Terror on the Beach (Commentary‪)‬

Life under late capitalism already compels us to sift through vast networks of information in order to gain a minimum of ontological security. Terrorism, however, adds a new degree of intensity to our obsession with sign hunting. If the globalization of paranoia has allowed our every communicative act to be logged and recorded by intelligence agencies for our own 'safety', at a cultural level we search for clues which grant some kind of perspective on the situation we are now told we live in--where 'everything has changed'. The search for parallels, indicators, predictors of the September 11 attacks goes on. Old conspiracies gain renewed status. We rediscover old science fiction movies and stories which tell of cities and civilizations destroyed. We sift through the global archive for traces of the uncanny in order to try and ground us in the present. It is this cultural imperative to find suitable paradigms for coming to terms with terror that has at least in part framed the reception of Michel Houellebecq's latest novel Platform. After the Bali bombings many commentators noticed that Platform--which was written two years earlier and ends with one of the main characters being slaughtered on a Thai beach by Muslim terrorists --could now be read as a kind of cultural pre-emptive strike. Of course it was Thailand and not Bali, but it was a (fictional) group of Muslim fanatical terrorists attacking tourists in the tropics, and for many people that was enough. It probably did not hurt that Houellebecq took a few cheap shots at Islam, both in the novel and in interviews, remarks which landed him in court and subsequently provoked a controversy about freedom of speech, which had its own precursor in the 'Rushdie affair'.