individual selves are transformed by taking on group identities and that the sharing of these identities is pivotal to the convergence of group members to a “prototypical emotion” that might be identified as a group emotion (or the emotion of a “state”).68

Other scholars have further fleshed out the idea of group identity and its implications for the production of distinctive social level phenomena one might call group emotions.69 These concepts will be familiar to rhetorical scholars and other social theorists who have drawn on “constitutive” theories of discourse that describe how various “personae” create a sense of collectivized identity or how narratives emplot those identities.70 It is important to treat these identities as always in process, because, as Ross has pointed out, complexities of the circulation of public affects always means affects are remaking affiliations even as affiliations steer affects.71 Nonetheless, in collective actions the scope of identities and affiliations shapes the range of feelings that can be experienced, and thus the appraisals that can be resonant. Second, substantial lines of behavioral research at many levels have underlined that human choice requires affect, 72 but to constitute collective actions, this requires the enunciation of shared motivations. That is, striking empirical research shows that without affect, individual humans are literally not motivated to action. They cannot make choices that align with what one would otherwise describe as their “values.” In the individual, acting on affects may not require articulation of those affects. Wetherell Page 66 →and Lutz are able to describe the social components of emotions at individual levels of action as having largely tacit status or as “practices” vaguely tethered through the culture’s language in general, rather than requiring specific articulation for each emotive moment. However, as Aristotle recognized, the process of public (as opposed to private or interpersonal) decision-making requires specific, kairotic articulation of these affects in discourse: “We” will (now/here) do “x” because “y.”73 Therefore, the debate as to whether the human nervous system can steer the individual without articulation in discourse (e.g., jumping back on seeing a snake in one’s path) can be set aside when examining state action and in social movements that seek to alter state action, because the coordination among individuals in complex and large states requires some overt description of the actions to be taken in the action-relevant time frame. Such discourse may not be presented as a strictly rationalized set of propositions, and in most cases will be embedded in complex webs of narratives and tropes. Those webs may be partially described via psychodynamic accounts, not merely in terms of the rational calculus they foreground, but descriptions in terms of emotions add additional information.74 The kairotic, or timely and appropriate, nature of such public discourse distinguishes it substantively from individual level emotion. Both Stephen White and Brent Sasley have noted the temporal disconnection between views of emotion in individuals—which tend to describe emotions as short-lived reactions—and the character of emotion directed at legitimating action in the name of a collectivity, which must sustain itself through a longer time horizon.75 Public emotion deployed for many collective projects must operate across durations longer than an “outbreak” of anger or joy. It must be sustainable across periods of quiescence, and yet remain activatable as the timetables for executing collective actions demand.76 Variations in intensity and in the particular circuits in which the relevant components of an emotion script circulate may help achieve this function. Patriotic fervor, for example, may circulate at a low level at ballpark ceremonies on a fairly sustained basis and be revivified on Memorial Day at slightly higher intensities. Both of these circulations make it easier to intensify the group sentiment when a political leader seeks to mobilize a nation for war. But particular scripts for that war must also be deployed in a time frame relevant to enacting the behaviors that constitute the war. The complexities of circulation constitute a third major factor that creates social emotion as more than individual level emotion. The different communicative circuits among which people are located, Page 67 →and the necessity to circulate political discourses to “the right bodies” to sustain a group identity or to coalesce intense feelings of affiliation in support of a specific action, also mean that the particular properties of the social circulatory system—not merely the individual bodies—shape the character of the emotion scripts and their associated collective actions. Circulatory systems (or networks, or flows, mutatis mutandis for each particular theoretical perspective) are embedded in the full range of historically sedimented features of social life, not only in discourses but in other material factors that often pass under the vague name “social structure”: who lives in which neighborhoods, who can get interviewed on NPR and Fox News, whose education encourages them to read the New Yorker and who follows which Facebook and Twitter affiliate networks, who can buy ads and direct their content, who works double shifts and so can’t attend ballpark games. These historically semi-sedimented factors are also tied to the particular lines of connection, speeds, and media dynamics of the discursive circulation

system.77 Consequently, the character of media systems also play substantive roles in channeling, shaping, and amplifying the emotions of differently positioned individuals. The polity’s circulatory system—that is, the system’s biases—are thus key components that take the raw materials of individual level emotion and transform them into a social level phenomenon, with patterns not reducible to or predictable merely by adding up the feelings of the individuals involved. All of this complexity has led theorists such as Andrew Ross, Margaret Wetherell, and Marcus Holmes to suggest that political emotion is too complex to study under labels such as “anger” or “compassion.”78 It is certainly true that at both individual and social levels, lived emotion is continuous, unsettled, and conflicted. It is never singular or simple. However, because a polity’s emotions are focused by leaders and deployed in action-oriented timetables, they can exhibit identifiable dominant tendencies. Political agitators, leaders, and parties employ their strategic prowess to guide the circulatory system to produce a temporarily dominant, semistable set of political emotions out of the broader and messier flux of emotion that always exists among mass numbers of individuals. Though even the most dominant social level affects are not discretely bounded or fully uniform, they often will have sufficient durations as clumps and clusters to be isolable as such, and therefore to enable coherent description of their components and likely linkages to political effects. It may be critical at most times to attend to competitions among rhetors for circulatory bandwidth, and therefore to recognize that there are multiple emotions at play, but the Page 68 →temporary coalescences make it often methodologically fruitful and theoretically justifiable to study basic and other emotions in polities. Taken as a whole, a view of collective emotion as a dynamic product of affectively laden identities constantly reforming in circulation systems coalescing around collectivized actions suggests another way of dispensing with the battle over whether human emotions are “social” or “individual.” The binary should be expanded to a trio: individual bodies house socialized emotions that are transformed on occasion into collective emotions (each level is recursive with the others). Thus, collective political emotion is “social” at two different levels. As anthropologists and cultural critics such as Lutz and Wetherell have indicated, individual level emotion is itself a product of social or cultural “histories.” But also, such socially shaped “individual” emotion is transformed in political action by the processes of sharing particular kinds of articulations at particular times, through particular circulatory networks. Although it is a recursive and competitive rather than unidirectional process, individual emotions, already socialized, feed into political networks, which simultaneously enable particular collective actions and reshape affective potentials and identities, producing new forms of socialization over the long haul.

Toward Assessments Understanding emotion on that political level introduces issues of assessment that will be focal in guiding the analyses I will offer of the rhetorics of Bush, bin Laden, and Sontag. These issues can be foreshadowed here by examining the counterintuitive change required in a crucial criterion for judging interpersonal emotional displays: sincerity. Because emotion has powerful implications for social interactions between individuals, people tend to be highly suspicious of fake emotion in nontheatrical contexts. Sincerity is the default criterion for avoiding emotional manipulation. But the application of the “sincerity” test to political emotion is misplaced. Todd Hall’s illuminating treatment of what he aptly labeled emotional diplomacy initiated this recalibration.79 Hall appropriately argued for the separation of sincerity and display. In emotional diplomacy, he pointed out, it doesn’t matter whether or not the displays of anger by Chinese diplomats are at all personally sincere, or nothing more than a cynical strategic ploy. If Chinese officials more or less uniformly followed the anger script in their verbal and nonverbal messages, then other nations responded as Page 69 →though this is “really anger.” Hall did not need to extend the argument further because his focus was on diplomats and their interactions with each other. However, his answer can be extended to collective emotion more generally by attending both to the long tradition of rhetorical studies and recent deep theorizing of emotion as an embodied phenomenon, which both indicate that the apparent gap between sincerity and strategy is essentially inconsequential in most political contexts.

In the first place, it is simply unlikely that groups of leaders will be able to sustain a display of anger if many of them do not actually feel and share anger, even though such displays may be episodic rather than sustained or singular. As Hall notes, many theorists and experimentalists have now established that merely expressing angerlike nonverbal and verbal codes is likely to spur feelings of anger in the individual displaying those anger signs. This means that leaders will typically pass a sincerity test if we understand it as “does the person exhibiting the cues of an emotion actually feel an emotion?” Most political actors will not be good enough theatrical actors to pull off a convincing display if they don’t actually feel the emotion. Second, and more important, the stimulation of an emotion from a deliberate decision to “act emotional” doesn’t make the anger so experienced less desirable in politician A than politician B’s unconsciously driven spontaneous and reactive upwelling of feeling (which we typically identify as “sincerity”). The insertion of deliberate choice is simply a reflection of the necessity to extend and suspend political emotion through time as described above. In political emotion—where the stakes are many lives and collective fortunes—it is more desirable that one’s emotional displays be deliberate rather than unconsciously driven. The mutually activating nature of emotional components means that the deep upwelling of feeling that we understand as “sincere” emotion can come from external cues, physiological stimuli, or an errant neuron activation caused by a bad night’s sleep. Most humanists and social scientists have focused on the “appraisal cues” for emotions, and they are partially justified in doing so because these components of emotion tend to be most pivotal in judgments of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of an emotional set to a situation or a normative system. Consequently, at least with regard to public emotion, enacting emotions that are deliberately reflected upon is actually what we should prefer over unreflected-upon or “sincere” ranting. Third, and finally, the “sincerity” criterion doesn’t provide a sufficient bulwark for protection against manipulation because it focuses on the immediate experience of the individual leader, rather than on the appropriatenessPage 70 → of the components of the anger script for cohering specific collective actions. To take Hall’s central example of Adolf Hitler deliberately working himself into a fury before addressing foreign diplomats, even in that case the criterion of whether “he said what he means” does not tell us what we should want to know. We have no way of knowing Hitler’s subjective emotional inner life, but it seems unlikely that he felt toward his diplomatic opponents emotions of kindness or sympathy or pity or any other emotion we would identify as duplicitous with a display of anger. Importantly, Hitler’s display of anger was fully consonant with his intended actions toward the diplomatic representatives of those nations. He really intended to attack them violently. Bullies may be quite “sincere” in their hostile feelings and threats toward others, and their anger toward those they threaten may come raging to the surface unbidden and without deliberation, but that does not make it laudable. The fruitful criteria for judging public emotion lie instead in careful attention to the fit among the component parts of the appraisal cues for an emotion, the intended action, the human relations involved, and the situation (at many levels, including the “audience” dynamics).

Summary The arguments above have sought to contribute to understandings of how the embodiment of emotion in individuals can make specific and extradiscursive contributions to collective action, even though collective emotion is not simply the aggregation of the emotion of individuals. Public discourse that circulates emotion in order to co-orient individuals toward collective action tends to remake those individuals as members of that collectivity in ways that are shaped and constrained by the circulatory systems through which the individual bodies commune. Nonetheless, some scripts are more likely than others to gain resonance in more cultures and across more systemic structures, because they align with the action tendencies, appraisal cues, subjective experiences, and even neurophysiology of a limited set of diffuse emotional complexes that are common among cultures, even in their distinctive variety. Anger is one of the most vivid, potent, and common of those emotions.

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Chapter 3 A Resonant Script for Angry Public Rhetoric Anger-laden stories swirled around 9/11. Some recounted the violation of sacred spaces. Others expressed outrage at abuses of human dignity for those held as captives. Several provoked ire at the loss of civil liberties. Most stories portrayed vile opponents: infidels! terrorists! the military-industrial complex! Many tales projected righteous victory. While the differences among the stories are important for global futures, the commonalities among the stories are striking, and also shape how billions of humans will inhabit this globe together. This chapter suggests that the commonalities among the angry public rhetorics of 9/11 are the product of the ways in which component features of the human social emotion we call anger come together to form a script with high potential to resonate and motivate. The chapter begins by describing what very diverse scholars have depicted as the social functions of anger, but with emphasis on some less-often recognized complexities of those functions. Those functions cohere with recurrent appraisal cues and action tendencies, which are next described. The form in which these components tend to be assembled is then specified as the particular narrative script offered in the introduction. The theoretical basis for the assembly of that script is an expansion from Aristotle’s early criteria for just anger to a fuller Burkean pentadic form, but with special attention to the constitution of the protagonists. Acting as a collectivity requires not only orienting against violators or out-groups but also orienting toward members of the collective in specifically articulated Page 72 →ways. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of the methodological issues involved in using this template as a tool of critical analysis.

The Social Functions of Anger Public anger occurs when many people share the multidimensional complex featuring the action tendencies of cognitive narrowing, optimistic bias, and antagonistic approach, and four appraisals: (1) negative events have occurred that (2) result from the blameworthy actions of others, and (3) one has a reasonably high likelihood of controlling the others’ behavior, and (4) a relatively high certainty about the events and their causes. The evidence for that claim will be elaborated below. First, however, the telos of that formation should be explored. The anger complex can be turned toward at least two different functions: it may be activated to rally a group to influence the behavior of others outside the group through direct threat, or it may be activated in a way that stimulates collective adjudication of alleged violations of normative codes. Both social goals involve rallying the group: the former to give their time, resources, and even lives to the threat or control of other groups, the latter to attend to, adjudicate, and punish the normative violation. Given the multidirectional relationships among the inherently fuzzy components of anger, these quite different social goals are prone to slip and slide between each other in any given case. Notably, the out-group may be depicted as alien not merely because they are a threat to the physical well-being of the group, but because they violate the collectivity’s norms or values. This slippage highlights that the linkages of human anger to threat displays in other animals, whether historically accurate or not, cannot be described as the essence of anger, even in an out-group context. In human anger, the inescapable role of symbolization tends to make anger manifest in a script common for both in-group-directed and out-group-directed rhetoric, albeit with different likely effectivities. Perhaps because this script best aligns with the in-group contexts for anger, most humanistic studies, and several others, have emphasized the prosocial functions of anger in communities. The most thorough studies of anger in history, anthropology, and psychology strongly overlap in building a prosocial depiction of the social functions of anger. In her pioneering study, anthropologist Catherine Lutz Page 73 →focused on the adjudicatory role of anger for a social group, the Ifaluk. She wrote that “to become justifiably angry [song] is to advance the possibilities for peace and well-being on the island, for it is to identify instances of behavior that threaten the moral order.”1 She identified five components of the social script for

such anger performances: (1) there is a rule or value violation, (2) it is pointed out by someone, (3) who simultaneously calls for the condemnation of the act, and (4) the perpetrator reacts in fear to that anger, (5) amending his or her ways.2 She noted that in the Ifaluk this script often plays out in interpersonal or familial contexts. In those contexts, differential power is involved, as higher power individuals (males and elders) are far more likely to display song and to do so toward lower power individuals than the reverse.3 When interpersonal displays or appeals to family members are not sufficient, however, the chiefs are appealed to as the adjudicators of angry claims. The collective judgments authored by these adjudicators are not oriented toward harming the perpetrators, but rather toward correcting their behavioral tendencies and restoring social harmony as that is understood in the Ifaluk social order. Studies by historians have pointed to a similar or overlapping range of functions for anger in larger human collectives.4 In a groundbreaking collection of essays edited by Barbara Rosenwein, most of the historians’ accounts noted the way in which scripts for anger have served to regulate the contributions and accumulations of members of leadership hierarchies, both charging them to risk life and resources to protect their peoples and lands from other nobles and also limiting their own depredations upon their people. For example, in an examination of anger performances in the early medieval period, Lester Little concluded that the use of anger displays by monks had a purpose, which was to bring about a change of behavior in the potentes. It was a tool used in negotiation with these powerful antagonists; it was a self-consciously and skillfully manipulated tool, or force, which was summoned to confront the more conventional force of heavily armed, mounted warriors.5 Page 74 →Focusing on related cases, Catherine Peyroux identified the way in which such purposes were tied to underlying social norms: “This framework of understanding attributes to anger an inherent claim about some sense of the вЂought,’ so as to capture the aspect of anger that stems as a response to some sense of what is felt to be вЂunjustifiable’ harm.”6 More recently, reflecting some of these literatures, rhetorical scholar Emily Winderman wrote that angry rhetorics bound people together “for the purposes of actionable redress.”7 Given this substantial recognition among humanists of the role of anger in adjudicating adherence to moral codes or social norms, it is not surprising that this function has similarly been attended to by social and natural scientists.8 Michael Petersen and colleagues argued that “anger evolved to manage rule violations in ancestral small-scale groups with high levels of social dependence between the members.”9 In summarizing the literature on anger from an evolutionary perspective, Daniel Fessler similarly concluded, “Anger motivates responses to transgression despite our propensity to discount the future, truncating ongoing transgressions and deterring additional transgressions.”10 There is, however, a difference between evolutionary psychologists and humanists with regard to the tendency to place the social function of anger in terms of particular social norms. Many contemporary humanists have specifically linked the normative structure involved in anger to “justice.” Peter Lyman, for example, declared that “anger is an indispensable political emotion—for without angry speech the body politic would lack the voice of the powerless questioning the justice of the dominant order.”11 Similarly, arguing for angry protest rather than carnivalesque approaches to social change, Marcyrose Chvasta mixed the threat aspects of anger with the normative adjudication, writing that she knew “for sure” that “expressing felt anger mobilizes government more effectively than (gleefully ironic or otherwise) celebration,” further insisting that “no policy, or law, or budget will change unless the State feels threatened. Protest is born of anger, an emotion from which the State—humorless or not—deserves no protection.”12

Taking a more nuanced approach, Lester Olson has provided a detailed and thoughtful analysis of Audre Lorde’s uses of anger in her activism. Olson drew attention to the limits of anger, which Lorde also came to recognize, but Olson emphasized the imperative Lorde raised to come “to terms with anger as a commonplace response to injustices and a resource for political activism—at times, deliberately disruptive and consciously rupturing the usual rules of engagement.”13 In these analyses, publicly Page 75 →expressed anger is valuable because it calls other parties (“the dominant order,” “the State,” “white women,” “corporations,” in the case of Lyman, Lorde, Chvasta, and Sheldene Simola, respectively) to account for their violations of the norm of social justice. These valuations presume that there is a potential social effectivity to such performances—greater justice might be achieved, social resources more fairly allocated, whether by threat or in the fashion Lutz recognized in the Ifaluk, by getting others to attend to the violations, and therefore feeling compelled to correct them. Defining anger as a response to injustice is appealing in part because it ratifies whatever anger one feels. There are nonetheless two important troubles with jumping to such an assumption. First, as a social emotion, angry rhetoric is a call for judgment, not proof of a wrong. The error in taking the mere feeling of anger as proof that injustice exists can be highlighted by the greater use of anger by conservative commentators in the mass media in the United States than by more progressive media sources, according to the counts made by Sarah Sobieraj and Jeffrey Berry.14 If one takes the existence of anger displays simply as a product of the existence of injustice or one accepts that angry discourse is generally desirable because it is necessary to address injustice, or both, then one must apparently side with those who believe that injustices toward conservative constituencies are greater than the injustices experienced by other groups. I project that most of the readers of this book will find that a conclusion not readily to be endorsed. Bullies aren’t in the right just because they are good at anger displays. Angry public rhetoric that proclaims itself to be striving to remediate injustice is not self-ratifying, but is instead a call for others to adjudicate a claimed norm violation.15 To the extent that a political rhetoric is not merely threat based, it assumes that—faced with the evident immorality/injustice of their actions—those who perpetrate injustice, those who are charged with regulating social justice, or at least a majority of the members of the society, will recognize and assent to the claim that an injustice is being committed. Focusing on this adjudicative aspect of angry rhetoric directs attention to the particular template for justice to which one is appealing among the social members who have the power to implement judgments. The degree to which that normative template is or is not shared will strongly influence the effectiveness of the political rhetoric. Assessing collective anger is further complicated by evidence that feeling anger typically requires both the recognition that social norms or moral principles are being violated and that those violations are perceived Page 76 →as related to one’s self-interests. In laboratory experiments that manipulated whether a target individual was treated unfairly or unfair treatment was meted out to a stranger or another individual with whom the target identified empathically, both Erin O’Mara et al. and Daniel Batson et al. found that individuals recognized unfair treatment whether it occurred to them, to someone with whom they identified, or to a stranger with whom they did not specifically identify.16 However, they felt angry about this unfairness when they or someone with whom they identified was treated unfairly. They were much less likely to feel anger when the stranger was affected unfairly. A study by Vincent Yzerbyt and colleagues reinforced this finding and emphasized its application to group identities. The anger of participants in their study was substantially intensified when a victim was categorized as a member of one’s own group, as compared to being categorized as a member of an outgroup.17 These studies might be taken by the cynical to mean that anger is cued by the blockage of one’s goals (selfinterest), but in fact not by injustice per se. Seeing appeals to justice as merely a (false) rationalization for selfinterests, however, would be an errant conclusion fueled by either/or dichotomous thinking. The use of anger as a social adjudication device requires both the shared norm and a party who feels they have been injured by a violation of the norm. This combination reflects the biosymbolic character of humans as material beings. The norms allow symbolic reflection but they have limited social utility unless they have consequences to individuals or subgroups.18 It is not that the self-interest is the true cause of anger and the appeal to justice merely a rationalization. It is that “justifiable anger” (song, or social or political or public anger) is aroused only

when two conditions simultaneously appear: a moral norm is shared, and it is called upon by people who perceive that they have a credible case that they are not being appropriately treated by others who claim to orient their relationship via that shared norm.19 A further issue with identifying justice as the inherent normative principle involved in anger is the cultural misuniversalization that may be involved. Aristotle identified anger with a slight to one’s personal status, rather than to abstract conceptions of justice such as are typically employed by those calling for the use of anger to achieve justice cited above. While status was certainly tied to the normative structure of Aristotle’s honor culture, status is quite distant in meaning from contemporary uses of “justice” or more broadly Christian or post-Christian senses of morality.Page 77 → Advocates who use the norm of justice in contemporary society are frequently operating on a vision of justice that emphasizes equal allocation of resources to social members. But this is not a universal vision of how resources should be allocated. In a culture where status hierarchies are taken to be sacredly ordained, earned, or merely normalized because they are essential to the functioning of the group, a violation of the status hierarchy (including someone’s call for equality!) is a violation of the group’s moral principles and therefore itself worthy of angry response.20 If anger is a key social regulator, especially a regulator of distribution of resources, the lack of shared norms to which anger may appeal presents a central problem for building and maintaining a global community organized around something other than violence in the current circumstances. Where people disagree about underlying norms, anger can’t serve as a call for social adjudication—it can serve only as a threat display or serve internal social functions for the group, such as easing humiliation through revenge.21 As many scholars have already observed, threat displays are self-escalating, because the local character of anger (its adherence to an individual or group’s self-interests) convinces group A that group B is willfully violating norms by refusing to adjudicate the anger according to those norms, while the anger simultaneously convinces group B that group A is irrational and threatening, and therefore can be dealt with only through counterthreat and violence. Additionally, the absence of shared norms for the adjudication of anger across groups may advantage the circulation of revenge.22 The difficulties for the productive use of anger at the global level are magnified by additional evidence that people tend, where possible, to dis-identify with victims, rather than to expand empathically to identify with them.23 There also appears to be a tendency to perceive anger by powerful groups as being congruent and anger by nonpowerful groups as incongruent.24 Any serious proposals for how to avoid the use of threat-based anger instead of normatively based anger in structuring human global relations must address these conditions and proclivities. This in turn requires understanding the appraisal cues and action tendencies for anger.

Appraisal Cues for Anger The vastness of the array of research on anger means that unanimity on any point is not to be expected. However, the overlaps among descriptions of Page 78 →the appraisal cues offered by scholars from multiple disciplines constitute sufficient support for describing anger as an emotion that is spurred when the following perceptions occur: (1) negative events have occurred that (2) result from the blameworthy actions of others, and (3) one has a reasonably high likelihood of controlling the others’ behavior, and (4) a relatively high certainty about the events and their causes.25 Karl Ask and PГ¤r Anders Granhag, for example, write that anger “is characterized by the appraisals that someone other than the self is responsible for a negative event, that the event was under the individual’s control, and a certainty about what happened.”26 A Negative Emotion? The understanding of anger as a “negative” emotion has gained substantial attention in historical studies of emotions.27 The view is also evident in the two-dimensional perspective on emotions in psychology. That view held that all emotions could be categorized via a circumplex structure based on the degree of arousal and the degree of positivity/negativity of the emotion.28 As Aristotle recognized, however, anger is not simply an emotion that feels negative; it can also involve some kinds of pleasurable feelings.29 The negativity of anger’s valence therefore refers not to subjective feelings but to an experience of injury, or what has been described as the “blockage of goals.”30 The negativity that cues anger is thus a sense of harm or loss, which typically has

subjectively negative feelings associated with it,31 even if it may also have positive feelings associated with arousal and anticipation of victory. Caused by a Conscious Agent? Attribution that the harm was caused by another conscious agent is also widely identified as typifying anger.32 While this appraisal cue may seem logically requisite, in practice it may be stretched, perhaps beyond recognition. People sometimes report feeling angry at themselves or at inanimate objects, and some people are habituated to anger, for example, because of chronic pain.33 One can either conclude that such cases constitute “atypical anger” or “not really anger,” depending upon how far off the edge of the cloudlike cluster of anger you perceive them to be. The view of emotions as fuzzy multidimensional complexes does not require the existence Page 79 →of absolute boundaries, only general tendencies, and, especially for public anger, the focus on another agent or group appears to be relatively general. Intentional and Blameworthy A third appraisal cue commonly attributed to anger is the idea that the agent is blameworthy. As Stephen White’s overview of the politics of anger put it, “a display of anger also involves a quasi-juridical appraisal of the act and of the person or persons deemed responsible for it.”34 Some researchers focus solely on the narrow criterion of intentionality, sometimes expressed as responsibility. Tanja Wranik and Klaus Scherer, for example, state that “[a]nger is experienced because one believes that an agent intentionally obstructed this important goal.”35 While people do get angry (at least briefly) at unintentional actions, the intention /nonintention distinction has tremendous purchase in many cultures.36 Those facing angry accusations seem to expect that saying “I didn’t mean to!” or “It was an accident” should mollify normative hostility, even if some recompense is still required. There is another sense of blame that has less unanimity among psychologically oriented theorists. This is the use of the term “blame” to indicate a moral or normative violation. Leonard Berkowitz states the schism mildly when he writes, “There is an interesting divergence of views regarding the perception of the instigating incident as unfair or improper.”37 Some psychologists perceive judgments of fairness and moral propriety as incompatible with standard evolutionary accounts. Such reductionist versions of biologically informed views simply have no way to account for judgments of moral blame. Additionally, the wide variation and nontangible nature of normative or moral rules makes it difficult to do controlled experiments (note the difficulty of even settling on “norm” or “moral” or “ethics”; intense academic debates reflect the complexities involved, which I sidestep here in the belief that whichever of these schools of thought you adopt, and whichever label you use, the implications about which I am writing remain sufficiently similar). Nonetheless, the widespread subjective sense that something like moral blame is involved in anger permeates humanistic literatures,38 and it has led even some psychologists to overcome the reductionist prejudice and include such opprobrium among the cues for anger experiences.39 One must simply be careful not to presume that “blame” can be defined in a culturally invariant fashion. Page 80 → Certainty and Controllability The last two important appraisal cues that have substantial consensus among psychologists are certainty and controllability, which can be closely interrelated. Jennifer Lerner et al. have been influential, writing, “For example, fear and anger, although both negative, differ in terms of the certainty and control dimensions. Whereas a sense that the situation not the self is in control and a sense of uncertainty define fear, a sense of individual control and certainty define anger.”40 There seems to be sufficient agreement that if one does not feel that one is likely to have the capacity to control the harm or the individual causing the harm, an individual or a group is more likely to experience or share fear, frustration, or sadness rather than anger.41 This dimension of anger has not been directly addressed by humanistic scholars, but it is consistent with historians’ assignment of greater

access to anger to elites across the centuries.42 Feelings of control are also typically tied to a sense of certainty rather than uncertainty. In her study of the polemical genre of angry rhetoric, for example, Erin Rand highlighted the polemical rhetor’s tendency toward expressing complete certainty about their truths; there is no acknowledgement of alternative possibilities.43 Feeling uncertain seems to encourage fear or anxiety rather than anger. Uncertainty appears to have even broader bases than merely the ability to control the situation. Being uncertain about who caused an event, or other aspects of a situation, might also inhibit anger. The research associated with this consensus may disrupt a commonsense view that judgments about whether or not one can control an issue should “come after” our feelings about it, which refer to other objective features of the stimulus. But being roused to anger may bias one’s sense of certainty, given the multidirectionality of the activation of components of emotions. This disruption of common sense might be important for thinking about how to circulate or quell anger.

Action Tendencies of Anger At the individual level, there are some common visible manifestations of anger. These are well illustrated by the nonverbal displays associated with anger in the historical studies assembled in the Rosenwein collection. Different images and literatures represented anger with burning eyes, stern Page 81 →gestures, trembling, groaning, sighing, gnashing teeth, blood boils with rage, jumps up, flushes and bristles, face darkens, face darkens then turns pale, face puffed up, swollen, but also a “smile of anger” that demonstrates an anger under a firm and witheringly superior control. The use of strong vocalics in angry rhetorics have been noted by rhetorical critics.44 Though these behaviors are multiple and distributed rather than singular or omnipresent, they are recognizable as members of a loosely bounded set. That is, they stand in contrast to the nonverbal action of withdrawal common to sadness or of expansiveness common to happiness. While such individual level nonverbal displays may play a role in contagion at the collective level, and have been studied as clues to psychodynamics,45 they will not be part of the focus here. Political leaders often learn more restrained nonverbal displays,46 and other action tendencies have greater impacts on action steps. These include biases in cognition, especially narrowing and incautious thought patterns, and patterns of physical movement identifiable as approach, antagonism, and attacking. Angry Cognition Biases Although proclivities for thinking in mind/body dualism may discourage recognizing cognitive biases as action tendencies, such biases have tremendous consequences for collectivities. Angry arousal involves cognitive narrowing, a way of thinking that relies on rote procedures rather than the search for novel information or deep processing. This mode of cognition tends to resort to stereotyping, and it enables excessive optimism. The cognitive biases associated with anger appear so obvious that they form a long-standing clichГ©: “blinded by rage.” A Shakespeare dictionary entry on “rage” shows the link to be so tight as to have provoked etymological change: “to the Elizabethans this word meant вЂmadness’.”47 To take an example closer to the present case, Dana Cloud has contrasted angry “diatribes” to discourses that “respond meaningfully to arguments and evidence.”48 Psychological research has added precision to this common but vague sense that anger is unthinking (or more often, that other people’s anger is unthinking) by demonstrating that people who are aroused by anger are more likely specifically to think incautiously, narrowly, and stereotypically. One of the paradigmatic studies of the optimistic bias or lack of cautionPage 82 → associated with angry cognition is Jennifer Lerner and Dacher Keltner’s contrast of anger and fear. Using both experimentally induced and naturally occurring instances of these emotions in separate studies, they verified the portrayal, going back at least to The Iliad, of the angry person as rash. Specifically, they found that those who were angry “expressed optimistic risk estimates and risk-seeking choices,” in contrast to those who were fearful.49 There are contextual effects that steer these factors,50 but the findings about anger are robust enough to generate caution about the use of political anger if one’s goal is to encourage an audience to move cautiously (rather than, for example, to initiate a war). This cognitive tendency has been studied specifically in international

conflicts. When operating under the influence of anger, those considering violent attacks on others have been shown to be prone to excessively optimistic assessments of success, costs, and benefits.51 This overoptimistic orientation coheres with other features of angry cognition. The brain on anger tends to shut down the search for more information and to favor a kind of rote or “heuristic” thinking.52 Nitika Garg, Jeffrey Inmann, and Vikas Mittal, for example, summarized previous research and provided additional experimental support for the claim that feelings of anger, perhaps because they are associated with high feelings of certainty, “result in greater reliance on message source expertise, stereotypes, and less attention to argument quality.”53 Rote or heuristic thinking relies on familiar categories and jumps to familiar conclusions rather than engaging in a search for alternatives. Ask and Granhag found that, in a legal context, those who were saddened used more substantive thinking than angry people, who were more likely to be “unaffected by statementhypothesis consistency.”54 Michael Parker and Linda Isbell contrasted fear and anger, showing that people who were angered spent less time looking for information about political candidates, whereas people who were fearful spent more time seeking information.55 Nicholas Valentino et al. also found that anger depresses information seeking in a political context.56 Larissa Tiedens and Susan Linton have shown how anger’s association with feelings of certainty may be central to its tendency to produce reliance on an expert’s claim rather than critical attention to specific information.57 This rote tendency, Roger Petersen and Sarah Zukerman observe, means that “anger also heightens prejudice and locks combatants into stereotyping one another.”58 Sharing anger would appear, therefore, to be a counterproductive rhetorical option for generating thoughtfulness or encouraging learning. Page 83 → Angry Movement The brain does not just think. It regulates the body’s hormones and motor actions. The “action tendencies” of an emotion may include and be a consequence of the cognitive tendencies already described, but they may also result from other forms of arousal. Tracing the complex, incomplete, and still murky research literatures on the physiology of anger does not (yet) bear sufficiently fruitful results. However, in the humanities, psychology, and biology there is substantial agreement that anger includes heightened activity levels (as opposed, for example, to sadness, which is stilling), approach orientation (as opposed, for example, to fear, which has a tendency to induce withdrawal), and antagonism (as opposed, for example, to the social orientation of amity or love). Taken together, and combined with the cognitive tendencies described above, this means anger produces a propensity toward “attack” imagined as violent action. The following will point out the shared ground between the psychological and various humanistic studies about these action tendencies. Aristotle specifically defined calmness as the opposite of anger. The characterization of anger as activating is shared in more recent humanistic observations, such as Philip Fisher’s characterization of anger as “an outward streaming energy.”59 Physiological studies, including analyses of heart rate and various endocrine responses, have also given support to the commonsense feeling that anger motivates activity.60 I know of no counterexamples in the psychological or humanistic literature that would describe anger as stilling rather than energizing, although descriptions of anger in Islamic medieval traditions have emphasized that display of control over the activations is prized.61 There is widespread agreement that this activation carries a directionality as well. Angry activity is not flight away from a stimulus (as in fear), but rather is prototypically toward a target perceived as the source of the blockage, threat, or harm. Michael Potegal and Gerhard Stemmler, for example, wrote that anger “involves active approach, in contrast to the negative emotions of sadness and fear which involve inhibition and withdrawal, respectively.”62 This action tendency appears in humanistic accounts as well, as Lutz quoted a cultural informant as saying that when angry, “I want to move toward that thing or person and stop it.”63 Anger-induced movement toward the source of a goal blockage is, not surprisingly, generally described as

antagonistic. Peyroux’s study of anger Page 84 →in medieval Europe noted, “Among the emotions, anger is a feeling-state that is at base antagonistic.”64 Violet Cheung-Blunden and Bill Blunden identified “fear with moving away (avoidance) action tendencies and anger with moving toward (antagonistic) action tendencies.” They indicated that “[a]ction tendencies that have been associated with anger include hitting, criticizing, killing, revenging, and attacking.”65 Yzerbyt and colleagues called this anger’s “offensive” tendency.66 Although it is possible to imagine antagonism without violent behavior, the prototypical image of angry antagonism assumes violent actions. Some scholars have taken this symbolic image as equivalent to the action tendency of anger,67 but most careful analyses would agree with Potegal and Stemmler that “anger without aggression is the norm in many cultures.”68 The perception that there is an “urge” toward violent action combined with the absence of actual aggression may create in common sense the image that anger is “naturally” violent, but that cultures engage in “anger control.” However, if anger is “naturally” a social mechanism for regulating resource distribution, then the direction of anger’s hostility naturally has multiple options, which might include the threat of violent action, but also more proactive means of encouraging violators to correct their behaviors or make recompense. A symbolically informed account would suggest that idealizations of anger focus on violence because the cognitive habits of anger amplify the tendency toward absolutizing inherent in symbolic structures. This symbolic focus on anger as violent is evident in social histories. The historical analysis by Little pointed out how anger was signified in images from the Middle Ages in Europe through violent actions such as a lance run through the target of the anger.69 The specific boundaries of the harm intended by violence should nonetheless be understood as variable by situation and cultural context. In the same volume, Genevieve Buhrer-Thierry traced the shift in actions portrayed as appropriate for the king’s anger through time, from the death penalty to blinding.70 Similarly, in Europe, the death penalty gradually was replaced by imprisonment for most crimes.71 Therefore, rather than depicting violence as the action tendency for anger, it might be more precise to suggest that anger’s action tendency is to inflict corrective or preventive harm upon the target. The inflicting of physical damage may be the most symbolically accessible image of harm, but other correctives are possible, and even predispositional, given the social goals of anger. If the behavioral proclivities stimulated by anger are oriented to the Page 85 →social goal of controlling the distribution of resources and risks, rather than simply by a desire to destroy a foe,72 then the harm selected will be that which accords with redressing distribution challenges. We typically call this “punishment” or “retribution.” As Kostas Kalimtzis’s review of the classical Greek tradition summarized this point, “anger has an inherent craving for retaliation and an impetus to consummate itself in a punishment.”73 Experimental studies have supported the tendency of anger to accord with support for punitive policies.74 Public anger requires the symbolic sharing of the cues for anger and the prescription of particular actions, so the final section of this chapter develops a template or common script that provides the predispositional form for public rhetorics that succeed at arousing anger among members of a social group.

The Symbolization of Public Anger Whatever the underlying forces and vectors exerted by anger on human bodies, large human groups must employ symbolic means to share anger if human emotions are to serve as a means of coordinating collective distributions of resources such as welfare programs and actions such as war. These complex symbolic processes can be plausibly integrated with the physiology of human bodies because both are material phenomena. The fact that neither physiological nor symbolic systems operate on a mechanistic basis grants latitude with regard to choices of scripts for anger, and there has recently been an uptick in the explorations of the symbolic options that can be constituted as anger.75 One long-standing option, promoted by Buddha and stoics such as Seneca, is simply to proscribe all anger.76 While this recommendation may serve individuals well in their own lives, if anger serves the functions of normative regulation, it may not be possible or desirable for social groups to do without anger in every case, as regulation of resource allocation on a normative or moral basis will seem more fair or just than

random or power-based distributions. Another important alternative was recently developed by Kenneth Zagacki and Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald. Drawing on Nelson Mandela’s rhetoric, they describe a script for “non-angry” rhetoric that might serve the functions of anger, without foregrounding the feelings of anger.77 This script would seem to have important applications in many circumstances. Page 86 →Below I add to these options by expanding Aristotle’s script for “good” anger through Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic framework to produce a fuller template, which shows how the appraisal cues and action tendencies described above tend to take on a particular symbolic form. Aristotle’s Criteria for Judging Public Anger Aristotle interpreted anger in consonance with the honor culture in which he lived. W. Rhys Roberts translated Aristotle’s definition this way: “Anger may be defined as an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one’s friend.”78 Aristotle detailed the different kinds of slight one might experience, including contempt, spite, and insolence. Aristotle’s definition is consonant with the accounts outlined above, although it defines the harm or goal blockage narrowly, in terms of status alone. Nonetheless, it posits a harm, a violation of a shared norm (the status hierarchy), and an intentional agent as the cause and target of the anger. It is worth noting the specific cultural influence of honor culture on the famous Greek philosopher’s account, because to do so may tame some biased reactions to the account of Osama bin Laden’s rhetoric in the next chapter. Aristotle’s descriptions of anger are not consonant with perspectives that presume the only morally acceptable status relationship among humans is one of equality (some contemporary versions of justice). Aristotle did not say that we get angry when someone fails to treat us as equals. Indeed, he presumed a hierarchy rather than a set of relations among equals, as when he indicated that we get angry at those “who oppose us though they are our inferiors.” He also ruled out defining anger as merely a retaliatory response when he emphasized “insolence” as a cause of anger: “These injuries must be such as are neither retaliatory nor profitable to the doers: for only then will they be felt to be due to insolence.” It is the intent to violate the person’s place in the status hierarchy per se that is the cause for anger in this account, consistent with anger’s social function of protecting the normative structure, which in an honor culture is pivotally defined by social status.79 Aristotle recognized anger as a public performance, and as such he specified how anger displays should be calibrated to the particular statusPage 87 → threat in five dimensions. William Harris summarized the Aristotelian template: “to be angry with the right people for the right reason and in the right manner, at the right moment and for the right length of time.”80 This template transforms three of the consensus elements of appraisal cues described above into a prescriptive discursive formula. “The right reason” signals the blameworthiness, including normative basis. “The right people” attends to the target agent. And the references to manner, moment, and duration take account of and point to the sculpting of the action tendencies. Aristotle’s template thus provides an important beginning in efforts to translate basic components of anger into a prescriptive guide for assessing or constructing discourse sharing public anger. This template, however, is insufficient to a global-level analysis. Burkean-Informed Template for Anger Kenneth Burke has been widely recognized as a dramatistic theorist who substantially revised Aristotelianism, while maintaining its focus on prescriptive assessment of public discourse grounded in descriptively based understandings.81 Burke sought to provide an account of human motives—literally what moves human beings—by attending carefully to the structures of language as embodied.82 As noted in chapter 1, he argued that the fundamental structure or “grammar” of human motives could be found in a pentad evident in drama: agents, do acts, for purposes, in scenes, utilizing agencies.83

Importantly for present purposes, Burke argued that there were characteristic ways in which humans arranged these grammatical elements into dramas. Focusing on Hitler, he identified the portrayal of scapegoats and unified, sacralized voices against those scapegoats as one of these powerful scripts.84 Although Burke did not explicitly make this argument, attending to the dynamics of contests for group leadership partially explains why angry public rhetorics tend toward such absolute dramatic forms. The absolute represents the maximum in intensity, so a rhetor who uses a modified, modest version will be exceeded in emotional intensity by the rhetor who can present the most intense version, which is the absolute version. America is not just good, it is (or should be) the best! The acceleration of absolutism through competition among rhetors does not operate solely at the level of the would-be leader’s search for strategies for self-promotion; it Page 88 →also operates in the collective action of the peoples who take up a rhetoric. Peoples in the thrall of absolutist rhetorics will on average be more motivated than people engaged with lower intensity rhetorics. The tendency of competition to drive public rhetorics in this direction seems to arise from a synergy between the appraisal cues, the structuring tendencies of language, and the cognitive biases of anger. If anger involves a template that presents binaries in terms of good and evil agents, and if anger predispositionally calls to mind hostile actions, then angry rhetoric will tend toward absolutized portraits of evil and an extremity of hostility. Angry rhetorics in competition with each other are thus prone to trade in the most extreme versions of language’s structural tendencies, necessarily turning a “rival” into an “enemy.”85 These synergistic dynamics would be less present in calm, sad, or compassionate rhetorics. Compassionate templates, for example, involve a partial fusing of we and they in an empathic identification, and “helping” is inherently a partial rather than total solution, so the emotion of compassion may feature internal dynamics that dampen rather than escalate the dynamics of binary absolutism.86 It seems that perhaps the match between anger’s appraisal cues and key structuring tendencies of language is distinctive in producing the maximal heightening of what one might consider the worst aspects of those cues and linguistic structures, especially given the dynamics of leadership competitions and with embodied tendencies of narrowing of cognition, stereotyping, and hostility. Observing how symbolic predilections tended to lead humans to violence and excess, Burke urged a “comic corrective.”87 In contrast to endless grammatical vigilance (Alfred Korzybski’s response to language’s structural capacities), or unceasing deconstruction or debunking critique (arguably Derridean and Foucauldian approaches), Burke saw these tendencies of language as part and parcel of the “symbol-using” animal’s mode of being. He indicated that, although humans could not separate ourselves from our dramatistic nature, we may have some choices among the dramas we will participate in or applaud and encourage. Instead of preferring tragic modes (which encourage dramas with plotlines that lead to death and purification by triumph or exclusion), Burke encouraged preferences for a comic or tragic-comic mode. The comic frame recognizes that all humans are subject to the same forces, and therefore the same excesses and follies. Our salvation lies not in destroying each other, but in pointing up our shared warts as shared. We may laugh at them together, but whether or Page 89 →not such dramas are funny, the focus on shared susceptibilities invites us to live together rather than to undertake the dramatic “cult of the kill.” Such a comic perspective is compatible with the restorative mode of an anger script directed at redressing normative violations in an in-group context. Chapter 7 will provide an example of how the comic perspective can modify performances of anger in an international context. For now, Burke’s understanding of rhetoric as the motivating deployment of predispositional patterns rooted in a pentadic grammar of language use warrants an expansion in Aristotle’s template.88 Aristotle’s template identified the “act” of the dramatic formula for anger in at least some detail (“in the right manner, at the right moment, and for the right length of time”). But the other elements are excessively compressed. In its attention to agent, Aristotle’s account is one-sided. The enemy is the antagonist, but as Burke’s analysis of Hitler’s rhetoric highlighted, a dramatic perspective encourages attention also to a protagonist. Similarly, Aristotle’s dictum “for the right reason” compresses the particular injury experienced (the harm) and the social norm that has been violated, that is, the “purpose.” If anger arises from violations of more norms than solely status hierarchies,89 then this compression obfuscates key elements of the script. A fuller dramatistic template should lead one to expect the appraisal cues and action tendencies of anger to

congeal in public rhetoric according to this script: (1) they (an absolutely antagonistic agent, identified as a long-standing enemy),90 (2) acted to cause serious harm (serious in terms of the normative claim being made),91 (3) to us (the model protagonist), (4) in violation of crucial social norms (or morals), (5) so we must attack!92 A scenic condition is the assumption that “we” have the power to act, but my analysis of war speeches across cultures has indicated that this may not be explicitly articulated, which could be accounted for by the activation of optimistic biases that discourage explicit attention to unfavorable conditions. The dramatistic template also would predict agencies to be important, but my analysis of war discourse also indicated that this may be given shockingly short shrift. It appears that the rote and optimistic Page 90 →cognitive tendencies of anger can impede sustained attention to the scene and agency of motivational grammars (which is perhaps why Aristotle’s observationally based description did not address these components). The treatment of protagonists, however, is distinctively important on the international scene, because in rallying their publics, leaders are simultaneously offering a specific vision of how their publics should be constituted. Existing scholarship provides a foundation for attending to this dimension of the template for angry rhetorics. The Constitution of the Protagonists for Public Anger Wayne Booth showed that the “real” author of a work is different from the implied author that is constructed by the statements that appear in the work.93 Edwin Black pointed out that in addition to this “first persona,” the rhetor constructs a “second persona”: the implied auditors, or the character that the audience is presumed or invited to inhabit.94 Phillip Wander then noted that these first two projections of agents tend to obscure a “third persona”—people who are affected by the rhetoric but excluded from the public or from the text.95 This line of research, combined with analyses of the sex, gender, and sexuality implied in various strains of public discourse, especially nationalistic rhetorics, has produced the development of nuanced and sophisticated understandings of the ways in which public rhetorics tend to offer a portrait of precisely sculpted visions of the “we” (protagonists) that is pitted in public rhetorics against an equally precisely depicted “them.”96 Such portraits must have some resonance with the experiences of their audiences, but they do not merely describe an objective, stable, or even preexistent set of identities or affiliations.97 One additional move is needed to judge the motivational structures that rhetors construct for the international arena. The portrait of the we that a rhetoric offers to a nation is typically not a homogenous blob, even after accounting for the exclusions that might be made with regard to race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and so forth. Public rhetors addressing large-scale collectivities, especially at the level of the nation-state, depict a structure of relations among those who identify as part of the we or second persona. This structure can be specified in many ways throughout a text, but it can be illustrated by attending Page 91 →to the salutation with which a national leader begins a speech. Box 3.1 provides examples of salutations from three speeches in three differently organized nation-states. All three leaders appeal to a national “we,” but each portrays a different set of internal relationships. Joseph Stalin speaks “on behalf of” a party that is explicitly separated from a highly variegated set of categories of labor identities (including fighting roles) who make up a “you” that is addressed as the national audience.98 In stark contrast, Hitler addresses members of a nation-state as a unity, but one that is immediately specified as racially purified and gender differentiated. President Bush relates himself as an equal to his “fellow citizens,” but places them last, after a list of constitutionally specified role players and the category of clergy. These three salutations project different visions of which groupings have primacy in the state and what their primacy among and relationship to each other should be. Box 3.1. Salutations from Leaders of Differently Structured Polities

Josef Stalin, Red Square on November 7, 1941 “Comrades, Red Army and Red Navy men, commanders and political instructors, men and women workers, men and women collective farmers, intellectuals, brothers and sisters in the enemy rear who have temporarily fallen under the yoke of the German brigands, our glorious men and women guerrillas who are disrupting the rear of the German invaders! On behalf of the Soviet Government and our Bolshevik Party I greet you and congratulate you on the 24th anniversary of the great October Socialist Revolution.” Adolf Hitler, Wilhelmshaven on April 1, 1939 “GERMANS! Volksgenossen und Volksgenossinnen!” President George Bush, Second Inaugural “Vice President Cheney, Mr. Chief Justice, President Carter, President Bush, President Clinton, Members of the United States Congress, reverend clergy, distinguished guests, fellow citizens: On this day, prescribed by law and marked by ceremony, we celebrate the durable wisdom of our Constitution and recall the deep commitments that unite our country. I am grateful for the honor of this hourВ .В .В .” These, of course, are only three of many possible configurations for structuring national affiliation that rhetors might propose. In each case, Page 92 →the speaker further develops these relationships as the speech proceeds, through choices of categories, pronouns, and various forms of overt specification of relationships among actors within the nation-state. Most angry public discourse in global societies will project such a structure of relationships among the “we” in some way, because social action at this scale requires different actions by different members of the polity, and this differentiation is directly involved in an ongoing contest among different would-be leaders of that polity. Attending to a rhetoric’s envisioned structure among people and groups is therefore crucially important when assessing the options global leaders offer at the international level. This expanded template describing angry collective discourse coheres isolated features of such discourse that have often been noticed because of their intensity and faults. Some of the key features of the template have formed the basis for previous comparative studies emphasizing the similarities in the discourses of Osama bin Laden and President Bush.99 Such analyses, however, have been driven either by the critic’s sense of what is most striking in these discourses or in some cases by isolated theoretical strands. The application of a systematic template for anger enables attention to a fuller range of dimensions of comparison and to the interactions among components. I close this chapter with observations about how one might use and simultaneously modify and refine such templates.

Methodological Notes The complexity of public emotion obviously implies that a variety of approaches to analysis of emotion in public discourse would be fruitful. Several scholars have explored dimensions of the methodological difficulties involved in emotion studies.100 The goals and constraints applied in this study are set by the theoretical structure articulated above and by a presumed value of forwarding nonviolent relations among the inhabitants of our globe. The theoretical structure suggests that both symbolic and other body-based inputs should be accounted for. This accounting will have particular features because global scale symbolic impacts are only loosely measurable and because the causal effects of symbolic outputs arise in substantial part through their level of success in circulating specific ranges of options. First, symbolic effects will be assessed primarily at the symbolic level, Page 93 →rather than in terms of other orders of being. Although symbolic causation involves other biological and physical phenomena, and to assess such components directly would surely be interesting, parsimonious tools for such assessments are usually not available, and the symbolic dimensions are materially real and important in themselves. Thus, the focus of analysis is on appraisal cues and action tendencies, with attention to subjective components primarily as scenic indicators or as indicators of the success or lack of success of the circulation of a particular rhetoric.

Second, the level of burden of proof for an analysis is not that it has provided an absolutely certain body of evidence. Certainty is unattainable in single analyses of most kinds, and evidently so in global level social phenomena. The appropriate standard is that the preponderance of the evidence has been accounted for and is consonant with the conclusion.101 This leaves conclusions open to further proof and contestation, but meeting this level of burden of proof indicates that the claim has been well supported enough to enter the arena of knowledge claims and even to ground action until better cases are made. Third, because symbolic visions are inherently “ought” statements about action, and they typically exert causal force through the creation and circulation of specific options, the assessment of such options is an integral component of the analysis. Nonetheless, if there are gaps between emotional inputs and the ideologies that are circulated as particular versions of these emotions, then such assessments should not be constituted merely by applause for ideologies with which one agrees or censure of those with which one disagrees. The theoretical perspective in chapter 1 does not deny that all discourse (including academic discourse) is ideological, but it does deny that all discourse is only ideological. Theories about emotion that are grounded in empirical observations—what some observers have described as “the world talking back to humans”—have the power to change our ideologies or to enhance our ability to share and enact them, if we can listen (which we can never do perfectly, but we can do more rather than less). Given the negative potentials of humans as a species wielding nuclear-scale weapons on partially primate-based motivational systems, I suggest the only hope for a decent future for most beings on this planet, however slim that hope might be, is that humans develop greater capacity to listen to what those messages say about our human proclivities. Practically and descriptively speaking, the methodology employed here involved assembly of a template for anger by a recursive working back Page 94 →and forth among academic literatures about emotion and the discourses of bin Laden, Bush, and Sontag (among others not described here). The “case” can therefore not “prove” the template. Instead, the case illustrates (1) that the template accords well with public emotion in this key international episode, (2) that examining discourse in accord with this template illuminates aspects of the success and failure of these discourses and ties them to something additional to the specific ideologies and other material resources available to the leaders, (3) points up particular aspects of angry rhetoric that should gain our attention for assessment in most instances of the circulation of public anger, (4) provides a model for further development of understandings of other collective emotions and differently situated cases in international discourses, and (5) points to inherent problems that must be addressed directly if international discourse is to provide the normative adjudication of resources that anger has historically served to achieve among humans. With regard to specific elements of this method of analysis of public emotion, the focal evidence is the specific symbols that circulated (in this case, almost exclusively words, though pictures, vocal sounds, and other nonverbal elements could be included). Symbols are a kind of “thing” that can be intersubjectively observed, pointed to, and assessed in a reasonably rigorous fashion. To point to intersubjective observations, however, requires subjective assessments of the emotional qualities of any given symbolic configuration. This may in some cases involve disagreement between the researcher and any reader of that research. When disagreement occurs, the “tie” goes to the available evidence about the subjective experiences of the focal audiences. Readers should not appeal to the incompleteness of such evidence, as such appeals merely substitute the reader’s own emotions for those of the available evidence about other people’s reactions. (Though readers being human, such humbleness is probably not to be presumed.) The involvement of subjective elements in these assessments is not a reason for discounting this kind of study. Audience research has shown repeatedly that the same kind of subjective assessment is involved in ideological analyses (and by implication it is involved in any laboratory study that utilizes discourse as an independent or dependent variable). Specifically, audience based research has well established that what ideological critics see in discourses is often (almost in every case where this has been examined) not consonant with what audience members see in discourses, or at least not as variegated.102 Such subjective elements in ideological studies Page 95 →go unrecognized because (1) ideological criticism has become familiar as a form, and (2) the review process means that scholars form themselves into homogeneous communities with shared ideologies. Where subjective responses are consonant they pass these off as acceptable (covert “truths”); those with which they disagree

remain uncirculated and so differences are unacknowledged. The subjective elements in ideological criticism do not delegitimate the value of ideological criticism, to the extent that the goal of the criticism is understood to be the identification of specific options opened and circulated by the discourse (and by implication those not so opened).103 I believe that ideological studies in general would be more powerful and of more relevance to broader audiences if they grappled with the results of audience studies, and so I explicitly include the analogical component of the subjective emotional experience of audiences in my own emotion studies, but this is not because there is a difference in requirements or qualities for studies of emotion as opposed to ideological studies. In both cases, one is dealing with the nature of an empirical phenomenon—symbols—whose effects occur through the mechanism of subjective consciousnesses. Methodologically, one in practice necessarily relies on some resource of subjective consciousness in both kinds of study. There are, of course, “machine” approaches to emotion that seek to assess the circulation of emotion (and ideology) in what appears to be a fashion that is independent of individual consciousness. Such approaches assemble “emotion dictionaries” that assign particular words to particular emotions. Methodologically, machines then count the number of words in each emotion category, and one may use those counts to make claims about how much a given emotion circulates or appears in a particular discourse. Some of these studies are quite informative about aspects of public emotion.104 However, they do not actually eschew the subjective experience involved in emotion. They merely assume that the subjective experience is the same for everyone (a problematic assumption), and defend that assumption by reference to some kind of comparison to other approaches to emotion, which merely displaces the subjective component to some less obvious location. Additionally, such approaches are also not yet sufficiently flexible and sophisticated to deal with multicultural discourses. Consequently, while in some cases I offer word counts, and I always rely on noncounted senses of the quantitative frequency of particular terms, I have not deployed word-counting algorithms about emotion. At this stage Page 96 →of this exploratory research, the assessments of the reader and of myself seem more subtle and therefore reliable. Although subjective bases are inevitable, intersubjective scrutiny can be improved by making the bases of one’s observations and assessments overt. Using a template is advantageous in that regard because it directs assessment to particular questions, and the development of the template provides the theoretical grounding for raising some questions as opposed to others. The template for angry public rhetoric draws one’s attention both to individual components of the anger script and to the interactions among those components. Separating harms from normative warrants and then observing the way those two elements pull on each other provides grounds for assessment—and for urging concrete alternatives—in all three of the case studies presented in chapters 4 through 6. Attending to the constitution of the “protagonist” who is to be rallied to act—and how the other demands of the narrative warp the relationships projected for the protagonist community—also forms a key grounds of assessment in the three cases. I would not have observed either of those dynamics without the template. The procedure described above can be formalized in the stepwise fashion summarized in table 3.1.

Summary This chapter has suggested that, once issues of emphasis and battles for disciplinary primacy are stripped away, there is substantial consonance among many researchers in widely different fields about the character of public anger. It seems to me surprising that the symbolic template for assessing the performances of anger that can be gleaned from extending and combining insights from Aristotle, Burke, persona studies, nationalism studies, and identity studies aligns in substantive ways with the nonsymbolic sources of anger. The publicly oriented template features attention to an antagonist, which matches the appraisal at the individual level focusing on an “other” as a causal agent and the approach tendency for redress. Similarly, the template’s attention to a claim of a norm violation aligns at the individual level with the appraisal of holding another “responsible” (in most researchers’ views) and in violation of a norm. The symbolic template, however, draws attention to facets not evident in other research, or only implicitly so. The dramatistic template encourages attention not only

to the antagonist but Page 97 →also to the character of the protagonist. Additionally, by explicitly separating injury and norm, it avoids taking for granted either dimension of these crucial elements of a rhetors’ claim that we should be angry. Equally, however, the psychological and social analyses make important contributions. The psychological research indicates that leaders and followers aroused to anger will be induced by anger’s rote cognitive tendencies to fall back on old categories to depict their protagonist and antagonist, and they will be resistant to seeing the world in fresh ways. Combined with anger’s encouragement of excessive optimism, this may lead to nationalist proclivities to repudiate the other, ever more so. Table 3.1. Steps for Studying Public Emotion 1: Inquirers—critics, analysts, or activists—react to a situation or set of discourse that seems important. They introspect and talk to others about how the discourse makes them feel, and why. 2: The inquirer researches the available literature on the specific relevant emotion(s) in the broadly culturalist, psychological, physiological, and social functionalist domains, with special attention to the overlaps and divergences regarding appraisal conditions and action tendencies. The inquirer assembles a portrait of the boundaries and qualities of the emotion in their own and at least some other culture that incorporates the overlaps in these different literatures. Where differences exist, the inquirer assesses why the differences exist, discarding claims that arise from “only our area of specialty matters” orientations. The inquirer harmonizes the overlaps and makes choices among any conflicting evidence that are explicitly explained. 3: The inquirer researches the subjective experiences that are responses to the emotion script among pertinent target audiences, alongside other contextual factors. These may include news sources, polls, individual memoirs, public statements, or the tracing of memes from a source. 3 or 4: The inquirer explores the alignments of the portrait of the emotion with the particular responses and historical condition. 4 or 5: If the inquirer is interested in the general phenomenon as much as the particular one, the inquirer might explore similar cases to assess the breadth of fit of the model. 4 or 5: Recursive re-assessment of one’s own emotional response and its alignment with that of others, with the model, and with potential historical impacts. 6 or so: Judgments or proposals. The inquirer provides an ethical, aesthetic, or other judgment of the texts or actions related to the texts in line with the model and other explicitly articulated criteria. Or, in light of the limitations of the texts and its actions, the inquirer proposes alternatives. Although this chapter is incomplete in spite of its length, the literatures reviewed and integrated here supply one with a wealth of resources for moving forward, with depth and breadth, to assess how the angry rhetorics of key global figures might have embodied these proclivities, and what kind of global affiliations they thereby offer us.

