Joseph Pugliese
Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia (Received 11 October 2007; final version received 6 November 2008)
I open this article by offering an exposition of Gilles Deleuze’s theorization on the figure of the phantasm. I then proceed to situate this figure within post-9/11 economies of racial profiling focusing, in particular, on the Islam phobic mobilization of the niqab in order to advance arguments premised on differentialist and cultureless racism. Drawing on the work of the British Iranian artist Reza Aramesh, I bring into focus the manner in which radicalizing soma technologies are deployed in order to reproduce racist stereotypes and to foment cultural panics. I conclude by underscoring the structural violence that is at once produced and disavowed by Western liberal democracies in the face of inassimilable others.
Keywords: racial profiling; whiteness; somatechnics; Islam phobia; Arab phobia; culturalist and differentialist racism; terrorism
The animating logic of the phantasm
In his, the logic of sense, Gilles Deleuze stages a comprehensive analysis of the complex ways in which sense and nonsense intersects and collide in the production of meaning and meaninglessness. In the context of his exposition, Deleuze offers a detailed discussion of the phantasm, analyzing its figuration in term of an ‘‘event’’ that problematises binary understandings of the real and the imaginary:
The question of whether particular events are real or imaginary is poorly posed. The distinction is not between the imaginary and the real, but between the events as such and the corporeal state of affairs which incites it about or in which it is actualized. (1990, 210)
Deleuze’s problematizing of the distinction between the real and the imaginary resounds with particular force in a post-9/11 world. Emerging from the event as such that is, the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City is something else altogether that cannot be categorized in the either/or category of the real/imaginary: the ‘‘phantasm-event’’ of Islam phobia, constituted by a cluster of Orientalist phantasmatic figures that I will presently discuss in some detail. Orientalism, writes Malek Alloula, ‘‘has set the stage for the deployment of phantasms’’ (1986, 3). Post- 9/11, the event as such produces its serialized phantasms that become corporeally coextensive with the event: the figure ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’, the woman wearing a niqab, the man with a turban, the woman behind the hijab, and so on.
These serialized phantasms override the distinction between the one, the event, and the other, the embodied forms that incite it. Deleuze writes:
The phantasm . . . like the event it represents, is a ‘‘noematic attribute’’ distinguished not only from states of affairs and their qualities, but from the psychological and from logical concepts as well. It belongs as such to an ideational surface over which it is produced as an effect. (1990, 211)
As noematic attribute, it can exist in thought alone even as it inscribes an exteriority in order to be perceived as event-effect or ‘‘event-phantasm’’. As such:
It transcends inside and outside, since its topological property is to bring ‘‘its’’ internal and external sides into contact, in order for them to unfold onto a single side. This is why the phantasm-event is submitted to a double causality, referring to the external and internal causes whose result in depth it is, and also to a quasi-cause which ‘‘enacts’’ it at the surface and brings it into communication with all other event-phantasms. (Deleuze 1990, 211)
The event-phantasm, then, is enabled by the topology of the fold, producing a type of mobius strip enfolding of both inside and outside into an ambiguous and spatially indeterminate loop. The double-causality of the event-phantasm marks the generative point of intersection between the noematic experience and the exterior reality that functions to constitute it; ‘‘quasi-cause’’ refers to the fact that the noematic experience of the phantasm can only ever constitute the phantasm-event in a qualified way that is always ‘‘split’’ or marked by the power-in-spacing of a hyphenated double-causality: neither fully external nor fully internal, the event phantasm straddles both domains as it ‘‘enacts’’ the topology of the fold. To couch it in the terms of the aporetic logic that animates it, the phantasm-event comes into being at the surface that is also its depth. My invocation of the aporia, as a figure of absolute impasse, is sanctioned by Deleuze’s following meditation on the phantasm:
Neither active nor passive, neither internal nor external, neither imaginary nor real, phantasms have indeed the impassability and ideality of the event. In light of this impassability, they inspire in us an unbearable waiting the waiting of that which is going to come about as a result, and also of that which is already in the process of coming about and never stops coming about. (1990, 211)
Post-9/11, this ‘‘unbearable waiting’’ is provoked by the phantasms of the West’s Islam phobia. The condition of unbearable waiting encapsulates the climate of fear, insecurity and anticipation for the terrorist disasters to come. Always already in a state of color-coded alert for the prospective destruction and violence these phantasms will bring to bear, the unbearable waiting is both assuaged and fomented by Western governments in the distribution, in the Australian context for example, of counter-terrorism fridge-magnets with 24-hour security hotlines and, most recently, the exhortation that Sydney citizens individually prepare a ‘‘‘Go Bag’ packed with maps, running shoes, energy bars and even sticky-tape so they can be ready for any disaster that may strike the city’’ (Creagh 2007, 1). The Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, is exhorting Sydneysiders to prepare a Go Bag because, she says: ‘‘All cities need to be aware of potential terrorism that’s a fact of life now’’ (Creagh 2007, 6). The ‘‘potential of terrorism’’ dramatizes that which, in Deleuzian phantasmatic terms, ‘‘is already in the process of coming about and never stops coming about’’. The ‘‘never stops coming about’’ of the potential of terrorism is precisely what drives the Global War on Terror, a war that, in its endless pursuit of shifting targets and serial phantasms, is structurally without closure and without end.
Within these charged phantasmatic narratives, terrorism is invariably mobilized as a violence-to-come that is inscribed, simultaneously, within the everyday life of the present. I can illustrate the paradoxical structural temporality of terrorism by drawing attention to the various Western color-coded barometers (as deployed in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States) that are being used in order to monitor and identify for civilian populations the different degrees of risk and danger of terrorist activity within their respective nations. These national barometers of terrorism situate the futurity of terror within the lived continuum of the present. These barometrical schemas underscore the power of terrorism in terms of an inexhaustible futurity that is destined to erupt in the present. In this sense, the terror of terrorism can be seen to come from a futurity without reserve that cannot be exhausted by the expenditure of any singular act of terror in the present or the past.
In terms of the temporal structure of terrorism that I am tracking here, one could say that it is constituted by the future anterior: in the future, terrorism will already have taken place in the everyday life of the citizen as Sydney’s Lord Mayor puts it: ‘‘That’s a fact of life now’’. The future anterior temporal modality of terrorism guarantees the impossibility of a horizon of closure precisely because its structure enables the future infinitely to have already erupted traumatically in the present. The temporality of terrorism is constituted by the charge of a diachronic undercurrent of potentiality that can abruptly synchronize violence in the routine present of the everyday. Its eruptive power must, by definition, be inexhaustibly future-oriented, even if the material power of its force can only be fully realized in its violent breach of the present a breach, however, which in its material instantiation can in no way exhaust its future reserves. This is why the ‘‘War on Terror’’ is, by this definition, a war without end. In operating within the temporal schema of a futurity already potentially inscribed in the present, in delineating a futural horizon with no apparent closure, the moving targets of terrorism become serially, opportunistically and phantasmatically substitutable both geopolitically (Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, etc.) and racially (Arab, Muslim, South Asian, etc.).
