Practices, Performances & How to Make War with a Hammer

Erik Ringmar, STJU, Shanghai, PRC

This article contrasts and compares three kind of doings: social practices, actions and performances. We will call them doings since they concern things that people do and since we need a general term which can incorporate activities of radically different kinds. Practices, the argument will be, are not the same things as actions and performances are something else again. Since human beings engage in doings of all three kinds, however, we need a theoretical framework which is able to incorporate them. The aim of this article is to provide such a framework. Several prominent theorists of social action deny the need for such an enterprise. As explanatory monists they claim that humans engage in only one kind of doings and that this kind can be explained with the help of one kind of theories. Thus rational choice theorists insist that human beings seek to maximize utility and that what they do always can be explained in those terms. And, although less common, there are theorists who make similar claims for both practices and performances. Thus an influential recent book on international relations theory introduces practices as a means of bridging conceptual and ontological gaps; practices are a glueon which can help promote the development of a common language despite theoretical divides.1 Similarly, scholars inspired by anthropological approaches have occasionally insisted,
1 Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, International Practices: Introduction and Framework, in International Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 10 The authors define a glueon as an ontological entity that cuts across paradigms under different names but with a related substance. ; See further Iver B. Neumann, Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn: The Case of Diplomacy, Millennium 31, no 3 (2002): 627 651; Rebecca Adler-Nissen, ed, Bourdieu in International Relations: Rethinking Key Concepts in IR (London: Routledge, 2012).

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following William Shakespeare, that all the world's a stage, and that all human action is irreducibly theatrical.2 In everything we do we play a role before audiences to whose verdicts we necessarily are subjected. There are good reasons why these attempts to reduce the one kind of doing to the other should be resisted. Although there certainly are close connections between social practices, actions and performances, the three are not the same. They have different ontological status, they presuppose different conceptions of the subject and of social life. By calling everything a practice, an action or a performance we ignore these differences and we misunderstand the object of our inquiry.3 Instead of conflating one doing with another, we should consider the nature of the linkages between them. Actions, we will argue, should be explained in relation to both practices and performances; actions presuppose practices and they are developed through performances. Social practices constitute a toolbox of taken-for-granted ways of doing things from which actors, when acting, chose the appropriate tools. Performances provide the means of conceptualizing the implications of our actions and of showing ourselves to others under circumstances we can choose and control. A theory which incorporate all three kinds of doings we could call a cultural theory of action. In order to illustrate the relevance of this framework, but also in order to let empirical material improve our theoretical understanding, we will engage in an extended case-study: the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The invasion was an action to be sure but, as we will see, it was explicitly designed to counter and disrupt the social practices in which other actors engaged. The Iraq War was more than anything a war against practices. In order to argue their case, the Bush administration staged a set of performance designed to show the Iraqis, but also
2 3 See, for example, Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1959). For a critique of practices as a sort of cement for the social science, see Laurent Thvenot, Pragmatic Regimes Governing the Engagement with the World, in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London: Routledge, 2001), 56.

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the rest of the world including Americans themselves, especially the US military just what the United States was capable of doing. The ultimate aim was to replace the old international system with a new system, a Pax Americana, which better safeguarded American security, interests and values. Hence the shock and awe tactics over the skies of Baghdad on March 21, 2003. Yet despite its initial successes, the performances failed and it is important for theoretical reasons to understand why. The outcome of the Iraq War allows us to study the limits of performative power but also the role of practices in international affairs.4 Before we can get to this point, however, we must first say more about hammers and how to use them.

Heidegger's hammer
Given the exacting requirements of rational choice theory, it is surprising that this way of explaining social outcomes has gained such traction. Most of the things we do in the course of a day is obviously not a matter of rational choices. Most of what we do is instead best described as habits. Habits are doings we engage in because we are conditioned to engage in them without making explicit choices or conducting even imaginary utility calculations.5 We get out of bed, have breakfast, rush off to work, and so on but none of these things is the result of a deliberate search for
the means of attaining ends.6 Habits are not well described as actions since they

take place in the background of our conscious lives; we have an awareness of the movements which our bodies go through meaning that if we lost sensitivity in our limbs we would no longer be able to carry them out and yet we give these
4 For a cultural explanation of the Iraq War based on a theory of narratives, see Philip Smith, Why War?: The Cultural Logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 154204. William James, Habit, in The Principles of Psychology, first published in Popular Science Monthly, February 1887 (New York: H. Holt & Co, 1890), 104127; For an application to international politics, see Ted Hopf, The Logic of Habit in International Relations, European Journal of International Relations 16, no 4 (June 16, 2010): 539561. Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), 2324.

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movements but little attention.7 We do not really remember which way the doors to our bedrooms swing, how we brush our teeth or comb our hair, and yet we open doors, brush teeth and comb hair everyday and our hands rarely make a mistake.8 Habits, we could argue, are practices, if we by practices mean doings which we carry out in this semi-automatic mode without accompanying accounts which rationalize what we are doing. Practices are things that our bodies do, with only partial and intermittent involvement of our rational faculties. If so, practices also include the kinds of doings that require skill.9 To develop a skill, after all, takes practice: we copy what the experts do, repeat the required movements over and over again, learn from our mistakes, and gradually come to master the tricks of the trade. Just like a habit, a practice cannot be described as an action since, even if a partial account can be given of it, the skill involved is not the same thing as the rules which describe it.10 A practice is a matter of knowing how, not knowing what;
that is, much of the knowledge involved is tacit unvocalized and unvocalizable and lodged in our hands rather than in our heads.11 Thus we say, for example, that a child knows how to play even if she cannot give an account of what she is doing indeed, she knows how to play before she knows how to speak.12

Yet this is not to say that habits and skills are the same thing. Dogs, soldiers and students are expected to provide automatic responses to given cues to do things in their sleep, as it were and the drills they go through to achieve this
7 8 9 James, Habit, 115116. Ibid., 118119. Joseph Rouse, Practice Theory, in Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, Volume 15: Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology (North Holland: Elsevier, 2006), 499540. Compare Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). The classical statement of this distinction is from Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); On tacit knowledge, see Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 41.