Page 98 → Page 99 →

Chapter 4 Osama bin Laden’s Righteous Anger On May 2, 2011, agents of the United States killed Osama bin Laden, the leader most responsible for the fiery and dramatic deaths of about 3,000 people from 62 nations in the attacks of September 11, 2001. Even after a decade of studied pursuit of bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, most Americans continued to interpret bin Laden’s statements and actions through the assumption that the goals of bin Laden and al-Qaeda were primarily to harm the United States.1 While this chapter will not be supportive of Osama bin Laden’s projected vision for global, regional, or local relations, to understand why bin Laden’s rhetoric took the forms it did and had the effects it had, one must analyze those messages from a broader perspective than its threat to the United States. The United States was a roadblock to bin Laden’s ambitions, but stopping the superpower’s actions in the Middle East was subsidiary to the ultimate goal he projected, and citizens of the United States were certainly not the primary audience for most of his statements in the period from 1979 to 2002, on which this analysis focuses. There are now over 4,000 academic articles published about Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden’s life, assassination, motivations, effectiveness, and methods have all received substantial attention. Much of the academic literature that has grown up about 9/11 has been focused on the issues of civil liberties in the United States, the stereotyping of Muslims, and the extension of the response into a war on Iraq.2 Only a dozen or so articles have provided close textual analyses of bin Laden’s discourse, especially in the period before and immediately after 9/11/2001.3 Several of these have criticized bin Laden for his extensive use of demonizing rhetoric, and some Page 100 →have pointed to the similarity in that regard between the al-Qaeda leader and President Bush. The template for angry public rhetorics assembled in the previous chapter suggests additional foci. A rhetorical analysis of this sort requires first establishing who bin Laden’s target audiences were, and then identifying his goals. The first two sections of the chapter therefore briefly overview bin Laden’s pursuit of a singular goal—the establishment of a pious caliphate—across a shifting series of audiences determined by his evolving strategic targets, which ranged from the Soviet Union to the United States to the leadership of most of the Islamic states. The bulk of the chapter then attends to the contours through which bin Laden’s statements fulfill the appraisal cues for anger in ways well aligned with those goals and partially resonant for his audiences. He demarcated all his diverse adversaries as putatively ancient enemies in accord with the absolutist norm of a militarized religious piety. He buttressed the appeal of this normative structure by depicting personal status gains for those best situated to use violence as their tool for such gains. Concomitantly, his depiction of harms was designed not to justify self-defense, but rather to motivate permanent violent action. These angry appraisals cohered with the action tendency of violent attack. As the chapter proceeds, I note the ways in which these angersupporting appraisals are related to the rote and optimistic cognitive tendencies of anger. The chapter assesses the effectiveness of those efforts by using the available, though imperfect, evidence of subjective responses provided by polls and public statements by leaders. That evidence indicates that the lineaments of anger in bin Laden’s rhetoric produced a call that was suited to achieving a variable range of specific effects with its target audiences, although the internal conflicts set up by the dynamics of anger also constrained these effects in particular and consequential ways. I base this analysis on all of the public discourse of bin Laden’s that had been translated into English at the time of this writing that was available, a corpus of over 200 pages of public statements.4 Out of respect for concerns that someone living in the United States might misrepresent bin Laden’s rhetoric in an Orientalist fashion, the chapter provides not only extensive quotation but also tables of additional examples. Issues of translation are of concern, and Sarah al-Mohannadi and Obaida al-Mommani and Eddie Ronowicz have illustrated the bias in the translations by Western media.5 To the extent possible, I have mitigated these tendencies by comparing the translations offered by different experts (for the major documents at least Page 101 →two

translations are typically available),6 and by attending to the available literature on linguistic sensitivity. This literature offers a variety of prescriptions, including the encouragement to avoid phrases such as “Islamic terrorism” and to construct alternatives such as “neo-Kharijism” to bin Laden’s preferred terms (which sought to reduce Islam’s diversity to a homogeneity).7 However, these experts do not themselves agree on the appropriateness of many terms, including jihadi.8 Such disagreements highlight the problem with defining writing “with sensitivity” about people (whether from one’s own culture or from others) as a project of searching for perfect words. As chapter 1 suggested, language creates for us the mirage that we should quest for “the perfect,” but such quests make us, as Kenneth Burke noted, “rotten with perfection.”9 In a cosmopolitan or post-cosmopolitan project, the best one can do may be simply to acknowledge one’s limited knowledge, and demonstrate that one is trying to listen well. I believe the analysis will show that I have at least listened very intently. The conclusions to which I come (which include that bin Laden and I cannot occupy the same political spaces) are based on my own political preferences and geopolitical location, and I present that not as the position that everyone should arrive at, but simply as the resource I can contribute to a hopefully global multi-logue. It has become a truism that we can’t speak “for” each other, but I believe we should continue to strive to speak “with” each other instead of “at” each other. I respect that different readers will react to the relationship between my preferences and those of bin Laden’s with their own preferences. Because of the concerns about the issue of bin Laden’s representativeness of Islam in the literature and in the political arena, I emphasize that I do not assume that bin Laden’s rhetoric represents anyone else’s beliefs (that is, he does not represent any homogeneous group such as Muslims, Arabs, Saudis, males, or the global oppressed). I situate his intended audiences as people to whom he seeks to appeal, not as his people. That is, of course, to take a position at odds from what bin Laden claims. An analyst must step back from the position of the rhetoric that is being analyzed at least temporarily, though she or he may conclude in the end either that the discourse should be endorsed or not.

Osama bin Laden’s Audiences Some scholars have treated bin Laden’s actions and statements as though they were addressed to the government of the United States, others as Page 102 →though to the American public, others to the Islamic world, or subsets thereof.10 All of these analyses are partially correct, because the global context in which bin Laden engaged was complex and his influence extended across at least four decades and many nations. Nonetheless, across these spatiotemporal contexts, some key features of history, the economics of globalization, and religion remained salient. With regard to history, what Europeans and Americans have tended to call “the Middle East” was artificially divided after World Wars I and II into nations, and the religiously based nation-state of Israel was created. While the direct colonial control of the Middle Eastern nations had been replaced by largely autonomous governments, those governments were subject both to the residues of that history and to outside influence designed to maintain access to resources in the region for the United States and Europe (including Russia and the Soviet Union).11 This history contributed to patterns of economic disparities both within and outside the Middle Eastern cultures and states. The dynamics of global capitalism, though described favorably or unfavorably and accorded different mechanisms depending on one’s political views, are generally understood to have contributed to a well of discontent in the region.12 On one view, this is because of the inherent inequalities of capitalism. Other views introduce additional elements, including the uneven distribution of oil wealth across the region, the existence of and propping up of monarchies and totalitarian governments by outside governments, rapid population growth, hypermasculinity, and racism.13 The significance of culture and religion have been more contested,14 but there is no doubt that the religions and cultures of the region, while far from homogeneous, are distinguishable from many other parts of the world. Rather than advocating for the singular importance of any one of these factors, a rhetorical approach sees all substantial contextual factors (whether “real” or merely “perceived”) as resources that a rhetor might seek to draw upon and reconfigure. The audiences for whom bin Laden formulated these resources changed through time as he changed the

geopolitical locations on which he focused his militaristic efforts. From about 1979 to 1989 he was involved in supporting the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. While targeting the Soviet Union as his enemy, his primary audience was potential funders and fighters from the Arab world.15 When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the “Crusader-Jewish” alliance began to enter his rhetoric as his named opponent, both because of ongoing violence in Page 103 →Palestine and because of conflict with the United States over control of Afghanistan. Although bin Laden definitively announced his support of the Taliban, the presence of the dominantly Arabian-derived forces that he had led in the autonomy-sensitive nation the Taliban now governed was becoming increasingly awkward. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden sought to resolve the tensions in Afghanistan by finding a new potential battleground. He offered his fighters to the Saudi government as a tool to repulse the Iraqi invasion and its implicit threat to Saudi Arabia. Instead, however, the Saudi government chose to ally with the United States and to permit what bin Laden characterized as the non-Islamic United States to use Islamic/Saudi land as a base for pushing Iraq out of Kuwait. There is little debate regarding bin Laden’s reaction. The rejection infuriated him, and he immediately refocused his efforts against the United States and increasingly against the Saudi Arabian government. The fervor and consistency of his attack on the government of his homeland led to his expulsion only a year later and to the eventual revocation of his citizenship. As bin Laden elaborated a case against the Saudi government based on its interaction with the United States and other “infidels,” and as he sought to reach funders and fighters from multiple states, his rhetoric increasingly implicated other Islamic governments. His specification of a Taliban-like government as the only acceptable model of governance for Islamic people implied the generalization of his conflict with Saudi Arabia to most Arabic and non-Arabic Islamic states. If even the strictly controlled Saudi state was not properly adherent to bin Laden’s version of Islam, then virtually all other Islamic-led states (not merely Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, or Yemen) were even more blameworthy. Simultaneously, as bin Laden turned back from Afghanistan toward the Middle East, Israel became a more intense focus of opposition as well. In accord with these shifts in his focus of attack, bin Laden’s target audience included more and less narrow groups of Islamic clerics, potential fighters, Saudi, Arabic, or Islamist publics, Western states, and the Soviet Union. As the bulk of this chapter will detail, he addressed Islamic clerics and potential fighters or donors through “in-group” focused anger, trying to rally them to his vision and cause, while also hoping to gain broad support or acquiescence from the majority of people of Islamic faith. Although he also addressed the United States, the USSR, and Europe (at various times) through threat-based rhetorics, these audiences are secondary Page 104 →to his ultimate goals. Though his rhetoric often included attacks on Israel, he did not seem to address Israelis—achieving his goal as he articulated it required the elimination of Israel, so presumably he had little interest in appealing to them to change their behavior. The tendency of most Americans to read themselves as bin Laden’s primary audience arises from the understandable focus on those addresses that bin Laden directed to Americans (in the aftermath of 9/11, but also a few key interviews in US media before then). Such a focus, however, tends to make bin Laden appear irrational. The rhetoric bin Laden directed toward the United States becomes more comprehensible if one understands those appeals as localized tactics, not a final goal. If the United States, Europe, and all non-Muslim Israelis had entirely vacated Saudi Arabia, or even some vast extent of Arabia and its environs, this would have provided a necessary precondition to bin Laden’s aims, but it would not have achieved the objectives bin Laden’s rhetoric projected, just as when the USSR absented itself from Afghanistan, his goal was not achieved. While scholarly efforts that debate the superstructural conditions that “caused” bin Laden’s rhetoric have value, the premise here is that it is also valuable to attend to the way in which bin Laden’s anger projected the future of global relationships and the ways in which the dynamics of shared anger shaped those projections.16 Bin Laden’s rhetoric, regardless of its target of attack or target audience, was consistently directed at a single goal.

Osama bin Laden’s Goal

Across time, Osama bin Laden was clear and consistent that his goal was to establish a territorially broad panIslamic “pious caliphate.”17 In his first major interview on Al Jazeera, he said, “Our aim is to liberate the land of Islam from infidelity and to apply God’s shari’ah until we meet with Him and gain his pleasure.”18 That message was repeated in an interview on June 10, 1999: “We seek to instigate the nation to get up and liberate its land, to fight for the sake of God, and to make the Islamic law the highest law, and the word of God the highest word of all.”19 The liberation he referred to was sometimes broad—the elimination of any non-Islamic persons or influence in lands he claimed for Islam—and often quite specific, such as the control of specific holy places. This statement, quoted in a newspaper in Urdu in 1998, encompassed both: Page 105 →[T]his sacred struggle should continue until Bait-ul-Muqaddas [Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem] and other holy places of Muslims are liberated from the occupation of non-Muslims and the Islamic Shariat [law] is enforced on the land of God. Obviously, for the enforcement of Shariat, it is essential for all Muslims that they should establish an Islamic system on the basis of teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.20 Bin Laden’s definition of “liberation” as the establishment of Shariat forestalls reading his relatively frequent use of that word in terms of Western concepts, either of individual freedom or of the material well-being of the masses. Indeed, bin Laden explicitly juxtaposed his vision of the theocratic state to democracy when a reporter asked him, “What is the difference between the pious caliphate and the present democratic system? ” He answered: They are totally different from each other. Consultation is very important in Islam but the consultation can be held only to appoint a pious and wise person as ruler. Under the present democratic system such people become rulers who are not pious. The parliaments make such laws which are unIslamic.В .В .В . This democracy has not given anything to the Muslims.21 In Islamic traditions, tribal leaders and distinguished religious figures have often been the primary legitimate consultants on governance issues, and bin Laden’s rhetoric further narrowed that scope to a concrete model when he endorsed the Taliban government and offered fealty to its leader.22 In a 1998 public letter praising Pakistan’s support of the Taliban against the US-led international effort to negotiate a different governmental system in conflict-torn Afghanistan, bin Laden called for Muslims around the world to come to support the Taliban’s fight. He told them that “they are also obligated by their religion to support the Taleban [sic] government in Afghanistan, because by enforcing Shariat in Afghanistan Taleban have established the system of God on God’s land. They are busy in Jihad to rid the Muslims of Afghanistan from the tyranny of nonMuslims.”23 Below, the discussion of social norms and projected affiliations will attend more closely to the specific character of this religious caliphate, but for now it is sufficient to highlight that the goal projected by bin Laden’s Page 106 →rhetoric is not merely to repel interlopers, but rather to establish a particular kind of political arrangement. As the next section will document, in order to achieve that objective, bin Laden’s enemies shifted repeatedly. This shifting cast of antagonists reveals that bin Laden’s rhetoric should not be understood solely as a threatbased anger directed at out-groups. Instead, the threat he could pose for out-groups served as a dramatic demonstration of power, which aided his rallying cry for in-groups to turn against their existing religious and political leaders and to rally around him to create his version of the ideal Islamic state.

Osama bin Laden’s Appraisal Cues for Anger Given the theoretical description of the social functions of anger, one would expect bin Laden’s rallying rhetoric to depict enemies, who have harmed one’s people, in violation of moral norms. Bin Laden’s rhetoric can readily be shown to fulfill these expectations, but in a manner that manifests and promotes in its target audience the cognitive tendency to apply deeply familiar scripts regardless of their fit, an optimistic risk-accepting bias, the absolutizing linguistic proclivities of angry rhetoric, and the coordination among these different appraisal components that is required to produce a consistent narrative that might enable the rhetoric to resonate with its audiences.

Osama bin Laden’s Enemies Angry public rhetorics identify blame-worthy agents—those who have violated norms (for rhetorics directed wholly within a group) or those who threaten the in-group (for rallying an in-group to threaten an out-group). As has been recognized by several observers of international conflict, where anger is directed against an out-group, this generally entails intense portraits of the out-group as an enemy, which may include a variety of metaphors that dehumanize them or characterize them as embodying absolute malevolence.24 Several observers have noted the prominence of the latter strategy in bin Laden’s rhetoric.25 Such observations, however, do not account theoretically for the unity of bin Laden’s very different enemies through time and space. Focusing on the dynamics of Page 107 →anger, however, leads to the expectation that bin Laden’s effort to rally fighters from approximately the same group of people across time on the same normative basis would reinforce cognitive tendencies toward stereotyping, such that all of his enemies—regardless of their particular features—would be represented in the same narrow frame. Indeed, regardless of the substantial differences among the Soviet Union, Israel, the United States, and the Arab Muslim governments, across several decades bin Laden depicts them all as the same, as absolute enemies to Islam, that is, as infidels. Communists Are Atheists Bin Laden’s first militant activism was directed against the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. It is not surprising that he therefore was anticommunist. But he sustained his opposition to socialism and communism throughout his career, and across national contexts, by portraying the values and social structures of socialism and communism as fundamentally at odds with the militaristic Islamic basis for affiliation that he urged. For example, he insisted that communism and Islam are inherently disjoint sets in 1994, decrying “the leaders of apostasy, the Communist Socialists in Yemen” and declaring that “[i]t is ludicrous to suggest that Communists are Muslims whose blood should be spared. Since when were they Muslims?”26 Again in 1996 bin Laden identified his active agitation against the Communist Party in Yemen as a source of tension between himself and the Saudi government when he replied to the editor of an Islamic newspaper published in London, we fought the communist Socialist Party before the union and the union plan, because they are atheist, communist, and oppressive socialists. They oppressed the people, destroyed everything, attacked God’s religion, and sanctified their party, saying nothing is louder than the party’s voice. I delivered a number of lectures in mosques inciting Muslims to fight them [the Socialists], which prompted the Saudi Government to prevent me from delivering any speeches. But with God’s grace, the youths continued the jihad, and we continued to cooperate with them against the heads of atheism in the Socialist Party.27 Page 108 →Bin Laden maintained this view after the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, after the conflict in Yemen was no longer a primary tactical focus, and after he had adopted the United States as his primary enemy. In 2003, although he recognized a temporary convergence of interests, he proclaimed that “Socialists are infidels wherever they are, whether they are in Baghdad or Aden.”28 The original rationale for fighting the Soviet Union was based on a perceived affiliation with Muslims and against the atheistic communists. When the battle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was won, he turned his primary energies to another set of enemies. Crusaders and All Other Religions After dispensing with the threat from the atheistic superpower, bin Laden next turned to face what he portrayed as the “Jewish-Crusader alliance.” As table 4.1 indicates, as early as 1994—more than six years before PresidentPage 110 → Bush’s widely criticized uses of the term “crusader”—bin Laden was already repeatedly and insistently using that history-drenched word as a descriptor for his enemies.29 The United States had not existed at the time of the Crusades, but bin Laden described the United States variously as a leader of the Crusaders, as a partner or dupe of Israel in a Crusade, as allied with or part of the “Western” Crusader forces, and occasionally he submerged the United States within the term “international” Crusaders. Table 4.1. Osama Bin Laden’s Use of “Crusader” as the Label for Enemies

Date

Sourcea

Direct Quotation (emphasis added)

1994 Public Letter 29 to bin Baz, the aggressive Crusader-Jewish alliance December MW 7 1995

c. 1995 /1996

“The Invasion of Arabia,” Public Letter the invasion by the American and western Crusader forces to Dissenting Clerics, MW 16

1996 “Ladenese the people of Islam realized that they were the fundamental target of the hostility of the 23 August Epistle,” Judeo-Crusader alliance MW 25 “Ladenese 23 August Epistle,” the presence of the Jewish-crusade alliance in the region FBIS 21 Interview with вЂAbd27 suffering the calamities of murder, disposession, and plunder at the hands of the al-Bari November crusaders вЂAtwan, FBIS 35 1997 Channel 4 Television 20 Network the bombing of Riyadh and Al-Khubar were a clear indication for the crusading forces February (London), FBIS 37 Channel 4 Television 20 Network this war is a new crusade led by America against the Islamic nations February (London), FBIS 38 3 March

Al-Islah (London), FBIS 39

the US crusading occupation

Page 109 →1998 Al-Quds al16 ’Arabi the international Christian crusade is rushing madly against our country Sudan February (London), FBIS 56 “World 23 Islamic Front, Judeo-Crusader alliance February ” MW 60

“World 23 Islamic Front, Crusader occupation February ” MW 60 Al-Jazeera we have formed with a large number of our brothers, the “Global Islamic Front for December Interview, Jihad against Jews and Crusaders” MW 69 Al-Jazeera December Interview, MW 73

one side is the global Crusader alliance

Al-Jazeera December Interview, MW 79

fighting Jews and Crusaders

December

December

December

December

Al-Jazeera Interview, MW 80 Al-Jazeera Interview, MW 84 Al-Jazeera Interview, MW 84 Al-Jazeera Interview, MW 89

the greatest external enemy, the Crusader-Jewish alliance

Crusader Western media

the devils and demons among mankind, and especially the Crusaders

while the greatest unbelief, the Crusader-American alliance

1999 Time 11 January Interview, FBIS 87 Doha Qatar al-Jazirah Space 10 June Channel Television, FBIS 120 Doha Qatar al-Jazirah Space 10 June Channel Television, FBIS 128 Doha Qatar al-Jazirah Space 10 June Channel Television, FBIS 133 2001

Afghanistan, having raised the banner of Islam, has become a target for the crusaderJewish alliance

the Crusader-Jewish alliance being led by the United States and Israel

It was not a force being pushed in from abroad, as the Crusaders in the western media try to depict them

the external archenemy, the Crusader-Jewish alliance

Statement 24 aired on alSeptember Jazeera, MW 101 Statement 24 aired on alSeptember Jazeera, MW 101 Statement 24 aired on alSeptember Jazeera, MW 101 21 October

American Crusader forces and their allies against the Muslim lands

the neo-Crusader-Jewish campaign led by Bush, the biggest Crusader, under the banner of the cross

prevent the American Crusader forces from conquering Pakistan and Afghanistan

Jihad Online News the flag of Islam to fight the world Crusade Network, FBIS 247

aShort

title of original as assigned by accessed source. FBIS = Foreign Bureau Information Service; MW = Lawrence, Messages to the World, followed by page number. Duplication is possible if different global news outlets cite a common interview. Given a theory that sees the circulation of angry rhetoric as maximally energized by stereotypes—which do not require novel information processing—bin Laden’s use of the term “Crusaders” is not bizarre, but rather readily explicable. It vividly casts contemporary lines of affiliation within a historic script explicitly based on an older and familiar battle for territory between Christians and Muslims. More surprisingly, perhaps, the force of this stereotype was absolute enough to include most other Muslim leaders, and any Muslims who did not repudiate them. Other Muslims Are Infidels, Too Because the intense anger necessary to rally fighters to sacrifice their lives was most fully supported by an absolutist vision, Osama bin Laden’s rhetoric put him at odds with most leaders of Middle Eastern Muslim nations. From 1990 to 2001, he articulated this opposition with increasing directness. For example, in a speech published on June 22, 2000, he called these government leaders “stooges” and appealed to the “shining” hearts of believers to stand against the leaders of existing Islamist nations.30 In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on 9/11, after most leaders of Muslim nations had expressed public support for the United States, and by implication, public opposition to bin Laden, he declared: This is a war which, like previous wars, is reviving the Crusades. Richard the Lionheart, Barbarossa from Germany, and Louis from France—the case is similar today, when they all immediately went forward the day Bush lifted the cross. The Crusader nations went forward. The Crusader nations went forward. What is the concern of the Arab nations in this Crusaders’ War? .В .В .В They have accepted the rule of the cross.31 Page 111 →Similarly, he savaged a document circulated by Saudi clerics urging international dialogue and understanding. He castigated the Saudi clerics’ statements (denying them status as legitimate interpreters of Islam) by interleaving statements from the Koran or hadiths, simultaneously cementing the assumption that there is no significant time-space between the 7th to 9th century and the present era.32 His organizational strategy employed rotation back and forth between the two eras, which also contributed substantially to the historical compression. Although that textual strategy can be sensed only by reading the full document, the treatment of existence as though it inhabited a sacred time in which earthly temporality is irrelevant can be illustrated by the following section. It may be confusing at first for many of my expected readers, because in it bin Laden is declaring the Prophet’s support for eternal offensive war and repudiating peace and understanding:

As for this atmosphere of shared understandings, [proposed by the Saudi clerics as well as their American correspondents] what evidence is there for Muslims to strive for this? What did the Prophet, the Companions after him, and the righteous forebears do? Did they wage jihad against the infidels, attacking them all over the earth, in order to place them under the suzerainty of Islam in great humility and submission? Or did they send messages to discover “shared understandings” between themselves and the infidels in order that they may reach an understanding whereby universal peace, security, and natural relations would spread—in such a satanic manner as this? The sharia provides a true and just path, securing Muslims, and providing peace to the world. If Muslims wished it thus, all they need do is follow it.33 Because his vision was fueled by angry absolutism, bin Laden’s interpretations of the authoritative documents of Islam, and those of the religious scholars with whom he affiliated, were on some key points in conflict with the interpretations offered by other, more prominent, Islamic authorities. Where other emotions might have encouraged framing these disagreements in different ways, anger was predisposed toward the claim that most existing Islamic governments were puppets of infidels. Victory against the United States was desirable because it was a key component in facilitating Page 112 →bin Laden’s victory in that internal war, as he proclaimed in the interview with Hamid Mir in 1997: “Russia was the head of the communist bloc. With the disintegration of Russia, communism withered away in the Eastern Europe. Similarly[,] if the United States is beheaded, the Arab kingdoms will wither away.”34 And Everywhere Else This portrayal of present conflicts as part of a permanent opposition fixed by and through a sacralized past integrally cohered with bin Laden’s claims to the right to control vast territories around the globe. Because of the compression of the historical timeline into a sacred totality, he included in the Muslim “nation” any territory in which Muslims had ever ruled. Thus, as early as 1994 he urged his fellow Muslims to support a course of action in which “the banner of jihad is raised up high to restore to our umma its pride and honor, and in which the banner of God’s unity is raised once again over every stolen Islamic land, from Palestine to alAndalus [much of Spain] and other Islamic lands that were lost because of the betrayals of rulers and the feebleness of Muslims.”35 Ethnic, religious, and nation-state borders have changed repeatedly through time and do not map neatly to concentrations of persons who have accepted the Islamic faith, particular versions of the Islamic faith, or any other faith or cultural identity, so bin Laden’s commitment to lines of affiliation formed around religious devotion was not readily describable in terms of the boundaries of prior Islamic political entities such as the caliphate or the Ottoman Empire. Instead, he variously described the imagined, but far-flung, past/future empire using two strategies, either with broad but vague passing references or by providing a broad but incomplete enumeration of regions and nations. The former strategy is illustrated by his statement in the previously cited 1996 interview: “a nation whose territory begins from the east of the earth to the west [min mashriq al-ard ila al-maghrib] and whose lands are linked together.”36 The vastness of the territory included in bin Laden’s vision becomes more evident when he employs the second strategy, specific enumeration. One of his most important statements, sometimes called the “Ladenese Epistle”(1996), provided one of the longest lists, because bin Laden Page 113 →used the document to call Muslims everywhere to fight for the restoration/expansion of the Islamic nation around the globe by modeling the appropriate passions: “The massacres that have taken place in Tajikistan, Burma, Kashmir, Assam, the Philippines, Fatani, Ogaden, Somalia, Eritrea, Chechnya, and Bosnia-Herzegovina send shivers down our spines and stir up our passions.”37 At other times, he explicitly hailed Muslims in Indonesia and China.38 That bin Laden’s absolutism was anger-encouraged, not merely a result of the dictates of the theology or ideology of the Koran, is made explicit at points where his portrait of enemies is not immediately consistent with the dictates of that source. Most notably, the Koran identified “idolators” rather than “peoples of the book” (Christians and Jews) as the primary enemies. Bin Laden’s anger rearranged the Koran’s hierarchy of infidels. This becomes evident at those places where his rhetoric works to manage this tension

between his ideological (or theological) enemies and the historically varying nature of the targets of his anger. He does so by foregrounding the immediacy of the threat to his religious group. As the quotation below indicates, this tactical management maintains most of the world in enemy status, under their shared stereotype as infidel: Whenever the idolaters are in a weaker position to harm Islam or Muslims than the Christians, then it is incumbent to fight the Christians, while postponing the battle against the idolaters, despite the fact that they are described as being a more formidable enemy [by the Koran]. And every rational individual today is aware that Crusading America, backed by Britain, Germany, France, Canada, and Australia, poses a greater danger and greater animosity to the Muslims than do Japan, both Koreas, China, and others.39 The sacred history through which bin Laden framed global relationships thus called his followers to restore a global empire, which perforce identified as enemies all non-Muslim states and their members. This vast depiction was consonant with anger—the absolutism of anger encourages such a vast sweep, and the successful circulation of anger requires an optimism that could be stoked by such a vision of a global reach of allies and a historical vision of success. This absolutism not only framed almost everyone as an infidel/enemy but also made the relationship of enemy itself absolute. Page 114 → Absolutely Enemies Bin Laden not only cast the world as enemy, he proscribed any contact between the Islamic nation and nonMuslim states. When asked if he had considered taking refuge in a European state, he replied, “I would rather die than live in any European state. Some Arab governments are circulating such rumors in a bid to distort [my] reputation. Muslims are not supposed to be adjacent to non-Muslim societies.”40 Similarly, in Al Jazeera’s rebroadcast of bin Laden’s lengthy interview with Jamal Isma’il in 1998, bin Laden gave an extended reply to the question of his goals and “what is the message you want to address to the Arab World and Islamic World in general?” Part of what bin Laden emphasized was the impossibility for Muslims to maintain the requisite purity if they interacted with non-Muslims: Don’t they read the Koran, or do they read it, but not ponder it? God says: “Ye believers take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors. They are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them. Verily God guideth not a people unjust” [Holy Koran]. He is of them, meaning that he becomes infidel like them.41 Bin Laden thus denied any possible friendly or respectful affiliation between his versions of Muslims and other peoples (although he sometimes mooted that separation when he implied that all others should live under a global Muslim “suzerainty”). Again, the absolutism is both striking and consonant with the circulation of anger. Bin Laden’s portrait of highly diverse enemies in terms of a single stereotype, executed with maximal absoluteness, illustrates the way in which the cognitive tendencies of anger may shape and sustain the circulation of a particular component of a dramatistic script through time. It also illustrates the interaction of the emotional intensification with the binary foundation of language. The second component of the dramatistic script—the normative basis for the call to action—similarly reflects absolutism, but also illustrates the ways in which the demand for dramatistic coherence may warp the norms to which the rhetoric appeals. Page 115 → By What Social Norms or Moral Principles? Consonant with his depiction of his enemies, the moral basis that bin Laden adduced for condemning his enemies and rallying his people was religious. However, chapter 3 predicts that normative appeals only motivate action when accompanied by personal interests. In bin Laden’s case the appeals to personal interest were

particularly important because the demands he put on followers were enormous. The most prominent of these interest appeals were status appeals framed as honor. Religious Righteousness The dominance of religious righteousness as the normative basis of Osama bin Laden’s rhetoric is widely familiar. That religiosity is illustrated in table 4.2, which provides a sampling of translations of his use of highly intense religious emotion words, such as “piety” and “zeal,” and examples of absolutist commitment that forward feelings of zealous piety. Bin Laden’s theology, however, was given a particular cast by his anger, which remade that theology to be as thoroughgoing as imaginable. He not only depicted the relationship with God as absolute but also portrayed the condition of permanent violent conflict as normative. Many religions prioritize the relationship with a god figure as the primary agent with whom any human must affiliate. As is typical of public discourse in many Islamic cultures, bin Laden usually began a text with a substantial statement of subservience to God.42 This was not “civic piety” on the model dominant throughout the political history of the United States; it did not confine respect for an abstract God to the background of political affairs.43 On the contrary, one’s affiliation with God was the focal affiliation in every context, public and personal. The pervasiveness of the presence of God in the here and now and in political action was verbally constituted not only by initial invocations of God, but by the repetition of these invocations throughout the text and by their ritual presence at the conclusion of most texts, which were generally sustained at some length. Such openings, closings, and repetitive references to God are typical of some genres of public rhetoric among officials in theocratic and quasi-theocratic Islamic states (as well as would-be Christian theocrats).44 Osama bin Laden nonetheless stretched the familiar for his broad audience in order to motivate specific and intense action. The basic structure of Islam as he depicted it was more absolutist and hence emotionally intense than even most of the rhetorics in the genres of discourse common to his Islamic audience, because he defined the afterlife not merely as more significant than earthly life (which is true of absolutist strands in many religious traditions), but as demanding immediate sacrifice of this life and everything in it as a permanent core definition of the religion. For example, in a public letter overtly addressed to religious scholars, he stated, “And life, to which the Qur’an, God, and His Messenger are calling you, should be a life of self-respect in this world and victory in the next—a life of jjhad for the sake of God Almighty.”45 Again, in March 1997, in an interview with Peter Arnett in Jalalabad, he said, “getting killed in the cause of Allah is a great honor wished for by our Prophet.В .В .В . We love this kind of death for God’s cause as much as you like to live.”46 Although the rhetorics of many religions indicate that one’s actions in this life will be judged as sinful, good, or indifferent and those actions will thus determine one’s fate in a next life, it is a select few religious sects that actively prioritize violent death on behalf of an earthly war for God.47 Page 116 → Table 4.2. Osama bin Laden Statements Illustrating Religious Zeal Date 1994 29 December 29 December 1995 c. 1995 /1996

Sourcea

Direct Quotation (emphasis added)

Public Letter to bin the zealous Islamic efforts to liberate Palestine Baz, MW 10 Public Letter to bin a scholar like you who is obliged to show zeal for our religious community Baz, MW 10 “The Invasion And life, to which the Qur’an, God, and His Messenger are calling you, of Arabia,” MW should be a life of self-respect in this world and victory in the next 18

1996 Interview in cooperate in righteousness and piety, and to raise awareness of the fact that the November Nida’ul Islam, highest priority, after faith, is to repel the invading enemy, which corrupts MW 42 religion 1997 March

Interview with Peter Arnett, getting killed in the cause of God is a great honor wished for by our Prophet “Transcript”

1998 23 “World Islamic wherever you find the polytheists, kill them, seize them, besiege them, ambush February Front,” MW 59 them Almighty God also says: “O ye who believe, what is the matter with you, that 23 “World Islamic when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of God, ye cling so heavily to the earth! February Front,” FBIS 58 .В .В .” Al-Quds alvigorously entrenched in the holy land of al-Hijaz, spreading apostasy among 14 May ’Arabi, FBIS young people 64 Abu Shiraz Article Life is only in the control of God and no human being can do anything about 26 May /Interview, FBIS it.В .В .В . My life and death are in the hands of God. 114 Al-Jazeera December gradually the original zeal dissipates Interview, MW 92 Al-Jazeera December this life, this world, is an illusory pleasure Interview, MW 93 1999 11 Time Interview, Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty.В В .В .В . It January FBIS 85 would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons 11 Time Magazine Whoever denies even a minor tenet of our religion commits the gravest sin in January Interview, FBIS 85 Islam Page 117 →2000 “Supporters of This is the purpose of life, so we don’t waiver to the right side or the left 22 June Shariah” side, but our only goal is straight forward; shahaada dying for Allah, fighting for Website, FBIS 138 Allah, dying for Allah to make his word вЂla ilaha illallah’ the highest. aShort

title of original as assigned by accessed source. FBIS = Foreign Bureau Information Service, MW = Lawrence, Messages to the World, followed by page number. Duplication is possible if different global news outlets cite a common interview. Western accounts favorable to bin Laden’s actions tend to present his efforts as situational, a response to Western imperialism. But bin Laden did not portray jihad as a temporary or situational exigence. He depicted the state of war as permanent—an essential feature of the religion itself. Violence was a constitutive element of his version of Islam and therefore permanent, not situational. For example, on September 24, 2001, he faxed a statement to Al Jazeera in which he castigated the (Islamic) Pakistani government’s support of the United States, urging that “[t]his battle can Page 118 →be seen as merely one of the battles of eternal Islam.”48 Three years earlier he had articulated this militaristic view in appealing to Wahhabi Muslim clerics to challenge the Saudi government’s decision to ally with the United States against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. In that public letter he wrote, “jihad will go on until the Day of Judgment.”49 Or, again, in an interview that appeared in Esquire in 1999, he portrayed violent conflict as integral to the Koranic frame: “We are sure of our victory against the Americans and the Jews as promised by the Prophet: Judgment day shall not

come until the Muslim fights the Jew, where the Jew will hide behind trees and stones, and the tree and the stone will speak and say, `Muslim, behind me is a Jew. Come and kill him.’”50 The religious zeal that bin Laden sought to circulate thus took a relatively rare and distinctive form. It was not the intense piety of a penitent who whips his own back or wears a hair shirt. It was not a call to live one’s daily life morally, or to set aside a part of each day or week for religious duty, or to set aside all of daily life, temporarily. It was a call to live permanently as a participant in what Juan Carlos AntГєnez and Ioannis Tellidis have argued should be called “neo-Kharijism,” but which more familiarly might be labeled as “militaristic Islam.”51 The righteous demands of bin Laden’s absolutist zeal could only be fulfilled by risking one’s life or giving up one’s goods to participate in a violent battle on earth that was depicted as lasting as long as earthly existence itself. The term “militant Islam” is sometimes used to try to capture this distinctive feature, but “militant” has become watered down as a metaphor that simply means “more committed” than usual, and that is easily misinterpreted as more devout or moral than others. Highly devout rhetorics have strong appeal for religious followers (even when the followers cannot live up to them), because being highly religious is implicit in the very idea of being religious (as Kenneth Burke’s injunction that religion is the “wordiest of words” explicates).52 Anger is the perfection of that absolutism through attack on others, whereas other emotions (mortification) constitute its perfection in relationship to the self. Although anger and the structure of linguistic resources do not independently and exhaustively account for bin Laden’s rhetorical choices, his particular formulation of Islam as eternal militarism took maximum rhetorical advantages of the proclivities of anger. Such absolutism tends to demand a heavy burden from its audience; in bin Laden’s rhetoric, it required the immediate sacrifice of every earthly Page 119 →thing for a relationship with God to be realized only in an afterlife. Even devout Muslims could be expected to experience hesitance at aligning with such a normative structure. To provide earthly incentives, bin Laden sweetened this moral code with a normative code of honor that offered immediate earthly rewards. Honor Status appeals framed particularly in terms of honor and shame pervade bin Laden’s interviews, statements, and doctrinal writings. As table 4.3 shows, he urged his followers to avoid “humiliation” or being ridiculed, as in the “Ladenese Epistle,” when he claimed that “[h]umiliation can only be eliminated through bullets and the shedding of blood.”53 He enjoined and presumed “pride” and a sensitivity to “insult” or “affront,” as when he lamented those who “insulted the pride of our umma and sullied its honor.”54 He condemned “weakness” and “cowardice.” These kinds of appeals are common in what have been called “honor cultures,” where they form the rationale for the regular display of angry countenance. Most human cultures have some degree of the features of the “honor” culture (it is particularly strong in Aristotle’s culture and in the southeastern US culture in which I reside).55 One can find many examples of honor talk even among American presidential candidates. Such talk is most pervasive in cultures where males must constantly use force or threat of force to defend their interests against the potential for threats from others.56 Having spent much of his adult life moving on the edges of the law and sometimes in battle conditions, it would not be surprising if the norms of honor culture had come to be preeminent in bin Laden’s life. However, on the rhetorical stage the psychology of leaders is secondary to that of audiences, because if a leader’s psychology leads to a rhetoric that does not appeal to potentially influential audiences, then the would-be leader will not be effective enough to merit much critical attention. The pertinent question then is with whom this kind of status appeal would be resonant. The ominous corollary question is whether this kind of status appeal pervades the Islamic religion and so would have resonated intensely with Muslims per se. Many religious rhetorics call for intense piety, but most of these do not accompany these

appeals with overt status Page 123 →appeals. Indeed, in many traditions, personal pride is a sin or that which must be transcended. Religious devotion is probably at least as likely to coexist with emotions of patience, withdrawal, and humbleness as it is to be paired with enjoinments to sensitivity against insult. There are grounds that indicate this holds true for at least the central document of Islam itself, the Koran. Page 120 → Table 4.3. Some Osama Bin Laden Sample Statements with Honor/Status Affects Date 1994 9 March 29 December 29 December 29 December 29 December 1995 c. 1995 /1996 c. 1995 /1996 c. 1995 /1996 c. 1995 /1996 c. 1995 /1996

Sourcea

Direct Quotation (emphasis added)

Al-Quds althe enemies of Islam want Muslims to remain weak and subservient Our work in ’Arabi, FBIS 1 Afghanistan, which caused some people to insult us Public Letter to bin insulted the pride of our umma and sullied its honor Baz, MW 7 Public Letter to bin cowardly Arab tyrants Baz, MW 9 Public Letter to bin in which the banner of jihad is raised up high to restore to our umma its pride and Baz, MW 14 honor Public Letter to bin betrayals of rulers and the feebleness of Muslims Baz, MW 14 “The Invasion of Arabia,” MW 15 “The Invasion of Arabia,” MW 15 “The Invasion of Arabia,” MW 18 “The Invasion of Arabia,” MW 19 “The Invasion of Arabia,” MW 18

the enemy invaded the land of our umma, violated her honor, shed her blood, and occupied her sanctuaries the feebleness and cowardice of many of its scholars in the face of its enemies and is there any torment—in the world, in the spirit, or the senses—worse for any believer than the humiliation and weakness that his umma is experiencing those who obey him will be proud and those who disobey him will be humbled if you have made a solemn pledge, but then follow cows’ tails and are happy with your lot and abandon the jihad, God decrees humiliation for you

1996 Independent (London), FBIS 12 “Ladenese 23 August Epistle,” FBIS 16 “Ladenese 23 August Epistle,” FBIS 17 “Ladenese 23 August Epistle,” FBIS 18 10 July

after it insulted and jailed the ulema 18 months ago, the Saudi regime lost its legitimacy the only response they got from the regime was rejection, disregard, and ridicule. The matter did not stop at the point of just humiliating them ignored the advice and ridiculed those who offered it

its signatories and sympathizers were humiliated, punished, and imprisoned

“Ladenese 23 August Epistle,” FBIS 19 “Ladenese 23 August Epistle,” FBIS 20

fighting in self-defense is the strongest way of warding off harm to honor and religion that presence is a provocation to the people and an affront to their religion, feelings, and dignity

“Ladenese 23 August Epistle,” FBIS 22

this claim reflects the scale of the crusaders’ and Jews’ spite toward Muslims and their children

“Ladenese 23 August Epistle,” FBIS 22

to protect the occupiers, which is the highest degree of humiliation, insult, and treason

Page 121 “Ladenese →23 Epistle,” FBIS August 25 “Ladenese 23 August Epistle,” FBIS 26 “Ladenese 23 August Epistle,” FBIS 26 Al-Quds al27 ’Arabi, FBIS November 29 Al-Quds al27 ’Arabi, FBIS November 31 Al-Quds al27 ’Arabi, FBIS November 33 Al-Quds al27 ’Arabi, FBIS November 36 Interview in November Nida’ul Islam, MW 37

God shamed you and you had to pull out. Your impotence and weakness were evident young men know that the humiliation inflicted on Muslims through the occupation of their holy sites humiliation can only be eliminated through bullets and the shedding of blood a whole people has been humiliated and persecuted. And the group that has been humiliated most is the Army an invincible [hasinah] land which enjoys security, pride, and immunity against the humiliation and subjugation allow one to breathe clear air unblemished with humiliation they said I can return to the Kingdom dignified and respected if I say through the media that the king is Muslim Americans’ crude and arrogant behaviour towards the Saudi army

1997 Interview with 18 March Hamid Mir, FBIS what has happened to the Muslim self-esteem? 46 Interview with Peter Arnett, March the spirit of power, dignity, and confidence has grown in our sons and brothers “Transcript” np Interview with Peter Arnett, March I have refused to live this submissive life “Transcript” np

March

March

March

March

March

March

Interview with Peter Arnett, this collapse made the US more haughty and arrogant “Transcript” np Interview with Peter Arnett, they have wiped disgrace and submissiveness off the forehead of their nation “Transcript” np Interview with Peter Arnett, came here with all arrogance to steal our oil and disgrace us “Transcript” np Interview with Peter Arnett, the US government went [to Somalia] with great pride “Transcript” np Interview with Peter Arnett, we are living in dignity and honor for which we thank God, subjected to the “Transcript” disgrace of not worshipping God np Interview with Peter Arnett, the American troops who came here with their military uniform walking proudly “Transcript” up and down our land np

Page 122 →1998 23 February 23 February

“World Islamic Front,” MW 59 “World Islamic Front,” MW 60 Al-Quds al23 March вЂArabi, FBIS 59 Al-Jazeera December Interview, MW 71 Al-Jazeera December Interview, MW 74 December December December December December 1999

Al-Jazeera Interview, MW 74 Al-Jazeera Interview, MW 74 Al-Jazeera Interview, MW 89 Al-Jazeera Interview, MW 90 Al-Jazeera Interview, MW 90

[God] condemns those who disobey my orders to servility and humiliation humiliating its people the shameful aspects American arrogance in its arrogance, it treats people as if they were slaves. We pray to God that He will humble it they have removed the shame from the forehead of our umma the pride of the believer defend the greatest house in the world, the Noble KaвЂba, and to be honored in doing so so perhaps the virility of the rulers in this region has been stolen, and they think people are women God Almighty, in his Unity, put men into servitude on this earth, the greatest servitude

those who risked their lives to earn the pleasure of God are real men. They managed to rid the Islamic nation of disgrace. We hold them in the highest esteem “Interview,” your situation with Muslims in Palestine is shameful—if there is any shame left February Miller in Esquire in America 2000 Time Interview, 11 January FBIS 84

22 June

Supporters of Shariah Website, FBIS 139

21 Doha Al-Jazeera, September FBIS 144

this disgrace never occurred before in the (Islamic) peninsula He went to ward off the injustice, paganism, and disgrace

2001 9 April 21 October

International Conference of there is no pride or victory except in jihad for the sake of God Deobandis, MW 97 Jihad Online News remove the injustice, humiliation, and submissiveness Network, FBIS 242

aShort

title of original as assigned by accessed source. FBIS = Foreign Bureau Information Service, MW = Lawrence, Messages to the World, followed by page number. Duplication is possible if different global news outlets cite a common interview. Although I make no claim to be a scholar of the Koran, and therefore can provide only evidence readily available to anyone on this question, it is a simple matter to search the Koran for the same emotional terms bin Laden used, with the caveat that translations are reasonably robust. Such a search using the Online Book Initiative indicates a relative scarcity in the Islamic holy book of the corpus of “honor” terms identified in table 4.3.57 Humiliation or humiliate occurs only three times, cowardice once, and insult not at all. Pride appears only eight times, and always in the negative, as in deprecation for being “big with pride.” The word glory occurs almost sixty times, but in only one case does it refer to anything other than glory to Allah. Similarly, the more than three dozen uses of forms of the word honor almost uniformly refer to honoring Allah.58 Whether or not you believe bin Laden otherwise has the “correct” interpretation of Islam, his prominent offer of personal glory or personal honor does not seem to be mandated by this fundamental Islamic authority.59 If the translations are accurate (more on that below), one could not suggest that this rhetoric of honor would appeal to most Muslims merely due to their familiarity with this religious resource. One can find in the al-Qaeda leader’s rhetoric explicit statements identifying a narrower target audience for whom status appeals might be particularly motivating. Bin Laden explicitly identified young men as a specific target audience that would be most likely to become the militaristic fighters for his caliphate. For example, in the December 1998 interview in Al Jazeera, he explained that from the age of 25 and above people enter into family commitments, they go out and have working commitments.В .В .В . And if we’re really honest we find that this section, between the age of 15 to 25, is when people are able to wage jihad. In Afghanistan most of the mujahidin are of this age.В .В .В . You go forward ten years and gradually the original zeal dissipates.60 Page 124 →Reflecting his disdain for earthly life, he portrayed his likely recruits as “the young men who have not been weighed down by the filth of the world.”61 Bin Laden emphasized this pattern in the Esquire interview when explaining the Arab fighters’ involvement in Afghanistan: “During the days of jihad, thousands of young men who were well-off financially left the Arabian Peninsula and other areas and joined the fighting. Hundreds of them were killed in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya.”62 His observation accords with the common agreement (at least extending back to Aristotle)

that young men are more susceptible to idealistic extremes of all sorts. They are also, however, a group typically attracted to the opportunity to gain status and especially status as couched in an honor culture’s vocabularies of pride and shame.63 To summarize, the moral and normative bases on which bin Laden founded his rhetorical appeal had potential strengths and limitations for his various audiences. One would have expected many Muslims to have been attracted by the foregrounding of intense religious zeal, but the totalization of that relationship to the exclusion of any action in earthly life other than a permanent, explicitly violent jihad would have impeded that resonance (as the quotations above by bin Laden indicate he recognized). The incorporation of status appeals based in honor was likely to have buttressed that potentially overwhelming moral demand to an effective degree especially for the explicitly targeted relatively young, male subset of that broader audience. This fissure between two of his major in-group audiences had additional unintended consequences. It produced an intensely hierarchical vision of the lines of affiliation among the Islamic people that bin Laden projected for his pious caliphate. Bin Laden’s Construction of the In-Group Bin Laden offered those who would rally to his vision a distinctive self-depiction as Muslims. As the indictment of the ulema (religious authorities) quoted above indicated, he repudiated the legitimacy of almost all existing voices of Islam. He did not, however, overtly assert that he alone was the proper interpreter of Islam. To do so would have usurped the Prophet’s role, especially absent a historically justifiable imitation of the process of coming to be a caliph. Given his dependence on the good will of the Taliban, to do so would also have been pragmatically inadvisable. Instead, Page 125 →whenever bin Laden specified what behaviors were required to make one a faithful Muslim, he offered two interdependent accounts: he insisted that the answers were selfevident from the Koran and that a hierarchical chain of warrior-imams would enforce what counted as selfevident. Addressing conflicts among different Muslim groups around the world, bin Laden called for unity, saying that “[d]ifferences among the Muslims will be removed through their belief in one God and one Book.”64 This answer does not offer guidance with regard to specific behaviors. Those answers were to be dictated by an authoritative hierarchical chain to which complete obeisance would be owed. The apex of the chain was God (Allah), who was linked to the Prophet (Muhammad), and through the Koran to the ulema and then to the devout Muslim.65 This is a common chain in Islamic traditions, and analogous to some other religions. The al-Qaeda leader’s rhetoric included two distinctive elements in that chain of affiliations. First, he emphasized the status of the warrior as equivalent to the religious authorities, and second, he portrayed the relationships as slave-like (ownership, utter obeisance). Osama bin Laden portrayed the warrior as equivalent in status to the ulema by representing Muhammad as both ulema and warrior. The Prophet’s status as “the Messenger” is a shared and high-profile tenet of Islam. Emphasizing his status as warrior is a choice with greater variance. That choice serves anger well, given the proclivity of anger to foreground actions associated with attack or even violence. Thus, bin Laden emphasized the role of the Prophet as a warrior when he quoted a hadith purporting to report one of the Messenger’s statements: I have been sent in the final hours with the sword, so that none is worshipped but Allah alone, partnerless. My provision has been provided under the shadow of my spear, and humiliation and contempt is upon whoever opposes my command.66 Defining Muhammad as a warrior enabled the generalization of the high standing of the Prophet to all warriors. In 1988, for example, he stated in an interview, reported by Abu Shiraz, that “God has regarded Jihad as the most sacred act. A Mujahid is the second person dear to God after the Holy Prophet.”67 In the set of affiliations Osama bin Laden offered, warriors thus shared the elevated status of the ulema. Their functions might be separate, and so the religious warrior was expected to accept the truths Page 126 →pronounced by the (specified/in-group) religious leaders, but bin Laden blurred those lines, at least with regard to his own standing.68

The second distinctive feature of bin Laden’s projected relationships among Muslims was his portrait of the hierarchical chain as slave-like; it was to govern every aspect of life, absolutely. He employed a term for “slave” to describe this relationship as one of pervasive power. His first address after the attacks, on October 7, 2001, began with a devout genuflection to God, which included the ritualistic opening sentence, which the BBC translated as “I witness that there is no God but God and Mohammed is His slave and Prophet.”69 The inclusion of the term “slave” marks a fissure in translation practices that requires some attention. Al-Mohannadi contrasts the BBC translation, which she argues is more faithful to the Islamic tradition, with that of the CNN version, which was reproduced in a variety of publications. This assistant professor of translation in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Qatar wrote: In the BBC’s version, the familiar Islamic testimony is rendered correctly—“I witness that there is no God but God and Mohammed is His slave and Prophet”—whereas in the CNN version it is rendered wrongly—“I believe that there’s only one God. And I declare I believe there’s no prophet but Mohammed.”70 Al-Mohannadi’s conclusion that the CNN translation is substantially inferior rests on its omission of multiple elements, including “slave,” and on the doctrinal error the CNN translator makes by creating a statement implying that Islam rejects the validity of any prophets prior to Mohammed. Her analysis does not attend to the further issue of translation practices across time. Before the success of al-Qaeda and the later militarist Islamic movements often labeled “ISIS,” an English speaker would typically have heard the ritual opening translated as “Mohammed is his Prophet” or “Mohammed is his messenger and prophet,” which is more akin to the CNN than the BBC translation. During the late 20th century, the apparent acceptance of slavery in the Koran was widely treated in a fashion similar to the Christian Old Testament’s treatment of it—as a historical rather than sacred factor. Presumably because it was seen as an archaism, many translators and others appear to have avoided the potentially negative connotationsPage 127 → of “slavery” by omitting the word or substituting for it. Subsequent to this period, however, one finds the restoration of the term “slave” in translations, especially in internet sources recruiting to and defending Islam.71 I therefore see bin Laden (and leaders such as Ayman al-Zawahiri who were his associates and who shared this terminology) as having influenced translation preferences not only for the BBC but for a substantial group of Muslims as well (this may also be true of preferences in the original language). The BBC’s use of the English term “slavery” is not only defensible on the religious, culturalist, and ideological grounds noted by al-Mohannadi, but also because that term conveys bin Laden’s more general portrayal of the character of the hierarchical relationships among Muslims as slave-like. Bin Laden appears to have had such images ready to hand, as he occasionally quoted passages of the Koran referring to slavery.72 The use of terms associated with slavery connotes both hierarchy and absolute control of another in daily life. This view of human relationships, which embeds them in an all-controlling hierarchy, is consistent with the type of government instituted by the Taliban of that era, which bin Laden offered as a model. The term “slave” was not, however, the only or even most common term bin Laden used to assert the right to control the daily lives of all Muslims. He was able to gain the same sense of absolutism by using terms such as command and obey, as for example, when he proclaimed his allegiance to the Taliban commander of Afghanistan: “We are not here independently, but are here in a state that includes the Commander of the Faithful. We are committed under God’s law to obey him.”73 Using the term “slave” nonetheless provided a special combination of rhetorical and functional advantages. The term has a special rhetorical intensity precisely because, in the contemporary context, “slave” is presumed to have a strongly negative connotation. Reversing the valence therefore heightens the intensity: the reversal implies that the context is so special as to justify the reversal of the valence of the term, while maintaining its absolute quality. Functionally, the insistence on a relationship of absolute command and obedience between the warrior caste and the rest of the Islamic people heightened the status appeals for his target audience of fighters while disabling any basis for disagreement or dispute.