Phantasmatic transpositions of culturalist racism: ‘‘in the land of the Niqab’’
In his essay ‘‘Is there a neo-racism?’’, Etienne Balibar proposes that contemporary Western culture is characterized by the growth of what he terms ‘‘culturalist’’ racism. Tracking the transmutations post World War II that have seen biological racism both discredited and legislatively prohibited in most Western countries, Balibar argues that a type of ‘‘racism without race’’ has begun to shape social relations and regimes of representation (Balibar 1991, 23). Balibar terms this form of ‘‘racism without race’’ as ‘‘culturalist’’ or ‘‘differentialist’’ racism; as one can no longer invoke scientific accounts, such as eugenics or anthropometry, of biological and congenital inferiority in order to buttress or justify one’s racist pronouncements or policies, culturalist differences are sought in order to mark a seemingly intractable and irreducible line between the superior Western subject and its inferior other. So, for example, in much contemporary Western discourse Islam phobia is justified by arguing that the ‘‘culture’’ of Islam promotes backward, static and ‘‘medieval’’ societies that are unable to adapt to the dynamic changes of a modernity ‘‘assumed to be universalistic and progressive’’ (Balibar 1991, 25). This hierarchical split along culturalist lines enables the ongoing reproduction and recoding of biological racism, and its attendant unequal relations of power, as it is now revamped under a differentialist guise: ‘‘In this way, we see how the return of the biological theme is permitted and with it the elaboration of new variants of the biological ‘myth’ within the framework of a culturalist racism’’ (Balibar 1991, 26).
Noting that the ‘‘idea of a ‘racism without race’ is not as revolutionary as one might imagine’’, as one of its prototypes has been anti-Semitism, deployed by various Western nations in different xenophobically nationalist forms, Balibar contends that the contemporary context is now marked by both the diffusion and consolidation of culturalist racism (Balibar 1991, 24). For the purposes of this article, I want to cite in some detail the particular manner in which Balibar frames the growth of culturalist racism:
Anti-Semitism is supremely ‘‘differentialist’’ and in many respects the whole of current differentialist racism may be considered, from the formal point of view, as a generalized anti-Semitism. This consideration is particularly important for the interpretation of contemporary Arab phobia . . . since it carries with it an image of Islam as a ‘‘conception of the world’’ which is incompatible with Europeanness and an enterprise of universal ideological domination, and therefore a systematic exclusion of ‘‘Arabness’’ and ‘‘Islamicism’’. (Balibar 1991, 24)
In the Australian context, the virulence of this form of culturalist racism is painstakingly outlined in the report by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), Isma: Listen, which documents the symbolic and physical violence experienced by Australia’s Arab and/or Muslim citizens and residents:
Physical attacks, threats of physical violence and attempted assaults were widely reported during the consultations. Muslim women were particular targets of physical violence carried out by strangers. Consultation participants reported numerous incidents of women in hijab being spat at, of objects being thrown at them from passing cars and of their hijabs being pulled off. (HREOC 2004, 47)
These testimonies of radicalized violence articulate the manner in which the civic spaces of the nation are becoming off-limits to particular target subjects, as many of the consultation participants experienced acts of race hate on the street, in shopping centers, schools, and so on (Pugliese 2006). In her detailed analysis of the violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim race riots that erupted at Sydney’s Cronulla Beach, Suvendrini Perera brings into critical focus the entrenched white supremacist relations of power that were so violently mobilized and deployed in order to exclude figures from entering one of Sydney’s self-declared ‘‘whites-only’’ zones (Perera 2006, 2007). The testimonies collected in the HREOC report document a systemic movement of foreclosure that ensures that select subjects will literally fail to appear within the civic spaces of the nation. This movement of foreclosure must also be seen as one of erasure, in which the institutional nature of racial discrimination will effectively wipe the face of the Arab and/or Muslim from the face of the nation. I refer here to the testimony of a Muslim school student and the fact that ‘‘The school had blacked out the young woman’s hijab in the class photo in an effort to make her blend in with the other non-Muslim girls’’: ‘‘I spoke to the photographer and he blamed the principal, and I spoke to the principal and he blamed the photographer. The principal in the end said: ‘Well, she stood out too much’’’ (HREOC 2004, 86). The virulence of ongoing assimilationist demands, underpinned by a symbolically violent Islam phobia, is encapsulated in this student’s testimony, where the marker of religion-cultural difference, the hijab, must be literally erased within the context of the annual school photograph.
In this context, the hijab becomes a racially charged phantasm-event: as phantasm, it is at once absent from the visual plane of the photograph, having been rendered invisible through the process of digital erasure; simultaneously, for the student, her hijab is graphically marked by its very absence: it is ‘‘there’’ in the very impossibility of being visually represented. As such, it is a phantasm-event that is at once imaginary and real, haunting the forcibly assimilated figure of the Muslim girl, drawing attention to what Deleuze so appositely terms the ‘‘corporeal state of affairs which incites it’’ (1990, 240) and which, simultaneously, disallows it from being actualized. Wrenched from its religious context, the hijab is instrumentalized into a somatechnics of unassimilable culturalist difference.1 Somatechnics refers to the in dissociable way in which the body of a subject is always already technologized and mediated by cultural inscriptions. In the West, this somatechnologisation of unassimilable culturalist difference can be seen to be operative across the broad spectrum of cultural artifacts inscribed by the sign ‘‘Islam’’, including the black beard, the hijab, the headscarf and the niqab.
The somatechnologisation of the niqab as embodied signifier of unassimilable cultural difference is graphically evidenced in Paul Sheehan’s (2007) ‘‘Mind the gap, where trouble brews’’. Sheehan is an Australian journalist who, over the past decade, has become somewhat of a national spokesperson on matters of race, assimilation and the dangers of multiculturalism. Sheehan’s articles are presented as analyses of what Balibar terms ‘‘crowd psychology’’. ‘‘It is not by chance’’, writes Balibar,
that the theories of differentialist racism . . . here connect with ‘‘crowd psychology,’’ which is enjoying something of a revival, as a general explanation of irrational movements, aggression and collective violence, and particularly, of xenophobia . . . The neo-racist ideologues are not mystical heredity theorists, but ‘‘realist’’ technicians of social psychology. (Balibar 1991, 23)
In Sheehan’s article, the niqab, as embodied somatechnics of unassimilable Islam, functions as the metonym through which the realist technician of social psychology can safely encode his Islam phobia. The article begins thus:
While car bombs were being prepared in London and Glasgow, I was visiting the land of the niqab, communities in England but not of England, where I was usually the only white person on the street, where the veil and the beard are the norm, and where sharia law holds greater authority than English common law. I was in East London, Bradford, Dewsbury, all bastions of the niqab. The niqab is the veil which covers the entire face of a woman, except for a slit for the eyes. (Sheehan 2007, 13)
The ‘‘only white man on the street’’ signals the shocking reversal of the natural order of things: white England, a once taken-for-granted tautology, is now no longer self-identical to itself. The white man has become a minority, an outsider in his own domain as the ex-colonial Black/South Asian subject has become the dominant figure on the streets. Autochthonic whiteness has been both displaced and overrun by the colored other. Reproducing the authoritative voice of the white anthropologist entering the exotic and dangerous lands of the colonial frontier, Sheehan Orientalises and metonymically homogenizes Britain’s Islamic communities into ‘‘the land of the niqab’’. ‘‘The land of the niqab’’ invokes that stock catalogue of colonial to poi of Oriental exoticism and otherness. The niqab becomes, like the hijab, ‘‘a nodal fixation’’ that self-evidently embodies ‘‘the most pernicious components of oppressive patriarchal backward cultures and traditions, those that have failed at modernity’’ (Puar 2007, 181). ‘‘The land of the niqab’’ enunciates, in Frantz Fanon’s incisive terms, that ‘‘zone of occult instability where the people dwell’’ (1976, 182). Traversing this zone of occult instability, the white anthropologist social psychologist proceeds to diagnose the pathological phenomenon of Islam in a British cultural context.