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end condition them to dispense with their own judgment.13 The development of a skill requires a considerable amount of drill too of course, but it does not consist of drills, and instead, in order to be successful, judgement is crucial. To read a map, repair a watch, tell a joke or land a plane are not things we can do in our sleep and they cannot be learned by rote.14 Skills such as these require the kind of knowinghow which is able to respond to a variety of, perhaps unexpected, circumstances as they come up. Yet this judgement is practical, not theoretical. A social world made up of practices, thus defined, relies on an entirely different social ontology than a world made up of actors. In a world of actors, the individual subject is ontologically primitive but in the world of practices, objects and their functions come first. Our concern, as Martin Heidegger put it, subordinates

itself to the 'in-order-to' which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time.15 Heidegger gives the example of a hammer. By simply looking at this tool we will never learn what it is for, and it is only by picking it up that its readiness-to-hand is revealed. Using the hammer we subject ourselves to a practice; the functions of the hammer are pre-prepared for us and its correct use is not dependent on our individual interpretation of it. Use of the hammer, moreover, is connected to other practices associated with other tools, skills and practical judgment. In this way a whole practice-based world opens up before us, a world where other human beings come to appear above all in their professional capacities as the wielders of tools, the masters of arts and the proud displayers of jobtitles.16 We learn about this world not by reading about it but by living in, and engaging with, it. This is the pre-theoretical world of objects and tools in which we, as conscious
13 14 15 16 Ibid., 4243; Compare James on the skill involved in knitting. See James, Habit, 118119. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 6, and 311316. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), I.15.75. Ibid., sec I.15.75.

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beings, first come to discover ourselves. As we respond to the manifold functions which this world presents, we take up our preassigned place in society and in this way our being finds itself a home.17 This is a busy but constrained world; the people who inhabit it have a rich intuitive understanding of social life but this understanding is rarely if ever an object of rational deliberation. The people going about their daily business have few individual characteristics. They appear together with others above all in a professional capacity; they are generic social beings but not authentic selves.18 The connection between a sense of being and the lack of authenticity is not coincidental: we are at home in the world above all since we have no means of distinguishing ourselves from others. Practices, thus understood, resemble institutions.19 Left to interact with each other over sufficiently long periods of time, the doings in which people engage come to take on a certain pattern. Practices, we could say, are gradually institutionalized. This pattern, just like the practices out of which it is formed, is often not conscious; it is relied on and taken for granted but rarely questioned or even noticed. The institution too, that is, presents itself to us as a kind of tool. The institution can be explicitly described of course such as in a statute which formally established it but this rationalization does not even begin to describe what the institution is or what it does. And in any case, before long, thanks to the practices through which it is established, the institution takes on a life of its own, gradually removing itself from its original remit. Only an institution without a history can be defined.20 The world of practices is not reducible to other doings or to other, more
17 18 19 Heidegger, Being and Time. On others described through their professional affiliations, see ibid. On this connection, see Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); For this perspective on institutions, see for example Walton H. Hamilton, Institution, Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 1932. I develop these points in Erik Ringmar, The Mechanics of Modernity in Europe and East Asia: The Institutional Origins of Social Change and Stagnation (London: Routledge, 2009).

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fundamental, social facts. There is a famous, logical, argument to this effect, first introduced by Gilbert Ryle.21 If a practice requires a prior plan that is, if a practice is treated as though it were an action this plan would itself have to be planned, but so would the plan to plan, and so on. Unable to break this logical regress, we would never come to actually do anything.22 This is not to say that we cannot ask why a certain practice exists. Indeed it is sometimes argued that a certain practice serves the interests of a certain segment of society and that its existence for that reason should be explained in terms of those interests.23 Yet, looking at the history of practices it is easy to see that they change far less quickly than the purposes to which they are put. In many cases it was the habit or the tool that came first and the purposes developed only later.24 This is true even in cases where a group explicitly invents a practice to serve its interests. Before long the practice is subverted and the tools taken over by other groups or used for different ends. It follows, again as a point of logic, that purposes cannot explain why the practice exists.

Rumsfeld's hammer
In 1997 a group of Neo-Conservative politicians and pundits drew up a manifesto for a New American Century, spelling out their view of America's place in the world.25 Signed by Dick Cheney, Ronald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and 22 others, they envisioned a new kind of world politics, dominated by the United States and by
21 Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 3032; This is the so called Ryles Regress. For version, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans G. E. N. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 30. See for example Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); For a critique, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Reality of Reduction: The Failed Synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu, in Fin de Sicle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason (London: Verso, 1995), 128194. Swidler, Talk of Love; In this respect practices can be compare to institutions. See Hamilton, Institution, 86; Ringmar, Mechanics of Modernity. Project for the New American Century, Statement of Principles, June 3, 1997.

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American values. The end of the Cold War, they wrote, has left the US as the
world's preeminent power and provided a unique opportunity to make the case and rally support for American global leadership.26 Yet president Clinton was squandering the opportunity, making cut-backs in military budgets. What was needed was a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad. Global leadership comes with global responsibilities: the history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire.27 Removing Saddam

Hussein, the group added in January 1998, is a good example of such a policy. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be
able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.28 In January 2001, no

fewer than ten member of the group took up positions as close to the new president as it was possible to get as Vice President, Secretary of Defense and Deputy Secretary of Defense, among others.29 Actualizing this remarkable vision was not going to be easy. Apart from America's declared enemies, there were plenty of skeptics and cynics or simply people too unimaginative to share in the enthusiasm for change. Many in the latter category may have agreed with the administration's analyses, at least in principle or in part, and yet they put up endless obstacles. They included many ostensible allies, such as France and Germany, but also members of the foreign policy establishment at home, including top-brass in the military who worried about how to execute an agenda at the same time so vast and so vague. The problem in all cases concerned the power of practices. Europeans and the domestic foreign policy elite were too set in their ways and too wedded to received interpretations. It was
26 27 28 29 Ibid.; Compare Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington D.C.: National Defense University, 1996). Project for the New American Century, Statement of Principles. Project for the New American Century, Letter to President Clinton on Iraq, January 26, 1998, http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm. Other members of the group who were close to the new administration without being appointees, include Jeb Bush and Dan Quayle.

