### Arthur Miller, September 11, and the Extraordinary Profitability of Being Wronged
*Clout Economics | Studies in the Moral Organisation of Capitalism*
There is something peculiarly American about the conviction that suffering confers innocence. It is a proposition which, if consistently applied, would make the history of capitalism an unusually embarrassing subject.
The difficulty, of course, is that suffering does not distribute itself according to the moral merits of those who experience it. The victims of September 11 were no more responsible for American foreign policy than an Iraqi child was responsible for Saddam Hussein. Yet the political imagination has an extraordinary capacity to transform the injuries of a population into the virtues of a state.
This is the point at which tragedy becomes ideology.
The nearly three thousand people murdered on September 11, 2001, were victims of an atrocity. But the subsequent political interpretation of their deaths was not simply an act of mourning. It was also an immense exercise in the production of national meaning, in which a historically specific act of violence was incorporated into a much older mythology of American exceptionalism.
The nation was wounded. Therefore the nation was innocent.
The nation was innocent. Therefore its response was righteous.
Its response was righteous. Therefore the question of its historical conduct could be postponed until further notice.
History, regrettably, had other appointments.
Arthur Miller would have recognised this procedure. Indeed, he did recognise aspects of it, warning in December 2001 about the expansion of governmental power under the pretext of combating terrorism.
For Miller, the problem of political innocence was never simply that individuals lied. It was that social institutions could organise themselves around fictions which became increasingly indispensable to their continued operation.
The question was not whether Salem believed in witches.
It was what Salem had become by needing to believe in them.
## I. THE CRUCIBLE, OR THE STATE AS MORAL ENTREPRENEUR
*The Crucible* is generally understood as an allegory of McCarthyism, which is true enough, though rather like describing capitalism as an unusually elaborate system of shopping.
Miller's play concerns the social production of guilt.
Its genius lies in demonstrating that accusation is not merely an expression of moral judgment. Under particular historical conditions, accusation becomes a means of acquiring power.
The witch trials allow previously insignificant individuals to exercise extraordinary influence over the lives of others. Personal grievances acquire theological significance. Religious conviction becomes judicial procedure. The institutions responsible for establishing truth become dependent upon the continued discovery of falsehood.
This is not simply mass hysteria. It is a political economy.
The accusation has acquired exchange value.
To denounce is to demonstrate virtue. To demonstrate virtue is to acquire legitimacy. To acquire legitimacy is to gain access to institutional authority.
And the more thoroughly the institution commits itself to the existence of the threat, the more difficult it becomes to acknowledge that its procedures may be producing the very reality they claim merely to investigate.
The system cannot afford to discover that it has been mistaken.
Such a discovery would threaten not merely a particular judgment but the authority of judgment itself.
This is the dialectical predicament of Salem: the court must continue finding witches in order to establish that its original decision to prosecute witches was justified.
The resemblance to certain modern security institutions is not difficult to discern.
After September 11, the American state undertook an enormous expansion of military, intelligence and surveillance activity. Some measures addressed genuine security problems. Others, including forms of indefinite detention, coercive interrogation and indiscriminate suspicion, raised profound questions about the relationship between national security and democratic rights.
The crucial point is that an institution organised around the anticipation of danger may find it increasingly difficult to imagine the disappearance of danger as anything other than a failure of vigilance.
The emergency becomes an administrative vocation.
And administrative vocations, unlike emergencies, tend to enjoy remarkable longevity.
## II. THE AMERICAN DREAM HAS A FOREIGN POLICY
The ideological universe of *Death of a Salesman* is particularly illuminating here.
Willy Loman inhabits a society in which personal success is understood as evidence of moral worth. The promise of American capitalism is not merely that one may become prosperous, but that prosperity will finally confirm one's significance.
The individual must become valuable in the eyes of an Other whose recognition is endlessly pursued and never securely possessed.
Willy's tragedy is that he mistakes a historically produced system of valuation for the natural measure of human dignity.
His failure becomes unbearable because he has internalised the standards by which he is condemned.
One might suggest that American exceptionalism performs a comparable operation at the level of national ideology.
The United States is not merely a powerful country. Within the mythology of exceptionalism, its power is understood as the expression of a universal historical mission.
Economic dominance becomes evidence of superior institutions.
Military power becomes the instrument of freedom.
Geopolitical influence becomes moral leadership.