Intertwined with the attempted suicide bomber attacks in London and Glasgow, the niqab is framed within a network of explosive terrorism. This tropic turn transmutes an item of religious clothing into a soma technology of incipient terror, threat and absolute otherness. ‘‘The niqab’’, explains the pseudo-anthropologist, ‘‘is the veil which covers the entire face of a woman, except for the slit for the eyes’’. As soma technology, the niqab here signifies a garment that refuses the colonial gaze. Entirely occluding the face of the Islamic woman except for a ‘‘slit for the eyes’’, it deflects the penetrative gaze of the West, even as it enables the occluded subject agentically to return the gaze without herself being scopically exposed. Driving Sheehan’s fetishisation of the niqab is what Medya Yegenoglu describes as the Orientalist interlacing of ‘‘the discourse of Enlightenment (characterized by the privileging of reason, truth, and progress) and the scopic regime of modernity (characterized by the valorization of the visual)’’ (1999, 108). For Sheehan, contemporary British Muslim women cannot, structurally, occupy the locus of Enlightenment (with all its attendant progressive values) and still be veiled in their niqabs or hijabs: the one structurally precludes the other; as such, an act of ocular centric divestment must take place if British Muslim women are to be brought into the civic fold of British Enlightenment culture.
Sheehan’s article is invested in fomenting a xenophobic politics: there is something abnormal and unnatural about the fact that the ‘‘veil and the beard are the norm’’ in these British streets. One cannot be both British and Muslim: ‘‘the land of the niqab’’, writes Sheehan, is constituted by ‘‘communities that are in England but not of England’’. Moreover, in keeping with their Oriental proclivities, British Muslims are represented as not observing the rule of British law: with no supporting evidence, Sheehan frames British Muslims as, tout court, placing Sharia law above English common law. This seditious behavior is reinforced by Sheehan’s use of the military metaphor of the ‘‘bastion’’; by qualifying bastion with the niqab, Sheehan militarizes this item of religious apparel, something that is made explicit when he terms the niqab ‘‘the symbol of revolt’’ (2007, 13). The niqab, as ‘‘symbol of revolt’’, once situated in its anti-colonial genealogies (e.g., Algerian female suicide bombers) is precisely what cannot be countenanced by the liberal subject, as it graphically brings into focus the contestation of the disavowed violences that ensure the continuation of colonial rule. Fleshing out the subtext that informs his text, Sheehan’s article exudes a nostalgic sense of postcolonial loss, white fear and anxiety: the once-white Christian suburbs of ‘‘East London, Bradford, Dewsbury, [are now] all bastions of the niqab’’, land of the Muslim/colored/seditious/terrorist other. In this charged context: ‘‘Islam phobia defines them [women who wear the niqab and the hijab] as ‘subversive’ and they have to cope with their ascribed identities of the enemy within’’ (Afshar, Aitken, and Franks 2005, 277; see also Mahmood 2005; Motha 2007). Paul Gilroy diagnoses this sense of postcolonial loss in terms of a ‘‘pathology’’ that deserves ‘‘the proper name of ‘postimperial melancholia’’’, inscribed by the ‘‘guilt-ridden loathing and depression that have come to characterize Britain’s xenophobic responses to the strangers who have intruded upon it more recently’’ (2005, 90).
The unsubstantiated claim that in these English suburbs ‘‘sharia law holds greater authority than English common law’’ positions British Muslim subjects as having already implicitly violated the rule of English common law before the fact. Operative here is a type of quasi-illegality or incipient criminality that functions to constitute subjects who always already resemble the crimes they have not actually perpetrated but are always already in danger of committing. I say ‘‘resemble’’ as the niqab and the beard here signify, in Sheehan’s article, somatechnic metonyms of an incipient criminality. The niqab and the beard function, in Michel Foucault’s terms, as ‘‘a way of linking together, simply through analogy, a whole series of illegalities below the threshold, of improper acts that are not illegal, and of piling them up in order to make them resemble the crime itself ’’ (2003, 19). The niqab, the hijab and the beard embody the threat of so many illegalities that bristle just below the social threshold and that, analogically, come to represent the somatechnics of crimes that will have always already been committed in advance of the fact; these surface effects are framed precisely in terms of the corporeal state of affairs that, phantasmatically, incite that which will always already be actualized: terror, violence, illegality and recalcitrant unassimilability.
Zones of occult instability and prosthetic white citizenship ‘‘in the land of the Niqab’’
Sheehan observes:
I’ve just been sharing . . . streets and markets with scores of women hidden behind black niqabs, quite a powerful social statement, but these women were in Tower Hamlets in London, Mannigham in Bradford, Savile Town in Dewsbury, and in shopping centers in Luton and Leeds. (2007, 13)
This is the scandal that haunts Sheehan’s article: that British Muslim women dressed in the niqab are to be found in such civic spaces as British streets, markets and shopping centers. In traversing and occupying such public spaces, British Muslim women breach the tacit radicalized order of space that is at once also gendered: precisely as identifiably British Muslim women, they refuse to be confined to the circumscribed zone of the domestic sphere (the home) and proceed, scandalously, to assert their freedom of movement as rights-bearing subjects in public spaces: streets, markets and shopping centers. Inscribed in Sheehan’s amazement that British Muslim women are traversing and occupying these urban public spaces is the implicit radicalized fissure that remains operative but unsaid: British Muslim women dressed in the niqab cannot, by definition, be British rights-bearing subjects and Muslim at one and the same time.
‘‘In England but not of England’’ dramatizes the problematic of passing as citizen-subject in the eyes of the white supremacist. Where the category of citizenship is, by tacit definition, defined by whiteness, subjects of color can only take up citizenship in a prostheticized way. As I have argued elsewhere (Pugliese 2005b), the critical power in conceptualizing race in terms of a prosthesis lies in the way in which it effectively dislocates race from its biological ground, as a type of naturalized biological datum, in order to disclose its status as techne`; that is, as a biopolitical soma technology of power. Whiteness is here understood not in terms of a biologically essentialized attribute, exclusively determined by one’s phenotypical features (color of skin, texture of hair, etc.); rather, whiteness must be seen to operate in terms of a transnational technology of radicalized power that is simultaneously contingent upon specific sites, subjects and relations. Whiteness, as Vron Ware argues, ‘‘is not reducible to skin color but refers to ways of thinking and behaving ‘steeped’ in histories of raciology’’ (2001, 205).
