Post-Irony and the Rise of the Security
State
Once again it's that day when we are
all supposed to wipe that jaded grin off our faces and feel the grasp
of our innermost sincerity in the face of a memory of that day when
everything went wrong. A coveted treasure-trove for propagandists of all shades, the
terrorist attack of a few years ago has been framed as an assault on
such various lofty apparitions as the nation, the liberal-democratic
form of government, the workers' movement and suchlike. With no shortage of
pompous, self-important contestants to the post-22/7 cake, the
general agreement seems to be that of a general agreement as such,
its dire emphasis rivalled only by its vagueness, its content
secondary to its very existence.
I do not doubt the sincerity of the
public demonstrations of (os-)love that have followed. But herein lies
their true danger. When politicized, love becomes false and perverted. As we have known since Robespierre, nothing lends legitimacy to totalitarian means as easily as a rhetoric of love, dissolving
the distance between subjects, between private and public, zoe and
bios. Without a minimum of public alienation, no space for rational
political discourse is possible, and we are left with Lippestad's
doctrine of totalberedskap or Total Preparedness – a principle not
only impossible to achieve, but which also has no place in a
democratic society.
After all, where has this rosy sentimentalism brought us? The new anti-terrorism law
allows for arrest and detention on suspicion of even just planning a
terrorist act, meaning one cannot buy a pair of pliers and a pack of
rubber gloves anymore without risk of being arrested and put in a
holding cell for a practically unspecified amount of time. Add to
that the Data Retention Act, the unbecoming unwillingness to confront the
NSA espionage programme, the privatization of online surveillance
and the increasing ubiquity of public cameras (and more disturbingly, police drones), all
of it to the sound of Herborg Kråkevik singing «Til Ungdommen».
This is not to suggest there has been a
shortage of index fingers already. Many have blamed the police,
ill-prepared for such episodes of grandiose violence in what is
usually among the most peaceful places on Earth. Some have blamed the media
for focusing too much on immigration issues and thus indirectly
preparing the ground for far-right terrorism. In the usual bickering
over parliamentary seats, some have pointed fingers at the Progress
Party for also never failing to bring up the immigration question. One
might even be lead to believe, according to certain commentators, that it
is our cynical sense of humour which ignited the bomb and shot those
children.
With all due respect to the victims and
bereaved, we have not only taken the attack seriously
enough, and told each other a sufficient amount of times how «love
ate hate» and how much closer we are as a nation now (as if that's a
good thing), I will go one step further and suggest we could use some Breivik
jokes, the more offensive and disgusting the better. We need to laugh
at this sideshow clown, his war on windmills and his vile fan club,
and otherwise employ all means necessary to deflate this bizarre event of its
symbolic content, rather than turn it into a totem for the
security state to dance around. And when we are done laughing, we need to grow up and let go of the illusion that such episodes can be fully prepared against.
Otherwise, as the cliché goes, the terrorists win.
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