Georgina Kilborn (Taussig- Entry no. 4)

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.