In the face of the problematic of ‘‘being in England but of not England’’, British citizens of color can only inhabit the fraught and contingent category of what I term ‘‘prosthetic white citizenship’’. Prosthetic white citizenship is what is conferred upon non-white subjects of the white nation. As a prosthetic, it is a citizenship that cannot be corporeally owned or nativized as the prosthetic of white citizenship remains visibly an adjunct to the non-white body. The hijab, the niqab, the Muslim cap or the black beard always give away the merely prostheticized citizen-subject. Understood within the doxic binaries of common-sense epistemologies, prosthetic white citizenship is not of the body (and thus ‘‘not of England’’/body politic of the white nation); rather, as techne` (technology) in opposition to physis (the natural), it can never be corporeally nativized. Prosthetic white citizenship, as a technology of biopower, is always imposed or conferred from the outside (of the body); as white techne`, it can only ever be taken up by its non-white subjects as simulation, precisely as a type of prosthetic or phantasmatic limb that always discloses its adjunct status as non-native artifice. Even as prosthetic white citizenship can be conferred upon non-white subjects, it can, precisely because it is viewed in terms of an artificial adjunct to the non-white subject, be withheld or taken away. I refer here, in the Australian context, to the recent deportation of the non-white Australian citizen, Vivian Alvarez Solon, back to the Philippines by Australian immigration officials who ‘‘misrecognised’’ her as an illegal immigrant, and to the recent report documenting the wrongful imprisonment of up to 10 Australian residents, including children and the mentally ill, within Immigration Detention Centers over the past few years (Pugliese 2007).
‘‘In Whitechapel, within sight of the City of London, the financial centre of Europe’’, writes Sheehan, ‘‘women in niqabs are common at the market. They retrieve their children from the Osmani Primary School then disappear into the rows of council houses nearby’’ (2007, 13). Throughout Sheehan’s article, British Muslim women dressed in the niqab appear as unnatural intruders illegitimately occupying Britain’s civic spaces and as haunting specters disrupting the natural order of things. A woman in a niqab in sight of the City of London is an unnatural sighting: it cannot be anything other than a phantasm, at once mysteriously appearing and disappearing, traversing that ‘‘zone of occult instability’’ constituted by the racial other. Sheehan’s representation of British Muslim women wearing niqabs in terms of radicalized phantasmata is visually underscored by the illustration that accompanies his article (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. British Muslim women in niqabs on a Petri dish.
Underscoring the profound sense of white supremacist and postcolonial loss that imbues this article, Sheehan concludes by drawing attention to ‘‘the tragedy of modern Britain’’: ‘‘The result is that Britain has become the centre of Islamic terrorism in Europe and a Petri dish of Muslim insularity’’ (Sheehan 2007, 13). In clinical terms, the Petri dish is that shallow, circular glass receptacle in which scientists breed and experiment on bacteria and other low-life organisms. Analogically, British Muslim women are represented as equivalent to pathogenic life. The ‘‘pathogens’’ in the illustration accompanying Sheehan’s text are all shown as dressed in the niqab. The gendered dimensions of this biopolitical analogy cannot be overestimated: Muslim women are the low-life ‘‘breeders’’ instrumental in reproducing a pathogenic population scripted as the cause of ‘‘the tragedy of modern Britain’’. Ichnographically, British Muslim women wearing their niqabs are symbolically inserted within the domains of pathogenic biology, colonial teratology and radicalized phantasmata. As biopolitical monsters, they visually reanimate the teratological figure of King Kong, a primitive colonial mutant who comes to haunt the centre of the imperial metropolis, wreaking violence and destruction. Looming above the heart of the city of London, they overshadow the key to poi of British civic life: the Houses of Parliament, the very symbol of British democracy and the rule of law; Westminster Abbey, an iconic symbol of Christian Britain; and the skyscrapers of the financial district stretching off into the distance. These pathogenic, monstrous black figures embody the ‘‘crowned anarchies’’ of phantasmata, threatening disorder, destruction and conquest’’ (Deleuze 1990, 263), even as they embody the Muslim-terrorist vengeance of those ‘‘that have failed at modernity’’ (Puar 2007, 181) and who are determined to destroy it.
As phantasmata, they invoke the phantasm-event of Islam phobia post 9/11, inspiring ‘‘an unbearable waiting’’ for putative acts of terror that, to paraphrase Deleuze, are already in the process of coming about and never stop coming about Figure 1. British Muslim women in niqabs on a Petri dish. (1990, 211). In keeping with what Deleuze identifies as the ‘‘demonic’’ logic of the phantasm, the ‘‘most concealed’’ here, the fully-veiled Muslim woman becomes, in this illustration, ‘‘the most manifest’’ (Deleuze 1990, 258 and 8). The British Muslim women in their black niqabs soma technologically embody the attributes of the phantasm: they are visually represented as ‘‘emanations which travel in the atmosphere [of central London] with agility’’ (Deleuze 1990, 217). As black phantasmata dominating the white cityscape of the city, they operate ‘‘undercover of an aggression, an insinuation, a subversion’’ of British common law merely by their presence. Animating the Petri dish of central London is ‘‘the vertigo’’ of Muslim phantasms that, as forms of viral low-life, are now out of control. The phantasm, writes Deleuze, is ‘‘the effect of the functioning of the simulacrum as machinery’’ (1990, 263); as machined serial figures that lack individuating identity, all Muslim women dressed in their niqabs are serially interchangeable. As figures that are impenetrable to Sheehan’s phallocentric-colonial gaze, they emerge in both his text and the accompanying illustration as so many phantasmagoric ‘‘sign[s] issued in the process of signalization . . . in the sense of a ‘costume’ [the niqab], or rather a mask, expressing a process of disguising, where, behind each mask, there is yet another’’ (Deleuze 1990, 263).
Visually, this illustration buttresses Sheehan’s position as white social scientist clinically examining the pathogenic Muslim low-life that is ‘‘breeding’’ in Britain and that stands to threaten and overturn its liberal-democratic institutions. What is exposed in Sheehan’s use of the analogy of the Petri dish, and in the accompanying illustration, is the manner in which differentialist racism effectively reproduces familiar forms of biological racism, even as it pretends to be doing otherwise. Where the niqab is mobilized by Sheehan merely to symbolize the unassimilability of Muslim culture, through the use of the biopolitical metaphor of the Petri dish it becomes precisely as a soma technology of radicalized difference coextensive with traditional forms of biological racism. Situated in the symbolically charged metaphor of the Petri dish, the veiled British Muslim women dressed in their niqabs represent ‘‘iconic ciphers of Europe’s postcolonial melancholia’’ (Gilroy 2004, xvii) that, in this context, signify the abject failure of Britain’s multicultural ‘‘experiment’’: the ‘‘experiment’’ with multicultural difference in the Petri dish of contemporary postcolonial Britain has produced nothing but infralegal phantasmata, terrorists and anti-civil monsters. This is the object lesson to be learned by other societies foolish enough to dabble with the ‘‘experiment’’ of multiculturalism; this failed experiment functions to justify, in Paul Gilroy’s terms, ‘‘pessimistic responses to the nightmare of multiculture’’ (2004, xvii).
