24/7, 16.8: is 24 a political show?

When writing about culture, one must necessarily contend with the problem of meaning. What can be said coherently about any given cultural artifact? Is the artifact always forthright about expressing what it means? Or is the artifact dealing in figurative expression, an allegory perhaps, that might make covert reference to a parallel, alternate narrative? What is the "best" technique for hunting down such a parallel narrative? Must we all become vigilant audience members, carefully substituting readings for or against any given manifest clue, in order that the latent narrative may see the light of day?

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There is a commonsense notion today that 24, the Fox television drama that premiered in 2001, is a show that tells us something about contemporary life. Roughly stated, the conventional wisdom on 24 is that "the show is America." Set in the post-9/11 United States, the hour-long serial is a prism into the nation itself, its anxieties about terrorism and torture, the growing police state, an obsession over real-time phenomena, the security of the clan and the family, the power of information systems, and the like. In recent months the show has provoked a flurry of controversy around these and other hot-button political debates.

Whether or not any of these issues adequately describes the inner workings of this particular cultural artifact remains to be seen. However, I would like to pose it as a problem for critique. Is 24 a political show? If so, in what ways is it political? How does this particular cultural artifact express a political claim? What hermeneutic method is appropriate to interpret the "meaning" of 24?

The most prevalent interpretation of 24 is a political one because the series advocates a utilitarian moral philosophy that pits dubious short-term actions (e.g., torture) against the "greater good" of the contemporary state. If the new millennium brings a novel spin to the utilitarian impulse, it is probably the way in which a teleological sense of total utility is concocted anew with both a tick-tock urgency and a military state in which the "maximized good" is that of moral truth itself. It is not clear if this is utopia or fascism. Nevertheless, two flags become unfurled. On one hand, the sense of urgency is a natural sublimation of the information age in which networked instantaneousness is the expected norm; any political "solution" is chronologically dependent only on the computer cycles available to execute it. The challenges in 24 are always informatic in this sense, because they hinge on the abilities of various cybernetic systems (weapon, com-link, agent, satellite camera) to operate smoothly without obstruction. On the other hand, from where does the show derive its yen for the definition of the total moral frame as that of the security of the state--at any cost--against total annihilation? This is also the consummate late-modern anxiety that those threats, which until now have arrived in many shades of grey, have now become, like the computer itself, binary; like the nuclear holocaust of the cold war, the terror strike, or the viral pandemic, or the warming of the planet--which promise to arrive not with small pricks of pins and needles but with a total collapse without recourse.

The utilitarian moral philosophy appears via a number of narrative and formal details. The most common is the digital clock, both in the nondiegetic time code that appears regularly before and after each commercial interruption and occasionally during narrative action, but also with in-world clocks that are ticking in every show (the nuke in season two, the virus pods in season three, the gas canisters in season five, etc.). The clock is adept at heightening the persuasiveness of the utilitarian rationale, for it convincingly elevates the absolute importance of the teleological good over the necessary blood that must be spilled in order to get there. If the end of society is so near, in seconds and minutes even, who will notice a little bit of spilt milk? Even President Wayne Palmer, one of the show's few characters not guided solely by the utilitarian impulse, confesses: "Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing for the right reason."

The question of totality is crucial here. One should remember that in Marxist theory "totality," echoed later by Georg Lukacs as simply the "whole," was an indicator for political consciousness: as capital evolves via fragmentation and isolation, thus progressive thought must totalize both spatially and systemically but also chronologically via reference to "historical" wholes. The teleological quality of utilitarianism as utopia, in the form of thinking about the total security of the population or the future good in broad strokes, is thus at first blush a positive development. It evokes the extremely valuable task, in a very general sense, of obtaining a knowledge of future desires in terms of the material present. This is a version of totality that is closely allied with achieving a progressive social consciousness. In 24, however, this does not happen. In a sort of "transfer of affect," any viable consciousness of social totality is transferred in the show over to the absolute totality of the moral claim: first that "we must save innocent lives" (the utopian, biopolitical claim), which leads directly to the second that "we must stop the terrorists at all costs" (the fascistic, utilitarian claim). All intermediate crimes therefore--murder, suspension of juridical rights--are absolved and erased by the moral telos. The totality creating the horizon of truth by virtue of the moral claim itself defines a new set of expedient "realities on the ground" that fit into such an image of the situation.

Yet the utilitarian position is perhaps most interesting not for the expedient solutions it proposes but for the way in which it prohibits alternate moral frames such as the fixity of specific economies and flows, the logical destiny that this or that must happen no matter what the injury, the militarization of everyday life, the alienation of the here and now in exchange for some profiting to be realized later--this is the ideological framework of millennial U.S. capitalism that saturates the moral narrative of the show. It is fundamentally the inability to think or dream in a non-economic manner that is the "totality" of the utilitarian claim. But what sorts of alternate frames are possible? Certainly pacifism has been evacuated as a possible moral frame, or altruism, or any sense of romanticism. Barring the saccharine subplots concerning the reuniting of various Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) family members, there is no inner life in this story, no feeling of interiority, and no longing for communion with humanity. But ironically it is also the moral frame of universalism that must fall by the wayside. The expediency of utilitarianism, at least in the militarized and biopolitical form evident in 24, is one that claims that there are no absolutes. For this is the only way in which short term crimes can be absolved by long-term solutions. Any action is okay today, as long as it is efficient and expedient in the long run. But is this not also the moral relativism of capitalism, that those cute premodern values such as family, justice, or the integrity of the individual must be cast off for 'round-the-clock attention to the bottom line? Thus the single moral claim, that the whole must endure, brings about its inversion in the absolute erosion of ethical action minute by minute.

To summarize, "totality" in 24 has a double if not triple life. It refers to the singular utilitarian frame, which must be asserted globally in order to vaporize any sense of experiential moral holism at the human level. Beyond this is a different notion of totality, the Marxian notion that the whole must always be brought to the fore if we are to make any coherent sense of our life or the social space we inhabit. In this new cognitive totality, one finds the logic of all the rest reflected. In fact, the logic will indicate the hermeneutic process itself, replete as it is with all the necessary gaps and hiccups of doing interpretive work.