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Hiroshima After Iraq: A Study in Art and War

OCTOBER 131, Winter 2010, pp. 3–22. © 2010 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Maurice Blanchot said that political impatience makes criticism warlike. Driven by the urgency of human-inflicted disasters, we want to proceed straight to the goal of social transformation, and so, wrote Blanchot, the indirection of the poetic—and, we might add, the artistic—displeases us.1 It should not be surprising, then, that the pressing events of the past eight years—war, rendition, torture—have produced many examples of impatient criticism. Two years ago, for instance, October sent a questionnaire to a group of art-world intellectuals, soliciting opinions on artistic opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and while October’s attempt to open up a conversation about art and war was welcome, its survey suffered from the fallacy of the loaded question. It asked: “What, if anything, demotivates the current generation of academics and artists from assuming positions of public critique and opposition against the barbarous acts committed by the government of the United States against a foreign country?”2 And, after noting that today “antiwar opposition seems most visible on the Internet” and asking if the “electronic-technological public sphere” measures up to the public protests of the Vietnam era, another question inquired whether this condition implies a “fundamental transformat ion of the sense of a polit ical public subject ,”3 a transformation that, in the context of the journal’s comparison between the present and what it portrayed as an earlier golden age of protest, could only be viewed as a degeneration from activism to quietism. What emerged was a thinly disguised decline-and-fall jeremiad about opposition to war, in which current antiwar activity