The ‘‘tragedy of Britain’’, Sheehan laments, pivots on ‘‘the issue of reciprocity’’:
when a society, such a Britain and every society in the developed West, provides freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom from oppression by the state, plus social security benefits and medical care, the implicit social contract is that there is reciprocity between the community and civil society. In Islamic communities, however, reciprocity is a problem. Because there is but one God, Allah, and his teachings dictate every aspect of life and social organization. This is a schism. (Sheehan 2007, 13)
The ‘‘schism’’ that Sheehan identifies in actual fact exposes the double standards and inequalities of Western liberalism. As J.V. D’Cruz and William Steele argue, ‘‘Liberalism is a sham if it would have us believe that in principle all people are morally equal and should have equal opportunities’’ (2003, 46), when in fact social relations in Western societies are structured by hierarchies and inequities of access that discriminate against certain subjects in term of race, gender, sexuality, class and (dis)ability. What D’Cruz and Steele underscore in their analysis of liberalism is that it is in fact riven by an historical double standard: ‘‘The non-discriminating core of traditional liberalism could only have been conceived abstractly, oblivious to historical inequality and injustice among peoples, including discrimination, slavery and colonialism’’ (2003, 46). It is the insistent manner in which liberalism abstracts and effaces the historical materiality of radicalized, gendered, sexualized, (dis)abled and classed bodies that enables the myth of communities that are all situated on an equal playing field and are therefore bound by the same ‘‘social contract’’. As Uday Mehta argues, in order to preserve the mythos of a social contract predicated on equality, what must be effected is the ‘‘sequestering of the abstract foundations of liberalism from its institutional commitments’’ to social (in)equality (1999, 79).
In emphasizing the manner in which liberalism has been instrumental in the dissemination and maintenance of Western empires, Mehta draws attention to its effaced eschatological dimensions:
the posture of liberal thought toward the world is judgmental. It is a corollary, if not a concrete implication, of this idea that it is also an evangelical posture in which the burning spirit has been that of politics and the eschatology of progress. (1999, 79)
Mehta brilliantly identifies here the judgmental and evangelical posture that informs Sheehan when faced by the embodied figures of cultural difference that appear to be recalcitrant to his assimilationist eschatology of progress. Saba Mahmood underlines the disavowed violence that underpins liberalism’s coercive moves ‘‘to reduce yet again all that remains irreconcilable into the trope of a shared humanity and its assumed teleological futurity’’ (2005, 199). Situated in this liberalassimilationist schema of a failed eschatology, the niqab, for Sheehan, symbolizes the ‘‘unseemliness of difference’’ that, in Mahmood’s words, can ‘‘not be synthesized’’ (2005, 198).
The entirety of Sheehan’s piece is governed by an a priori field of Eurocentric disciplinary normativity. Within the grid of this disciplinary field, British Muslims are positioned as the interlopers, the visibly prosthetic citizen-subjects and mutant monstrous phantasms that radiate a diffuse, tacit, quasi-illegality or, put in Foucauldian terms, a pernicious infralegality. Already marked by the unsubstantiated assertion that, in their communities, ‘‘sharia law holds greater authority than English common law’’, British Muslims’ cultural practices are inscribed, irrationally, by a series of infralegal analogies: their dress, their beard, the fact that they ‘‘retrieve their children from Osmani Primary school then disappear into rows of council houses nearby’’, their ‘‘lack of reciprocity’’, and so on. Situated within the schema of differentialist racism, these infralegal analogies represent ‘‘kinds of miniature warning signs . . . that are presented as already analogous to crime’’ (Foucault 2003, 23). As such, Sheehan’s article must be seen as part of the larger machinery of a contemporary transnational white supremacism, fomenting xenophobia, fear and suspicion, even as it self-represents as a liberal heartfelt call for ‘‘reciprocity between community and civil society’’. As Tahir Abbas argues:
After 9/11, and certainly after 7/7 [London bombings], a whole host of factors have negatively impacted on British Muslims. These include increasing anti-terrorist measures, greater policing powers, racial and ethnic profiling in the criminal justice system, civil society debates around culture that place South Asian Muslims at its heart, although never explicitly, and questions around the apparent unassimilability of Muslims, with a focus on ‘‘community cohesion’’. (2007, 292)
Underpinning this concern with ‘‘community cohesion’’ is a tacit understanding of a ‘‘cosmopolitanism’’ that is both ‘‘proprietary [and] Eurocentric’’ in its assimilative and normative demands (Perera 2008, 139). In other words, the veiled Muslim woman embodies, at one and the same time, ‘‘women’s oppression as ‘categorical proof of Islamic terror’’’ (Perera 2008, 141) and the figure of incipient terror who will overturn the fundamental axioms of the enlightened liberal nation-state.
In the course of his article, Sheehan draws attention to the ‘‘disturbing’’ fact that the London suicide bombers were native born subjects ‘‘who turned to mass murder’’ and who, together with the Glasgow car bombs, ‘‘have merely added to the long list of murders and attempted murders that have afflicted Britain in the name of Allah during the past decade’’ (2007, 13). As I have argued elsewhere, post 7/7, the white British media’s scripting of the fact that the London suicide bombers were native-born in terms of a ‘‘chilling’’ and ‘‘shocking’’ fact functioned effectively to erase white Britain’s long and bloody imperial history of native-born terrorists, dispatched in the time of empire to the four corners of the globe in order to ensure the ‘‘pacification’’ of its subject peoples (Pugliese 2006). This is the violent history that simply cannot figure in contemporary accounts of British terrorism without rupturing the veneer of moral self-righteousness that constitutes British liberal ‘‘civil society’’.
Sheehan’s Islam phobic attack on British Muslim women who wear the niqab is mobilized in terms of an object lesson for Australia’s non-Muslim citizenry its subtext is: Australia is at risk of terrorist attacks that will be launched by its own Australian Muslim subjects and their prospective destruction of the nation’s social contract and liberal body politic. As such, it must be inserted within a cluster of Islam phobic pronouncements that have been articulated by prominent Australian politicians. National Party senator John Stone has called for the
virtual ‘‘halting’’ of the ‘‘Muslim immigrant inflow.’’ In Quadrant last September [2006], he referred to the ‘‘Islamic cancer in our body politic.’’ Pauline Hanson is planning to run for the Senate in Queensland for Pauline Hanson’s United Australia Party. Her sole policy appears to be a moratorium on Muslim immigration. Fred Nile, leader of the Christian Democrats in NSW [New South Wales], has advocated the same cause. (Henderson 2007, 13)
Finally, the suburban dimensions of this Islam phobia, situated in the context of the Petri dish ‘‘failed experiment’’ of multiculturalism, can be seen in recent reports that real-estate agents in the Sydney suburb of Camden had held meetings debating
the issue of selling homes to Muslim families wanting to relocate to the area. The news came as some residents voiced outrage about the [proposed Islamic] school, with at least three businesses organizing petitions against the Quranic Society bid to build Camden College, a combined primary and secondary school with 1200 students. (Cuming and Marcus 2007, 11)
Compulsory visibility: the radicalized somatechnics of the balaclava
On 24 April 2007, a report was released on the New South Wales police’s ongoing use of the ethnic descriptor ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’. The report stated that:
NSW police use the description Middle Eastern too frequently in media releases, skewing the perception of crime rates and contributing to racial tensions . . . The report said up to two-thirds of the police media releases that mentioned ethnicity referred to suspects of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern appearance. This was a disproportionate use, said Peter El Khouri, a member of the council [that released the report] . . . ‘‘There is a perception that the Middle Eastern community, Australians of Middle Eastern background, are significantly responsible for the crime in the state,’’ Mr. El Khouri said. (Tadros 2007, 3)
Located in the context of the Global War on Terror, the ethnic descriptor ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ has become symbolic of a taken-for-granted criminal status (Pugliese 2003, 2005a). What object, however, functions automatically to symbolize this ethnic descriptor, its criminal status and the cluster of emotions (fear, anxiety, and terror) that it generates in the general public? Embedded in the above-cited report on police overuse of this ethnic descriptor is this extraordinary disclosure: ‘‘The [NSW police] service constantly ignores its policy on the use of ethnic descriptions and has even issued releases referring to suspects wearing balaclavas as being of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern appearance’’ (Tadros 2007, 3; emphasis added). Articulated in this disclosure is the symbolic conflation of an object (balaclava) with a radicalized ethnic identity (of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern appearance) that marks a criminal figure in advance of the fact of his or her having committed any crime. Operative here is a radicalized somatechnics of identity in the service of cultural panics. The face of a figure ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ is, in this context, already interchangeable with the soma technology of the balaclava precisely as symbol of the terrorist and the criminal. The radicalized phenotypical features of the face ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ are already tautological in their relation to that hyperbolic symbol of terror: the balaclava. The textural contours and chromatics of the balaclava articulate the phenotypical morphology of the ethnic descriptor ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’, regardless of the fact the mask occludes the actual phenotypical identificatory features of the face. In other words, the balaclava is a soma technology precisely because it biopolitically intextuates an ethnic descriptor onto the face of the target subject.
The naming of the balaclava by the New South Wales police as metonymically interchangeable with the ethnic descriptor ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ articulates the ultimate ruse of un/masking: in effect, there is never any unmasking of the terrorist as such, since the face ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ cannot be, structurally, unmasked to strip away the balaclava is already to impose the ethnic descriptor that the mask signifies. The aporia of this double movement in fact constitutes a double bind for the figure ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’: she or he cannot be read, in the context of the West’s cultural panic over this figure, as a citizen-subject who is innocent of having perpetrated a crime until proven guilty by due legal process. On the contrary, the figure ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ is precluded from occupying that locus. In advance of the fact of having committed any crime, they are already criminalized: the phenotypicality of their face-as-balaclava proxy evidences as much; recursively, the soma technology of balaclava-as-ethnic descriptor proxy (re)iterates the same.
Perhaps nothing more powerfully illustrates this point, and the personal cost of embodying this radicalized double bind, than the case of Dr Mohamed Haneef, the Indian doctor working in a Brisbane hospital who was wrongly charged by Australian Federal police on terrorism offences. On 2 July 2007, Haneef was arrested and imprisoned for ‘‘recklessly’’ providing assistance to a terrorist organization by leaving his mobile SIM card with his cousin, Sabeel Ahmed, one of the Glasgow bombers, when he left Britain in July 2006. Haneef’s Australian visa was subsequently cancelled and he was threatened with deportation. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Damian Bugg, after a review of Haneef’s case, declared the alleged use of Haneef’s SIM card in the Glasgow bombing to be an ‘‘error of fact’’. Haneef returned to India voluntarily, is currently unemployed, and has commenced court proceedings in order to have his Australian work visa reinstated (ABC News 2007). Furthermore:
More than a year after a terrorism charge against him was dropped and more than $8 million later, the Australian Federal Police have finally confirmed that they have cleared the Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef as a suspect in last year’s terrorism attack on Glasgow airport. (Sydney Morning Herard 2008, 1)
In advance of the fact of having committed any proven criminal offence, on his arrest Haneef was paraded across the Australian media as a terrorist caught by the expertise of the Australian police. Photographed in the cell of a police armored wagon, stripped of civilian clothes, wearing a nondescript sack, his hands manacled and his head between his legs, Haneef was publicly ‘‘unmasked’’ as a terrorist. After the collapse of the government’s case against Haneef, despite the fact the court declared there was insufficient evidence to go to trial and that his visa should be reinstated, Haneef was still publicly represented by the government in terms of a terrorist suspect, regardless of the fact that they could not produce any evidence to substantiate this claim. In other words, released by the courts, rein scribed within the garb of civilian clothes, Haneef was still symbolically compelled to ‘‘wear’’ his balaclava mask of criminal/terrorist. Black of beard, dark of eye, swarthy-skinned this was sufficient evidence to prove the phenotypicality of his face-as-balaclava proxy of a criminal/terrorist.
The differentialist racist terrain that I have been traversing has been brilliantly mapped in the sardonic artwork of the Iranian British artist Reza Aramesh. Across a number of installations, Aramesh has brought into critical focus the radicalized charge of the face of Middle Eastern appearance-as-balaclava proxy for criminalization. In his Carboot Sale: Palm Trees Sold (Figure 2), Aramesh has three suited, balaclava masked figures situated in the space of an actual car-boot sale held in a warehouse in East London. Within the parameters of this civic-mercantile space, Aramesh mobilized three men of Middle Eastern background (a doctor, a television and film producer, and a criminal lawyer) and had them don balaclavas as they ‘‘illegally’’ hawked their wares: palm trees sold from a car boot.
Figure 2. Reza Aramesh, Carboot Sale: Palm Trees Sold, 2004.
As Orientalized metonyms of the Middle East, the palm trees are the ‘‘hot’’ merchandise that stand in contradistinction to the cool artwork that hangs on the walls. Aramesh, however, overturns this dichotomy by playing on the in dissociable double bind that inscribes the logic of the mask. On the one hand, the balaclava- masked men tautologically signify criminal non-citizen Middle Eastern subjects who can only appear within the context of civic spaces as always already criminal types, in contradistinction to the unmasked citizen-subjects milling around them and their palm trees. Yet Aramesh’s work brings into crisis the very rhetorical status of the mask: if a balaclava is at once tautological in terms of a particular phenotypical configuration of racist stereotypes and ethnic descriptors, the viewer is compelled to ask: what ‘‘masks’’ are the seemingly unmasked citizen-subjects also inscribed with? What are the phenotypical features of a face that allow a subject the privilege to occupy a civic space untrammelled by racist stereotypes? What radicalized features are so privileged within raciological relations of power that the cultural inscription/mask of one’s phenotypicality is effectively invisibilized? In other words, what are the biopolitical relations of power that enable one traverse civic spaces as though one were not wearing a mask that is, as though one’s face were not always already soma technologically intextuated by a cluster of biopolitical significations? Aramesh further amplifies the complex logic of the double bind that inscribes the mask-as non-mask in his use of the palms as Orientalized proxies of illegality and criminality. The illegal status of the palms, as ‘‘hot’’ merchandise that is being sold by self evidently criminal types, is at once resignified by their location in a civic space: their very status as illegal booty is simultaneously resignified as they become artworks reflexively commenting on the processual nature of politico-cultural construction and commodification.
