Making the Terrorist Dance: Technologies of Power, Foucault, and September 11, 2001

 

By Elizabeth R. Kesling, Earlham College

 

 

“Disciplinary punishment has the function of reducing gaps.  It must therefore be essentially corrective.”

--Michel Foucault1

 

“Use power to help people. For we are given power not to advance our own purposes nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power and it is to serve people.”                                     

--George W. Bush

 

“Similarly, the offender becomes an individual to know.”             

--Michel Foucault2

 

“The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends. It is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them...We've seen their kind before. The terrorists are the heirs to fascism. They have the same wield of power, the same disdain for the individual, the same mad global ambitions.”                                          

--George W. Bush

 

 

There can no longer be any doubt today that “...we must hear the distant roar of battle” (Foucault 308).  And yet, although “I can hear you, the rest of the world can hear you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,”3 the reverberation of a certain discourse has yet to yield much more of a figure than the promise of Osama bin Laden or the reduction of Saddam Hussein.  Perhaps all of this noise has failed to bring forth the elusive figure of the terrorist, yet I would argue that this loud rhetoric of terrorism has succeeded to such an extent that we can see the terrorist everywhere.  If, however, this is indeed a battle, where is the blood?

Discourse and its subject are intertwined in the public sphere because of the presence (or perhaps) absence of a certain technology of power in which the iterability of 9/11/2001 has become yet another of its mechanisms.  In other words, the fact that there is an uncanny doubling in the simultaneous appearance of terrorist networks and the failure of the bloody spectacle of the terrorist to appear suggests that we are dealing with a technology of power where both the war against terror and the terrorist emerge out of the same event.  Consequently, to speak of terrorism produces a rapid multiplication of terrorists everywhere, providing the justification for a worldwide war on terror.  The act of speaking about 9/11/01 allows the terrorist and the war fighting terrorism to emerge. 

In analyzing the shift from authoritative to disciplinary power, particularly with the disappearance both of the monarchical state and public torture, Foucault demonstrates that the new form of power after the Enlightenment becomes a more efficient means of producing the obedient subject.  Before the Enlightenment, the dominance of the king was displayed as prominently as possible, especially when it came to dealing with the transgressive subject. Foucault states:

 

The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual….Besides its immediate victim, the crime attacks the sovereign; it attacks him personally, since the law represents the will of the sovereign; it attacks him physically, since the force of the law is the force of the prince….in punishment, there must always be a portion that belongs to the prince…it requires redress for the injury that has been done to his kingdom…but it also requires that the king take revenge for an affront to his very person (Foucault 47-8).

 

How does the form of punishment employed, then, correlate to the type of power exercised before the eighteenth century? If, as Foucault suggests, “…[punishment] belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested” (47), the punishment enacted on the body of the criminal was in direct correlation to the very physical power emanating from the presence of the king.  The form of punishment is inextricable from a certain understanding of the subject, and this understanding is derived from the exercise of power.  Power produces knowledge, which produces a subject and also the means by which to subject the subject4.  If the form of punishment before the Enlightenment was spectacular, it was because the king’s power was impressive in its excess.  Consequently, even the criminal became glorified upon the gallows.  The visible abundance of the king’s wealth of power translated directly onto his glorious subject, who upon transgressing, was visibly and spectacularly punished.

The emergence during the Enlightenment, then, of the liberated individual no longer subject to the will of the king ironically becomes the condition for a new type of subjection (Foucault 222).  The Enlightenment’s fascination with disciplines, with the possible divisions of knowledge, yielded a disciplinary power framework to which the new Enlightenment intellectual could be subjected.  In stark contrast to authoritative power, however, disciplinary power manifests itself almost entirely without public display.  In fact the very ideal of disciplinary power operates under the assumption that power is most efficient when there is an absolute absence of the public spectacle.   Foucault explains:

 

The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible….there were the minor techniques of multiple and intersecting observations, of eyes that must see without being seen (170-1).

