Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Of monsters

2004; Routledge; Volume: 18; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0950238042000232235

1466-4348

S. Amit,

Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology

Abstract Monsters gave birth to modernity: those unnamable figures of horror and fascination shadow civilization as its constitutive and abjected discontent. In Europe, from the late eighteenth century on, the term monstrosity mobilized a set of discursive practices that tied racial and sexual deviancy to an overall apparatus of discipline, and, later in the nineteenth century, to the emergence of biopolitics. This article draws a history of monstrosity through overlapping discourses, tying the contemporary figure of the monster-terrorist to the sexual and racial deviancy of what Michel Foucault termed the 'Abnormals.' Beginning with an engagement with Deleuze's and Foucault's notion of 'biopolitics,' this article follows the emergence of the monster-terrorist in that subfield of policy studies known as 'terrorism studies.' This article argues that specific and implicit conceptions of the civilized psyche, linked to norms of the heterosexual family, ground the figure of the Islamic terrorist in an older colonial discourse of the despotic and licentious Oriental male. Keywords: oriental despotismterrorismexcessmonstrositysexualityracebiopolitics Notes See http://www.witchshaven.com/talitubby.html. For the Falwell-Teletubby debate, see Bill Ghent (); Carolyn Gargaro (); Jonah Goldberg (). Gargaro notes in her article: 'On the 24th of December, 1997 CNN reported that Tinky Winky was gay. "The Teletubbies also have a following among the gay community. Tinky Winky, who carts around a red handbag but speaks with a male voice, has become something of a gay icon" [CNN, 12/24/97]'. Although no longer available at the site dailyadultjoke.com (probably for copyright infringement reasons – for more information contact the author directly [arai@english.fsu.edu]), other similarly digitally altered images are still available, such as 'Saddamized in San Francisco' Originally aired on 9 April 2002. I am following Gilles Deleuze in his elaboration of the concept of assemblage: 'What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage's only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a sympathy' (Deleuze and Parnet , p. 69). Much could be said here about Delueze's tying sympathy, as symbiosis, to the 'unity' of relations he calls an assemblage. As a form of reading, my aim is to stage the confrontation, and the fraught confluence of 'different natures' of interpretative practices. Or death: in his illuminating article on 'Necropolitics', Mbembe () argues that counter-terrorism is a war machine that assembles on the same plane of immanence strategies and rationalities of discipline, biopolitics and now, once again, necropolitics. For a fuller consideration of this argument, see Jasbir , 'Remaking a model minority', forthcoming in Social Text. In a review of a recent art exhibition on the monstrous at the DeCordova Musuem, Miles Unger glosses why a meditation on monstrosity is timely: 'having been thrust into a context never imagined by its organizers may perhaps work to the show's advantage, throwing into bold relief many aspects of the monstrous that might otherwise have remained harder to detect. Now, more than ever, it seems important not to neglect our fears and to inspect by daylight the demons that always hide in the recesses of the mind. Psychologists have often suggested a therapeutic role for tales of horror, which allow us to acknowledge real fears in a form made manageable through narrative conventions' (Unger ). The analysis that follows is part of an on-going research agenda around questions of citizenship, the normalized psyche, globalization and counter-terrorism after 9/11. Part of this analysis has been produced through conversations with Jasbir K. Puar (see Puar and Rai, ). Moreover, this analysis has a specific genealogy: it is informed by the pioneering work of scholars and activists such as Edward Said (, ), Cynthia Enloe (), Ann Tickner (), Noam Chomsky (), Shirin M. Rai (), Edward Herman (), Helen Caldicott (), Philip Agee (), Talal Asad () and others. These writers have opened a space of critique that brings the epistemological and ethical claims of terrorism studies to crisis. Their rigorous and impassioned interrogation of US foreign policy has not only enabled subsequent writers to make connections to ongoing domestic wars against people of colour and the working poor, but crucially their critiques have also enabled the counter-memory of other genealogies, histories and modes of power – for example, sexuality, colonialism and normalization. As Said put it in Orientalism, 'modern Orientalists – or area experts, to give them their new name – have not passively sequestered themselves in language departments … Most of them today are indistinguishable from other "experts" and "advisers" in what Harold Lasswell has called the policy sciences' (1971, p. 107). (See Lasswell , Lasswell , and also Lerner .) Later in his critique of Orientalism, Said remarks on how monstrosity