Figure 3. Reza Aramesh, The Eternal Spring, 2004.
The figure of the balaclava-as proxy for the face ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ is, in Aramesh’s The Eternal Spring, contextualized within the private space of the home (Figure 3). Even within the confines of this private space, Aramesh suggests that the logic of the radicalized mask is inescapable. His staging of a choreography of relaxed and homely postures lounging, kneeling, reclining is problematises by the somatechnics of the balaclava. As the soma technology of the balaclava is fused to a set of radicalized phenotypical features, it becomes impossible to remove it even within the domestic confines of one’s home space. In this sense, the homely atmosphere of this domestic scene is already rendered unhomely, uncanny. A spectrality of threat and violence haunts this scene. None of the domestic objects the hookah, the Oriental rug; the flowers can vitiate this sense of threat. The very fact that one of the male figures is unmasked only serves to confirm this fact: enmeshed within the charged choreography of visibly masked figures, he represents the embodied tautology of the balaclava-as-proxy-for-the-criminal-face-of-Middle-Eastern-appearance.
In the play of mirrors, the naked figure of the woman embodies the stereotypical gendered dimensions of this double logic of the mask-as-truth. A reflection caught in double reflections, the naked figure of the woman signifies the Nietzschean burden of the untruth of truth, of the appearance of all reality:
There is no such thing as the essence of woman because woman averts, she is averted herself. Out of the depths . . . she engulfs and distorts all vestige of essentiality, of identity and property . . . There is no such thing as the truth of woman, but it is because of that untruth of that abyssal divergence of the truth, because that untruth is ‘‘truth’’. (Derrida 1993, 51)
The reflection of the naked woman in Aramesh’s image stages the rhetoricity and literality of this gendered and Orientalized double logic. Her literal turning away from the men and the spectator instantiates the tropological dimensions of this turn. Through this move, the cliché´ of one of Western philosophy’s ‘‘eternal verities’’ is both performed and mocked in the embodied gendered reflection of ‘‘eternal spring’’ as appearance (reflection) of appearance (image): she averts in order to underscore this rhetorical undoing of essentiality and identity: to be unmasked is already to be masked. Doubling this effect, the unmasked young man with averted gaze echoes as much.
The double turns and aversions the woman away from the men and the men from the naked woman instantiate, in turn, a queer scene of desire. In her comprehensive tracking of the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and ‘‘terrorist assemblages’’, Jasbir Puar asks:
What is queer about the terrorist? And what is queer about terrorist corporealities? The depictions of masculinity most rapidly disseminated and globalized at this historical juncture are terrorist masculinities: failed and perverse, these emasculated bodies always have femininity as their reference point of malfunction, and are tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and the body homosexuality . . . (2007, xxiii)
In the frame of this queer scene of terror and desire, the terrorist is the homosexual positioned in a network of homoerotic poses supine, kneeling with hands on crotch and spread-eagled and sideways looks. Their gaze averted (no backward glance here) from the naked woman, she becomes, in this queer choreography, the ‘‘reference point of malfunction’’, underscoring their failed heterosexuality and their perverse homosexuality.
Aramesh brilliantly dramatizes the symbolically violent logic of this radicalized, gendered and sexualized terrorist economy in So You’re Afraid of What: Avi on a Bed of Roses (Figure 4). Representing the figure of a hooded Avi lolling and sexually available on a bed of rose petals, the image at once invokes and satires the radicalized attributes of iconic white heteronormative American beauty. Poster boy Avi embodying a swarthy, hirsute and queer un-American beauty cannot, even in this most intimate of moments, be divested of his mask of terror. The logic of the balaclava-as-proxy for the figure ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ precludes the possibility of removing what has been soma technically sutured to the racially profiled flesh of the target subject. In this image, Aramesh provocatively exposes the way in which queerness, in Puar’s words, ‘‘is always already installed in the project of naming the terrorist’’: ‘‘It is not that we must engage in the practice of excavating the queer terrorist, or queering the terrorist; rather, queerness is always already installed in queering the terrorist’’ (2007, xxiv). Aramesh graphically dramatizes the a priori status of a queerness that pre-originality inflects the phantasm-event of the terrorist. The title of Aramesh’s image polysemically interrogates what is at stake in these queer economies indissociably inscribed by the vectors of race, sexuality and gender. What exactly is the locus of terror/desire in this image? What parts of desire remain scandalous and unnamable in this naked act of exposure and solicitation? So you’re afraid of what? Your disavowed homoerotic fantasies of the swarthy-balaclava-cladhomo- Arab-Muslim-terrorist lolling on a bed of roses? Describing another image altogether, the image of a figure in Osama bin Laden drag, Puar’s reflections appositely elucidate Aramesh’s image: ‘‘Visually, the body reclaims the faggotry, the effeminacy, the failed masculinity, always already installed in the naming of the terrorist, staging further defiance in the face of such easily rendered accusations of being a terrorist’’ (Puar 2007, 14). Lolling on his bed of roses, Avi at once interrogates and solicits the violence of categorical positionings, radicalized descriptors and disavowed queer economies of unspeakable desire.
Figure 4. Reza Aramesh, So You’re Afraid of What: Avi on a Bed of Roses, 2004.
In effect, what Aramesh draws attention to throughout this series of images is the manner in which the figure ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’, whether it be the woman dressed in the niqab or hijab, or the swarthy man with a black beard, are compelled by white supremacist regimes to live lives marked by ‘‘compulsory visibility’’ (Foucault 1982, 187). In coining this term, Foucault refers to the way in which disciplinary power demands that its subjects be ‘‘constantly seen’’ in order to hold them ‘‘in a mechanism of objectification’’ and subjection (1982, 187). Transposing Foucault’s term to contemporary regimes of Islam phobia and Arab phobia, the disciplinary mechanism of compulsory visibility inscribes racially profiled and targeted subjects within scopic economies of hyper-surveillance. In the context of these economies of hyper-surveillance, British or Australian Muslims and/ or Arabs become coextensive with their racially marked metonyms: the niqab, for example, operates at once to insert Muslim women within scopic regimes of compulsory visibility that mark them as prime targets of race hate and violence, whilst simultaneously marking them as infralegal criminals who will breach the contract of the Western liberal state. Placed under relentless and constant watch because of their infralegal suspect status, racially-profiled colored subjects can neither inhabit the tautological category of white-citizen-subject nor enjoy the civil liberties and rights of white ‘‘invisibility’’ that automatically accrue to this racially privileged subject. Whereas for them the category of (white) citizen-subject can only be lived as a mere prosthetic, the violent soma technologies of racial profiling and ethnic descriptors are, conversely, precisely what they embody autochthonously.