The particular interests of a state acquire the appearance of universal values.
Here we encounter a familiar ideological operation: the conversion of historical advantage into moral entitlement.
September 11 interrupted this narrative.
The world's most powerful state discovered itself vulnerable to an attack whose perpetrators rejected its claims to universal legitimacy.
The event could have prompted a sustained examination of the contradictions of American power, without in any way excusing the perpetrators.
Instead, an influential political narrative represented the attacks primarily as an assault upon freedom itself.
The explanation was not entirely invented: al-Qaeda's ideology was profoundly hostile to pluralism and democratic freedoms. But the explanation was politically selective.
It elevated one dimension of the conflict into its total meaning.
The United States had not merely been attacked.
Its account of itself had been vindicated by the attack.
This is a most convenient form of historical reasoning.
Even catastrophe becomes evidence that one was right all along.
## III. THE VANISHING MEDIATIONS OF HISTORY
What is remarkable about the post-9/11 political imagination is the degree to which it could present the event as a rupture without history.
The attacks appeared as an intrusion of irrational violence into an otherwise intelligible international order.
Yet the international order had its own history: colonialism, Cold War alliances, military interventions, oil politics, authoritarian states, religious movements, and the uneven incorporation of societies into global capitalism.
To insist upon this history is not to justify terrorism.
Explanation and exoneration are not synonyms, however frequently they are confused in television studios.
The point is rather that an event cannot be understood adequately when severed from the historical totality within which it becomes possible.
Fredric Jameson's injunction to historicise is useful precisely because it resists the reduction of political phenomena to isolated moral spectacles.
The event is never simply itself.
It is also a condensation of historical processes whose relationships are not immediately visible.
September 11 was simultaneously a mass murder, a geopolitical event, a media spectacle, a crisis of American national identity and a turning point in the organisation of global security.
These dimensions are related without being reducible to one another.
A properly historical interpretation must hold them together.
The ideological interpretation, by contrast, tends to eliminate mediation.
It moves directly from injury to innocence, from innocence to authority, and from authority to action.
The historical question—what produced this configuration of violence?—is displaced by the moral question—who stands with us?
And thus the complexity of international relations is reorganised into the simplicity of a loyalty test.
The world becomes considerably easier to govern once its contradictions have been divided into good people and bad people.
Unfortunately, it does not become any easier to understand.
## IV. THE COMMODIFICATION OF THE CATASTROPHE
To describe the political economy of September 11 is not to claim that the attacks were orchestrated for profit, or that the grief of their victims was insincere.
Such claims would mistake the structural consequences of an event for the intentions that produced it.
Capitalism does not require every historical development to have been consciously designed in the interests of capital.
Its remarkable adaptability consists partly in its capacity to incorporate developments whose origins lie elsewhere.
A catastrophe may produce new markets without having been caused by those markets.
A security emergency may expand state expenditure without every participant being motivated by financial gain.
An ideological narrative may legitimate economic arrangements without being reducible to a commercial advertisement.
The post-9/11 security apparatus nevertheless generated vast fields of economic activity: military contracting, surveillance technology, intelligence infrastructure, private security, reconstruction and logistical services.
The state, so frequently instructed by neoliberal doctrine to withdraw from economic life, proved capable of extraordinary intervention when the object was national security.
Apparently, the invisible hand was perfectly willing to accept a defence contract.
This contradiction deserves attention.
Neoliberalism is often represented as the retreat of the state before the market. In practice, it has frequently involved the reorganisation of state power around particular forms of accumulation.
The state may reduce certain social obligations while expanding its coercive and security capacities.
It may discipline public expenditure in the name of fiscal responsibility while mobilising enormous resources for military projects.
The question, therefore, is not whether the state intervenes.
It is for whom, toward what ends, and under which moral descriptions its interventions become legitimate.
Security supplies one such description.
The protection of life becomes the universal language through which highly particular allocations of resources can be justified.
The political economy of fear is not that fear is imaginary.
It is that real fear can be organised into durable structures of power.
## V. THE MUSLIM SUBJECT AND THE ADMINISTRATION OF INNOCENCE
There is another character in this drama, though one who was rarely permitted to write the script.
The Muslim.
In the aftermath of September 11, Muslims across different national and social contexts encountered intensified scrutiny, suspicion and demands for public declarations of loyalty.
The category itself was extraordinarily heterogeneous.
