THE VIRTUAL TRANSNATIONALIST

"For many national citizens, the practicalities of residence and the ideologies of home, soil and roots are often disjunct, so that the territorial referents of civic loyalty are increasingly divided for many persons among difference spatial horizons: work loyalties, residential loyalties, and religious loyalties may create disjunct registers of affiliation."

A few more thoughts on OBL before he vanishes again into the ahistorical.

Impure spaces. Capital no longer requires the “technology” of the nation-state. Why, after all, should power be made to flow through the ancient and constricted aqueducts of the fabled Hegelian state?  There are now many contenders for the post-statist impure political space, but the paradigmatic community of this sort is the internet, i.e. the real home of Bin Laden, the virtual culture-hero. 

So what sort of rhetorical battle was Bin Laden fighting? Was it the old anti-colonial/anti-imperialist battle of 1945-1989? Was he a political fighter, or a peculiar type of baudrillardean image specialist? A creature of western security agencies? Or a Dostoyevskian nihilist? All of the above. He’s a baffling nowhere man:  a rich Saudi playboy fighting his family’s chief benefactors, the Sauds, living most of his adult life in exile by launching an apparently quijotic war against the ghostly spirit of the United States, which no longer exists in a certain place, in any case. A titanic battle between virtualities.

At its most utopian, Islam preaches a sort of “withering away of the state” through a perfectibility of human action, an ideal community without need of either despots or ulama: the ummah. That utopian sense was lost in the chaotic maze (from the outsider’s perspective, naturally) of Islamic jurisprudence, which was perhaps a necessary conservative move to protect Islam from its human tendency to fragment and schism along tribal lines.

Mirrors: labile terrorism imitates airmobile capital; It is inconceivable without it. Mammon too has his utopian ummah, which exists above and beyond its political and financial structures.

A HERO FOR OUR TIME

With the new conditions that now predominate in the society crushed under the iron heel of the spectacle, one knows, for example, that a political assassination finds itself placed in another light; can in a sense be sifted. Everywhere the mad are more numerous than before, but what is infinitely more convenient is that they can be talked about madly. And it is not some kind of reign of terror that imposes such mediatic explanations. On the contrary, it is the peaceful existence of such explanations which should cause terror.  -- Debord, Commentaires

This doesn't happen every day: It's mythic. A Nobelist for Peace kills the arch-terrorist with a stroke of a pen. From here on out, convinced Salafists can be identified as those odd people staring wistfully out to sea. And Nothing is too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance, etc.

Melville: But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God -- so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis.