continuing relevance of disciplinary power, however modified by the logic of the exception.
The Double, on the other hand, could be said to simultaneously underwrite and exceed what Foucault terms biopolitical strategies of management that operate through a calculus of ratios and probabilities and in which pathologies are immanent rather than confined. Taking into account a whole constellation of variables, this modality of power is visible in theories of radicalization that, rather than always employing clear categorizations (though many do), consider a broad and ever-expanding list of cognitive, affective, and experiential variables in calculating what may take an American outside an acceptable curve of normality.71 In search of and in anticipation of the dangerous individual, this logic of security “works on the future” and focuses on the uncertain and “tries to prevent [violence, crime, terror, etc.] in advance”—an urgency fed by the political costs of a terrorist attack occurring on one’s watch.72 The anticipatory calculus of uncovering an enemy that might materialize in the people and places one would least expect is an intrusive one. In “William Wilson,” the true horror of the Double is uncovered only through covert action, penetrating the only private space Wilson has in the school—his bedroom. The narrator’s discovery of the Double (in the sense that they share a physiognomy) occurs by casting a secretive light into a private space. In the context of homegrown terrorism, this practice takes two interrelated forms: first, sweeping modes of surveillance that penetrate into the most intimate dimensions of everyday life, such as the NSA’s PRISM; second, the use of informants. Government informants, however, do much more than monitor and surveil; their function exceeds the biopolitical. Unlike discipline, which lets nothing escape, Foucault asserts biopower “lets things happen.”73 The Double requires that this be taken further and facilitates strategies that “make things happen”—it is a preemptory and “incitatory” figure.74 Informants explicitly aid in the “radicalization” and mobilization of US residents and citizens, the practices and consequences of which are examined in Chapters 2 and 3.75 The informant is himself a double—the inversion of the enemy-Double—illustrating just how the figure and discourse of the Double is not simply a threat to be confined, but a construct that is part and parcel of contemporary modalities of conflict.
If the Double marks the abandonment of the form of “originary [external] difference intrinsic to the Western logos,” it does so in a temporary and oscillating manner and works in conjunction with other strategies.76 Importantly, the Double does not negate the consequentiality of the other. The racism, violence, and discrimination faced by American Muslim and Arab communities serve as constant reminders. The move from the other to the Double, much like that of discipline to biopower and conventional to absolute hostility, is only a shift “in emphasis” (much like the imbricated histories that make up the genealogy of homegrown terrorism).77 Moreover, forms of hostility overlap and biopolitical modalities embed themselves within the strategies of disciplinary power. The Double and other are contrapuntal figures and their relational trajectories play out side by side, intertwine, merge, and separate in complex ways. Indeed, the securitizing notion that titles this book could be written as “home|grown” to illustrate that it marks not simply the combination of foreign seed and native soil but an attempt to keep them separate through their conjunction. This relation is staged in popular fictional portrayals. In the widely popular series Homeland, the homegrown terrorist is a white Marine named Nicholas Brody who returns home after eight years in captivity. Yet, Brody’s crisis of identity and involvement in a terror plot are closely tied to Abu Nazir, a prototypical bin Laden figure (i.e., bearded, turbaned, Arab, and Muslim), with whom he developed a complex relationship through the latter’s son (who was killed in a US drone strike). The program, in which a military hero “turns,” plays out America’s contemporary fears of homegrown terrorism. It is a phenomenon also visible in the before-and-after images that accompany news accounts of Americans who have tried to join ISIS.
Here, assertions that contemporary security positions the citizen as simultaneously suspect and spy must be tempered by the fact that this position is not equally distributed. That is, some are more suspect than others (Brody’s radicalization is tied to, though not strictly at the hands of, the prototypical other). And while there have been recent cases of informant-led operations preventing violence against Muslim Americans, the rhetoric (and effort) of government officials illustrates that the practice is largely focused on America’s mosques.78 Moreover, the invocation of the Double is (an attempt at the) postracial in that it facilitates the distancing, at least rhetorically (through representations of terror via the white body), of the official government position from strategies of profiling, even as government agencies undertake such measures. Last, the brown-Arab-Muslim-other is irrevocably tied to the development and conjuring of the Double in contemporary security discourse (Chapter 1 dives deeper into the complex work carried out in marking an influence for political violence as “foreign”). Together, the Double and the other create a productive tension of deferral and closure, disruption and suture. The two figures are deeply imbricated, and the Double is often a figure deployed strategically to uncover the potential other hiding within the populace. Nevertheless, the distinction between the other and the Double is crucial because, as I have outlined here, the Double exhibits significantly different forms of representation, fulfills a unique function, and signals distinctive relations of enmity and power. While the Double is by no means an equal opportunity concept, always inflected with the identity of whomever it is placed over, it captures the ambivalent play of otherness and likeness in discourses that warn of a threat that can mutate and materialize, a phenomenon somewhere in between infiltration and emergence, in the homeland.
Chapter Overview
The remainder of the book takes its cue from the genealogy presented here. I have attempted, however briefly, to retrace how the purview of counterterrorism in the United States has been (re)defined over time (historically) in a way that affects its spatiality and how the Double reemerges in discourses of security in this context. The following chapters are organized along these dimensions of homegrown terrorism/counterterrorism: definitional, historical, and spatial. These are not the only possible gateways for thinking through homegrown terrorism and counterterrorism, but they are tied to significant questions or problems concerning these phenomena. Discuss terrorism long enough and questions about its definition will arise. A constant issue in security, academic, and popular circles, the addition of “homegrown” into the mix only further complicates the matter. Also, terrorism is often invoked in an ahistorical tonality or has a way of obscuring important pasts. Thus, a history of anxieties of infiltration holds promise for making sense of the phenomena under the umbrella of terrorism in a more critical light. Last, in the late war on terror, anxieties concerning the collapse of spatial divides are increasingly visible in, for example, the construction of border walls.79 Yet, boundary making in this environment is not limited to the border. Rather, it permeates social, cultural, and political relations, and, thus, examining the spaces of counterterrorism within (rather than at) US borders is a crucial aspect of understanding homegrown terrorism.
The three dimensions of homegrown (counter)terrorism that structure this book reveal more than just insights to the questions or anxieties from which they emerge. Each provides an entry point into further developing the figure of the Double and its place in security discourse. It is a potential I exploit by pairing the definitional, historical, and spatial with issues of identity, media, and citizenship, respectively. Certainly, these issues and the dimensions to which they are tied are intricately cross-stitched and overlapping; thus, the chapters are meant to be iterative in that respect. In other words, the pairings (definitional/identity, historical/media, spatial/citizenship) are intervals that cadence and cascade, and it is from the subsequent intersections and interstices that the Double emerges in all its complexity. The book is replete with doubles: shadows, split personalities, clones, imposters, and doppelgängers. The Double as a heuristic construct here is not intended to reduce these manifestations into mere synonyms or different representations of a unified phenomenon. Rather, the Double ties these together in shifting ways that reveal the intricacies of today’s anxieties,
