The Job of the Terrorists by Karl Ove Knausegaard

A few minutes after five thirty John was standing by the side of the bed shouting at me to wake up. I put on my clothes from the day before and took him into the kitchen. Outside, the sun was coming up over the horizon. Its rays were sharp and penetrated the room. Everything became visible in its light, the bits of food on the floor, the trail of coffee stains that ran from the counter on the right of the sink on the other side, the globules of fat that specked the surface of the sausage water in the saucepan, the two bloated sausages that lay at the bottom, split open, the two empty milk cartons next to it, the open packet of margarine, so soft it as almost fluid, its yellow color much deeper now than when it had been taken from the fridge. The Wetex cloth, stiff as a shell when dry, draped over the lip of metal that separated the twin bowls of the sink, like some odd fitting that was part of it, originally white, now a grimy gray. The glasses and cups, plates, and bowls that were piled up in the sink, spilling out over the stainless-steel draining board like some encroaching plant of glass and crockery. The two empty jars of pasta sauce left unrinsed behind the tap, insider red with what remained of their contents. The transparent plastic cheese wrapper, which to a distracted eye made it look like the label with the logo on it hung in midair above the chopping board that had been pushed back against the wall. The beetroot juice the wood had absorbed. The withered plants in the widow, dead for months, so much a fixture now that no one thought of throwing them out anymore. The table, with its glasses and plats, the jug of water with its tiny bubbles, the dried-up crumbs and other detritus that pointed to where the children sat, the empty bags of fruit that lay dumped, like little hangars of plastic among the drawings and drawing pads, crayons and felt pens, not to mention the two shelves on the wall next to the window, swelling like some coral reef with objects that the children had collected and kept over the past couple of years, from sweet dispensers in the shape of princesses or Disney figures, little boxes full of beads, bead boards, sticks of glue, toy cars, and watercolors, to oddments of jigsaw puzzles, bits of Playmobile, letters and bills, dolls, and some marbles with little dolphins inside that Vanja had wanted when we were in Venice the previous summer. The shelves were a kind of station; once something was put there it was out of circulation and stayed there. We had a number of such places where the lives of objects came to a sudden end, most notably the long counter in the hall, presumably once used as a kind of sideboards for serving food before it was taken into the dining room, since it had those kind of cupboards above and below, which were now crammed with all matter of stuff we must have thought we needed but no longer knew we had, some three cubic meters of discarded lamps, used and unused lightbulbs, candles, piles of printer paper, rolls of undeveloped film, heaps of photographs, loose as well as collected in the little yellow folders in which they had been delivered, cookery books, assorted children’s clothing, woolen tights from winter, odd socks, odd gloves, a pink Hello Kitty rain hat, a number of T-shirts, most likely outgrown, a hoodie, a thick sweater, napkins bought in abundance from IKEA, flowerpots, cables from old computers, extension cords, ballpoints and lighters, old paperbacks, washed but unironed tablecloths, invitations and advertising brochures, glossy weeklies, unused sparklers, a collapsed rice-paper lamp shade, the children’s birthday train with numbers on them in which you could put little candles, balloons and whistles, bits of their wooden train set, including a station building and a locomotive, drawing pads, DVDs, CDs, tea towels- all in all a mountain of stuff that from time to time sent Linda into a panic mode, the sudden feeling of utter chaos it could bring about would be too much for her. Not infrequently she came home with organizers and storage boxes to help her get on top of things; different boxes for different objects, a shelf for my mail, another for hers, with our names on then, like other people had, people who were tidier than us, but these systems would collapse after only a few days and everything would be chaotic again. It would get on my nerves too, and about once every six months or so I went through the lot, sorting and tossing, whittling down these bulging piles, only for them to swell again within weeks. It was if they were alive, drawing objects towards them and consuming them, growing bigger and stronger all the time.

Happily, the children didn’t seem to be bothered. Conceptions of inner and outer chaos were not yet relevant to them, they approached the world as an unproblematic place most of the time, which was probably right, I thought to myself now. The material world was neutral, we wove our inner psychological landscapes into it, coloring it with our conceptions until it couldn’t help but be messy. But it was a practical issue, nothing to do with morals. We weren’t bad people for being messy. Our messiness was not a sign of poor moral fabric. I could tell myself this, but it didn’t help, the feelings it stirred in me were too strong; as I moved around in all our mess it was if it were accusing me, accusing us, we were bad people, unfit to be parents.

