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TWO

“A General Principle of Democracy”

TERROR AND COLONIAL MODERNITY

In the New World, as in Africa and the Indian subcontinent, the advent of colonial power was justified via appeal to the inherent terror of the “state of nature.” In the colonial imagination, the “state of nature” was a space imbued with the sublime—an unfathomable space, inhabited by infrahuman beings, that inspired a disorienting, even paralyzing admixture of astonishment, terror, and pleasure, and that invited and demanded the pacifying influence of Enlightenment rationality and colonial power. Empire, that is, was conceived by its architects as a project of “counterterror.” The object of this project was not simply the terror intrinsic to the colonized world but the terror of anti-colonial resistance. The imperial state interpreted the latter as evidence of the former—which is to say that violent opposition to colonialism was explained, by the colonial imagination, as the expression of an essential native barbarism rather than as a rational political response to, or reflection of, the terrors of empire. In the context of the War on Terror, this paradigm persists. The neoconservative doctrine of preemption assumes that the innate terror of the enemy other will soon erupt. The enactment of military violence is required to negate both the latent and manifest instances of anti-imperial terror.

The term “counterterror” betrays the ways in which the state’s response to terror is itself a form of terror. The duality of terror as at once within and without, fundamental yet threatening to the imperial state, was revealed with a particular clarity, as myriad historians have argued, in the moment of the French Revolution, and the transition therein from Jacobin to Thermidorean violence—from Robespierre’s insistence that terror was “an emanation of virtue . . . a general principle of democracy” to its later redefinition, in the moment of counterrevolution, as the archetypal enemy of the state. For thinkers such as Arendt, as for Hegel and Kant, the relationship between terror and the liberal state is uniquely a problem of foundation. The abiding historical and philosophic question is whether the glorious ends of revolution justify its violent means. As the ongoing history of Euro-American imperialism makes especially plain, though, terror is a central technology of the mature and not merely nascent form of the liberal state. Terror is also, crucially, one basic condition for the birth of political modernity. The emancipation of the bourgeoisie in Europe was enabled by the terrors of primitive accumulation—the extraction of resources and exploitation of slave labor in the New World. In his reflections on primitive accumulation, Marx highlights the ways in which capital “comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”¹ But just as Arendt confines the terrors of the liberal state to the moment of its beginning, Marx imagines the terrors of primitive accumulation as primordial rather than perpetual. Countering these conjoined historiographic elisions, my argument in this chapter highlights the enduring mutuality of state terror and primitive accumulation.

The essential and enduring terrors of capital and the imperial state give rise to violent resistance. In the event of the Haitian Revolution, the masses of slaves in revolt demonstrated, to the world, that the radical realization of Enlightenment universalisms would be made possible by the violent destruction—and not merely philosophic rejection—of chattel rationality. In the mid-twentieth century, in dialogue with the anticolonial energies then reverberating throughout the world, C. L. R. James summoned the example of Haiti’s slaves—and that of their leader Toussaint L’Ouverture—into contemporary service. James reflected on the content of the revolution’s form—the theoretical implications of its violent methods, and the immutable contradictions of its violent aftermath. Writing in rhythm with James, in an allied conceptual idiom, Frantz Fanon meditated on the possibilities of an anticolonial violence that would bring newness into the world without itself calcifying, in the wake of independence, into the perpetual terrors of capital and state. The insights of James and Fanon continue to resonate in the current conjuncture. The possibility of a subjective terror that transcends the objective terrors of imperial power, without being assimilated by the latter, is a problem today posed from multiple political positions by a diversity of actors and theorists.

In this chapter, I demonstrate that the politics of terror are expressed in and by three primary modalities—terror as a pretext for imperial power, terror as a method of imperial power, and terror as a form of resistance to imperial power. Critical reckoning with the “terror” concept requires that we examine the interrelation of these modalities, within the recent histories of capital and the security state, and within the broad frame of colonial modernity.

TERROR AND THE COLONIAL SUBLIME

Kant, Burke, and the Colonial Sublime

The modern genealogy of the sublime is commonly traced to Kant and Edmund Burke. For both thinkers, the sublime—as a political and aesthetic analytic—was clarified by the colonial encounter. Writing in the latter half of the eighteenth century—a moment of deepening imperial processes in the Americas and in South Asia—Kant and Burke employed notions of the sublime to theorize the European male subject’s confrontation with the radical difference embodied in and by the state of nature.

In Kant’s definition, the sublime refers to the “boundlessness” of nature—that which is, in comparison to other phenomena, “absolutely great.”² This greatness inspires in the subject a mixture of awe, pleasure, and terror. The receiving subject, Kant argued in his Critique of Judgment (1790), is broken down by the fearful immensity of nature. But in response, he submits to the primacy of reason, thereby restoring both the self and the social order at large. In Kant’s theorization of the “dynamic” sublime, the recognition of nature’s terrible power conditions the ultimate ascendancy of reason and rationality—and of the European male subject who is understood to be the privileged owner of such properties.

