Terror is “a social fact and a cultural construction” which
reinforces and mediates imperial sovereignty at a universal level. The ‘report’
functioning as a form of narration, facilitates the mediation of this culture
of terror. Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report is evidence of the report’s
paradoxical nature; on the one hand it elucidates the details of the torture
and terror of the Indian labour force by British colonials in the rubber trade
of the late 19th century. On the other hand, this report, like Michael
Taussig’s Culture of Terror-Space of
Death, serves as proof of the process through which a culture of fear is
established and maintained. The NSA’s intelligence reports uncovered by Snowden
are of a similar paradoxical character. They detail information uncovered on
potential terrorist threats, yet, simultaneously, they function as a
counter-discourse on account of their covert and sometimes illusory nature in
the context of society.
Narration functions, according to Taussig, as a facilitator
of the culture of terror. The development and foundation of the colonial
“diseased’ imagination, was largely the product of story-telling. For instance,
Crisóstomo Hernandez was a skilled orator of the time; his narration of terror
enabled him to reign over those who were fearful. In the context of the
Putumayo rubber boom, story telling operated as a political force enabling
colonial domination over the Indians. The manner, in which these stories
created a domineering climate of terror, was, asserts Taussig, the result of
“magical realism”. This involves “creating an uncertain reality out of
fiction”, where truth and illusion thereby become entangled, creating a social
force of fear. Such fear metastasized into “an organized culture… that
sustained the precarious solidarity of the rubber company employees”.
Accordingly, the culture of terror is “a high-powered tool
for domination and a principal medium of political practice.” And it is
precisely this climate of fear, which, following September 11, 2001, afforded the
NSA with increased scope in their surveillance operations. The accounts of NSA
findings take the form of reports, reinforcing the cultural construction of
terror. This construction is both reductive and inflammatory in nature. It,
like the files, obscures political agency, which has been employed to end
regimes of coercion such as terrorism.Yet, at the same time these accounts both
create and reinforce a climate of insecurity.
So, states of terror are a product of misinformation, transforming
sensory experience and producing fear even when the object of terror is absent
or illusory. It is exactly this process of secrecy and misinformation that
intelligence agencies rely upon for their success. The NSA’s reliance on
deception, as evidence in Clapper’s flagrant lie to congress about the extent
of the NSA’s data collection on American civilians, demonstrates the means
through which the NSA employs deception to reign over the population, in effect
reinforcing a climate of fear. Similarly, NSA’s ability to convince corporate
technology partners to intentionally insert flaws into their products is
further evidence of deception in the quest for hegemony.
As such, this climate of terror operates on two levels, the
individual as well as the social. It operates by destroying frameworks of
meaning and networks of trust, between the state, who afford NSA increased
authority and the individual, whose civil liberties are progressively
threatened by this augmentation of power. At a social level, the defence of
democracy in the digital age is threatened by the covert nature of state
surveillance.
The technology of the report, owing to the work of whistle-blower
Snowden, has created a global state of alertness. This transparency, or rather
overtness has generated a counter-discourse, enabling the victim to denounce
the hegemonic victimizer. This is novel. Political and legal mechanisms
necessary to hold the NSA accountable for their intelligence and security behaviour
have been and still largely are, rendered impossible due to the blanket secrecy
of their operations. For instance, challenging constitutional concerns in the
court of law are made virtually impossible when the application and
interpretation of FISA’s Act are held secret. Here, we can see how terror in
the context of Putumayo resulted in "a death-space in the land of the
living where torture's certain uncertainty fed the great machinery of the
arbitrariness of power”. Taussig therefore offers this “space of death” as a
threshold to establish meaning and consciousness in societies in which terror
and torture are pervasive.
This is applicable to the current digital age where, fear
has arisen from the perpetuation of terrorist threat and such “cultural
elaborations of fear” have in turn, enabled the control of mass populations.
The “true catharsis” of this state of insecurity is the self-subversion of the
counter discourse, made possible through contemporary whistle-blowers, such as
Edward Snowden.
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