‘What do you say, John, do you think I should clean things up a bit while you’re having breakfast?”

He looked up at me and nodded. I let the blinds down, lifted him into his chair, gave him his cornflakes and milk, which he seemed happy with, and began emptying the dishwasher .  .  .

I got myself a cup, poured the now brewed coffee into a thermos and took it out with me onto the balcony, where I sat down with a smoke, leaving the door open so I’d know if anything happened inside. Gazing out over the kilometers of rooftops I remembered  I’d had a dream. I’d been sitting in the same place. The sky had bee lack and crisscrossed by planes. Some had been very close, gat jumbo jets with every detail of their fuselages plain to see, others merely lights passing beneath the stars. The feeling it had given me had been intense and fantastic. Fantastic, fantastic it had been, and then I’d woken up.

I leaned back and put my feet up on the railing. The sun, bright and blazing, had warmed up the air around me considerably, and its rays burned against my face, sparkling in the window, the tabletop, and the shiny metal of the thermos.

Low-flying planes sweeping between tall buildings, sometimes sky-scrapers, sometimes ordinary towers, were something I dreamed about recurringly,  perhaps two or there times a year. Sometimes I was on board myself, other times I looked at them from a distance. Even in the dream I found myself marveling a how beautiful and unreal they were. Occasionally I saw great plane disasters too, entire scenes in which they came hurtling from the skies to crash into a building or a street, exploding into flame. For that reason, the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 was like watching a dream, to me. All the elements were there. The skyscrapers, the great shining airplanes, the impact, the flames. But while these dreams were oddly concentrated, always centered on some single point around which all my feelings in someway seemed to be gathered, the true-life event was quite differently open and expansive, and I felt I could remove myself from it and connect with it.

The job of the terrorists was to penetrate into our subconscious. This had always been the aim of writers, but the terrorists took it a step further. They were the writers of our age. Don DeLillo said this many  years before 9/11. The images they created spread around the globe, colonizing our subconscious minds. The tangible outcome of the attack, the numbers of dead and injured, the material destruction meant nothing. It was the images that were important. The more iconic the images they managed to create, the more successful their actions. The attack on the World Trade Center was the most successful of all time. There weren’t that many dead, only a couple of thousand, as against the six hundred thousand who died in the first two days of the Battle of Flanders in the autumn of 1914, yet the images were so iconic and powerful that the effect on us was just as devastating, perhaps more so, since we live in a culture of images.

Planes and skyscrapers. Icarus and Babel.

They wanted into our dreams. Everyone did. Our inner beings were the final market. Once they were conquered, we would be sold.

I took another slurp of coffee, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, stood up, pressed and index finger against one nostril, and with a swift, forceful exhalation expelled a glob of mucus from the other over the balcony.

“You do your morning ablutions al fresco, I see,” said Geir. He was standing in the open doorway watching me.


My Struggle Volume VI pages 273-277

The Dominant Ideological State Apparatus by Louis Athusser

In the pre-capitalist historical period it is absolutely clear that there was one dominant Ideological State Apparatus, which concentrated within it not only religious functions, but also educational ones, and a large proportion of the functions of communication and ‘culture’. It is no accident that all ideological struggle, from the 16^th to the 18th century, starting with the first shocks of the Reformation, was concentrated in an anti-clerical and anti-religious struggle; rather, this is a function precisely of the dominant position of the religious ideological State apparatus.

The foremost objective and achievement of the French Revolution was not just to transfer power from the feudal aristocracy to the merchant-capitalist bourgeoisie, to break part of the former repressive State apparatus and replace it with a new one (e.g., the national popular Army) – but also to attack the number-one Ideological State Apparatus: the Church. Hence the civil constitution of the clergy, the confiscation of ecclesiastical wealth, and the creation of a new ideological State apparatuses to replace the religious ideological State apparatus in its dominant role.