This normative focus on status and the militaristic vision of the projected Islamic people worked together to constrain bin Laden’s depiction of the harms to which his audience should respond with anger. Page 128 → What Harms? To present an injury as a harm that justifies anger requires calling upon a set of shared norms that have been violated in causing the injury.74 Because his vision presumed the centrality of violence to his social group’s core identity, bin Laden could not decry the enemy’s actions based on their use of violence per se. His alternative resource was to present the harm as the violation of the autonomy of those who should rightfully guide the religion. Thus, for example, in his October 2001 defense of the 9/11 attacks he argued, “Its sons are being killed, its blood is being shed, its holy places are being attacked, and it is not being ruled according to what God has decreed.”75 Throughout the statement, there is reference to bloodshed, but there is equal or greater emphasis on the autonomy of the religion. For the broad, relatively devout Islamic public, commitments to peaceful coexistence (whether within or outside the religion) and to relationships to other religious leaders posed sources of resistance to aligning according to bin Laden’s militaristic vision. To forward his preferred realignment, bin Laden presented the broad Islamic audience a stark choice between two sets of harms: they could join with the infidels, who were monstrous and permanent purveyors of global violence on behalf of no moral purpose, or they could turn against the infidels and the heretical Islamic leaders who supported them, and put their violence on the side of God, who had the power to ensure victory even against the most massive of earthly powers. Key evidence that bin Laden is offering this choice in his October statement, rather than an appeal based in selfdefense, lies in his reference to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan. That example illustrates the evil and violent nature of the United States; it does not establish that the United States has caused death and destruction to Muslims that must be responded to or defended against.76 Similarly, bin Laden’s most explicit reference to death caused by the United States in areas that are predominantly Islamic was the reference to deaths in Iraq, but bin Laden had volunteered his fighters to prosecute the war in Iraq prior to the Gulf War in 1990. The case of Iraq, if it is not merely hypocritical on bin Laden’s part, thus illustrates that the United States is also a killer. This takes away the possibility of repudiating bin Laden on the grounds that he had used violence. If the use of violence does not provide a criterion for choice, then the religious norms bin Laden defends provide the basis for affiliating with bin Laden rather than rejecting him. The need for bin Laden’s rhetoric to employ Page 129 →this relatively complex framing illustrates the way in which components of the dramatistic script for anger constrain each other, and particularly how the drive toward attack in such scripts can constrain and shape the way in which the harms are depicted. Urging Action The collective action to which bin Laden’s angry rhetoric sought to rally Muslims was violent attack: on the USSR, on various Middle Eastern and African governments, and on the United States and Israel. Attack is the predispositional action for anger, and violent attack was consonant with bin Laden’s broader ideology. However, the establishment of his normative vision required more than attack—it required actions to build a vast pan-national polity. Angry rhetorics do not cohere with the other types of action necessary to orienting people around such efforts, and bin Laden did not call for such actions. The disjunction between the attack orientation of anger and the ultimate goal was heightened because the optimism and absolutism of anger produced a grandiosity in the way in which that goal was envisioned. The vague and vast borders his anger projected for the future transnational Muslim state set a monumental and ill-sculpted task. The threat components of this angry rhetoric were equally vague. Americans often asked, puzzled, “What did bin Laden expect to achieve by these attacks?” The answer I’ve given above is that he expected to demonstrate his role as a powerful and successful leader of Muslims. But Americans received these attacks as

threat rhetoric, and their function in that regard was nonsensical in terms of our predispositional set of expectations for anger, because bin Laden did not have the perceived power to shape the targeted policies of the United States. Indeed, the most likely reaction to a painful and costly threat from a substantially weaker source is that the more powerful agent retaliates massively against the weaker source. Thus, rather than intimidating the United States into withdrawing its forces from around the world, the most predictable response of the United States would have been an increase in violent involvement in Islamic countries as a means to crush the threat.77 Nonetheless, bin Laden’s statements consistently conveyed a strong optimism that his alliance would be able to change the behavior of the United States. When asked why he thought he could defeat a superpower Page 130 →such as the United States, he gave two lines of response. First, he argued that Muslim guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan had demonstrated their ability to defeat a superpower when they defeated the Soviet Union. Second, he argued that the United States was psychologically weak and unable to maintain a long-term campaign, as evidenced by their reactions in Somalia, where a relatively small-scale response by local insurgents led the United States military/government to give up their mission. The first answer overstates the singular role of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Whether the second answer is correct depends on one’s view of how long is a “long term.” Certainly, the United States has remained involved in the Middle East beyond bin Laden’s own life span, and the interviewer’s feeling that the question needed to be asked indicates that, at the time, the potential for the success of bin Laden’s endeavor was hardly to be taken for granted. Therefore, the credibility of claims about the likely efficacy of violent attack for expelling the United States and Israel from the Middle East seems to have been fostered primarily by the optimistic tendencies of angry cognition.78

How Did Osama bin Laden’s Rhetoric Make Us Feel? As chapter 1 noted, taking subjective experience seriously presents difficulties in public rhetoric. To the extent that one’s interest is in the global effects of discourse, therefore, a reasonable alternative is to seek measures of effects that are objectified (or, more precisely, intersubjectified), such as poll data and public statements, but that are as closely aligned as possible with the subjective experiences upon which the analysis has focused. One can gain a sense of the trends of subjective responses to bin Laden’s rhetoric by triangulating popular demonstrations, statements by popular leaders, heads of state, and the limited Gallup and Pew polls taken in late 2001 and the summer of 2002. These data indicate that the threat dimension of bin Laden’s anger was received as such by its targets, but rather than discouraging the unwanted actions of the enemy, it intensified them. The evidence also suggests that the angry call to rally fighters and donors may have been somewhat successful, though it was probably constrained by the policing actions instigated by the United States and its allies. Finally, the contagious effects of bin Laden’s angry rhetoric directed at the majority of Muslims, urging them to reorganize themselves in support of a Page 131 →pan-Islamic caliphate, were resonant with regard to alignment against the United States and somewhat against leaders in the region, but less so with regard to acceptance of bin Laden’s envisioned polity. It should need no evidence beyond common experience to establish that the United States received bin Laden’s angry threat as such. It took the violence of the attacks on 9/11 to get the United States to take bin Laden’s threat seriously (though the intelligence establishment knew about the threats he was making well before that, and published interviews in the mainstream press of the United States had conveyed some dimensions of that threat). This does not mean that actions spoke louder than words. Bin Laden’s ability to organize the attack demonstrated the potency of his rhetoric, and the rhetoric explained the attacker’s intention. Nonverbal actions gain meanings through words, and words gain additional meanings through other actions. The United States did not respond to bin Laden’s angry call by being convinced that it should withdraw completely, or even militarily, from all nations with any substantial Islamic presence or history, though it did eventually withdraw from its major encampment in Saudi Arabia, which was important to bin Laden’s rhetorical history. Indeed, the US response to the threat was to expand its military presence and activity in the

Middle East, to pursue and kill bin Laden, and to dramatically curtail the operations of al-Qaeda through covert pursuit that was so intense that many critics have dubbed it ethically heinous. As is often the case when a less powerful agent employs angry rhetoric to threaten a more powerful agent, the recipient of the intended threat may recognize the threat, but respond not with the projected submission, but rather by exercising their greater power. Bin Laden’s angry optimism mis-described the risk to him and his associates of threatening the United States. This is to say that bin Laden’s rhetoric did not function either to evoke a favorable normative adjudication on a globalized level or to intimidate the United States into what he projected as better behavior. One might argue that provoking US expansion served bin Laden’s interests in using anger to rally his ingroup, at least in the short term, by making the demonic (or at least intrusive or imperialist) presence and intentions of the United States more evident to the peoples of the region. There is some evidence to support this rhetorical effect. By 2011, the US presence in Iraq was far and away the single most agreed upon policy item that people in multiple nations in the Mideast identified as a basis for their Page 132 →disapproval of the United States.79 However, to suggest that bin Laden’s rhetoric was successful because people came to agree that the further involvement of the United States in the Middle East that it stimulated was disapproved of by the majority of the people in the Middle East is the most limited of claims to success. The threat to leaders of the nation-states in the Middle East was similarly received and responded to with hostile counteraction, rather than by backing down, albeit with less uniform middle term effects. In the immediate aftermath of bin Laden’s successful attacks in the United States, the public statements by the leaders of the world’s nations did not side with bin Laden, but rather were overwhelmingly sympathetic to the United States.80 Even the leader of the usually prickly French, Jacques Chirac, made a televised statement in which he deprecated the “monstrous attacks, there is no other word for it.” He would later repeat Le Monde’s headline of the 11th that “Nous sommes tous AmГ©ricains.”81 Those responses seem predictable if one assumes that the world was aligned as “West” against the “(Middle) East.” Presuming such an alignment, an attack from a Middle Easterner on the West should be expected to prompt statements of support from “Western” nations. If that line were the governing one, however, one would not have expected Middle Eastern or Islamic nations to express sympathy or support for the United States. The support by these nation-states’ leaders was almost as strong and uniform as that offered by Europeans. One of the most empathetic statements came from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat: “We are completely shocked. It’s unbelievable. We completely condemn this very dangerous attack, and I convey my condolences to the American people, to the American president and to the American administration, not only in my name but on behalf of the Palestinian people.”82 The official leaders of Jordan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Iran, and Egypt all condemned the attacks as acts of terrorism. Moreover, these governments exhibited a remarkable degree of cooperation with the United States (the most vivid example is Pakistan’s acceptance of the Bush administration’s “requests” with regard to its invasion of Afghanistan). These official statements also were not countered by a wave of condemnations of the United States and support for bin Laden or al-Qaeda from Islamic religious authorities, as bin Laden’s rhetoric appeared hopefully to have projected. This is not to say that religious authorities and government officials all enthusiastically aligned with the United States.83 Some statements were Page 133 →notably tepid. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was restrained in tone and scope: “The very regretful and tragic incident reminds it once again of the gravity of terrorism. As a UN member the DPRK is opposed to all forms of terrorism and whatever support to it and this stance will remain unchanged.”84 Tellingly, however, only Saddam Hussein (Iraq) expressed enthusiastic public support for the attacks: “The American cowboys are reaping the fruit of their crimes against humanity.”85 These international responses align not with an often-touted (and derided) East-West divide, but rather in accord with the descriptions offered above of bin Laden’s rhetorics. Officials of existing Islamic governments and groups understood themselves as targeted or threatened by bin Laden’s anger and its potential contagious effects. Unlike the United States, however, the position of these leaders was more variably powerful, and therefore

more ultimately vulnerable to the angry rallying cry against them that bin Laden sought to propagate. It took a decade, but some of these governments would indeed fall to popular uprisings. Did bin Laden’s angry rhetoric have the contagious force to play a substantial role in these overthrows? To the extent that one is asking the narrow question of whether bin Laden’s rhetoric directly caused the overthrows that he projected, the answer is surely “no.” His death, the supplanting of al-Qaeda by other organizations such as the Islamic State (ISL or ISIS), and the subordination of the Taliban as a pan-Islamic center upon the US invasion of Afghanistan, all indicate the lack of direct success by the standards his rhetoric set (which required that his hierarchy of agents be the ones interpreting Shariat and dictating the pious caliphate). However, it is equally reasonable to take a somewhat broader view and ask whether bin Laden’s rhetoric had contagious effects in the sense that it spawned imitations that have been more strategically or pragmatically effective. To answer that broader question requires attending to the ways in which bin Laden’s rhetoric permeated or failed to permeate the fighters and populace of the Middle East. It is difficult to judge the success of bin Laden’s rhetoric in motivating financial contributions and militaristic fighters. It should count as some measure of success that throughout his career, bin Laden maintained a cadre of fiercely loyal devotees. His rhetoric was clearly one pivotal factor in motivating these people. The size of his network, however, ebbed and waned. How many young and wealthy people so attracted counts as success? One lesson that bin Laden has taught us all is that it doesn’t take many absolutist devotees to cause substantial Page 134 →disruption of the daily lives of the populace of even highly “developed” nations. Any judgment is further constrained by the serious impediment to bin Laden’s ability to attract such devotees after 9/11 due to the extensive efforts of the United States (and other nations) to shut down al-Qaeda. Recall that optimism is a pivot point to the contagion of anger. However attractive the other elements of bin Laden’s rhetoric might have been to those offered high status through the establishment of a medieval-styled caliphate, the success of the authorities in limiting (though not eliminating) the flow of funds and in jailing, torturing, and disappearing al-Qaeda leaders was a major dampener to that optimism for potential recruits. The widely touted emphasis on the strengths of “network” organizational structures for terrorism tends to emphasize the virtues of a “headless” structure that makes individuals less visible and more replaceable. Those analyses fail to take into account the ways in which human motivations are affected by shifts in the likelihood that one will need to be “replaced” if one participates as a node in the network. A qualified judgment thus seems in order. Bin Laden’s formulation of pious zeal, status, and hierarchy motivated many fighters, but as long as nation-states could daunt the optimistic assessments of those recruits with regard to their ability to actually occupy a position of status and hierarchy, the promises of religious piety were on their own insufficient to motivate large numbers of recruits to take on the earthly risks. Bolstering such an estimate is the stunning pulse of recruits that ISIS/ISL (i.e., the Islamic State led by led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) experienced when it demonstrated the ability to control territory and hence populations.86 The other key audience for the long-term effects of bin Laden’s call to angry reaffiliation was the larger group of Islamic peoples. Popular statements supporting the attacks were made by leaders of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad (Gaza).87 Popular celebrations or demonstrations against the United States of contested size occurred in Ramallah (West Bank), Palestine, and Lebanese refugee camps.88 Whatever their size, these events indicate that there were at least some people who were strongly predisposed to resonate with bin Laden’s rhetoric after 9/11. Crucially, these demonstrations were far from large enough to justify equating being “Muslim” with automatic or even strong support for the attacks. More telling, perhaps, were the ways in which public opinion worked to exculpate bin Laden, for example by refusing to believe that bin Laden was the architect of the 9/11 Page 135 →attacks, or endorsing his defiance of the United States while condemning his methods.89 Read together, the several reviews of the limited poll data available on this issue support the conclusion that there was wide variability depending on the country one inhabited and what were the most recent specific events (the chain of events, including the invasion of Iraq and attacks by various groups on local soil, shifted the midpoints in the polls).90 These data indicate the contours of a partial success of bin Laden’s rhetoric with the general

public. On the one hand, very few people endorsed such attacks. Only in Lebanon and the Ivory Coast did a majority of Muslim citizens affirm that suicide bombing was justifiable (asked only in the 2002 poll), whereas, at the other end of the distribution, only 13 percent of Turkish Muslim respondents agreed. A substantial 33 percent, but still a minority, of Pakistanis agreed.91 Though general, this evidence indicates that Muslims did not broadly align with bin Laden’s call for violent attack either on the United States or on their home governments. However, the evidence also indicates that a far more successful element of bin Laden’s rhetoric was his effort to realign the populace against the United States. The decline in the favorability rating of the United States from the 1999/2000 poll to the 2002 poll (JuneOctober) was from 52 percent to 30 percent in Turkey, from 23 percent to 10 percent in Pakistan, and from 75 percent to 61 percent in Indonesia (not all nations allowed the polls or all the questions on the polls).92 It seems clear that bin Laden’s rhetorical actions succeeded in realigning many Muslims against the United States. The reaction of Muslims around the world to bin Laden as a leader is more complex. On the one hand, there was substantial “confidence in” bin Laden expressed in polls in several nations.93 Nonetheless, as the analysis by Richard Gauvain reveals, this is best interpreted as a general endorsement for his personal qualities and willingness to serve as a symbol of resistance to the United States.94 There was, however, no general rush to join bin Laden’s jihad and to promote his pan-national Muslim state. Osama bin Laden’s angry rhetoric thus had an array of outcomes. It failed to offer an effective threat to the United States, but it succeeded to a limited extent at attracting a warrior caste. It did not lead the majority of Muslims to support his effort to establish his militaristic caliphate, but many increasingly rejected US leadership and at least some aspects of Page 136 →the US role in the region. These mixed findings may represent structural challenges for successful uses of anger to realign groups. To the extent that angry rhetoric is successful only when based on shared norms and a shared vision of who “we” should be, the use of an out-group threat to unify an in-group may be unstable if the normative basis for attacking the out-group is warped to produce an unacceptable relational basis for unifying the in-group.

Assessment from (One) Globally Oriented Perspective This chapter has shown the ways in which bin Laden’s public rhetoric flowed along the common troughs of public anger laid by the character of human biology, the structures of language, and the character of rhetorical competition for public leadership. This would-be leader of Muslims called them to fight enemies depicted through an absolutized binary drawn from a rote image—“infidels” all, including the hypocrite Muslim leaders who allied with them—who had inflicted harm, in a normative rather than merely physical way, through their insulting presence, on a projected we, aligned through a 9th century vision of a militarized and hierarchicalized Islam—thereby violating the ultimate shared social norm, the will of God (as the imam/warrior caste perceived Him). The analysis of the subjective data above concluded that bin Laden’s rhetoric had some substantial success, but that it fell far short of his goals. However, the project of illuminating where and how anger can go wrong for humans should not rest solely on the question of whether an angry rhetoric achieves its creator’s objectives.95 Precisely because the engagement of anger as one’s basis for collective motivation depends on normative grounds and predisposes one to specific kinds of rhetoric, a thorough analysis requires attending more generally to the kinds of options toward which angry rhetorics might drive us. Such a project is inherently an ethical one, and it therefore presupposes particular moral sentiments. I close this chapter with an ethical assessment that I have tried to root in a sensibility attending preferentially to the necessity and desirability of sharing the planet with seven billion other people, most of whom do not share my worldview. In the absence of a broadly contagious appeal for the hierarchical, militaristic, or medieval components of his vision of Islam, bin Laden’s Page 137 →effort to build new affiliations within his projected “in-group” turned to the attack on powerful out-groups. In the absence of agreement about how the Islamic community should be constituted, anger at the obviously nonobservant community could form a basis of shared identity. Attacks on

the USSR, Israel, the United States, and nationalist Islamic governments thus not only grounded the optimism necessary to the contagious efficacy of shared anger, they also provided a basis of affiliation by negation. This is a common and widely recognized tactic of leaders; if you can’t generate internal agreement about policy, values, or institutions, you can often generate affiliation through anger directed against a demonic agent. When that demon is internal, one calls the tactic scapegoating; when the demon is external, one calls it war.96 When one’s rhetoric is absolutely thoroughgoing, as bin Laden’s managed to be, a permanent and total war is required. What is not common among analyses that point to those trends is to accept that this rhetorical dynamic is itself a central causative factor of international conflict. After noting the tactic, analysts typically point to other factors (such as hypothetical “interests” or “nationalism”) as the true cause of the conflict, and they treat the rhetorical tactic as only a manifestation of the interests. But the mere existence of differing interests cannot—absent the mechanism of angry public rhetoric—produce or sustain violent attack. Logically, therefore, public rhetoric should be treated as a necessary causative factor in those violent conflicts. Whatever the contextual factors that helped it to flourish might have been, Osama bin Laden’s angry rhetoric could not serve as a functional social resource for redressing unjust conditions or differences in interests because it offered neither worthy visions of social affiliations nor generalizable social norms. The social affiliations promoted by his anger entailed absolute disjunction between the faithful and infidels. He likely did not care that the absolute quality of his zeal meant that he could offer no grounds for building affiliations between Muslims and the rest of the world. Indeed, as quoted above, at times he called for rigorously cutting off those relationships. Even the rhetorical problem that this absolutism may have contributed to limiting bin Laden’s ability to build affiliations with the majority of Muslims was not an insuperable problem from his view: with enough militaristic force, that roadblock could be overcome, as long as he could assemble a sufficiently strong cadre of loyal imamwarriors. For Page 138 →everyone except that cadre, however, the angry absolutism did not merely reflect a difference of interests, it created new lines and degrees of difference in interests. The rhetoric contributed to the escalation of perceived differences between Muslims and other entities such as “Christians,” “the United States” or “Europe,” and it stretched apart or even severed interests between the (would-be) imam-warrior cast and other Muslims. The positing of an absolute divide between infidels and Islamic absolutism was not the only factor leading to the incapacitation of bin Laden’s anger as a mechanism of social adjudication. His unwillingness to posit a shareable warrant as the basis for that adjudication was equally critical. Bin Laden’s rallying cry against the Soviet Union/communists/socialists/atheists and then later against the United States/Israel/West/Crusaders /Christians was a call for autonomy. The desire for autonomy that he projected is widely shared among Muslims according to polls and anecdotes.97 But as the many quotations above have established, bin Laden’s version of autonomy was not grounded in the value of justice, or in a democratic claim that all the world’s peoples deserve autonomy rather than subordination to powerful economic or military elites. Instead, Osama bin Laden articulated the claim that the followers of his version of Islam have a special place granted by God that no other human group has. His willingness to eradicate Israel illustrates that bin Laden was not arguing based on a moral principle that demanded equal respect for all religions. He consistently argued for territory and glory for his religious adherents on the grounds that God willed only the adherents of that religion to have such places. Whether offered by Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, or others, such a nonreciprocal claim cannot serve as a basis for weighing competing claims in an international network in which multiple religions and secularities are at large. Given that this rhetoric expressed vast territorial ambitions, the world community could only deal with promoters of such a vision through physical restraint or violence. Bin Laden’s featuring of violence as permanent and normative might even be taken as a form of recognition that he had no shareable warrants to offer the rest of the world. Perhaps instead we should interpret the demand for autonomy as a call for some kind of local or indigenous control? This is consistent with bin Laden’s portrait of any Islamic government of which he disapproved as a puppet of the West or the United States. Governments should be locally controlled, not controlled from outside. But bin Laden did not offer the alternative of popular or even local control to Islamic people. Instead he Page 139 →urged pan-Islamic, top-down control by imams selected by the ability of violent warriors to enforce their

alliance. Given his promotion of the Taliban as a model, even daily life practices were to be defined and enforced by a hierarchical array of imams-with-warriors. Osama bin Laden thus did not offer Muslims a vision based in a shareable norm of autonomy. Some Muslims might accept his claim to the exclusive place of Islam, but doing so on the normative basis he offered required ceding the right to complain when others with greater power chose to enforce their different vision of exclusive values with a different militaristic hierarchical chain. From bin Laden’s articulated positions, the triumph of ISIS over al-Qaeda is objectionable on no grounds other than bin Laden’s belief in his unique access to religious correctness. It is not a novel observation to say that the articulation of nonshareable warrants consigns the world to physical power as the sole basis of authority, even if it does so in the name of devoutly professed religious zeal. It is perhaps more notable to point to the ways in which the choice of such warrants are predispositionally imbricated in public anger in contemporary global conditions. If anger is contagious when people feel they are treated unfairly, but global conditions predispose people against articulating warrants that are shareable for redressing such maltreatment, then the only action tendencies available are those associated with threat—separation and violence—rather than the more socially functional choices of redress or reform of behaviors. Osama bin Laden’s angry rhetoric has had its attractions to people in the Middle East and to left-based critics of “the West” or the USSR around the globe because it draws attention to conditions in the world that, by other values than those bin Laden advocated, seem to require change. To that extent, one might display respect toward bin Laden’s angry rhetoric as a symptom of global relations in need of redress. But one should equally display a recognition that instead of employing that anger as a prod to imagine how alternatives could arise, bin Laden simply fell into the troughs of highest proclivity for public anger: hardening old lines of affiliation, ramping up intensity, mis-calibrating optimism and certainty. Instead of enabling him to deploy a rhetoric that rallied people to correct injustice, these proclivities led him to rally people toward imposing alternative injustices upon each other, and to imagine their relationships to the other peoples on the globe in a mode of hostility and alienation. A careful comparison of the research literature on human anger to bin Page 140 →Laden’s particular deployment of that anger should caution us against assuming that the intensity and absolutism of one’s anger is a marker of the justice of one’s vision. Perhaps, even more than that, bin Laden’s case suggests that present global conditions disable the ability of angry rhetorics to articulate shared futures that are capable of resolving those injustices. In responding to bin Laden, President George W. Bush also turned to the resources of anger. Unlike the exiled fighter, the American president had access to the greatest military might the world had known, and the success of his appeals gave him the public support to exert that force widely. Exploring the American leader’s powerful deployment of anger will therefore further specify the range and consequences of angry public rhetorics.

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Chapter 5 President Bush’s National Anger Responses to the attack launched by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001 unfolded chaotically, rippling out in multiple directions, their waves crossing and refracting from the hundred thousand jetties of the global landscape. In the United States, as Thomas Goodnight has observed, reactions on the first day were so ambiguous as to disrupt even the well-honed patter of news reporters: On that morning, no one quite knew what to make of events, beginning with a lick of flame 30 stories high that leaped from the North Tower and ending 100 minutes—a short eternity—later in the collapse of the Word Trade Center. Gasps, uncomfortable pauses, bizarre metaphors, and reaching analogies sputtered forth. Anchors and reports from the street shared fragmented perspectives.В .В .В . More than occasionally a news anchor lapsed into uncomfortable silence.1 This uncertainty about what the events meant—the causes, key actors, and implications—coincided both with the prevalence of shock and with a plurivocity of emotions, including sadness, anger, and fear. President George W. Bush was the person best positioned to guide these inchoate feelings in a manner that could support a collective response, both on behalf of his nation and for the other peoples on the globe that bin Laden’s network threatened. On the one hand, Bush and his ghostwriters did so with tremendous sensitivity to the national emotional climate, especially to the demands of funerary moments and the eulogistic genre.2 Page 142 →In doing so, they channeled national shock and sorrow into shared anger, building substantial support for the president’s sweeping plans of action around the globe. On the other hand, the Bush administration’s rhetoric has been widely criticized on multiple grounds. Various close readings have highlighted the ways in which Bush’s speeches expanded state sovereignty,3 deployed shifting temporalities,4 activated a “clash of civilizations,”5 unproductively mixed analogies to different wars,6 and deployed absolutized binaries of a noble “we” and an evil “them.”7 Other analyses have embedded the administration’s rhetoric broadly in various kinds of legacies, genres, or histories.8 Many of the components discussed below have been noted in these prior analyses. The contribution herein lies not in a novel identification of each component, but rather in providing an account that explains the appearance of all of these components by showing how they form a coherent whole shaped by the predispositions of the script for angry public rhetoric. This explanation, I suggest, leads to broader frameworks for assessing such public discourse and for identifying better options. The president’s rhetoric responding to 9/11 clearly manifested the elements involved in sharing public anger. Anger’s proclivity to amplify and fall back on familiar categories made tenable the subordination of al-Qaeda to a set of nation-states constituted by long-standing enemies of the American government, irrespective of the degree to which those nations had actually been involved in the attacks. The intensity of anger and its rote-like fixation on pre-established action patterns made persuasive the president’s escalation of the harm caused by al-Qaeda’s sporadic and local (though deadly) attacks to an unbounded global war. This inflation of the enemy and action required converting a pair of potentially general social norms (freedom and self-defense) to a self-interested and narrow frame that delegitimated their normative basis. Finally, in spite of his claim that freedom across the globe was threatened, the president could not envision his globe-mates as equal partners. Reverting with anger-blinded optimism to the crumbling vision of a self-sufficient United States, he instead rallied a “we” depicted as only those willing to submit to the sovereignty of his nation. This path was enormously costly, has failed to reduce the threat, and has arguably undermined any standing the United States might have had as the promoter of global freedom.9 The president thereby also missed a precious opportunity to cohere the collection of freedom-valuing nation-states. That step would have been a prerequisite to

addressing the evolving Page 143 →global conditions, which many analysts have described as ranging from the weaponization of multiple technologies to increased access to interlinked global communication, free trade, and individual mobility.10 The final section will argue that the president’s failure was not his own, but rather a consequence of his inability to provide creative solutions to problems that all of us have yet failed to resolve. While the character of collective anger is not the only factor that blocks the required creative thinking, it is a sufficient factor to account for such blockages. These conclusions are based primarily on the widely disseminated public speeches of the evening of September 11, on September 14 at the National Cathedral and the “bullhorn” speech that same day, the Address Before Congress on September 20, 2001, and the Ultimatum Address to Iraq of March 18, 2003.11 The analysis focuses on the first four of those texts because they were the most widely attended to by the public in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, and they provide a specific corpus about which my claims could be readily dis-validated. I include the address on Iraq because the war in Iraq has been seen as the culmination of the president’s rhetorical framing of the events of 9/11 as a “war on terror,” and therefore has served as a focal point of criticism of the president. The arguments about the texts presume an understanding of the administration’s goals. After identifying those goals, the chapter attends to the state of the president’s audiences. Because of the constraints the audience and occasion presented, the president needed to perform a rhetorical transformation of public emotion, transmuting shock and sorrow into anger. Such transmutations are sometimes crucial factors in the flow of public emotion, so I will provide a summary of that transitional rhetoric before providing the detailed analysis of the appraisal elements in the rhetoric circulated by the president. In this chapter I embed the assessments with descriptions of individual components, rather than saving assessments for a separate section, as they are more readily intelligible in that order.

President Bush’s Goals There is a large and detailed archive of relatively reliable information about President Bush’s goals leading up to his 9/11 rhetoric. His motivations have been explored not only in his autobiographical writings, but by biographers, policy analysts, and historians of his administration.12 While partisanPage 144 → and ideological factors lead these different authors to portray those goals in more and less favorable lights, there is a rough core agreement about the basics. Because the focus here is not on personal motives but on the rhetoric crafted for public circulation, I use “the president” or “President Bush” as a shorthand for talking about the publically articulated goals of the president and the top levels of his administration, sidestepping the debate about the extent to which these rationales spontaneously arose from Bush’s brain.13 The pressing interest is not in judging, crediting, or blaming a person but rather in exploring the options made available by the rhetorics his uniquely powerful position enabled him to circulate. Many commentators have pointed out the dependence of the Bush administration’s responses to the terrorist attacks on the goals prescribed in a longer standing nationalist ideology and foreign policy agenda.14 The most cogent statement of the Bush administration’s foreign policy prior to the attacks is generally considered to be Vice President Dick Cheney’s “Defense Strategy for the 1990s,” written when he was President G. H. W. Bush’s secretary of defense. By most accounts, Cheney, having then been promoted to vice president, was influential in the response to 9/11, and his doctrine was in essential accord with some of the less diplomatic voices of the administration.15 The Cheney doctrine asserted the goal not only of defending the territories of the United States from attack but also of protecting its access to economic resources around the globe. With regard to the Middle East, for example, the strategy statement proclaimed, “In the Middle East and Persian Gulf, we should seek to foster regional stability, deter aggression against our friends and interests in the region, protect U.S. nationals and property, and safeguard our access to international air and seaways and to the region’s important sources of oil.”16 This doctrine—that a nation-state will use unilateral military force not only to defend its territories but also to maintain its access to the world’s economic resources (through transit corridors and otherwise)—provides

support to those who claim that the administration had global imperialist intent.17 The shareable status of the norms on which it rested will be discussed in more detail below. Before 9/11, however, Bush had endorsed a broad vision of foreign policy consonant with that doctrine, but with the additional premise that, because the United States was the beacon of freedom, what was good for it was good for the world. In campaign speeches in 1999 focusing on foreign policy, candidate Page 145 →Bush emphasized, “The protection of America itself will assume a high priority in a new century. Once a strategic afterthought, homeland defense has become an urgent duty.”18 However, Bush also insisted that this greater focus on American defense as “the sworn duty and chief responsibility of a president”19 was not a more isolationist or selfish approach than that of his predecessors because American interests and global interests were consonant. Campaigning on November 19, 1999, for example, he said, “Some have tried to pose a choice between American ideals and American interestsВ .В .В . but the choice is false. America, by decision and destiny, promotes political freedom—and gains the most when democracy advances.” He said American foreign policy “must have a great and guiding goal: to turn this time of American influence into generations of democratic peace.”20 The events of 9/11 changed some of the president’s foreign policy goals. For example, he reduced his emphasis on missile defense. But these two aspects—the centralizing of American interest, and the moral defense of that interest by a claim that America’s interests were consonant with those of the globe—were retained and perhaps strengthened. In 2002, the National Security Council’s “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America” declared that the US’s goal included not solely secure access to such resources for the United States but was also potentially universal. The document insisted that “this path is not America’s alone. It is open to all,” setting as explicit goals to “ignite a new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade” and to “expand the circle of development by opening societies and building the infrastructure of democracy.” The US’s dominant role in this world agenda arose, according to the administration’s policy statement, from both its unique power and its faith in freedom: The United States possesses unprecedented—and unequaled—strength and influence in the world. Sustained by faith in the principles of liberty, and the value of a free society, this position comes with unparalleled responsibilities, obligations, and opportunity. The great strength of this nation must be used to promote a balance of power that favors freedom.21 The Bush administration thus claimed to harmonize self-interest with the interests of other members of the global community by promising to care paternalistically for the freedom of others. This claimed harmonization Page 146 →was undermined by the assumption that the military power of the United States authorized—even obligated it—to define the long list of entailments of “justice,” “freedom,” and “human dignity” that the document went on to adumbrate, and to define who had failed to meet the roll-call. In so doing, it summarized at the general level what the president’s 9/11 speeches articulated in the specific context. The epigraph to the document, attributed to President Bush, declared that peace might be an ultimate goal, but it should be subordinate to liberty and justice: “We fight, as we always fight, for a just peace—a peace that favors liberty.” And, since we could not fight everywhere, the doctrine dictated that we would fight for liberty (only) where it is in our national interests to do so. Such a doctrine thereby turned the principle that freedom was a universal right into the doctrine that violence on behalf of freedom would only be tolerated or pursued when it aligned with the interests of this putatively singular nation-state. Although the president might not have understood this entailment as such, these limits to the doctrine were crucial to its deployment and effects. To produce public resonance with the president’s embodiment of this doctrine in a rhetorical response to the 9/11 attacks, this general set of goals would need to be tailored to the specific conditions of the national and international audience in the aftermath of 9/11. The national emotion-scape was a key feature of those conditions.

The President’s Audiences After the attacks on September 11, President Bush’s staff hastily prepared a speech to the nation. They also

had the chance to speak to a listening world. The president had been in constant motion, physically, cognitively, and sentimentally throughout the day. Many members of the US public had likewise experienced the day in turmoil. Thousands of people were dead. Thousands more had barely escaped with their lives. Millions had watched the deaths and destruction unfold on television. Tens of millions had seen the replays and heard streams of disjointed and confused commentaries. The president did not have the power to define these events in any possible way.22 By the time he spoke on the evening of 9/11, millions of people had already begun the process of defining the events within a variety of constraints.23 This is not to say that a single rhetorical trajectory was predetermined. Bush indeed had options, but the set of options that might be Page 147 →convincing was constrained not only by the breadth of his administration’s vision but also by the range of options that different distributions of the public might find plausible or desirable. Typically, treatments of American political rhetoric describe a president’s audiences and the options they make relevant in the terms of partisan alliances; how will Democrats, Republicans, and independents respond to a presidential message? Such attention to party (or in a slightly different version, to ideological blocs) makes sense with regard to electoral politics, because affiliations and ideologies are generally important to people’s judgments of such political domains. The evidence indicates, however, that the response of the majority of Americans to 9/11 was not governed strictly by such partisan labels, but rather was heavily influenced by their emotions.24 The evidence about the character and range of the emotional responses to the attacks before the president spoke is clear enough to indicate that he did not simply create the emotionality of his audiences, but rather channeled shifting and multiple emotions into the more narrow trough of national anger. The largest number of critiques of President Bush’s 9/11 rhetoric by academics that have pointed to emotional elements have argued that Bush promoted fear in the aftermath of 9/11 in order to generate support for bad policies (especially the invasion of Iraq and the elimination of civil liberties).25 The analyses below will indicate that the president’s rhetoric did not amplify fear in the early speeches (though he amplified fear in the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003). The early speeches instead tended to coalesce an angry solidarity. While I came to this conclusion independently, it is supported by the quantitative analysis of Krista De Castella and Craig McGarty, and consistent with those previous writers who have approached the president’s texts employing a theory of emotion, rather than from theories of ideology.26 Amplifying fear would not have served the president’s agenda, because fear encourages withdrawal rather than aggressive action, and fear is also more compatible with broader reflection. As chapter 2 summarized, empirical studies specific to 9/11 have shown that feelings of anger were associated with higher preferences for war than were feelings of fear.27 Moreover, fear-like affect and other potent emotions were already circulating in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, independent of the administration’s preferences or efforts. In open-ended formats in national polls on September 12 “shock” was Page 148 →the most frequently volunteered description of people’s emotion.28 In closed format polls that unfortunately neglected to include “shock” as an option, respondents endorsed descriptions of their own subjective feelings as sorrow (82%), anger (42%), desire for retribution (34%), and fear (31%).29 Fear may have been the best available proxy for “shock” in the list that respondents were given, and other polls indicated that the attacks caused a reflex worry that led almost 70% of respondents to check on their family members’ safety.30 In the face of these swirls of shifting emotions, President Bush could not act as an all-powerful architect of shock, sorrow, fear, or even of anger. If you do not credit public opinion polls, you would find a similar pattern in witness accounts. Testimony from newspapers and public collections suggest that those who were close to ground zero experienced shock and fear and grief and horror. Marian Fontana was screaming because she thought her spouse was killed;31 Jason Kordelos reported “a nonstop roller coaster of horror and emotion.”32 Kathleen Avino, near ground zero, said: As I looked out the window I watched the upper faГ§ade of the tower fold inward and saw a silver fin

enter the hole. Next came the boom, and a shuddering of the trailer, the fireball, and then the black smoke engulfing the entire upper floors of the building. I did not feel or hear my scream; it was as if someone else had lost their mind, not me. I was frozen in place staring out the windows, with that strange sound coming out of me.В .В .В . Meanwhile the street was filled with confused and terrified souls.В .В .В .33 As distance from the site of the devastation grew, emotions may have been less intense, but they were similar in palette. Susan Demerit reports the reactions of those who were watching on a company television: “Employees would stop and watch in horror and helplessness. None of us could bear to see what was happening to our country and all the innocent people for more than a few minutes, leaving with inevitable tears of sorrow.” Many, like Gertrude Zell, felt it was “a sad time.”34 Others, like John Murphy, turned to religious services, because “[w]e’ve got to get through this somehowВ .В .В . It’s too big for me right now. It overwhelms me, what those people did to us.”35 For many people, there was also anger and hate. This manifested itself in a spike in anti-Islamic harassment, with reports of over 300 Page 149 →incidents in the three days after the attacks. Mosques were attacked and families were spat at and yelled at: “go back to your country.”36 These comments and descriptions of actions are not “pure” memory. They are remembered at different stages of the conflict, and after media exposure and interpersonal interactions. Nonetheless, the consonance of such anecdotes with the immediate polling data indicate that 9/11 aroused emotions, especially sorrow, shock/fear, and anger, that formed a powerful aspect of the American audience the president faced. The president’s choice to channel the intense but multiple affects of his national audience toward shared anger accorded well with his administration’s existing defense doctrine. But this choice also was attuned to the vocalization of anger by strategically placed sections of the populace. Although similar voices could be found among politicians and pundits, a key moment that illustrates this attunement occurred on September 14. Having just given the eulogy at the National Cathedral, the president went to New York to address the rescue workers near the site of the fallen Twin Towers. He opened with the sorrowful eulogistic tones of the speech he had just given: I want you all to know that America today, America today is on bended knee, in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn. The nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut as we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens. The crowd of overwhelmingly male firefighters and police officers standing amid the devastation was in no mood for a eulogy, however. They wanted a fight-speech. They restlessly yelled “I can’t hear you!” The president caught the mood, dropped his eulogistic remarks, and shifted from sorrow to anger, responding, “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people—and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” Bush’s autobiography reports that before the speech, angry individuals in the crowd had already urged, “George, find the bastards who did this and kill them.”37 These individuals’ perspectives were not isolated ones. On the evening of September 11, the polls indicated that 66 percent of the population believed that the United States should “retaliate even if innocent people are killed.”38 The president amplified and channeled the anger, as we will see, turningPage 150 → the nation away from the emotions more likely to provoke thoughtfulness, such as fear and sorrow, and toward the narrowing of cognition and limited ranges of action and affiliation preferred through anger’s arousal. Given that shock and sorrow were highly common feelings, however, it was to his advantage to work with those emotions, transforming them, rather than merely to insert his anger. He therefore focused his address on the evening of September 11 around the transmutation of fear and on the 14th he redeployed sorrow with great rhetorical skill.

From Shock and Sorrow to Anger

On September 11, the president had to respond to the shock of the nation. Astutely, the dominant emotional frame of all of the remarks he made that day was reassurance.39 Although he reiterated the basic themes at his short addresses throughout the day, the evening speech gained the nation’s full attention.40 After an opening paragraph describing the destruction of the day, Bush directly and overtly recognized the other emotions that his audience was feeling, including fear. He admitted that the events “have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger. These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat.” But the president’s purposes and goals did not entail fanning that fear. As chapter 3 reported, a key difference between anger and fear is confidence. In paragraph after paragraph, therefore, once Bush had recognized their shock and fear, he reassured his audience through metaphors about America’s “steel,” through confident statements about what the government was doing to meet the threat, and through short declarative sentences, “Our country is strong.” He reminded his audience that they were part of a powerful nation that had triumphed in previous wars. But he also called on a source of supernatural strength, “God.” This speech laid the foundation for transforming fear into anger by building the confidence, optimism, and certainty needed to channel the appraisals of harm experienced by the nation toward shared anger, and collective, violent action. The president’s eloquent eulogy on September 14 was equally adept at transforming sorrow into righteous anger. Speaking at the National Cathedral, the president’s rhetorical options were constrained by the expectations surrounding eulogistic performances. These constraints could not be ignored without substantial risk of rejection Page 151 →by the audience. Generic constraints are important in many speaking circumstances, but the potency of death makes eulogistic constraints particularly powerful. Anthropologists and other scholars have studied reactions to death around the world. While there are a dizzying range of variations in practices, the majority of cultures feature some common themes. Rhetorical scholars Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell have described the topics through which those themes play out in public eulogies in US culture. They concluded, “a eulogy will acknowledge the death, transform the relationship between the living and the dead from present to past tense, ease the mourners’ terror at confronting their own mortality, console them by arguing that the deceased lives on, and reknit the community.”41 Emotional potentials are linked to these topics. Carolyn Kitch’s excellent summary of the literature on American public funerary practices has revealed a predictable progression of emotions related to public loss.42 Kitch indicated that after death(s), a community moves through three stages. First, as they recognize the separation, emotions are dominated by “shock and disbelief.” Next comes a liminal stage dominated by grief, but also the search for answers and healing. In the final stage, the community re-forms itself, and leaders signal moving forward with those newly formed relationships.43 President Bush’s speeches were sensitive to this progression and the topics that the American audience would expect on a funerary occasion. As described above, the speech on the evening of September 11 addressed the “shock and disbelief” of the public with reassurance. Below I will detail how the Address Before Congress on the 20th addressed the third stage, constituting the community as moving forward to protect itself in a war for freedom. The pivotal moment in this progression, however, was the eulogy at the National Cathedral on the 14th, given during what Kitch describes as the liminal period. The speech displays remarkable sensitivity to this context by opening with the sentence, “We are here in the middle hour of our grief.” The president then proceeded to address the nation’s grief, but to do so by giving meaning to the loss of life by defining and dedicating the lives of the lost to the righteous battle for freedom. The speech comprised what Campbell and Jamieson call a “hybrid” of the genres of eulogy and war rally. Its arc moved from sympathetic grief directed at the families of individual victims to unified angry action. The president began by mourning victims who were ordinary people: “men and women who began their day at a desk or in an airport, busy with life.” But Page 152 →these individuals were also “casualties” and were joined to “men and women who wore the uniform of the United States and died at their posts,” foreshadowing war. Having turned the opening sympathy for others’ grief into a sense of loss for the nation, the president then demanded resolute action not only on our behalf, and on theirs, but on the world’s behalf: “Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: To

answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” The president moved his audience along the emotional trajectory from sorrow to anger by tightening a spiral between individual and national levels that transferred the emotional energies of grief and sympathy into dedication to collective, warlike action.44 This fusion, which rests on the salving of grief through the prospect of the accomplishment of a collective cause that makes loss meaningful, has been used in other funerary war speeches such as Pericles’ epitaphioi and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. In the transition from grief to anger, the president progressively introduced and amplified the appraisal cues for anger. Commentators have read “the war on terror” as present in the president’s very first utterances because the president mentions war and evil enemies from the beginning.45 But such a reading ignores the rhetorical work necessary to form those isolated scraps into a compelling drama that can motivate collective actions. Such readings also miss the way in which the president’s rhetoric included an attentive respect for the constraints of diverse existing emotions and the generic constraints of cultural funerary norms. This attention to the audience’s emotional needs advantaged the president’s vision over his American opposition, who generally did not attend sufficiently to these conditions of the national audience in their responses to the attacks (as described in chapter 6). The sensitivity to his audience may have also helped make more palatable the less plausible elements of the president’s script for shared anger.

The President’s Appraisal Cues for Anger The President’s Enemies Critics of Bush’s 9/11 speeches have attacked the president for positing a “Manichean” enemy.46 While this complaint accurately points up the anger-encouraged absolutism of the president’s rhetoric, it has insufficient reach. The president’s speeches indeed frequently opted to define the nation’sPage 153 → enemy vaguely, intensely, and with hostility, either as “terrorists” or as perpetrators of “evil.” However, basing one’s judgment of the presidential discourse on that ground all but ensures a public endorsement of the president’s choices, rather than of the critic’s complaints. Even most of the president’s public critics—at least when pressed—allowed that the killing of civilians in spectacular displays was a wrong of an intensity that they could not condone.47 The term “evil” does not seem to be any more ill-suited for describing the killing of thousands of civilians than any other broad term of judgment that might have been applied. Decrying the use of “evil” in this case seems a judgment based more on the actions the president proposed or on preexisting affiliative sentiments than on the appropriateness of the term as a value judgment.48 A key theme of this book is that thoughtful analysis should recognize the distance that is available between the appropriateness of a public emotion to its causes and the actions and alliances that such a public emotion is used to engage. While it is also true that my “freedom fighters” can be your “terrorists,” the previous chapter indicated that freedom was not a favored value for bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. So, critics of the president’s policies should not want to base their critique on an alliance with Osama bin Laden. And crucially, a fair assessment of the president’s labeling of the attackers would have to take into account that on the evening of September 11, the president did not have certainty about more specific labels ready to hand. Although al-Qaeda was strongly suspected as the collective agent behind the attacks, the president would have been properly criticized if he had made such a hasty claim, especially given the faulty rush to assume that Muslims had been responsible for the bombing attack on the Oklahoma Federal Building in 1995. In the absence of definitive information, the president appropriately chose to place the actions, not the agent, as the subject of his statements. He described “deliberate and deadly terrorist acts” and “acts of mass murder.” But the enemies stayed unnamed: “those who are behind these evil acts.” The perpetrators were “evil,” “the worst of human nature,” but they were humans, not devils or beasts.49 Even by the 14th, in both the bullhorn speech and the eulogistic address at the National Cathedral, the president avoided

naming the attackers, instead calling them “enemies of freedom.” That the president described the attackers vaguely and in terms of their actions rather than as Arab, Muslim, or any other concrete label might have counted to his credit rather than to his blame. Page 154 →From a globalist’s perspective, the fundamental problem with the president’s naming of the enemy was not that he condemned them intensely, but rather that he linked terrorists with a potentially infinite slate of nation-states. The fusion of nation-states with broadly dispersed, largely covert groups meant that a response to the terrorists required war with an extremely large number of nations. It also entailed the odd condition of attacking at least some of the nations that the terrorists themselves would have marked for destruction. Bush made this linkage between terrorists and nation-states from the beginning, saying on the evening of 9/11, “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” The speech to Congress on September 20 directed that linkage specifically against Afghanistan, and on March 18, 2003, it would be expanded further to include Iraq. Given that terrorists inhabit every nation—including the United States and most of its allies—the scope of the enemy thus defined was unbounded. The major rhetorical work that articulated this linkage occurred in paragraphs 14–24 of the Address Before Congress, when the nation had reached the third stage of the grief process and was emotionally ready to accept a reknitting of the community’s relations. Unfortunately, the absolutism fueled by the president’s choice to circulate public anger formulated that identity as the implacable foe of an unlimited list of nation-states. The president began the answer to his own question, “Who attacked our country?,” by pointing to “a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al Qaeda.” He listed their previous attacks on US-affiliated targets and analogized them to a mafia with political motivations. To his credit, he then worked to separate al-Qaeda from Islam at large: “The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics—a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam.”50 Having narrowed and delegitimated the religious claims of the enemy, he then amplified (not incorrectly) their violent intentions, before identifying their leader: Osama bin Laden. Again, not incorrectly, he noted the global reach of the organization by citing their presence in specific nations such as Egypt and Uzbekistan before indicating that “[t]here are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries.” Having thus, almost in passing, set the enormous charter to eliminate terrorists from 60 nation-states, he then turned to the first nation on his list. He identified Afghanistan as a proper Page 155 →starting point by defining that nation as a training ground for all those terrorists. The nation of Afghanistan, however, was not presented merely as a nation in which al-Qaeda lurked, but rather as an instantiation of a competing world vision: “In Afghanistan, we see al Qaeda’s vision for the world.” The shared motivational set of al-Qaeda and the Taliban-led government provided a compelling resource for Bush’s construction of the enemy as a fusion of terrorist and nation-state. That fusion, however, simultaneously invoked the sovereignty of nation-states or cultures and a US-based vision of freedom as a universal value. The president created this internally conflicted fusion by listing nation-state-enforced violations of freedom, but these had concrete cultural bases. Specifically, he decried the Afghanistan government’s restrictions on the appearance of men (requiring them to have beards), the schooling of women, and restrictions on consumer goods (owning a television). He specifically denounced not only the brutality of the regime but also their refusal of freedom of religion. This meant that the United States was asserting the right to determine by force the rightful sovereignty of governments of other nations based on their adherence to freedoms defined from a US perspective.51 The president dampened the audacity of that assertion by separating the Taliban regime from the people of Afghanistan. In paragraph 20, he separated the “people of Afghanistan,” whom the United States “respects,” from “the Taliban regime,” which he portrayed as an illegitimate government because it

was “repressing its own people.” He then worked to further that separation by reemphasizing the separation of the terrorists and their militarist Islamic supporters from Islam per se. In one of the longest paragraphs in the speech, he declared respect for Islam and for those who practice it in the United States and around the globe. He insisted that it was the terrorists, not the United States, who constituted the enemy of Islam: “The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them.” This claim, however, was weakened by the linkage of a nation-state to the terrorists. It is harder to envision as “fringe” a group that has the support of a nation-state. He further delegitimated this notion of the “fringe” status of the terrorists by emphasizing that Afghanistan was only a start: “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” Page 156 →The president’s fusion—of the terrorist group with the nation-state in which they were based—relied on the shared motivational set of both of these agents’ opposition to specific freedoms. In the case of al-Qaeda and Afghanistan’s existing government, this fusion was tenable, but this was not as true around the globe. As many people have pointed out, Saddam Hussein’s government was brutal in respects that matter; however, it did not forbid men from wearing beards, or women from going to school, or either from owning televisions, and it managed some degree of religious diversity. Noting the differences in the motivational sets of al-Qaeda and Iraq is important to the ultimate vision of world interactions that I will elaborate in chapter 7. A world community may evolve that will decide to exert control both over groups such as al-Qaeda and over violent dictatorial regimes, but it will not wish to do so on similar grounds and through similar means, and no individual nation can claim a normatively shareable right to do so because doing so violates the sovereignty of other nations. Be that as it may, the attractiveness of President Bush’s fusion of nation-states and terrorist networks may be further attested to by the way in which it generated mis-aimed criticisms, which ignored the different challenges these different types of agents pose for the peoples of the globe. I have listened to multiple, well-intentioned people mock the president’s declaration that al-Qaeda attacked the United States because they hate freedom. The ground for this mockery has been the belief that instead alQaeda hated us because of our prior behavior in Iraq (either the warful actions against their invasion of Kuwait or the indirect effects of economic sanctions, which were portrayed as exemplars of a larger pattern of behaviors). Chapter 4 indicated why this belief about al-Qaeda is insufficiently informed; bin Laden indeed opposed US and Israeli presences, but he also wanted to fight Iraq and overturn most Middle Eastern governments, and his goal was the establishment of a global empire on normative grounds that were indeed quite different from “freedom” or “democracy.”52 Basing one’s critique of Bush on an inaccurate reading of bin Laden delegitimates one’s critique to American audiences. As chapter 4 showed, when speaking about bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the president was correct when he indicated that “[t]hey hate what we see right here in this chamber—a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” The president was also correct to assert that “[t]hey want to overthrowPage 157 → existing governments in many Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa.” The president’s attributions of motives to bin Laden (and al-Qaeda) were reasonably accurate. Even if you believe that bin Laden’s motives were “caused” by some underlying source such as inequitable wealth, that is not what bin Laden asserted.53 The reason to refuse to align with the president’s vision comes from elsewhere than his attributions of Osama bin Laden’s motives. The reasons to reject the president’s vision arise from the claimed right of the United States to deny the sovereignty of other nations, which was given resonance for Americans by the president’s alignment of all of his previously designated foreign enemies with al-Qaeda. The president’s statements about motivations, however correct they might have been about al-Qaeda, were not correct with regard

to most nation-states in which terrorists were operating, even on the president’s own accounting. One can highlight the incorrectness of the president’s alignment of terroristic freedom-haters against freedomdefending nations by noting that he listed Egypt both as a state that harbored such terrorists and as a target for overthrow by those terrorists. Saudi Arabia was a nation-state that was refusing to crack down on financial support of terrorist organizations, but Bush also listed it (correctly) as a target of those terrorist organizations.54 This fundamentalist Islamic kingdom was also no lover of many freedoms for most of its people. Pakistan constituted an even more complex case.55 Bush’s bifurcation did not describe an alignment of states; instead it justified his attack on nation-states he already viewed as enemies by selectively aligning them with the terrorists’ motives. The president’s fusion of al-Qaeda and its motives with long-standing enemies of the United States was likely to be persuasive to angry Americans, because anger encourages attributions of blame to preexisting categories of agents. Sadly, this dated and overbroad projection of enemies undermined the possibility of offering globally shareable normative warrants for the enormous suite of actions the president’s vision encouraged. This choice was tied to the president’s inability to imagine a “we” appropriate to the nature of the attacks. Anger perversely reinforced his vision of American autonomy, rather than allowing him to see the way in which alQaeda’s organization, methods, and supra-US goals might require a broader set of affiliations to best serve American—and global—interests. Page 158 → Who Are “We”? Although the American president sometimes constructed the “we” who faced harm from al-Qaeda in global terms, he repudiated any structure of affiliations that did not allow the United States to pursue independently his chosen courses of action. He infamously insisted that all nations make a choice: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Being “with us” further entailed a role not as equals or shared decision-makers, but instead as “allies and friends” who could only “support” or stand beside the United States, which retained the core identity of the “we” that most mattered and that would exercise all control. On the evening of the 9/11 attacks, the president was primarily focused within a national frame. In this speech, at least 18 of the references to the “we” who were affected by the attacks and who would have to respond to them were explicitly nationalist (as box 5.1 indicates). This nationalist reflex is not surprising and does not mark out the American president as uniquely nationalistic; both the French president’s and prime minister’s addresses after the January 2015 attacks in Paris were similarly nationalist. The prominence of a nationalist response by a person elected as a national leader in a moment of crisis may serve as a symptom of the lack of a more globalist vocabulary and perspective, but it is not unique for the time. However, Bush’s portrayal of the nation’s relationship to other nations and peoples would be pivotal. The US president recognized that other nation-states were relevant and might share some of the US perspective when he said, “America and our friends and allies join with all those who want peace and security in the world, and we stand together to win the war against terrorism.” That short depiction offered several categories of affiliation. One might be a friend, or an ally, and even if you weren’t a friend or an ally, you might still want peace and security and stand against terror. Rather than following those possibilities and strengthening such affiliations, however, when he mentioned concrete behaviors, the US president made it clear that the United States was the central and controlling actor. Others only offered “assistance” and “condolences” to us. The Address Before Congress again was the occasion for the fullest elaboration, providing the most substantial attention to the relationship between the United States and “friendly” states.56 The president signaled Page 159 →the US’s centrality and separate status by opening the speech with a portrait in which the rest of the world was watching the United States: “The entire world has seen for itself the state of our Union—and it is strong.” The president then thanked “the world for its outpouring of support.” He emphasized that

“we” will never forget specific tokens of that support, such as the playing of the US national anthem on foreign soils, or moments of prayer and silence in specific global locations. He also noted that the deaths were not just of American citizens. In doing so, however, he indicated clearly that the “we” he envisioned was a national entity, as he set off the United States as a we with our own apart from others: “Nor will we forget the citizens of 80 other nations who died with our own.” Box 5.1. Terms Constructing President Bush’s 2nd Persona in the September 11, 2001 Address our fellow citizens our Nation our country a great people a great nation foundation of America american resolve we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world our Nation best of America our Government’s our military our Government federal agencies in Washington the American economy members of Congress on behalf of the American people, I thank the many world leaders who have called to offer their condolences and assistance America and our friends and allies join with all those who want peace and security in the world, and we stand together to win the war against terrorism all Americans America has stood down enemies before we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world With the British prime minister sitting in the live audience, the American president gave Britain the most explicit attention, recalling both a shared history and being “joined together in a great cause” and with a “unity of purpose.” But in spite of this allusion to the Churchillian era, Bush did not use any expressions comparable to “the English speaking Page 160 →people” to signal a fused identity. Instead, he called Britain a “friend,” thereby portraying the two nations as having separate identities, albeit with a warm relationship between those identities. The distance between these entities was highlighted in the very next paragraph; Bush stated that the enemies warred “with our country” (not “our countries”). Similarly, in paragraphs 36–38, when the American president returned to the world context, he restated the vision of a world with many nations that have common interests and values, who share interconsequentiality, but in which the United States is the controlling actor; others “help,” “support,” or “rally to America’s side.” The president’s rhetoric thus figured the terrorists’ attack on the World Trade Center and the deaths of those from 80 nations as an attack centrally on the United States. Although he indicated that the attack had implications for the world, he did not rally any articulable global entity that might respond as such. A global “we” might be threatened by al-Qaeda, but only “we” the United States would decide the response. That absence is not solely the fault of Bush; given the structural limits of the United Nations, one would have been hard pressed to come up with a credible entity to offer as the noun for a global “we.”57 The next chapter will show that cosmopolitan intellectuals more ideologically committed to an egalitarian globalism did no better. That task remains for us.

A second crucial problem with the president’s depiction of the protagonists in his version of the 9/11 drama was also a function of the limited rhetorical resources at hand. In order to offer resonant condolences, the president drew heavily upon the funerary resources of the Christian religious tradition.58 That choice at least partially overwrote the president’s effort to displace a we/they binary mapped over Christian/Muslim religious identities. In giving a strong place in his public rhetoric to Christianity, the president subtly dis-included Muslims from the American “we,” even as he worked to deny an equivalence between the enemy and Muslims. In all of Bush’s speeches on 9/11, religion played a visible role. The second largest topic among academic literatures attacking the Bush administration’s rhetoric surrounding 9/11 has been the accusation that the president or the mass media, or both, displayed or fanned hostility to Islam or Arabs.59 These claims are rarely supported with extensive quoted evidence, because such evidence would have to be manufactured, at least with regard to the president’s own rhetoric.60 There is no mention of Islam in the 9/11 speech, and in the major speeches after that date the president explicitly Page 161 →argued against the idea that the terrorists represented Islam (or any other ethnic group). I have already quoted some of those examples, but as further examples, in the eulogy on the 14th he emphasized that “[t]his is a unity of every faith and every background,” and in the Address Before Congress on the 20th, he explicitly offered a vision of the nation as one hosting multiple religions, “the saying of prayers—in English, Hebrew, and Arabic.” He even explicitly criticized those who had acted with hostility to Muslims in the United States: “We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them. No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith.” Although one can always imagine more to be done, the president also went to the Islamic Center of Washington on September 17 to give a speech centrally focused on pleading for respect of Islam by other Americans. In that speech the president quoted the Koran, and he stated that “[t]hese acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.” He claimed of the Arab American leaders he met at the mosque, “They love America as much as I do.” He insisted that “[w]omen who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes.” He even castigated those who would attack fellow citizens because of their Muslim religion as representing “the worst of humankind, and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior.” James Maggio, who is otherwise highly critical of Bush’s rhetorical efforts, praised him on this score: “Bush admirably attempted to quash the torment of Muslims by casting them as ordinary Americans.”61 The president clearly made repeated overt efforts to deny that the fault lines of the conflict lay between Christianity and Islam, at least in this early period.62 But intentional efforts are often incapable of overwriting deep-seated emotional resonances. Repeated attention has been given to the fact that the president used the problematic term “crusade” twice in informal remarks.63 Far more important, however, were his choices, in his eulogy and at other times, to employ the resources of Christianity as a substantial component of the reassurance and consolation he offered the audience he had figured as American.64 On September 11, the president employed Psalm 23, often used at Christian funerals, and made into at least one hymn, which reassures Christians of God’s presence in “the valley of the shadow of death.” In the eulogy, his Page 162 →extensive attention to prayer might have been religiously neutral (though it might have offended the 10 percent of the population who are overtly atheist), except that the model of prayer was not the public, ritualized prayer most visible for Muslims, but rather prayer that accorded with a Christian model. He specifically provided an exemplar of such prayer, quoting a woman at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He also used the common Christian maxim, “his purposes are not always our own” (Proverbs 3.1).65 Later, he referenced “a beloved priest” giving last rites. And he called on “the Lord of life” who “holds all who die and all who mourn”—repurposing a familiar phrase referencing the Christian notion of the resurrection of Christ as the source of eternal life (and the “The Lord of Life” is the name of some Protestant churches in the United States). The president closed with an allusion to another biblical passage, Romans 8.38, “as we have been assured, neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, can separate us from God’s love.”