Like the imperial imagination at large, the Kantian sublime simultaneously posits the terrible vastness of the natural world and enacts its domestication. This double movement was performed in a quite literal way by artists of the romanticist movement, who at once paid homage to the immensity of nature and confined that immensity within the manageable parameters of a picture frame. In nineteenth-century North America, the artists of the Hudson River School exalted the immense scale, uncorrupted emptiness, and great, terrifying beauty of the New World. But in reducing that scale to the confines of the painting—and permitting the consuming public to view it at a position of safe remove, in a gallery or domestic setting—they affirmed human mastery over nature, and testified to the imminence and essential righteousness of the continent’s conquest. The depiction of empty landscapes symbolically cleansed the continent of its native inhabitants, at once eliding and providing visual proof of the epidemiological slaughter then well underway. Those paintings that did include, if not foreground, the representation of indigenous subjects imagined them as indistinct from the deep gorges, impenetrable forests, and rushing rivers—as evocative of terror and the “negative pleasure” that accompanies it, as less than human, and as subject to the inexorable destiny of white civilization. This rendering of indigenous subjects as a part of nature echoed Kant’s own philosophy of racial difference. As Gayatri Spivak and other postcolonial critics have argued, Kant imagines the “Fuegan” or the “New Hollander”—“man in the raw,” as he elsewhere terms the savage, colonized subject—as a potential source of, but incapable of being redeemed by, the sublime. (Women too are denied entry into the community of rational subjects for whom the sublime is “universally communicable.”)³

According to Burke’s earlier elaboration, the sublime is “whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror.”⁴ Burke allows that the terror of the sublime might also elicit feelings of pleasure—indeed, his own reflections share with Kant a basic understanding of the sublime as a displeasure that provokes feelings of pleasure—but its ultimate effect is disarming; the colonial subject is undone, his grasp of and power over the world threatened by the impenetrable and unfathomable vastness of what he confronts—an ascendant nature that exceeds, and demands the surrender of, humanity itself. In Burke’s rendering, there is no second moment wherein the individual, and the reason he wields, reclaims his power over the sublime object.

Though Burke’s 1757 treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is not explicitly staged within or addressed to any particular geographic context, the work is haunted by what would become one of the thinker’s abiding political concerns: the ethical and moral consequence—for Britain especially but also for its colonized subjects—of the British imperial project. Throughout his entwined intellectual and political lives, Burke maintained a deeply ambivalent relationship to Britain’s imperial projections in his native Ireland, in India, and in America. His extensive writings on Ireland and India in particular can be read, in good faith, as either a serious critique of empire or a primer on how to most effectively govern in the colonies—to rule, that is, in a way that reconciles the brutality of empire with the Enlightenment vocabulary in which it is clothed. Luke Gibbons situates Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry against the backdrop of British colonial rule in Ireland. Burke was appalled, Gibbons notes, by both the violent tactics of the Whiteboy movement—which sought to protect tenant land rights—in the 1760s and by the colonial government’s brutal reply.⁵ The government’s execution of Whiteboy agitators and suspected enablers was designed as a display of sublime terror, which would awe the subject population into an unquestioning reverence for the justice (or justness) of colonial rule. Burke advocated for a more measured mode of colonial power, one that would mitigate and obscure the object of terror, and one that would seek to enlist the colonized subject—via the judicious manipulation of the sublime—into the administration of the colonial regime, rather than simply seek their passive submission to its abstract dictums. Burke lamented, though, that social conditions in Ireland did not encourage the articulation of this more subdued, but still sublime, form of colonial power. The British imperial presence had so succeeded in suppressing local customs that no sound social fundament existed within which a more benign, more cooperative, colonial order might take root. Burke identified in India more fertile ground for his ideal imperial government. India, Burke famously avowed, was possessed of rules and principles equal in their legitimacy to, and endowed with an even greater historical weight (“tradition”) than, those of Britain. In his speeches in support of the former Governor-General of India Warren Hastings’s impeachment, Burke railed against the excesses of British power in India, abuses he attributed to the amoral mercantilism of the East India Company, and to the despotic tendencies of the Empire’s “adolescent” foot soldiers. At once an impassioned plea for “sympathy” with the humanity and rights of the Indian people and a plainly orientalist affirmation of Britain’s paternalistic relationship to them—an argument for cultural relativism that appeals to a universal morality and historicity—Burke’s speeches and writings on India are a feat of rhetorical contortionism. In each of the meandering discursive paths down which he travels, though, Burke is guided by an abiding political-aesthetic concern with the sublime. As Sara Suleri observes, Burke deploys the trope of the sublime to describe the unknowable vastness of India (even as he attempts to construct around that vastness a taming taxonomic apparatus).⁶ This vastness is, for Burke, doubly threatening. First, the terror evoked by the immensity of India threatens to overwhelm the imagination—undo the cognitive security—of the youthful agent of empire. Second, the sublimity of India is threatening because of the terror it provokes—the arbitrary, excessive, and punitive reassertion of colonial power. Importantly, at stake for Burke in both cases is the integrity of British social and political order, the danger posed to British society by its exposure and subsequent reversion to the unmitigated power of the sublime. In place of a colonial government guided by the naked pursuit of profit and propped up by the arbitrary exercise of force, the mode of rule Burke imagined would recognize the essential humanity and cultural singularity of the Indian people, and would conceal (or attenuate) the violence of colonial social relations with the “wardrobe of a moral imagination.”