Naturally, these things did not happen automatically: witness the Concordat, the Restoration and the long class struggle between the landed aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie throughout the 19^th century for the establishment of bourgeois hegemony over the functions formerly fulfilled by the Church: above all by the Schools. It can be said that the bourgeoisie relied on the new political, parliamentary democratic, ideological State apparatus, installed in the earliest years of the Revolution, then restored after long and violent struggles, for a few months in 1848 and for decades after the fall of the Second Empire, in order to conduct its struggle against the Church and wrest its ideological functions away from it, in other words, to ensure not only its political hegemony, but also the ideological hegemony indispensable to the reproduction of capitalist relations of production.

That is why I believe I am justified in advancing the following Thesis, however precarious it is. I believe that the ideological State apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of a violent political and ideological class struggle against the old dominant ideological State apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus.

This thesis may seem paradoxical, given that for everyone, i.e. in the ideological representation that the bourgeoisie has tried to give itself and the classes it exploits, it really seems that the dominant ideological State apparatus in capitalist social formations is not the Schools, but the political ideological State apparatus, i.e. the regime of parliamentary democracy combining universal suffrage and party struggle.

However, history, even recent history, shows that the bourgeoisie has been and still is able to accommodate itself to political ideological State apparatuses other than parliamentary democracy: the First and Second Empires, Constitutional Monarchy (Louis XVIII and Charles X), Parliamentary Monarchy (Louis-Philippe), Presidential Democracy (de Gaulle), to mention only France. In England this is even clearer. The Revolution was particularly successful there from the bourgeois point of view, since unlike France, where the bourgeoisie, partly because of the stupidity of the petty aristocracy, had to agree to being carried to power by peasant and plebian ‘journees revolutionaires’, something for which they paid a high price, the English bourgeoisie was able to ‘compromise’ with the aristocracy and ‘share’ State power and the use of the State apparatus with it for a long time (peace among all men of good will in the ruling classes!). In Germany it was even more striking, since it was behind a political ideological State apparatus in which the imperial Junkers (epitomized by Bismarck), their army and police provided it with a shield and leading personnel, that the imperialist bourgeoisie made its shattering entry into history, before ‘traversing’ the Weimar Republic and entrusting itself to Nazism.

Hence I believe I have good reasons for thinking that behind the scenes of its political State Ideological Apparatus, which occupies the front stage, what the bourgeoisie has installed as its number-one, i.e. as its dominant ideological State apparatus, is the educational apparatus, which has replaced in its functions the previously dominant State apparatus, the Church. One might even add: the School-Family couple has replaced the Church-family couple.

Why is the educational apparatus in fact the dominant ideological State apparatus in capitalist social formations, and how does it function?

For the moment it must suffice to say:

1) All ideological state apparatuses, whatever they are, contribute to the same result: the reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation.

2.) Each of them contributes to this single result in the way proper to it. The political apparatus by subjecting individuals to political State ideology, the ‘indirect’ (parliamentary) or ‘direct’ (plebiscitary or fascist) ‘democratic’ ideology. The communications apparatus by cramming every ‘citizen’ with daily doses of nationalism, chauvinism, liberalism, moralism etc., by means of the press, the radio and television. The same goes for the cultural apparatus (the role of sport in chauvinism is of the first importance), etc. The religious apparatus by recalling in sermons and the other great ceremonies of Birth, Marriage and Death, that man is only ashes, unless he loves his neighbor to the extent of turning the other cheek to whoever strikes first. The family apparatus .  .  . but there is no need to go on.
30 This concert is dominated by a single score, occasionally disturbed by contradictions (those remnants of the former ruling classes, those of the proletarians and their organizations): the score of the Ideology of the current ruling class which integrates into its music the great themes of the Humanism of the Great Forefathers, who produced the Greek Miracle even before Christianity, and afterwards the Glory of Rome, the Eternal City and the themes of Interest, particular and general, etc., nationalism, moralism and economism.

4) Nevertheless, in this concert, one ideological State apparatus certainly has a dominant role, although hardly anyone lends an ear to its music: it is so silent!  This is the School.

