New Theater of Cruelty: Beheadings Demand Civilization’s Response

LONDON: After the Sept. 11 attacks, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard got himself into a bit of mischief by describing the strikes as a kind of ultimate spectacle: “the absolute event, the ‘mother’ of events, the pure event.” He attributed to it a single meaning: “the radicality of the spectacle, the brutality of the spectacle” that succeeded in revealing “a triumphant globalization fighting with itself.”

Many people, including this writer, reacted with unease. The comments seemed at once to applaud the terrorists while undermining the reality of the carnage.

The series of beheadings by a group that calls itself the Islamic State are a new act of theater, and once again, use of a metaphor associated with entertainment may come across as an act of praise or of trivialization in the face of grief. The use intends neither, but rather is a modest appeal for all people who oppose extremism to confront a stark reality: The jihadis have harnessed the power of spectacle to hijack the world’s imagination, while global civilization has failed utterly to formulate an adequate response.

If the attacks on the Twin Towers used the iconography of the Hollywood action blockbuster, the beheadings in the desert evoke drama far more ancient – Old Testament strife, Hellenic legend. They have the austere force of the Edipo Re of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, a connoisseur of cruelty, and of some scenes in Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal. The scenes are self-consciously theatrical, yet this does not sap them of their power – a point that global democratic leaders must digest in order to confront the challenge of the Islamic State executioners.

It may sound unlikely, but ISIS is carrying out in extremis the program of the “theater of cruelty” of the influential French dramaturge-demiurge Antonin Artaud. The early 20^th-century man of the stage wrote in his manifesto “Theater and its Double” that he strives to create “a theater in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theater as by a whirlwind of higher forces.” Artaud wants to create a theater for “la foule” – the crowd, the mob, the masses – in opposition to tired, insipid old codgers and he appeals to ancient religions: “These gods or heroes, these monsters, these natural and cosmic forces will be interpreted according to images from the most ancient sacred texts and old cosmogonies.” Introducing his  second manifesto, Artaud writes: “This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity [italics added] which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.”

As theater, the work tends to be rubbish, although Artaud has influenced many greats, including director Peter Brook. None of this matters. The key issue is how appealing its message may be to a certain cast of mind. The cocktail of violence-and-purity may find particular, one is tempted to say universal, resonance in the restless, conflicted, often-miserable, never-satisfied adolescent mind – a cast of mind that under the pressure of another set of circumstances, often socioeconomic, can be fertile ground for jihadi recruitment. There are many more serious reasons for the appeal of jihad, from a scarcity of employment opportunities to often cogent arguments about colonial legacies, but one must not ignore the notion that jihad may simply come across as a grand, romantic adventure. Adolescents are mesmerized by purity, impossible goals that most people shed as they mature. Or, obsession with purity can be psychosis: Robespierre wanted a pure revolution, and the Nazis dreamed of a pure race. The jihadis, in many ways, follow a venerable western tradition of idealism, as puritanical and racist, that has always ended in tragedy.

Global leadership certainly must not fight this theater of cruelty with reciprocal tools – an orgy of rah-rah triumphalism or vaudeville of sentimental propaganda. Former US President George W. Bush was a master of both, pledging “shock-and-awe” in Iraq and  gazing into Vladimir Putin eyes and claiming to see his soul.

Our global community must – and history tells us we can – find a way to drive rational discourse buttressed by an adequate iconography. Leaders like Ronald Reagan, Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi  shared a sharp sense of theatre: In the fight against communism, Reagan, once an actor, urged from Berlin for Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” – the performance was better than any he gave in Hollywood. When King marched with 250,000 in Washington DC, the moment was transcendent in the history of civil rights and an act of consummate dramaturgy. On a quest for reconciliation, Mahatma Gandhi showed not only moral steel but a shrewd sense of theatrics in recognizing the power of a mass hunger strike.

Of course, in a postmodern world, any deliberate attempts at inspiration are suspicious – and on balance, that is perhaps healthy. Yet it is paramount that we awaken from our post-dogmatic slumbers, not to seek a new dogma, but to reclaim the imaginative terrain for our civilized world. A skeptical posture is fine and well, today we must, like Hume, fight passionately for sound sense and reason.

We must be warriors of tolerance, calling to arms our reason, our compassion and our sanity. Our leaders should show the way. US President Barack Obama, for starters, needs to rediscover the magic of his early presidency, the ability to draw millions of supporters, as he approaches its twilight. Germany’s Angela Merkel, who has political clout to burn, can complement her nation’s growing diplomatic muscle with bold symbolism, following in the way of her predecessor, Helmut Kohl, who stood alongside French President François Mitterrand in stirring scenes of post-war reconciliation. In India, Narendra Modi, who was chief minister in Gujarat at the time of horrific revenge killings against Muslims in 2002, can resonate beyond the borders of his country by deploying his charisma in a major gesture of Hindu-Muslim reconciliation.

Calling for such acts of reconciliation and inspiration is not to say military strikes are a bad idea, but suggest that the ultimate battlefield may also have to include the theater of persuasion. Otherwise another group of extremists will simply pop up somewhere else.

While Baudrillard’s analysis is stimulating, bringing a genuinely valuable contribution to the global agora, we must reject his assertion that the 9/11 attacks were a manifestation of globalization at war with itself. Baudrillard is correct to assert that “this is not a clash of civilizations,” but only in the sense that it is global civilization – the civilization of China’s Tang dynasty, of the Sicilian court of Roger II Hauteville, of India’s Muslim Mughal emperors and of the Ottoman Sultan Selim III – in conflict with anti-civilization, a movement that in its purest distillation is simply a disrespect for life.

We must be warriors of trust. Our adventure of globalization has the ability to yield such riches – material, cultural, spiritual and intellectual – or founder under the weight of intolerance and hate.

The message of globalization requires global leadership – and someone to sit in the director’s chair.