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these practices they had to fight. This is where Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, brought out his hammer. What he advocated, he said, was a toolbox approach to defense planning.30 A tool, Rumsfeld pointed out, echoing Heidegger, is a means of gaining knowledge. Depending on which tools you have at your disposal, you come to live in a world made up of some things and not others if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.31 Rumsfeld used this analogy in an argument in favor of a radical overhaul of the US military.32 The generals, he argued, are still preparing for a war with the Soviet Union, but this enemy is no more. With the passing of the Soviet Union disappeared the old predictable international system in which sovereign states had armed themselves, deterred each other, and occasionally clashed in protracted wars. Instead, said Rumsfeld, we live in an era of surprises where threats are unpredictable and defense planners often ignorant even of the extent of their own ignorance.33 Many new threats cannot be dealt with by traditional military means. To effectively respond to them, soldiers need new and more high-tech weapons and generals need new strategic concepts and new tactics for the battle-field. And the military forces need to be reorganized: some units must be closed, others forced to cooperate in new ways and hybrid agencies created. What is needed, said Rumsfeld, is a change of culture: We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach; one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists; one that does not wait for the threats to emerge and be validated but rather anticipates them before they appear and develops new capabilities to dissuade and deter
30 31 32 Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 281. Ibid. Donald H. Rumsfeld, Transforming the Military, Foreign Affairs 81, no 3 (May 2002): 2032; Ullman and Wade, Shock and Awe, xxiixxiv, 810; See further Stephen Peter Rosen, The Future of War and the American Military: Demography, Technology, and the Politics of Modern Empire, Harvard Magazine, 06 2002. Donald H. Rumsfeld, DoD News Briefing: Secretary Rumsfeld and General Myers (presented at the Department of Defense, Washington, D.C., February 12, 2002).

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them.34 Once installed in his Pentagon office, Rumsfeld lost no time. He began by reviewing the war-plans drawn up for each potential conflict around the world. He was not impressed: Either it's world peace or it's World War III. Either the switch is off or on. ... We're not going to do it that way.35 The mind-set of the Europeans too was shaped by an international system which no longer existed, yet they seemed constitutionally unable to understand that this was the case. In the old international system, each state had had a right to sovereignty, but in the twenty-first century this right allowed some states to shelter terrorists, to develop weapons of mass destruction or to commit crimes against their own people and humanity. Against such leaders, the world community had an obligation to undertake preemptive strikes a crime according to the laws of the old system. In the old world, organizations like the United Nations represented the best hope for a lasting peace, but in the new world the UN was a talking shop that wasted time and gave the right to vote to America's enemies.36 Even the age-old practices of power politics were obviously pass: terrorists were impossible to deter or contain, arms races were irrelevant in cases of asymmetric warfare, and failed states could not be trusted as partners in alliances or in balance of power politics.37 The way to fight these outdated practices, Donald Rumsfeld suggested, is to focus on the range of tools available in the respective toolboxes. In relation to the US military his suggestion was to add more tools. If American soldiers had more options, they would become more flexible in their responses. While this sounds like
34 35 36 Rumsfeld, Transforming the Military, 29. Woodward, Plan of Attack, 35. George W. Bush, President Says Saddam Hussein Must Leave Iraq Within 48 Hours (Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation, Washington D.C., March 17, 2003); On Cheneys critique of the UN, see Woodward, Plan of Attack, 235; On Hans Blix, see ibid., 240. For one powerful statement, see George W. Bush, Text of Bushs Speech at West Point, New York Times, June 1, 2002; For a discussion, see Erik Ringmar, How to Fight Savage Tribes: The Global War on Terror in Historical Perspective, Terrorism and Political Violence (March 2013).

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a perfectly unobjectionable proposal, the consequences, Rumsfeld realized, were potentially far-reaching. New tools make old tools obsolete and thereby also the skills they make possible. As skill-sets become redundant, so do the people who possess them, unless they are prepared, and able, to adapt. Moreover, military units too become obsolete, are upgraded or downgraded, and in the process power shifts from the wielders of the old tools to the wielders of the new. Take the apparently innocuous example of the introduction of night-goggles which allowed soldiers to hit enemies, unopposed, in complete darkness.38 Or the increasing reliance on private contractors.39 The contractors were useful precisely because they knew nothing of the practices which made regular military units such sticks in the mud. In relation to the Europeans, and the practices of the old international system, the Bush administration tried the opposite strategy to reduce the number of tools available. By going it alone on matters ranging from global warming to missile defense, land mines and an international criminal court, the US effectively deprived these new institutions of power.40 Moreover, old institutions, such as the United Nations, were ridiculed and ignored, and so were a number of well-established practices protecting, for example, civilians and prisoners of war.41 By depriving the international system of tools such as these, its members became less powerful but,
38 On the implications for the battle-field, see Evan Wright, Generation Kill: The True Story of Bravo Company in Iraq - Marines Who Deal in Bullets, Bombs and Ultraviolence (New York: Bantam Press, 2004), 241. A subject of several recent studies, see for example Christopher Kinsey, Private Security and the Reconstruction of Iraq (London: Routledge, 2007); David Isenberg, Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq (Westport: Praeger, 2009). On the ICC, see The Unites States and the International Criminal Court, Law and Contemporary Problems 64, no 1 (2001); On missile defense: Fred Kaplan, Bushs Latest Missile-Defense Folly, Slate, March 12, 2004; Massimo Calabresi, Behind Bushs Missile Defense Push, Time, June 5, 2007; On land mines: Rosa Brooks, Dubyas Land Mines, Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2008. See, for example, Steve Coll, Our Secret American Security State, The New York Review of Books, February 9, 2012; Mark Danner, After September 11: Our State of Exception, New York Review of Books, October 13, 2011; David Cole, Killing Our Citizens Without Trial, New York Review of Books (New York, November 24, 2011).

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more fundamentally, they were forced to reassess their priorities. When a tool is missing or broken, we said, practices stop and we are forced to take a new look at ourselves and the world we inhabit.42 The absence of the right tool forces us to make do with the ones we have, to improvise, rationalize and economize on resources. This too changes world-views and shifts organizational power, if not right away at least in the longer run. Stuck in the mind-set formed by the old international system, the reactions of both the US military and the Europeans were easy to predict. They were happy neither with more tools nor with fewer. For the US military this may above all have been a matter of self-protection.43 It takes time, after all, to learn how to use new tools, and many weapons and operational procedures can only be properly tested in battle-field situations. Soldiers, whose lives depend directly on the tools of their trade, are for this reason alone likely to resist changes. A better tool is worse than a tool one knows one can depend on. It is consequently not surprising to learn that Rumsfeld was profoundly unpopular with the generals.44 As for the Europeans, they never shared the Bush administrations analysis of the changing world situation and they never regarded the old practices as redundant. It was never clear to them why sovereignty was an obsolete concept, why deterrence and containment could not work, and why the panoply of international practices suddenly was outdated.45 To Rumsfeld, this was old thinking, typical of Old Europe, represented above all by Germany and France.46
42 43 44 45 This, again, is Heideggers point regarding broken and missing tools. See Heidegger, Being and Time. William Nash et al., The FP Interview: Reinventing War, Foreign Policy 127 (November 2001): 39; For a general argument, see Swidler, Talk of Love. Nash et al., Reinventing War, 39; Woodward, Plan of Attack, 322. The most notorious statement of the difference between Europe and the UN is Robert Kagan, Power and Weakness, Policy Review Online, no 113 (June 2002): 119. Robert Kagan is the son of Donald Kagan, one of the original members of the Project for the New American Century; Compare Erik Ringmar, Inter-textual Relations: The Quarrel over the Iraq War as a Conflict between Narrative Types, Cooperation & Conflict 41, no 4 (2006): 403421. Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary Rumsfeld Briefs at the Foreign Press Center