Moreover, these regimes of compulsory visibility need to be complicated by the tacit knowledges that antedate the actual process of catching sight of somebody in the field of vision. These tacit knowledges, as precognitive, are inscribed by what Puar terms ‘‘regimes of affect and tactility [that] conduct vital information beyond the visual’’ and that enable the move from ‘‘looks like’’ (a terrorist) to ‘‘feels like’’ (a terrorist) (2007, 187). It is precisely this affective move that perhaps best explains the complex operations at work in the production of racial phantasmata: even before one has caught site of the threatening figure of the radicalized other, one senses or ‘‘feels’’ that spectral presence that radiates precognitive, tacit, ‘‘intuitive’’ danger and threats of violence:
So the lungs spasm even before the senses cognate the presence of a shadow in a ‘‘dark street in the dangerous part of town.’’ The ‘‘dangerous part of town’’ and the shadow [/ phantasm] are then identifiable objects for which epistemic force is confirmed only after, or, more accurately, as affective response has taken place. (Puar 2007, 189)
In this way, the visual identification of racial phantasmata must be construed in terms of ‘‘identity-as-retrospective-ordering’’ (Puar 2007, 215). This retrospective ordering of identity is what takes place as/after the affective precomprehension or precognition of the radicalized other has been set in motion, and it is perhaps here that, in the context of this pre-rational embodied locus of affect, one can begin to source the power exerted by racial phantasmata.
‘‘Boys will be boys’’: whitewashing histories of racial violence
In the course of this article, I have been concerned with mapping the racializing dynamics of contemporary forms of culturalist and differentialist racism in the context of post-9/11 Islam phobia and Arab phobia. My focus has been on the ways in which items of clothing the niqab or the balaclava have been soma technically charged as symbols of threat and terror. As such, within the context of the white supremacist narratives I have been unfolding; these embodied metonyms of infralegal activities have been mobilized in order to foment cultural panics. I drew attention, in passing, to the unspoken asymmetries of power that inscribe and constitute Western liberalism. Western liberalism’s traditional non discriminating core is founded on the effacement of histories of radicalized violence, including genocide, slavery and lynchings. The Native American cultural theorist Andrea Smith succinctly articulates the whitewashing of this foundational violence:
White supremacy, colonialism, and economic exploitation are inextricably linked to US democratic ideals rather than aberrations from it. The ‘‘freedom’’ guaranteed to some individuals in society has always been premised upon the radical unfreedom of others. Very specifically, the US could not exist without the genocide of indigenous peoples. (Smith 2005, 184)
In moving toward the conclusion of this article, I want to bring into focus the violent radicalized double standards that continue to inscribe Western liberalism by drawing attention to one final example of radicalized soma technologies. A recently released video posted on YouTube showed the activities of a group of Australian soldiers stationed in Darwin, capital city of the Northern Territory. One of the soldiers ‘‘is shown in the full garb, complete with pointed hood, of the Klan, the fanatical group that tortured and murdered black people in the US’’ (Skehan 2007, 3) (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Australian soldier wearing a Ku Klux Klan tunic and hood.
Australia’s former Prime Minister, John Howard, when asked to respond to the activities of the soldiers, replied that ‘‘boys will be boys’’: ‘‘I have some understanding of the disposition of people in these situations to let off a bit of steam . . . People get into a lather of sweat and so on . . . Let’s be sensible about this’’ (Skehan 2007, 3). The former Defense Minister, Brendan Nelson, remarked: ‘‘it is letting off a bit of steam and a bit of Larrikin irreverence’’ (Skehan 2007, 3). Reproduced in the remarks of these two figures of white governmental authority is a disavowal of the fact that the soma technology of the Ku Klux Klan’s white tunic and pointed hood signifies, for people of color, violence, race hate and terror. The racial violence embodied by this garment is, in their dismissive remarks, at once vitiated and naturalized by being inserted within phallocentric hetero-normative white-supremacist narratives of ‘‘boys being boys’’. The invocation of the ‘‘irreverent’’ figure of the Larrikin, an exclusively white heteromale Anglo-Australian national icon, functions further to neutralize the history of radicalized violence represented by this Ku Klux Klan garment. Furthermore, the white supremacist practices performed by members of the Australian army in the Northern Territory must be situated in the context of the Australian government’s recent deployment of the military in order to deal with alleged cases of child abuse in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities (see Marr 2007, 33). This extraordinary move, made without any consultation on the part of Indigenous communities, and in direct violation of the recommendations made by the recent Indigenous report All children are sacred on how best to address child abuse, has generated panic amongst the Indigenous communities because of the long history of colonial violence perpetrated by both military and paramilitary forces, including massacres and the forced removals of Aboriginal children from their parents during the years of colonial assimilation.
Not far from where white Australian soldiers performed their mock Ku Klux Klan ‘‘antics’’ is Coniston, the site of a massacre of Warlpiri people by white police. This massacre, which occurred in 1928, is still within the living memory of some of the Northern Territory’s Aboriginal people:
Some 60 to 70 Warlpiri people were killed over several weeks by a police party. Murray, the officer in charge, openly admitted to a policy of shoot to kill. According to a missionary who spoke to survivors of the killings, ‘‘the natives tell me they simply shot them like dogs and that they got the little children and hit them on the back of the neck and killed them’’ . . . An inquiry headed by a police inspector, at which Aboriginal people were refused legal representation, was established into the killings. The inquiry cleared those who were involved. (Cunneen 2001, 55)
Viewed in this colonial context, the Ku Klux Klan garb must be seen as historically coextensive with both Australian military and police uniforms. As a soma technology invested with a history of white violence and terror, this history is what must be disavowed, neutralized and reduced to mere ‘‘boys’ games’’. In an exemplary manner, this move is what reproduces the complex logic of disavowal and displacement that so characterizes white relations of power: whiteness denigrates its own apparatuses of violence and terror, resignifying its own racially marked soma technologies of violence as neutral and benign, whilst simultaneously inscribing a range of other racially charged soma technologies in terms of so many embodied metonymic displacements: fear, terror and violence they only ever arrive in the garb of the niqab, the balaclava and that swarthy figure ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’. Situated within this white logic of structural effacement and metonymic displacement, these racially charged phantasmata are mobilized as so many infralegal threats that are ready to destroy the ‘‘implicit social contract’’ a contract in which what must remain ‘‘implicit’’ is the disavowed white violence that at once founds and constitutes its liberal core.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Michael Mucci for his generosity in allowing reproduction of the image of women in niqabs on a Petri dish. The author is also grateful to Reza Aramesh for his generous permission to reproduce his artwork. The author’s readings of Reza Aramesh’s images do not necessarily reflect the views of the artist. The YouTube image is reproduced with permission of Australian Associated Press.
Note
1. I am grateful to Susan Stryker for coining the term ‘‘somatechnics’’. For a detailed definition of this term, see the Somatechnics Research Centre website (http://www.somatechnics. org).
Note on contributor
Joseph Pugliese is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. His research areas include race and ethnicity, cultural theory, migration and diaspora, visual culture, embodiment and technology, terrorism and racial profiling, and cultural studies of law.
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