 

The removal of the monarch meant that excess visibility of power could no longer be tolerated.  Power vanished from the public eye, and instead, made its appearance in the everyday disciplining of its subjects.  The glorified criminal becomes replaced by the “docile body” of the soldier, the student, or the prisoner, much as the excessively brutal judge becomes an attention to detail, to the minute functionings of a power that was at once not traceable in any one body and yet everywhere in people’s minds.

The disappearance of the singular manifestation of power marked a shift from a power that exercised control over the body to one that exercised control over the soul.  While discipline was an exact science of the control of the body, its power to discipline came from the Enlightenment notion of the soul of the individual as the key to his/her subjectivity.  The sudden discovery of the soul as the mechanism yielding the individual simultaneously resulted in the soul as a means to subject that individual. 

The absence of the singular figure of power meant that punishment, too, could no longer be spectacular.  But the question became, however, how it was possible within the disciplinary power framework to move from spectacle to discourse.  Foucault argues that disciplinary power does not need specific individuals to fulfill the role of the observed and the observers, for if individuals are disciplined into obedient subjects, then any one of these individuals can exercise power over him/herself.  The same individual is both the one being disciplined and the one providing the discipline (Foucault 206).  Rather than speaking of the singular and excessive figure of the monarch, one becomes obsessed with the individual cell, the disciplined individual whose concept of his/her own liberation allows him/her to be subjected to the restriction of that liberty.

Disciplinary power is formed out of the desire to be independent and the nature of discipline.  While the very desire to be independent allows for disciplinary power to function most efficiently, the very nature of disciplinary power prevents any true independence, for no individual who has been appropriately disciplined can entirely negate society. This is perhaps one of the most ingenious aspects of disciplinary power, for it creates an individual that simultaneously denies and proves the existence of a coercive force.  The iteration of various disciplinary mechanisms leads to the establishment of a “technology” of power so efficient that the individual can only be such to the extent to which he/she is subjected to the collective functionings of the society.  Consequently, the individual will subject him/herself willingly to discipline so that he/she can know him/herself more completely.  This increase in knowledge in turn leads to the further success of discipline.  It is the inextricable relationship between power and knowledge, then, that makes the “technology” of disciplinary power an art.

Within the bounds of criminality, a subversive individual is produced who allows the further manifestation of disciplinary power.  This delinquent figure, in doing the “dirty work” of the disciplinary society, becomes knowable by the patterns of his/her criminality.  The very fact that the delinquent can be named as “madman,” as “maniac,” or even as “terrorist” provides for the possibility of his/her rehabilitation through the disciplinary mechanisms of the penal system.  In short, the individual delinquent can be linked to a collectivity of delinquents within a history of delinquency such that his/her repeated transgressions become merely iterations of a predictable pattern of criminal behavior.

In examining Bush’s speeches and the media’s coverage of the event and its aftermath, September 11 and the terrorist cells responsible for it begin to bear an eery resemblance to the Foucauldian delinquent.  As Foucault states:

The positive mechanics will operate to the full in the language of every day, which will constantly reinforce it with new accounts.  Discourse will become the vehicle of the law: the constant principle of universal recoding...’Filled with these terrible images and salutary ideas, each citizen will spread them through his family and there, by long accounts delivered with as much fervour as they are avidly listened to, his children gathered around him, will open up their young memories to receive, in imperishable lineaments, the notion of crime and punishment, the love of law and country’ (Foucault 112).

In order to avoid glorifying the terrorist or the terrorist act as a spectacular display of excessive or authoritarian power, the event of September 11 is made routine by its very repetition.  The invocation of September 11 becomes the means through which society and its individuals are disciplined; the invocation of September 11 makes both the terrorist emerge and the United States emerge as subjects.

With the emergence of the terrorist as delinquent, we see also the appearance on the scene of multiple experts, all of whom claim the power and the authority to “name” the terrorist and the terrorist act.  But how have we moved today to the sudden (or perhaps not so sudden) emergence of the expert and the delinquent terrorist? How has it become possible to take one event, that of 9/11, and translate it into a global network of terrorism that seemingly knows no bounds? How has it become possible to trace the movements of terrorism and terrorist cells even across national boundaries? How, in other words, has it now become possible to name the terrorist?