Although the president did not explicitly claim the national civil religion in the name of Christianity, he drew all of his religious references from this religion. Of special import, there are no balancing passages that I could detect from the Koran except in the speech at the mosque, which was not widely watched. Moreover, these were not merely examples of individual relationships with God, which might be expected in a secular but multireligious state. Instead, often the relationship portrayed was between God and the nation. The president/preacher paraphrased the Christian Bible, and then offered a prayer, “May He bless the souls of the departed. May He comfort our own, and may He always guide our country. God bless America.” Bush’s choices are not merely individual or partisan failings; they signal the limited rhetorical resources available for use with his national audience. In the United States, the rhetorics that had provided the source of personal comfort, and the reassurance that the “dead live on” that are crucial to the eulogistic genre,66 have historically been derived overwhelmingly from the Christian religion. In most contexts, public political figures have been able to manage the religious diversity of the United States in the face of the historical predominance of the Christian tradition by means of what has been called the “American civil religion.” This has been described as a contract in which short, ritualized mentions to God and relatively vague prayers have been combined with rotation of pastors/priests/rabbis/elders Page 163 →from various traditions to give some presence to religion in the national discourse, without giving specific theological traditions extended, explicit privilege.67 As Roderick Hart and others have noted, in their public discourse American presidents have thereby adopted a compromise between a purely secular state that eschews all mention of religion and a specifically religious or theocratic state that explicitly endorses a particular religious view. Vanessa Beasley has argued that this civil religion forms a core of American national identity.68 Such appeals have been biased by what has been called the “Judeo-Christian tradition” that has dominated the nation’s history, but the use of these Christian resources are typically so shallow in presidential addresses as to permit a wider variety of religious traditions either to read themselves into the tradition (God could conceivably be “Allah” or—weh) or to read over the tradition with the minor irritation of an annoyance of small immediate consequence (e.g., for atheists or Wiccans or polytheists). However, Bush’s choice to serve as a kind of national chaplain delivering the national eulogy,69 combined with the intensity of experience brought about by the deaths of thousands of individuals, encouraged a more thorough engagement with such familiar, even ritualistic, religious discourses of comfort than could fit the standard contract of the American civil religion. The emotional demands of the situation therefore presented the president a deeply problematic choice: he could either perform the “civil religion,” thereby providing little in the way of familiar resources to give the comfort and reassurance expected by the majority audience in this situation, or he could utilize the most ready-tohand resources—those of the Christian religion—and thereby highlight the Christian religiosity of a nation that was being attacked by people who sanctified their attacks in the name of an Islamic theocracy. The president chose the latter. The consequence was to reinforce the feeling actively promoted by bin Laden and others that the conflict was a Christian vs. Muslim Crusade. Responding to both the demands of sorrow and anger, President Bush thus constructed us, the victims of 9/11, as tolerant of other religions, but essentially Christian. He constructed us as the United States of America, a singular, dominating nation, albeit one operating with “support” from friends and allies in a globally interconnected world.70 Given the construction of the enemy in terms of nation-states, an angry script then required rallying the “we” of the nation-state to war. Page 164 → National Actions Angry feelings arouse the urge to attack. War or threat of war is the most vivid way in which nation-states have historically enacted their anger. The conservative cognitive dynamics of anger therefore make war the most readily imaginable means of acting in the face of provocation by other nation-states. Although “negotiation, ” “economic sanctions,” and “developmental assistance plans” are also international scale actions, anger seems less likely to be sated by these less evidently attack-oriented actions. Such emotional

dynamics helped to make resonant for the American public what virtually all commentators have recognized as the Bush administration’s constant focus on war, even though that action set did not match the situation. Indeed, the poor fit with the situation is strong evidence that it was the emotional dynamics of national anger that drove the action choice by the public, whatever the underlying motives of George Bush, the man. Carol Winkler and others have argued that an alternate frame for replying to the kind of spectacle-oriented political violence that is usually called “terrorism” could have been enacted by defining bin Laden and alQaeda as criminals, thereby setting into play a different set of actions.71 The actions appropriate to criminals are far more narrow than war: one arrests, prosecutes, and punishes criminals. Winkler argues for the feasibility of this alternate frame by noting that it had been previously employed by President Clinton. Unfortunately, this suggestion does not account for the mismatch between the emotional scale of a threat to a nation and the action of prosecuting a few individuals. This emotional mismatch would have predisposed any national leader against merely offering a set of actions defined within a frame of criminality in cases such as this one, with thousands of victims, and especially where the perpetrators were foreigners who defined their own agendas in terms of nationstate sovereignty. Even President Clinton, though he had employed the “crime” frame when responding to the attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma, had also used the war frame, even in light of the domestic basis of that incident.72 Winkler nonetheless has done an important service in drawing our attention to the choice of frames available. And she is correct that Bush used the war frame more than did Clinton. But Bush also employed a mix of frames, drawing on the “crime” frame when he referred to the terrorist attacks as “murder,” the terrorists as “thugs and killers,” and calling on “law enforcement” to “find those responsible and to bring them to justice.” Page 165 →The very terms “war crimes” and “war criminals,” used in the ultimatum to Iraq, represent the fusion of the conceptual clusters of war and crime. The resort by both presidents to a mix of frames in responding to violent attacks on the nation by small groups suggests the insufficiency of either the war or crime frame to address a new world (dis)order. The parallel in the otherwise two very different ideologies and conditions of the Clinton and Bush presidencies raises a hypothesis about the nature of public anger. Perhaps the “crime frame” and “war frame” articulate a fundamental difference between “in-group” directed and “out-group” directed anger. “Crime frames” tend to capture the underlying social tendency to use anger in restoring normative patterns of distribution within the group. “War frames” tend to articulate the sense that the “other” is to be staved off—kept outside the community—defeated if not destroyed. When an agent is envisioned as outside the community, then the norms and actions of a crime frame are unlikely to feel sufficient. The legalistic justification of “self-defense” or norms of procedural justice do not seem emotionally right in a drama about a threatening outsider with the power to disrupt the community’s “way of life,” and who, as an outsider, is not beholden to the interests of the community. In the face of the pragmatic inadequacies of the war frame and the emotional insufficiencies of the crime frame, it was consequential that the president did not overcome the narrowing tendencies of angry cognition to construct a new frame, but rather intensely amplified anger’s predisposition toward “attack,” which aligned with the “war” frame. Indeed, the cognitive narrowing supplied by shared anger encouraged and enabled Bush—and his American audience—to double down and take the war not only to Afghanistan, but to an enemy recently battled and still troublesomely waiting in the wings: Iraq. To apply the war frame in the new conditions, however, required that the president provide dangerously unshareable normative warrants for war. The dramatic coherence required by scripts of anger meant these warrants were entwined with his portrayal of the harms that had occurred on 9/11. The Harm to America The actual injuries suffered in the United States on September 11 were substantial and horrible. Thousands were killed; huge buildings were reducedPage 166 → to rubble. The scale of injury was certainly such as to warrant an intense national emotional response. But if bin Laden was correct about anything, he was correct that this type of

violence was not extraordinary on the contemporary world scene. Many nations had experienced substantial violent attacks, some at the hands of the United States and its allies, or their agents, some at the hands of those seeking to forward a particular self-serving vision of Islam, but also in many places and for many ideologies around the globe. Therefore, defining the harm in the simple descriptive fashion of lives lost and buildings leveled would have failed to capture the import of the attacks.73 A key feature of that import was that the territorial control of the government of the United States was successfully infringed by a foreign group on a scale not seen since the Japanese had successfully attacked Pearl Harbor.74 To fit the emotional experience of the events, an appropriate description would have to capture the shock of that breach, not only for the United States but also for those many around the world who took the power of the United States for granted. The president’s rhetoric accorded with those violated expectations by lamenting the harm in terms of the loss of individual lives, but by characterizing those losses as emblematic of the nation’s threatened ability to defend its “way of life,” summarized as “freedom.” As I will detail in the next section, this move would create problems with regard to the normative justification of US actions on the global stage, because it required the characterization of “freedom” as both a universally shareable warrant and as offering a distinctive warrant to America to defend itself through violent action unlimited by any external entities. But first, we should briefly note how Bush’s framing of the harm provided the urgent rationale for that normative distortion: he melded the interests of the United States with that of the world community by claiming that the attack had been designed to thwart the US’s ability to bring freedom to the world. The president’s address on the evening of September 11 declared, “America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.” Three days later, in the eulogy at the National Cathedral, the president similarly asserted. “They have attacked America because we are freedom’s home and defender.”75 A little over a week later, the Address Before Congress provided the space and appropriate genre—deliberative address—to formulate the harm in fully geopolitical terms.76 The president repeatedly identified the threat to freedomPage 167 → with “our country.” Again, however, he fused America’s freedom and interests with America’s interest in global freedom, “the advance of human freedom,” and he presented the attacks on the United States as caused by the US’s global leadership for freedom: “They stand against us, because we stand in their way.” The president herein defined American interests (our free way of life) with the propagation of freedom around the world. This way of framing the harm was required by the normative warrants on which he based his rallying call. The President’s (Non)Normative Bases As was the case with Osama bin Laden, the dynamics of the anger script warped President Bush’s potentially shareable normative warrant of freedom and self-defense into a self-interested and nonshareable form. Bush not only gave freedom a limited scope more relevant to Americans than to many other people, he also authored a doctrine of preemptive invasion that could apply only to the United States. As he had in the speeches immediately after 9/11, in his Ultimatum to Iraq the president justified his demand that Iraqis turn over Saddam Hussein and give the United States complete access to all Iraqi territory by asserting the universal value of freedom. He said, “The power and appeal of human liberty is felt in every life and every land.” The president promised: As we enforce the just demands of the world, we will also honor the deepest commitments of our country. Unlike Saddam Hussein, we believe the Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty. And when the dictator has departed, they can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation. Some have mocked the president’s representations of the US’s intent to bring freedom to Iraq, and more broadly to the Middle East, as nothing more than a craven quest for oil, but I suggest that a broader perspective

points beyond comedic gluttony to the hubristic flaws of tragedy in the vision the president held. His autobiography, interviews, and public statements all indicated that he projected that the outcome in Iraq would resemble the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that the war in Iraq would replicate the US role in protecting freedom in Europe from Adolf Hitler. The president’sPage 168 → projections may have arisen from an inadequately broad reading of history, but they were grounded in some history, shared with his audience. In Eastern Europe, the removal of the Soviet dictatorship may not have brought utopia, but it did bring orderly self-government. The case of East Germany provided a resonant touchstone. The toppling of the large statue of Saddam Hussein was intended to iconicize this projected similarity. Edward Said’s denunciations of “Orientalism” should warn us against too blithe of an account of the reasons why the ouster of dictators in Middle Eastern states should not have been expected to lead to successfully self-governing states. Chalking the differences in outcomes up to “culture” leads too easily to reinforcing the “clash of civilizations” hypothesis in a different register.77 Chalking the difference up to a history of European colonialism might foster an important historical truth, but it doesn’t tell one how to get to autonomous democratic government for the future. Attributing the differences to economic structures built on oil or sand surely also tells part of the story. But if freedom in some form is an aspiration for human beings, then each of these factors should have been temporary obstacles rather than impossible barriers; Bush’s call to “freedom” should have resonated not only with Americans, but in the broader global community as well. A more proximate difference between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein explains the failure of Bush’s normative warrant to generalize globally; the citizens on both sides of the Berlin Wall worked to breach it themselves. In so doing, they built a set of concretely realized freedoms that were formulated through the debates and power dynamics internal to those living within the relevant territory. The freedoms they constructed together were not dictated by agendas, habits, and visions from people living elsewhere (though they surely made choices to draw on some visions from elsewhere rather than others). Because his normative basis for global war not only subordinated a putatively universal value of freedom to the US’s broadly defined self-interests, but also required imposing the US’s definition of freedom, the president was unable to enable freedom for others even if that were a sincere aspiration. However much the president may have wished otherwise—and more importantly, however much the American audience who shared his feelings might have hoped—the slide from “their actions are wrong because they threaten freedom” to “we (USA) are acting for freedom” rested on a premise that was fundamentally unshareable around the globe, both as an abstraction and for concretely building democracies.78 Page 169 →President Bush’s rhetoric was also resonant for most Americans, and not for many people around the globe, because the concrete exemplars of freedom he employed seemed valuable—worth fighting for!—to Americans, but not necessarily to others. Bush’s foreign policy doctrine had articulated one crucial aspect of freedom for America—the maintenance of global access to resources under the rubric of “free markets.” This version of freedom was probably also resonant with more members of his US audience than many critics of the president have been willing to contemplate.79 A nation that built its wealthy way of life on its access to global resources (“free markets”) surely did require the freedom to securely access these resources around the globe to maintain that way of life. The purchasing power parity per capita of the United States was more than three times greater than the international average at least in part because of access to these global resources. But this did not reflect merely the interests of an elite among US citizens. All but the bottom quintile of American incomes were above the global average. A substantial majority of Bush’s countrypersons would therefore have shared the economic interest that was embedded in this vision of freedom. This shared economic interest might well have reinforced the schism between the freedom (qua free markets) of the United States and the rest of the world, making the rhetoric far more resonant for most Americans than it could be for most of the world community. The president deepened the divide between his version of “freedom” and a more generalizable concept of freedom in 2001 when he provided a list of the freedoms that seemed most crucial from his vantage point: religious freedom, freedom of dress and movement for women, and freedom to choose and use consumer goods (cited above). The particularity of that list can be highlighted by comparing it to that from a half century earlier,

offered by an American president facing a Great Depression, who called for Freedom from Fear, Freedom from Want, Freedom of Speech, and Freedom of Religion.80 Similarly, only three years before President Bush’s speech, halfway around the world in yet a different cultural and political context, Aung San Suu Kyi emphasized freedom from fear as the necessary precursor to burst through the corruption and intimidation of the military government in Myanmar.81 The variations among these speaker’s foci illustrate that the priority and specific face of freedoms were likely to be different for people situated in different times and places. Propositionally stated, though the president may have been completely sincere in his belief that he was defending his actions based on what should be a universally appealing norm—freedom—his defense of war was premisedPage 170 → on something different and lesser. Instead of honoring the core freedom requisite to international interaction—the right of all people to govern themselves according to their own visions and values82—the president’s rhetoric asserted the right of the United States to fight to instantiate particular versions of freedoms in the places of its own choosing. Such a rhetoric was understandably resonant for an angry America—it made the battle feel righteous. However, it was unlikely to be resonant for others, and so it could not provide a compelling global basis for the violent and massive actions against other states that the president projected. There was a globally shareable normative warrant available that the president might have used. In response to the violence inflicted by al-Qaeda, a cautious president might have wished to point to a fundamental principle of nonviolence, with a clause for self-defense.83 Killing “civilians” who do not present an imminent threat to you is globally understood as murder, and probably the attacks of 9/11 would have been relatively easy to represent as a violation of generally endorsed norms of human behavior. As chapter 4 detailed, most nations responded with sympathy to the United States because that normative warrant of peaceful interaction had been violated. Even the left-leaning critics of the president generally conceded that to the extent that bin Laden had been wrong, it was precisely because he violated this norm. Unfortunately, even had Bush’s anger been scalable to the more modest goal of self-defense, global conditions blocked a use of this adjudicatory norm. The president could not promise to try Osama bin Laden and the others responsible for the attacks and thereby prevent and deter their future aggressions, because the world had no police authority that could apprehend bin Laden or other responsible parties, and Afghanistan had granted them de facto asylum. In the absence of a shared mechanism for providing defense against non-state actors sheltered by nation-states, to apprehend the perpetrators of past and planned attacks required the articulation of a now infamous doctrine of preemptive war. Extensive commentary has been written about the wrongness of the doctrine of preemptive war that Bush articulated as a cold, cruel necessity of a new world order.84 Such ethical guides provide crucial background to the present pragmatic task of attending to the strategic success or failure of the president’s circulation of that doctrine. The president’s Ultimatum to Iraq, where he articulated the doctrine publically, imagined (1) an essentially democratic and peaceful people governed by an evil dictator, (2) the Page 171 →potential for nations of the latter stripe to inflict harm around the globe not through conventional war but through sporadic and deadly attacks (like terrorists), (3) the existing international governance body’s recognition of the potential for harm by that government but inability to act. The president therefore (4) asserted the right of sovereign nations to defend themselves against such unpredictable threats, that is to act independently, to make war on other nations preemptively, rather than as a response to direct attack by those nations. Table 5.1 provides supporting evidence from the speech. With regard to these themes, the president’s portrait of Saddam Hussein was partially correct and partially errant.85 With regard to the potential for enemy regimes to use terrorist-like attacks, the president pointed to differences between war and globalized insurgencies, which many analysts have noted. Although there is not a simple discontinuity between “terrorism” then and now,86 in the “old” world order nation-states fought wars in which victory meant violently defeating or out-resourcing the military of an opposing state, an action that could effectively constrain that other state’s ability to inflict harm on one’s own populace. AlQaeda’s use of leveraged violence showed that the scale at which violence was now possible provided

ambitious agents with means to attack that were not based on balances of military power or control of territory. The historical means of preventing attacks from global enemies was the threat of counterattack, a process that unfolded in time. However, the leveraging of power also coincided with the possibility of concealing destructive power disproportionate to one’s community, and of deploying it rapidly, whether by small networks or nation-states. Counterattack was less a deterrent in these conditions. The president’s answer was to launch a preemptive war, asserting the right to try to eliminate all such weapons from any potential enemy’s hands. Such an extreme action was favored by the optimistic and absolutist dynamics of public anger, even though as a matter of global principle and practical constraints it is not achievable. Even within the United States itself, it has not proven possible to prevent an increase in the frequency of spectacle-oriented mass killings.87 Moreover, the contemporary fusion of “weaponry” with the technologies of daily life makes it impossible to identify a category of weaponry that uniquely would justify preemptive war. The only other option, an agenda to reduce all potential enemies to preindustrial status, not only contradicts the agenda of establishing free Page 173 →markets but arguably results in more terroristic violence, as the greatest increase in global terroristic violence was occurring in states that lacked stable governments.88 The patent impossibility of the president’s totalistic vision of the eradication of all potential enemies and weapons illustrates better than anything else the way in which the optimistic biases of anger enable the resonance of, and therefore the circulation of, doctrines that would otherwise appear outlandish on their face. Page 172 → Table 5.1. Bush’s War Rationale in the Iraqi Ultimatum of March 18, 2003 Theme “an essentially democratic and peaceful people”

Sample Statements “If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you.” “We will tear down the apparatus of terror and we will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free. In a free Iraq, there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near.” “The Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty. And when the dictator has departed, they can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation.”

“governed “This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq’s neighbors and by an evil against Iraq’s people.” dictator” “when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror” “The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now.” “potential for such nations to “The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with inflict harm the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of through thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.” terrorist-like attacks” “The terrorist threat to America and the world will be diminished the moment that Saddam Hussein is disarmed.”

“In one year, or five years, the power of Iraq to inflict harm on all free nations would be multiplied many times over. With these capabilities, Saddam Hussein and his terrorist allies could choose the moment of deadly conflict when they are strongest.” “Terrorists and terror states do not reveal these threats with fair notice, in formal declarations—and responding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not selfdefense, it is suicide.” “the existing international governance body’s “Yet, some permanent members of the Security Council have publicly announced they will recognition of veto any resolution that compels the disarmament of Iraq. These governments share our the potential assessment of the danger, but not our resolve to meet it.” for harm by that government but inability to act” “sovereign nations have “Before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger will be the right to removed.” defend “The United States of America has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own themselves national security.” against such “Free nations have a duty to defend our people by uniting against the violent.” unpredictable threats” “ad hoc international “Many nations, however, do have the resolve and fortitude to act against this threat to peace, coalition led and a broad coalition is now gathering to enforce the just demands of the world. The United by the U.S. Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities, so we will rise to ours.” must act” For the international community, the noticeable difference between the response to the war in Afghanistan and that in Iraq indicates that the preemptive doctrine was pivotal in separating world support from world alienation. While the war in Afghanistan was not enthusiastically supported even among US allies, it did receive substantially greater support than did the invasion of Iraq. Invading Afghanistan was at least understandable as necessary to preclude Osama bin Laden from further attacks and to bring him to justice.89 In Iraq, however, no identifiable agents had already inflicted harm on the United States. The case of Iraq rested on Bush’s argument about preemption of the possibility of the use of “weapons of mass destruction.” While the claim to have a right to invade others preemptively might seem desirable to the world’s most militaristically powerful nation, it was more likely to seem threatening to all others. It is not a shareable normative warrant, as it reduces not to normative criteria, but merely to the access to sufficient power to prevail. The president’s rhetoric provided some cover for the absence of a shareable criterion for preemptive war by constructing Saddam Hussein as an already culpable agent, thus again mixing the crime frame with the war frame. Although he depicted the Iraq invasion in terms of what Saddam Hussein or Hussein-associated terrorists might do, he also presented the invasion as a kind of punishment for what Saddam Hussein had already done. The angry desire for retribution (Osama bin Laden had not yet been “brought to justice”)90 could be at least partially sated through the punishment of another evil actor, Saddam Hussein. This substitution of emotional satisfactions provided further camouflage for the wildness of the optimism required to accept a vision in which the United States eliminated all possible weapons of mass destruction from all of its potential enemies around the world.

The president’s assertion of the normative right of a nation to take this impossible route was also given credibility by the lack of an effective international body for either “bringing to justice” individual terrorists after the Page 174 →fact or for controlling nation-states bent on the use of high-tech warfare on their peoples or on neighboring lands. Even if the president’s presentation of the state of the United Nations’ decisionmaking process was, to say the least, muddled, he was correct that the veto authority by a single nation on the UN Security Council was a roadblock to truly internationally based actions (among other issues for which some remedies are proposed in chapter 7). In the absence of an effective international governing body, what route did a nation have other than taking the execution of justice and the creation of security into its own hands? The president’s reliance on unshareable and obfuscated norms in his otherwise skillful rhetoric points, I suggest, not merely to his cravenness, or even solely to the character of anger, but also to the limiting conditions that shaped the responses available for an angry nation-state at the turn of the 21st century. Though the president’s actions might not have met the requirements of a consequence-oriented assessment, the lack of well-honed rational alternatives meant that the attraction of anger’s predispositional alignments—national anger requires war!—would meet little resistance among his countrypersons. The evidence suggests that the president’s efforts to circulate this angry vision indeed met with great success in the United States, even as it repelled other nations.

Subjective Experience: Turning Global Sorrow into American Anger The substantial available evidence indicates that Bush’s rhetoric between September 11, 2001 and the end of March 2003 successfully channeled the collective political emotion of “America” into anger,91 though the inaccuracies and normative limitations identified above made it subject to rapid erosion thereafter. Several dimensions of the polls are of interest for present purposes.92 A variety of polls showed substantially heightened support for the president himself as leader.93 The effectiveness of Bush’s early efforts at reassurance are particularly clear, as comparisons of confidence in the government to prevent further attacks in the United States peaked in the polls on the week of 9/11 (see table 5.2).94 Bolstering these national polls, a carefully designed and focused set of pre/post data by Roy Eidelson and Mary Plummer showed that Americans’ perceived sense of helplessness as a group also Page 175 →declined during this period.95 Although polls only imperfectly reflect the impact of a president’s speech, these data are consonant with the conclusion that Bush’s efforts to build optimism through reassurance and a sense of solidarity were successful. This optimism was, according to the template of public anger, critical for channeling angry alignment with the president’s support for “war” as the nation’s focal action. Polls taken on September 11 already showed both that the public shared the president’s vision that the harm inflicted was warlike, and a predisposition for war as the action response. Gallup results from that early point showed that 86 percent would “describe these attacks as an act of war” and a CBS poll showed 60 percent endorsed the labeling of the attacks as “another Pearl Harbor.”96 Polls from October 2001 through March 2002 showed enormously high levels of public support for “military action” against terrorism, consistently at 89–91 percent.97 Similarly, high support was articulated for “military action against Afghanistan” (at 90% on October 7, 2001, and not declining below 86% in 2001 and 2002). Support for use of ground troops was somewhat lower (65–77%), but people endorsed the idea that military action was warranted “even if innocent people are killed” (again in the 65–71% range in 2001). More generally, 87–90 percent “approved” of the “way that George W. Bush is handling the campaign against terrorism.” As perhaps the greatest proof of the resonance of his proposed actions, 78–87 percent approved of taking actions against additional nations throughout 2001 and 2002. The president’s sweeping linkage of the small terrorist network with an unspecified list of nation-states seems to have resonated with most Americans. Additional support for the resonance of the president’s rhetoric is available in the careful analysis by Anthony DiMaggio of the public response to the September 20 speech. Although DiMaggio did not attend to the Page 176 →specific components of the president’s angry rhetoric, he used the available polls to demonstrate an impressively strong alignment with the president’s speech: “Of those who followed the speech, 81 percent

reacted very favorably, with another 14 percent responding somewhat favorably. Just 3 percent responded in a neutral, somewhat unfavorable, or very unfavorable way.”98 Table 5.2. Americans’ Confidence in the Government to Prevent Further Attacks “Great Deal” of Confidence “A Good Amount” of Confidence Pre-9/11 (6/1997) Immediate to President’s Addresses 9/11/2001 9/25/2001

10%

26%

35% 35%

31% 31%

Subsequent (3/2002)

18%

38%

Note: All data in this table is summarized from Huddy et al., “Reactions to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.” Evidence for alignment with other specific elements of the president’s appraisal cues for anger is less clear. I could find no direct polls measuring public acceptance of Bush’s conception of “freedom.” One might, however, interpret the many polls that showed increased public willingness to sacrifice civil liberties immediately after 9/11 (as compared to previously or later) as consonant with the president’s focus on a limited script of “freedoms,” though as many commentators have pointed out, respondents were most likely to accept these trade-offs with other people’s civil liberties rather than their own, and this was a short-lived effect.99 The polls are difficult to interpret in terms of public alignment with or rejection of the president’s depiction of Islam. Bush’s framing of the relationship of “Muslims” to other Americans was complex. They are not equivalent to “the enemy,” and they are to be included, but they aren’t Christian like traditional Americans. By and large, the public was more likely to see the war in Muslim vs. Christian terms than the president’s overt advocacy supported, but Muslims within America were seen to have the rights of Americans, although by sometimes slim majorities. To illustrate the complexity of American responses, a question that focused on Muslims who were not also Americans brought widespread rejection of affiliation with “Muslims”; responses to the question “do you think the U.S. (United States) immigration laws should be tightened to restrict the number of immigrants from Arab or Muslim countries into the United States?” produced 83 percent agreement in 2001, declining somewhat, but not overwhelmingly, in 2002 to 76 percent. On another question that focused on Muslims outside the United States, the public seemed to disagree with the president’s depiction of Muslims as not the enemy; 71 percent (2001) agreed that “the Muslim world considers itself at war with the U.S.” (60% in 2002). In contrast, questions that focused on Muslims inside the United States tended to produce answers indicating consonance with the president’s portrait of Muslims as part of the American “we.” For example, a majority indicated that “[t]reating Muslims differently violates their free exercise [of religion] rights” (50% in 2001 and 52% in 2002).100 Most of Page 177 →those polled also agreed that it was either “very likely” (46%) or “somewhat likely” (41%) that “Arab-Americans, Muslims and immigrants from the Middle East are being singled out unfairly by people in this country.” A majority also agreed with the president’s portrayal of “mainstream Islam” as a “peaceful religion” (57%, asked in January 2002). Most of the questions about Muslims in America included high levels of uncertainty: “don’t know” or “unable to rate.” That ambiguity also appears consonant with the president’s placement of Muslims as “not them” but “not exactly us” either. Although the central focus of this analysis has been on the president’s rhetoric immediately after 9/11, a broad assessment should take account of the relatively short lifespan of the highly favorable response. Although the president was reelected, support for the actions his vision had set in motion eroded within four years.101 The president’s approval ratings had spiked to 90 percent shortly after the attacks. By 2004 they had dropped to

around 50 percent, and the average for his second term was only 37 percent.102 By 2005, the majority of Americans concluded that the war in Iraq had been a “mistake” and they withdrew their support for the president.103 One might surmise that the costs of the actions embedded in the president’s vision caused an erosion of the optimism that sustained the vision. Or one might argue that the lack of internationally resonant warrants caused global support for the US actions to erode, which raised the consequences of those actions. Regardless of the path by which one accounts for the decline, the president’s vision did not have staying power. An even more rapid decline of support is evident in America’s potential global partners. Around the world, the view of the United States among both prior allies and others became less positive in the period after 9/11 according to expert analysis of the available polls,104 and specific data in both Pew and Gallup polls. Although in the week after the attacks world leaders expressed their sympathies, and people in some nations attended events in support, this sympathetic response was short-lived. Perhaps one might well have expected polarizing effects to decrease America’s favorability among nations with which the United States had an existing adversarial relationship (e.g., North Korea and Iraq), but one would not have expected allies to decrease their favorability as a result of the attacks. The polling data is not precise enough to allow tracing the decline to particular elements of the president’s suite of discourse and discursively framed actions, but the turn away from the United States is so substantial among so many nations (though not quite all) that the president’s vision Page 178 →and the actions it entailed are surely a substantial cause.105 Tables 5.3 and 5.4 give some examples from the Pew and Gallup surveys (note that Pew reports favorable ratings and Gallup reports unfavorable ratings). With regard to Canada and Europe, a telling finding was that a majority supported “the US war on terrorism” in 2001, but only Germany indicated that “US foreign policy considers others.” Not surprisingly, nations such as Jordan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Turkey did not support the US-led war on terrorism.106 If President Bush thought he was promoting American actions as a beacon of freedom, the available evidence indicates that the rest of the world did not find this leadership compelling.

Summary and Implications In response to the 9/11 attacks, President Bush’s rhetoric rallied the American public to angry retaliation and much more. The analysis has tried to be fair to the American president, situating his rhetoric within four factors Page 179 →that constrained his options: the demands of human shock and grief, the dynamics and legacy of nationalism, the limits of the international community’s ability to control international violence, and the real threat posed by the modern capacity for highly leveraged violence. Table 5.3. Polling Data Reported by Pew on Favorable View of US by Various National Populations Before and After 9/11 1999–2000 mid-2002 March 2003 Britain 83% 75% 48% France 62% 63% 31% Germany 78% 61% 25% Italy 75% 70% 34% Poland 86% 79% 50% Russia 37% 61% 28% Turkey 52% 30% 12% Table 5.4. Gallup Poll Reports on Unfavorable Ratings of US by Muslim Nations

Iran

2001 2005 63% 52%

Jordan

62% 65%

Lebanon Morocco Pakistan Saudi Arabia

40% 41% 69% 64%

Turkey

33% 62%

42% 49% 65% 79%

Even accounting for those factors, the analysis has suggested that the American president’s rhetoric was shaped consequentially and undesirably by the dynamics of anger. The president’s economic and foreign policy doctrines might have been what prevented him from reacting to the shocking attack of 9/11 with a global Marshall Plan or by the dismantling of the free market system, but it was the cognitively narrow, wildly optimistic, and attack-oriented dynamics of anger that enabled him to rally Americans around the quixotic goals of rooting out all terrorists and every threat, everywhere. The president transformed public shock and sorrow into anger. In the process, he amplified the already consequential harm experienced by Americans to make righteous the indefensible normative doctrine that America’s status as a “beacon of freedom” justified its preemptive invasion of other sovereign nations. Nonetheless, anger was a poorer fit for the president’s goals and for some aspects of his ideology than it was for bin Laden. Osama bin Laden’s ideology of righteous dominance was thoroughgoing and therefore fully consonant with the dynamics of anger. The match resonated especially well with the would-be fighter/leaders bin Laden sought to recruit. In President Bush’s case, in the most charitable view, his goals required the broadening to a global “we” who shared freedom, but Bush’s angry cognitive fallback was to an American “we” whose vision of leadership involved violent imposition rather than freedom-oriented alliance. Even in the less charitable view, which sees the president’s call for global freedom as merely a cover for Bush’s true promotion of elite American freedom of enterprise, the empirical facts validated what a doctrinal assessment would have predicted. Even mighty America could not sustain the vision anger encouraged: an unlimited series of wars against terrorists in every nation where some resistance to American hegemony might abide. Those who endorse President Bush’s “preemptive war” doctrine on the grounds that global politics necessarily reduces to military might fail to understand that human symbolic action does not merely reflect existing material conditions, but also creates options. The United States as a leader seeking to dictate to the world was not materially powerful enough to enforce its will on the diverse peoples of the Middle East. But “United States Page 180 →as a dictator to the world” was only one symbolic choice among other feasible options. While military might deployed toward grabbing what an already formulated “we” can grab is always a temptation, humans are subject to many other temptations, including the formation of a global polity that really might protect global safety and freedom. Realpolitik should take account of the full range of the “real” for human beings in order to deserve such a name. Taking account of this broader scope of human realities, international politics thus might be redefined as the construction of better temptations. Angry public rhetoric is illsuited for building such temptations. On the other side, some who have criticized the Bush doctrine of preemptive war because it mandates a nonshareable understanding of freedom have overgeneralized their objection. Noting the way in which claims to universal values such as freedom have been used by this president and many others to forward the interests of the world’s few, some critics of imperialism have rejected the values of freedom and democracy.107 They have drawn a harmfully wrong conclusion—that the values are “only” American. Such a conclusion is equally the product of anger’s binarizing trajectories, though here the “we” is a set of righteous resisters to the status quo and any State. As chapter 6 will illustrate, such anger-saturated claims are rarely accompanied by an alternative slate of values that can be enacted and promoted as such. As a result, unintended and unsavory values are given free rein. If humans are necessarily those who cohere their social structures through symbolic action, the absence of any alternative visions for co-orienting humans toward one anothers’ well-being favors, by default, dictatorial regimes that exercise their power through force or through skillful deployment of human

emotions toward skewed norms.108 The analysis of President Bush’s rhetoric above showed that specific global conditions, combined with the dynamics of shared public anger, reinforced visions that forwarded “freedom” in ways that were both normatively illegitimate and practically ineffective. Rather than disavowing freedom (and thereby, in effect if not intent, joining the “realpolitik” crowd), the desirable option is to work to change the conditions that produce a skewing of freedom’s articulations. If my account of anger is correct, this necessarily requires the creation of global forums with participants who bring their own and multiple priorities and visions for freedom and other values to bear in discussing actions that they must recognize as affecting others as well as themselves. This seems to be the minimal basis for buildingPage 181 → shared normative warrants. If violence or interestskewed universals are not to govern global relations, then the only material option is for people around the globe to affiliate with each other to some degree to engage and to recognize that some of their actions have effects upon others that must be accounted for. Such global discursive interactions should not be held to a Habermasian ideal of “rational” civility: we need not give up clashing, even competing, identities.109 Such activities do not require forsaking anger, but they require anger directed at correction rather than at extermination of the other, anger that is more like in-group anger than out-group anger. President Bush thought his attacks in the Mideast would produce a “fall of the Wall” kind of experience, because he saw humans as “naturally” freedom-seeking, but merely controlled by evil dictators. Remove the dictator, and the people will be free. But democracy is not a natural condition that exists wherever counterforces of evil are absent. Democracy is produced by specific kinds of work—rehearsal and envisioning according to values that are co-created.110 President Bush was wrong to think that “shock and awe” would be any more effective than napalm for enabling others to construct their lives together with greater freedoms. The continuing appeal of violent courses of action in the face of violence’s failures is a testimony to the power of the channels of anger to guide human collective action. Though anger is not the whole story, it adds the requisite enabling of collective power to other factors such as self-interest. Anger escalates far more than it innovates. Its dangerous fusion of righteous normative appeal and self-interest is nonetheless a challenge we cannot simply dodge by appeals to reasonableness or abstract goodness. The motivating self-interest of anger is critical because it provides the impetus to hold each other accountable. Instead, to steer anger productively in a global context requires constituting felt affiliations that cut across old lines. One might have hoped that cosmopolitan intellectuals would have offered such affect-expanding rhetorics to the world in the aftermath of 9 /11, but they too had their horizons limited by the anger of the moment.

Page 182 → Page 183 →

Chapter 6 Susan Sontag’s Angry “Howl” In the first few weeks after 9/11, American elected officials of both major political parties stood beside President Bush and supported his policy agenda with almost no dissent.1 The skill of the president’s rhetorical team in crafting a compelling version of the anger script surely accounts in substantial part for this near-unanimity. But if the power of language for humanity lies largely in discourse’s capacity to construct novel options, then accounting for the success of any particular script also requires comparing it to the other available options. The primary alternative rhetoric calling for Americans to rally on normative grounds in response to the events of 9/11 came from public intellectuals on the nation’s radical political left, most notably Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag.2 Left-leaning individuals including Robert Jensen and Ward Churchill, who had less public recognition at the time, were able to offer similar versions of this alternative rhetoric in letters published in newspapers or on less prominent websites.3 The claim that these statements cohere as a set rests on a different basis from the cases of bin Laden and Bush. Their status as leaders of evidently pivotal organizations made it relatively straightforward to isolate a particular corpus of rhetoric that circulated as a set because it circulated in their name (whatever the complexities of staff writers and translations). In the present chapter, the analysis grew from the identification of a set of highly similar rhetorics toward the discovery of an identity that might be said to link the authors of the statements. It initially seemed that the group might share a social history (i.e., the “postbeat” generation, a set of cosmopolitan “thinkers and artists who commingle but are alone together”).4 Upon investigation there turned out to be Page 184 →too much diversity among the ages and experiences of the authors to warrant such a grounding. Sontag and Chomsky were born within seven years of each other, but Jensen and Churchill were not. Sontag and Chomsky were politically radicalized by the Vietnam War, but the younger advocates seem to have been more motivated by issues of gender or race. Chomsky, Jensen, and Churchill were university professors, but Sontag usually operated as an independent writer and director. The advocates tended to hail from areas of specialization that were closely related to communication, but linguistics, journalism, ethnic studies, and popular culture hardly form a monolith. Jensen claims to be a radical Christian, Sontag has set aside a Jewish heritage, and Chomsky is a deliberately tolerant agnostic or atheist. Sontag and Chomsky were well traveled, and in Sontag’s case her adoption of Paris as a home of the heart seems clearly to have been central to the sense of herself as a “foreigner.”5 But, again, Jensen’s rhetoric—though it shares a critique of America—does not seem to have grown from extensive experience as an expatriate. The only identifiable substantive factor that these advocates seem to have shared was a well-elaborated set of beliefs: that the United States, typically seen as the current leader of an entity of longer duration—“the West”—was a (neo)imperialist power that routinely employed massive and unjustifiable violence and economic might to control the rest of the world for its own substantial gain, doing so at extreme costs to all others. The alternatives these advocates had previously supported in their many writings varied in some ways, but they all promoted a vision of human relations that held people around the world to be as deserving of care, justice, and good lives as the members of the nation-state they inhabited. Many of my readers will share this ideology to some degree, and many academic engagements with 9/11 have defended this perspective by amassing facts to support it or by elaborating principles of justice or care.6 Defending that vision in further academic detail, however, is not the sole productive means for advancing it. This chapter argues that, even if you share that ideology, and you believe that avoiding terrorism would have been best accomplished by ending economic, cultural, or military imperialism by the United States, the rhetorical options crafted by these cosmopolitan advocates were seriously deficient for rallying Americans to those goals. Guided as it was by the proclivities set in motion by their anger, their rhetoric failed to articulate feasible alternative actions, and they did not offer models for global reaffiliation in the wake of the tragedy. Moreover, Page 185 →unlike

President Bush, they did not adapt their rhetorics to the intense climate of public feelings. Given that they disparaged the American public and attacked the American government, it is not surprising that their statements failed to rally American majorities to their side, but instead were ignored or rejected by the general public and media pundits, sometimes vociferously. This chapter draws examples to support these claims from the statements of Chomsky and Jensen—as well as from a later and less angry but ideologically similar interview by Edward Said that offers something of a contrast. These examples show that the persuasive deficiencies in these rhetorics were caused not by the idiosyncrasies of the individuals, but rather by the shared force of anger operating within an ideology quite different from those of Osama bin Laden or President Bush. Nonetheless, to provide a clear parallel with those other cases, the focus of this chapter is on Sontag’s essay published in the New Yorker of September 24, 2001. Her essay repays this focal attention because Sontag’s later reflections on and revisions of the statement provide a window that gives greater depth to the analysis, because Sontag was the most broadly recognizable of these figures, and because Sontag’s essay gained the greatest public circulation. At the very least, Sontag’s visibility was crucial to the relatively broad public hearing that her statement gained. Of the authors responding to 9/11 from this ideological orientation, only Chomsky was in Sontag’s league with regard to public visibility. Both Chomsky and Sontag were preeminent examples of the “public intellectual” in America. Both had gained the “public” portion of this status from their political activism in opposition to the Vietnam War. Before that, Sontag had been largely oblivious to international politics.7 Like many other intellectuals, however, the war focused her attention not only on the international realm, but on questions of justice, power, and oppression.8 From that era, both Chomsky and Sontag engaged in substantial arguments against “establishments” of various characteristics. Chomsky focused more on media and economic systems. Sontag tended more often to address issues of culture and gender, but she also tried to rally the world against the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and she spoke out against Israeli expansionism.9 The public visibility gained by their radical activism came with a cost because it positioned them in a contradictory relationship with the American majority public. If American government and American culture were neocolonialist, racist, sexist, and inegalitarian, and if AmericanPage 186 → government and culture were at all the product of the democratic preferences of the American majority, then in attacking American policy and culture, one was also implicitly attacking the very people one wished to convince to overturn that government and change that culture. Like many advocates of their era, Chomsky resolved this tension by blaming the media, which he argued was almost completely beholden to economic elites. Chomsky thoroughly developed arguments that Americans have been kept in ignorance of the truth by the deliberate machinations of the propaganda apparatus that masquerades as news and entertainment. This position allows critics to position themselves as unveiling the cover-ups of the media, without blaming the American public for their ignorance. It is compatible with a presumption that when the public becomes informed, they will act justly. Although Sontag also deployed this option at times, it was less sufficient due to her particular role as a media “celebrity.”10 As a well-published critic of popular and high culture and someone who defended the value of a hierarchy of standards, her projected audience was bifurcated. She directed her novels and films to an aesthetic elite and did not respect the average person’s judgment on those creative products. Meanwhile, she framed her critical essays as efforts to educate the reading public about culture. Both projections implied that the broad public was ignorant, and Sontag did not routinely presume that they were educable or morally oriented. She was not timid about castigating the American public vociferously and directly.11 Although Sontag’s role as a cultural critic thus separated her from the American public in ways that would prove problematic in her political address to that public, the cultural focus of her status as “intellectual” gave her tremendous advantages over Chomsky with regard to visibility. Chomsky’s credentials derived from his position as a prominent linguist. While his theory of transformational grammar gained some public coverage in the high-brow public press, it was hardly a subject about which many people outside of the academic field of linguistics would give great attention. In contrast, Sontag’s credibility as an intellectual derived from her attention to a topic—popular culture—that gave her essays a broader popular reach. To some substantial

degree, as Daniel Schreiber notes, her focus on culture enabled her to “bridge the gap between egghead and middle-class cultures.”12 She appeared in “middle-brow” sources such as Vogue and in ads for Absolut Vodka.13 Page 187 →More than Chomsky, Sontag’s need to tack through the changing terrain of American popular culture in a vibrant period of innovation made her a figure who “embodied the contradictions of her time.”14 For example, in overt opposition to poststructuralist perspectives, Sontag defended the concepts of “truth” and “beauty,” but in championing the primacy of the sensuous over what the critical establishment had understood as “meaning” she found common ground with Jacques Derrida “against interpretation.”15 Because of her success in embodying those contradictions, Sontag “made herself a cynosure of contemporary culture,”16 and became “the most famous public intellectual of the late twentieth century.”17 Of course, Sontag’s “star quality” came in some substantial part from her gift for aphoristic writing, a talent that Chomsky did not manifest to the same degree.18 Her star quality and accessible, terse, intense style meant not only that Sontag was invited to place her immediate reaction to 9/11 in a relatively high profile venue—the New Yorker of September 24—but also that it would subsequently gain the greatest circulation of any of the intellectuals’ angry calls to judge US actions as violations of normative principles.19 The wide circulation of Sontag’s statement emphasizes that public judgment, not mere circulation, is the telos of angry public rhetoric. On that ground, Sontag’s rhetoric was no success. As David Talbot put it, the essay “created the biggest uproar of her life.”20 The “famous four paragraphs” as David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, would dub them, would unleash what The Nation called “a torrent of right-wing abuse.”21 Andrew Sullivan at the Dish called her a pretentious buffoon, and others labeled the statement disgusting (Charles Krauthammer), obscene (Ralph De Toledano), or sleaze (Andrew Field).22 Perhaps the most vivid attack on her short essay appeared in the New York Post: “I wanted to walk barefoot on broken glass across the Brooklyn Bridge, up to that despicable woman’s apartment, grab her by the neck, drag her down to ground zero and force her to say that to the firefighters.”23 Others, including a letter writer to the Washington Times, compared her statement to bin Laden’s rhetoric: “That kind of erratic intellectual enlightenment is only a stone’s throw away from what someone like Osama bin Laden would say.”24 As the section on subjective reactions will show, the responses of the right-wing pundits may have been more colorful than those of the general public, but they otherwise reflected the widespread rejection of the rallying call offered by Sontag and her co-advocates. It is Page 188 →worth exploring the ways in which the anger script they crafted might have generated that reaction.

Sontag’s Purposes and Audiences Information about Sontag’s purpose and audiences are available because she publicly reflected on the essay, articulating revisions of her position in the next week after its publication.25 In later attempting to defend the New Yorker statement, she explained in an interview published in Salon on October 16 that “what I wrote was a howl of dismay at all the nonsense that I was hearing.”26 To describe one’s communication as a howl connotes a strong expressive component,27 but additionally, howling seems to assume a preexisting pack. The howl of one wolf or coyote is contagious to those similarly attuned, merely through its familiarity and intense manifestation. Sontag indicated that what had led to her howl was the thought that “вЂ[u]h-oh, here comes a sort of revival of Cold War rhetoric and something utterly sanctimonious that is going to make it very hard for us to figure out how best to deal with this.’” The rest of the interview confirms that Sontag was primarily focused on avoiding a warlike response to the attacks, as she emphasized, “the Gulf War revisited is not the way to fight this enemy.”28 If Sontag’s primary goal was to get the American public to howl with her against a war, she appears to have been stunningly tone deaf to her audience. She insisted that her statement had been “mild” and that she hadn’t thought “for a moment my essay was radical or even particularly dissenting. It seemed very

common sense. I have been amazed by the ferocity of how I’ve been attacked.”29 Other left intellectuals similarly reflected surprise at the intense hostility of the public opposition to their statements.30 Exploring the appraisal cues these rhetors offered in their effort to rally the public to their visions may help explain the role of anger in the gap between expectations and responses.

Sontag’s Depictions of Opponents and Affiliates Anger must have its enemy, but as was the case for Bush and bin Laden, that enemy does not have to be singular or simple. Sontag’s rhetoric highlightedPage 189 → three primary categories of antagonists: American government officials, mass media, and the American public. The guilty parties in the government included “a wide spectrum of public figures,” who were depicted with more and less specificity as including the president, intelligence agents, and military air crews. Significantly, Sontag did not explicitly portray the terrorists as enemies. Additionally, her portraits of positive affiliations were at most indirect. In the absence of depictions of these actors, and given her attacks on the American government and public, it is not surprising that most people appear to have rejected her call, and even interpreted her as aligning herself with the enemy. Sontag portrayed both the government of the United States and the media as guilty of maliciously motivated stupidity, and of failing to enlighten the public, whom she portrayed as ignorant and passive. As you read her statement (box 6.1), you will see that she portrayed “public figures and TV commentators” as malevolent agents due to their “self-righteous drivel and outright deception.” She castigated America’s intelligence agents for their “ineptitude.” Similarly, Sontag placed “our leaders,” including our “robotic president,” as agents from whom readers should dis-affiliate by depicting them as “manipulative” and ignorant. According to Daniel Lazare, the section of the essay comparing the courage of the terrorists to that of the agents of the United States produced the most inflammatory responses among Sontag’s critics.31 Paragraph 1 of the statement suggested that the US’s bomber crews were cowards, by comparison to the terrorists. These crews were not directly named. They were presented as metonymic instantiations of the nation itself, which was depicted as a bomber of others (“the ongoing American bombing of Iraq”). Sontag intensified this contrast by representing the United States as arrogant: “the world’s self-proclaimed superpower.” Although being a superpower can be perceived as positive or negative, describing this as “self-proclaimed” foregrounds arrogance. Sontag thereby denigrated the judgment, without denying its correctness. In the Salon interview, Sontag replied to her critics’ hostile denunciation of this comparison. Her replies indicate a gap between her underlying belief set and how anger had initially driven her to respond. Rather than admitting that her statement had been intemperate, however, her revision took the form of a denial that she had said what the critics had responded to. Thus, in response to those who had disparaged her statement on the grounds that she had claimed the attackers were courageous, she insisted, Page 190 →“No, I did not use the word вЂcourage’—I did use my words carefully. I said they were not to be called cowards.”32 Her original statement had, however, employed the term “courage.” To respond to the unacknowledged but more important point—that praising the enemy in contrast to one’s own military belied misplaced alliances—she merely extended briefly on her original statement’s parenthetical designation of “the matter of courage” as Page 191 →“a morally neutral virtue,” adding, “I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don’t consider it a moral virtue.”33 Whether courage and cowardice were in some technical sense “moral” virtues or some other kind of virtues, Sontag should hardly have expected her readers to see as affiliatively neutral a depiction of terrorists as “not cowards” in comparison to the US’s bomber crews. Box 6.1. Susan Sontag’s Statement in the New Yorker, September 24, 2001 The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the

acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards. Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy. Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy-which entails disagreement, which promotes candorhas been replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. “Our country is strong,” we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be. New Yorker, September 24, 2001, 32. Reprinted by Permission Susan Sontag/The New Yorker: Copyright Conde Nast (The Conde Nast Publications, Inc., 2001). Spurred by anger, the projected image that Sontag crafted for the reader to identify with was thus, as Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock indicated, an “atavistic . . . throwback” to her previous political writings:34 the projected reader who could affiliate with her vision was someone dis-affiliated not only from the American president but also from its media, military, and “alliances and actions.” Under any circumstances, this might have invited a reading of Sontag by most Americans as an enemy of the United States. Even some of her biographers have given that reading to Sontag’s statement.35 In the Salon interview, Sontag denied that she placed the United States as the culpable party, insisting, “no, I don’t think we have brought this upon ourselves, which is of course a view that has been attributed to me.” However, her “angry polemic” had said that the attacks were: “undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.”36 While one might argue that these two statements are not technically identical—it is possible to separate statements of cause and effect from blame, or to identify a history of interactions that distribute blame and cause in something other than the simplistic patterns of an angernarrative—Sontag does not offer such a rationale. The simplest explanation is that Sontag’s original statement was driven by anger’s activation of her prior indictment of US foreign policy, and other sentiments later allowed her to adapt her position more precisely to the present context. Evidence for the change in sentiment will be offered shortly. But further evidence of anger’s activation of old stereotypes is available in one of the most oft-kilter moments in the statement. Sontag’s anger explicitly called to the fore older battles between the affiliates of left-leaning intellectuals and the US government. The penultimate paragraph of her statement emotionally heightened the pitch of her indictment of America’s leadership by suggesting that they were worse than a Soviet Communist Party

congress with regard to their failure to argue about the events. Although the phrasing put Sontag, and thus those who would affiliate with her, above both the Soviets and the Americans, Page 192 →the deprecation of Americans by contrasting them to Soviets was bound to call up old hostilities and old alliance structures. The historical association of leftists with the Soviets and against the “capitalist” United States would probably on its own have alienated many members of the American public from the affiliative alignments Sontag was offering.37 It might have been necessary for Sontag to indict actions and policies of the US government in order to achieve her objectives, but it was anger—not the demands of her goals or situation—that prompted the fallback to the contrast with the Soviet Union, which no longer existed, but which had been a pivotal agent in the left’s affiliative structure during much of Sontag’s career. Anger’s reliance on past stereotypes and its proclivities for enhancing binaries encouraged these articulations, which undermined the likelihood that any readers who weren’t already firmly aligned with left intellectuals would join her affiliations. Sontag’s rhetoric also alienated her audience by insulting them. Sontag portrayed the public as dumb and passive. She described them as ignorant of basic facts (such as the American bombing of Iraq). She indicated that they were being “infantilized.” Their stupidity was tied to the assumption that they were passive dupes of the media or government, rather than making active choices: “they are not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality.” This further implied that if the public supported their government, it must be because they could only respond to what they were fed. Unlike Sontag (and her projected non-“American”, ideal reader), they couldn’t be expected to take a burden of reality on their own. Sontag’s depiction of the antagonists thus not only denied affiliation with American leaders but also as a member of the American public. One can imagine a rhetoric that attacks the perpetrators of evil American foreign policies and urges the reader—as a member of the public—to choose different leaders. But this is not how Sontag placed the characters in her drama. Rather than urging Americans or global publics to join her, the narrowing cognitive frameworks of anger led her to speak to her pack—other intellectuals who could be presumed to know what the public did not know, to be smart and active, unlike the public, and already aligned against the government and media they also disparaged. Sontag spoke about the public, rather than with the public. Even absent the emotional context of grief, fear, and anger, Sontag should not have expected the majority of the American public to engage a reading generous enough to adopt the affiliative set she depicted. In such Page 193 →an emotional context, her treatment of the public emotions of the moment was at best insensitive and at worst further deprecated the audience. Sontag insisted in the follow-up interview that she was “genuinely and profoundly, exactly like everyone else, really moved, really wounded and really in mourning.” But her original statement treated grief in a cursory and dismissive fashion. The statement, “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together,” pays insufficient attention to the depth of feelings and their implications. Indeed, Sontag also dismissed as “grief management” the American president’s sensitive response to these emotions. Unlike the president, who channeled grief to fuel shared anger against the enemy, Sontag’s statement does not honor grief, or work to transform it, but rather moves immediately to her howl at American public officials and the public. Distance—both immediate and longer term—may have made Sontag tone deaf to the demands of most readers’ grief. In the essay “A Few Weeks After,” she cited the effects of distance (she had been in Berlin during the attacks) in leading her to produce what she described as “a diatribe.”38 Upon her return to New York, she noted that confronting “the reality of the devastation, and the immensity of the loss of life, made my initial focus on the rhetoric surrounding the event seem less relevant.”39 Sontag’s initial response, written at a distance from this devastation and from other New Yorkers, was driven by a different global context. Sontag described to David Talbot the touchstone for the anger that drove her statement: “As I was writing my essay for the New Yorker, I became very angry. And I was thinking about the dumping of napalm upon thousands

of retreating Iraqi soldiers on the Basra Road, at the end of the Gulf War—a slaughter which one U.S. general described as вЂa turkey shoot’.” The context to which Sontag’s New Yorker statement responded was thus displaced in time and different from those to whom she was writing. Her anger was shaped not by affiliation with Americans, but rather by long-standing dramatis personae in her repertoire regarding her own engagements with the Middle East. In the absence of any condemnation of the terrorists, in the presence of extensive condemnation of all identified affiliates of the United States (from president to public to press), with the drive-by deprecation of the United States in comparison to the Soviet Union, and with only an indirect hint that one should affiliate with the shadowy depiction of the smart, argumentative (left?), it should not be surprising that readers in the Page 194 →United States responded to Sontag not as their affiliate, but as an affiliate of Osama bin Laden. Sontag expressed surprise that people would read her essay in this way. In the Salon interview, she admitted, “I’m still so stunned by the way my remarks were viewed.” In the face of that rejection, she began the work of offering an alternative structure of alliances, insisting that bin Laden and the Taliban were not her allies: “I’m not against fighting this enemy—it is an enemy and I’m not a pacifist.” She gave extensive grounds for rejecting the terrorists and the Taliban based in secularity and feminism, describing the attackers as people with whom one could not compromise, and who viewed the “U.S. as a secular, sinful society that must be humbled, and this has nothing to do with any particular aspect of American policy.” She castigated their treatment of women at some length, reaffirming that “[a]s a secular person, and as a woman, I’ve always been appalled by the Taliban regime and would dearly like to see them toppled.” Her attention-getting statement in the New Yorker had said none of this. The quick, angry statement reflected instead the optimistic bias of anger: People will agree with me! When that optimism was crushed by the public’s repudiation of her call, Sontag reassessed her rhetoric. She began to rearticulate the affiliations in the situation, rather than merely autonomically producing the stored characters from her previous rhetorical efforts. In some cases, merely insisting that one’s compatriots reorient their affiliations rather than reorienting one’s own might be appropriate. Angry genres such as the jeremiad can be successfully used toward such ends.40 But the Salon interview denies that was Sontag’s intent. Understanding anger as a biosymbolic phenomenon that heightens existing stereotypes and closes off novel thinking explains why Sontag’s initial response was not the one that she soon indicated that she believed in. In more reflective moments, Sontag realized that her older affiliative patterns were insufficient to the moment. But to craft a call to normative judgment through righteous anger was to foreclose exploration of the difficult questions about whom one might affiliate with and how in a situation perceived as involving one party (an American-led coalition) that had dumped napalm on another party (Iraqi soldiers) who had invaded another country (Kuwait) and participated in Saddam Hussein’s own list of atrocities, and where others (bin Laden) threatened all of the above. In such a situation, normative violations abound and it is easy to become angry, but the flash of anger encouragesPage 195 → bad answers to the pivotal questions for building futures: With whom do you affiliate, and how? Sontag’s first anger-induced reaction—to articulate a pattern of affiliations that placed smart people against the American public and their leaders—was presented in even more intense form in statements from other left intellectuals. Noam Chomsky’s response on September 12 explicitly portrayed the US’s actions as worse than those of the terrorists: “In terms of number of victims they do not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext.В .В .В . Not to speak of much worse cases, which easily come to mind.”41 Like Sontag, Chomsky also portrayed the public as a feeble group who would be easily cowed: “вЂDefense’ is a thin cover for plans for militarization of space, and with good PR, even the flimsiest arguments will carry some weight among a frightened public.” Similarly, in a letter to the Houston Chronicle, professor of communication studies Robert Jensen joined the small chorus denouncing the past actions of the United States, declaring: But this act was no more despicable as [sic] the massive acts of terrorism—the deliberate killing of

civilians for political purposes—that the U.S. government has committed during my lifetime. For more than five decades throughout the Third World, the United States has deliberately targeted civilians or engaged in violence so indiscriminate that there is no other way to understand it except as terrorism.42

Jensen also explicitly separated himself from the public, writing in his third sentence that “as I listened to people around me talk, I realized the anger and fear I felt were very different, for my primary anger is directed at the leaders of this country.” To affiliate with Jensen would therefore not be to join a righteous public, but to repudiate your ties with other Americans and their leaders. Less angry rhetorics found space to articulate explicitly an alternative vision of global affiliation. The “Diverse Coalition’s” statement, which was the least angry-toned of the publically visible statements, insisted: We note that although the terrorist acts of September 11 were aimed at the United States, citizens of over 50 nations are counted among Page 196 →the victims. The carnage of terrorism knows no borders. Our best chance for preventing such devastating acts of terror is to act decisively and cooperatively as part of a community of nations.43 While such efforts were inevitably too terse to be effective or ideologically sufficient, they pointed toward an option that was arguably appropriate to the situation and which gave a basis for a broadened affiliation that also respected the grief of the moment. In the crucial moment, Sontag failed to offer her audience any constructive, collective identity. The only people who were offered a tenable position of affiliation with Sontag were those already placed at alienated locales (the academy and the cosmopolitan scene). This anger might have been compelling—even pleasurable—to those already alienated from the United States, but it was not well crafted to encourage any new adherents to join in this alienation, let alone to transcend it. The alienation was also evident in the absence of sufficient, shareable norms, which inhibited the construction of any compelling visions for collective action.