was used by such 'biological speculators' as Isidore and (his father) Etienne St. Hilaire in the first half of the nineteenth century in France: 'Not only were Etienne and Isidore legatees of the tradition of "Romantic" biology, which included Goethe and Cuvier …but they were also specialists in the philosophy and anatomy of monstrosity – teratology, as Isidore called it – in which the most horrendous physical aberrations were considered a result of internal degradation within the species-life'. Such anomalies (whether physical or linguistic, let us keep in mind) 'confirm the regular structure binding together all members of the same class' (Said , pp. 144–5). One can link monstrosity, therefore, to nineteenth-century projects of physical anthropology and comparative linguistics that integrated concerns for 'regular' structure within an overall framework of the intrinsic coherence of nature. From Rand's website: Our job is to help improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis. We do that in many ways. Sometimes, we develop new knowledge to inform decision-makers without suggesting any specific course of action. Often, we go further by spelling out the range of available options and by analyzing their relative advantages and disadvantages. On many other occasions, we find the analysis so compelling that we advance specific policy recommendations. In all cases, we serve the public interest by widely disseminating our research findings. RAND (a contraction of the term research and development) is the first organization to be called a 'think tank'. We earned this distinction soon after we were created in 1946 by our original client, the US Air Force (then the Army Air Forces). Some of our early work involved aircraft, rockets, and satellites. In the 1960s we even helped develop the technology you're using to view this web site. (http://www.rand.org/about/) Ruby (, p. 18). Like Post, Strentz also has offered a personality grid for terrorist psychopathology. 's first type of terrorist is the leader. Such a person has the overall vision and intellectual purpose of the terrorist group. He/she understands the theoretical underpinnings of the group's ideology. Strentz proposed that such a person has developed a sense of inadequacy but projects his/her sense of inadequacy onto society (thus, the belief that society is inadequate and in need of change). The leader is suspicious, 'irrationally dedicated', and uses 'perverted logic' (1981, p. 88). The narcissist and paranoid personality is attracted to this terrorist position. The second of Strentz's roles is that of the opportunist. Such a person has technical know-how and is the group's 'muscle'. Strentz suggested such a person has a criminal history that predates his/her involvement in the terrorist group. According to Strentz, the antisocial personality is drawn to the opportunist role. Lastly, there is the idealist. This is the young person who is never satisfied with the status quo and who has a naive view of social problems and social change. Strentz claims that an inadequate personality best describes the person who is attracted to this role. This confrontation between Order and its Other would be predicated not only on the isolation of a discreet and clearly identifiable figure, that of the Oriental despot, but also on a certain geographical determinism. Inden depicts this famous confrontation in this way: 'Characterized by a salubrious mixture of topographic zones and a temperate climate, Western Europe is inhabited by temperate peoples of wide-ranging skills and organized into nations of a moderate to small size. Asia, with vast river valleys juxtaposed to its uplands and a climate either hot or cold, is inhabited by peoples of extreme temperament and organized into large empires' (2001, p. 52). Of course, this construction of Oriental despotism went through a series of revisions and epistemic ruptures over the course of at least two centuries. From early Missionary deployment in the Clapham sect, through formalization in James Mill's utilitarianism, from scienticization in the anthropological texts of Henry Maine and Alfred Lyall, to anti-national stereotyping of educated Babus in Rudyard Kipling's sociological fiction, the Oriental despot was never exactly the same character twice. As we shall see, this shifting figure, as the constitutive exclusion that enabled British discourses on civilization, sexuality and the nation, haunts a scene set beyond history or fiction. Consider for instance, 's Wali Dad in 'On the City Wall' (1990, pp. 153–73) or the Bengali Babu in Kim (1983). Macaulay writes Nothing in history or fiction, not even the story which Ugolino told in the sea of everlasting ice, after he had wiped his bloody lips on the scalp of his murderer, approaches the horrors which were recounted by the few survivors of that night. They cried for mercy. They strove to burst the door. Holwell who, even in that extremity, retained some presence of mind, offered large bribes to the goalers. But the answer was that nothing could be done without the Nabob's orders, that the Nabob was asleep, and that he would be angry if anybody woke him. Then the prisoners went mad with