It included secular Muslims, devout Muslims, socialists, conservatives, dissidents, immigrants, citizens, refugees, religious scholars and people whose relationship to Islam was largely familial or cultural.
But the security imagination has little patience for such distinctions.
Its function is classification.
A population becomes intelligible through its presumed relationship to a threat.
The individual Muslim could thus be required to answer for a collective identity whose political meaning had already been established elsewhere.
This is a particular form of subjectivation.
The subject is constituted through the demand to demonstrate that they are not what the dominant discourse suspects them of being.
They must become the acceptable Muslim.
The moderate Muslim.
The properly integrated Muslim.
The Muslim whose opinions on terrorism are available for immediate public inspection.
The difficulty is that the criteria of acceptability are established by institutions whose authority the subject is not necessarily permitted to question.
Here the connection with Miller becomes especially sharp.
In *The Crucible*, the demand for confession is not simply a means of discovering truth.
It is a ritual through which the accused recognises the court's authority to define the terms of innocence.
Similarly, when an entire population is expected to demonstrate its distance from violence committed by a few, the act of demonstration can reproduce the premise of collective suspicion.
The innocent must continually establish innocence.
The accusation, meanwhile, enjoys the luxury of remaining implicit.
One might call this the administrative production of the suspect.
The individual is not necessarily accused of a particular crime.
They are required to manage the social meaning of an identity.
And this management becomes part of the ordinary labour of citizenship.
## VI. THE TRAGEDY OF THE GOOD AMERICAN
Miller's theory of tragedy offers a way of understanding the subjective dimension of this political order.
In *Tragedy and the Common Man*, he rejects the notion that tragedy belongs exclusively to kings and aristocrats.
The ordinary individual may be tragic because their struggle for dignity places them in conflict with the social order that determines their worth.
The tragic subject is not necessarily destroyed by a personal defect.
They may be destroyed by their commitment to an image of themselves that society has made both indispensable and impossible.
Willy Loman cannot relinquish the promise of success because the promise has become the organising principle of his identity.
John Proctor cannot surrender his name because it represents the irreducible remainder of his dignity.
What, then, of the good American after September 11?
The good American is invited to identify with a nation whose virtue is presented as self-evident.
To question the state's actions may appear to threaten the very identity through which the individual experiences political belonging.
The contradiction is painful.
One may oppose torture while believing one's country uniquely committed to human rights.
One may oppose imperial domination while believing one's country the principal agent of freedom.
One may defend civil liberties while accepting their suspension as a temporary necessity.
The ideological solution is to treat these contradictions as exceptions.
The torture is an aberration.
The war is an unfortunate necessity.
The surveillance is temporary.
The civilian casualties are regrettable.
The underlying moral identity remains untouched.
But the accumulation of exceptions eventually begins to resemble a system.
At which point the tragedy becomes visible.
The subject's fidelity to an ideal may prevent them from recognising the institutions operating in its name.
The good American becomes trapped between the desire to preserve national innocence and the obligation to confront national power.
This is not a uniquely American predicament.
It is a recurring contradiction of nationalism wherever collective identification becomes a substitute for historical judgment.
## VII. THE EXCHANGE VALUE OF MORAL INNOCENCE
We may now formulate the specifically Clout Economics dimension of the problem.
Modern political authority depends not only upon coercion and economic resources but also upon the accumulation of symbolic legitimacy.
States must explain why their actions deserve recognition as lawful, necessary or just.
National suffering can become a particularly powerful source of such legitimacy.
The mechanism is not automatic.
The suffering of a population does not inherently justify the actions of its government.
Rather, political institutions must perform the work of conversion.
Grief is represented as national unity.
National unity is represented as moral clarity.
Moral clarity is represented as political authority.
Political authority legitimises particular forms of state action.
These actions may reorganise economic resources and institutional capacities.
The resulting structures can then reproduce the narratives that originally authorised them.
This is the circulation of moral capital.
Its peculiarity lies in the transformation of an injury suffered by individuals into a legitimacy claimed by institutions.
The dead become symbols.
The symbols become arguments.
The arguments become policy.
And policy becomes an apparatus with interests, budgets and a considerable reluctance to disappear.
One need not deny the original suffering to question the conversion.
Indeed, to distinguish the victims from the institutions claiming to speak in their name may be the beginning of a more serious ethics of remembrance.