Harms, Norms, and (In)Action As a group, the responses of American left intellectuals to the attacks on 9/11 valorized understanding as the key social norm undergirding their call for public anger, and they rejected the actions they anticipated that the United States might take, but offered no concrete alternatives. The demands of narrative coherence further led the statements to depict the harms represented by the attack ambiguously. Sontag’s statement was especially weak in the latter regard. She described the harm committed by the attacks solely as “a monstrous dose of reality.” She was virtually alone in the extent of this omission, as Jensen at least directly referenced the “deaths of thousands” and the “Diverse Coalition” statement called them “unspeakable acts of brutality” and “carnage.”44 Edward Said provided the longest treatment, dedicating a full first paragraph to a characterization of these events, but that treatment was oddly abstract. Chomsky opened by recognizing the attacks as “major atrocities,” though he immediately undercut that representation with the claim that they were less atrocious than atrocities committed by the United States. These constrained depictions of the injuries inflicted by the attacks Page 197 →might seem out of proportion to the experience as it had unfolded, not only on the day of the attacks (as described above by Thomas Goodnight), but also in light of the sustained replay of the dramatic visuals (which many commentators have treated as forceful causal loci of their own).45 Angry narratives demand, however, that depictions of harm cohere with the enemies and norms in the drama rather than being grounded primarily in faithful descriptions of events or experiences. Given that these intellectuals’ accounts portrayed the attacks as caused by the previous bad actions of the United States or its leaders, the central harm to be corrected was the publics’ and leaderships’ stipulated lack of knowledge and understanding of those bad actions by the United States. Where Bush escalated the injuries inflicted on 9/11 to global freedom, Sontag and her ideological associates transformed the injuries into tokens of

ignorance that resulted from insufficient efforts at understanding. For Sontag, understanding was depicted as achievable through a mix of argument, knowledge acquisition, cognitive skill, and moral qualities of honesty or objectivity. Sontag explicitly valorized “disagreement,” “candor,” “reality,” “historical awareness,” and being “smart.” Stupidity, manipulation, unanimity, psychotherapy, and emotions (grieving) were by contrast, therefore, the offenses that violated these values. In her statement in the New Yorker, the violations were assigned to American figures, but not to bin Laden’s affiliates. In the Salon interview she undertook to even the score with a more thorough attack on al-Qaeda and the Taliban, whose religiosity especially appears to have violated Sontag’s normative vision of understanding. Sontag was not unique in identifying the central harm of the situation with the breach of understanding. Said’s interview in particular was replete with a call for understanding. However, some other responses emphasized additional norms as warrants for anger. Jensen foregrounded nonviolence. The short Peace and Justice statement not only emphasized justice and life but also called for freedom, civil liberties, and democracy. Civil liberties tended to be the most prominent in academic writings when these began to appear. Contrary to some portraits of the left as value-less, these voices all articulated social warrants based in value commitments, although the only explicitly articulated value in Sontag’s original statement could indeed be read either as a kind of anti- or meta-value: more understanding. It may not be surprising that normative warrants such as understanding or peace do not immediately call to mind active and specific concrete policies.Page 198 → It is in that sense predictable that these rhetorics were bereft of specific alternatives to the actions encouraged by either bin Laden or Bush. Sontag provided no clear indication of actions that might protect the public in the short term or punish the guilty. She also did not choose the course of pointing out that revenge might be impossible because those most directly responsible for the attacks were already dead. In both the original statement and in the subsequent interview, she rejected war as the appropriate action, but she offered nothing more effective for the short term. The original statement declared only that “a lot of thinking needs to be done.” In the follow-on interview, Sontag expanded on her treatment of appropriate actions. For the most part, she continued to emphasize the actions that she opposed. She insisted that “the Gulf War revisited is not the way to fight this enemy.” She also derided the delivery of humanitarian aid by the United States to Afghanistan as a charade. The interviewer pushed her to expand the alternatives she offered, and although she briefly explored several, she discarded each of the alternatives as soon as she entertained them. For example, she suggested making Afghanistan a dependency of Pakistan, but then dismissed that possibility because that “wouldn’t please India and China. They’d probably like a little country to annex themselves.” She considered the desirability of forcing withdrawal by Israel from Palestinian regions, but then delinked the cases, discounting the causative nature of the US’s support of Israel for producing terrorist attacks by saying that bin Laden’s network was “using this as a pretext. If we were to change our support for Israel overnight, we would not stop these attacks.” In the end, she gestured vaguely at “a complicated, long set of operations, some of them military and covert,” but discredited even these options with the lament that “the United States is not very experienced in these matters.” Sontag conceded that smart people might be challenged by the complexities of finding an alternative to war, admitting, “I’m sure bright and hard-nosed people in Washington are genuinely puzzled about how to do it.” Ultimately, Sontag relieved herself of the burden of providing effective alternatives to the war she wanted to avoid: “It’s not for me to speculate on this, but there are all sorts of realpolitik outcomes that one can imagine.” A march through failed alternatives that ended with an expression of hope for other unknown and hard-to-find-and-execute alternatives may not seem unusual among intellectuals (we are charged with addressing the Page 199 →complexities of situations), but as a public rhetoric it surely left room for doubt that “understanding” could reliably be counted on to find a safe and just path forward other than war. The absence of concrete, specific action options was typical among the left-oriented declarations. Jensen stated

only that war is not an acceptable action, so the audience “should demand of their government” that “the insanity stop here.” Chomsky urged that we need to “seek to understand,” which meant “entering the minds of the likely perpetrators” to understand how the United States had caused others’ bad actions by humiliating them. Like Sontag, Said referred to a long-term campaign, giving no hint of the specific actions that would be a part of this campaign. Instead, his focus was on the action of developing greater understanding of the United States as the cause of the terrorism: “We need a much more precise, a much more defined, a much more patiently constructed campaign, as well as one that surveys not just the terrorists’ presence but the root causes of terrorism.” There is one important prescription for action that was offered by the least anger-driven statements of the left intellectuals. Both the Peace and Justice Statement and Said promoted a judicial response rather than a war. The former declared: “As citizens of this great nation, we support the efforts being made to find those behind the acts of terror. Bringing them to justice under the rule of law—not military action—is the way to end the violence.” Similarly, Said suggested that “[t]he just response to this terrible event should be to go immediately to the world community, the United Nations. The rule of international law should be marshaled.” These suggested lines of action promoted a laudable ideal: the terrorist actions should have emphasized to all of us the need for the world to develop a means for bringing international terrorists to justice. Nonetheless, as a concrete prescription this was not actionable in the moment. The world lacked any means of forcing the Taliban (or any other nation) to deliver up, let alone search for and detain, any persons still living who might have borne legally actionable responsibility for the attacks. The world had and has no consensually supported regular mandatory tribunal or written legal procedure and code for such prosecutions (let alone mechanisms for carrying out sentences). Said himself recognized the futility of his own suggestion, although again providing an anti-US rationale as the reason for its futility: “It’s probably too late because the United States has never done that.” Page 200 →The United States is surely guilty of having blocked international tribunals, but it has not stood alone in that regard. Moreover, in the immediate moment it was not—and would not be—the United States that blocked action by the United Nations against the terrorist networks. Anger’s insistence on hostile blame and calcification of old lines of affiliation here shows its head among the left as it had among the right. Both demanded broad agents to blame, and the calcification of affiliations blocked a perspective that could address the common reluctance among nation-states to adopt globally based political action. Neither the representatives from the political left nor the right used the occasion to justify a call for the kind of global network that would resolve the new challenges the peoples of the world were facing. The goals of these public intellectuals did not fit well with their ideologies, as articulated in anger, at least in this situation. The old affiliations did not align along the current complexities and had little chance to recruit members of the public to their cause. “Understanding” does not cohere with the attack orientation of anger. Moreover, the cognitive process of searching for new solutions was dissuaded by the cognitive tendencies of anger, but anger’s optimism hid all these weaknesses from those for whom the vision was familiar. Anger left Sontag, like the others, with little else than a diffuse attack orientation, so they attacked their same old foes and stood dismayed at the response. Action steps matter to the effective sharing of anger. According to a view that understands emotions as interacting complexes, actions are not simply what one thinks of “after” one has become angry in response to prior judgments of harm, norms, and affiliations. As chapter 3 detailed, the research literature indicates that when a people does not believe that they are capable of executing a proposed action, they are unlikely to share anger (turning instead, for example, to fear). Consequently, even if all of the other components of anger had been more appropriately executed, the inability of the American left to offer effective actions would probably have doomed their chances to entrain the American public to their anger. Faced with a vision that told them they should “study up” for the long term, rather than undertake steps that promised justice and prevention against an agent of proximate threat, would it be surprising if a people rejected the classroom? Page 201 →

Subjective Feelings: Rejecting the Judgment The analysis above describes the public anger articulated by Sontag and like-minded others as directed at the policies of the United States rather than at those who guided the airplanes into their internationalized targets on American soil. In Sontag’s case, that anger was normatively warranted by the breech of the value of “understanding” by the American president and media, but also implicitly by the passivity of the American public in the face of continued breeches. The action that Sontag and others recommended—enhancing public understanding of global politics—was surely consonant with this value, but unlikely to appear as sufficient for the situation. I have suggested that an empirically and theoretically grounded theory of public anger would predict that this version of an anger narrative would not have appealed to the American public, especially given that the members were already sharing grief, fear, or anger. The available evidence indicates that even though these rhetorics achieved some substantial level of circulation, so that Sontag’s angry call got a public hearing, nonetheless outside of the left-oriented regions of the academic community, the normative claim to judgment she offered was rejected. People who read these angry calls did not appear to share the advocates’ anger, but rather turned their anger on the advocates. This was true to a substantial extent even in some of their own cosmopolitan communities. When Sontag read a version of the statement in Berlin to an audience of a hundred who had gathered to hear her, they responded with “stunned silence.”46 Schreiber claims that the statement not only caused a “worldwide scandal,” but also that even liberal New Yorkers who agreed with much of her belief set were indignant at the statement.47 No polls are available to provide quantitative support of such observer-based claims, because no polls directly measured the response to Sontag’s statements. However, the poll data referenced in the previous chapter showed that the major goal of forestalling public support for the president’s wars was not met. The increase in the president’s “favorable” rating also suggests that the left did not attract many new affiliates to their oppositional stance to the nation’s government. More direct evidence of public response is available in “letters to the editor” written by an array of citizens.48 These letters support both the claim that the left’s discourse circulated among a fairly broad range of the public, and that their call for normative judgment against the United States was Page 202 →rejected. The New Yorker did not print the responses of the general public to Sontag’s statement (Sontag also reported receiving “hate mail”).49 However, the responses in the Houston Chronicle to Robert Jensen’s statement published there provide an informative set, because many people wrote and the paper posted multiple responses.50 These letters indicate that many people felt these intellectuals’ responses violated the funerary moment, and the writers explicitly rejected the affiliations that the leftists had offered. Joe Swiney was particularly direct in pointing to the violations of eulogistic decorum: “Such extreme views should not be printed while the nation is in mourning. It is not decent to argue at a funeral” (September 19). Art Nicholson’s comment similarly focused on the way in which a sense of common decency requires respect for people’s feelings of loss in the days immediately after such losses. He wrote that Jensen’s angry attack “went beyond good taste. Jensen offended those who have lost loved ones in the current attacks” (September 15). Letter writers also rejected Jensen’s angry rhetoric specifically by attending to the affiliational lines he had drawn. Max Jentsch suggested that Jensen physically enact his rejection of America by moving out of it: “I suggest an equally sensational solution to his emotional pain: move. Move to one of the countries he mentioned and express an opinion different from that country’s government or disagree with the leadership” (September 15). Of course, a reasonable reply to such statements demanding that one “love it or leave it” is that the point is not to leave America, but to change it. Nonetheless, these comments point out the way in which angry attacks on people’s existing affiliations may be expected to harden lines of affiliation and therefore impede the fluidity required for change. This point is further illustrated in Marvin Tyson’s insistence that Jensen is wrong about American bad intentions, and that America—in spite of its mistakes—is still the best affiliative choice:

We always make every effort to avoid spilling civilian blood, in both our ground and air warfare. I know full well that this country has made mistakes. We have supported some people that, in hindsight, we shouldn’t have. But I also know that this is the most benevolent country the world has ever been blessed by. We will continue to support Jensen’s right to spew his twisted, illogical diatribe against us because we so treasure freedom and differing opinions. (September 15) Page 203 →I point to these letter writers to highlight that people of potentially good will formed active members of a public who could conceivably have been swayed by an alternative rhetoric by Jensen. Jentsch’s reply in particular illustrates the way in which at least some members of the public might have been open to a differently directed appeal. Jentsch explicitly articulated a multiperspectival potential: Disgust, anger, pity and pride are just a few of the emotions I experienced while reading Robert Jensen’s article. I am proud to live in a society that welcomes—encourages, even—people’s opinions in a public forum. Jensen enjoys a freedom purchased by the blood of generations of patriots. As a professor at a university, he also enjoys access to young minds and media to influence people and, perhaps, even policy. It took courage for him to stand against a nation in mourning over this senseless loss of life. Or was it was [sic] self-centered, insensitive sensationalism? (September 15) Jentsch concluded the latter was the better account of Jensen’s anger. But Jentsch’s pride in America’s unique willingness to entertain different views and his self-awareness about the multiplicity of his own emotions are indicative of the manifold potentials that existed among the public in the aftermath of 9/11. Noting this complexity helps to highlight that appealing to those potentials is not a simple matter of articulating the feelings and affiliations that come immediately to mind as a product of one’s own righteous anger. This is not to suggest that all members of the public could have been successfully appealed to in order to forward the goals that Sontag, Chomsky, Said, Jensen, or others might have prized. There were many members of the public whose minds were closed either by ideology, durable affiliations, or their own fear and anger, people such as Betty W. Chastain, who declared: “God himself established Israel, gave them the land and promised that whoever blessed Israel would be blessed and whoever cursed them would be cursed. Now do you understand?” (September 19). It is worth noting, however, that Chastain accepted the value of “understanding,” though her basis for understanding was incompatible with that of these intellectuals. Even among those for whom the norm of “understanding”Page 204 → was shared, therefore, that norm provided no guarantee that the actions and affiliations defended by any particular user of that warrant would be agreed upon. To the extent that Sontag rested her notion of understanding on argument and disagreement, this norm could not be taken as a sufficient ground of any suite of actions.51 These responses provide an incomplete but instructive picture of the range of ways in which members of the public other than professional pundits articulated their subjective, and sometimes searching, reactions to Sontag and similar voices. Perhaps attending too closely to the reactions of hardened right-wing ideologues, with their tirades against the “idiocies of the left,”52 obfuscates the greater range of affiliative potential that waits to be tapped in the broader public. If they were to achieve their objectives of stopping a war, the voices from the left needed to resonate with a much broader range of Americans. The description above and the citations of those who wrote letters in response taken together reveal why the rhetorics of the would-be antiwar speakers were inadequately crafted if they sought that purpose.53 An anger targeted at a community during a funeral moment is surely almost always doomed to fail. Even had they waited a week or two to launch their efforts, describing one’s audience as a group of passive dupes would surely have provided a recipe for rejection. And reconfiguring one’s audience’s affiliations

may be best achieved not by portraying them as affiliated with cowards and demons, but by vivid depictions of the others with whom they should be/are affiliated. For most Americans, the subjective experience of listening to Sontag et al. was to experience someone being angry at one, rather than to share the experience of being angry at those who attacked one, with the perhaps necessary pleasures of the possibility of remedying that vulnerability and felt injustice.

Conclusion Anger exerts its demands on us: to speak, to attack, to try to rally others. Sontag’s howl surely felt gratifying for her as she penned it. Sontag’s skill at manifesting anger may have accounted for the wide circulation of the statement. Her penchant for angry political rhetorics may even account in Page 205 →some measure for her celebrity.54 But anger opens the vistas of those who believe themselves committed to superior “understanding” no more than it opens those of any other human beings. It is worth noting briefly how far off the mark anger’s proclivities can take one by attending to Chomsky’s statements. His anger in the moment of 9/11 was clearly directed at exactly the same affiliations his previous rhetoric had been directed at, no matter how far that required one to twist the present conditions. Incredibly, he defined the victims in terms of class and his perceived international affiliates: “The primary victims, as usual, were working people: janitors, secretaries, firemen, etc. It is likely to prove to be a crushing blow to Palestinians and other poor and oppressed people.”55 He also defined the enemy as his standard political opponents, who supported the military, and turned the issues of action toward his prior campaign about missiles and space: “The events reveal, dramatically, the foolishness of ideas about вЂmissile defense’.В .В .В . But these events will, nonetheless, be used to increase the pressure to develop these systems and put them into place. вЂDefense’ is a thin cover for plans for militarization of space.” He then concluded, “In short, the crime is a gift to the hard jingoist right, those who hope to use force to control their domains.” Incredibly, Chomsky’s anger twisted round to cast al Qaeda as just another pawn of the US military-industrial establishment that Chomsky had long been fighting. Anger was, in myriad ways, a problematic emotion for progressive rhetoricians to seek to share in the moments after 9/11. Progressives are, of course, human, and driven by the urge to howl as much as other humans. Although anger may be a potent temptation in any given moment, it is a complex that can be tuned down, tuned up, or tuned differently through explicit deliberation, habit, and our mutual reinforcement of each others’ choices. Of late, many have chosen to tune up each others’ anger in the belief that doing so is the best way to promote the causes of justice. This chapter should have given at least some reason to believe that the deployment of anger is at the least more complicated than that when it comes to forwarding progressive trajectories. The chapter is also built on the premise that would-be progressive leaders could have used the roiling emotions of 9/11 to build stronger senses of global affiliations among other peoples. Jensen in particular made some efforts in that regard, but his castigation of America set up a choice between Page 206 →affiliating with America and affiliating with others outside America, and that emotionally loaded split overrode his attempt to articulate Americans-with-others. Building global affiliation is not an easy project, and efforts of that nature would surely have generated some resistance in the aftermath of 9/11. Nonetheless, for anyone concerned about global-level issues such as climate change, transnational corporatism, mass migration, species extinction, economic inequalities, or imperialism, building global affiliations would have been the right project for the moment. The positive sentiment toward Americans evinced around the world made it look like America was among friends. The need for an international police force to bring terrorists to justice might have had some chance to overcome the long-standing reluctance of Americans to cede any sovereignty to others. A rhetoric that foregrounded an affiliated world standing against bin Laden’s outlaw band would have been possible and potentially far more productive than one that castigated America for its past evils. To be effective, such a rhetoric would probably have required progressives to give up their special status as a “smarter” elite and to envision themselves merely as one concerned element of a

complex world community. But surely, upon some reflection, that would be possible? Urging such a position does not require that one demean the value of “understanding.” That social value is surely crucial to most efforts at social betterment. However, the isolation of the academy and of some cosmopolitan intellectuals, perhaps combined with status drives and other motivational structures, seems often to produce a mis-equation of “understanding” with deconstruction or a hermeneutics of suspicion. Multiple other scholars have drawn attention to other kinds of understanding: phronesis, doxa, or technГЄ.56 They have made academically based arguments that creative envisioning and judgment are also products or processes of understanding, even though these include emotion. The ultimate constraint on the rhetoric of the cosmopolitan intellectuals was—all too appropriately given their ideologies—a severe structural problem. The action steps that a progressive rhetoric would have liked to recommend were simply not available. There was no global justice system, there was no effective international constraint on decisions by the United States or others to invade other nations, and there was not even a robust sense that the peoples of the world had common interconsequentiality for each other and therefore had common responsibilities to each other. In the Page 207 →face of those absences, progressive rhetorics in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 were constrained either to be unattractive due to their impotence or to take aim at the longer haul and begin the hard work to build the sense of global identification and the institutions that might productively accompany it. For the most part, progressives defaulted to an impotent past. Chapter 7 tries to contribute to the long-haul alternative.

Page 208 → Page 209 →

Chapter 7 What Should We Do Next? This study has sought to indicate how a theoretical framework built on a definition of humans as symbolizing animals can explain recurrent patterns of collective action on the international scene, without declaring those patterns to be the unalterable products of deterministic forces. It has assumed that the sharing of public emotions constitutes a key nexus of collective action, and it has used the example of anger to illustrate how particular qualities of an emotion shape public discourses surrounding a global event, additional to the ideological preferences or positionality of a public leader and his or her supporters. This concluding chapter outlines in three steps some implications of those analyses for strategic choices and alternative models of global interaction. Section one will summarize the commonalities revealed among the three examples, but it will spotlight the ways in which the sharing of public anger nonetheless serves some types of agendas better than others. Section two will focus on the micro-pragmatics of angry public discourse, exploring options for better use of emotions in the public rhetoric we share, including both crafting alternative routines for sharing anger and also the elaboration of the utilities of other emotions. Section three will go macro, focusing on the recalcitrant qualities of public anger to ask what kinds of structures for global relationships we might want to begin constructing. Page 210 →

Summary of Anger Appeals: How Angry Rhetorics Serve Different Agendas Bush, bin Laden, and Sontag were differently situated and enculturated individuals, with dramatically different agendas. Yet this manuscript has offered evidence that in some key regards each of their rhetorics flowed into paths predisposed by a common script for rallying publics to collective action through anger. The statements of all three would-be global leaders were in thrall to the anger-activated and mutually reinforcing tendencies of language to dichotomize and absolutize and of body-scripts that close down heuristic cognition in favor of narrow, rote proclivities blindered to risks, predisposed to focus on enemies, and moved to attack. These biosymbolic features of anger account for specific and crucial elements of these leaders’ scripts, which included common topics, deployed with common faults or excesses. All of their portraits of enemies were stunningly imprecise and overbroad or misdirected. They rallied allies, but called for affiliation on bases that were unnecessarily narrow and inadequate to the task at hand. They escalated their depictions of the harms that had been inflicted from concrete injuries to all-encompassing abstractions. They narrowed the norms at issue to biased scope. These commonly shared features did not, however, resonate with the appropriate audiences of these speakers to a common degree. The strategic rhetorics induced by anger do not serve all possible agendas equally well. The Enemy One might assume that when a devastating and concrete harm such as the violent attacks of 9/11 occurs, the alignment of enemies is made obvious by simple facts: Which persons executed the attacks and upon whom were they inflicted? Instead, these three advocates illustrate how the depictions of prominent advocates are powerfully skewed by the predilections of anger. Under the influence of anger’s cognitive tendency toward rote fixation on existing routines, these advocates aligned the portraits of their enemies with previously declared opponents, even if that required massive expansion, distortion, or even reversing the roles of victim and perpetrator in the immediate context. Those distortions had different utilities for achieving different rhetorical goals. Page 211 →Bin Laden faced substantially different enemies through time. Regardless of how different these opponents were, his rhetoric identified all as members of a single category, dictated by the vision of a sacred, permanent battle. Communists, Western Crusaders, and Muslim governments all became enemies by being cast as

infidels. This anger-aligned propensity to identify opponents and to depict them within previously established affiliations resonated with and rallied a group of fighters. Not only did it enable him to sustain his jihad over decades (when the USSR no longer formed a central target he readily found a new one consonant with the goal of a caliphate), but it also enabled him to play enemies off against each other. His ability to participate in the defeat of the USSR in Afghanistan and to inflict heinous damage on the United States not only forwarded his war against these infidels but it also gave him legitimacy among young recruits in his battle against virtually all of the Islamic governments in the Middle East. He could apply the label of infidel to Islamic-led governments if they engaged in any cooperation with the infidel United States or USSR. By contrast, Bush’s anger-soaked portrait of the enemy served short-term and narrower goals better than broader and longer term ones. In the early phase, responding to the ambiguity of the situation, the president offered intense but vague descriptions of enemies represented solely by their evil acts. As it became clear that alQaeda was at fault, however, the character of this group presented a rhetorical problem. Rather than attempting to sustain anger by focusing on this small, obscure, and difficult-to-prosecute group of men, Bush turned to nationstates, a category of opponent readily activated by the rote cognitive proclivities preferred by anger because it had previously been the standard type of enemy for nation-states. At this point, the vagueness of the early depictions of “evildoers” facilitated the shift from specific groups of terrorists to a large group of nation-states. In the short term, this intense, absolutist expansion served the president’s agenda well by rallying Americans in support of two wars. In the long term, to the extent that the primary goal (for the United States, whether or not for the president’s advisors) was increased American security and an international community open for free trade, attacking nation-states to get at terrorist networks has proven to be at best insufficient and at worst disastrous targeting. Bush’s ideological opponents—exemplified by Susan Sontag—proved to be no more adept at identifying opponents. Furthermore, they appear to have been the most thoroughly disserved by following anger’s guidancePage 212 → in selecting an enemy. For the most part, they made their audience or its affiliates (their own nation-state’s political leaders, press, and public) into the enemy. Anger’s influence, which predisposes one to rigidify preexisting categories, intensifies the lure of old affiliations, and its influence is particularly striking in this case. Sontag’s initial angry statement, and other angry statements from the ideological left, fell reflexively into a well-established pattern that lamented old enemies. For them this meant pointing to “the establishment,” especially the government of the United States and its presumptively media/corporate-duped people, as the source of any local or global problem. Such a frame served well to gather academics and others selfidentified by their alienation and ideological affiliation, but it repulsed the majority of the American public, who were responding to other forces unifying them on behalf of their national identity in that moment. The narrowing tendencies of anger also forestalled the creative thinking that would have enabled greater development of appeals designed to rally a global people, a central goal of the cosmopolitan ideology in that context.

We Who? Pragmatically, it would seem that a leader locked in deadly battle would seek the broadest possible range of affiliates to maximize the resources that could be brought to bear against the enemy. But that is not how public anger appears to work. All three of these rhetors instead were influenced by the cognitive paths of anger that predispose cognition toward narrow conservation of long-standing ties. This trend appears to have been facilitated by anger’s proclivity both to activate the linguistic tendencies of absolutism and to induce unreasonable optimism about the narrow community’s capacity to overcome risks. Bin Laden’s “we” iterated his notion of the ideal past of the Koranic era. To provide the necessary motivations to balance out the absolutely demanding notions of piety in his normative frame, he portrayed the true Muslim as a militaristic participant in a hierarchical chain with everyone else in slave-like subordination to an imam-warrior caste. To narrow affiliative bonds via the focus on the militaristic true believer might seem counterproductive. But given the primacy of the need to recruit fighters, this identification of such fighters as rightful holders of places at the top of the Page 213 →hierarchical chain served his immediate interests relatively well. This portrait was also consonant with his long-term goals, to whatever extent those goals might be

achievable, as his endorsement of the Taliban showed that this was precisely the type of social structure he was content to enact. Although this depiction consigned most Muslims to abjection, the intensity of the spiritual appeals and the vividness of the attacks on outsiders were enough to at least gain a tolerant wink from many people who identified as Muslims but who would not be part of the potential warrior-imam caste. The effectiveness of President Bush’s portrait of a protagonist was more mixed. Bush defined those he would mobilize as “Americans,” followed by those “friends” of America who would obediently adhere to America’s plans. This nationalistic portrait accorded with Bush’s position as an elected leader of a nation-state. It recognized the outpouring of support from many nations and people who were likewise threatened by the attacks on 9/11, but only in the most limited possible way. In casting global alliances as a web of subordinates to the United States, the president followed a 50-year-old script. This portrait of an America prepared to “go it alone” succeeded in rallying his nation, but it failed to take advantage of the single most opportune moment for putting global relationships on a new footing that had occurred since the end of World War II. By insisting that the United States would seek redress “in a way and at an hour of our choosing,” the president sealed the eventual failure of any ability to promote truly supranational efforts to stymie terrorists on his watch. Sontag and her co-advocates were the least well served by the affiliations they projected under the narrowing forces of anger. One must look closely to find any “we” with whom Sontag’s audience could identify. The only group that received an even slightly favorable overt depiction were the terrorists (for their lack of cowardice). This left only indirect opposites—the “not stupid,” the historically “aware,” the disagreers—as the basis for alliance among any audience that might not have been willing to identify with the terrorists. While such a negative positionality is explicitly favored by many critical theoretic perspectives, the way in which it indirectly (and often unintentionally) aligns with a public audience’s enemies seems to vitiate its ability to function as a successful public rhetoric. The conditions of 9/11 made it an opportune time to build new affiliations—explicit and attractively global ones—but the creativity necessary for such novel rhetorical efforts was forestalled by anger’s preference for quick, absolutist resort to the past. Page 214 → Harms! Few will find it surprising that, in the heat of anger, public rhetorics seeking to rally public response tend to intensify the harms that have been committed. The ways in which these angry public rhetorics shaped the harms motivating and caused by the 9/11 attacks is perhaps nonetheless impressive, given that the harms themselves were already of a nature and on a scale sufficient to have garnered rapt worldwide attention. A sympathetic analyst would say that bin Laden could have found plenty of ground for legitimate grievances against the United States by reference to specific recent actions in the Middle East. Bin Laden’s justification, however, could not simply decry violent actions by the United States, because he advocated permanent violence. Instead, therefore, he portrayed the harm as the violation of the hegemony of his religious group and as a matter of “honor” as much or more than as death-dealing violence to his people. President Bush also distinctively dramatized the harm he called his nation to address. It was not enough that alQaeda had killed almost 3,000 people and devastated a substantial portion of a major city, and more. The president portrayed the harms represented by bin Laden’s attack as abstract and universal—a threat to global freedom. That expansion surely held an important grain of truth—free markets, free speech, and freedom of movement are stifled when terrorists operate with impunity or when militaristic religious states seize control of nation-states and close their borders. Nonetheless, the depiction was motivated as well by the president’s expansion of the target from terrorists to nation-states. If the harm was murder, then the murderers would need to be punished; it took a larger harm to justify the shift of target from a few terrorists to an indefinite list of nationstates. That expansion, however, produced a contradictory internal tension in the character of freedom. Claiming the right of the United States alone to declare which nations stood the test of freedom isolated the United States from normative mutuality with the other nations of the world, on the basis of freedom, or probably any other

shareable normative value. The left intellectuals also circulated a portrait of harm that was profoundly shaped by the other components of their angry narratives. Like bin Laden, they directed their audience’s focus to the harms created by the foreign policy of the United States. Framing the recent deaths in this way surely could not have been better calculated to alienate the American Page 215 →public in their moment of grief and vulnerability. To cast the concrete harm as proof of the nation’s poor judgment might have seemed compelling to those already convinced of that poor judgment, but to those who did not already share that assessment, it could not but appear as a judgement aligned with the normative call of the enemy who had executed the attack. An alternative rhetoric, one that depicted alQaeda as an enemy of the peoples of the globe, would likely have been at least somewhat more successful. Working explicitly to affiliate global peoples against violence would not have violated cosmopolitan goals. Movement toward such a potentially more productive rhetoric was effectively impeded by anger’s encouragement to perceive new harms in old frames. According to What Norms? In keeping with the social function of anger, which is to align social behavior and distribute resources according to social priorities, a harm only justifies a righteous public response if the harm violates some shared social norm. In small or homogeneous communities, public anger serves the purpose of rallying the social group to change behavior that violates shared norms. In the global community, this regulative function is more difficult to enact. In part this is because different communities have both different norms and different needs or interests. The problem may also, however, be due to the relationship between motivation and social norms. As chapter 3 summarized, righteous anger generally requires not only a shared social norm but also a personal or group-identified interest. The risk created by this formula is that the interest component will warp the shared norms. In global discourse, this distorting force is amplified by the size of the collectivities involved, which facilitates their blinkering to selfinterests. All three advocates followed anger’s path to rhetorical failure in this regard. Osama bin Laden’s advance of “the sacred” as his central norm did not constitute a shareable claim to “religious autonomy,” because bin Laden did not assert that people in general or nations in general should have religious autonomy. He insisted his version of Islam was the only acceptable religion. The sacred was therefore not a reciprocal norm, but a set of doctrines to be imposed by those who had both the willingness to claim unique access to it and the military power to enforce the vision their access purportedly gave them. Although bin Laden was not able to amass the Page 216 →military might to enforce his vision widely, he would not have found a lack of reciprocity inconsistent with his ideology or theology. President Bush similarly promoted a value that might be configured in a way that had universal reach, but which he sculpted to serve only his envisioned affiliative group. While he often spoke of the importance of global or universal freedom, he limited the reach of this norm to the United States by prioritizing freedoms most pertinent to the United States and by tying the guarantee of freedom to US judgments. Only those would be “free” whom the United States deemed it in the US’s interests to be free. The president’s logic similarly limited the right to a preemptive national self-defense to the United States. Whether this served the president’s goals—or more importantly, the goals of the many Americans who affirmed his rhetoric—depends on your projection of their priorities: Did they want merely to advantage the United States in the immediate run, or were they truly interested in global freedom? Instead of piety or freedom, Sontag foregrounded the value of “understanding” as the normative warrant being violated. Although one can imagine an argument that this value is at the root of all civilization, or at least of human cooperative capacities, and therefore pertinent for the situation, this relevance in the context was hardly self-evident to most Americans. The resort to the value of “understanding” was a reflexive one for this ingroup, and its deployment insufficiently summarized the urgent concerns of the national or even global audience. Was it a shareable norm? That depends on how open-minded you believe that Sontag, Said, Chomsky, and Jensen really were.

Taking Action To be angry together is to be predisposed to collective activity, specifically to attack, which may include intense, even violent, action. The circulation of these three sets of angry rhetorics activated their publics toward attack, but not in precisely the same ways. The action to which bin Laden rallied his target audience was a permanent jihad. Given his status as an exile, with limited resources and warriors at his side, his holy war was not a conventional war, but rather a series of strategic attacks. Distinctively, bin Laden projected this action set as permanent. Such a permanent agenda cannot be completed in a lifetime. Page 217 →Since his death, others have taken up his action agenda. The permanence of those actions has yet to be established. President Bush likewise led his affiliates to enact the violent impulse of anger. In line with the rote tendencies of angered cognition, he rallied his nation to war, because war is what angry nations have always done. “Pounding sand”—as his administrative team labeled actions such as the bombing of Afghanistan—might not be particularly effective, but bombs signify a kind of maximal action at the physical level, which seemed to fulfill the urge for intense, violent action invited by his nationalist anger. Unfortunately for the world, the destruction of the sitting governments and much of the infrastructure of two nations has proven ineffective at removing the nurseries of terrorism. Arguably, it has even enabled terrorist organizations to act as violent gangs on a larger scale, and even to seize control of substantial territory, however temporarily. The hearty uptake of the president’s anger by his people activated action tendencies that seemed to have served bruised egos better than such objectives as free commerce around the globe. The rhetoric of the left intellectuals was distinctive for its more-and-less explicit repudiation of international violence and war. In this regard, Sontag and her co-ideologues resisted anger’s most extreme tendencies, but they did not resist the urge to attack. They simply changed their object of attack from the immediate perpetrators of the violence to what they argued should be understood as a more culpable source. Their explicit recommended action—better understanding of the US’s international track record—was better than urging a violent attack on the United States. But it was both vague and not presented as providing any immediate effectivity for stopping terrorist attacks. In the absence of strong alternatives, the American people chose war, perhaps not because they were confident it would be effective, but because they were offered no other option that could salve their anger or address the sources of their fears. Subjective Responses The differing elements of the angry rallying cries of these rhetors were associated with varied levels of resonance with their divergent target audiences. Osama bin Laden’s rhetoric gained him a small core group that identified so intensely with his vision that they were willing to sacrifice their earthly Page 218 →lives for it. While he did not convert most Muslims to that vision, he did gain a halo of tolerance and even partial identification among the broader Islamic community. His portrait of intense religious devotion appears to have had some resonance and to have been associated with bolstering of resentments over the influence, violence, and broader involvement of the United States in the Middle East. President Bush’s rhetoric also resonated strongly among his immediate target audience. The wave of support he received after 9/11 lasted three years, authorized two wars, and produced changes in the government, civil liberties, and the national self-image.1 Given the polarity in the nation at the time of these events, a weak presidential rhetoric would have been unlikely to sustain itself that long or for such substantial changes.2 Because it attended carefully and artfully to the public’s mourning, and drew judiciously and extensively on the cultural heritage of the majority, Bush’s rhetoric resonated powerfully with the majority of the American public, even if it did not fit particularly well the needs of the global populace nor even mobilize the vast resources of the United States for an effective response to global terrorism. In contrast, Sontag, Said, Chomsky, Jensen, and the other left-oriented intellectuals at best pleased a small group of academics and other leftists, while receiving broad and intensely hostile repudiation by the pundits and public

at large. Their choice to make the nation the enemy and to warrant anger based on the public’s failures of understanding, along with their inability to offer a compelling alternative affiliation, gave no basis for emotional contagion to work among the general American public, even had they provided a compelling line of action to follow. This summary of the rhetorical effectivities of the three leaders’ rhetorics should suggest that rallying a public with angry rhetoric tends to serve some kinds of political agendas better than others. Anger fits well the goals of those who are willing to affirm violent action and who project non-egalitarian interrelationships. Anger urges control through violence, and those who are dictatorial need such means of control. In contrast to the recent spate of defenses of anger by various left-leaning intellectuals documented in chapter 3, anger may serve less well the agendas of those who seek global freedom or greater understanding. Bush’s anger served him personally (he became the manly leader) and served his short-term ends—rallying the nation to war. But the actions favored by national anger at the time were arguably blunt cudgels applied to an opponent that required a Page 219 →more surgical touch. Even more thoroughly, Sontag’s angry howl served her goals of greater understanding not at all. Sontag herself seemed to be personally shaken by the vitriolic responses to her statement. And anger, because it wants vivid attack, and is conservative and rote, serves neither to enhance thought processes nor a goal of inciting audiences to greater understanding. It surely does not generate empathy for the other. In spite of its tendency to promote strong feelings that one’s rhetoric serves righteous justice, the predisposing pathways of human anger do not offer sufficient strategies for coalescing peoples to make the world more just, caring, or to protect it from environmental degradation. On the one hand, anger appears to be useful in rousing people who are already committed to each other and to shared norms to work together to counter injustice, as many scholars have detailed.3 On the other hand, addressed to out-groups, the contagion of anger is prone in many situations to be counterproductive. Being angry does not open minds, broaden affiliations, or encourage expansion of one’s consideration of social norms—all conditions generally required for meliorative social policies. Anger sometimes can serve effectively as a threat, but only for agents who have the power to make a threat of a size substantial enough that the costs threatened outweigh the benefits the opponent receives from the behavior the threat is designed to redress. Such conditions would seem to arise more frequently for those who already enjoy high power than for those with relatively low power, and therefore might more often serve conservative rather than emancipatory agendas. Passionate, righteous, activists will be loath to give up their anger. And, indeed, one should surely heed one’s angry sense of injustice. But listening to one’s anger does not require merely sharing it with others. To insist on linking one’s felt experience with one’s public interactions might be called the self-expression fallacy (a common fallacy, to be sure).4 Better options for global agendas would seem to require one to be more thoughtful about the construction of anger displays.

Changing Anger Displays Osama bin Laden’s anger displays served his immediate needs, within the frame of his ideological commitments, but President Bush’s and Susan Sontag’s goals would have been better served by offering different appraisals.Page 220 → President Bush’s putative goal of promoting world freedom would have been better served by internationalizing, rather than nationalizing, the affiliations he offered. This might have enabled him to offer freedom as a truly shareable warrant, and even have helped create the conditions for a plan of action that was more tailored to the nature of terrorist attacks than have been two chaos-engendering wars. Sontag also would have had a better chance of rallying people to her goal of heightened international understanding if she had offered an artfully crafted vision around which an international audience could affiliate. Neither of these alternatives would have been guaranteed to sway audiences in the demanding rhetorical dynamics of the moment. It required less work for the American president to offer an American affiliative set, and it was probably more emotionally powerful in the short term. To have tried to broaden the perspectives of Americans and to have failed would have been costly for the man, George Bush, and for his political party. Those potential costs, conflicting ideological commitments, and the blocking force of anger on the necessary creativity all ensured that

his administration did not create such alternatives. For Sontag, attending to an alternative could only have enhanced her success: even if the alternative would likely have still garnered resistance, and even though the effort would have to have been part of a longer-term persuasive campaign rather than an immediate conversion. There were, however, formulations available that would have begun to bridge the ideological space between an imperialist American vision and a more equitable global politics. Those formulations might have directly hailed an audience of Americans to become more equitably engaged with others as “Americans in equal partnership with the peaceful, free peoples of the world.” A more extreme version might have dropped the nationalistic label and simply asked the audience to “support the вЂbeacons of peace and freedom’ wherever they shine, to cooperate to make a world safe for free peoples everywhere.” Key to broadening affiliations in this way—for both the president and Sontag—would have been alternative portrayals of the enemy. Instead of amplifying the enemy, one could have belittled the opponent. As chapter 3 noted, this entails using what Kenneth Burke has called a “comic” rather than the more ready-to-hand tragic frame.5 By comic frame, Burke and his proponents do not primarily mean humorous. Though theatrical comedies often invite laughter, their fundamental structure recognizes a common, Page 221 →flawed humanity shared by everyone. Comedic orientations deflate egoistic pretensions by a kind of mocking that recognizes both the inescapable limitations of being human and the shared substance that forms our flaws, mutual dependence, and even merits. A masterful example of this approach in global politics was provided by some of Winston Churchill’s treatments of Hitler. There can be little doubt that Hitler was a powerful and evil-appearing threat to the British people in 1940 and 1941. But Churchill did not routinely amplify Hitler’s power or his demonic attributes. Instead, he used an indirect mockery to cut the FГјhrer down to bite size.6 Research on satire shows that, contrary to other kinds of anger, sarcasm can increase thoughtfulness and reconsideration.7 The space between literal and abstract meanings created by satire requires the human brain to engage in something other than rapid rote processing. The problem with most kinds of sarcasm or satire (including that employed by Charlie Hebdo) is that the mocking retains a superior position for the mocker.8 That kind of humor cuts the opponent down to size, but maintains the omniscient position of the observer or judge. It thereby maintains a perspective of a “superior we” looking down on an “inferior them.” In contrast, the comic frame requires a humbling of all parties—observer and opponent—in order to humanize the enemy without dangerously and falsely aggrandizing us. Churchill used epic as well as comic forms, but he portrayed the British people as capable of winning through specific human traits, not because of a superhuman status. Such egalitarian comic portraits require some rhetorical skill, especially in light of the delicate politics of Islam vs. Christianity that have already been noted. Yet one can imagine a president asking the global audiences for whom he competed with al-Qaeda: “Do these puffed up pretenders to religious purity really think they can bring down the world’s faith in freedom with an airplane?” And surely the rhetorical artistry of Susan Sontag was up to a similar task in her gender critique—“you claim God is on your side, but you need AK-47s to keep Islamic women faithful?”—as well as her broader geopolitics—“if you’ve got a personal pipeline to Allah, how come you’re sulking in a cave and the imams are in the mosques praying with the faithful?” Such an approach would have deflated the status appeals that bin Laden relied upon to recruit jihadists even as it separated al-Qaeda from their presumptive special access to dictate what Islam means. The comic frame promises the world a defeatable foe, an antagonist who has taken the warts of humanity to a horrible, but still correctable, excess. Page 222 →The comic frame reminds us that one needn’t make war on scoundrels or testosterone-drunk teenagers, even if one needs to take decisive measures to control their depredations. A more rhetorically appropriate performance of anger for both the president and his domestic critics would have included not only a comically diminished enemy and an internationalized affiliative group, but also a set of norms that were both shareable and probably plural. Both Bush and Sontag reduced the normative basis for humanity to a single value: freedom or understanding, respectively. Rhetorical intensity prefers singulars, as they are so readily absolutized. But no society can function through allegiance to a single value; human interactions, needs, and

potentials are too complex for that kind of simplicity. A Burkean perspective warns that such purification rites are among the rhetorics most dangerous for human beings. Moreover, Bush’s value set is really dual—freedom and defense—but following the rhetorical lure to reduce the latter to a subcomponent of the former effectively de-universalized the former, albeit not overtly. Similarly, Sontag’s valuation of understanding—though laudable—is simply insufficient. Understanding is a crucial ingredient of a more peaceful and just world, but understanding is passive and recursive, and left to itself it becomes locked in a little world of perpetual critique, even while the show that is the rest of living must go on. Offering a single value feels more eloquent, more emotionally intense, but it is a recipe for exclusion, injustice, and blindness to real harms warranted by other values. Theorists from Aristotle to Buddha have urged the value of something like a middle way, but they have done so generally by depicting moderation as a midpoint between two harmful extremes of a singular value. That leaves too much room for the purist to insist that their willingness to accept the harms that accompany the extreme serves merely as the ultimate proof that they occupy the ultimate point of the good on the spectrum. Instead, perhaps one should understand moderation as the laudable and necessary product of the press of multiple values upon each other. Purists ask us to sacrifice too many values when they reduce an ethics to only one. The rhetorical drive for intensification that is induced by anger also might generally need to be scaled back with regard to the portraits of harms it encourages. Was not the death and destruction of 9/11 sufficient to justify our shared grief and collective action? Many commentators have Page 223 →noted that President Bush’s choice to reformulate those deaths as the abstraction of global freedom distracted from the central, crucial task of stopping al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Sontag’s choice to expand the frame in a different direction—to the foreign policies of the United States—was an unsuccessful move in the face of people’s evident intense experience of the immediate harm. In Sontag’s case, the choice was clearly counterproductive. If the public was truly ignorant of their government’s foreign policy, then too much spadework was needed to simply launch an unevidenced attack on the government that was offering to prevent (and at least arguably needed to protect) the audience from experiencing another attack. A better approach would have been to highlight the principles that were threatened by the attack: especially just redress of grievances. Building adherence to such a principle, and then touting a course of action that faithfully modeled that principle as part of the US’s response, might have moved the American audience at least some distance in the direction that those critics felt that Americans should go. Doing so would have allowed, even required, the critics to dwell with their audience in the pain of the loss, rather than trying to hurry them over it. Instead of standing above the global demos, it would have asked them to stand with it. Finally, anger wants action now, action that is aggressive, muscular, even violent. President Bush had reasons of personal and policy interest for succumbing to that pull, but Sontag and her allies surely did not. Yet succumb they did. Lacking any well-developed globally based options toward which to direct their audience, they turned instead to counterblame. That move surely felt right, and therefore felt as though it worked toward the goal of expanding the scope for understanding global structures. Such feelings, however, were self-deluding and left them without any viable proposals for action.9 Before turning to an effort to envision the necessary action alternatives, however, it is also worth considering the resources offered by emotions other than anger.

Other Emotional Options Human communities have a rich array of emotions—disgust, compassion, joy, fear, or sadness—by which to regulate their interactions. Moreover, various cultures have developed nuanced emotional repertoires from Page 224 →which we might also borrow, including amae (a positive feeling of being taken care of, in Japan) and metagu (a fearfulness of the potential to draw anger on one’s self for moral violations, among the Ifaluk).10 Most humanistic engagements of social emotions have described them as undesirable.11 Such critiques often offer instructive lessons, but they have tended to conflate all possible variations of an emotion with a particular political use of that emotion. Thus, Lauren Berlant’s analysis of compassion begins with its situated use by President George H. W. Bush, elaborating a critique of compassion per se based on those uses.12 Similarly, Sara Ahmed

writes an extended critique of “happiness” that assumes that the use of “happiness” in Western philosophy defines all possible uses of the emotion. Barbara Ehrenreich similarly critiques happiness because it has been used by a “positive thinking” industry, which she argues has had negative political effects. Because each of these critiques defines emotions merely as an ideology, they mistake a particular ideology for the potential actions of the broader and more diffuse cluster that is designated by its naming as a particular emotion. Such critiques of emotion tend to offer their audiences questionable alternatives. Ehrenreich urges her audience to be rational instead of happy, and Ahmed urges “the hap” (something like openness to experiencing whatever comes along) as an oddly and hastily articulated progressive practice. The alternative approach employed in this work has been to identify patterns of components of a given emotional cluster to enable more detailed comparisons of potential ways of constructing the emotion shared. Such an approach takes into account a more multidisciplinary set of resources than is yet typical in humanistic treatments.13 This will remain an endeavor requiring care and perceptiveness because of the diffuse and complex nature of emotional clusters. Even something that English describes as a singular emotion—for example, “hope”—can have different manifestations with different consequences. Thus, for example, experimentalists have identified distinctive effects for what they label as “promotion” hope vs. “prevention” hope. The latter includes a direct awareness of the negative alternatives to the hoped-for option, whereas the former’s flavor is more exclusively positive. Such apparently small differences have consequences for motivating people to act together: as compared to the simpler “promotion” hope, including the negative contrast in “prevention hope” may harm the ethos of those who do so.14 Maintaining such nuances tends to run against the grain of common Page 225 →practices in much critical, cultural, and communication studies. Operating on an expanded version of the slippery slope fallacy based in a notion of purity akin to the “one drop” rule, some critics identify the presence of any token of a disvalued ideology as evidence that the user is an ideological enemy. This is not only to fail to understand how discourse functions (whatever “meaning” is taken to be, it arises in units larger than a single word or phrase), but it also fails to understand how intensities and orientations are aligned with bodily movement. Refusal to attend to such nuance may paralyze possibilities for judgments and practices in ways that may matter for planetary wellbeing. Hate—defined as a hostile affect that demands the extermination of the target—is hard to imagine as a productive emotion in any context.15 And anger surely may slide into hate. But a refusal to distinguish anger and hate means that one must either countenance hate or condemn all anger. The latter is surely impossible and probably undesirable and the former seems undesirable as well. No emotion offers a utopian mix of qualities that makes it a fitting basis for rhetorics promoting all social agendas and situations, or even a perfect fit for any given situation. The sharing of each emotion offers the rhetor a potential set of strengths and weaknesses. Rhetoric is an art that requires deploying the available resources to optimize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of those resources for the given situation. This means that totalistic judgments on the rhetorical resources Aristotle identified with the term “pathos” do not serve us well. Thus, the critics of disgust are surely correct that disgust’s tendency for inciting social exclusion can be dangerous and deployed for discriminatory ends. However, as Emily Winderman and I have argued, eschewing all uses of disgust can hamper the ability of advocates of care and justice to address effectively some challenging political situations.16 Similarly, happiness is a two-sided coin with regard to its potential for social change. On the one hand, happiness tends to promote a “keep on keepin’ on” action tendency, which is generally counterproductive for social change efforts.17 On the other hand, happiness appears to foster precisely the kind of expansive imagination that is useful for imagining new futures.18 If happy spaces are safe spaces for imagination, then happiness is at least a useful, if not a core, ingredient for practices focused on social change. Related emotions may also prove fruitful.19 More systematic research on the social tendencies of various emotional clusters seems likely enough to bear fruit that this ought to be a research priority of any intellectualPage 226 → or foundation interested in promoting peaceful, deliberative global interactions. Some systematic efforts to describe productive versions of various social emotions have been undertaken. Michael

Pfau, for example, has argued that—contrary to the widespread academic opposition to the stimulation of public fear—there is a version of “civic fear” that is not only acceptable, but necessary to such progressive projects as environmental protection and economic redistribution.20 Although I believe Pfau’s formula is incomplete without attention to the action tendencies of fear, engagement with such formulas, and intense exploration of such potentials, should be a priority for those who seek to move the public toward less crisis-filled futures. As a move in that direction, we might ask how Sontag might have used either fear or sadness to promote her ends. Sontag’s article appeared at approximately the cusp between the second (grief absorbed) and third (reconstitutive) stage of the public mourning process as that process is described in chapter 5. Sharing the public’s sorrow might therefore have been an obvious starting point for building and broadening affiliations. In what directions would dwelling in sorrow together have tended to lead those who had read such a response? Although the research is far from finished, and is already showing complexities, the evidence suggests that sadness, like fear, can be a cognitively open emotion (at least when not routinized in depression). When mildly fearful or sad, people are more prone to look for alternatives, rather than to lock down on rote routines as they collectively do when angered.21 The dangerous potentials in sadness and fear are the proclivity to withdraw, and, in the case of fear, to individualize rather than socialize.22 Sadness, however, seems to entail simultaneously a withdrawal from a negative stimulus, but also openness to social support and a tendency toward fairness.23 Importantly for discourse that seeks to draw attention to social structure, sadness and fear do not require an evil enemy. One can be fearful of thunder or sad about the loss of a home to a fire. Moreover, the sadness at death requires a reconfiguration of the social network, which is at that time uniquely open to reaffiliations because the loss of people from the network simply requires some reconfiguration—as long as those affiliations do not evidently break with existing bonds and values, which are more treasured at that moment than ever.24 Sharing sadness with her grieving audience should have provided Sontag the chance to offer a future affiliation that simultaneously made the Page 227 →deaths meaningful and addressed the deep sadness at the sense of loss—not merely of the individual lives—but rather at the loss of a sense of a reliable and safe community. Interestingly, Sontag herself seems to have sensed the importance of sorrow. When the New Yorker essay was reprinted in a collection of essays in 2007, it included an additional opening phrase, “To this appalled, sad American, and New YorkerВ .В .В .”25 To deepen this sentiment, she might have asked her audience, “What will it take to make us safe? To ensure that we don’t have to grieve together again over the victims of violence?” And she could have answered that it would take a world dedicated to working together to provide justice—a justice that resisted violence, but violence of every kind, including that of powerful nation-states. Sharing sorrow with Americans might have enabled them to hear the question Sontag perhaps should have wanted to ask, “when does bombing make us safer, and when does it merely stir the forces of disorder?” When Abraham Lincoln faced the devastation from the Battle of Gettysburg, he didn’t tell his audience to get over their sorrow, to get smart about beating the Rebs, or even to get angry and retaliate. Instead, he encouraged Americans to dedicate and consecrate the hallowed ground and the lives of those who had fought, notably to consecrate them to a Union reimagined on subtly but importantly shifted values. While Lincoln was clearly one of the most skillful rhetors whom American public address scholars have intensely studied, his example illustrates that it is possible to create options for social change at moments of deep grief. Lincoln, of course, had a strong idea of what it was he wanted for the people of his nation. We are only beginning to specify a concrete set of trajectories for global interactions.

Creating Global Deliberative Forums for Governance Human anger routines appear to play a prominent role in global affairs. Close examination of the internationally directed rhetorics of Bush, Sontag, and bin Laden has provided reason to believe that the way in which the human anger complex organizes the intersection of several phenomena—nationalism, linguistic strategies of binarism and absolutism, competitive structures for leadership, and human biological resources—is tilted toward producing patterns of global relations that support violence and injustice Page 228 →more or less as a matter of routine. But this analysis does not support the conclusion that all is lost. It suggests instead that to steer a different

global trajectory requires providing appropriately located and formed counterforces, whose lineaments can be identified from the component characters of the forces they are designed to blunt. At least by 1990, scholars in international relations and other disciplines had begun to suggest that a model of “discursive democracy” (as John Dryzek dubbed it) had unique fit for addressing the global-level problems created by the interaction of more than seven billion people of diverse backgrounds and dispersed geographies.26 Intense discussions and debates have surrounded such proposals, addressing their normative,27 philosophical,28 and practical aspects.29 In 2011, Richard Beardsworth provided a detailed overview of major strands of these arguments and a reply from the perspective of a limited vision of cosmopolitanism.30 While the arguments will not likely be closed in this century, rather than enter specific strands of these arguments—a task that would require another book-length manuscript—I simply endorse most of Beardsworth’s arguments, albeit with what I take to be a shift of emphasis that has some importance. Many critiques of philosophically grounded cosmopolitan positions argue that discursively based approaches are biased because they represent the cultural preferences of “Westerners” at the cost of “traditionally” based cultures.31 The critics note that appeals to discursive democracy are usually grounded by reference to a presumed universal human moral principle such as dignity or norms implicit in communication, often JГјrgen Habermas’s universal speech criteria. I believe that the values grounding discursive democracy are not “Western” but rather arise as derivative products of human social dependence, albeit in contest with other derivative products. I also believe that they would and should ultimately “win” in a global democratic debate. Nonetheless, it is not defensible to start the debate by positing the “win” of these norms as the foundation for the debate. Instead, the defensible grounding of cross-cultural discursively based governing actions arises from an inescapable choice facing everyone in the current global condition: one must interact with other peoples and so one must choose whether to ground cross-cultural relations in violence or in discourse. One can’t mandate as a matter of universal principle that cultures should choose more open-ended discursive engagements over more physically violent ones (to array the choice as a multidimensional spectrum rather Page 229 →than a simple dichotomy). One can try to make evident the long-term greater attractiveness of the former options. Part of that argument is to show how, regardless of the internal workings of one’s culture, neither governance approaches grounded in discourse or in violence have ever prevented cultures from changing. Because humans are a discourse-using, tool-creating creature, every culture has always undergone change. After a brief defense of this approach, which largely restates in a particular form what has been developed by others over the past 30 years, I will outline what I would call a pragmatic deliberative position32 that aspires to craft a multilevel monitory democracy33 that is based on an open-ended model of aspirational and boot-strapped trajectories rather than an absolutist telos.34 In an increasing number of ways being documented by scholars and recognized by political actors, human beings now live in interconsequence with other people far distant from them in culture and position on the globe.35 Even the most isolated group or individual on the planet experiences impacts, from large to small, of phenomena such as air pollution, global climate change, habitat loss, satellites in the night sky, and airplane overflights. Most people are not isolated, but rather fed, clothed, housed, heated, and entertained by people enmeshed in institutions from most parts of the globe. Each person or group experiences these impacts differently, and the benefits and costs of these impacts are differently distributed. Attention to these differences is crucial to both justice and care, but the encroachment of other humans produced by population growth, by increasing demands for resource utilization to support better lifestyles, and by technologies for mobility mean that all humans are impacted by each others’ quests for resource utilization and by the negative consequences of those resource utilizations. To the extent that each group’s behavior encroaches on others situated around the globe, the interconsequentiality of behaviors will, in fact, be interregulated. That regulation can be accomplished by mechanisms that are describable as falling somewhere along a continuum sliding from brute force to deliberative accommodation.36 To the extent that one prefers more deliberative and accommodative approaches over blunt violence and threat of

violence, then one in effect endorses, at the least, this rule of thumb: If you offload a substantial negative effect on others, you can’t claim local sovereignty over the behaviors that produce that negative effect for others. All those who are affected share the sovereignty, wherever they may reside. Page 230 →This rule of thumb accords with critical theoretic preferences to eschew principles framed as substantive obligations. It is a negatively grounded vision of governance. It also accords with poststructuralist preferences because it does not envision a totalized polity or community that must coordinate all its behaviors. It is compatible with multiple, federalized sources of governance, and thus avoids what Robert Goodin has called “the great bogeyman of international political theorizing,” that is, a single and all-powerful world government.37 It does not even really justify constructive action for common projects above national sovereignty in the absence of extranational consequences. Implementing the principle also does not require a thick vision of a global people who share a great deal with others, only that a set of advantages-and-harms are distributed among people on the basis of deliberation rather than military might. For these reasons, this protoprinciple may ultimately prove to be too thin a basis to bridge what Manuel Castells has called “the growing gap between the space where the issues arise (global), and the space where the issues are managed (the nation-state).”38 Nonetheless, for now, it provides the modest, minimally defensible basis for taking action with regard to the most pressing conditions in which Earth finds itself. The rule sums up a motivation even the most self-oriented people would share: “I don’t want to suffer from your actions, or pay the price for your gains.” The rule also leaves nations or other groups the theoretical capacity to maintain their full sovereignty: just keep everything within your own bounds. If you think such self-containment and its negative consequences to the group that might prefer to withdraw make that “in principle” unrealistic, that is only to affirm that you think that the guiding rule is a substantial one. This rule of thumb might seem to be potentially too broad: it could authorize special pleaders to claim that the butterfly effect means that others’ choices always affect them. The potential for overbreadth, however, should not be the guiding concern in the current circumstances. Injunctions to context-sensitivity are to be taken seriously and pragmatically engaged: currently, there are so many material limitations working against the instantiation of any democratically generated global agreements at all that worrying about the overimplementation of such a principle is currently irrelevant. If the world changes sufficiently so that the rule needs to be further sculpted down, that will be the task for another day. To implement such a provisional rule requires some kind of global governing apparatuses. We now have the capability to build electronic platformsPage 231 → that would enable people from anywhere in the globe to participate in deliberative discussions with policy consequences on specific agenda items for organizations with global reach such as the World Health Organization and the World Bank. These groups should implement public participatory platforms for at least components of their decision making. That suggestion presumes the value of democratic deliberation but not of replacing representative governance with direct democracy completely. The value of combining participation and representation has been illuminated by several sources, which have also emphasized that innovative combinatorial forms are possible.39 It is enough for now to focus on gaining participatory inputs for global interactions that are maximally democratic given the existing constraints. A substantial academic literature has identified concerns with democracy. Only a few passionate advocates have suggested that these critiques delegitimate democracy from its stance as “the least desirable form of government, except for all the others.”40 The rest of us might well focus our attention on the pragmatic goal of using our critical understandings of the problems of democratic systems to produce the best democratic systems we can produce. The human task cannot be to wait around until perfection arrives, but instead generally to work toward the better. The major flaws that are recurrently identified in democratic systems seem to be (1) the oppression of minorities by majorities in purely democratic systems;41 (2) the unequal power of differently situated individuals and groups to participate with effective influence in democratic processes, to which this book has added the differential influence of different emotion scripts for different agents;42 (3) the envisioning of deliberative processes as

focused on consensus or unity;43 (4) the need for policing forces to implement democratic policies;44 and (5) the broader fact that any government limits individual or group “freedom.”45 At this early point in efforts to build global democratic affiliations there is a more and less pressing need to address each of these problems. With regard to the first and second, differential power and the resulting oppression of minorities by majorities are typically addressed by bills of rights and constitutions and by designing voting mechanisms that encourage fragmentation-with-coalition rather than majoritarianism. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides the existing starting point for trying to reduce the opportunities for global polities to oppress minorities. It is too early to envision anything like a global constitution that would Page 232 →specify the relationships among various parties. Perhaps such a written constitution will even prove to be unwise or unnecessary. In any case, as Laura Valentini has summarized, such a constitution cannot be imagined until there is a global demos.46 The goal at this point can therefore be only to create such a precondition for other politics, but rather than a single demos, the goal should be to create multiple global polities of some breadth and thickness. Articulating the third concern, many advocates have identified existing democratic theories as flawed because they focus on consensus or unity.47 This concern is integrated with the belief that democratic engagement promotes the mis-universalization of singular groups. Democratic processes, it is suggested, become part of the forces of oppression because groups that are historically or economically advantaged are better able to participate and succeed in the processes of democratic deliberation. The alternative, as theorists as disparate as Chantal Mouffe and Nancy Fraser have indicated, requires imagining democratic processes as existing among pluralities rather than as a singular “people.” In Mouffe’s words, “Instead of trying to erase the traces of power and exclusion, democratic politics requires bringing them to the fore, making them visible so that they can enter the terrain of contestation.”48 In Fraser’s terms, “it would be more appropriate to unbracket inequalities in the sense of explicitly thematizing them.”49 Additionally, Fraser notes the need for multiple public spheres. The latter element is central to this proposal, and the appendix addresses ways in which the “unbracketing” can be explicitly thematized within procedures and processes that attend to the counterforces anger brings to bear. Explicitly thematizing emotion scripts becomes part of this process, not solely because more powerful actors have less experience in restraining their anger with lower powered individuals than vice versa, but also for that reason. Addressing the fourth and fifth concerns, some theorists are critical of democratic processes because all effective governance systems necessarily constrain something like individual “freedoms,” require policing agencies, and creating stabilities and closures. This concern emphasizes the importance of building processes and policies that minimize constraints on freedom to temporary exigencies rather than as permanent, sedimented ideals. In the face of humanity’s linguistically fostered proclivities for invention and therefore constant change, governance activities should be reconceived as adaptations to new conditions rather than as trying to establish a final Page 233 →ideal (although some constraints on the pace of change seem desirable). This reenvisioning of governance as mutually deliberated adaptation to changing conditions rather than as living up to timeless ideals responds to humanity’s increasing familiarity with the changes through history that human symbolic capacities enable. The reenvisioning also accords with the demands of poststructural theory (which may be simply one way of encoding those understandings at the theoretical level). The problem of enforcement is particularly difficult at the global level and when one imagines multiple global polities rather than a singular global demos. Within a sovereign nation, one can at least imagine that a regularized and equitably enforced rule of law could approach a living arrangement where the state’s monopoly on violence protects inhabitants from violence at the hands of avaricious or rapacious individuals.50 However, it is difficult to imagine how to coordinate the policing powers of nation-states with those of a World Health Organization and the latter with those of a World Bank or a World Trade Organization (even if each of these were more democratically guided). For this reason, incentives rather than coercive mandates may prove to be a primary tool of such global agencies. Whether this is true or not in the long run, the absence of a dedicated police force will shape the options available in the early stages of the formation of multiple global polities. This may have a salutatory effect on the imagination for the long term as well.

