Homegrown. Piotr M. Szpunar

Jerzy Lec, Myśli Nieuczesane

      THE BOMBER. The all-caps bolded declaration juxtaposed against the image of an attractive teenager is a dissonant composition, one that scribbles in a tense interval into the score of the war on terror. For some, the image and its placement, reminiscent of Jim Morrison’s posthumous Rolling Stone cover (September 17, 1981), not only glamorized a terrorist, but worse still disrespected his victims. Three people were killed and about 260 injured on the final stretch of the 2013 Boston Marathon when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his older brother Tamerlan remotely detonated two homemade bombs. Tamerlan was killed during a shootout with police. The younger brother’s fate was foreshadowed by the caption accompanying the 1981 Morrison cover to which the 2013 one was widely compared: “He’s hot, he’s sexy, and he’s dead.” Tsarnaev was tried, found guilty of all thirty counts with which he was charged, and sentenced to death in 2015.

      For others the image marked a cadence, the shifting of the war on terror into a new modality, however unpleasing. This sentiment was most clearly expressed by the Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi who ruminated about the nature of the “modern terrorist”: “You can’t see him coming. He’s not walking down the street with a scary beard and a red X through his face. He looks just like any other kid.” In Taibbi’s juxtaposition of the Tsarnaev cover to a 2011 Time magazine cover that posthumously featured Osama bin Laden (with “a scary beard and a red X”), the image of the enemy-terrorist morphs from a clearly delineated other packed in neat Orientalist binaries into a figure that confuses the boundaries that demarcate us from other. This figure is the Double.

      After 9/11 philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek asked, “Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?” echoing the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s post–Cold War reflections in which he lamented the violence that the loss of an identifiable enemy might bring. This lost enemy is the spatial-political structuring enemy central to the thought of German jurist Carl Schmitt.1 Yet, even as Žižek acknowledged the dispersion of the enemy into a shadowy network, he recognized the reinvigoration of the binary logic of the enemy image. Indeed, for the first decade of the twenty-first century, bin Laden (in name and image) acted as a synecdochic figure that stood in for a dispersed global enemy, providing a template for countless popular and political representations of threat, one built atop age-old Orientalist fantasies. The enemy, imagined as other, unifies a collective. By embodying what a collective is not—and externalizing blame, aggression, and evil—the other provides a clearly bounded adversary (by race, culture, religion, ideology, etc., however porous the political borders) against which to identify and be identified, against which to mobilize and be mobilized.2

      In 2010, Attorney General Eric Holder publicly announced that the threat facing the United States had changed. He warned Americans that they had reason to fear their neighbors, those “raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born.”3 Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security, reiterated Holder’s assertion in a statement to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. She testified that the threat of homegrown terrorism—Americans taking up arms against their own country—has no “typical profile.”4 Certainly, the claim that the enemy is “walking among us” is a commonplace war on terror assertion. But it is a claim based on the loosening of state boundaries—the enemy walks across borders and within our cities. In the context of the war on terror, analysis of what threat looks like, that is, how it is represented, has continued to center on what the Italian political philosopher Carlo Galli calls the “hyper-representation” of others (the racialized enemy images that Žižek sees as reinvigorated).5 But the Double figure that I develop in this book, and that Napolitano and Holder invoke, does not fit this mold. Rather, it is a threat explicitly communicated as one not clearly or categorically identifiable. It demarks a foe running loose within the country’s borders who might look, talk, and/or act “like us,” who might materialize in the people and places one would least expect, even a good-looking, pot-smoking, popular university student.

      This book fills this gap and analyzes security discourses that do not depend exclusively on hyper-representations of threat. Instead, it focuses on discourses that also rely on the regular invocation of markers of likeness and similarity. The articulations of likeness in security discourse are not to be taken as self-evident claims. Rather, much like those of difference they are “non-factual” constructs. In other words, I examine the exploitation of the murkiness against which hyper-representations are said to be deployed by the state. Here, the bin Laden image is overlaid (and as I will show neither erased nor discarded) by multiple, shifting others; Tsarnaev’s is only one iteration in an ever-expanding series. Contra the other, the Double is a figure that, in failing to externalize the negative of a collective’s own self-image, functions to disrupt the collective, marking the group as fractured. It takes the ambivalent and productive splitting of cultural theorist Homi Bhabha’s stereotype (simultaneously dangerous/active and obedient/passive) and redirects it onto one’s own community.6 More broadly, I show throughout this book that the Double is a modality of communicating threat that reflects the cultural-political plane on which contemporary security discourses operate. Here, the spectrality of the structuring enemy migrates onto the plane of representation. In this process members of a collective are marked as potentially dangerous, both suspect and susceptible.

      Indeed, the breadth of events and actors described as terrorist has expanded in recent years, accompanied by the proliferation of debates concerning who is “the real terrorist” (though the seed of either growth is not to be found in the rubble of the Twin Towers). Referring to groups who participate in arson and other acts of sabotage, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced in 2008 that “ecoterrorism” was the country’s number-one domestic terror threat. In both 2009 and 2015, the Department of Homeland Security stated that the nation’s most dangerous terrorists sprang from the political right—racist white supremacists and the Sovereign Citizen movement, respectively. The violence of the former most recently materialized when nine African American churchgoers were massacred in Charleston, South Carolina. The latter consists of loosely affiliated individuals who reject the authority of the federal government, several of whom have targeted and killed police officers. The violence against persons and property in these contexts is carried out by white men. However, in their warnings to the American public, Holder and Napolitano were concerned with neither the activist left nor the racist right. Rather, in both instances they were referring to jihadists.

      There have certainly been incidents of jihadist violence in addition to the Boston Marathon bombing that have perplexed commonplace war on terror stereotypes. In 2011, Daniel Patrick Boyd, a former high school football star and small business owner from North Carolina, plead guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists. As did a New Jersey woman, Colleen LaRose (aka Jihad Jane), that same year in an unrelated case. In 2015, a Protestant-raised Oregon man turned al-Qaeda operative named Adam Gadahn was killed in a drone strike. A federal grand jury indicted him for treason nine years earlier. All three homegrown jihadists are Caucasian. More recently, sympathizers and recruits of the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) have left pundits similarly perplexed (such as the case of a nineteen-year-old white woman, Shannon Maureen Conley, from Colorado who was arrested by federal agents as she was about to board an Istanbul-bound flight, her first and last stop before heading to Syria). But, as this book will show, invocations of likeness in the context of terrorist threat, like those found in the statements of Holder and Napolitano, are not limited to those who are white. In this effort, here I depart from the Tsarnaev case and return to it in the conclusion.

      In this book, I am not interested in adjudicating whether or not, or how much, an individual (threat, enemy, or foe) is “like us.” This is often the work of rabid nationalists, though hardly exclusive to them. Rather, I approach claims of likeness from a more oblique angle. The original valence of Polish poet Stanisław Lec’s aphorism in the epigraph is ethical and unhinging.7 It draws attention to how a collective can take on the monstrous qualities it projects onto its adversary in times of war. The moment he describes is not one of identification, nor is it simply a matter of role reversal. It is a fundamentally disruptive experience of asymmetrical refraction in which identification itself is put into doubt. Holder and Napolitano’s statements, however,