by Robert Buck and Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff
Waking up Sunday morning, June
12th, confronted by the barrage of news about a mass shooting at a nightclub in
Orlando called Pulse, one immediately encountered an abundance of conflicting
information but a lack of coherent narratives. The search for a unifying
discourse was repeatedly thwarted. Was this the work of ISIS? Al-Qaeda? Was the
shooter gay? A violent homophobe? Or both? Was he a racist? Was he mentally
ill? Was this a hate crime? If so, against the LGBT community? The Latino
community? How did he get a Sig Sauer MCX, a full size assault rifle, into the
club? The quest for answers grew more daunting and frustrating as the week wore
on. An avalanche of additional eyewitness accounts, FBI statements, and media
confabulations only increased the surplus of alleged rationales and
inconsistent narratives.
Paradoxically, given the
profusion of information and possible motives, one faced a breach in knowledge.
It was precisely the lack of answers that ultimately emerged as the question
itself. This miasma of “senselessness “ is murder in the era of the One All
Alone.
The shooting has been referred
to as the worst act of terror on U.S. soil since 9/11. A discourse of unity,
nationalism and the construction of an evil Other of terror took hold in the
wake of 9/11. From Al-Qaeda to ISIS, we’re no longer dealing with the same
brand of terror. In the hands of the Other terror appealed to ideals and
semblants.
The shooting spree at Pulse,
in which 49 young people were killed and 53 wounded, has a different contour
than an explicit act of “post 9/11” terror. For the shooter, ideology seemed to
be an after thought. The massacre was not an initiative of ISIS. Although Omar
Mateem was on the terror watch list, he claimed his allegiance most
demonstratively ex post facto. Direct any grievance to one goal, violence, and
ISIS will claim credit for it as an act of terror. Any crime in the name of
ISIS, pure drive, limitless, and all consuming. Soft targets. Total war.
Global.
What function does ISIS fill
if they herald The Lone Wolf? The Lone Wolf does not “go postal”. He roams,
stalks the periphery, hunts just outside the city limits, on the frontier. For
The Lone Wolf the social bond is fugitive. Motivation and intent are replaced
by indiscriminatory hatred. ISIS elevates hatred itself.
According to congressional
reports, the shooter was monitoring the horror in real-time feeds on his
iPhone. “And on Sunday morning, during the siege at Pulse, ‘Mateen apparently
searched for ‘”Pulse Orlando”’ and ‘”Shooting.”” [1] “’He even searched for
references to the massacre while he was carrying it out’, a United States
senator said.”[2] In this phenomenon we witness the underside of the empire of
the Imaginary, the terrifying repressed of Internet culture, the darkest web.
From the Lacanian perspective,
can the shooting even be understood as an acting out? Omar Mateen, trawling for
himself on the screen of his device for Facebook posts during his attack, put
himself on the stage of the Imaginary.
A Lone Wolf sought to extinguish
the pulse of the jouissance of life. Is this terror in the age of the One All
Alone?
1 “Gunman in Orlando Posted to
Facebook During Nightclub Attack, Lawmaker Says”, The New York Times, Friday,
June 17, 2016, pg. A16
1 Ibid.
1 Ibid.
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