This description of an aspirational global democratic forum merely repeats, perhaps with some reshaping, other well-developed academic treatments of such fora. The analysis of anger provided in this book adds a particular potency to these arguments. Recognizing that anger is a primary mode by which human collectives are actively motivated in adjudicating resource distributions, and that because of the ineradicable need for such adjudications human collectivities are intensely predisposed toward the sharing of anger, means that the creation of global affiliations and norms may be something close to an absolute requirement for the reduction of global conflict. Global forums for direct discussion of international relations among the world’s peoples are needed to create an arena for adjudication, which requires in the short- and midterm the interactive experiences necessary to thicken global affiliations and to craft the kind of shared social norms that are required for adjudicatory scripts to function. The fundamental premise underlying the structuring of such global forums with little more than Page 234 →these initial goals is that the analysis of humans as “symbolizing animals” entails the assumption that affiliations are the pivot upon which social emotions turn. As chapter 2 argued in tandem with other scholars, the various identities with which “we” might feel ourselves to be affiliated direct our emotions and thereby (in recursive interaction) guide our collective actions. To enable anger to regulate social behavior through shared norms thus requires the creation of a sufficient sense of global affiliation that one can imagine others located around the globe not solely as opponents but also as sharing some legitimate stake in decisions about allocations and behavioral regulation, even if not in any totalistic fusion (affiliation, not “identification”). While academic or other public rhetorics that encourage global affiliation, as this book does, are part of the process of creating such affiliations, they are weak gruel for the purposes. Because affiliational strength is not a matter of abstract belief, but is a set of feelings created in substantial part by interaction, rehearsal, and interest, global affiliation will not be strong enough to overcome nationalist or local interests in crucial cases unless people have invested substantial time interacting with others on global level tasks that give strengthened presence to shared consequences.51 Various sources have begun to document the ways in which Internet-based communication can create such emotional relationships across existing international divides. Damien Smith Pfister’s analysis of an Iraqi blogger’s global influence led him to conclude that as peoples “encounter each other through the networked public sphere, affective ties form.”52 Although no affective tie is impervious to conflict, if affective ties are pivotal, a path to global affiliation will consist of stair-steps constituted by platforms that provide initially small but focused opportunities for building such feelings of affiliation. Small trial steps in this general direction are better than dreams of instantaneous perfection.53 The development of “international public spheres” has already proceeded through social movements and nongovernmental organizations.54 Further steps should be to create Internet-based global forums open to any person for discussing and resolving specific globally important policies. The Internet has, for the first time in human history, made possible the engagement of peoples in what John Keane has called “monitory democracy”55 in a fashion that is relatively transparent and timely across supratribal scales. Experiments in such monitoring processes on the national level have begun (see, e.g., Regulations.gov, Project on Government Oversight, Open Page 235 →the Government), but the systems will need to be invented and developed through time. International organizations such as the World Health Organization, World Bank, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and Red Cross/Red Crescent already exist, so it would be counterfactual to suggest that global level coordination is impossible. The element that remains missing in these international organizations is direct public input into policy-making processes in globally accessible fora. Such organizations should immediately begin the experiments necessary to incorporate direct deliberative input from individuals across the globe into their policy-making processes. Thus, for example, when the World Health Organization was considering policies related to the creation and global dissemination of “super-flu” strains, it should have called for input by all of the world’s peoples, rather than allowing 22 expertly biased and self- and nationally interested individuals to decide in favor of the creation and greater dispersal of such creatures around the globe.56 In sum, I have suggested that we can’t know right now exactly what kind of globality we want because we don’t exist yet. However, I’ve also suggested that the experience of peoples around the globe with democracy suggests that those of us who prefer greater peace and justice and care should begin to try to create

whatever we that will become precisely by engaging in the process of building some global forums that use global participatory input to make policies, that defend the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights as a starting point but not a permanent set of principles, and that celebrate, or at least accept, affiliations across political identities rather than demanding a unified “people.” You and I can affiliate as global citizens on a minimal and provisional basis, even if we don’t share each others’ identities. If we don’t do so, we can only suffer each other’s resource depredations in silence or in violence. Consequently, the first task of those who are concerned with global justice should be to begin to build various flavors of some global demos. To be effective at drawing the time and attention of people whose lives are otherwise already cluttered enough, these policies will have to address issues that matter to many and participatory results will need to have the promise of being implemented.57 Getting global entities to begin to incorporate direct democratic participation will be no small task. In order to make these discussions as equitable as humanly possible for the current era, details of the rules of such forums are worth giving some attention to, so I have offered a tentative outline for such an approach in the appendix. Page 236 →

Not a Conclusion: Maybe Another Step The recommendations offered in this chapter may well seem simultaneously quixotic and mundane. I would encourage you to consider this just about the right mix for the dynamic moments in which we are living. With regard to its implications for scholarship, the quixotic and mundane are merged in the suggestion that good theory requires familiarity with both the rapidly expanding understandings of human biological proclivities and the foundational structures of language. This claim requires an appreciation for the mundane, because the details of emotional activations are composed of mundane facts. The theoretical claim may also require a taste for the quixotic because there are so very many mundane facts involved, and so many scholars are so comfortably entrenched in their resistance to learning things produced by other wings of the academy. With regard to political agendas, the suggestions made in this book are appropriately quixotic, because some “big visions” are required to break the logjams of the human heritage, which have given us only the options of a sedimented empire or violent contests for empire. This need for novel visions must be balanced with the shared lesson from the humanities and social sciences in the past few decades: there are so very many details in which the devil can hide. The mundane details matter, and they are impossible to assemble into predictable and perfect wholes. Consequently, humble starts are preferable to sweeping shifts in the face of our continued ignorance about key characteristics of human minds, human relations, and global-scale phenomena. Humble starts should nonetheless have some general sense of direction. The theory of humans as symbolizing animals provides both a sense of the direction needed and some initial tools. The treatment of anger in this analysis should also provide a model for further academic analyses of emotions in political relations. One can easily imagine analyses of the role of hope or compassion or sorrow employing the method here pursued. A detailed assessment of the proclivities of such emotions at the discursive and biological levels would produce a template to describe the tendencies encouraged by specific complexes. An examination of diverse and key public rhetorics that shared the specific emotion would then allow an understanding of the range and possibilities of the operation of that emotion in particular contexts and for particular purposes. Even analysis of the emotion of fear in national and international politics—which has received substantial attention—would seem likely to Page 237 →profit from accounting for typically neglected components of fear, such as the action tendencies of withdrawal and individualization and the appraisal cue of power or competence. Such a project is academically interesting, but its interest value should lie substantially in the potential leverage such understandings might give us to develop collective options additional to the proclivities to which the structuration of language and biology first predispose us. This exploration of anger through the integration of multiple kinds of empirical observations has suggested where the dampening and redirecting of at least some important performances of our anger begins to gain plausibility.

One might recraft the anger we would share with our affiliates to avoid the worst of the amplifying and warping tendencies of anger. We might also expand the emotional repertoire that is employed toward the ends some justice-oriented peoples might seek where anger isn’t sufficient. This trajectory involves developing the skills to point up the blind spots in our own righteous feelings of anger. In the global context, however, the crucial component of this initiative has been to suggest the need to develop particularly formatted institutions that recognize and counter the ways in which anger has generally been the proximate hinge in global relations. If anger is to swing toward social adjudication based on shared norms, instead of always toward threat-based advantage for the powerful, then there must be both affiliative and shared normative bases available. Perhaps, as righteous pessimists self-assuredly insist, we cannot succeed at such tasks. Perhaps, however, our ability now to assemble multidimensional portraits of the specific elements of emotions that have repeatedly led us toward bad outcomes gives us better access to a crucial set of tools. By doing so, it rejustifies that tiny bit of optimism that many scholars, intellectuals, and advocates have held, that human minds and feeling sets can be oriented toward enabling greater goods.

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Appendix How Do We Get a Maximally (for Now) Fair Deliberative Platform? This appendix elaborates some suggestions for constructing a platform for global deliberation that maximizes the fairness of these deliberations as we currently understand the possibilities for doing so. Critics of public discussion have pointed out myriad ways in which existing inequalities impede the possibility of fair discussions, and these issues are exacerbated in online platforms.1 Around the globe and in local quarters, unequal access to communicative interaction exists. Differences among people that produce challenges to equitable discussion include the following:2 1. Internet access and consequent proficiency with its use 2. Time away from work/family to participate 3. Competence in one of a few “world languages” 4. Linguistic orientation toward public persuasion 5. Personal/group credibility (“ethos”) based in cultural styles and other factors 6. Self-confidence/self-image 7. Direct and indirect threats to livelihood for public participation 8. Access to effective emotional regulation and control scripts 9. Status-quo-supporting arguments take less space to present than novel arguments Page 240 →None of these differences can be completely eliminated. Perfect elimination of differences should not be the goal; the wish that one could produce mathematical equality of power in the face of diversity in qualities improperly imagines that “power” can be summarized as a singular abstraction (such as net income or wealth). Power appears in varying forms of social, intellectual, economic capital, and patterned interactions that have their differing effectivities in differing settings. To “equalize” all of those effectivities could only be an authoritarian and probably homogenizing endeavor. Nonetheless, minimization of the difference in the potential to shape public deliberation should be a goal, and that goal can be worked toward on Internet platforms for deliberation in several ways. The ideal of democracy even suggests that such processes might serve in the long haul to lessen degrees of power differences created by social structures by giving those with less power the chance and the coalitional power to alter those structures. Thereby, such platforms might “pluralize hegemony” not by making more nation-states have more power, but rather by making peoples and groups and low-power individuals have more power.3 An important key to thematizing and equalizing power in discussions lies in the design of appropriate moderation procedures for online discourse.4 Desirable processes preserve transparency, the contributive agency of individuals and groups, and yet also give access to communicative resources and respect the limitation of resources that individuals face. Constraints of time and access mean that moderators should provide streamlining through segregation of threads and multiple summaries, while ensuring that all contributions are posted in an accessible place for transparency. More specifically, a global interaction would generate so many contributions that most individuals could not read them all. To facilitate access to key ideas and feelings, moderators could provide a “primary” thread that includes arguments and feelings selected to present the most common themes as well as the full range of themes, even perhaps with a subordinating link to all similar contributions so that the frequency of such arguments could be relatively rapidly assessed by readers. Simultaneously, all other contributions should be placed in a “secondary” thread. Such contributions might include off-topic contributions or side battles constituting only ad hominem attacks among specific contributors (which often seem to develop in public news commentary spaces). The requirement to post all posts, even if in secondary threads, provides a transparency that helps Page 241 →guide and constrain biases in moderators’ judgments; errant judgments by moderators could receive public critique by multiple persons. After a substantial period of discussion, moderators could solicit summary

statements from active participants who represent distinguishable views, so that time-pressed participants could read these summary statements, rather than the wealth of threads, if they so chose. The myth of the singular summary should be discarded.5 Where controversy exists, it is not possible to provide a single overview. Instead, different summaries of competing positions enable more authentic and broad summarization of points of contestation. Summaries, however, are useful as compared to reading dozens or even hundreds of posts, because of the material constraint represented by time. Summaries also enable the presentation of novel ideas with the greater space and rhetorical skill they require for intelligibility as compared to familiar ideas. Moderators should also invite and enable many participants who might not otherwise “attend” the deliberation. This would provide a counterforce to cultural, self-image/confidence, and access issues. Some of these invitations should be to already established nongovernmental entities that can reasonably be presumed to represent a variety of diverse interests, and some should be to individuals or cultural groups who have not participated previously in the global public’s deliberations. Achieving such an invitational procedure with the appropriate depth and breadth would require active engagement in a variety of venues by the “moderators.”6 It may also require providing equipment and training in the use of Internet forums.7 Linguistic competence can be facilitated by providing volunteer translators (and back-translators) for all contributions to the platform from any language, and by ensuring that translations into at least the three most frequently available world languages are presented for each contribution. Issues of credibility, self-confidence /image, and emotional regulation issues can be partially addressed by volunteer rhetorical coaches. When a person submits a contribution, they could be automatically offered a rhetorical coach, or they could request one in advance. Recommendations of rhetorical coaches could be adopted or ignored by the poster after individual or group discussion in other venues (which the coach could be required to recommend). Moderators (or rhetorical coaches) could influence the dynamics of emotional contagion in various ways. They could thematize issues of emotion in their own posts. They could suggest to those who send them posts Page 242 →that they might want to broaden their represented affiliations, attend to the efficacy of their action statements, the potential shareability of their stated norms, or ask participants if they might wish to reconsider other aspects of their messages before posting. They could also post replies highlighting these aspects of messages. Finding the most sensitive and effective approaches to the productive construction of shared emotions will be a matter of trial and error. One can formulate a productive goal as the facilitation of broader affiliation—and hence greater effectiveness for each poster’s message—without eliminating the distinctive concerns of those posters’ messages. Research to assess the impacts of different approaches will surely be desirable as we begin to experiment with a thematization of emotion that is not based merely on hostility to each others’ emotions, but rather based in an understanding of what makes emotions move us as they do. The issue of potential threats to participants raises the possibility of anonymization. In general, public contributions should require accountability from the agent who wants to make those contributions. Anonymity seems to encourage hostile attack to the point of vileness.8 However, there may be cases in which moderators might judge that low-power individuals are otherwise subject to coercion that would prevent them from representing their own views absent anonymization.9 This list should be seen as a “starter set” that is “up for trial.” As Darrin Hicks and Lenore Lansdorff indicate, “if we design procedures that are mutable and dynamic and that build in space for constant challenge and revision, they will not threaten heterogeneous argumentation.”10 Or, at least, we can try to constantly improve their ability to protect heterogeneity while still producing collectively legitimated short-term and midterm actions in the world.

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Notes Introduction 1. The literature on 9/11 has grown so large, across so many disciplines, that it is impossible to provide a reasonably comprehensive review. Accounts that focus on laying blame on the actions of “the West” are further detailed in chapter 6, but see Jensen, “September 11 and the Failures of American Intellectuals”; Fritch et al., “Disingenuous Controversy”; Hossein-Zadeh, “Muslim World and the West”; Maira, “Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms”; Tracy, “Bearing Witness to the Unspeakable.” For an account attributing responsibility to “Western hegemony” with different time horizons and foci, including capitalism and religion, see Rockmore, Before and after 9/11. Accounts that assign responsibility to the “terrorists” include Frum and Perle, End to Evil; KГјhnhardt, “Global Society and Its Enemies”; Rowley, “Terrorist Attacks on Western Civilization.” An abstract overview of responses to 9/11 on different grounds is provided by Hyde, “Rhetor as Hero and the Pursuit of Truth,” and a helpful review essay is Miller, “Terrifying Thoughts.” One official view is the 9/11 Commission Report. 2. Long and Brecke, “Emotive Causes of Recurrent International Conflicts.” 3. Olson, “Anger among Allies,” 286. Olson’s analysis remains one of the most thoughtful rhetorical treatments of anger. 4. Hutchison and Bleiker, “Theorizing Emotions.” 5. Duncombe, “Emotional Diplomacy”; Hall, Emotional Diplomacy; Jasper, “Emotions of Protest” and “Constructing Indignation”; Rand, “Gay Pride”; Mercer, “Feeling Like a State”; Ross, Mixed Emotions; Sasley, “Theorizing States’ Emotions”; Olson, “Anger among Allies”; Yang, “Achieving Emotions in Collective Action.” 6. Berlant, Compassion; Cloud, “Therapy, Silence and War”; Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided. 7. Long-standing because of anger’s tendency toward rote rather than exploratory thought. 8. The harm must cohere with the norm both because dramatistic theories prescribe that the components of the drama must cohere and because the social function of anger is built around normative adjudication. Page 244 →9. The absolutist dynamics lead to the focus on attack rather than on other correctives for the harm. Contrast this template to a list of appraisal cues that did not take into account the biosymbolic dimensions of anger: (1) an agent, (2) acted to cause harm, (3) in violation of legitimate purposes (social norms or morals), (4) so we must act in response (to punish, retaliate, prevent future harm by threat, attack). 10. Westen, Political Brain. 11. A psychodynamic account that explains some elements of resonance is provided by Solomon, Politics of Subjectivity. 12. John Lucaites and I earlier attributed some of the success of the movements of the era to the interplay of King’s rhetoric and that of black power advocates such as Malcolm X. The present analysis is compatible with that, but deepens the interpretation in terms of King’s use of the in-group script. Another book-length analysis would be needed to give a substantive assessment of the impact of Malcolm X’s use of anger both as a rallying tool and as a threat-based rhetoric; Lucaites and Condit, “Reconstructing .” 13. Quick, Bates, and Quinlan, “Utility of Anger,” show that including anger appeals in a message related to perceived self-interests (clean air) effectively increases favorable interest in the issue. Therefore, anger may be useful as an in-group rhetoric for increasing arousal and involvement on an issue. This is different from the threat function and from the social solidarity function (the latter of which Chvasta, “Anger, Irony, and Protest,” assigns to the positive emotions). Van Zomeren et al., “вЂPut Your Money Where Your Mouth Is’,” show alternate pathways for group-based anger. See also Miller et al., “Relative Impact of Anger,” and Jasper, “Emotions of Protest.” 14. Such versions of angry rhetorics seek to work by threatening the out-group. However, declaring

one’s group to be disempowered but implying that one has the power to execute a threat against those with greater power constitutes a performative contradiction. The “we have nothing to lose” rhetoric attempts to compensate for that gap, but its content value may often be swamped by the emotional dynamics of the frame taken as a whole. 15. For more on the binary casting of opponents and a proliferative intersectional alternative, see Condit, “Control by All.” 16. F. Y., “Susan Sontag Documentary.” 17. Numerous biographies now exist of Osama bin Laden and George Bush. Although these disagree on many points, they seem to agree on the major points of the descriptions I have summarized here. Specific sources I have consulted about more specific characterizations and claims are provided in each of the relevant chapters. The publication of the first two volumes of the diaries of Susan Sontag, Reborn and As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, have stimulated several biographical and critical studies, utilized and cited in chapter 6. 18. “Susan Sontag.” 19. He describes it as “an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification towards what concerns oneself or towards what concerns one’s friends.” Aristotle, Rhetoric, book 2. 20. This correction of the “naГЇve realist” account has been empirically supported and received sophisticated theoretical treatment by scholars as differently oriented as Page and Shapiro, Rational Public, and Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Page 245 →21. Foss and Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion”; Foss and Foss, Eloquence of Women’s Lives; McCann, “Prisoners of Conscience”; McCormack, “Arguments from Analogy.” 22. Jackson, “Core Commitments of Critical Terrorism Studies”; Falk, “War and Peace”; Kennelly, “Terror of the Talk”; Spivak, “Terror”; Staun, “When, How and Why Elites Frame Terrorists.” 23. See the special issue on “Neoliberalism and/as Terror,” in Critical Studies on Terrorism, introduced by Heath-Kelly, Baker-Beall, and Jarvis, “Editors’ Introduction.” 24. For example, Davis and Silver, “Civil Liberties vs. Security”; Ojanen, “Terrorist Profiling”; Qureshi, “Researching Rendition and Torture.” 25. Cainkar, “Global Impacts of September 11”; Muscati, “Reconstructing вЂEvil’,” but more examples are noted in chapter 5. 26. See especially the “roundtable” introduced by Allison and Pratt, “вЂWar on Terror’”; Sharlach, “Veil and Four Walls”; Allison, “Feminism and the War on Terror.” 27. Ivie, Democracy and America’s War on Terror; Murphy, “вЂOur Mission and Our Moment’”; Bostdorff, “George W. Bush’s Post-September 11 Rhetoric”; Winkler, In the Name of Terrorism; Kuypers, Bush’s War; Lockett et al., “Going Public”; Vivian, “Neoliberal Epideictic”; Crenshaw, “American and Foreign Terrorists”; Jeffords and AlSumait, Covering Bin Laden; Miller and Mills, “Terror Experts”; Norris, Kern, and Just, Framing Terrorism; Redfield, Rhetoric of Terror; Dimaggio, Selling War; Holland, Selling the War. 28. Agathangelou and Ling, “Power, Borders, Security, Wealth.” 29. Agathangelou and Ling, “Power, Borders, Security, Wealth,” 521. 30. They specifically trace the source to the economic structure and therefore elites, rather than to popular motivations: “This power narrative must resonate culturally to elicit attention but its logic draws from an ideologically rationalized economic infrastructure,” Agathangelou and Ling, “Power, Borders, Security, Wealth,” 519. They ascribe the motivating desire of elites to a sequence of hypermasculinist affects captured in the metaphor of “the hunt” as described by Brian Luke, “Violent Love,” 635: вЂвЂanticipation, desire, pursuit, excitement, penetration, climax, and satiation.” While this sequence may account for some of the passion experienced by many of the males pursuing jihad or wars on terrorism, it is not offered as, and cannot stand as, an account of, for example, the motivations of the Muslim mother they quote as eager to sacrifice her son to the holy war so that she may have a weekly conference with God when she secures her place in heaven. 31. Agathangelou and Ling represent these as new for some scholarly enclaves, which may be the case, but they have been readily available as part of the broad academic discourse for decades, e.g., Said, Orientalism

and “Orientalism 25 Year Later”; Shome, “Postcolonial Interventions.” 32. Agathangelou and Ling, “Power, Borders, Security, Wealth,” 536. The standard default is to blame “the media” or refer to the extra power that elites have to circulate their ideologies. While this advantage is substantial, if that is all there is to it, then the game is over, because elites by definition have more power to circulate their messages, so they win. Only if there is some specific advantage to specific discourses can the academic enterprise be of some use in producing better worlds. In that case, the job is to find those advantage-accruing elements, i.e., to study rhetoric.

Page 246 →Chapter 1 1. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion and Promise of Happiness; Berlant, Compassion; Clough and Halley, Affective Turn; Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided; Hariman and Lucaites, “Dissent and Emotional Management”; Hartnett, “Fanny Fern’s 1855 Ruth Hall”; Pezzullo, “Articulating вЂSexy’”; McGee, “Rehabilitating Emotion”; Rand, “Inflammatory Fag and a Queer Form”; Short and Hardy-Short, “вЂBless Us with Tears”; Stearns and Stearns, Anger; Gross, Secret History of Emotion; Stewart, Ordinary Affects. 2. Rosenwein writes in Anger’s Past, 2, that it is “a serious and ongoing theoretical debate among professionals in psychology and anthropology. To pose the problem in its starkest form: Some scholars view emotions as innate whereas others consider them to be вЂsocial constructions.’” 3. Massumi, Parables; Brennan, Transmission of Affect; Connolly, Neuropolitics. Many studies that broaden from particular symbols to impute other kinds of elements of affect may implicitly assume either a cultural-only or biocultural model. It is difficult to ascertain which when these issues are not directly addressed. See Grossberg, “Postmodernity and Affect”; Boromisza-Habashi, Speaking Hatefully; Johnson, “вЂMan’s Mouth Is His Castle’”; Jorgensen-Earp and Lanzilotti, “Public Memory and Private Grief”; Nakayama and Corey, “Anger in Performance.” 4. Hawhee, Moving Bodies. 5. Lamented even by mutually opposed theories, including Massumi, Parables, and Leys, “Turn to Affect.” There was a time when inserting “Western” in front of “academic” would have been obligate. However, not only is the term “Western” now evidently problematic as a descriptor that is pseudogeographical, the increased study of “Eastern” approaches suggests that the assignment of mind/body dualism to “Western” theory is not quite correct. Although “Eastern” and other “non-Western” theories might treat mind and body in more complementary rather than oppositional ways, and though the division seems to be parsed among different components differently, it no longer seems strictly correct to assign the dualism to “the West”; Lu, Rhetoric in Ancient China. 6. Jackson, Conduct of Inquiry, has argued that theory might better begin with methodology than either epistemology or ontology, and I don’t disagree, because in practice what I write here as ontology and epistemology were shaped by what was, and was not, possible to do methodologically, and my expansions from those limits. However, I do not write this chapter foregrounding methodology because of my perception of the limitations on clarity that would result, given the history of the academy’s foregrounding of ontology and then epistemology. My critique of the “New Materialisms” and the “New Humanism” also suggest to me that placing methodology first (at least at this stage of academic reflection) invites statements about ethics, ontology, and epistemology that can be more harmful than helpful. 7. Brockman, New Humanists, offered this label, but it is not widely used among traditional humanists. See especially Pinker, Blank Slate, the faults of which are discussed below. In Better Angels, Pinker relies on an unreflected-upon paean to reason because he lacks a theory of ideation, which I provide below. 8. Wilson, Consilience, 144. 9. Coole and Frost, New Materialisms; Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Connolly, “New Page 247 →Materialism”; Dolphijn and van der Tuin, New Materialism; Tiainen and Parikka, “Opening Words.” 10. Barad, “Interview,” 59. Or Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 9: “The human species is being relocated within a natural environment whose material forces themselves manifest certain agentic

capacities.” 11. In Bennett’s words, it will “encourage more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things” (Vibrant Matter, loc. 39, Kindle). 12. Although many of these theorists reject the old constructionism (e.g., De Landa, “Interview,” 38–39)—which held that mere articulation of a set of symbols “constitutes” reality or the human world—nonetheless this political prong of their project is based on that simplistic version of constructivism: just change the words people use to describe nonhuman matter and they’ll start to behave differently. Reviewers’ and editors’ preferences for other material and a shorter work resulted in the removal of more extended arguments supporting these claims about the New Materialism and New Humanism. 13. Condit and Railsback, Transilience. 14. Ong, Orality and Literacy. 15. Putative alternative candidates suggested to me include artificial life and supranatural entities. The former strikes me as a potential candidate, though it is not reducible to either “living” being (in the biological sense) or therefore simply symbolic being. The supranatural defies a materialist analysis, not only because we have no reliable access to it but also because it claims to defy fundamental laws of physical being. 16. The inclusion of the measurement devices and therefore of observation is essential here, but not in the reductive fashion that makes the observer and the devices no different from the measured item ontologically. All measurements (even when understood as products of “inscription devices”) are actions of relationship of a specific kind, institutable only by entities that have symbolizing capacities. 17. This is not incompatible with Karen Barad’s lovely insight (“Interview,” 66) that the later double slit experiments demonstrate that temporality is constituted through interaction. Barad frames the discussion as Niels Bohr vs. Werner Heisenberg, and declares Bohr the winner, but Heisenberg’s principle remains true at many levels, so the proper conclusion is that both Bohr and Heisenberg are correct. Her frame constitutes another instance of “transcending” binaries by collapsing to one instead of proliferating. 18. For an evolutionary and chemical account that is clear and edifying, see Greenspan, Introduction to Nervous Systems. 19. Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought and What Makes Biology Unique? 20. The preference for “machine” metaphors has enabled the incorporation of the notion of function while explicitly blocking the connotations of conscious intentionВ .В .В . at least until the cultural importation of artificial intelligence and “terminator” agents into the cultural vocabularies. But “machine” metaphors also always imply functions, so anyone who employs such metaphors is covertly using function talk—even when they disown the concept of function. 21. Mountain lions have stalked and preyed upon cyclists, whereas horses typically either ignore them or react in fear. 22. Opportunism involves the relationship of a new physical/form (a “self”) with its Page 248 →physical “environment” as opposed to merely the diffusion of energy/matter relations across space /time. An “environment” presupposes the separation of “identities” in a way that the physical matter surrounding a rock does not. We can’t accurately talk about a rock having an environment, because a rock does not have a self. Although “we” can use our linguistic apparatus to demarcate it as an “object,” there is no internal “it” that has the capacity to replicate its form employing different matter. It is the specific type of relationality to a self-similar that creates the possibility of a “self” and therefore what is “nonself” to the self, i.e., its “environment.” The adjacent energy/matter to a rock exerts forces on the atoms that we can demarcate as being “in the rock,” but the rock lacks the ability to have an opportunistic relationship with that adjacent energy/matter, because it has no boundaries that define its “self”—no historical chain of replication of a form—so there is no “environment” to it. We can certainly decide to “say” that the blob of matter that we choose to demarcate as “the rock” is separate, and we choose to call everything around it “its environment,” but that choice obfuscates differences between the physical matter arranged in what we have called “the rock” and physical matter in what we would label “a plant” (the former is only a demarcatable entity because we say it is; the plant is already self-demarcating, even if not in

language). 23. This distinction is useful even though evolution is a semicontinuous process (there is no singular bright line between the living and nonliving and there are rarely bright lines at speciation events). The fact that there is not a clear-cut boundary between biological life/nonlife is not a refutation of the description of biology as a mode of being with distinctive characteristics. The discrete qualities of language-as-acategorizer are often an imprecise match with the continuities of the world. Such mismatches must be attended to, but their existence does not constitute a reason for ignoring differences across progressively changing features in the world. 24. When one reaches the level of predicting the evolution of species, one has little predictive power, though if one can know the precise contours of opportunity potentials, there may still be some low-power prediction available. This may be fundamentally because the process of replication in nonstable environments is itself optimized by a mix of stable (predictable) and unpredictable environments. Something approaching self-identical reproduction might be favored by a completely stable environment, but such environments do not exist in any case, and self-similar reproductive processes (evolution, which allows for greater opportunism) are actually favored by some level of variation in the environment (which allows for the success of some variants of the “self”). The tendency to ignore this fact accounts for the ridiculous quality of many “just so” accounts of evolution of specific features, which tend to rest on the assumption that evolutionary environments are stable (and hence organisms can reach something like an “optimum” form), when the constant seasonal and large-scale changes in environments is one of the evident facts of biological/planetary history. 25. For depth on the debate, see Wilson and Wilson, “Evolution вЂfor the Good of the Group.’” E. O. Wilson eventually came to see the role of human sociality in evolution as he describes in The Social Conquest of Earth, and he was thereafter cast out by much of the genetics community. 26. Hauser and Konishi, Design of Animal Communication. 27. Male baboons use verbal contests (“wahoos”) to demonstrate who is stronger Page 249 →and thereby obviate the need for more damaging direct physical engagement; Cheney and Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics. 28. Identifying humans as more complex communicators is not to claim that we are superior animals to others. Eagles are better fliers. Dolphins are better swimmers. Hierarchicalizing plants and animals may enhance egoistic feelings. However, excessive efforts to tear down such hierarchicalizing by others also may be driven by status-promoting feelings. 29. These appear to be related to some more general abstract template, and the debates are heated about whether the general abstraction ability came before the word capacity or vice versa, but my money is on a spiral of mutual augmentation. 30. Human consciousness is composed of multiple components rather than a singular one, so debates about what human singular thing constitutes human consciousness are fundamentally mistaken. Some of the components are shared with other beings and some may not be. The human suite includes the little narrator; a somewhat fixed perceptual field (especially the visual field for most people, but also the aural, nasal, haptic); an attention director who shifts the perceptual field and the little narrator to particular areas; a sense of bodily perception or awareness of the body in a field (I’m right side up!) that runs as a kind of background but that is constantly brought into partial attention for different reasons; and a “theater in the mind” that is most evident in dreaming processes and some kinds of internally focused thinking while other consciousness elements are dampened. The insistence that only one of these is equivalent to human consciousness is an essentialist fallacy in my view. It is the full suite that makes for the richness that we experience as “consciousness”; other animals clearly share some of these features, but all are different to some extent in different species due to differences in perceptual systems (at the least). 31. This is to say that it is literally inside and outside of any single head. 32. Research has established that humans, like other animals, can “count” without specific numerical symbol systems (that is, match identical quantities of things) only up to around four. Humans and other animals can also approximately match large quantities with other similarly large quantities. However, “mathematics” per se requires symbol systems. There is no algebra, trigonometry, calculus, and so forth without such symbol systems. The myth that “math is the language of the universe” is unacceptably naГЇve in the present era. Math is a powerful tool for describing and accounting for structures

of the universe, but it is our language, not the universe’s. 33. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. 34. Gilles Deleuze and FГ©lix Guattari and followers such as Massumi emphasize what they describe as the “transcendent” quality of language and valorize it (Kenneth Burke makes a similar move), and this captures this third level of being on which symbolic being operates, but by using the old vocabulary of the transcendent, they obfuscate the relationships between the physical and the symbolic and reinscribe the commonsense tendency to treat symbolics as “spiritual” in the religious or Platonic sense. 35. Francis Bacon and John Locke’s prescription of “clarity” as the ideal for communication addresses the breadth of (mis)understanding that can arise from this complexity, but it is doomed to fail if my description is accurate (and as many others have argued on related grounds). Page 250 →36. KГ¶vecses, “Cross-Cultural Experience of Anger”; Russell, “Culture and the Categorization of Emotions.” 37. Goodnight, “Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument.” 38. I claim that the human drive for liberty arises from underlying human characteristics including our proclivity for movement, our desire to self/group-advantage, and our capacity to create new options through symbolization itself. These characteristics were concretized as a drive for “liberty,” which is a particular form, within a particular political milieu, and that value competes with other values—security, equality, care. So concretizations in other cultures are different. Similarly, the formulation of laws of physical being shifts through time and are subject to modification, qualification, and reformulation. The underlying matter of physical being doesn’t change (we believe), but the scope of our access to the range of that matter changes. In the case of social being, some of the underlying characteristics have not changed much in the last 50,000 years or so in which we have all been “modern humans,” but similarly the scope of various elements has changed, and thus reformulations do, must, and should occur. 39. Burke, “Definition of Man,” 16. 40. Allen, Talking to Strangers. If we are all the same, we don’t need a polity: we will just spontaneously execute the same models. If we are all different, polity is impossible: anarchy and its attendant “might makes right” defaults for coordination would be the state of such a nature. 41. The first of these is the primacy of the model of the sciences, which putatively assigns judgment to the public realm, while maintaining judgment as a suppressed but active phenomenon in the technical realm—a split with undesirable consequences in the public realm. The second force, operative in the humanistic realm, is the always-available condemnation of a judgment for its lack of perfection (which the theory above shows to be an invalid criterion). 42. Although I disagree with Bruno Latour’s focus on the “parliament of things” and his metaphorization of things as agentic, his argument for the limitations of criticism is spot on: Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 43. These early diggings included Locke’s (errant but provocative) explorations of ideas; Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of the social order; Immanuel Kant’s simultaneous and incompatible defenses of the ineradicability of perception, the existence of absolute qualities for perception, and the demand that ethics be grounded fully independent of those; Karl Marx’s insistence on a scientific materialism, but inconsistent placement of “ideology” in relationship to the modes of production; Sigmund Freud’s attention to dreams as a symbolic force shaping and reflecting human cognition and relationships; and dozens of other tributaries. 44. Condit, “Kenneth Burke and Linguistic Reflexivity.” 45. De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. 46. Korzybski, Science and Sanity. 47. Burke, “A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language.” 48. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology and Limited Inc. Derrida also sometimes argued that this was not an inherent proclivity of language, but rather a fault traceable to Western alphabets. This claim was intrinsically at odds with other aspects of his analysis, and in any case has not been supported by informed international assessments that show binaries in “Eastern” discourses; Lu, Rhetoric in Ancient China. It may Page 251 →be the case that other cultures treat binaries in different ways (specifically, the argument is often made that so-called Eastern cultures or African cultures treat binaries as complements rather than in the so-called Western fashion of polarities). Whether or not these differences hold, in both cases the binary

remains central to the operations of language. 49. Burke, “The Range of Piety,” in Permanence and Change. 50. The study of nonhuman communication processes shows substantial overlap between humans and animals, and ongoing research is painstakingly describing a gradient of capacities rather than sharp distinctions, but where gradients are steep enough, they warrant treatment as distinctions-in-practice. Hauser and Konishi, Design of Animal Communication; Cheney and Seyfarth, Baboon Metaphysics. 51. One can define “the best” nut in an empirically limited sense (best among these empirically present nuts), but then “best” is just the “most better available.” “Best possible” in the linguistic sense adds the supralocal, supratemporal dimension. 52. See the review by Gronbeck, “Dramaturgical Theory and Criticism.” 53. Fisher, “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm.” 54. Burke, Grammar of Motives; Bormann, “Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision.” 55. Some treatments of articulation theory seek to displace concepts of meaning or reference or description with the vocabulary of articulation. I signal here that I believe articulation theory should be treated as a deeper level of explanation of concepts such as description or meaning or reference rather than as oppositional to them. 56. Arguably, the contribution of writing (and especially the ease of writing and reading) to the human communicative repertoire is precisely the production of expansions in scope of discourse that enabled expansion beyond the firm grasp of the fundamental structuring forces, as in Ong, Orality and Literacy. Derrida placed the phonetic alphabet as a fundamental factor in this. Although I don’t agree with his characterization of this as a negative force in human conceptualization, the role of the phonetic as opposed to more iconic alphabets may have created a kind of ease for writing that could be contributory to these effects. 57. What appears to me to be the most popular interpretation/use of Derrida’s insights in these regards is to deny meaning to whatever enemy discourse is of interest at the moment (patriarchy, homonormativity, globalization, terrorism, and so forth). While these are perfectly defensible political agendas, they should not drive the full range of interpretations of Derrida’s insights. Just as the discovery of the “non”existence of matter and even of atoms as solid material entities (instead, they are probabilistic relational clouds of energy-matter distributed particularly but dynamically in space) does not warrant the interpretation that “tables” do not exist, but rather that tables are fabulously complex relational constitutions (“thingness” is a remarkable occurrence!), so we should not conclude from Derrida’s insights that “meaning” does not exist or should have no impact on us. Rather, Derrida’s insights can be interpreted to indicate that “meaning” is a fabulously complicated human action, and our judgments of texts cannot be confined to saying, “well, it’s all just founded on binaries, so it is a delusion we should ignore.” As symbolizing animals our delusions are precious to us, and Derrida’s insights should be used to guide our analysis and to enable more complex judgments than simple dismissal, which involves a cynicism built on the rejection of our sociolinguistic nature.

Page 252 →Chapter 2 1. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions, story on 158, interpretation on 177–80. Lutz mis-equates the published research literature, especially that of psychologists, as representing the “dominant culture” of vaguely defined “Western” societies. This move, combined with the claim that there are no definitive anthropological accounts of anger in America, authorizes her disciplinarily encouraged misrecognition of the commonalities that are all around her. Nonetheless, her book is a valuable intellectual gem. 2. Matheson, “What Does Obama Want of Me?”; Lutz; Unnatural Emotions; Rosenwein, Anger’s Past; Wetherell, Affect and Emotion; Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought; Briggs, Never in Anger; Ling, “Decolonizing the International.” 3. Ekman and Friesen, “Constants across Cultures,” 128. See summary in Fox, Emotion Science. The article has faults, including the longer story used for “fear” than for other emotions, and the relatively large range of accuracy of selection when photos of different particular comparison groups are used. These factors do not vitiate the general pattern I am describing, although they further weaken Ekman and

Friesen’s claim to discreteness. Recent research by Gendron et al., “Perceptions of Emotion,” shows the stories provide context that is important for increasing the reliability of the interpretations. So, mere facial information does not provide sufficient information to interpret across cultures the emotion someone is feeling. That finding is consistent with the “complex” and “family resemblance” view I’m promoting here, but it doesn’t mean that cultures don’t share complexes, which is their claim. 4. Vytal and Hamann, “Neuroimaging Support for Discrete Neural Correlates of Basic Emotions.” 5. This is even more evident in her description of her reaction and her host’s reaction when a man comes into her hut in the middle of the night. She screams, which her host thinks is funny. She recognizes that he thinks it is funny and why: her fear is inappropriate to the local culture’s view of the situation. This indicates the host recognizes it as fear, even though he thinks it inappropriate because the culture’s understanding of the situation does not fit the appraisal cues for fear. 6. For versions of such efforts, see Reddy, Navigation of Feeling; Wetherell, Affect and Emotion. 7. Contra, for example, Reddy, Navigation of Feeling. 8. Vytal and Hamann, “Neuroimaging Support.” 9. The dismissal of variation as “noise” in social scientific research is common, especially when researchers want to hype the importance of their findings by implying that they would find even bigger effects if they could cut through such putative noise. Though ascertaining the difference between functional variation and variations resulting from inadequately precise measurement devices (the legitimate reason for eliminating some variation from some types of experiments) is beyond current methods, one is not thereby authorized to discard it all as irrelevant noise, especially given the now evident individual variations in brains in many dimensions. 10. For example, findings on vocalics in anger are reviewed by Green, Whitney, and Gustafson, “Vocal Expressions of Anger.” The most vivid example of difference is Briggs’s description, in Never in Anger, of the absence of evident displays of anger among adults toward other adults in a small Alaskan group. Rather than seeing this Page 253 →as a counterexample, it is an outlier on a distribution. The rarity of this case indicates it is better treated as such rather than as evidence that there are no general forces at work. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, argues there are other examples (e.g., Balinese grief), though the Balinese instance has shown complex layers of displays rather than absolute absences. For an overview of the difference perspective, see Wetherell, Affect and Emotion. 11. Freeman et al., “Culture Shapes a Mesolimbic Response.” 12. From my view, their study regrettably took an American-centric linguistic perspective by casting the binary opposite of “dominance” as “subordination” instead of as “cooperation” or “resistance.” That limitation meant some richness was foreclosed, but it does not affect these core conclusions. 13. Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 46. Wetherell appears to portray affect/emotions as more plastic than I do (“the enormous plasticity of the human brain”), and she seems to be reluctant to assign much evolutionary role to emotions, emphasizing more exclusively that “bodies and brains become customised through developmental and cultural processes” (46), but she concedes that “it must also be the case that potential patterns of activity are constrained to some extent by neurophysiological limits in addition to what is acquired through habit and practice” (46). Her account therefore lacks primarily the deep historical notion of social function. 14. Aristotle is credited with the invention of “pathos” as a technical term for emotion in public discourse. In spite of my allegiance to this heritage, I avoid this term due to the more interdisciplinary framing, especially because the dominance of “reason” led to the disparagement of all emotion as overly emotional, which was denigrated as “pathos.” On Aristotle’s relationship to more fragmentary precursors, see Wisse, Ethos and Pathos. Debate on various interpretations of Aristotle’s theory of pathos includes Fortenbaugh, Aristotle on Emotion; Garver, “Deliberative Rationality and the Emotions”; Gross and Dascal, “Conceptual Unity of Aristotle’s Rhetoric”; Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric; Sokolon, Political Emotions; Hyde and Smith, “Aristotle and Heidegger on Emotion.” For an alternative tradition, see Garrett, “Pathos Reconsidered from the Perspective of Classical Chinese Rhetorics.” A summary of contemporary multidimensional accounts of emotion is provided by HarrГ© and Parrott, Emotions.

15. Aristotle, Rhetoric, book 2. 16. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 4. 17. For example, Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion and Promise of Happiness; Berlant, Compassion; Hartnett, “Fanny Fern’s 1855 Ruth Hall”: Pezzullo, “Articulating вЂSexy’”; Winderman, “S(anger) Goes Postal”; Cloud and Feyh, “Reason in Revolt”; Rosenwein, Anger’s Past”; Stearns and Stearns, Anger; Pfau, “вЂWho’s Afraid of Fear Appeals?”; Terada, Feeling in Theory. For indeterminate or mixed views, see Rand, “Inflammatory Fag”; Hawhee, Moving Bodies; Hyde, “Emotion and Human Communication”; Johnson, “вЂMan’s Mouth Is His Castle’”; Jorgensen-Earp and Lanzilotti, “Public Memory and Private Grief”; Malin, “Communication with Feeling”; Marinelli, “Revisiting Edwin Black”; Nakayama and Corey, “Anger in Performance”; Linklater, “Anger and World Politics.” 18. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual; Connolly, Neuropolitics; Lundberg, “Enjoying God’s Death”; Solomon, “I Wasn’t Angry.” For example, Rand defines “Gay Shame” as an ideological construct in “Gay Pride and Its Queer Discontents.” Page 254 →19. Bleiker and Huchinson, “Fear No More”; Neta Crawford, “Passion of World Politics.” 20. Hariman and Lucaites, “Dissent and Emotional Management”; Gunn, “On Speech and Public Release”; Brennan, Transmission of Affect: Grossberg, “Indifference of Television.” 21. For example, Berlant, Compassion, conflates “compassionate conservativism” in the first Bush presidency with compassion per se, and Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, conflates “Western” philosophical treatments of “happiness” with all possible manifestations of happiness. Engbers’ essay, “With Great Sympathy,” an otherwise brilliant treatment of “sympathy” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s oratory, nonetheless not only conflates specific and general, but further places general “contagion” theories of emotion as though they were distinctive to sympathy. Many studies seem ambivalent about the relationship, but the lack of distinction leads to a collapse to the particular. For example, Rand’s sensitive and interesting analysis implies “shame” and “pride” have some general potentials, and discusses the ambivalence of the affects underlying these potentials, but it then articulates “Gay Shame” in terms of a fairly ideologically circumscribed discursive description (which is appropriately particular in this case). 22. Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas, “Compassion.” 23. Petersen et al., “Who Deserves Help?” 24. If one identifies intensely with another person or group, then one experiences an impact on that person or group as an impact on one’s self. While some social identities might be presumed to be more likely to be experienced through deeper and more rapid identification (one’s nuclear family) than others (a stranger), for humans this is not a uniform condition. One can fight with one’s brother over a toy with every bit the anger and adamancy that one fights with a strange child at daycare over that same toy. And who counts as one’s “family” varies among human cultures, not to mention how cultures frame the boundaries between “us” as a broader group and “them.” Compare Lamm, Meltzoff, and Decety, “How Do We Empathize with Someone Who Is Not Like Us?,” and Decety, Echols, and Correll, “Blame Game.” 25. Mercer, “Feeling Like a State”; Sasley, “Theorizing States’ Emotions”; Ross, “Coming in from the Cold”; Halperin, Canetti-Nisim, and Hirsch-Hoefler, “Central Role of Group-Based Hatred.” I offer the concept of “affiliation” as a corrective to theories of identity. Theories of identity seem to lead to debates over authenticity and encourage purist conflicts (who really represents “me/us”?). Such theories were arguably useful in the late twentieth century, but at the very least they need to be supplemented by the idea that one can affiliate with others who are not “essentially” like one’s self or any group with whom one might share an “identity.” The concept of affiliation both captures the potential for active agentic choice to overcome one’s (past) identity as a limit and also the possibility that one might “feel with/for” someone who is not like one’s self in every way. As such it seems less prone to totalization. 26. Burke, Grammar of Motives; Bormann, “Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision.” 27. Berlant, Compassion.

28. E.g., Jorgensen-Earp and Lanzilotti, “Public Memory and Private Grief.” 29. Rand, “Gay Pride”; Ross, Mixed Emotions. 30. Yang, “Achieving Emotions in Collective Action.” 31. Hariman and Lucaites, “Visual Tropes and Late Modern Emotion”; Gunn, Page 255 →“On Speech and Public Release”; Mercer, “Feeling Like a State”; for background, see Hawhee, Moving Bodies. 32. Ross, “Coming in from the Cold.” 33. Ross’s use of “affect” aligns with Deleuzian theories. As discussed above, however, Deleuzian theories give up resources that they do not need to give up. This is evident in a brief comparison of his analysis of 9/11 to mine. While the broad outlines of our analyses overlap, my analysis is able to indicate explicitly why the diffuse “affects” of 9/11 became aligned in the way they did, whereas the “affect” oriented approach has to merely describe what happened, or, in explaining, revert merely to the level of discourse, a move that Ross otherwise argues is insufficient. 34. Aristotle, Rhetoric, book 2, Part 1. 35. Thrall and Cramer, American Foreign Policy and the Politics of Fear. 36. Sadler et al., “Emotions, Attributions, and Policy”; Lerner et al., “Effects of Fear and Anger on Perceived Risks of Terrorism.” On a different policy set, see Small and Lerner, “Emotional Policy.” 37. Sadler et al, “Emotions, Attributions, and Policy,” 249. 38. Skitka et al., “Anger Wants a Fight and Fear Wants вЂThem’ to Go Away,” 375. 39. Huddy et al., “Threat, Anxiety, and Support of Antiterrorism Policies,” 593; Dumont et al., “Social Categorization and Fear Reactions to the September 11th Terrorist Attacks.” On a hopeful note, research also suggests that the president’s explicit statements opposing stereotyping might also be expected to have a positive impact: Mallan, Sax, and Lipp, “Verbal Instruction Abolishes Fear.” 40. Shen and Bigsby, “Behavioral Activation/Inhibition Systems and Emotions”; Scherer and Grandjean, “Facial Expressions Allow Inference”; Roseman, Wiest, and Swartz, “Phenomenology, Behaviors, and Goals”; Xie et al., “The Role of Emotions in Risk Communication.” 41. James, “What Is an Emotion?,” 190. 42. This four-part structure is not universally used, but it is widely recognized, although some sources separate the neurobiological elements into muscular reactions and neurohormonal levels of action. See Fox, Emotion Science. 43. Cicero, De Oratore, 2:179–230. 44. Leys, “Turn to Affect,” has reacted against multiactivation accounts as “anti-intentional” on the ground that they embody a mind-body dualism that separates cognition from affect. This reaction merges two different cases of “separation.” On the one hand, there is the separation implied in the description of a particular reaction of a particular person at a particular time. On the other hand, there is the separation of sources of different codes (e.g., those of biology and those of ideology). She (correctly, I believe) argues that in any particular instance of a person evincing “an emotion” there is always some “cognitive” component. But this does not mean that this “cognitive” component comes first in the experience of an emotion. For example, she replies to the case where an experimental subject responds to stimulation of her brain by a probe with laughter by saying that there was always already a context. Therefore, she indicates, the laughter does not illustrate an autonomous bodily response outside of cognition (of context). This is a very weak answer to such experiences. There are surely always contexts, but the context in which the laughter is generated in these experiments is not any context that would be suitable for laughter (e.g., a joke). There are no Page 256 →“appraisal cues” that correspond with the laughter; it is not attached to a suitable cognition. This is why the experiment convinces most people that there is an autonomy of affect. The experimental subject may be laughing, but she is not experiencing what we recognize as within the distribution of mirth experiences. Some of the components of mirth have been activated, but the complex is not activated. That is why the person instantaneously searches for an intentional account for her laughter. (And this account holds for the other cases Leys examines). Affect in this sense is not

“autonomous”—it never stands alone in lived experience—it is always part of a complex that drives toward inclusion of various kinds of cognitions (e.g., appraisals, subjective experiences that include conscious and nonconscious reflection of the discursive kind), or responds to them. Nevertheless, what the affect theorists call affect is not always a response to cognitions, either. If affect is not autonomous, neither are appraisal cues. Attending only to one component of the complex cannot account for the qualities of emotion. We need vocabularies that enable us to make such accounts with greater precision than our current commonsense vocabulary. Leys is correct that reducing these to the old bins of “mind” and “body” or “cognition” and “affect” are insufficient. The proliferation to subjective experience, action tendencies, appraisal cues, and neuromuscular interactions provides richer resources than the old dualism, and certainly richer than her collapse to “cognition.” 45. Psychologists have tried different schemas for arraying the relationships among emotions. Valence and approach/withdrawal tendencies are two of the dominant ways of schematizing these relationships in what are called “dimensional” theories of emotion. Such approaches proceed according to reductive proclivities. The results can be informative, but any one or two such dimensions do not provide sufficient descriptors of emotion for any critical or applied purposes. See Fox, Emotion Science. 46. Russell, “Culture and the Categorization of Emotions”; KГ¶vecses, “Cross-Cultural Experience of Anger.” 47. Angie et al., “The Influence of Discrete Emotions”; Lerner and Keltner, “Fear, Anger, and Risk”; Moons et al., “Anger and Fear Responses.” 48. Malin, “Communication with Feeling”; Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism”; Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism.” 49. Massumi, Parables; Brennan, Transmission of Affect. 50. Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism.” 51. I am not arguing that affect-based approaches lack utility; Lundberg’s analysis is insightful, and Solomon, Politics of Subjectivity, for example, shows that some discourses (specifically conservative ones) tend to fulfill the combination of conditions for resonating with identity-lack that are common among humans. I am arguing that additional utilities can be gained by treating “affect” as itself differentiated. 52. Biesecker, “No Time for Mourning”; Engle, “Putting Mourning to Work”; Lucaites and McDaniel, “Telescopic Mourning/Warring in the Global Village.” 53. Jasper, “Emotions of Protest”; Yang, “Achieving Emotions in Collective Action”; Olson, “Anger among Allies”; Chvasta, “Anger, Irony, and Protest.” 54. Hutchison and Bleiker, “Theorizing Emotions.” 55. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions, 4. 56. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions, 4. Page 257 →57. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions, 5. 58. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions, 5 and 7. 59. Rosenwein, Anger’s Past; Matheson, “вЂWhat Does Obama Want of Me?’”; Reddy, Navigation. 60. Matheson, “What Does Obama Want of Me?,” 133, for example, recently claimed to offer a “conceptualization of anxiety as a result of affective investments in a network of discourse rather than an individual feeling.” But the analysis is based on concepts that can only happen in individual minds (e.g., the experience of anxiety as a product of an interrupted “fort-da” relationship). Matheson’s analysis actually would show that “anxiety results from affective investments in a network of discourse that are partially constituted as individual feelings.” Neither version would count as a novel observation. A sign of some progress in the intellectual consideration of the factors involved is the stepping back of some scholars to claims merely that the social level is vastly more important than the biological level of the individual, e.g., Reddy, Navigation of Feeling. 61. Wetherell, Affect and Emotion, 89. She also writes: “I see affective practice as a moment of

recruitment and often synchronous assembling of multimodal resources, including, most crucially, body states. It is the participation of the emoting body that makes an assemblage an example of affect rather than some other kind of social practice” and “affective practice mobilises, recruits and stabilises brain /body states,” 159. Although Wetherell is at pains to recognize the social in individual interaction, her rejection of an evolutionarily based version of biological inputs to those social level phenomena disables a perspective encouraging international interaction; she goes out of her way to highlight dissenters from the psychological consensus that there are some durable biological constraints across individuals and cultures. 62. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, describes emotion as the co-orienting of bodies, and I owe much to this insight. However, her analyses tend to collapse the active force to the discourse that does the coorienting, rather than recognizing any other inputs to emotion, and so her critical analyses end up reading like standard ideological analyses. Incorporating action tendencies and recognizing the existence of emotional clusters that contribute to particular ideological moments is necessary to avoid that collapse back to ideology. 63. Mercer, “Feeling Like a State”; Cox and Wood, “вЂGot Him’.” 64. Hall and Ross, “Affective Politics after 9/11,” emphasizes that emotion should not be equated with intense displays or subjective outbreaks of feeling. Emotion at both high and low intensities may be politically consequential. They also note that the flow of emotions in political systems is not unidirectional. Emotions can flow from the bottom up, the top down, or horizontally. Finally, they highlight that emotions can be constituted in politically salient forms through different mechanisms: calibration toward others’ emotional states, (self-conscious) manipulation, cultivation, and display. 65. Cicero, De Oratore, 2:179–230; Quintilian, Institutes, 6:2:26; Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 76–79, 2–3, 80–95, 116–17; Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 263, 264, 358–63. 66. Brennan, Transmission of Affect; Lamm, Meltzoff, and Decety, “How Do We Empathize?” Page 258 →67. Fan et al., “Anger Is More Influential Than Joy.” 68. Sasley, “Theorizing States’ Emotions.” 69. Holmes, “Believing This and Alieving That”; Graham, “Emotion and Public Diplomacy”; Ross, “Coming in from the Cold.” 70. Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric”; Black, “Second Persona”; Wander, “Third Persona.” 71. Ross, Mixed Emotions, 8. 72. Damasio, Descartes’ Error. Note that while Wetherell and Leys both criticize various theories of affect on the grounds that those theories posit separate bodily responses in some ways, neither criticizes this specific claim. 73. Though nondiscursive elements—symbolic and otherwise—can play important roles, such as Hitler’s gigantic flags, mass salutes, and night-lit ceremonies. 74. The present macrolevel theory can afford to be agnostic about the specific psychodynamic theories involved. In my view, the available options have difficulties that will need to be better worked out in the transfer of individual psychodynamics to the collective level, but there are talented scholars working along these lines, including Solomon, Politics of Subjectivity; Gunn, “Hystericizing Huey” and “Marantha”; Lundberg, “Enjoying God’s Death”; Matheson, “What Does Obama Want of Me.” Even Brennan, Transmission of Affect, and Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, offer psychoanalytic foci for their theories. 75. White, “Politics of Anger”; Sasley, “Theorizing States’ Emotions.” 76. Hall, Emotional Diplomacy, notes that diplomatic emotions are likely to fade over time, but only if the cues disappear. This marks a difference between singular episodes of diplomatic emotion and the long-term “intractable conflicts” addressed by Bar-Tal, Intractable Conflicts, and others such as Halperin et al., “Central Role.” In the latter case, the stimulus associated with the emotional cues continually reappears. In such cases, however, the political level and social level in the anthropological sense seem more directly tied to each other, further amplifying the utility of distinguishing those levels, assuming their relationship predicts whether diplomatic emotions fade over time. 77. Stahl, “Clockwork War”; Connolly, Neuropolitics. 78. Ross, Mixed Emotions; Wetherell, Affect and Emotion; Holmes, “Believing This and Alieving

That.” 79. Hall, Emotional Diplomacy.

Chapter 3 1. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions, 156–57. Other examples of anthropological studies of anger that reflect similar orientations include Lambek and Solway, “Just Anger”; Hollan, “Staying вЂCool’ in Toraja”; Rebhun, “Swallowing Frogs”; Raval, Raval, and Becker, “вЂHe Cursed, and I Got Angry.’” The often cited exception is Briggs, Never in Anger. If this is indeed a case in which a social group does not display anything recognizable as anger, this would refute a “discrete” and “universal” version of emotions, but it does not refute a distributional view. The distributional view leads one to expect such cases to be rare but not nonexistent. Cultures may counter dispositions; it simply Page 259 →takes substantial cultural “work” to do so. Indeed, this book suggests that some of our dispositions about anger are undesireable, but that we have some reason to hope that we can find the right kinds of work to redirect them. 2. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions, 157. Similar dynamics of calling on a third party judge are identified in a public ethnography of “hate speech” in Hungary by Boromisza-Habashi, Speaking Hatefully, 6. He also recognizes that it is a “problem of political and moral affiliation,” and involves “taking sides.” 3. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions, 156. 4. Harris, Restraining Rage, 28; Kalimtzis, Taming Anger, 1. 5. Little, “Anger in Monastic Curses,” 33. 6. Peyroux, “Gertrude’s Furor,” 41. A highly instructive treatment of the classical era can be found in Kalimtzis, Taming Anger. For a broader range of assessments, see Allen, “Anger/Ogre”; Harris, Restraining Rage; Stearns and Stearns, Anger; Tavris, Anger. A related summary of the moral function of anger is available with a slightly different perspective from Simola, “Anticorporate Anger”: “Anger comprises a form of care-based moral agency directed not only toward the affiliative advancement of connection among community members, but also toward the (political) resistance to violation, injustice, and carelessness through which disconnection from responsive community relationships occurs,” 255. See also Little, “Seeing and Caring,” and Wallace, “Reconstructing Judgment.” 7. Winderman, “S(anger) Goes Postal,” 387. See also West, “Reviving Rage,” 101–2. 8. Royzman et al., “CAD or MAD?”; Mullin and Skitka, “Exploring the Psychological Underpinnings”; Miller et al., “Relative Impact of Anger.” 9. Petersen, “Distinct Emotions, Distinct Domains.” See also Fessler, “Mad Men,” and Haidt, Righteous Mind. 10. Fessler, “Mad Men,” quotation from abstract. 11. Lyman, “Domestication of Anger.” See also White, “Making Political Anger Possible.” 12. Chvasta, “Anger, Irony, and Protest.” See also Salzman, “Contextualizing the Symptom.” 13. Olson, “Anger among Allies,” 287. 14. Sobieraj and Berry, “From Incivility to Outrage.” 15. This is one of the places where discursively focused Foucauldian or other approaches that efface situated agency in favor of visions of relatively untethered discourse circulating at the social level, with no tethers to local actions and competitions of interest, lack the resources to fully understand rhetorical phenomena. 16. O’Mara et al., “Will Moral Outrage Stand Up?”; Batson et al., “Anger at Unfairness.” See also Hutcherson and Gross, “Moral Emotions.” 17. Yzerbyt et al., “I Feel for Us.” Studies showing the efficacy of anger on behalf of others have not typically addressed the level of identification between self and others, which on the transilient theory would be a key confounder. 18. I believe that putting the issue in this way accounts for a study by Zackariasson, “Angry Young Men,” of young male Scandinavians of relatively comfortable social class who were highly active in

feminist and social justice causes. It documented that these individuals were motivated by their perceived anger at injustices to others. It is possible to identify one’s interests with others, or to gain status from a “fight” for others,Page 260 → and thereby come to have a stake in those interests, even if one does not materially benefit from the direct redistribution for which one is calling. 19. This suggests that the argument by Vanessa Beasley, in You, the People, that the United States has bonded itself around claims to shared social norms rather than ethnic identities may not mark the United States as unique. Claims by academics studying other bases for national self-identification have focused on racial and gender identities, but setting off to find such markers may draw one’s attention away from these other bases of mutual affiliation (which is not to deny that such identity markers aren’t used as boundary markers to exclude and include groups from the normatively based affiliations otherwise offered). For Kantian purists, the presence of self-interest delegitimizes anger as a moral emotion. This merely points up the inadequacy of Kantian expectations, at least at the level of social morality. From a perspective that sees social regulation among humans as necessary and desirable, it isn’t problematic that self-interest provides the fuel to the fires of justice, as long as the emotion functions to preserve and enact the shared moral principles. More deeply, if no one’s self-interest is being violated, then a norm might reasonably be said to be either irrelevant to the social group’s lived experience or that it is being applied satisfactorily. As long as the moral principles appealed to can be recognized as shared norms, then public anger displays that require simultaneously self-interest and shared standards (e.g., “justice”) can appropriately serve the goals of social (moral) regulation, so long as everyone has access to those displays (a large caveat, of course). This admittedly requires recalibrating our expectation that appeals to moral norms should be “selfless,” but little other than romance is lost in that shift. 20. The Ifaluk illustrate both the complexity of social norms and their variation. Their normative system includes both strong norms in favor of sharing and also specific resource allocations to high status individuals, including routine visible physical deference to men by women. Most cultures that place some version of “the sacred” as central to their normative structure similarly do not employ notions of justice (or at least notions of justice based on equal distribution of material resources) as the core social norms toward which anger displays will be oriented. 21. Cox and Wood, “вЂGot Him’”; Fattah and Fierke, “Clash of Emotions”; Saurette, “You Dissin Me?”; Berkowitz, “Assassinating Justly.” 22. In the definition offered by Cox and Wood, “Got Him,” the collective emotion of revenge in an international context is focused on destroying the other, rather than merely seeking redress or a change of behavior by the object of anger. They argue that the killing of Osama bin Laden was motivated by collective revenge. Rather than communicating with bin Laden or those associated with him, they indicate that the hate-based rhetoric that circulated about bin Laden’s assassination served the function of salving feelings of humiliation that had been roused by the 9/11 attacks. 23. Yzerbyt, “I Feel for Us,” 535. 24. Kamans, “Communicating the Right Emotion.” If anger is understood as an emotion that appears when one is capable of redressing the norm violation (see below; in contrast to sadness, which appears when capaccity is lacking), then this makes sense; to claim that one is disempowered is to claim that one does not have the power to redress one’s situation. This might have an interesting application to explaining why firehoses and dogs attacking young black people produced a stronger ameliorative Page 261 →response in white people (through the avenue of sympathetic engagement with fear), whereas shaking angry fists produces backlash, because it appears as an attack. This is a controversial suggestion, and runs against the current academic preference for aggressive violence, but those interested in actually changing society rather than merely demonstrating their moral superiority to it might want to ask what routes are best for social change. 25. “Perceptions” in this account are not necessarily recognized in the mind’s stream of articulation or even brought to the forefront of attention in articulate form, but they are more than “sensed” if “sense” implies not integrated into portions of the brain other than the sense receptor apparatus. See the discussion in Berkowitz and Harmon-Jones, “Toward an Understanding,” and Clore and Centerbar, “Analyzing Anger.” 26. Ask and Granhag, “Hot Cognition,” 538. 27. Kalimtzis, Taming Anger; Harris, Restraining Rage; Stearns and Stearns, Anger.

