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it is confusing...
i wanted to push reset on the debate and move it in another direction.
we're parallel in that we both moved in the same general way.
ward churchill is kinda interesting: his main arguments were directed against the protestations of innocence made by the major media outlets during 9/11/2001 and then repeated ad nauseum. they were simple enough: the trade center and pentagon (leaving aside the field in western pa) were self-evidently symbolic targets, they were directed against symbols of american military and economic domination--to the extent that "globalization" is understood elsewhere as american-dominated capitalism, there was a logic behind the attacks. whether one moves from there to a justification of them or not is a political choice, one that in principle you could argue either way--in other words, it is not obvious that you justify actions when you explain them or try to situate them inside a logic. i dont think explanation and justification are synonymous and have no problem with stating the logic that explains the choice of targets and not moving from there to justification. churchill for whatever reason is presented as having chosen to conflate the two. whether he in fact did or not, i dont know simply because i didnt follow the case closely as it was unfolding--and because i dont think explaining and justification are the same----i did not agree with his political choice to conflate the two. personally, i see the churchill situation as an index of the pathetic political times we lived through after 9/11/2001. that doesnt mean i see him in any way as a martyr--because i think his arguments were wrong and his approach cloddish, i think in the end he did more harm than good by allowing himself to be positioned as an exemplar of a particular type of dissent--at a moment when it was obvious that the public media brigade wanted hysteria unmixed with reflection. and it was that lovely period that brought us the iraq war, yet another gift that keeps on giving.
i say this because i do not personally care whether arguments polarize politically IF they are legitimate interpretations. but i see no reason not to think critically about interpretations, whether i agree with the general political position they enact or not. so the consequence is that whether a particular claim is politically polarizing is not in itself terribly important to me. but if you are going to play that game, you need to have your shit straight. and churchill, to my mind, didnt. but this has nothing to do with the public pillorying he got, nor with the way in which the right used him as a football for their own ends.
the most basic claim he made can be stated in a general manner: the bounded rationality of bureaucratic systems enables people who work within those systems to distance themselves from the effects of what they do---to bracket ethical and politcal questions that attend what they do day after day. so if the symbolic value of the wtc was as an indicator of american economic domination, and if you accept that for the people who carried out the attacks that american economic domination is a political Issue, then it follows that the folk in the wtc were complicit in that domination. period. there is no way around it IF you accept the main argument (the one about american economic domination)---staying away from such complexity to some extent explains the fatuousness of the "war on terror"---incorporating too much empirical reality in empty nationalist sloganeering is not effective.
the point here is that this is an argument about bounded rationalities in general, about bureaucratic administrative apparatus(es) in general--you find it in zygmunt bauman's book "the holocaust and modernity" detailed with considerable power (and in a very discomforting way)...for him, this administrative structure was the condition of possibility for the actual implementation of the holocaust--and this for the same reasons outlined above--bounded rationality, a sense of professional duty, compartmentalization, etc. so these systems have characteristics which are real problems--but they are also central to how contemporary capitalism operates.
(by the way, to avoid the objection, these sentences simply follow one another: i am NOT equating american economic domination with the holocaust...)
so it is a polarizing move to make this kind of critique of administrative systems.
does that mean that one should not make them?
but what if baumann is right?
(btw the book is much better, much more interesting than this potted summary makes it out to be--i'd recommend reading it)
things get ugly quick.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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