Roger Taussig begins his 1984 article “Culture of
Terror—Space of Death. Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of
Torture,” by introducing the concept of the “culture of terror.” For Taussig, a
culture of terror is a symbolic and discursive mediation of reality; it is a
particular kind of cultural lens that perceives the world as menacing and
antagonistic. The problem is that these discursive constructions of “reality”
have material implications; even though they might not be “factually correct,”
they nonetheless affect us as if they were, and we react accordingly.
The second important concept that Taussig introduces is that
of the “space of death.” This space is both symbolic and literal/material – it
is the epistemic “murk” that characterizes inter-cultural communication and
interaction. It is a discursive space wherein the “truth” of representations
cannot be established, and the symbolic imaginary is the only lens available
for interpreting/experiencing the world. One example that Taussig gives of this
type of “space of death” is the Belgian Congo in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The experience of a
Westerner like Marlow in the Congo unfolds entirely within a space of death—an
epistemic murk. The environmental and cultural context is so completely foreign
and unnerving to Marlow that he has no possible way of “knowing” whether the
tales of cannibalism and madness that he is being told are true. Since there is
no possibility for epistemic certainty, Marlow’s every action and conception of
his environment is mediated through the discursive lens. In the Belgian Congo,
as in Putumayo, the only discursive lens available to the western agents is
that of “civilization and economics vs. savagery and cannibalism.”
I think that what is most interesting here is Taussig’s
inversion of the dominant historiography of colonialism. The colonial encounter
is almost always depicted as the indigenous communities being terrorized into
submission by the invading powers, who arrive with biological and mechanical
technologies of destruction that seem otherworldly, magical, and demonic to the
indigenes. In this version of the encounter, the colonizers act out of
self-assured superiority and ruthlessly exploit the oppressed subjects. Insofar
as the colonial encounter is always a space of death (ie. of epistemic
uncertainty), I think Taussig would agree that the indigenes construct their
own discursive lens for interpreting and responding to the colonizer, and that
that discursive lens is almost always a culture of terror, but I also think
Taussig would argue that the colonizers themselves are acting within a culture
of terror—they too are terrorized. The colonizers have no way of attaining
epistemic certainty or knowledge about the indigenes, and usually attribute a
sort of heathen savagery and animalic demonism to them. The colonizers’
discursive construction of the indigene as savage and evil in turn terrifies
the colonizers, and causes them to experience the encounter as antagonistic and
threatening. In this way, the colonizers’ own perceptions of the indigenes
causes them to act in an excessively brutal manner. In Heart of Darkness, Mr. Kurtz’ insanity and brutality is not the
result of some calculated capitalist rationale – it is the only affective
response that is capable of retaliating against and responding to the imaginary
space in which he finds himself. The descent into barbarism and inhumanity that
Casement and Hardenburg document is the inevitable affective reaction to the
discursively-constructed culture of terror that the colonizers exist in.
To understand what I mean here, it is useful to recall
Walter Benjamin’s concept of the phantasmagoria. The shadowy images produced by
the phantasmagoric machine (in this case the imagery of cannibals and savage
indigenes, which are produced by the optic lens, the brain, and the narrative)
are perceived as real to the subject living inside the phantasmagoria. The
subject responds to these shadows as if they were real because it experiences
them as real.
The crucial question then becomes “how do we undermine the
discourses that reify the cultures of terror which give rise to inhumane
brutality?” The dominant method of constructing counter-discourses has been to
emphasize and rely upon scientific rationalism. The idea here is to undermine
imaginary realities by revealing the ‘true’ reality – that of materiality. In
the context of Putumaya, a counter-discourse of this type might take the form
of a scientific argument that “the indigenes are fundamentally and biologically
identical to the colonizers—the only differences being cultural and linguistic—and there is no irreducible
distinction between the two groups.” This kind of scientific counter-discourse
would be aimed at undermining the culture of terror that conceives of the
indigene as a distinct, non-human entity (eg. the auca, who is perceived as being part-beast). The strategy behind
such scientific counter-discourses is to eliminate the epistemic and
ontological uncertainty surrounding the encounter – to relocate the encounter
outside of the space of death.
Taussig thinks these kinds of counter-discourses are doomed
to fail. Instead of challenging the terrorizing phantasmagoria by attempting to
unveil the materiality behind the shadows, Taussig argues that an effective
counter-discourse needs to insert a different
phantasmagoria; one that allows for peaceful relations. A phantasmagoria that “perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the
impenetrable as everyday.” In other words, the only way to challenge fascist poetics
is with what might be called a poetics of
wonder; a poetics that is non-combative and non-imperial. I am very
sympathetic to this idea, since I think that the strategy of replacing discursive
imaginaries with scientific rationalism opens up the door to further
antagonisms (Nazi science is a perfect example of biologico-fascist poetics).
Ewen Macaskill and
Gabriel Dance’s article “NSA Files Decoded. What the Revelations Mean for You”
provides a commentary on a different historical culture of terror: the culture
of “national security” that arose following September 11, 2001. The space of
death out of which the culture of terror emerged was the epistemic uncertainty
surrounding the identity, intentions, capabilities, location, and affiliations
of the perpetrators. I’ll end this short essay by fleshing out the analogy
between Putumayo and the post-9/11 world. If we agree with this comparison, and
we accept that the national security discourse that gave rise to the Patriot
Act and the NSA is indeed a culture of terror, then it would seem that the
“savage” of Putumayo has been symbolically transfigured into the “terrorist” of
today. Those who live within the phantasmagoria of the War on Terror experience
the imaginary “terrorist” as a non-human evil; a savage demon waiting to
destroy them and end their civilization at any moment. They come to know this
“terrorist” through modern-day muchachos
– the reporters, specialists, government agencies, and ‘insiders’ who claim
some special knowledge of this shadowy figure, while simultaneously fueling and
confirming the dominant narratives and discourse. The citizens living within
this new culture of terror, like their colonial counterparts, impulsively arm
themselves with the inhumane brutality they feel is necessary to militant against
and protect themselves from this inhuman Other. In this reading of the War on
Terror, the atrocities committed by the colonizers in Putumayo reemerge—both in
prison camps like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, as well as in mainstream
American society. The NSA’s violation of the civil rights of hundreds of
millions of people is society’s collective response to the demonic threat of
terrorism.
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