28. Or approach/avoidance. E.g., Shen and Bigsby, “Behavioral Activation/Inhibition Systems,” 3: “The physiological component, core affect, consists of valence and activation, which form the two orthogonal dimensions of a circumplex.” 29. As in the declaration, in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, that “Vengeance, oh, vengeance is a pleasure reserved for the wise.” Aristotle, Rhetoric, book 2; this has also been recognized by psychologists, e.g., Potegal and Stemmler’s summary, “Cross-Disciplinary Views,” 5–7. 30. Describing injuries as a “blockage of goals” is an odd locution, but such a description has a broader cultural range than Aristotle’s emphasis on anger as resulting from status violations. See a brief review of concepts associated with goal blockage by Berkowitz, “Appraisals and Anger,” 271; Potegal and Stemmler, “Cross-Disciplinary Views,” 3. 31. Tiedens and Linton, “Judgment under Emotional Uncertainty,” 974: “When people feel angry or remember feeling anger, they report thinking that the situation is unpleasant.” 32. Nakayama and Corey, “Anger in Performance,” 112. See the quotation by Ask and Granhag above; the Tiedens quotation continues “and not of their own doing.” See also Berkowitz, “Appraisals and Anger,” 271. 33. Detailed studies of such feelings show, according to Wranik and Scherer, “Why Do I Get Angry?, ” 255, that it is “a bit like feeling angry at someone else and a bit like feeling ashamed or guilty.” They note that the research indicates that such feelings lack a sense of violation of moral norms and are associated with different action tendencies. They also report that such subjective feelings are shorter in duration and rarer. Anger at inanimate objects also seems to be atypical in that it is prone to short duration (we catch ourselves and feel silly?) or it involves the personification of the inanimate object. As with chronic anger induced by abuse or pain, the time-course of these actions is consistent with seeing anger as a complex, which can begin in a given instant in one part of the complex, and then activate the rest of the complex. The irritability induced by living with chronic pain leads one to seek others to blame, because the component parts of anger activate each other, even if the architecture of one’s own body is not exactly an external agent. Likewise, anger at inanimate objects seems silly, so one adjusts one’s view to attribute a spiritual inhabitant to the log one just tripped over. With regard to the public sharing of anger, some definitions describe the genre of Page 262 →the jeremiad as a distinctive manifestation of anger because it focuses its blame on the audience, instead of on others. A helpful summary of previous treatments of the jeremiad is available in Short and Short, “Bless Us with Tears.” See also Murphy, “вЂTime of Shame and Sorrow’”; Carpenter, “Historical Jeremiad.” 34. White, “Politics of Anger,” 140. For empirical research supporting the role of blame in anger, see Wagner, “Fear and Anger in Great Britain.” 35. Wranik and Scherer, “Why Do I Get Angry,” 248. See the experimental support by Goodall, Slater, and Myers, “Fear and Anger Responses to Local News.” 36. In US culture, for example, if you run over someone while you are driving and texting, this can be dismissed by jury members as “accidental” and not criminally culpable, because you did not intend to run over them. 37. Berkowitz, “Appraisals and Anger,” 272–74. 38. Winderman, “S(anger) Goes Postal”; West, “Reviving Rage”; Lyman, “Domestication of Anger”; Muldoon, “Moral Legitimacy of Anger.” 39. Berkowitz, “Appraisals and Anger,” reviews the range of opinions under the heading “Legitimacy.” In many sources, authors use the term “blameworthy” without specification of whether that includes merely intentionality or some broader set of normative criteria. Empirical support for including blame comes from Wagner, “Fear and Anger in Great Britain”; Thomas, “Men’s Anger”; Goodall, Slater, and Myers, “Fear and Anger Responses”; KГјhne, Weber, and Sommer, “Beyond Cognitive Framing Processes.” 40. Lerner et al., “Effects of Fear and Anger,” 147; KГјhne, Weber, and Sommer, “Beyond Cognitive Framing Processes.” 41. Moons et al., “Anger and Fear Responses,” 216: “Anger is a negative emotion associated with appraisals of certainty, low risk, and relative strength.В .В .В . Fear, in contrast, is associated with appraisals of uncertainty, risk, and relative weakness.” Tiedens and Linton, “Judgment under Emotional Certainty,” 974: “and that they are certain about what is happening.”

42. Stearns and Stearns, Anger; Tavris, Anger. 43. Rand, “Inflammatory Fag,” 303. 44. Rand, “Inflammatory Fag.” 45. Gunn, “On Speech and Public Release.” 46. Such as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presentation of the “Day of Infamy Speech.” In such cultural repertoires, the display of the control of anger is expected. See also Ghazzal, “From Anger on Behalf of God,” 203–30. 47. Shakespeare’s Theatre, 376. 48. Cloud, “Therapy, Silence and War,” paragraph 5. 49. Lerner and Keltner, “Fear, Anger, and Risk.” 50. Baumann and DeSteno, “Context Explains”; Aarts et al., “Art of Anger.” 51. Thrall and Cramer, American Foreign Policy; Fessler, “Mad Men,” sees this as a more general tendency in all violent conflict. 52. The exception to these findings occurs in the work of Robin Nabi (“Anger, Fear, Uncertainty and Attitudes”). This work does not control for the punitive policy preference others have found to be associated with anger, nor does it align issues of certainty/uncertainty with fear and anger. This highlights the extent to which the importancePage 263 → of treating anger as a complex rather than focusing on a single component (e.g., uncertainty) creates research challenges. More careful parsing of these factors is clearly needed as the research stream goes forward. 53. Garg, Inman, and Mittal, “Incidental and Task-Related Affect.” See also Miron-Spektor et al., “Others’ Anger Makes People Work Harder Not Smarter.” 54. Ask and Granhag, “Hot Cognition.” 55. Parker and Isbell, “How I Vote.” 548. Gino and Schweitzer, “Blinded by Anger,” found that anger decreased the tendency of people to listen to advice from others, as well. 56. Valentino et al., “Is a Worried Citizen?” 57. Tiedens and Linton, “Judgment under Emotional Certainty.” 58. Petersen and Zukerman, “Anger, Violence, and Political Science,” 566. See also Jin, “Examining Publics’ Crisis Responses.” 59. Fisher, Vehement Passions, 13; Harris, Restraining Rage. 60. Moons et al., “Anger and Fear Responses”; also Finucane and Power, “Effect of Fear.” Indeed, following Darwin, some psychologists persist in defining anger as “a basic action pattern whose evolutionary adaptive function is to motivate the organism’s action around overcoming obstacles to desired goals” (my emphasis, Lewis, “Development of Anger,” 179). In order to sustain this definition, Lewis invents the category of “rage” to cover the fuller complex that I here describe as anger. The motive structure for doing this arises in part for him because of his focus on infants and children, but more broadly this kind of definition is warranted by those who want to assimilate human anger to the simplest possible phenomenon so that it can be identified with the evolutionary heritage. Defining anger as the response to a blockage of goals is clearly overbroad, as depression and other withdrawal based emotions also respond to blockage of goals, and from an evolutionary perspective must also be seen as motivating the situationally correct behavior to deal with blockages. 61. Ghazzal, “From Anger on Behalf of God.” 62. Potegal and Stemmler, “Cross-Disciplinary Views of Anger,” 5; Moons et al., “Anger and Fear Responses,” 216. 63. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions, 156. 64. Peyroux, “Gertrude’s Furor,” 41–42. 65. Cheung-Blunden and Blunden, “The Emotional Construal of War,” 127. 66. Yzerbyt et al., “I Feel for Us,” 539. It has also been described as “hostility”; Matsumoto, Hwang, and Frank, “Effects of Incidental Anger.” 67. Fessler, “Mad Men,” 362–63, centered violence as the key action tendency of anger because both ethnographic and judicial records indicate that anger “figures prominently in violent conflict.” He moves from that evidence to the claim that “the most common behavioral outcome of anger is an attempt to harm the transgressor,” but that seems to be an error deriving from assumed but ungrounded logical transitivity. It is a fallacy to conclude on the basis that violent outcomes are usually caused by anger

that anger usually causes violence. Anger is far more prevalent than violence. 68. Potegal and Stemmler, “Cross-Disciplinary View,” 4. They provide a brief review of several sources that see aggression as the “evolutionary” primal action tendency of anger. This view draws on the idea I am rejecting that individuals first evolved and Page 264 →then social groups evolved to control anger. That view is controverted by the evolution of humans as always already a social living species. For a partial review of the multicultural literature, see Hollan, “Staying вЂCool’ in Toraja.” 69. Little, “Anger in Monastic Curses,” 15–18. 70. Buhrer-Thierry, “вЂJust Anger’ or вЂVengeful Anger’?” 71. Pinker, Better Angels. 72. Halperin et al., “Anger, Hatred, and the Quest for Peace.” Their research indicates that there is a consequential distinction that separates anger from hate, which is precisely that the latter, because it imagines the foe to be impossible to reform, also takes eradication of the foe as the only possible action tendency. Romani, Grappi, and Bagozzi, “My Anger Is Your Gain,” make a similar distinction between anger and “contempt,” assigning to anger a corrective function and to contempt a destructive one. 73. Kalimtzis, Taming Anger, 81. 74. CotГ©-Lussier, “Fight Fire with Fire.” Also Goodall, Slater, and Myers, “Fear and Anger Responses.” 75. Garrett, “Pathos Reconsidered,” traces the public representations of emotions more generally in Chinese traditions. These various traditions appear to share a focus on the question of the control of anger. Because Aristotle offered a quasi template that has received uptake specifically in recent scholarship on anger, I focus on Aristotle and recent works in public rhetoric, recognizing that this reflects an underlying bias toward a particular orientation to public rhetoric that is often classified as “Western.” I offer that perspective as fruitful, but try to be attentive to the slowly growing literature on anger in various cultural contexts. A body of work has attended to genres of rhetoric (such as the jeremiad, e.g., Carpenter, “Historical Jeremiad”; polemics, e.g., Rand, “Inflammatory Fag”; or war rhetoric, e.g., Ivie, “Presidential Motives for War”) or components of rhetoric that might reasonably be described as angry, such as the dehumanization of the enemy common in war rhetoric (e.g., Ivie, “Images of Savagery”). 76. Vernezze, “Moderation or the Middle Way,” offers a fruitful comparison of the Buddhist and Stoic vs. Aristotelian traditions. 77. Zagacki and Boleyn-Fitzgerald, “Rhetoric and Anger.” Their script seems consonant with Hattam and Zembylas’s (“What’s Anger Got to Do with It?”) call for a “post-indignation” pedagogy. 78. Aristotle, Rhetoric, book 2, part 2. 79. Studies of honor cultures tend to imply it is a distinct type, but the role of male honor in a culture falls on a spectrum rather than constituting fully discrete kinds of societies. Honor as a primary shaper of anger displays tends to take a more prominent place in social groups where there is a limited legal code or limited effectiveness of the enforcement of a legal code. The more men are on their own to protect their interests, the more they rely on threat displays to deter potential challenges. Men in such cultures become tuned to threats to their status, because their status is a marker of their ability to enforce their interests. They employ anger displays to contest and discourage threats to their status, because loss of status increases threats to their ability to defend their interests. Threats are inherently public, in that an unwillingness to defend one’s status against insult from one source is perceived to encourage others similarly, a perception that has received at least some synthetic and analytic attention. Reification Page 265 →processes turn these performances into a set of social norms. In cultures where honor forms the primary normative structure, the relationship between the threat function of anger and the social adjudication function is quite tight. Leung and Cohen, “Within- and Between-Culture Variation,” describe three types of cultures: honor, dignity, and face cultures. They indicate that honor cultures “tend to originate in вЂlawless’ environments, where a weak (or nonexistent) state is unable toВ .В .В . protect individuals from predation, ” and that in such cultures, “an honorable person demands respect, will not tolerate being cheated or affronted, and will pay back wrongs done to him or her,” 510. Harinck et al., “Good News about

Honor Culture,” note that honor cultures have wide geographic dispersion, “Typical honor cultures can be found around the Mediterranean, in the Middle East, in Latin America, or in the southern states of the United States,” 68, and that, in the absence of insult (which sets aggressive spirals in motion), people in such cultures are capable of handling conflict, perhaps even more effectively than people from dignity based cultures. Classic works in the United States include Cohen et al., “Insult, Aggression, and the Southern Culture of Honor,” and Hayes and Lee, “Southern Culture of Honor”; Cohen et al., “Field Experiments Examining the Culture of Honor.” Henry, “Low-Status Compensation,” argues that economic disparity (measured by the GINI coefficient) accounts for the behavioral differences observed in this line of research by multiple studies, but treats status difference as an individual psychological variable related to low personal self-esteem. While this may also be true, Pinker’s (Our Better Angels, 115) explanation of the variable from a social perspective (low-status people tend to have less access to reliable law enforcement) seems to provide a compelling social-level account. The classical Athenian case is referenced by Kalimtzis, Taming Anger, 8–10. 80. Harris, Restraining Rage, 403. See also Zagacki and Boleyn-Fitzgerald, “Rhetoric and Anger.” 81. These understate Burke’s distinctive contributions, focusing on one narrow dimension, as argued, for example, by Hershey, “Burke’s Aristotelianism”; Holland, “Kenneth Burke’s Dramatistic Approach.” 82. Hawhee, Moving Bodies, traces out in an elegant, thorough, and detailed fashion many links between language and body in Burke’s theoretical corpus. 83. Burke, Grammar of Motives. He further associated the featuring of each pentadic element with a philosophical system. 84. Burke, “Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle.” Other types are covered in Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 187, and Burke, Rhetoric of Religion, 1–44. 85. Ivie, “Images of Savagery” and Democracy and America’s War on Terror. 86. Goetz et al., “Compassion.” See also Hoijer, “Discourse of Global Compassion.” 87. Burke, Attitudes toward History, esp. 39–44. For a summary and application, see the classic work by Carlson, “Gandhi and the Comic Frame” (there have subsequently been dozens of essays applying and developing the concept). For a treatment of the underlying philosophical challenges of the perspective to which the present project offers a pragmatic resolution, see Desilet and Appel, “Choosing a Rhetoric of the Enemy.” 88. Burke’s use of “grammar,” “rhetoric,” and “logic” does not align with conventional academic specifications of these categories. He is not arguing, therefore, that Page 266 →every language will have these five components built into what linguists call their “grammar.” He would merely specify that all languages can specify these components through their narrative processes. 89. Violations of a status hierarchy compress the symbolic and interest dimensions very tightly, so the compression of injury and norm in his schema makes sense within Aristotle’s culture. In the ontoepistemology offered here, other kinds of injuries and norms are more distant, which should become evident in the case analyses. But in any event, merely the proliferation of types of norms and injuries requires separation of these two categories in a dramatistic frame. 90. Long-standing because of anger’s tendency toward rote rather than exploratory thought. 91. The harm must cohere with the norm both because dramatistic theories prescribe that the components of the drama must cohere and because the social function of anger is built around normative adjudication. 92. The absolutist dynamics lead to the focus on attack rather than on other correctives for the harm. Contrast this template to a list of appraisal cues that did not take into account the biosymbolic dimensions of anger: (1) an antagonistic agent, (2) acted to cause harm, (3) in violation of legitimate purposes (social norms or morals), (4) so we must act in response (to punish, retaliate, prevent future harm by threat, attack). 93. Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction. 94. Black, “Second Persona.” 95. Wander, “Third Persona.” Morris, “Pink Herring and the Fourth Persona,” increased our understanding of how complicated these relationships among “real” audiences and “implied” personas can be, as some discourse creates the space for a “fourth persona”: an implied textual wink between the author or author’s persona and an auditor or fourth persona, at the expense of the second

persona, understood as the overtly projected audience. 96. This is framed in a slightly different way by Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion. Engbers, “With Great Sympathy,” shows that well-designed rhetorical appeals can also overcome such preconstituted divisions. 97. Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation,” provides a classic account of the in-process construction of these elements. 98. The initial “Comrades” can be read either as inclusive of all or as a separate hail of party members, who have primacy of place. 99. Agathangelou and Ling, “Power, Borders, Security”; Bhatia, “Religious Metaphor”; Alexander, “From the Depths of Despair”; Cronick, “Discourse of President George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden”; Leudar, Marsland, and Nekvapil, “On Membership Categorization.” 100. Crawford, “Passion of World Politics.” 101. The concept of burden of proof and preponderance of the evidence received their classic formulation in Whately, Elements of Rhetoric. Readers are referred to that source for an argument in their favor, though Whately’s arguments need updating for present understandings of the historicization of biases. 102. Ceccarelli, “Polysemy”; Eberly, Citizen Critics; Radway, Reading the Romance; Morley, “Nationwide” Audience; Stromer-Galley and Schiappa, “Argumentative Burdens.” Page 267 →103. Dow, “Response Criticism.” 104. Fan et al., “Anger Is More Influential.”

Chapter 4 1. De Luce, “Bin Laden Bent on Spectacular US Attack,” illustrates the tenacity of this US-centric focus, arguing that the documents of the so-called Bin Laden’s Bookshelf, released in 2015, show that “Osama bin Laden pleaded with his followers to stay focused on attacking the United States.” My reading of the Bookshelf shows it to be consonant with the earlier rhetoric I describe here, albeit with different tactical conditions, with the attacks on the United States a strategic component of the larger effort. By the time the Bookshelf was released, several of those governments had been overthrown, and the resulting disorder required strategic revisions, something this chapter shows that bin Laden did throughout his career. De Luce does not give specific sources for the quotations he presents from the Bookshelf, but my reading of the Bookshelf suggests he is selectively focusing on a preestablished theme. His article leans on intelligence analysts, who understandably employ a US-centric lens. My view is more consonant with some of those with greater expertise on the region and on bin Laden than I, including Beeman, “Great Satan”, 31–32, and Jacquard, In the Name of Osama Bin Laden. 2. Reflecting on the 10-year anniversary conference, the editors of the special issue concluded that “[i]t was following the invasion of Iraq that critical terrorism studies as a project got off the ground”; Blackbourn et al., “Editor’s Introduction,” 3. Semmerling, “Those вЂEvil’ Muslims! ”; Merskin, “ Construction of Arabs as Enemies.” 3. Fricano, “Horizontal and Vertical Honor.” Most of the analyses are comparisons of Bush and bin Laden: Agathangelou and Ling, “Power, Borders, Security, Wealth”; Beeman, “Great Satan”; Bhatia, “Religious Metaphor”; Cronick, “Discourse of President George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden”; Mommani and Ronowicz, “English Translation.” 4. I also subsequently read the public rhetoric from the period after that of interest here, published in IntelCenter, IntelCenter Words of Osama bin Laden, Vol. 1. I also attempted to search for translations made by Al Jazeera, but the search functions available did not enable identification of all of the texts that might have been translated. Where I could locate these, I have compared them. However, the present analysis is based primarily on three major collections of bin Laden’s texts (Lawrence, Messages to the World (hereafter MW: excerpt(s) from The Al Qaeda Reader, translated and edited by Raymond Ibrahim, translation copyright В© 2007 by Raymond Ibrahim. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved); Ibrahim, The Al Qaeda Reader (hereafter AQR); Foreign Broadcast Information Service, “Compilation of Usama Bin Ladin Statements 1994-January 2004,” (hereafter FBIS). The FBIS source, marked

“For Official Use Only” but released by Secrecy News, is perhaps the most suspect with regard to translations, but it is both the most comprehensive source and also the one that gives the reader full and specific citations to original documents, so that the critical and multilingual reader can check the original sources. MW and AQR Page 268 →do not consistently provide full citations to original references, though their credentials for translation are more evident. A substantial number of texts circulated under bin Laden’s signature. It is impossible to employ conventional means to assure the authenticity of all of those texts, because he was frequently seeking to protect his security by ensuring that it would be difficult to trace anything directly back to his person. Text-analysis methods also cannot be reliably employed because there is good reason to believe that bin Laden often worked with cowriters, although to varying degrees. At least a few of the texts in the collections I’ve employed may not even have been authorized by bin Laden, and I’ve specifically excluded three. However, the focal concern with regard to the circulation of a public rhetoric is not with identifying which views a particular person (“bin Laden”) really held. The goal is instead to trace and understand the lines of affiliation and the associated motivational affects that circulated “as” the views of the public figure “bin Laden.” Those who read texts circulated under bin Laden’s name at the time would not have had access to any verification of their authenticity. Fortunately, the texts in the corpus collected under his name during this period seem to be remarkably consistent with one another with regard to their portrayal of affiliations and their major emotional appeals. Therefore, issues of authenticity do not present crippling concerns for the present purposes. Another technical concern regarding authenticity is choice of spelling. I retain the spelling from the translations used rather than “correcting” it to some putative ideal, because I do not accept the idea that there can be a single correct version of spelling between the two scripts. This means that there is inconsistency in spellings in this text, as there are disagreements among common US practice, Chicago Manual of Style preferences, and the various sources quoted. Human social groups use control over language—including pronunciation, grammar, and spelling—as markers of affiliation. Because my goal is to expand affiliations, pluralization of spellings best recognizes the plurality of practices. My conclusion after comparing the three sources is that the emotive elements are robust across translation at the scale of focus here (which is not to deny that there are surely additional points of inflection that might be of interest in studies focusing on some specific aspects of bin Laden’s rhetoric). Although the collections rely on different translators with different interests and different personal and cultural orientations, and although bin Laden’s texts were circulated and recirculated under a variety of titles and dates at different locations around the world, below I identify only themes that are evident regardless of translations and variations in publication sources of texts. With regard to the latter, where different newspapers or broadcast stations, for example, produced highly selective sections, the themes identified nonetheless appear repeatedly across time and space. A final source of comparison is with the texts from the later era (2002–8) that were mostly published in al-Qaeda’s own translations. These translations seem to differ primarily in their less formal style, though there appears to be some shift toward using phrasings that might have more appeal to Europeans and cosmopolitans in the United States (signaled, for example, by the greater use of the word “oppression.”). In general, I would suggest that the more literal translations have the advantage of being closer to the precise wordings of the originals, but at the expense of creating distance between readers from the two cultures, whereas the more Page 269 →informal translations lessen the distance, but at the expense of losing the cultural distinctiveness of the original. 5. Mommani and Ronowicz, “English Translation.” Mohannadi, “Translation and Ideology”; Baker, “Narratives of Terrorism,” frames this differently, identifying the sources of the problem of othering as located both in other linguistic conventions and in social structural issues. 6. There are differences across cultures regarding the use of names and name order. I have opted for parallelism of structure with the other main figures. The confusion caused by name order is more systematic than this, because some sources reverse name order in translating to US audiences and some do not. I have honored the translator’s choice with regard to names other than Osama bin Laden (where I have opted for consistency).

7. AntГєnez and Tellidis, “Power of Words”; Brooke, “Jihadist Strategic Debates before 9 /11”; Cherney and Murphy, “What Does It Mean”; Appleby, “Labelling the Innocent.” 8. Compare AntГєnez and Tellidis to Brooke. 9. Burke, “Definition of Man.” 10. Sources attending primarily to US audiences are detailed in chapter 5, but sources such as Ceslo, “Al Qaeda’s Post-bin Laden Resurgence,” and Gunaratna and Jayasena, “Global Support for Al Qaeda,” attend to “Muslim” audiences, but with a US-goals-based focus; Nacos, “Terrorist Calculus,” attends to the putative goals of the terrorist, but the assessment is from a US perspective; Sayyid, “Mixed Message,” offers a perspective centered alternatively in various Middle Eastern and Muslim-led nations; Alexander, “From the Depths of Despair,” takes a performative perspective that attends alternatively to the two audiences. Gauvain, “Osama bin Laden as a Multi-Vocal Symbol,” takes an interpretive perspective based in key questions in Islamic doctrine intertwined with abstract treatments of informants. 11. The evidence of this as a doctrinal goal for the Bush administration appears in chapter 5. 12. Illustrated from different political perspectives, in Frum and Perle, End to Evil, and Stokes, “Ideas and Avocados,” 88. 13. Agathangelou and Ling, “Power, Borders, and Security”; Bell, “Grey’s Anatomy Goes South”; Hunter, “US Interests”; 9/11 Commission Report. 14. Huntington, “Clash of Civilizations”; Gunning and Jackson, “What’s So вЂReligious’ about вЂReligious Terrorism’”; Gauvain, “Osama bin Laden as Multi-Vocal Symbol”; Bhatia, “Religious Metaphor”; Rockmore, Before and after 9/11; Brown et al., “Sacred Violations.” 15. There is contention as to whether bin Laden was knowingly allied with the Central Intelligence Agency or other US forces in this period, but the reality of those relationships is not particularly relevant to an assessment of his public rhetoric, so I set those debates aside for present purposes. 16. Some of these discussions focus on the attitudinal factors (politics, economic distress, or religion), Jo, “Who Sympathizes with Osama bin Laden?”; Tessler, “Arab and Muslim Political Attitudes”; others focus on “underlying” causes, including colonial histories or economic systems, e.g., Rockmore, Before and After; Chomsky, “Quick Page 270 →Reaction”; a multiperspectival overview is provided by Holloway, Woods, and Grice, Representing American Events, chap. 1. 17. Bin Laden, “Interview by Hamid Mir,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 47. 18. Bin Laden, “Interview by Jamal Isma’il,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 174. 19. Bin Laden, “Al-Jazirah Program, 10 Jun 99,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 120. 20. Bin Laden, “Expel Jews, Christians,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 78. 21. Bin Laden, “Interview by Hamid Mir,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 47. 22. As AntГєnez and Tellidis, “Power of Words,” observed “Al-Qaeda intends to forge a global Islamic identity, one that foregoes the different streams that exist in the culture(s) and identities of Islam, ” 119. 23. Bin Laden, “Expel Jews, Christians from Holy Places,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 78. In April 2001 a recording of bin Laden reaffirming his support for this dictatorial theocracy was released at a religious conference in Peshawar. The speech was reported in a mix of third and first person (the distinctive spellings are retained from the original), but it indicates he described Afghanistan as the only nation that “has implemented real Islamic system,” and then quotes bin Laden as saying, “Almighty Allah and you should be witness that I, Osama-Bin-Mohammad-Bin Ladin, am giving вЂBaiat’ [allegiance] to Mulla Omar.’” This is shortly after the Taliban’s destruction of the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan (March 2001), and bin Laden explicitly supports that action in this message. “Bin Ladin Calls on Muslims to Invest in Afghanistan, Join Jihad,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 152. 24. Ivie, Democracy and America’s War on Terror; Bar-Tal, Intractable Conflicts; Kinder and Kam, Us against Them; Ross, Mixed Emotions. 25. Agathangelou and Ling, “Power, Borders, Security, Wealth”; Bhatia, “Religious Metaphor”; Cronick, “Discourse of President George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden”; Leudar et al., “On Membership Categorization.”

26. Bin Laden, “The Betrayal of Palestine,” December 29, 1994, from Lawrence, Messages to the World, 8. 27. Bin Laden, “Interview by Abd-al-bari вЂAtwan,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 35. 28. “Usama Bin Ladin’s Message to Iraq, Urges Muslims to Overthrow Regimes,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 251. 29. The most noted incident was President Bush’s statement that “[t]his crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while,” made on September 16, 2001 in reply to questions taken on the South Lawn, Bush, “Remarks.” When attacked for that statement, his spokespersons insisted that this was crusade with a lowercase c, not with a capital C. He also used the term on February 16, 2002 in a statement to troops in Alaska: “They stand with us in this incredibly important crusade to defend freedom, this campaign to do what is right for our children and our grandchildren.” Bush, “President Rallies.” 30. “Supporters of Shariah Website Publishes Bin Laden вЂSpeech’,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 141. Page 271 →31. Bin Laden, “Interview by Taysir Alluni,” from Lawrence, Messages to the World, 127–28. 32. As Michael C. Leff has shown, in “Dimensions of Temporality,” use of a historical horizon compacted by the religious frame can place events in a sacred time, moving events and policies out of the temporal distinctions of then and now. This move can transform existing affiliations and enmities along the model of past or other options. 33. Published as “Moderate Islam Is a Prostration to the West,” from Ibrahim, Al Qaeda Reader, 31. 34. Bin Laden, “Interview with Hamid Mir,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 46. 35. Bin Laden, “The Betrayal of Palestine,” December 29, 1994, from Lawrence, Messages to the World, 14. 36. Bin Laden, “Interview by Abd-al-bari вЂAtwan,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 31. 37. Bin Laden, “A Declaration of Jihad against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries,” published in three parts, October 12, 13, 14, 1996; from Lawrence, Messages to the World, 25. 38. Abu Shiraz, “May Interview with Bin Laden,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 114: “I request the Chinese Muslim brothers to be united to protect their rights and try to contact me as soon as possible. Since they are living very far away from the Islamic world, they need to study Islamic history more. They should also extend their relations with the organizations of other Muslim countries.” “Full Text of Interview,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 242: “These massive demonstrations from the Philippines in the Far East to Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and Mauritania only express the conscience of the nation.” 39. Bin Laden, “Moderate Islam Is a Prostration,” from Ibrahim, Al Qaeda Reader, 36. 40. Bin Laden, “Interview by Abd-al-bari вЂAtwan,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 34. 41. Bin Laden, “Interview by Jamal Isma’il,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 175. 42. For example, “Bin Laden’s Warning.” 43. For an articulation of the American versions of civic piety, see Hart, Political Pulpit. 44. I make this conclusion based on my own reading of published translated speeches, but see also Benkharafa, “Comprehension Treatise.” 45. “The Invasion of Arabia,” from Lawrence, Messages to the World, 18. 46. Arnett, “Transcript of Interview.” He explicitly called fighting “the highest degree of belief in religion”; “Bin Laden Declares Jihad on Americans,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 21. 47. Even when bin Laden called for other types of sacrifices, these too were to be directed toward the violent goal of jihad. In the devout interview with Al Jazeera in 1998, for example, he called for emigration to support the jihad, Al Jazeera, December (no date given), “A Muslim Bomb,” from Lawrence, Messages to the World, 68. 48. Bin Laden, “To Our Brothers in Pakistan,” from Lawrence, Messages to the World, 101.

49. Bin Laden, “Invasion of Arabia,” from Lawrence, Messages to the World, 19. Page 272 →50. John Miller, “Conversation.” 51. AntГєnez and Tellidis, “Power of Words.” 52. Burke, Rhetoric of Religion. 53. Bin Laden, “Ladenese Epistle,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 26. 54. Bin Laden, “Public Letter to bin Baz,” from Lawrence, Messages to the World, 7. 55. As summarized in the notes to the previous chapter, Harinck et al., “Good News about Honor Culture,” emphasize that honor cultures have wide geographic dispersion and are typically capable of handling conflict in nonviolent ways. See also Cohen et al., “Insult, Aggression, and the Southern Culture of Honor,” and Cohen, Dov, and Nesbitt, “Field Experiments Examining the Culture of Honor.” 56. Leung and Cohen, “Within- and Between-Culture Variation,” elaborated in the notes to the previous chapter. 57. Holy Qur’an. 58. This is consonant with Fricano’s (“Horizontal and Vertical Honor”) analysis of the honor cultural dimensions of bin Laden’s rhetoric, undertaken with a different focus and methodology. 59. Islamic traditions also give something like sacred status to a range of “hadiths” collected in the two centuries following Muhammad’s death, but there does not appear to be full agreement among sects and scholars about which of these texts qualify, and with what certainty. A search of the online hadith database shows no use of the term “insult” and only four of “coward.” There are multiple uses of “pride,” many of which disparage pride, e.g., “He who has in his heart the weight of a mustard seed of pride shall not enter Paradise,” or negative ascriptions of pride as in “pride and simulation is among the uncivil owners of horses and camels.” Other statements in the collection might seem to portray pride in a way that leaves open a favorable appeal to it, as in “Glory is Allah’s loin cloth and pride is His cloak.” From ahadith.co.uk, http://ahadith.co.uk/searchresults.php?q=coward (accessed February 12, 2014). I quote bin Laden’s use of a hadith that uses “humiliation” below in relationship to in-group relations, as well. 60. “A Muslim Bomb,” from Lawrence, Messages to the World, 91–92. 61. “A Muslim Bomb,” from Lawrence, Messages to the World, 93. Although bin Laden recruited from the relatively young, he had many adherents who had been with him throughout the conflict with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, so his total forces were not youthful. The biographies of the participants in the 9/11 attacks are indicative: by the time of the attacks most were middle aged, but they were mostly from relatively well-to-do backgrounds. They included at least two sons of wealthy families along with multiple men from professional/commercial class families (lawyers, cleric, school principal, food supplier/date and lemon farm manager or owner). Poll data analyzed by Jo, “Who Sympathizes?,” also supports the claim that economic motivations are not the primary basis of support for bin Laden in Pakistan and Indonesia. 62. Miller, “Conversation.” 63. The focus on males’ particular interest in status is intrinsic to the theory about the nature of honor cultures, which is historically derived (if not necessarily true for every imaginable human culture), e.g., Hayes and Lee, “Southern Culture of Honor and Violent Attitudes.” Page 273 →64. Bin Laden, “Interview by Hamid Mir,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 45. 65. Illustrative usages from “Bin Laden Declares Jihad on Americans”: “God above everyoneВ .В .В .В ,” “there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his subject and messenger, ” and “the true ulema, heirs of the Prophets,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 14–16. 66. “Moderate Islam Is a Prostration,” from Ibrahim, Al Qaeda Reader, 41. 67. “May Interview with Bin Laden Reported,” from Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 115. 68. Bruce Lawrence noted that bin Laden sought to establish himself as an ulema, in spite of the fact that he did not have the typical training and life path of Islamic scholars. Because of the uncertainty of this ethos, he routinely interlinked his proclamations with those who had the schooling to stand as authoritative interpreters of the Koran. However, in 1994 he also articulated the status of ulema as including those with

both traditional scholarly credentials and also credentials more like his own, which he defined as knowledge of the conditions of the world. Quoting Imam ibn al-Qayyim, he noted that two kinds of knowledge were necessary for a valid decree including both contextual and that more “tangible” knowledge, in “Public Letter to Bin Baz,” from Lawrence, Messages to the World, 11. 69. Similarly, “We have pledged slavery to God Almighty alone” in “вЂExclusive’ Interview,” Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 179, and in interviews of his companions included in Ibrahim, Al Qaeda Reader. 70. al-Mohannadi, “Translation and Ideology,” 536. 71. A Google search for the phrase “Mohammed is his slave and prophet” in May 2017 produced pages of hits. On the first two pages all that were interpretable were recruiting appeals or defenses of Islam. 72. Bin Laden, “Moderate Islam Is a Prostration to the West,” from Ibrahim, Al Qaeda Reader, 38. 73. Bin Laden, “Interview December 1998, Broadcast on al-Jazeera,” from Lawrence, Messages to the World, 86. 74. As described in chapter 3, an accidental or justified injury is no basis for revenge and an unjustified injury caused by an affiliate is a cause for amelioration or punishment, but not retaliation. 75. Bin Laden, “Bin Laden’s Warning.” 76. The progression of the address also supports this interpretation, for the careful reader schooled in the techniques made available by Leff, “Dimensions of Temporality.” 77. Alexander, “From the Depths of Despair.” 78. Angry public rhetorics tend to overlook the enemy’s capacity for retaliation, because the competition among potential leaders of the in-group drives them to follow the line of anger’s innate optimism, to escalate their threat out of proportion to the balance of power between nation-states that may be expected to play out. This is why national leaders employing anger rhetorics routinely act in ways that look irrational to outsiders. Kahneman and Renshon, “Hawkish Biases,” provide a summary of several “hawkish biases” that lead to threat inflation in international conflict, including a Page 274 →positive illusion bias. This account is consonant with theirs, but adds that particular kinds of activation (experiencing anger, and at the public level, the sharing of angry rhetorics) intensify that bias. Some of the other hawkish biases they identify might be grounded at least predispositionally in the structure of angry rhetorics as well (e.g., “pseudo-certainty” is one particular framework in which absolutism might operate in common international conflict conditions). Fessler, “Mad Men,” further suggests that the dynamics of anger activated by the internal rhetorical competition must drive leaders to overstate the potentials for action, rather than to calibrate actions to the conditions pertaining among the competing outgroups. 79. Ray, “Opinion Briefing.” 80. Fox et al., “One Year Later”; New York Times, “Reaction from around the World,” September 12, 2001. 81. Chirac was quoted in the PBS story “World Reacts to Terrorist Attacks.” Colombani, “Nous Sommes Tous Americains.” The editorial indicates a shared sense of shock and solidarity: “Comment ne pas se sentir en effet, comme dans les moments les plus graves de notre histoire, profondГ©ment solidaires de ce peuple et de ce pays, les Etats-Unis, dont nous sommes si proches et Г qui nous devons la libertГ©, et donc notre solidaritГ©.” It also directly rejects claims that the attackers are pursuing justice: “Ceux-lГ ne veulent pas d’un monde meilleur, plus juste. Ils veulent simplement rayer le nГґtre de la carte.” Chirac’s repeat of the Le Monde headline is in Kaplan, “Bush’s Many Miscalculations.” 82. “Attacks Draw Mixed Response in Mideast,” CNN. See also New York Times, “Reaction from around the World.” 83. An assessment of the different levels of policy support by different nation-states is provided by Sayyid, “Mixed Message.” 84. “DPRK Stance towards Terrorist Attacks on U.S.,” http://kcna.co.jp/item/2001/200109/news09 /12.htm#3 85. “Attacks Draw Mixed Response in Mideast,” CNN. 86. It would be an additional project to document the similarities between bin Laden’s rhetoric and that of ISIS/ISIL, but existing accounts emphasize the omission by ISIS/ISIL of the focus on the United States;

Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants.” 87. “Attacks Draw Mixed Response in Mideast,” CNN. 88. For an example of undocumented claims that these were large, see Alexander, “From the Depths of Despair.” 89. Gauvin, “9/11 as a Trigger”; Sayyid, “Mixed Message.” 90. Ceslo, “Al-Qaeda’s Post-bin Laden Resurgence”; van Ginnekin, “9/11 as a Trigger”; Gunaratna and Jayasena, “Global Support”; Jo, “Who Sympathizes.” These authors’ selection of data from the polls tend to have ideological foci that make it worthwhile to compare their selections of data to the poll data available at Pew, “What the World Thinks in 2002.” 91. These numbers are from Pew, “What the World Thinks in 2002,” 4–5; see also Mogahed, “Muslims and Americans”; McCauley and Scheckter, “What’s Special about US Muslims, ” which compares the Pew to the START polls; Tessler, “Arab and Muslim Political Attitudes” attends to a compilation of other surveys. 92. Pew, “What the World Thinks in 2002,” 4–5; see also Mogahed, “Muslims and Americans.” See also McCauley, “What’s Special about US Muslims.” A key point is Page 275 →the way in which Muslims in Egypt and Pakistan identify first as members of a religion, rather than as members of a nation-state, in contrast to Muslims in Indonesia, Morocco, or the United States. Such attitudes were obviously conducive to bin Laden’s vision. Mogahed, “Muslims and Americans,” shows those trends continue through 2006; however, after 2003 the US’s invasion of Iraq becomes a factor influencing attitudes directly. 93. Gunaratna and Jayasena, “Global Support.” 94. Gauvin, “Osama bin Laden as a Multi-vocal Symbol.” 95. See Campbell’s reply to Hill, “Conventional Wisdom.” 96. Burke, “Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle.” 97. Mogahed, “Muslims and Americans,” 3.

Chapter 5 1. Goodnight, “Metapolitics,” 70. 2. In addition to the assessment below, see Murphy, “Our Mission and Our Moment.” 3. Maggio, “Presidential Rhetoric of Terror.” 4. Jarvis, “Times of Terror.” 5. Collet, “Civilization and Civilized.” 6. Angstrom, “Mapping the Competing Historical Analogies.” 7. Agathangelou and Ling, “Power, Borders, Security, Wealth”; Beeman, “Great Satan”; Bhatia, “Religious Metaphor”; Cronick, “Discourse of President George W. Bush”; Thompson, “Magic for a People Trained in Pragmatism.” 8. Bostdorff, “George W. Bush’s Post-September 11 Rhetoric”; Graham, Keenan, and Dowd, “Call to Arms”; Mullin, “US Discourse on Political Islam”; Lazar and Lazar, “Discourse of the New World Order”; Loseke, “Examining Emotion as Discourse”; Murphy “вЂOur Mission and Our Moment’”; Silberstein, War of Words; Craig Smith, “President Bush’s Enthymeme”; Vivian, “Neoliberal Epideictic”; Winkler, In the Name of Terrorism. 9. Some advocates continue to defend the president’s choices, saying either that the plan was good but the execution was poor or that more time is needed. Evidence that the consensus view, even among mainstream conservatives, is that the president’s policies failed, comes from the decision of his brother, running for the Republican nomination for president (and hence from the right side of the electorate), to admit that “вЂ[k]nowing what we know now, I would have not engagedВ .В .В . I would have not gone into Iraq,’” as quoted by Barbaro, “Jeb Bush Finally Says.” 10. There is some agreement on these changing conditions, even if disagreement about significance and response, e.g., Bolton, US National Security; Cimbala, George W. Bush Defense Strategy; Peleg, Legacy of George W. Bush; Thrall and Kramer, American Foreign Policy; Kaufman, In Defense; MacDonald et al., Bush Leadership; Frum and Perl, End to Evil. A position emphasizing continuity is offered by Lynch and

Sing, After Bush. For the changing “interconsequentiality” across the globe, see chapter 7. 11. Bush, “Address to the Nation on the Terrorist Attacks, September 11, 2001”; “Remarks at the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance Service, September 14, Page 276 →2001”; “Remarks to Police, Firemen, and Rescueworkers at the World Trade Center Site in New York City, September 14, 2001”; “Address Before a Joint Session on the United States Response to the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, September 20, 2001”; “Address to the Nation on Iraq, March 17, 2003.” 12. Dietrich, George W. Bush Foreign Policy Reader; Smith, Bush; Woodward, Bush at War; Bush, Decision Points. 13. A debate currently culminating in and engaged in depth in the biography by Smith, Bush. 14. There is a crippling wealth of analysis and critique of the Bush foreign policy agenda. I highlight one facet of this for the analysis of the circulation of anger, but for a discursive analysis of his foreign policy documents, see Dunmire, “9/11 Changed Everything.” For a discussion of Bush’s doctrine in context, see also the debate assembled in Ikenberry, Crisis of American Foreign Policy; for key pertinent original materials, see Dietrich, George W. Bush Foreign Policy Reader. 15. The more nationalistically overt and extreme version was often attributed to Paul D. Wolfowitz, and named “the Wolfowitz Doctrine,” e.g., Tyler, “US Strategy Plan.” Tripathi, Overcoming the Bush Legacy, points to the “Project for the New American Century Statement of Principles,” issued June 3, 1997, as another formulation of these principles. 16. Cheney, “Defense Strategy for the 1990s,” 21; emphasis added. 17. Tracy, “Bearing Witness”; Scott, Road to 9/11; Holloway, Woods, and Grice, Representing American Events, chap. 1. 18. Bush, “A Period of Consequences,” in Dietrich, George W. Bush Foreign Policy Reader, 24. 19. Bush, “A Period of Consequences,” in Dietrich, George W. Bush Foreign Policy Reader, 22. 20. Bush, “A Distinctly American Internationalism,” in Dietrich, George W. Bush Foreign Policy Reader, 26–28. 21. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. 22. Loseke, “Examining Emotion,” 509, for example, offers an untenable option when she suggests that the president “might have constructed the events of that day as a one time occurrence, as something that would never happen again.” Such an interpretation would have made the president seem ignorant of a variety of events already coded as related, and which predisposed Americans to place this event as a spectacular heightening of a series: the previous bombing of the World Trade Center, the attack on the USS Cole, and attacks on multiple US embassies. The president would have been, further, derelict in his duties had he done so, given that he knew that al-Qaeda operatives were taking credit for the event and promising additional attacks. Likewise, Maggio’s claim in “Presidential Rhetoric of Terror,” 810, that the president set “the limits of discursive definition, and hence created the parameters of thought” is an overstatement that ignores the countervoices and constraints on what could be persuasive. 23. Constraints included that this was the deadliest attack on US territory in six decades (including the more rhetorically shaded option “since Pearl Harbor”), where “attack” has the consensual meaning that it was a deliberate, destructive human-generated action and where “deadliest” means it resulted in the largest number of deaths (on the evening of 9/11 this could only be estimated as “in the thousands”) Page 277 →and the destruction of the most square footage of buildings. The recent attacks on the Federal Building in Oklahoma had also set expectations. See also Silberstein, War of Words. 24. Three different kinds of evidence are relevant. First, liberals increased their alignment with the president and their conservativism as much as conservatives did (Nail and McGregor, “Conservative Shift”). Second, the studies cited in chapter 3 showed that emotions were highly predictive of policy preferences. Third, those exquisitely sensitive weathervanes—the elected politicians themselves—flocked to the president’s side, rather than remaining in their partisan strongholds. The case was similar for most journalists: DiMaggio, Selling War; Norris et al., Framing Terrorism. 25. The literature is summarized in De Castella, McGarty, and Musgrove, “Fear Appeals,” 2; Rothe and Muzzatti, “Enemies Everywhere.” Examples include Kellner, “Media Spectacle,” 11; Denzin, “Politics and the State”; Aly and Green, “Fear, Anxiety and the State of Terror”; Sunstein, “Fear and Liberty”; Sparks, “Liberalism, Terrorism, and the Politics of Fear”; Snow, “Media, Terrorism, and the Politics of Fear,” 19. See also Konty et al., “Scared Selfish.”

26. De Castella and Craig, “Two Leaders, Two Wars,” and De Castella et al., “Fear Appeals in Political Rhetoric about Terrorism.” DiMaggio, Selling War, 2, agrees with this, focusing on “hope and fear” as the emotions related to the war in Afghanistan. Although his analysis of polls and the interface of presidential rhetoric is a brilliant advance on previous work, his reading of the emotion in these speeches is not tight enough because it lacks attention to specific appraisal cues. Critics attending to emotion who have identified the president’s rhetoric as focused on anger rather than fear include Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion; Lockett et al., “Going Public, Crisis after Crisis”; and Loseke, “Examining Emotion as Discourse.” 27. Skitka et al., “Confrontational and Preventative Policy.” 28. CBS Poll, evening of September 11, 2001, reported in Saad, “Americans Clearly Support.” Assessment of the level of fear felt by Americans was complicated by the different ways in which fear could be framed. 29. Ipsos-Reid poll, evening of September 11, 2001, reported in Saad, “Americans Clearly Support.” This illustrates the value of doing qualitative research prior to doing quantitative polling and of using emic rather than etically generated terms for such polls; the pollsters clearly missed providing on their lists the term “shock,” which evidence suggests would have been a favored choice by the populace. 30. For actions taken individually in response to the attacks, see Schuster et al., “National Survey of Stress Reactions,” which reports that 90 percent of the population reported some level of postattack stress and 44 percent reported “one or more substantial symptoms of stress.” People indicated they had talked to others (91% of those with PTSDs and 83% all others), turned to religion (84% PTSDs and 69% others), checked on the safety of family members (83% and 69%), and made donations (42% and 31% ). A study by Eisenman, “Terrorism-Related Fear,” indicated that disadvantaged groups were even more likely to feel the stress of these events. 31. Waldman, Welchlin, and Frost, America, September 11th, 58. For similar examples and an analysis that is compatible, though differently focused, see Holland, “From September 11th.” 32. Waldman, Welchlin, and Frost, America, September 11th, 59. Page 278 →33. Waldman, Welchlin, and Frost, America, September 11th, 65. 34. Waldman, Welchlin, and Frost, America, September 11th, 120. 35. Waldman, Welchlin, and Frost, America, September 11th, 132. He is a Detroit resident, not the rhetorical critic. 36. See “Hate Crime Reports up in Wake of Terrorist Attacks.” 37. Bush, Decision Points, 148. My reading of the “bullhorn speech” as an incident where the president came with the intention of using a consolatory funeral rhetoric and then was moved by the crowd’s emotional demands to shift to an angry rhetoric was made before I read the president’s autobiography. The autobiography indicates the president, coming from the eulogy at the National Cathedral, had no prepared remarks, but did intend a consolatory rhetoric. He wrote that “my first instinct was to console,” and the first lines fit that consolatory mood. However, he indicated that when the crowd cheered his “I can hear you!,” he changed his focus: “It got a cheer. I had been hoping to rally the workers and express the resolve of the country. Suddenly I knew how” (149). 38. CBS News.com Staff, “CBS Poll.” 39. Smith, “President Bush’s Enthymeme,” also points to reassurance as a dominant theme. 40. See Silberstein, War of Words, for a close reading of the remarks earlier in the day. 41. Jamieson and Campbell, “Rhetorical Hybrids,” 147. 42. Kitch, “вЂMourning in America.” 43. I have framed her description in terms of the relational format I am emphasizing; see her description on 215. Specifically, Kitch argues that the media “not only covered, but conducted a public funeral ceremony” after 9/11. She traced visual images in the major national news magazines in their first three issues after 9/11 in relationship to the three successive stages of the ritualized phases of meaning. Biesecker, “No Time for Mourning,” has argued that such a progression of mourning did not occur in the public visual rhetoric, but instead the nation became stuck in mourning due to the endless repetition of the early images. Resolving the debate between Biesecker and Kitch is not necessary to the present point, as both critics affirm the emotional demands of the moment of loss and the desirability of a progression toward reconstitution of identities (whether individual or national).

44. This focus on the individual has been criticized as a “(neo)liberal” or “conservative” ideology (unfortunately, under the absolutizing binary tendencies of language, some would-be leftists tend to castigate any mention of individuals as a pollution of ideology). My own view is that any ideology that fails to account for individuals will be brutal in its application, because abstractions feel no pain and are infinite in their demands. This means that desirable progressive positions are “both/and” rather than “either/or” style thinking. A progressive adds to the world understandings of social structure and culture, without subtracting the importance of living, thinking, feeling, human bodies. With that understanding, it is problematic when a speaker ignores issues of social structure and culture, but not merely when a text includes mentions of individuals. 45. Silberstein, War of Words. 46. Kellner, “Media Spectacle,” 11. Muscati, “Reconstructing вЂEvil’”; Smith, “President Bush’s Enthymeme.” Page 279 →47. Spivak, “Terror”; Barsamian, “Interview with Said.” Details on Sontag in chapter 6. 48. Some critics would argue “evil” is a moral term, claiming to take an antimoralistic stance. But even Foucault (e.g., Birth of Biopolitics) does not manage to completely efface moral judgment from his arguments, and most academics are overwhelmingly motivated by moralistic criteria. Assigning “morality” to a value structure based on religion or to one lacking in self-reflexivity (as compared to an “ethics”) is a move often made by academics to deride the “moralism” of others (on what are moral grounds even if not labeled as such). 49. The significance of the move to dehumanization (or to stop short of that) has been elaborated upon by many critics, e.g., Ivie, “Images of Savagery” and “Presidential Motives for War.” 50. A critique has subsequently been elaborated among academics and analysts and spread to the political realm based on the idea that identifying this group as a fringe nonetheless blames Islam in various ways. The alternatives, such as calling them “neo-Kharijism,” would hardly have been available to the president or intelligible to the world audience, so they might stand as nominable options now, but they do not stand as a critique of the president’s choices then. See AntГєnez and Tellidis, “Power of Words”; Cherney and Murphy, “What Does It Mean to Be a Moderate Muslim?” 51. The president would insist that there could be cultural variations in the character of freedom and democracy (e.g., in his second inaugural address), but he never reconciled his preference for particular versions of freedoms with the implications of different cultures for whom those freedoms would not be preferred. 52. In fairness to these critics, I emphasize that after the September 11, 2001 attacks, bin Laden and alQaeda increased the use of “oppression” based rhetoric that echoed the US/European left’s critique of the American government. Since the criticism of the United States escalated at the planned invasion of Iraq, this is the rhetoric to which these critics were probably most attentive. See IntelCenter, Words of Osama bin Laden. 53. The foreign policy critique is linked to the broader critique of American imperialism as a neoliberal economic system. The former, narrower critique was—as chapter 6 will detail—the primary critique of the moment. The broader critique was more often heard later, especially among academics, e.g., Turner, “Class, Generation and Islamism”; Vivian, “Neoliberal Epideictic”; Hossein-Zadeh, “Muslim World and the West,” 1. The latter article illustrates the way in which scholars turn Bush’s critique of al-Qaeda into a critique of “people in the Muslim world,” thus reifying what the American president did not do. This would mean that they are themselves “Orientalizing.” It should seem ironic and unfortunate to find that the very academics who are objecting to a “clash of civilizations” overtly are in their labeling and categorizing practices actually reproducing that view, even though they do so by “siding” with the other side of the binary. Some critics also tend to oppose the president’s touting of freedom because they associate it solely with free market policies. I support the broader goal of freedom for everyone on the planet, which must continually be defined by our discussions of the term, but I have also argued that the critique of our freedom by the terrorists shines a useful light on the ways in which a value set that privileges only freedom as a value undermines civilization and makes us behave as brutes, in Condit, “Where Is Public Address?” Page 280 →54. Shane and Lehren, “Leaked Cables.”

