Session 3: The Political Nexus I

Session 3: The Political Nexus 1
Chair:: Ipek Atik

The Politics of Terror
Ali Riza Taskale
Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom

The foreclosure of the political and the implosion of the social provoke new, obscene forms of violence: terror, which is not a product of “a clash between antagonistic passions, but the product of listless and indifferent forces” (Baudrillard 1993: 76). No wonder that it is terrorism—naked violence—that demolished the WTC (World Trade Center). Transpolitics and terror mirror each other in a smooth space of indistinction; they are the twin faces of control society.
This paper is threefold. Firstly, the paper will discuss that terror is a catastrophe that has become a dispositif, a technique of governance which imposes a particular conduct, a new model of truth and normality, on contemporary sociality by redefining power relations and by unmaking previous realities especially the aftermath of 9/11. That is, it is no longer an exceptional terror from the outside, it is terror within, terror which occupies an ambivalent zone between, or rather, disrupts the dialectic of exception and the rule. Discipline, control, and terror coexist; they contain within themselves elements of one another, and their topologies often overlap/clash, which is why it is difficult to ‘distinguish’ one form of power from another and why the space of power must be that of a zone of indistinction.
Secondly, the paper will assert that terror emerges as a utopia specific to control society, as its line of escape. It invests in insecurity, uncertainty, and unsafety, turning citizens into hostages, to homi sacri. In the transpolitical war against terror, the state extends exception as a permanent state along a totalitarian line (of flight from terror). The fantasy generated by terror is, in other words, based on the promise of security, certainty, and safety which brings us back to disciplinary entrenchment as protection against terror. Lastly, the paper will end a discussion of how escape from discipline enables control, how from within control society terror emerges, and how the territorial logic of discipline resurfaces in the aftermath of terror?

Tocqueville’s Virus: The Globalisation of Fear
Mark Featherstone
Department of Sociology, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire, United Kingdom

In this paper I use Alexis de Tocqueville’s notion of the virus, which he employed to describe the strange process that led the utopian ambitions of the French revolution to collapse into bloody terror, to trace the history of the relationship between utopia, dystopia, and the virus of fear. Following my reference to Tocqueville’s notion, which was in many respects attached to the modern event par excellence, I leap back to examine the origin of ancient modernity in Herodotus’s Histories. Here, I reflect upon the significance of Herodotus’s invention for the Greek world and suggest that Plato’s original utopia, which appeared in the century following the emergence of historical time, was comparable to a Freudian paranoid reaction-formation provoked by the anxiety caused by the recognition of the passage of time and the resolution of this anxiety in a dystopic society conditioned by its fear of others, people outside of the polis who were representative of chaos and dis-order.
In the second half of the paper I make use of this model of the relationship between history, utopia, dystopia, and fear to examine the origin of liberalism in the works of Machiavelli and Hobbes and the connection of these ideas to the nascent formations of capitalism in the 17th century. Here I show how anxiety, fear, and paranoia were embedded in the normal symbolic order of capitalism from the very beginning and suggest that the modern version of Platonic communism, expressed by Rousseau, Marx, and Engels, and realised by Robespierre, Lenin, and Stalin, was fated to produce nightmarish totalitarianisms simply because of the ways in which it reacted to the radical uncertainties of laissez-faire capitalism.
In the final section of the paper I turn off a discussion of the collapse of the European totalitarianism and the rise of American liberalism in the post-world war II world to explore the emergence of the neo-liberal utopia of fear, which suggests that radical anxiety is a condition to be embraced, and the explosion of new fundamentalisms, which reflect the emergence of new conservative utopias, psycho-social reaction-formations meant to resolve the anxiety of global insecurity in a new state of total certainty. Throughout the paper I hold onto Tocqueville’s metaphor of the virus to suggest that bio-political concerns have always been at the heart of efforts to control radical anxiety. In the first section of this paper I show how in the original utopia, the Republic, Plato was concerned to preserve the health of citizens through the construction of a monumental cordone sanitaire, the space of the city itself.
The same was true of the moderns. Whereas the totalitarians fought to preserve the integrity of their social systems from the virus of otherness, represented by consumerism in the Soviet model and impure blood in the Nazi version, through the construction of various walls, camps, and cordons, the liberals sought to domesticate anxiety, fear, and paranoia and transform it into a spur for the production of surplus value through webs of legal and cultural norms. I suggest that this situation has simply extended through the post-world war II, post-historical, period. The twin fundamentalisms operative in the contemporary world, represented by the neo-liberals determined to realise a globalised pure capitalism and the Islamic radicals set on the creation of a new Muslim super-state, are similarly set on harnessing or controlling the turbulence of the new world system that has led to the crystallisation of Tocqueville’s metaphor of the virus in all kinds of contagions and infections through its realisation of a truly globalised society characterised by uncertainty and, as a consequence, anxiety, fear, and paranoia.