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Chesterton's hammer
Before we continue the account of the Iraq War, we need to say more about hammers. Hammers, like other tools, can obviously be used in a large number of ways, including unorthodox and playful uses such as the back-yard game of toss the hammer and the Olympic sport of hammer throw. Yet also these doings are genuine in the sense that they rely on the functions the weight, size, sense of balance made available by the tool.47 But consider instead the way a hammer is used on a stage. In the theater the tool is turned into a prop and its properties are irrelevant as long as it appears to the audience to be the genuine article. A hammer used on a stage represents a tool, its use is derived from ordinary uses, but it is not a tool and it is not used in order to actually make anything.48 Such a theatrical use of a hammer was spotted in Pearson's Magazine by G.K. Chesterton where, during the American presidential campaign of 1904, a speaker who, as he brought forward his points, hammered nails into a board.49 A little sound common sense, the paper concluded, often goes further with an audience of American working-men than much high-flown argument, and apparently the speaker won hundreds of votes for his side. To Chesterton, however, such use of a hammer illustrated both what was wrong with American society and with the yellow journalism of which Pearson's Magazine was a leading exponent. It was obviously outrageous to take the hammering of nails into a board as an example of common sense.50 This was not a rational argument, but neither was it a practice,
(presented at the U.S. Department of Defense, Washington D.C., 2003); For comments, see Outrage at Old Europe Remarks, BBC News, January 23, 2003, sec Europe, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2687403.stm. 47 48 Heidegger, Being and Time. Stage props, as Rayner puts it, are uncanny because one wonders about their reality even as they give sensory testimony. Alice Rayner, Presenting Objects, Presenting Things, in Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy, ed David Krasner and David Z. Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 191. G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (New York: Garden City Publishing, 1905), 122. Ibid.

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since the hammering, as Chesterton pointed out, did not actually build anything.51 Instead the speaker with the hammer was a performer engaged in a performance. Performances differ from other doings in that they are staged and have an audience.52 The stage is a confined space, dedicated to the purpose, which is set off from the continuity and flow of ordinary life. The most obvious example is the stage of a theater which you can observe only by taking leave of the world outside and entering a make-believe world organized by the rules of the imagination. And yet, performances have pretensions to verisimilitude; they are at the same time presentations and re-presentations. The actions presented on the stage represent life outside the stage above all the lives of individuals and the circumstances in which they find themselves. The purpose of the performance is to show this representation to an audience;the play seeks to demonstrate or teach something, to convey emotions and experiences.53 A performance heightens, distills and intensifies ordinary life; it is a fake reality, an inauthentic ontology, which purports to be more real than reality itself. Thus understood, performances are not only taking place in theaters but elsewhere in society too. A social performance is a staged event, performed by actors in front of an audience, which takes a social, political or economic issue as its topic and makes a a social, political or economic point.54 The aim of a social performances too is to show something, to teach, convey emotions and experiences. Examples include extravagant displays of royal opulence, staged
51 52 For Wallas comments on this passage, see Wallas, Human Nature in Politics, 106107. Compare Jeffrey C. Alexander, Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance Between Ritual and Strategy, in Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason L. Mast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2990; See further Erik Ringmar, Performing International Systems: Two East Asian Alternatives to the Westphalian Order, International Organization 66, no 2 (2012).

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Theory and theater share etymological roots in the Greek, theo, meaning
seeing. Compare Turners social drama, which however has a more restricted definition. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); See also Alexander, Cultural Pragmatics.

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debates between presidential candidates, the destruction of a palace during a war, mass demonstrations, victory parades, state funerals, a revolutionary fte, the cult of a political leader, acts of terrorism, and so on.55 As members of the audience we know, but generously forget, that this is nothing but a make-believe: the represented is taken as the real for the purposes of the performance. In a social performance these two frames are fused the presentation and the re-presentation are expressed through the same set of doings yet it is nevertheless possible to keep the two apart. Much of what humans do are indeed representations rather than presentations, but the fact that we can make the distinction means that the world of actions and of performances are not the same.56 And the representation only comes to constitute itself as such once it is staged and performed; that is, once it is situated in a environment which is chosen and controlled by a director and scripted by a playwright. Performances achieve verisimilitude above all by being about something which the audience recognizes. What the play is about is the first thing a member of the audience wants to know as she sits down to watch, and this aboutness is key to her continued interest and attention. What the performance is about is directly related to the things the actors do, but their various doings in turn can only be understood in the context of a plot. The plot introduces a situation characterized by a problem, a tension or a dilemma of some kind, and the performance proceeds as the plot is worked out, action by action, to its eventual dnouement.57 As a result
55 See, inter alia, Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State In Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); Mona Ozouf, La fte rvolutionnaire, 1789-1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Performance of Politics: Obamas Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Erik Ringmar, Liberal Barbarism and the European Destruction of the Palace of the Emperor of China (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012). Goffman concedes this point towards the end of Presentation of Self, when he calls the performance metaphor a scaffold which he needs to take down. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 254. As already emphasized by Aristotle, The Poetics, trans Samuel Henry Butcher (London: Macmilllan, 1898).