55. The president extended this fusion of terrorists with nation-states in the “Address to the Nation on Iraq” on March 17, 2003. He began by fusing the terrorists with the government of Iraq as he had with Afghanistan, shifting the threat from “terrorists” (powerful, but limited networks) to “terror states.” He alternated between assigning the threat to the state of Iraq (or its leader, Saddam Hussein) and to terrorists (in the form of networks such as al-Qaeda), while positing increasingly tight degrees of relationship between the two. At paragraph 6, for example, he pointed the finger at terrorists, who were merely helped by the nation-state: “Using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.” By paragraph 21, the two were allies making choices together: “With these capabilities, Saddam Hussein and his terrorist allies could choose the moment of deadly conflict when they are strongest.” Working the other side of the ledger, to reduce a nation-state to “an evil group” of men (like terrorists), the president repeatedly referred to the “Iraqi regime” and personified it as Saddam Hussein. President Bush thus used the frames and emotional climate established immediately after the attack on 9/11 as the ideological and emotional reservoir to extend the action of “war” from Afghanistan to Iraq. 56. The eulogy of the 14th contained only one vague reference to the world community: “unity against terror is now extending across the world.” 57. Using “the West” would have been both wrong and offensive, the “United Nations” might have been technically acceptable but its resonances would not have been comfortable for much of the US or global audience. The weakness of the “world” as an alternative lies both in the lack of strong sense of affiliation for the “world” among most of its peoples, and in the fact that some of the nations in that world were, on Bush’s account, the attackers. 58. Murphy, “Our Mission and Our Moment”; Silberstein, War of Words, chap. 2. 59. Ironically, some such critics conflate Islam and Arab, but see Cainkar, “Introduction”; Lazar and Lazar, “Discourse of the New World Order”; Merskin, “Construction of Arabs as Enemies”; Muscati, “Reconstructing вЂEvil’”; Semmerling, “Those вЂEvil’ Muslims!”; Steuter and Wills, “Discourses of Dehumanization”; Kellner, “Media Spectacle, Fear, and Terrorism,” 11. Likewise, Kumar, “Framing Islam,” 23, claims that “the вЂclash of civilizations thesis eschewed by the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations, was adopted and promoted by the Bush Jr. administration.” Kumar’s indictment depends on reading Bush’s use of terms such as “radical Islamic” or “the Taliban” as equivalent to (generic) “Islamic,” which is precisely to ignore demarcations that he seems to be arguing should not be ignored (since his first criticized frame is “Islam is a Monolithic Religion”), and these are demarcations President Bush explicitly makes. Kellner’s essay has virtues beyond that of Merskin’s including his focus on Bush’s consequential choice to declare as the enemy an ill-defined and expansive set of “terrorist” networks—which I treat below. Analysis by Collet and colleagues indicates, however, that Kellner is making a conflation between the clash of civilizations hypothesis (which Collet et al. argue to be systematically present in Bush’s rhetoric) and the overlay of that clash upon a Christian/Muslim conflict, which is not explicitly in Bush’s rhetoric (and even explicitly argued against in Bush’s rhetoric), but Page 281 →which is nonetheless available to be read into that “clash” because of Bush’s concrete uses of Christian religion. 60. Merskin, “Construction of Arabs as Enemies,” uses fragments of quotations from different parts of addresses to create the impression that the president made statements that he did not make. She cites but dismisses the president’s demarcation of Islam from radical Islam on the grounds that the public is too ignorant to understand the distinction, a deprecation of the public that aligns with the discussion in the next chapter. 61. Maggio, “Presidential Rhetoric,” 820. 62. Some have distinguished between the earlier multilateral efforts and later unilateral efforts, and noted that the multicultural, multireligious focus was more prominent in the period on which this chapter focuses. 63. The Wikipedia article on this, as of January 22, 2015, was garbled and incorrect. It claimed the president used the term on September 11 and at the eulogy, which is not true according to the video and print texts

I’ve found. That article then correctly cited two uses at a press conference on the White House Lawn on September 16, 2001 (“Remarks by the President on Arrival”) and at a troop rally on February 16, 2001 in Alaska (“President Rallies the Troops”). 64. Bostdorff, “George W. Bush,” provides a detailed reading of particularly sectarian dimensions of this rhetoric. Bhatia, “Religious Metaphor in the Discourse of Illusion,” explores the parallels between bin Laden’s use of religious rhetoric and its relationship to identity categories and that of Bush. Megoran, “God on Our Side?,” shows a related dynamic in British eulogies related to “terrorism.” Stramer, “Language of War,” notes the impact of the pervasive use of Christian religious resources and accounts for the president’s use of these resources from Bush’s personal history and notes a shift from a Wesleyan to a Calvinist mode at 9/11. 65. John Raymond pointed out to me that the phrase “not our own” might also have resonated with the closing of the Romero prayer (a fairly widely circulated poem, written by Bishop Ken Untener, see http://www.romerotrust.org.uk/romero-prayer). 66. Jamieson and Campbell, “Rhetorical Hybrids,” 147. 67. Hart, Political Pulpit. 68. Beasley, You, the People, 47–67. 69. Although several others, including religious leaders, spoke at the Cathedral, it was predictable that the president’s address would gain singular attention, and the form he gave to the address was, as I will discuss below, a hybrid eulogy/rally speech. See also Silberstein, War of Words. 70. He also portrayed the members of that nation as generous, selfless, courageous individuals, linked primarily to each other through family and business ties, and linked to their government primarily as protective wards, a vision that has been previously criticized for its insufficient model of democracy, and which also supports the argument below that Bush’s vision of “freedom” was an excessively limited one. 71. Winkler, In the Name of Terrorism. See also DiMaggio, Selling War, 11. 72. As an example, although the “crime frame” dominated, in his radio address of March 16, 1996, President Clinton set the “terrorists” against “the peacemakers” and defined the challenge as one to “national security.” Clinton also urged “strong sanctions on nations that sponsor terrorism.” Page 282 →73. Some criticisms have used the strategy of reducing the “risks” to mere injury levels (and comparing them to other risks, such as driving) to argue that the president’s emphasis on “the war on terror” was inflated. But these critiques are tone-deaf to the significance of the event in the preexisting ideational probabilities in a way that Bush was not. 74. On the evening of September 11, the polls already showed that 60 percent of the population saw the attacks as “another Pearl Harbor,” CBS News.com Staff, “CBS Poll.” See also Milford, “National Identity, Crisis, and the Inaugural Genre.” 75. He also explicitly equated the injury with the assault of a war: “War has been waged against us.” He mentions that the “unity of terror is now extending across the world,” but this brief mention is indeterminate with regard to whether the world is simply the context for America’s fight, or whether the world features true partners in the fight. 76. Murphy, in “вЂOur Mission and Our Moment’,” has argued that the president used the occasion epideictically rather than deliberatively. The loose generic constraints of addresses to joint sessions of Congress have been described by Campbell and Jamieson, Deeds Done in Words. 77. Lee, “Us, Them, and the War on Terror,” provides a nuanced and careful account arguing that Bush’s error was not (as the majority of critics have alleged) that the president “othered” Muslims, but rather that he failed to take account of relevant differences between the cultures in the regions he invaded and other cultures. 78. That is, values such as “freedom” are better understood as having variable borders and emphases, rather than as universals that appear in the same form everywhere. Plato conceived of universals as having a singular, perfect form, but Plato’s universals did not exist in the earthly or human plane of being. As suggested in chapter 1, views such as Plato’s are probably figments of the fact that words seem to denote singular entities. Many subsequent scholars have correctly attacked this notion of the existence of universals, but their arguments do not refute the existence of some substantial commonality of aspiration

among humans. We all must breathe, eat, and drink or die. But we do not need to eat and drink the same things (and we even seem to have different tolerances for oxygen pressure and even air pollutants). We all seem to create music and decoration, but the particular forms of music and decoration vary widely. How far our commonalities extend is a matter impossible to settle in any general way, but the urge for freedom seems to be rooted both in our biological character (mammals generally prefer freedom of movement) and in our symbolizing tendencies (the impossibility of pure communication with others creates an individuality of expression that amplifies our biological preferences?). Both the commonalities (humans prefer freedom) and the specificities (what they prefer as freedom varies) are important to constituting the general (rather than universal versus nonexistent) nature of a value such as “freedom.” 79. There is a fairly common tendency to assert that 9/11 was a sign of the faults of global capitalism or “neoliberalism,” and to assume that the president duped his public by refusing to identify that cause, but I am suggesting that even if global capitalism or neoliberalism were a/the cause, it would not have been sufficient to name it as such in order to gain American collective action behind an anticapitalist or antineoliberal Page 283 →rhetoric; examples of such commentary include Agathangelou and Ling, “Power, Borders, Security,” and Thompson, “Magic for a People.” 80. Roosevelt, “1941 State of the Union Address.” 81. Kyi, “Freedom from Fear.” 82. I would even defend the notion that the sense of self-government must be defined as the right of all long-term adult residents of a territory to participate equally in the shaping of their shared government if it is to have logical consistency. Such a principle requires direct representation of women and other subordinated groups, and thus violates cultural prescriptions of those cultures. However, if the government does not admit at least this principle, then it gives up the claim to base its own power on anything other than tradition and power. As such, it cannot logically claim standing in a world community on any grounds such as equity or mutual respect. This belief does not in any way justify a freedom-loving nation using violence to enforce self-government on others. Whether it authorizes a unified world community to use inducements to reorganize oppressive regimes requires further global discussion. 83. See Elshtain, Just War, for an articulation of this rationale in context. 84. Reus-Smit, American Power and World Order, takes account of both of these in providing an ethical assessment, with which I am in agreement, but the focus here is on the pragmatics of a strategic rhetoric that could align with such an assessment. 85. Saddam Hussein had, indeed, invaded another nation (Kuwait), and there is a fairly broad consensus that he used torture and chemical weapons against the people of his nation. He was certainly hostile to the United States and a dictator. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did not, however, have either nuclear weapons or stores of chemical or biological weapons. Nor were they the primary sponsor of al-Qaeda or other terroristic groups. Moreover, the president’s depiction of Iraqis as a unified and inherently peaceful people ignored the way in which religious, ethnic, and economic conflicts influence any people’s political relationships. No group of people is “inherently” peaceful or warlike. To the extent that the president’s recipe for preventing terrorist attacks was based on these ingredients, then it was doomed to prove a faulty script, at least on factual grounds, which means that there were also empirical counterforces to its success. 86. As observed in detail by analysts such as Jackson, “Core Commitments”; Falk, “War and Peace”; Spivak, “Terror”; Staun, “When, How and Why”; Kennelly, “Terror of the Talk.” 87. I use the term “spectacle oriented mass killings” because of the stark discrepancy between official figures on terrorism, which show no increase within the United States since 9/11 (though a massive increase elsewhere, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/19/terrorism-is-booming-almost-everywhere-but-inthe-united-states-state-department-report/), in contrast to the large increase in mass murders within the United States, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44126.pdf. While it is difficult to parse which of these mass murders in the United States should be called “terrorist,” I believe that several not labeled by the US government as “terrorism” share the anger dynamics of terrorism and have been modeled on terrorists narrowly defined, even though the attackers are not involved in “terrorist” networks. 88. http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/19/terrorism-is-booming-almost-everywhere-but-in-the-united-statesstate-department-report/

Page 284 →89. The two cases overlap, but in the case of Afghanistan, the dynamics are slightly different. The anger script’s fusion of terrorists with nation-states led Bush to intertwine two rationales for America’s actions there. One rationale argued that the Taliban government should turn over criminal terrorists (a demand that might have resonated with the expressed sympathies of much of the world). The other rationale argued that the United States had a right to invade Afghanistan, not because they wouldn’t hand over the terrorists, but because their government was deficient in American-prized visions of freedom. However much peoples of other nations around the globe might agree with the American-prized visions of freedom, they could not resonate with the claim that America had the right to decide which nations were sufficiently free and to invade at will those which were not. Mullin, “US Discourse,” explores the role of Bush’s administration in forwarding a double standard for the use of violence. 90. The role of revenge in the killing of Osama bin Laden has been explored by Cox and Wood, “Got Him.” 91. Silberstein, War of Words, 11, says that “[r]hetorically, the President is very much in step with the public,” but she is emphasizing only the warlike dimensions and its sentiments. 92. The most detailed analysis is provided by Dimaggio, Selling War. Key summary sources include Huddy et al., “Reactions to the Terrorist Attacks”; Bloch-Elkon, “Public Perception”; Sullivan and Hendriks, “Public Support for Civil Liberties,” 380; Moore, “Americans See Terrorist Attacks as вЂAct of War’”; Saad, “Americans Clearly Support”; McCauley and Scheckter, “What’s Special?” 93. Bloch-Elkon, “Public Perceptions”; Dimaggio, Selling War, 5, argues that “[p]revious studies suggest that expectations of success and concern with military casualties are the main reasons for war opposition. I argue that the most important reason for growing opposition is perception that war is immoral.” The biosymbolic view would be that changes in consequences tilt the level of optimism, which dissipates anger, which then enables the broader moral view to be more readily accessible. 94. Huddy et al., “Reactions to the Terrorist Attacks.” 95. Eidelson and Plummer, “Self and Nation.” 96. Saad, “Americans Clearly Support.” 97. The poll data in this paragraph is summarized from Huddy et al., “Reactions to the Terrorist Attacks.” 98. DiMaggio, Selling War, 22. His analysis correctly emphasizes the role of the mass media in amplifying and circulating the president’s discourse, but this circulation would not have occurred if the press had not found the president’s rhetoric resonant. 99. As the pointed analysis by Lewis, “Clash,” emphasizes, whether the questions are asked about specific freedoms or more abstractly also makes a substantial difference. Sullivan and Hendriks, “Public Support,” provide an overview of the changes in the focus of these questions that illustrates the complexities involved for using these questions in any straightforward fashion. For a highly critical view, see Kelley, Post-9/11 American Presidential Rhetoric. 100. Panagopolous, “Arab and Muslim Americans.” See also Mogahed, “Muslims and Americans.” 101. Bloch-Elkon, “Public Perceptions.” 102. Gallup, Presidential Approval Ratings. Page 285 →103. Read the suite of Gallup polls at http://www.gallup.com/poll/1633/iraq.aspx, but especially note that by 2005 majorities indicated that “the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq.” The Pew polls show the same crossover to “wrong decision,” http://www.pewresearch.org /2008/03/19/public-attitudes-toward-the-war-in-iraq-20032008/. Other poll results are available at http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm. Later polls showed this evolving into general isolationist preferences, the “US Should вЂMind Its Own Business Internationally,’” http://www.peoplepress.org/2013/12/03/public-sees-u-s-power-declining-as-support-for-global-engagement-slips/. See also Fox, Rainie, and Madden, “One Year Later.” 104. van Ginnekin, “9/11 as Trigger”; Ray, “Opinion Briefing.” 105. In some nations respondents were asked whether President Bush or the American people were to blame, and in those cases allies assigned greater blame to the president whereas nations without close

positive ties were more likely to blame the American people. 106. Pew, “What the World Thinks in 2002.” 107. E.g., Mendoza, “Undemocratic Foundations of Democracy,” 933 and 938, illustrates what I take to be the failure to understand “ideographs” (such as liberty, equality, freedom, or democracy, McGee, “Ideograph”) as essentially contested and highly malleable terms, rather than as essentialized absolutes produced only in one form in one locatable space-time, e.g., Mendoza writes that “from the colonial experience of Latin America, modernity, capitalism, nation building, and democracy are understood as organically linked with colonialism, as parts of the same historical movement of European expansion and domination over the modern or colonial world system,” and “Latin American feminists say that the genocidal reason of the West must make room for an alternative thinking, a reason beyond the West, a postoccidental reason that is beyond democracy.” As Keane, Life and Death of Democracy, and many others have documented at great length, democracy is not a unique product or value of a “Western” experience, but has roots and variations around the globe. 108. I have traced this dynamic in more detail, giving Slavoj Žižek’s rhetoric as a specific example in Condit, “Multi-layered Trajectories.” 109. The literature on Habermas’s perspectives is voluminous, but for present purposes, especially looking ahead to chapter 7, the comparison to Mouffe by Khan, in “Critical Republicanism,” is useful. 110. Keane, Life and Death of Democracy.

Chapter 6 1. Only Representative Barbara Lee voted against the House resolution authorizing military action in response, for which she gave only a brief justification on the floor of Congress. 2. Sontag, “Talk of the Town,” 32; Noam Chomsky, “Quick Reaction.” Edward Said (Barsamian, “Interview with Edward W. Said”) gave a response that is ideologically similar, but it came later, and was somewhat more measured. One hundred and fifty other prominent figures, including Gloria Steinem, Martin Sheen, Alice Walker, Helen Caldicott, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee, weighed in by signing a public statement,Page 286 → “Diverse Coalition of Americans,” that called for justice not vengeance. Because this statement, and a few others, received no evident uptake, I do not address them, but additional investigations of these options might be interesting. 3. I give explicit attention to the essay by Robert Jensen, “Letter to the Editor,” A-33, and replies to it on September 15, 19, and 22, also in the Houston Chronicle. Ward Churchill posted the most extreme and elaborated version of such a rhetoric on September 12, but at the time he was not widely known, which may explain why there is no evidence of the circulation of the essay until he became a figure of controversy in 2005. The relatively obscure location in which it was posted, its extremity, rambling character, and length may also have contributed to its failure to circulate. Because of this apparent lack of circulation at the time, I have not explicitly incorporated it in the analyses below. The response to it when it gained attention in 2005 seems to have been similar to that described for the other essays, but the time displacement means that these responses should not be included in the “subjective responses” section, for reasons articulated in the essay seeking to discredit these responses published by Fritch et al., “Disingenuous Controversy.” They list the essay as having been published in Pockets of Resistance, at a site that is no longer accessible. I accessed the essay on May 25, 2017, as “Some People Push Back,” at http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html 4. Sontag is referred to as having “joined a world of expatriate beats” by Kaplan, Dreaming in French, 99. The latter quotation is from Mitrano, In the Archive of Longing, 11. 5. Kaplan, Dreaming in French, 140, quotes Sontag as saying “I am very attached by temperament to the status of the foreigner.” 6. For example, “Political Islam or Islamism is the consequence of the social frustrations, articulated around the social divisions of class and generation that followed from the economic crises of the global neoliberal experiments of the 1970s and 1980s”; Turner, “Class, Generation and Islamism,” 139. See also Hossein-Zadeh, “Muslim World and the West.”

7. Kaplan, Dreaming in French, reports that even though she was living in Paris during the uprisings related to France’s colonies, Sontag wrote nothing about these events in her diaries (108), and later declared, “I came to Paris in 1957 and I saw nothing” (97). 8. See, e.g., Schreiber, Susan Sontag, 101; Ching and Wagner-Lawlor, Scandal of Susan Sontag, 5; Sontag, Essays of the 1960s and 70s, 452–528. 9. Sontag, “Godot Comes to Sarajevo.” 10. She is called a “celebrity” by Schreiber, Susan Sontag, 90, and by Ching and Wagner-Lawlor, Scandal of Susan Sontag, 1. 11. E.g., Maunsell, Susan Sontag, 173; Sontag, “What’s Happening in America,” in Essays of the 1960s and 70s. 12. Ching and Wagner-Lawlor, Scandal of Susan Sontag, 15. 13. Schreiber, Susan Sontag, 93. 14. Rollyson, Understanding Susan Sontag, 2. 15. Maunsell wrote that Sontag would “unashamedly defend вЂhigh’ culture from the barbarians at the gates,” Susan Sontag, 169. Derrida identified a shared project as being “against interpretation” in a letter to Sontag, according to Kaplan, Dreaming in French, Page 287 →128. See Sontag, At the Same Time, 3–13, and for her declaration that “I choose truth,” see At the Same Time, 152. 16. Rollyson, Understanding Susan Sontag, 4. 17. Nelson, Tough Enough, 1. 18. Schreiber, Susan Sontag, 93. 19. Talbot and Sontag are both at pains to distinguish her rhetoric from other leftists, especially Chomsky, but the differences they identify do not make explicit appearances in Sontag’s New Yorker statement. Talbot describes Sontag as “independent” and emphasizes specific deviations from typical left alliances. But the need to argue in the Salon interview for her “independence” from others signals both that the New Yorker statement appeared as similar to others and the general impression that she is typically “on the left.” Talbot, “вЂTraitor’ Fires Back.” 20. Talbot, “вЂTraitor’ Fires Back.” 21. Lazare, “New Yorker Goes to War,” 25. The quotation of Remnick is from the same Lazare essay, “New Yorker Goes to War,” 25. 22. Sullivan, “Appeasement Watch”; Krauthamer, “Now Is Not the Time”; De Toledano, “Withstanding the Hate from Within,” 48; Field, “Sleazy Ideas of Terrorism.” 23. Dreher, “Painful to Live in Stricken N.Y.” 24. Guanipa, “A Confused Soul.” 25. In addition to the interview by Talbot in Salon, a translation of an additional reflection was published in At the Same Time, 108–17. 26. Talbot, “вЂTraitor’ Fires Back.” 27. A helpful anonymous reviewer has pointed out that Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem, “Howl,” would have been familiar to Sontag, and, indeed, Ginsberg also circulated through the American expatriate scene in Paris at times overlapping with Sontag. 28. She later endorsed a “limited, focused military engagement,” At the Same Time, 123. 29. Talbot, “вЂTraitor’ Fires Back.” 30. Dana Cloud publicly responded to the University of Texas’s president’s reply to Professor Richard Jensen’s letter on the attacks (discussed further below). She later appeared fearful, angry, and surprised at the responses she received to her counter-rhetoric, reporting that her “attempt at criticalrational intervention into public discussion was met almost univocally by emotional responses by fax, email, and phone. Most of them—hundreds of them—were angry and hate filled” (“Therapy, Silence, and War,” paragraph 6). Cloud characterizes the public as “affected” in contrast to herself. 31. Lazare, “New Yorker Goes to War.” 32. Talbot, “вЂTraitor’ Fires Back.” 33. Sontag later elaborates this argument in At the Same Time, 183–84. 34. Rollyson and Paddock, Susan Sontag, 304. 35. Rollyson and Paddock, Susan Sontag, 304. See also Schreiber, Susan Sontag, 227. 36. “Angry polemic” is a label offered by Schreiber, Susan Sontag, 226.

37. The choices of affiliation she offered might thus have appeared as “American,” “Soviet,” or “above both but formerly with the Soviets.” 38. Sontag, At the Same Time, 108. 39. Sontag, At the Same Time, 109. Page 288 →40. On the genre of the jeremiad, see Carpenter, “Historical Jeremiad as Rhetorical Genre, ” and Murphy, “вЂTime of Shame and Sorrow’.” 41. All quotations of Chomsky in this chapter come from “Quick Reaction.” 42. All quotations of Jensen in this chapter are from the “Letter to Editor,” published September 14, 2001. 43. “Diverse Coalition of Americans Speak Out against War.” 44. “Diverse Coalition of Americans Speak Out against War.” 45. Biesecker, “No Time for Mourning”; Engle, “Putting Mourning to Work.” 46. Schreiber, Susan Sontag, 226. 47. Schreiber, Susan Sontag, 227. 48. Eberly, Citizen Critics, has modeled the use of such letters as a way of discerning the shape of public understandings of social issues. 49. Schreiber, Susan Sontag, 228. 50. The Houston Chronicle published replies on September 15, 19, and 20. The Outlook editor, David Langworthy, published a summary/explanation, “A Star-Spangled Argument,” in which he claimed that there was “virtual unanimity in opposition” to Jensen’s position. Some letters published on these dates on the broad topic shared what appeared to be elements of the critical perspective held by Jensen, but interestingly these did not directly reference Jensen’s statement. 51. The insistence that only “they” had access to understanding and knowledge of history was also incompatible with their own version of understanding. It was not true that all of their opponents were ignorant of history. History, as humanists are fond of emphasizing, has many tales to tell. As an example of a historically informed attack on their position, appearing even in a brief format, consider Krauthammer, “Now Is Not the Time.”

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Index Note: Page numbers in italics refer to tables. 9/11 attacks, 1–2, 12, 56–57, 128; deaths in, 1, 99, 146, 159–60, 163, 196, 214, 222–23; defining of, 146–47; emotional responses to, 56–57, 131, 141–43, 147–48 (see also anger; grief; shock; sorrow); participants in, 189–91, 213, 272n61. See also al-Qaeda; violent action 9/11 rhetorics, 4–5, 9–10, 15; alternative, 183 (see also leftist intellectuals); commonalities in, 209–19. See also bin Laden, Osama; Bush, George W.; Sontag, Susan absolutism, 84, 89, 171, 212, 229, 266n92; bin Laden and, 100, 106–7, 111, 113–18, 127, 129, 137–40; Bush and, 154; intensity and, 87–88, 140, 222; Sontag and, 210 abstraction, 249n29 accommodation, 229 action tendencies, 4, 5, 49, 55–58, 70; of anger, 80–85. See also collective action; violent action activism, 74–75 activity levels, 83 affect, 50, 255n33; autonomy of, 256n44; choice and, 65. See also emotions affect theory, 3, 60–61 affiliations, 65, 212–13, 235, 254n25, 260n19; of bin Laden, 108, 110, 114–15, 124–25, 128, 133–38, 212–13; broadening, 220; of Bush, 158–63, 213, 220; global, 195–96, 205–7, 213, 215, 233–35; narrow, 210; of Sontag, 188–96, 202, 204, 212–13, 220, 226–27 Afghanistan: bin Laden and, 170, 270n23; condemnation of 9/11 attacks, 132; Soviet invasion of, 102–4, 107–8, 130; Taliban in, 105 (see also Taliban); terrorist and, 154–56; US humanitarian aid to, 198; US war in, 165, 173, 277n26, 284n89 Agathangelou, Anna M., 12–13, 245n30 aggression, 84, 223, 263n68 Ahmed, Sara, 224, 254n21, 257n62 alienation, 139, 173, 192, 196, 212, 214 Al Jazeera, 104, 114, 117, 123, 267n4, 271n47 Allen, Danielle, 250n40 al-Qaeda: attacks by, 99–100, 171 (see also 9/11 attacks); freedom and, 153; goals of, 154–57, 270n22; Islam and, 154; Sontag’s criticism of, 197; as target, 131, 133–34, 139, 211. See also bin Laden, Osama Page 326 →amae, 30, 224 anger: action tendencies of, 80–85; after 9/11 attacks, 56–57, 148–52, 174–78, 201; alternative displays of, 219–23; appraisal cues for, 77–80; biosymbolic dimensions of, 194, 266n92 (see also biological

mode of being); cognitive biases of, 81–82 (see also optimistic biases of anger; rote thinking); complexity of, 67; cultural differences in, 43–44; as epiphenomenal, 1; hate and, 52, 59, 225, 264n72; idealizations of, 84; individuals and, 10–11; injustice and, 74–76; “justifiable,” 44, 76; negative valence of, 60, 78; normative adjudication and, 26, 73–77, 243n8, 266n91; optimism and (see optimistic biases of anger); as pleasurable, 78; script for (see script for public anger); social functions of, 5, 25–26, 43–44, 71–77; structural dynamics of language and, 40–41; visible displays of, 80–81 angry movement, 83–85 angry rhetorics, 10; agendas served by, 209–19; as causative social agent, 1–2, 137; modes of, 4–5. See also 9/11 rhetorics antagonists, 83–84, 89, 96. See also enemies; opponents Antúnez, Juan Carlos, 118, 270n22 appraisal cues, 4, 5, 49–53, 69–70, 244n9, 266n92; autonomy of, 256n44; mutual activation and, 58–59 —FOR ANGER, 77–80; bin Laden, 100, 106–30; Bush, 152–74, 176 approach orientation, 83–84 Arab Muslim governments. See Islamic states Arafat, Yasser, 132 Aristotle: on action tendencies, 56; on anger, 78, 86–87, 89, 96, 264n75; on calmness, 83; on emotion as social, 49, 53; form/matter distinction, 18; honor culture of, 76, 86, 119, 124, 266n89; on moderation, 222; on pathos, 225, 253n14; on public decision-making, 66; on status, 11, 76 Arnett, Peter, 117 articulation theory, 251n55 artificial life, 247n15 Ask, Karl, 78, 82 assessments, 35–36, 68–70; ethical, 17, 136–40 atheists, 107–8 attack orientations, 6, 83–85, 89, 200, 216–17, 244n9. See also collective action; violent action audiences, 90–92; bin Laden’s, 99–104, 111, 118, 123–27; Bush’s, 146–50; psychology of, 119; research on, 94; Sontag’s, 186, 188 Aung San Suu Kyi, 169 autonomy, 128, 138–39, 214, 215 Avino, Kathleen, 148 Bacon, Francis, 249n35 Baghdadi, Abu Bakr al-, 134

Bagozzi, Richard P., 264n72 Baker, Mona, 269n5 Barad, Karen, 16, 247n17 Barbaro, Michael, 275n9 Bar-Tal, Daniel, 258n76 Bates, Benjamin R., 244n13 Batson, Daniel, 76 Beardsworth, Richard, 228 Beasley, Vanessa, 163, 260n19 Benhabib, Seyla, 291n32 Bennett, Jane, 247n11 Berkowitz, Leonard, 79, 262n39 Berlant, Lauren, 53, 224, 254n21 Berlin Wall, fall of, 167–68 Berry, Jeffrey, 75 Bhatia, Aditi, 281n64 Biesecker, Barbara, 61, 278n43 Bigsby, Elisabeth, 57, 261n28 binaries, 5–6, 36–40, 52, 88, 114, 136, 192, 250n48, 251n57. See also mind/body dualism bin Laden, Osama, 99–141; on autonomy, 128, 138–39, 214, 215; credentials, 273n68; goals of, 99–100, 104–6, Page 327 →112–13, 129–36, 156–57, 213 (see also caliphate); killing of, 99, 131, 260n22; as leader of al-Qaeda, 154, 173 (see also al-Qaeda); relationship with CIA, 269n15; scholarship on, 99–100; social position, 9–10; Sontag and, 187, 194 —RHETORIC, 4, 12, 15; absolutism, 111, 114–18, 127, 129, 137–40; affiliations, 108, 110, 114–15, 124–25, 128, 133–38, 212–13; appraisal cues for anger, 100, 106–30; collective action, violent, 100, 117, 124, 128–30, 216–17, 271n47; compared to Bush, 92, 100; on enemies, 106–14, 132–33, 137–39, 157, 211; on harms, 100, 128–29, 214; on honor and shame, 86, 119–24; in-group, 106, 124–27, 131–32, 136–37; intensity of, 139–40; Islam and, 101–2, 115–19, 128–29, 179; norms and, 115–27, 131, 138–39, 215–16; oppression-based, 279n52; optimism, 129–31; out-group, 106, 136–37; sources and translations, 100–101, 123, 126–27, 267n4, 269n6; status appeals, 119–24, 127; stereotyping by, 107, 110, 113, 114; subjective responses to, 100, 130–36, 217–18; target audiences, 99–104, 111, 118, 123–27 Bin Laden’s Bookshelf, 267n1 biological mode of being, 15–17, 20–26, 32, 41–42, 51, 54–55, 69–70, 76

biosymbolic approach, 41–42, 76, 194, 210, 284n93 Black, Edwin, 90 blameworthy agents, 79, 106, 262n39 Bleiker, Roland, 3, 63 Bloch-Elkon, 284n93 blockage of goals. See goal blockage Bohr, Niels, 247n17 Boleyn-Fitzgerald, Patrick, 85 Booth, Wayne, 90 Boromisza-Habashi, David, 259n2 Bostdorff, Denise M., 281n64 Brecke, Peter, 1 Brennan, Teresa, 59, 60 Briggs, Jean L., 252n10, 258n1 Britain, 159–60 Brockman, John, 16, 246n7 Buddha, 85, 222 Buhrer-Thierry, Genevieve, 84 Burke, Kenneth, 16, 36–40, 52, 96, 101, 118, 249n34, 292n51; comic corrective, 88–89, 220–22; dramatistic framework, 86–90 Bush, George H. W., 144, 224 Bush, George W., 141–81; goals of, 143–46; social position, 9–10; support for, 174–78, 183, 218. See also United States —RHETORIC, 4, 12, 15, 91, 141–43, 178–81; absolutism, 154; affiliations, 158–63, 213, 220; appraisal cues for anger, 152–74, 176; audiences, 146–50; collective action, violent, 150–52, 163–65, 217; compared to bin Laden, 92, 100; constraints on, 146–47, 151; crusade, use of term, 110, 161, 270n29; on enemies, 152–57, 176, 211, 279n53; eulogistic, 149–51, 153, 161–63; on harms, 165–67, 214; norms and, 157, 166–74, 181, 216, 223; sources, 143; subjective responses to, 174–78, 218 Bush, Jeb, 275n9 caliphate, 100, 104–5, 112, 123–24, 131, 133–35, 211 Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, 151, 282n76 Canada, 178

Carter, Jimmy, 289n2 Castella, Krista De, 147 Castells, Manuel, 230 causality, 20, 23, 26, 33–36 certainty, 4, 60, 72, 78, 80, 82, 93, 139; Bush and, 150, 153 Chaput, Catherine, 61 Charlie Hebdo, 221 Chastain, Betty W., 203 Cheney, Dick, “Defense Strategy for the 1990s,” 144 Chirac, Jacques, 132 choices, affect and, 65–66 Chomsky, Noam, 9, 183–86, 195–96, 199, 203, 205, 216, 218, 287n15 Christianity, 160–62, 221 Page 328 →Churchill, Ward, 9, 183, 184, 286n3 Churchill, Winston, 221, 291n40 Chvasta, Marcyrose, 62, 74–75 Cicero, 59, 64 circulatory systems, 67–68 civic fear, 226 civil liberties, 147, 176, 197 civil religion, American, 162–63 civil rights movement, 7 clarity, 249n35 Clinton, Bill, 164–65, 195 Cloud, Dana, 81, 287n30 Cochrane, Molly, 291n32, 292n44 cognition, 28–32, 49–50, 255n44 Cohen, Dov, 265n79 collective action, 65–66, 70, 152, 209, 216–17, 223; bin Laden and, 100, 117, 124, 128–30, 216–17, 271n47; Bush and, 150–52, 163–65, 217; Sontag and, 196–200. See also attack orientations; violent

action collective anger, 1–9, 75, 143. See also anger collective emotion, 3, 36, 49–50, 53–55, 63–70. See also emotions; social emotions Collet, Tanja, 280n59 colonialism, 102, 168. See also neoimperialism comic frame, 88–89, 220–22, 289n8 commonalities, 34–35, 43–48, 71, 282n78 common sense, 54, 80, 84 communication: clarity and, 249n35; functions of, 26–27; of ideas, 30; nonhuman, 37–38, 251n50; writing and, 251n56. See also language communism, 107–8 compassion, 224; action tendencies and, 58; appraisal elements of, 53; binary absolutism and, 88; complexity of, 67; as social signal, 25–26 conscious agents, 78–79 consciousness, 249n30 consensus, 231–32 conservatives, 6, 34, 75 constructivism, 29, 247n12, 293n53 contagion of anger, 59, 64, 81, 130, 139, 218–19, 254n21 contempt, 264n72 controllability, 80 correctives, 84, 88, 244n9, 264n72, 266n92 cosmopolitanism, 228 courage, 189–91 Cox, Lloyd, 260n22 Crawford, Neta, 3 criminal, terrorism as, 164–65 critique, 35, 250n42 Crusaders, 102–3, 108, 108–9, 110, 161 cultural contexts of emotions, 2–3, 30, 43–44

cultural evolution, 62–63 Darwin, Charles, 263n60 death, reactions to, 151. See also eulogy; funerary practices; grief; mourning; sorrow Deleuze, Gilles, 249n34, 255n33 De Luce, Daniel, 267n1 Demerit, Susan, 148 democracy, 180–81, 197, 285n107; direct participation, 231, 235; discursive, 228–29, 292n42; flaws of, 231–32. See also monitory democracy Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, 133 Derrida, Jacques, 37, 88, 187, 250n48, 251nn56–57, 286n15, 292n51 determinism, 21, 23–24, 30, 33, 41, 48, 209 De Toledano, Ralph, 187 Diamond, Jared, 16 differences, 34–35, 43–48, 61 DiMaggio, Anthony, 175, 277n26, 284n98 discourses, options opened by, 34 discreteness, 32, 38–39 discursive democracy, 228–29, 292n42 disempowerment, 231, 260n24 disgust, 22, 45–46, 225 dispositio (organization), 19 Page 329 →“Diverse Coalition of Americans,” 195–96, 286n2 dramatistic frames, 10, 39–40; pentad, 52, 87; template (script), 87–90, 114, 129 Dryzek, John, 228, 292n42 dualism. See binaries; mind/body dualism Duncan, Hugh Dalziel, 39 “Eastern” theory, 246n5 Ecker-Erhardt, Mathias, 292n51 Egypt, 103, 132, 154, 157, 178, 275n92 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 224

Eidelson, Roy, 174 Einstein, Albert, 18, 33 Eisenman, David P., 277n30 Ekman, Paul, 44–47, 51 elites: motivations of, 12, 245n30; power of, 61–62, 245n32 emotional diplomacy, 68–69 emotional manipulation, 68–70 emotions, 1–9; after 9/11 (see 9/11 attacks); biological elements, 15–17, 24–25, 51, 54–55, 69–70; brain activation patterns in, 46–47; components of, 49–58; cultural contexts, 2–3, 30, 43–44; directional flow of, 257n64; evolutionary function of, 25–26, 62–63; functions of, 61–63; as fuzzy complexes, 43–48, 52–53, 57, 60–61, 78; ideology and, 8, 224–25; mutual activation of components, 58–61; physiological elements, 15–17; relationships among, 59–60, 256n45; social change and, 225–27; structural dynamics of language and, 40–41; symbolic elements, 15–17, 50–51. See also collective emotion; social emotions; individual emotions emotion studies, 92, 95, 236–37; methodology, 92–96 enemies, 210–12; alternative portrayals of, 220–23; bin Laden’s, 106–14, 129–30, 132–33, 137–39, 157, 211; Bush’s, 152–57, 176, 211, 279n53. See also antagonists; opponents energy/matter/time, 18–21 Engbers, Susanna Kelly, 254n21 Engle, Karen, 61–62 environment, 248n22 epistemology, 15–16, 246n6 equality, 7–8, 86, 138, 240 Esquire, 118, 124 essentialism, 5–6, 36–37, 40 ethics, 17, 136–40 eulogy, 149–51, 153, 161–63, 202 Europe, 178; as bin Laden’s enemy, 114; as bin Laden’s target audience, 103–4; colonialism, 102, 168 evidence, 93, 266n101 evil, 153, 181, 279n48 evolution, 23, 248nn23–24; anger and, 74, 263n60, 263n68; emotions and, 25–26, 62–63 expatriates, 183–84. See also Sontag, Susan

fairness, 226 fantasy/fantastic ideas, 33–35, 41–42 fear, 82, 226; after 9/11 attacks, 56–57, 141, 147–52, 192, 201; analysis of, 236–37; evolutionary function of, 25; negative valence of, 60 feeling, display of, 257n64. See also emotions feminism, 194, 259n18, 285n107 Fessler, Daniel, 74, 263n67, 274n78 Field, Andrew, 187 Fisher, Philip, 83 Fontana, Marian, 148 Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), 267n4 Fore people (New Guinea), 44, 45 form/matter distinction, 18–20 Foucault, Michel, 88, 259n15, 279n48 Fraser, Nancy, 232 freedom: calls for, 197; global, 179–81, 218, 282n78; government limits on, 231–33; terrorist attitudes toward, 153, 156–57, 279n53; US vision of, 142, 144–46, 155, 166–70, 176, 178–81, 214, 216, 281n70, 284n89 Page 330 →Freeman, Jonathan, 48 free markets, 145, 169, 179, 214, 279n53 Freud, Sigmund, 250n43 Friesen, Wallace, 44–47, 51 Fritch, John, 286n3 functions: of anger, 11, 26, 72–74, 77, 215, 244n13, 259n6, 260n22, 263n60, 264n72; in biological theory, 22–26; of emotions, 24–25; of global anger, 139, 233; in honor cultures, 86, 265n79; social vs. individual, 24–25; of symbols, 37–39; theory of social functions, 61–62 funerary practices, 141, 151–52, 160, 202. See also eulogy fuzziness of ideas, 32 fuzzy complexes, emotions as, 43–48, 52–53, 57, 60–61, 78 Gallup polls, 177–78 Garg, Nitika, 82 Garrett, Mary M., 264n75

Gauvain, Richard, 135 gender, 12, 39, 90–91, 155, 184–85, 221, 260n19. See also men; women Germany, 178 Gettysburg Address, 152, 227 Gino, Francesca, 263n55 Ginsberg, Allen, 287n27 global capitalism, 102, 282n79. See also free markets; neoliberalism global governance, 227–35 global norms, 5. See also norms global relationships, 209, 213 goal blockage, 78, 83, 86, 263n60 Goetz, Jennifer, 51, 53 Goodin, Robert, 230 Goodnight, Thomas, 141, 197 Grandjean, Didier, 57 Granhag, Pär Anders, 78, 82 Grappi, Silvia, 264n72 gratitude, 290n19 grief, after 9/11 attacks, 148, 151–52, 154, 192–93, 196, 201, 215, 222, 226. See also mourning Grossberg, Lawrence, 50 group identities, 65. See also identity group norms. See norms Guattari, Félix, 249n34 Gulf War, 128, 188, 193, 198. See also Iraq Gunn, Joshua, 50, 54–55 Habermas, Jürgen, 228, 291n32 hadiths, 125, 272n59 Hall, Todd, 3, 64, 68–70, 258n76 Halperin, Eran, 258n76, 264n72

Hamann, Stephan, 44, 46–47 Hamas, 134 happiness, 8, 224, 225, 290n17 Hariman, Robert, 50, 54 Harinck, Fieke, 265n79 harms, 78, 89, 136, 214–15; bin Laden on, 100, 128–29, 214; Bush on, 165–67, 214; Sontag on, 196–200, 223 Harris, William, 87 Hart, Roderick, 163 hate, 52, 59, 148, 225, 264n72 Hawhee, Debra, 16 hawkish biases, 273n78 Heisenberg, Werner, 247n17 Hendriks, Henriet, 284n99 Henry, P. J., 265n79 heuristic thinking, 82 Hicks, Darrin, 292n49 hierarchies, 48 Hitler, Adolph, 70, 87, 89, 91, 167, 221 Holmes, Marcus, 67 honor, 214; bin Laden on, 86, 119–24; in the Koran, 123; male, 264n79 honor cultures, 76, 86, 119–24, 264n79 hope, 224, 277n26, 289n14 Houston Chronicle, 195, 202 Huddy, Leonie, 56 humiliation, 119–23, 272n59 Hussein, Saddam, 118, 133, 156, 167, 171, 173, 194, 280n55 Hutchison, Emma, 3, 63 hypermasculinity, 12, 245n30 idealizations of anger, 84

ideas, 28–32 identification with victims, 77 Page 331 →identity, 22, 51–52, 196, 254nn24–25, 291n36; environment and, 248n22; markers of, 260n19; Muslim, 275n92; political emotion and, 65 identity studies, 96 ideological studies, 93–95 ideology, 50, 57; emotion and, 8, 224–25; supporting neoimperialism, 12 idolaters, 113 Ifaluk, 43–44, 73, 75, 224, 260n20 imam-warrior caste, 125, 136–39, 212–13 incrementalism, 293n53 individual emotions, 3, 63–68, 152, 278n44. See also emotions Indonesia, 135, 275n92 infidels, 107–14, 128, 136, 137–38, 211 in-group based rhetorics, 4, 72, 244n13; bin Laden’s, 106, 124–27, 131–32, 136–37 injuries, 266n89, 273n74. See also harms injustice: anger as response to, 74–76; bin Laden and, 137–40. See also justice Inmann, Jeffrey, 82 intellectuals, leftist. See leftist intellectuals intensity, 50, 55–56, 61; absolutism and, 87–88, 140, 222; of bin Laden, 139–40; of term “slave,” 127; variations in, 66 intentionality, 79, 262n39 interconsequentiality, 229 interdependence, 292n51 international law, 174, 199–200. See also justice International Monetary Fund, 235 Internet-based global forums, 234 interpersonal interactions, 3, 68, 73, 149, 288n54 Iran, 132, 178 Iraq, 128; invasion of Kuwait, 103, 118; terrorists and, 154–56; US and, 131–32, 143, 156, 165, 167–68, 170–73, 275n9

Isbell, Linda, 82 Islam, 154, 221; in Bush’s rhetoric, 160–61, 280n59; “Islamic terrorism,” 101 (see also neoKharijism); militaristic, 118; radical, 280n59, 281n60. See also Koran; Muslims Islamic clerics: as bin Laden’s target audience, 103, 111, 118; responses to 9/11 attacks, 132 Islamic Jihad (Gaza), 134 Islamic law, 104–5 Islamic State (ISIS/ISL), 126, 133–34, 139 Islamic states: as bin Laden’s enemies, 107, 110–13, 132–33, 137–39; as bin Laden’s target audience, 100, 102; responses to bin Laden, 132–33. See also individual countries Isma’il, Jamal, 114 Israel, 185, 198; as bin Laden’s enemy, 107–10, 137–38, 157; as bin Laden’s target audience, 102–4 Jackson, Jesse, 291n41 Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus, 246n6 Jalalabad, 117 James, William, 58 Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, 151, 282n76 Jasper, James, 3 Jensen, Robert, 183–85, 195–97, 199, 202–3, 205, 216, 218, 286n3, 287n30 Jentsch, Max, 202–3 jeremiad, 194, 262n33 “Jewish-Crusader” alliance, 102–3, 108–10 Jews, 118, 157 jihad, 117–18, 124, 211, 216–17, 271n47 jihadi, 101 Jo, Jung In, 272n61 Jordaan, Eduard, 292n42 Jordan, 132, 157, 178 jouissance, 61 judgment, 35; moral, 279n48; power and, 73. See also assessments justice, 6–7, 184, 260n19, 286n2; autonomy and, 138; international, 164–65, 199–200, 206–7, 227;

norm of, 74–77; symbolic systems and, 34. See also social justice justifiable anger, 44, 76 Page 332 →Kahneman, Daniel, 273n78 Kalimtzis, Kostas, 85 Kant, Immanuel, 250n43 Kaplan, Alice, 286n7 Keane, John, 234, 285n107 Kellner, Douglas, 280n59 Keltner, Dacher, 82 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 7, 244n12 Kitch, Carolyn, 151, 278n43 Koran, 113, 118, 125; honor culture and, 123; quoted by Bush, 161–62; slavery in, 126 Kordelos, Jason, 148 Korzybski, Alfred, 37, 88 Krauthammer, Charles, 187, 288n51 Kumar, Deepa, 280n59 Kuwait, 194 Labroo, Aparna A., 290n17 “Ladenese Epistle” (1996), 112–13, 119. See also bin Laden, Osama Langsdorf, Lenore, 292n49 language: sensitivity in usage, 101; social emotions and, 64–65; structures of, 5, 36–41, 52; transcendent quality of, 249n35; units of, 38–39; words, 28–32 Langworthy, David, 288n50 Latour, Bruno, 250n42 Lawrence, Bruce, 273n68 Lazare, Daniel, 189 leaders: absolutist rhetorics, 87–88; motivations of, 11; psychology of, 119; rhetorics of, 11–12; speech salutations, 91–92 Lebanon, 178 Lee, Barbara, 285n1, 289n9

Leff, Michael C., 271n32 leftist intellectuals, 9–10; collective action and, 217; individual drives, 288n53; rhetorics of, 183–87, 196–200; subjective responses to, 218. See also Chomsky, Noam; Churchill, Ward; Jensen, Robert; Sontag, Susan Lerner, Jennifer, 80, 82, 290n23 Leung, Angela K.-Y., 265n79 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 39 Lewis, Carol W., 284n99 Lewis, Michael, 263n60 Leys, Ruth, 255n44, 258n72 liberation, 105 liberty, 33, 250n38. See also freedom Libya, 132 Lincoln, Abraham, 152, 227 Ling, L. H. M., 12–13, 245n30 linguistic sensitivity, 101. See also language Linton, Susan, 82, 261n31, 262n41 Little, Lester, 73, 84 Locke, John, 249n35, 250n43 Long, William, 1 Lorde, Audre, 74–75 Loseke, Donileen R., 276n22 loss, 78, 166; as meaningful, 152, 227. See also grief Lu, Xing, 246n5, 250n48 Lucaites, John, 54, 61, 244n12 Lucaites, John Louis, 50 Luke, Brian, 245n30 “lumping,” 35, 291n36 Lundberg, Christian, 50, 61, 256n51 Lutz, Catherine, 43–44, 63–64, 66, 68, 72–73, 75, 83, 252n1

Lyman, Peter, 74–75 machine metaphors, 16, 47, 95, 247n20 Maggio, James, 161, 276n22 Malcolm X, 244n12 Mandela, Nelson, 85 Marx, Karl, 250n43 masculinity. See men mass killings, 150, 153, 171, 283n87 Massumi, Brian, 50, 60, 249n34 materialism, 18 Matheson, Calum, 257n60 matter, 18–21, 250n38; environment and, 248n22; “non”existence of, 251n57 Maunsell, Jerome Boyd, 286n15 Mayr, Ernst, 22 McDaniel, James, 61 McGarty, Craig, 147 meaning, as complicated human action, 251n57 Page 333 →measurement, 20, 54, 247n16, 252n9 media, 12, 64–65, 67, 75, 278n43, 284n98; criticisms of, 100, 160, 185–86, 189–92, 201, 212, 245n32 Megoran, Nick, 281n64 men, 39, 123–24, 155–56, 259n18, 260n20, 264n79; hypermasculinity, 12, 245n30. See also gender Mendoza, Breny, 285n107 Mercer, Jonathan, 3, 64 Merskin, Debra, 280n59, 281n60 metagu, 224 methodology, 92–96, 246n6, 267n4; name order, use of, 269n6 Middle East: colonial history, 102, 168; subjective responses to bin Laden, 132; US foreign policy and, 131, 144. See also Islamic states; individual countries mind/body dualism, 2, 16, 246n5, 255n44 Mittal, Vikas, 82

moderation, 222 Mohannadi, Sarah al-, 100, 126–27 Mommani, Obaida al, 100 monitoring processes, 234–35 monitory democracy, 229, 234 Moons, Wesley G., 262n41 moral blame, 79 moral judgment, 279n48 moral principle, universal, 228 moral view, 284n93 Morocco, 275n92 Morris, Charles E., 266n95 motivations, 11, 87, 134 Mouffe, Chantal, 232 mourning, 226, 278n43. See also eulogy; grief movement, angry, 83–85 Mozart, Wolfgang, 261n29 Muhammad, 125 Mullin, Corinna, 284n89 murder, 150, 153, 164, 170, 214, 283n87 Murphy, John, 148, 282n76 Muslims: in America, 160–61, 176–77; as bin Laden’s target audience, 105, 124–27; hierarchical relationships among, 126–27; identity, 275n92; non-Muslims and, 114; responses to bin Laden, 134–36; status appeals and, 119–24. See also Islam; Koran; neo-Kharijism Nabi, Robin, 262n52 narrative, 36, 39, 52 nationalism, 144, 158, 179, 213, 220 nationalism studies, 96 National Security Council, 145 nation-states: collective anger in, 7; terrorism linked to, 154–56, 175, 211, 214, 280n55. See also individual countries

neoimperialism, 12, 184–85 neo-Kharijism, 101, 118, 279n50. See also Islam neoliberalism, 61, 279n53, 282n79, 286n6 neurophysiology, 49, 54–55, 58, 70 New Humanists, 16–17, 30–31, 246n6 New Materialists, 16–18, 246n6 Newtonian mechanics, 17–18, 20–21 New York Post, 187 Nicholson, Art, 202 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 250n43 nonverbal displays of anger, 80–81 nonviolence, 170, 197 normative adjudication, 5, 94, 131, 243n8, 266n91; role of anger in, 26, 73–77, 243n8, 266n91; shareable warrants and, 138–39, 166, 220 norms, 4–5, 7, 266n89; bin Laden and, 115–27, 131, 138–39, 215–16; Bush and, 157, 166–74, 181, 216, 223; local, 43; motivation and, 214; shared, 222, 260n19; Sontag and, 196–200, 216, 218–19, 223 norm violations, 72–78, 89, 96, 136, 194, 215–16 Nussbaum, Martha, 49, 51, 253n10 observation, 247n16 Oklahoma Federal Building bombing, 153, 164 Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucy, 292n51 Olson, Lester, 2, 3, 62, 74 Page 334 →O’Mara, Erin, 76 Ong, Walter, 251n56 ontology, 15–16, 246n6 opponents, 71, 205; Sontag’s, 188–96, 211–12. See also antagonists; enemies opportunism, 23–25, 33–34, 41 oppression, 185; of minorities, 231–32; rhetoric based on, 279n52 optimistic biases of anger, 4, 6, 8, 81–82, 89, 97, 142, 212, 273n78; action and, 200; bin Laden and, 129–31; Bush and, 171, 173, 175, 179; consequences and, 284n93; contagion of anger and, 134; Sontag and, 194 Orientalism, 168

others, 51–52, 269n5; identification with, 76–77 out-group based rhetorics, 4, 71–72, 165, 181, 219, 244n14, 274n78; bin Laden’s, 106, 136–37; progressives and, 7–8 Paddock, Lisa, 191 Pakistan: Afghanistan and, 198; attitudes toward US, 117, 135, 178; condemnation of 9/11 attacks, 132; Muslim identity, 275n92; support for Taliban, 105; terrorists and, 157 Palestine, 132, 198 Parker, Michael, 82 pathos, 49, 225, 253n14 Patrick, Vanessa M., 290n17 peace, 35, 73, 111, 145–46, 158, 170, 197–99, 220, 235; Islam and, 128, 154, 177 Pearl Harbor, 166, 175, 190, 276n23, 282n74 Perelman, Chaim, 292n51 perfectionism, 37–38, 101, 118, 225, 231, 234, 240, 250n41, 282n78, 293n53 Pericles, 152 persona studies, 65, 96 Petersen, Michael, 74 Petersen, Roger, 82 Pew polls, 177–78 Peyroux, Catherine, 74, 83 Pfau, Michael, 226 Pfister, Damien Smith, 234 physical mode of being, 15–17, 20–24, 35, 41–42 physiological systems, 6, 15–17, 32, 44–45, 49, 53, 60, 83, 85. See also neurophysiology piety, 100, 115, 116, 118–19, 134, 212, 216, 251n49 Pinker, Steven, 16, 30–31, 246n7, 265n79 pious caliphate. See caliphate Plato, 282n78 Plummer, Mary, 174 policing agencies, 231–33

political activism, 74–75 political emotion, 63–68. See also collective emotion polity, 35, 250n40 “populist” appeals, 8 positive illusion bias, 274n78 poststructuralism, 19, 41, 230 Potegal, Michael, 83–84, 263n68 power: anger and, 77, 219; authority and, 139; disempowerment, 231, 260n24; of elites, 61–62, 245n32; judgment and, 73; of US, 131, 166, 173, 184 prediction, 24 preponderance of evidence, 93 presence, 292n51 pride, 123, 272n59 probability clouds, ideas as, 32 progressives, 6, 34, 75, 205–6, 278n44; out-group based rhetorics and, 7–8. See also leftist intellectuals proliferation strategy, 2–3, 17, 20 proof, burden of, 93–94, 266n101 propaganda, 186 Propp, Vladimir, 39 prosocial functions of anger, 72–73 protagonists, 89–92, 97, 212–13. See also affiliations psychodynamic theories, 66, 258n74 psychology, 58, 63, 97, 256n45 PTSD, 277n30 public rhetoric: defined, 11. See also angry rhetorics; bin Laden, Osama; Bush, George W.; Sontag, Susan Page 335 →punishment, 85, 273n74 purification, 10, 88, 222 purity, 114, 225 Qayyim, Imam ibn al-, 273n68 quantum mechanics, 18, 20

Quick, Brian, 244n13 Quinlan, Margaret R., 244n13 Quintilian, 64 radical critiques, 291n40, 293n53 radical Islam, 280n59, 281n60. See also neo-Kharijism rage, 263n60 Railsback, Bruce, 17 Rancière, Jacques, 291n40 Rand, Erin, 3, 50, 53, 80, 254n21 Raymond, John, 281n65 realpolitik, 180 reason, 2, 253n14 reassurance, 150–51, 161–63, 174–75, 278n39 Red Cross/Red Crescent, 235 reduction strategy, 2–3, 17 re-evolutionary perspective, 61–63 religious caliphate. See caliphate Remnick, David, 187 Renshon, Jonathan, 273n78 resource distributions, 77, 85, 229; adjudicating, 233–34 retaliation, 178, 273n78 retribution, 85, 148, 173 revenge, 77, 260n22, 273n74 rhetoric: defined, 11, 225. See also angry rhetorics; bin Laden, Osama; Bush, George W.; Sontag, Susan Roberts, W. Rhys, 86 Rollyson, Carl, 191 Romani, Simona, 264n72 Romero prayer, 281n65 Ronowicz, Eddie, 100

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 262n46 Roseman, Ira, 57 Rosenwein, Barbara, 73, 80 Ross, Andrew, 3, 53, 55, 64–65, 67, 255n33 rote thinking, 6, 81–82, 97, 142, 210–11, 243n7, 266n90 Saad, Lydia, 277n29 sacred time, 111 sacrifice, 117, 118, 124, 217, 271n47 Sadler, Melody, 56 sadness, 8, 141, 226; 9/11 and, 56–57; as low status, 290n22. See also sorrow Said, Edward, 9, 168, 185, 196, 199, 203, 216, 218, 285n2 sarcasm, 221 Sasley, Brent, 3, 65, 66 satire, 221 Saudi Arabia: alliance with US, 103–4, 118; as bin Laden’s enemy, 157; as bin Laden’s target audience, 103–4; US withdrawal from, 131 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 37 scapegoating, 87, 137 schadenfreude, 30 Scherer, Klaus, 57, 79, 261n33 Schreiber, Daniel, 186, 201, 287n36 Schuster, Mark A., 277n30 Schweitzer, Maurice E., 263n55 script for public anger, 5–6, 71–72, 85–97, 114, 129, 210 self, 51–52, 248n22 self-defense, 142, 165, 167, 170 self-government, 283n82 self-interest, 76, 115, 181, 215, 244n13, 260n19; American, 145–46 semiotic forms, 19, 64–65 Seneca, 85

September 11, 2001 attacks. See 9/11 attacks Shakespeare, William, 81 shame, 49, 51, 56, 62, 254n21, 289n11; bin Laden on, 119–24 Shariat (Islamic law), 104–5 Shen, Lijiang, 57, 261n28 Shiraz, Abu, 125 shock, after 9/11, 141–43, 147–52, 166 Silberstein, Sandra, 284n91 Simola, Sheldene, 75, 259n6 sincerity, 68–70 Page 336 →Skitka, Linda, 56 slave, use of term, 126–27 Small, Deborah, 290n23 Smith, Craig Allen, 278n39 Sobieraj, Sarah, 75 social change, 7; emotions and, 225–27; rhetoric and, 60 social circulatory system, 67–68 social emotions, 3, 25, 49, 51–53, 71–77, 223–27, 234; functions of, 61–68 socialism, 107–8 social justice, 75, 259n18. See also justice social norms. See norms social relationships, 48, 63 social status. See status Solomon, Ty, 256n51 Somalia, 130 song (“justifiable anger”), 44, 76 Sontag, Susan, 4, 9, 183–207, 287n15; “A Few Weeks After,” 193; bin Laden and, 187, 194; New Yorker statement, text of, 190; Salon interview, 189, 194; social position, 9–10, 184–87, 286n4 —RHETORIC, 15; affiliations, 188–96, 202, 204, 212–13, 220, 226–27; alternative emotions and, 226–27; audiences, 186, 188; collective action and, 196–200; on harms, 196–200, 223; norms and, 196–200, 216, 218–19, 223; on opponents, 188–96, 211–12; purposes, 188; stereotyping, 191–92,

194; subjective responses to, 187, 191, 201–4, 218–19 sorrow, 8; after 9/11, 141–43, 148–52, 174–78, 226, 289n9; importance of, 227; as social signal, 25–26. See also sadness sovereignty, 229–30 Soviet Union. See USSR “splitting,” 35 Stalin, Joseph, 91 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 254n21 status: hierarchies, 76–77, 86, 89, 264n79; social, 11, 76, 86, 264n79; young men and, 123–24 status appeals by bin Laden, 119–24, 127 Stemmler, Gerhard, 83–84, 263n68 stereotyping, 4, 6, 81–82, 99, 255n39; bin Laden and, 107, 110, 113, 114; Sontag and, 191–92, 194 stress, 277n30 structuralism, 19, 41 subjective experience, 49, 53–54, 70; ideological criticism and, 94–95; mutual activation and, 59 subjective responses, 217–19; to bin Laden, 100, 130–36, 217–18; to Bush, 174–78, 218; to Sontag and leftist intellectuals, 187, 191, 201–4, 218–19 Sullivan, Andrew, 187 Sullivan, John L., 284n99 supranatural entities, 247n15 Swartz, Tamara, 57 Swiney, Joe, 202 symbolic effects, analysis of, 92–94 symbolic mode of being, 5, 15–17, 26–36, 41–42, 96, 209, 236, 249n34 symbolization of public anger, 85–92 Talbot, David, 187, 193, 287n15 Taliban: bin Laden/al-Qaeda and, 103, 105, 124, 127, 139, 155, 213; destruction of Buddhas of Bamiyan, 270n23; international law and, 199; Sontag’s rejection of, 194, 197; subordination of, 133; terrorists and, 284n89. See also Afghanistan Tellidis, Ioannis, 118, 270n22 template. See script for public anger

temporality, 18, 247n17; sacred time, 111–13, 271n32 terrorism: as criminal, 164–65; discourses on, 12; “Islamic,” use of term, 101; linked to nation-states, 154–56, 175, 211, 214, 280n55; “network” organizational structure, 134. See also 9/11 attacks; Oklahoma Federal Building bombing thinking, 28–32 threat inflation, 273n78 Tiedens, Larissa, 82, 261n31, 262n41 totalization, 36 transcendence, 27, 29, 249n34 Page 337 →transilient onto-epistemology, 17–20, 41 translation issues, 100–101, 123, 126–27, 267n4, 269n6 Tronti, Mario, 292n45 Turkey, 135, 178 Turner, Bryan S., 286n6 Tyson, Marvin, 202 ulema, 124–25, 273n68 uncertainty, 80, 177 “understanding,” 196–206, 216, 218–19 United Nations, 174, 200 United States: American public, criticisms of, 186–87, 189, 192, 197; as bin Laden’s enemy, 107–12, 129–30, 137; as bin Laden’s target audience, 99–104; civil religion, 162–63; compared to Soviet Union, 191–93; criticisms of, 184–202, 205, 279nn52–53; demonstrations against, 134; foreign policy, 144–46, 170–74, 179, 214–15, 223 (see also Afghanistan; Iraq); freedom and, 142, 144–46, 155, 166–70, 176, 178–81, 214, 216, 281n70, 284n89; international attitudes toward, 132, 177–78; Muslims and, 135–36, 148–49; nationalism, 144, 158, 179, 213, 220; neoimperialism, 184–85; partisan politics, 147; power of, 131, 166, 173, 184; preemptive war doctrine, 170–74, 179–80, 216, 276n15; subjective responses to bin Laden, 130–31; violence by, 128, 189, 194–95, 214–15 unity, 231–32 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 231, 235 universal emotions, 2–3, 44–48 universal moral principle, 228 universals, 282n78 Untener, Ken, 281n65

USSR: as bin Laden’s enemy, 107–8, 137, 211; as bin Laden’s target audience, 100, 102–4; compared to US, 191–93 Uzbekistan, 154 Valentini, Laura, 232 Valentino, Nicholas, 82 values, 65, 72 van Zomeren, Martijn, 244n13 vernacular rhetorics, 11 victims, identification with, 77 Vietnam War, 185 violent action, 83–85, 216–17, 223, 227–30; bin Laden and, 100, 117, 124, 128–30, 216–17, 271n47; Bush and, 150–52, 163–65, 217 Vytal, Katherine, 44, 46–47 Wahhabi Muslim clerics, 118 Wander, Phillip, 90 war, 89, 137; alternatives to, 198–99, 204; mobilization for, 66, 151–52, 217; repudiation of, 217 (see also leftist intellectuals); US preemptive war doctrine, 170–74, 179–80, 216, 276n15. See also Afghanistan; Gulf War; Iraq; Vietnam War; violent action warrior-imams, 125, 136–39, 212–13 Washington Times, 187 weaponry, 171, 176 Westen, Drew, 6 Western orientation, 228, 264n75, 292n42 “Western” theory, 246n5 Wetherell, Margaret, 43, 48, 64–65, 67–68, 253n13, 257n61, 258n72 Whately, Richard, 266n101 White, Stephen, 66, 79 Wiest, Cynthia, 57 Wilson, E. O., 17, 30–31, 248n25 Winderman, Emily, 74, 225 Winkler, Carol, 164

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 28 Wolfowitz, Paul D., 276n15 women, 12, 39, 155–56, 169, 194, 221, 260n20, 283n82. See also gender Wood, Steve, 260n22 words, 28–32, 249n29; discrete character of, 38–39. See also language Worfian views, 29–31 work, matter and, 17–18 World Bank, 231, 233, 235 World Health Organization, 231, 233, 235 Page 338 →World Trade Organization, 233, 235 Wranik, Tanja, 79, 261n33 writing, 251n56 Yang, Guobin, 3, 62 Yemen, Communist Party in, 107–8 young men, 123–24. See also men Yzerbyt, Vincent, 76 Zackariasson, Maria, 259n18 Zagacki, Kenneth, 85 Zawahiri, Ayman al-, 127 Zell, Gertrude, 148 ЕЅiЕѕek, Slavoj, 291n40 Zukerman, Sarah, 82