The dead cannot be asked to approve the uses to which their deaths are put.
That should make the living somewhat more cautious.
## VIII. ARTHUR MILLER AND THE LIMITS OF THE MORAL SPECTACLE
What distinguishes Miller from a merely moralistic critic is his insistence that individuals inhabit social relations they do not fully understand.
His characters are neither simply innocent nor simply guilty.
They participate in institutions, fantasies and obligations whose contradictions become visible through dramatic conflict.
The purpose of tragedy is not to reassure the audience that evil people do evil things.
Such reassurance would be rather cheap.
It is to reveal how a society produces situations in which ordinary commitments become destructive.
The court's commitment to justice becomes an instrument of injustice.
The salesman's commitment to success becomes a mechanism of humiliation.
The nation's commitment to freedom may become entangled with practices that undermine freedom elsewhere.
The tragic contradiction lies not in the absence of ideals but in the social organisation of their pursuit.
This is why the political economy of September 11 cannot be adequately understood as a contest between sincere patriots and cynical profiteers.
The relationship between ideology and material interest is more complicated.
People may sincerely believe the ideas through which institutions reproduce their power.
They may act from moral conviction while contributing to arrangements whose consequences contradict that conviction.
Ideology is not simply a falsehood imposed upon an otherwise innocent population.
It is part of the lived structure through which people make sense of their obligations, identities and possibilities.
The question is therefore not merely how to expose hypocrisy.
It is how to transform the social conditions that make particular contradictions appear natural, necessary or unavoidable.
That is a considerably more demanding political project.
It is also less likely to fit on a commemorative bumper sticker.
## IX. THE END OF INNOCENCE IS NOT THE END OF ETHICS
There is a temptation, when confronted with the ideological uses of suffering, to conclude that all moral claims are merely instruments of power.
This would be a mistake.
The fact that grief can be politically appropriated does not make grief unreal.
The fact that human rights can be selectively invoked does not make human rights meaningless.
The fact that innocence can become an ideological category does not eliminate the distinction between victims and perpetrators.
A materialist critique does not require the abolition of moral judgment.
It requires an account of the historical conditions under which moral judgments acquire social force.
The victims of September 11 were victims.
The civilians killed in subsequent wars were also victims.
These propositions are not in competition.
Their coexistence becomes difficult only when the recognition of one population's suffering is made dependent upon the denial or minimisation of another's.
The task is not to distribute innocence according to geopolitical allegiance.
It is to refuse the conversion of innocence into a monopoly.
This is perhaps the most useful lesson Miller offers.
The preservation of dignity requires more than fidelity to an inherited moral vocabulary.
It requires the capacity to confront the institutions that claim to embody that vocabulary.
Sometimes the defence of justice demands criticism of the court.
Sometimes the defence of freedom demands criticism of the state.
And sometimes the defence of a nation requires abandoning the fantasy that the nation has always been right.
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## ♧♤◇ THE CLOUT ECONOMICS HYPOTHESIS
The ideological significance of September 11 lies not only in the event itself but in the historical processes through which its meaning was organised.
The catastrophe became a site of struggle over national identity, political legitimacy, security, historical memory and the distribution of economic resources.
Arthur Miller's dramatic imagination helps us understand how the moral authority of institutions can become dependent upon narratives that those institutions are increasingly unable to question.
The specifically economic question concerns the conversion of symbolic legitimacy into material and political power.
**The specifically tragic question concerns what happens to human beings when their dignity becomes dependent upon believing those conversions are just.**
This is the peculiar achievement of ideology.
It persuades us not merely that the existing order is necessary.
It persuades us that our own goodness depends upon its necessity.
And so we arrive at the central contradiction.
A society may genuinely mourn its dead while using their deaths to authorise policies that produce further suffering.
A nation may sincerely believe in freedom while developing institutions that restrict it.
A political order may claim universal moral principles while distributing their protections unequally.
None of these contradictions can be resolved by identifying a few hypocrites.
They are contradictions of the social totality.
And the purpose of criticism is to make that totality historically intelligible.
Not so that innocence may finally be awarded to the correct nation.
But so that innocence might cease to function as a substitute for justice.
**WELCOME TO CLOUT ECONOMICS.**
*Where the tragedy is real, the innocence is nationalised, and the reconstruction has been outsourced.*
**♧♤◇ CONSTANT VIGILANCE!**
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