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of the unfolding of the plot, the actors come to discover what choices and opportunities they have and what the limits are of their freedom of action. As members of the audience, we are no longer telling only our own story but forced to consider other people's stories as well and the story of our society as a whole. In this way the performance provides a means of coping with a situation with which we could not have coped, or not coped as well, on our own.

hammers over Iraq

It was only after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington that it was possible to implement the Neo-Conservative agenda. These acts of terrorism are best understood as performances which, although they ultimately strengthened America's sense of unity and resolve, were successful to the extent that they really did terrorize a large portion of the US population.58 An intense sense of fear works not only on our minds and emotions, but also directly on our bodies we tremble, cry, vomit or, famously, vacate our bowels. And even in less acute cases, fear tears apart the fabric of everyday life, making the familiar look new and strangely uncanny. We stop, drop our tools and abandon our practices.59 Hence the widespread feeling that 9/11 had changed everything; that the world was born anew on that day. It was a a plastic, teachable moment, as Michael Gerson, Bush's speechwriter, put it; the optimum time to mold and rally public opinion, to educate and explain.60 In a single instant, said the president, we realized that this
will be a decisive decade in the history of liberty, that we've been called to a unique role in human events. Rarely has the world faced a choice more clear or
58 On 9/11 as a symbolic action in a complex performative field, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, From the Depths of Despair: Performance, Counterperformance, and September 11, in Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason L. Mast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 91; On the psychological impact on Americans, see Roxane Cohen Silver, An Introduction to 9/11: Ten Years Later., American Psychologist 66, no 6 (2011): 427428; Smith, Why War?, 160171. Compare the discussion of anxiety in Heidegger, Being and Time. Quoted in Woodward, Plan of Attack, 85.

59 60

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consequential.61

Bush constantly returned to his visit to Ground Zero in New York in the immediate aftermath of the attacks an experience which he remembered as very, very, very eerie and as a nightmare, a living nightmare.62 He recalled the faces of the rescue-workers pulling bodies out of the wreckage, including one man who, looking him straight in the eyes, had demanded that the US go get the people responsible.63 Returning to Washington, Bush had broken down. Presidents don't particularly like to cry in front of the American public, particularly in the Oval Office, but nevertheless I did.64 Given the public mood, however, the tears made sense, more sense in fact than some of Bush's rather awkward, off-thecuff, statements. This visceral reaction explains his oft-repeated claim that the decision to invade Iraq was made with his gut.65 A rational decision would not have been sufficient since it would not have corresponded to the terror inspired by the original atrocity. This also explains his supreme sense of certainty.66 The president's gut was not responding well to rational arguments; the decision to go to war was right above all since it expressed the right bodily stance what Donald Rumsfeld referred to as a forward-leaning posture.67 Adding and removing the tools of doubters and skeptics could only take the White House so far. It was instead through action that the Americans were going to demonstrate to the world what they could do. [Y]ou can't talk your way to a solution to a problem, the president had explained. We are the leader. And a

61 62 63 64 65

George W. Bush, President Delivers State of the Union Address (presented at the U.S. Congress, Washington, D.C., January 29, 2002). Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 69. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 55. See, for example, ibid., 136137, 340; Ron Suskind, Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush, The New York Times, October 17, 2004, sec Magazine. Suskind, Faith, Certainty. Woodward, Plan of Attack, 19; Woodward, Bush at War, 20.

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leader must combine the ability to listen to others, along with action.68 In the
world we have entered, as he put it in addressing the soldiers at West Point, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.69 Just as the NeoConservatives in 1998, he had Saddam Hussein in mind. On the level of the gut, the

connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein was as strong as it was irrefutable. Both had the same power to terrorize Americans. The events of 9/11 were consequently nothing but a subset of a far larger category of threats, and to only capture Bin Laden would for that reason never be sufficient.70 The real mission was to rid the world of evil, by actively and militarily confronting America's enemies.71 The weakest link in this axis was Saddam Hussein, and taking him out
was thus the best way to begin the transformation.72 This was how the NeoConservative vision became the official foreign policy of the US government. It was a highly plausible interpretation, and the Neo-Conservatives were right there in the White House arguing their case and effectively making many of the key decisions.

But the president was guided by a far grander vision.73 It was a matter of making the world safe for America, but also of making the world a better, more peaceful and equitable, place for everyone else. It would all happen under the auspices of a new Pax Americana. The United States, Bush explained, was on a sacred mission.74 We have a great opportunity to extend a just peace by replacing
poverty, repression and resentment around the world with hope of a better day.75

We have our best chance since the rise of the nation state in the 17th century to

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Ibid., 340341. Bush, Text of Bushs Speech at West Point. On Cheneys insistence on this point, see Woodward, Plan of Attack, 4; Woodward, Bush at War, 364; On Rumsfeld and Wolfowitzs insistence, see ibid., 49. Woodward, Bush at War, 67; The notion of an axis of evil was introduced in Bush, President Delivers State of the Union Address. Woodward, Bush at War, 83. Ibid., 282. Woodward, Plan of Attack, 88. Bush, Text of Bushs Speech at West Point.

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build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war.76 As the only remaining superpower, the Americans did not have to ask for permission. The war they contemplated would create a new situation on the ground which other countries would have no choice but to accept.77 Were an empire now, in the words of a Bush advisor, and when we act, we create our own reality.78 In this way the invasion would come to legitimate itself. The war would be justified in terms of the new international system which the war itself would bring into being. It was through a performance that these goals were to be achieved. The war was simultaneously to be presented and re-presented.79 It would be carried out with the tools of warcraft with which the Iraqis would be confronted, subdued, and, if need be, killed. Yet the war would simultaneously be a representation, and the same tools would be used, in a Chestertonian fashion, as props. The Iraqi theater of war was a stage, chosen and equipped by the Americans, where their world-transforming power would be put on display. Watching the performance, Saddam Hussein would be forced to submit and Iraqis to cower; evil-doers throughout the world would take heed and Americans at home would take comfort; European skeptics too would be taught a lesson and so would the US military. Once these various messages were firmly accepted by their intended audiences, the world would have been transformed. The old international system would be gone and the new America-sponsored world inaugurated. In the run-up to the war there was a palpable sense of anticipation in Washington DC. The coming war was going to blown the Iraqis away both literally and figuratively. The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been
76 77 78 79 Ibid. Woodward, Bush at War, 281. Suskind, Faith, Certainty. For an analogous argument regarding the Gulf War of 1991, see Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Originally published in Libration, January 4, February 6 and March 29, 1991 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