Whatever its politics, Burke’s account possesses a keen dialectic sensitivity to the irrationality of rationality—the irrationality, specifically, of the putatively rational colonial response to the sublimity of the colonized (or soon-to-be colonized) world. While Kant imagines a second moment in the European confrontation with the sublime, wherein the male subject reestablishes his power over the boundlessness of nature through the exercise of reason, Burke recognizes that “reason” functions in the colonial context as euphemistic cover for the articulation of political terror (the synthetic sublime). The sublime power of nature is countered not with the ascendancy of reason but with the sublime power of the colonial state. Here we can glimpse the genealogical origins of the terror/counterterror cycle that structures the political present. The “terror” invoked in the rhetorical figure of the “War on Terror” signifies an ontological essence as much as a political practice. The legitimate violence of the state, in other words, is responding not just to the ideology and method of “terror” but to its intrinsic residence in the world’s uncivilized spaces and peoples.

The Colonial Sublime Today

Burke’s meditations on the political sublime anticipated the term’s contemporary articulation, which evokes less the grandest canyon or tallest mountain and more the great terror produced by human technologies of mass violence. Today, the archetypal image of sublime terror is not a stormy sea or vast desert but the mushroom cloud left by the atomic bomb.⁷ Importantly, though, these two manifestations of the sublime are not contradictory but allied, and their mutual entanglement was as much a feature of the eighteenth century as it is of the twenty-first. In the colonial context, the terror inherent to “first nature” required the production of “second nature” sublimity. Technologies of transport and communication were used to both inspire fear and compel subservience to the ideology of “development.”⁸ To borrow an example from Brian Larkin’s Signal and Noise, the introduction of the railroad in Nigeria did more than transform the economic and cultural geography of the colony, tying together north and south and deepening the connection of the country at large to global processes of accumulation; it also provoked among the rural population a profound feeling of “fear and terror” at the limitless capacities of a colonial power that could transform the landscape itself.⁹ Technologies of extermination were more unitary in their terrorizing effect. The exceptional space of the colony served as a laboratory for new methods of extermination, the lethalness and awe-inducing capacities of which could be tested on infrahuman subjects. In the New World, the introduction of repeating firearms—first the Colt six-shot revolver, and later the Spencer Carbine rifle—transformed the settler-conquest of the American West. Prior to their innovation, the superior horsemanship of Plains tribes such as the Comanche could match the cumbersome technologies and tactics of federal regiments; their advent altered the balance of power in battle and provoked new levels of terror in indigenous communities, for whom such weapons posed a cosmological as well as physical threat. In North and Southern Africa, the Gatling gun enabled the British Empire to expand spatially, and to “pacify” colonized populations terrorized by the specter of mass extermination. The first aerial bombs, meanwhile, were manually dropped from an Italian plane onto Tagiura, an oasis outside of Tripoli, in 1911. The bomb redrew the lines of the battlefield, incorporating civilians and cities into the theatre of war in previously unimaginable ways. It was also a perfect technology of sublime violence. The people lying in wait below turned in terror toward the heavens, pacified—the colonial strategists hoped—by a combination of reverence and fear. A communiqué released by the Italian Air Force in the aftermath of that first fateful attack claimed that the bombing “had a wonderful effect on the morale of the Arabs.”¹⁰ During the interwar period, the bomb was embraced by European imperial powers—most especially Britain—as an essential instrument of colonial governance. “Air control,” or terror from above, preserved the lives of imperial soldiers by targeting colonized noncombatants.

In the metropole, the bomb carried both utopian and dystopian connotations. In the popular imagination, the potential it contained for mass destruction promised at turns planetary peace and the end of human (or European, or British) civilization. One common trope of early twentieth-century British science fiction imagined a “superweapon” that would cleanse the world of Anglo civilization’s last resistors. Another recurring sci-fi narrative gave expression to darker fantasies; in the latter genre, the inferior races appropriate the “superweapon” and bomb Britain into savagery and oblivion.¹¹ This nightmare inversion of the colonial order of things contradicted the Kantian assumption that “man in the raw” was incapable of actively mediating, and being redeemed by, the sublime.¹² It also prefigured contemporary terror politics and its attendant narrative frameworks. In contemporary popular culture and governmental discourse, the “terrorist” is simultaneously imagined as primitive, prior to the temporality of modernity, and as a potential exponent of the most sophisticated modern weaponry. Before September 11, many prominent members of the U.S. foreign policy apparatus, more convinced by the Kantian formulation, thought such an attack ontologically impossible. In the spring of 2001, Paul Wolfowitz dismissed Osama bin Laden as “this little terrorist in Afghanistan”—a “man in the raw,” in other words, whose natural habitat was a cave in Tora Bora. But the events of September 11 represented the realization of the imperial nightmare conveyed by those century-old pulp fictions: the colonized subject, seizing control of the sublime power of modern technologies and visiting a vengeful terror upon his colonial overlords.¹³