It takes children from every class at infant-school age, and then for years, the years in which the child is most ‘vulnerable’, squeezed between the family State apparatus and the educational State apparatus, it drums into them, whether it uses new or old methods, a certain amount of ‘know-how’ wrapping the ruling ideology (French, arithmetic, natural history, the sciences, literature) or simply ruling ideology in is pure state (ethics, civic instruction, philosophy). Somewhere around the age of sixteen, a huge mass of children is ejected ‘into production’: these are the workers or small peasants. Another portion of scholastically adapted youth carries on: and, for better or worse, it goes somewhat further, until it falls by the wayside and fills the posts of small and middle technicians, white-collar workers, small and middle executives, petty bourgeois of all kinds. A last portion reaches the summit, either to fall into intellectual self-employment, or to provide, as well as the ‘intellectuals of the collective laborers, the agents of exploitation (capitalists, managers), the agents of repression (soldiers, policemen, politicians, administrators, etc.) and the professional ideologists (priests of all sorts, most of whom are all convinced ‘laymen).

Each mass ejected en route is practically provided with an ideology which suits the role it has to fulfill in class society: the role of the exploited (with a ‘highly-developed’ ‘professional’, ethical’, ‘civic’, ‘national’ and a-political consciousness); the role of the agent of exploitation (ability to give workers orders and speak to them: ‘human relations’), of the agents of repression ( ability to give orders and enforce obedience ‘without discussion,’ or the ability to manipulate the demagogy of the political leader’s rhetoric), or the professional ideologist (ability to treat consciousness with the respect, i.e. with the contempt, blackmail, and demagogy they deserve, adapted to the accents of Morality, of Virtue, of “Transcendence’, of the Nation, of France’s World Role, etc.).

Of course, many of these contrasting Virtues (modesty, resignation, submissiveness on the one hand, cynicism, contempt, arrogance, confidence, self-importance, even smooth talk and cunning on the other) are also taught in the Family, in the Church, in the Army, in Good Books, in films and even in the football stadium. But no other ideological State apparatus has the obligatory (and not least, free) audience of the totality of the children in the capitalist formation, eight hours a day for five or six days out of seven.

But it is by an apprenticeship in a variety of know-how wrapped up in the massive inculcation of the ideology of the ruling class that the relations of production in the capitalist Social formation, i.e. the relations of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to the exploited are largely reproduced. The mechanisms which produce this vital result for the capitalist regime are naturally covered up and concealed by a universally reigning ideology of the School, universally reigning because it is one of the essential forms of the ruling bourgeois ideology: an ideology which represents the School as a neutral environment purged of ideology (because it is . . .lay), where teachers respectful of the ‘conscience’ and ‘freedom’ of the children who are entrusted to them (in complete confidence) by their parents (who are free, too, i.e. the owners of their children) open up for them the path to freedom, morality and responsibility of adults by their own example, by knowledge, literature and their ‘liberating’ virtues.

I ask the pardon of those teachers who, in dreadful conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can find in the history and learning they ‘teach’ against the ideology, the system and the practices in which they are trapped. They are a kind of hero. But they are rare and how many (the majority) do not even begin to suspect the ‘work’ the system (which is bigger than they are and crushes them) forces them to do, or worse, put all their heart  and ingenuity into performing it with the utmost awareness (the famous new methods!). So little do they suspect it that their own devotion contributes to the maintenance and nourishment of this ideological representation of the School, which makes the School today as ‘natural’, indispensable-useful and even beneficial for our contemporaries as the Church was ‘natural’, indispensable and generous for our ancestors a few centuries ago.

In fact, the Church has been replaced today in its role as the dominant Ideological State Apparatus by the School. It is coupled with the Family just as the Church was once coupled with the Family. We can now claim that the unprecedentedly deep crisis which is now shaking the education system of so many States across the globe, often in conjunction with a crisis (already proclaimed in the Communist Manifesto) shaking the family system, takes on a political meaning, given that the School (and the School-Family couple) constitutes the dominant Ideological State Apparatus, the Apparatus playing a determinant part in the reproduction of the relations of production of a mode of production threatened in its existence by the world class struggle.

April, 1970