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contemplated before, an excited Pentagon official told CBS News.80 The campaign has the potential of making the aerial assault depicted in Picasso's Guernica look like a Monet watercolor.81 It was Rumsfeld who initially had asked the military planners to investigate the use of overwhelming force to make Saddam Hussein crumble a tactic known as shock and awe.82 Introducing the notion to the president, Bush had chuckled. Shock and awe, was a catchy notion, but was it a gimmick?83 The people of Iraq were about to find out. On March 21, 2003, the hammers of war came down on the Iraqi capital. The Baghdad area endured a steady hammering from U.S. warplanes and cruise missiles, American newspapers reported.84 The new close-air campaign takes what some call a "hammer and anvil" approach thats unlike anything youve seen.85 The shock and awe tactics was first developed by a team of scholars and retired generals in a research report published in 1994.86 The aim of rapid dominance, as it officially was known, was to destroy or so confound the will to resist that an adversary will have no alternative except to accept our strategic aims and military objectives.87 The enemy was to be struck by the sublime wrath of a vengeful God. The aim of the US commanders, much as the dream of some megalomaniacal theater director, was to gain complete control of the operational environment, and to use that dominance to control what the adversary perceives, understands, and knows, as well as control or regulate what is not perceived, understood, or known.88 Obviously, American soldiers would come to play an entirely different role under these circumstances. Instead of slavishly following
80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 Sue Chan, Iraq Faces Massive U.S. Missile Barrage, CBS News, January 24, 2003. Harlan Ullman quoted by William Bunch in The Philadelphia Daily News. Woodward, Plan of Attack, 101. Ibid., 102. Mark Abel, Baghdad Hammered, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, March 29, 2003). Bruce Rolfsen, Hammering Baghdad, Air Force Times, April 7, 2003. Ullman and Wade, Shock and Awe. Ibid., xi. Ibid.

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orders, they had to learn to think for themselves.89 This was the entrepreneurial approach to warfare which Rumsfeld had advocated, although the authors of the

report preferred the term institutionalized brilliance, meaning the ability of each soldier to improvise a role.90 Through improvised brilliance it would be possible to get into the minds of the adversary, but also into his body and guts. The reactions they sought, the authors of the report happily explained, was a non-nuclear equivalent to reactions achieved at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. After all, had not the psychological impact of the atomic bomb convinced the Japanese to immediately surrender?91 On November 12, eight months after the start of military action, the US once again applied their hammers to the Iraqis. By the fall of 2003 scattered groups of determined insurgents had transformed the conflict into a guerrilla war, and as always the US military performed badly on a stage not of its own choosing. Operation Iron Hammer was their attempt to regain the initiative. We were sending a message, said a US commander, The message is, 'We're coming'.92 As reporters on the ground discovered, however, the operation seemed more than anything designed to lift the morale of American soldiers and not so much to gain battlefield advantage as to create a perception that the United States had taken the initiative.93 The bombs were big, plentiful and truly frightening, but they were targeted not to inflict civilian casualties and, by implication, quite unable to hit the by now perfectly illusive enemy. The Iron Hammer was heavy on the sound and light on the fury.94 The operation netted some insurgents, however, in addition
89 90 91 92 93 94 Ibid., xxixxxx. Rumsfeld, Transforming the Military, 29; Ullman and Wade, Shock and Awe, xxix. Ullman and Wade, Shock and Awe, xxvi. Dexter Filkins, Air Raid Sends Iraqis Message, but What Is It?, New York Times, November 14, 2003, sec World. Paraphrased in Daniel Williams, Japan Balks at Troops for Iraq; U.S. Hammers Rebels, SFGate, November 14, 2003. Jen Banbury, Operation Iron Hammer: Make Noise, Kill Cows, Slate, November 21, 2003, http://www.salon.com/2003/11/21/baghdad_diary_2/; On the narrative crisis of 2004, see Smith, Why War?, 177181.

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to many innocent Iraqis, and both groups were detained without trial in military prisons, the most notorious of which was located at Abu Ghraib.

a cultural theory of action

There are many kinds of doings, we said, not only actions but practices and performances as well. These three kinds are ontologically distinct and it is a mistake to conflate them. Instead we should study how they related to each other and how they can be combined. In order to do this, lets briefly summarize what we have learned in theoretical terms from our empirical case-study. In our discussion above we said little about actions, but this is not to say that actions are unimportant. On the contrary, actions are the kinds of doings most closely associated with social events and thereby with social outcomes. Thus, while practices answer mainly how-questions how did you do that? and performances answer mainly what-questions what is this play about? actions, by being directly preceded by motives, answer mainly why-questions why did you do what you did? Since explaining social events and outcomes are one of the main things that social scientists do, actions are one of their main preoccupations. Yet explanations of actions are incomplete as long as they do not also consider practices and performances. A theory that include all three, we could refer to as a cultural theory of action.95 Take rational choice theories. Actors, on this account, ascribe utility to the potential outcomes of the actions they contemplate and they rank the outcomes accordingly. When brought before a person's mind at the appropriate moment, this process of rational choice results in a rational action. Suddenly remembering what our interests are, we act in order to satisfy them. Although rational actors, thus defined, are seen as free to make their own choices, they are necessarily
95 Lebows distinction between fear, interest and honor corresponds to this trichotomy. Richard Ned Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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constrained by the imperatives of meaning. Before a rational action can be carried out, that is, the actor must make sense of the situation she is in, of her interests and her self and these definitions presuppose a world which is meaningful. Meaning is never made by individuals alone but always together with other members of our society, and by the people who preceded us. Meaning thus understood is often said to form a system, a discourse, which is compared to a vast imaginary dictionary where all meanings of our society can be looked up.96 Yet this account is flawed or at least radically incomplete. The idea of a grand social dictionary is an intellectualist legend perpetuated by anthropologists and literary theorists who believe meaning can be equated with texts. What we need is rather a pragmatics of meaning an account not only of what meanings are but of how they came to be.97 The dictionary-view of meaning becomes implausible once we remember that human reason in and of itself lacks access to the world and that it always must work with the impressions provided by the senses.98 These impressions have their own meanings, as it were. Embodied, pre-interpreted, experiences can be said to be meaningful to the extent that the sensations which arise in the body can be said to be meaningful. A new-born baby can feel comfortable, hungry, sleepy or distressed, and these reactions have meaning but not because they are explicitly interpreted.99 Such meaning is tacit and pre-rational in exactly the same sense as the practices in which we engage. In fact, practices are an important source of
96 Although the point is usually made that many entries in this dictionary are contradictory and some pages are missing. Ann Swidler, Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies, American Sociological Review 51, no 2 (April 1986): 273286; Lisa Wedeen, Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science, American Political Science Review 96, no 4 (December 2002): 713728. Alexander, Cultural Pragmatics. See also Mark Johnson, Merleau-Pontys Embodied Semantics: From Immanent Meaning, to Gesture, to Language, EurAmerica 36, no 1 (March 2006): 127; Francisco J. Varela, The Reenchantment of the Concrete, in The Artificial Life Route to Artificial Intelligence: Building Embodied, Situated Agents (Hillsdale: L. Erlbaum, 1995), 320336. Johnson, Merleau-Pontys Embodied Semantics, 3.