Foucault argues that there is a decisive shift in the penal system’s approach to criminality, and that this shift is a result of the change in focus from the body of the criminal to the soul of the criminal.  In short, because discipline is concerned with the rehabilitation of the criminal, it is not so much the crime itself that becomes the object of focus but the extenuating circumstances, the history behind the crime that are the source of disciplinary power5.  Our ability as experts on criminal behavior to categorize, to provide the historical context for the terrorist act becomes the means through which we can incorporate the terrorist as delinquent into the disciplinary power framework.  Take this example from one of George W. Bush’s addresses:

 

This group and its leader -- a person named Osama bin Laden -- are linked to many other organizations in different countries, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.  There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries.  They are recruited from their own nations and neighborhoods and brought to camps in places like Afghanistan, where they are trained in the tactics of terror.  They are sent back to their homes or sent to hide in countries around the world to plot evil and destruction.

 

We find that the terrorist today is more obedient than ever.  Indeed, our not-so-concealed delight in discovering the vast disciplinary mechanisms of the terrorist cell means that we truly have a subject worth studying.  The sheer audacity of the disciplined terrorist thrills us to no end; it has every “expert” babbling incessantly because we can see the disciplinary power framework at work even in the delinquent behavior of the terrorist.  Take for instance, these excerpts from others of George W. Bush’s addresses in which the visibility of the terrorist cell leads to the possibility of its incorporation into a disciplined society:

 

Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen.  It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears, and showed us the true scope of the task ahead.  We have seen the depth of our enemies' hatred in videos, where they laugh about the loss of innocent life.  And the depth of their hatred is equaled by the madness of the destruction they design.  We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities, detailed instructions for making chemical weapons, surveillance maps of American cities, and thorough descriptions of landmarks in America and throughout the world.

 

Because it is now possible to link the individual terrorist to an entire terrorist network, rehabilitation is no longer just about the amelioration of the individual terrorist but of the entire nation which harbors these terrorists.  If we can speak of a certain transnational terrorism today, it is because the disciplinary apparatus has allowed our knowledge of this delinquent to extend across national boundaries.  It is no longer inconceivable, then, to incarcerate an entire nation for the sake of eradicating terrorism.  Indeed, it can be argued that this incarceration, this disciplining occupation, this reforming presence of the “expert” on democracy is in fact necessary for this nation to emerge as a nation.

By making the terrorist act and the terrorist himself visible, the United States emerges as a subject, who ironically, is cast as refusing to be subjected to the fear-driven power of the terrorists.  In seeing the terrorist everywhere, whether in the domestic or international arena, the United States also becomes a transnational subject, able to extend across national borders in order to rehabilitate the terror-filled nations of the world.  What is hauntingly brilliant about discipline is this very fact: that the visibility of the criminal provides the perfect cover for an otherwise brutal and exacting science of power, that if not for this “mask,” would indeed be indistinguishable from the figure of the king. 

The power to see the criminal everywhere, in everyone, the secret knowledge that every individual could be a terrorist, is what allows every individual to be subjected to that power.  The terrorist can be rooted out, while the disciplinary mechanism that allows both the terrorist and the terrorized to emerge remains hidden beneath an impenetrable series of never-ending disciplinary machinations.  If we cannot find Osama bin Laden today, we cannot also find George W. Bush.  Both of these figures are subject to the same mechanism, such that sometimes, they even become indistinguishable from one another.  Who is the terrorist and who is the terrorized? The true terror is that this question is irrelevant to the functioning of the disciplinary technology of power.  The discourse on terrorism is indeed, then, “...a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules, from which it extends its effects and by which it masks its exorbitant singularity” (Foucault 23).◦

 

© Elizabeth Kesling, 2006

 

 

 

 

Notes