despair. They trampled each other down, fought for the places at the windows, fought for the pittance of water with which the cruel mercy of the murderers mocked their agonies, raved, prayed, blasphemed, implored the guards to fire among them. The goalers in the meantime held lights to the bars, and shouted with laughter at the frantic struggles of their victims. At length the tumult died away in low gaspings and moanings. The day broke. The Nabob had slept off his debauch, and permitted the door to be opened.... But these things – which, after the lapse of more than eighty years, cannot be told or read without horror – awakened neither remorse not pity in the bosom of the savage Nabob. (Macaulay , pp. 395–6, emphasis added) See Derrida's analysis of the 'remarkable' trait as the law of the law of genre, where he writes: 'If I am not mistaken in saying that such a trait is remarkable in every aesthetic, poetic or literary corpus, then consider this paradox, consider the irony (which is not reducible to a consciousness or an attitude): this supplementary and distinctive trait, a mark of belonging or inclusion, does not properly pertain to any genre or class. The re-mark of belonging does not belong' (Derrida , pp. 60–1). The questions that are posed in this literature are: Why does terrorism occur? What motivates terrorists? What strategies and tactics do terrorists employ to achieve their goals? How do terrorists perceive their external environment? Under what conditions will terrorists abandon their violent struggle? The success of the terrorism studies literature in answering these questions is uneven.... [T]he most powerful analyses of the origins of terrorism tend to be highly specific, applying only to a single terrorist movement of an individual terrorist, and rooted in particular social and psychological circumstances. (Falkenrath , pp. 159–81, p. 164). I would also add that the recent articles that I have read in this journal do not indicate a monovocal diatribe against the 'terror from the East' (see Chalk , pp. 241–69, p. 242). Gigante notes that during the same period 'the physiologist John Abernethy (1764–1831), whom Keats knew from his medical training at Guy's Hospital in London, was claiming that materialist practitioners of the "science of life" were destroying all the poetry of the living organism by reducing it to the sum of its functions. Just as the physical sciences had eliminated the life of the rainbow, in other words, radical physiologists, such as Abernethy's rival William Lawrence (1783–1867), were threatening to dissolve the mystery of life itself. Scientific discourse between 1780 and 1830 was preoccupied with the idea of a "living principle" that distinguished living matter from nonliving. The focal point for the dispute between Abernethy and Lawrence over this possibility of a supervenient vital principle was the work of the British physiologist John Hunter (1728–1793). Although Hunter was not the first to renounce the mechanical application of Newtonian principles to the living organism, he lent the weight of extensive empirical experimentation to the idea that life was something superadded to-or in excess of-physical organization'. Against the materialism represented by Lawrence, vitalists in the wake of Hunter sought to define the science of life beyond the mechanistic sphere of Newtonian science that had dominated the physiology of the first half of the eighteenth century' (Gigante , p. 433). As Gigante argues: 'The French zoologist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, building on the work of Georges Cuvier and Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, founded a school of philosophical anatomy on the concept of "unity of composition". The concept allowed Geoffroy and his leading disciple, Etienne Serres, like Hunter, to define monstrosity as something gone awry during "recapitulation", or self-repetition' (437). 'West Wing airs attacks show' (BBC News ); see also Shales (). Drawing on Richard Dienst, Gilles Delueze, and Stephen Heath, Patricia Clough has recently argued that television, whose unit of value is not narrative but rather the 'image', aims primarily to capture attention and modulate affect through a logic of exposure, over- and underexposure; television works more directly than cinema in attaching the screen/image and the body. … this is because television is not 'a subject-system', that is, a technological system understood to be perfecting the human being, serving as an extension of the human body, while maintaining the intentional knowing subject at its center and as its agency. Instead, television makes the subject only one element in a 'network imagination' of teletechnology. As such, television points to and produces itself in a network of a vast number of machinic assemblages, crisscrossing bodies – not just human bodies – producing surplus value, pleasure, and signs all on one plane. (Clough , p. 99). The taxonomy reads thus: '"a certain Chinese encyclopedia" in which it is written that "animals are divided into: a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, I) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies"' (Foucault , p. xv).