97 98

99

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tacit meanings. A beloved pair of well-worn shoes, for example, or the breakfast cereal we eat every morning, give meaning to our daily lives not because we stop to consider how important they are, but precisely because we do not.100 Yet practices also provide the means by which more elaborate interpretations can be constructed.101 As a result of the way our bodies interact with the world, we come up with conceptual schemes and increasingly elaborate interpretations. We make sense of things with the help of metaphor.102 Things are up since we know what it means to sit up, stand up and get up; our moods, the stock market or the government are down since we know what it means to move downwards or to fall. Or, to take a slightly more elaborate example, descriptions of a theory as well constructed, solid, unfounded or badly supported, all presuppose a metaphorical transfer of meaning from buildings to theories. And what buildings are we know since we know how to interact with them and how to build them. In this way meaning-making comes to presuppose, and build on, practices. Since rational actions rely on meaning, we can conclude, they rely on practices. Most of the time, however, this process of meaning-making is perfectly opaque to social actors. Interpretations are presuppositions which we rarely have a reason to question or even notice. Instead, when deciding what to do, we rely on the existing practices which our society makes available to us and we chose between them much as we would between the tools in a tool-box. When confronting a certain situation, that is, we use the repertoire of social practices in order to furnish a response.103 A cook, as Michael Oakeshott puts it, is not a man
who first has vision of a pie and then tries to make it; he is a man skilled in cookery,
100 On Oakeshotts old shoes, see Michael Oakeshott, On Being Conservative, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991); Compare Thvenot, Pragmatic Regimes. 101 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 102 Ibid. 103 Swidler, Talk of Love; Ann Swidler, Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies, American Sociological Review 51, no 2 (April 1986): 273286.

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and both his projects and his achievements spring from that skill.104 To say that actions are grounded in practices gives a conservative bias to what we do.105 The

tools we use we go on using not because they are the best ones imaginable but only because they are the ones at our disposal. Since we have no practical experience of the alternatives we stay with what we know. This is how practices come to structure power.106 By helping establish a certain way of life as inevitable and real, habit, in William James' words, dooms us all to fight out the battle of life
upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.107 But practices also set a social and political agenda which we never are in a position to question or on which it never would occur to us to introduce new items. By providing us with a certain access to the world, and thereby only to some ways of understanding it, the tools on which our practices rely constrain our thinking.

Yet there is a difference between actions and practices and the difference is the presence of a choice. A choice is most directly forced upon us when a tool on which we have been relying unexpectedly breaks down or goes missing.108 Suddenly
we have to stop and pay attention, and since we cannot go on as before we have to make other plans. Short of such a break-down, however, practices quite automatically tend to give rise to plans. Oakeshott's pie-maker too, because of the

very fact that she is skilled in cookery, has come up with a project which she seeks to execute. To execute a project is always first a question of seeing oneself in a certain situation, of defining one's interests and one's self, and to anticipate the
104 Michael Oakeshott, Rational Conduct, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, Originally published in Cambridge Journal, vol 4, 1950. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 111. 105 On the conservative bias of practices, see Oakeshott, On Being Conservative Compare, however, Scotts left-wing politics. 106 Practices, we could argue, provide a new way of thinking about Lukes three faces of power. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 107 James, Habit, 121. 108 Heidegger, Being and Time.

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reactions of the people around us. To come up with a project, that is, is to stage an imaginary performance. Rational actions, that is, are re-presented before they are
presented; we play the role in our minds before the action itself takes place. The utilities we ascribe to various outcomes are a result of how this imaginary performance is received by the imaginary audiences we address, including our future selves.109 Once staged in our minds, however, our actions are not limited by what exists, but instead only by what we can imagine. In this way, the performance takes us, thought by imaginary thought, away from habits, established practices and ways of life. Suddenly it is easy to see ourselves in new roles, new environments, and in the context of new plots.110 Tools, lets remember, cannot only be used when executing a skill but sometimes also, infelicitously, as props. We are only pretending to hammer, but such pretense is precisely what removes us from established practices. The hammer-as-prop is used to destroy the old and to construct the new. Since many performances celebrate life exactly as we know it, this not the only possible outcome to be sure, yet while practices have a definite conservative bias, performances have

a transformative potential.111 While practices are the way society preserves itself, performances are a way for individuals to think. Social performances provide such imaginary rationalizations for society as a whole. Here the clutter and contradictions of ordinary life are replaced with a staged environment, filled only with the things, actors and relationships which the director and playwright want the audience to see. The social performance tells the
109 Compare Alessandro Pizzorno, Some Other Kind of Otherness, in Development. Democracy and the Art of Trespassing: Essays in Honor of Albert Hirschman, ed Alejandro Foxley (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986); This, no doubt, explains the intuitive plausibility of Goffmans framework. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 110 Compare Heideggers indictment of TV antennas in Martin Heidegger, Messkirchs Seventh Centennial, trans Thomas J. Sheehan, nd, 4157. 111 On the theatricality of the French Revolution, see Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1982); See Anne Mallory, Burke, Boredom, and the Theater of Counterrevolution, PMLA 118, no 2 (March 2003): 224238.

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audience members what things are, what they mean, and what kind of a society they live in, alternatively, it points to ways in which society can be changed and improved. As enacted, the external environment is internalized, the unknown is socialized, rationalized and made explicit. As a performance, it teaches things far more convincingly than any lecture or instruction manual. The performance is a representation of real life, not just a text, and as such it has a texture which resembles the texture of life itself. What we see before us, that is, makes sense not only since we can locate actors and actions in the context of a plot, but also in the context of the practices and tacit meanings which we share with other members of our society. The performance is powerful because it works on this visceral level, conveying emotions, jerking tears, eliciting laughter and gut reactions. We are shocked and we are awed. A cultural theory of action, lets summarize, identifies three distinct kinds of doings: practices, actions and performances. The three are ontologically distinct: practices are semi-conscious behavior undertaken in a world of functions and tools; actions are conscious attempts by individuals to gain utility; performances are representations designed to show and teach and elicit reactions from an audience. Though distinct, the three are closely related. Actions rely on practices as a source of meaning and as a tool-box of standardized responses. Yet tools can also be used as props and as ways to imagine, and creatively re-imagine, the world. Actions are re-presented before they are performed, and in social performances such representations come to concern society as a whole. Within this framework, actions should still be explained as the result of individuals seeking to gain utility, but the interpretations on which they rely should be explained as the result of practices, and the calculations they carry out should be explained as the result of the performances in which they engage.

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failed performances
The performances which the Americans staged in Iraq were a next to complete failure and the new international system which they were supposed to inaugurate never happened.112 The ontological power-grab attempted by the Bush administration was abandoned. The story of this dnouement is highly instructive for students of international relations, but here lets focus on the implications for how we theorize the relationship between actions, practices and performances. The basic cause of the failure was the wide discrepancy which existed in the minds of the members of the Bush administration between the Iraq War understood as a military action, intended to subdue enemies, and as a performance, intended above all for a world-wide audience of TV-viewers, including America's long list of detractors and foes. The war as presented had an entirely different logic than the war as re-presented, and the problem was that the administration was interested in the latter but not really in the former. They were not sufficiently interested, that is, in the war understood as a protected set of violent and complicated encounters taking place between actual people in an actual place. The administration, notoriously, never counted dead bodies and they never saw, or smelled, the blood.113 Compare, for example, the self-assured way in which Rumsfeld insisted that the invasion could be carried out with only a fraction of the close to 700,000 troops which had been used in the Gulf War in 1991. Some of the Pentagon generals had hoped that the deployment of troops in Iraq would stop Rumsfeld's reforms, but in his mind the deployment provided instead a great opportunity to speed up the
112 According to a survey reported in the Washington Post, 78% of Americans supported president Obamas decision to withdraw troops from Iraq, and 62% said the war had not been worth fighting. Peyton M. Craighill, Public Opinion Is Settled as Iraq War Concludes, Washington Post (Washington D.C., June 11, 2011); For earlier opinion polls, see Public Attitudes Toward the War in Iraq: 20032008 (Washington D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2008). 113 On the refusal to do body counts, see Woodward, Plan of Attack, 327; See, however, Iraq Body Count, 2012, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/.

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process. The soldiers would go to war on his terms and as the war was successfully executed he would show them that he really had been right all along. This, in the end, was how the US military would be convinced to abandon their various hidebound practices. The US soldiers were turned into the audience of the performance in which they themselves were starring. If they only played their roles sufficiently convincingly, Rumsfeld believed, they would gradually come to convince themselves. Given the relative lack of attention to the actual war, the American performance was always going to be sensitive to developments on the ground. As the US generals were the first to point out, there were not enough soldiers involved in peace-keeping, and as US journalists were the first to discover, the nation building effort was quickly bungled.114 The experts who suddenly appeared on the scene were often well connected in Washington DC but entirely unconnected in Iraq; they had no real knowledge of the country, its culture or language. And as they increasingly came to take refuge in the protected Green Zone in Baghdad, or were embedded in military convoys when they traveled, they were not in a position to improve their understanding of where they were. American nation-builders handed out platitudes about freedom and democracy much as American soldiers handed out chewing-gum to children.115 Happy as the Iraqis were to get rid of Saddam Hussein, they were not impressed. Performances, we said, are a means of showing some things and not others. That is, they are rationalizations of the world in which we live. Performing in the Iraqi theater of war, the Americans showed the Iraqis a vision of their future. At first politely paying attention, the audience soon grew restless. It was a radical vision to be sure, but it had next to nothing to do with the established practices of Iraqi life. An important set of such practices concerned the relations between
114 Abel, Baghdad Hammered. 115 Peter Maass, The Toppling: How the Media Inflated a Minor Moment in a Long War, The New Yorker, January 10, 2011.

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ethnic groups, the distribution of power, and questions of security. These practices were now replaced by explicit rules enforced by the US. The US performance, that is, shattered many of the practices which constituted normal Iraqi life. In addition, the physical infrastructure was not improving: electricity, sewage and water worked only intermittently, and looters roamed freely on the streets of Baghdad. When regular people were stopped in roadblocks, randomly rounded-up, treated roughly or even tortured, the insurgency gained ground. The Americans were clearly insensitive and ignorant of Iraqi life. In their minds the Iraqis may have appreciated what the Americans tried to show them, but the invasion was interpreted above all through its effect on their bodies. In the end, lets conclude, the Iraq War was a performance staged mainly for the benefit of audiences back in the United States. After 9/11 it was obvious to Americans that their government had to go after the perpetrators of the atrocities, and this was also the personal promise which Bush had given the rescue workers at Ground Zero in New York.116 This was why the Americans treated the terrorists as enemy combatants rather than, as some Europeans suggested, as criminals. A criminalization of the action would have turned it into a bureaucratic procedure and that was not good enough. What mattered most of all to Americans was that they could see their country go after the perpetrators; that is, that they could see America rise up, run after them, and eventually apprehend and kill them.117 Americans demanded that their quest for retribution to be staged and performed. A nation at rest, vanishes from sight; we are still what we are, but it is never clear what we are and where.118 This, Neo-Conservatives felt, was what had
116 Roger Ailes: The American public would tolerate waiting and would be patient, but only as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible. Support would dissipate if the public did not see Bush acting harshly. Woodward, Bush at War, 207. 117 See, for example, George W. Bush, Press Conference (Washington, D.C., October 11, 2001), http://www.whitehouse.gov. 118 On normal times, see Swidler, Talk of Love.

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happened to the United States after the end of the Cold War.119 It was only through the animosity of an enemy that America once again would become visible to itself. The war in Afghanistan had been disappointing in this respect: Osama bin Laden had gone into hiding and there were not enough strategic targets on which America could unleash its fury.120 Iraq, the White House was delighted to discover, was a great improvement in this respect; there were literally thousands of things they could bomb.121 By appearing on the Iraqi theater of war, the United States was going to appear above all to itself, in an active, heroic and forward leaning posture. As a result Americans would be able to recognize themselves again, and they would cheer themselves on as they fought to make the world a better place. This was how the memory of 9/11 would be erased. This was also, ultimately, why the Iraq War failed.

119 Ullman has an argument like that. Ullman and Wade, Shock and Awe; Compare Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 2006). Fukuyama was one of the original members of the Project for a New American Century. 120 Woodward, Bush at War, 123, 174. 121 Woodward, Plan of Attack, 110; The campaign contained 1,000 aim points, nearly all of which were against the Republican Guard. Rolfsen, Hammering Baghdad.

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