Homegrown. Piotr M. Szpunar
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the Communist to the jihadist and beyond; exceptional and administrative modes of depoliticizing violence—none of these divisions are absolute, and the emergence of one, much like the move from the other to the Double, does not depend on the disappearance of another. Together the lineages constitute a historical triad from which to understand the emergence of the Double in its current forms and inflections. For Sigmund Freud, the Double simultaneously embodies what is “familiar and agreeable and … that which is concealed and kept out of sight.”48 A figure that takes the most ordinary of shapes (the everyday citizen) together with the most existential of threats (the monstrous terrorist), the Double is a dissonant melody, always out of key and in constant motion. The genealogy of homegrown terrorism does not produce the shape of the Double in any deterministic sense. The Double is an amorphous and complex figure. This history simply provides a backdrop from which to begin to theorize and make sense of the ways in which the Double is constructed in contemporary security discourses.
The Double
A cultural-literary motif employed in oral and written traditions across cultures and civilizations, the Double dates back to a twelfth-century BCE ancient Egyptian story, “The Tale of the Two Brothers.” In it doubling is evident not only between the two brothers, but also in the externalization of the younger’s soul, which takes on many changing forms. Shadows, reflections, and twins—the earliest manifestations of doubling that fascinated humankind—souls, lookalikes (doppelgängers), clones, suspected imposters, complementary characters, and psychological personality splits, these are the many expressions of the Double. Oscillating in and out of fashion, late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century European literature marks the height of the Double’s popularity.49 Despite claims of its facile nature and that film had reduced its complexity, the Double has retained its peculiar draw. Notable twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers who employed it include Kafka, Borges, Nabokov, Saramago, Roth, and Pamuk, to name a few.50 In intellectual circles the Double has been applied to an equally dizzying array of themes: Saussure’s theory of the sign, Christian theology, Hegel’s dialectic, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Derrida’s work on language and representation, posthumanism, literary history, and the relationship of philosophy and literature more generally.51
The Double’s seemingly endless iterations and uses present the daunting but necessary task of defining how it will be used throughout this book and how it relates to homegrown terrorism. While the Double’s multiplicity has led some to describe the concept as “embarrassingly vague,” malleability and amorphousness are its essence, its constitutive anxiety found in its shifting and porous boundaries.52 The blurring of clear boundaries is precisely the core anxiety concerning incidents of Americans taking up arms against their own country and a productive force in strategies of security. Thus, the definition offered here does not reduce the multiplicity of the Double, but retains its core ambiguity. Also, since the nineteenth century—though some trace this back to Descartes’s division of cogito and res extensa—the Double has been a predominantly psychological construct marking opposing tendencies, identity crises, and man’s fundamental incompleteness.53 While this book is primarily concerned with the Double in a collective context, the psychological inflection remains consequential. Claims that a Double is lurking and loose within the collective are dependent on assertions that the group’s members are not only suspect but also susceptible to crises of identity. With these points in mind, the Double is a trope that blends the familiar and the unfamiliar by placing within the familiar an amorphous sense of otherness, strangeness, and potential danger.
The bright rays fell vividly upon the sleeper, and my eyes, at the same moment, upon his countenance. I looked;—and a numbness, an iciness of feeling instantly pervaded my frame. My breast heaved, my knees tottered, my whole spirit became possessed with an objectless yet intolerable horror. Gasping for breath, I lowered the lamp in still nearer proximity to the face. Were these—these the lineaments of William Wilson? I saw, indeed, that they were his, but I shook as if hit with a fit of the ague in fancying that they were not. What was there about them to confound me in this manner? I gazed;—while my brain reeled with a multitude of incoherent thoughts. Not thus he appeared—assuredly not thus—in the vivacity of his waking hours. The same name! the same contour of person! the same day of arrival at the academy! And then this dogged and meaningless imitation of my gait, my voice, my habits and my manner! Was it, in truth, within the bounds of human possibility, that what I now saw was the result, merely, of the habitual practice of this sarcastic imitation?54
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson,” from which the above passage is quoted, begins with a man who narrates his lifelong entanglement with his Double (who I will also refer to as “Wilson”). The Double’s likeness to the narrator is at first made evident to the reader only through their common name.55 Time and again the Double thwarts the narrator’s mischievous actions. Their story ends with a single-blow murder-suicide in which the narrator kills Wilson, and, through a mirror that subsequently takes Wilson’s place, realizes that he has mortally wounded himself. One of innumerable possible examples, Poe’s story is a richly dense source from which to illustrate my definition and introduce key aspects of the Double. These include the identity markers deployed in conjuring the Double, its tie to media and communication technologies writ broadly, and, ultimately, its function in the context of homegrown terrorism.
The above passage describes the moment in which the narrator first recognizes the face of the Double as an exact likeness of his own. The Double often appears—and is predominantly thought of—as a lookalike.56 This occurs slowly in Poe’s story. The narrator discovers their shared physiognomy gradually over time and only once he examines the sleeping Wilson by candlelight. The closing scene leaves no doubt: “in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev embodies this realization in the context of homegrown terrorism. But the Double does not solely, or always primarily, manifest in phenotypic duplicates or matching physiognomies. It can appear in vision (not limited to the face or physical body), voice, and manner. In “William Wilson,” before the reader learns of the uncanny similarity between both faces, the narrator indicates not only physical likenesses—height, “general contour of person and outline of feature”—but also similarities in style of dress, gait, and the timbre of voice. Indeed, the conjuring of the Double in cases of homegrown terrorism is not exclusively based on physical markers but, paralleling the racism that pervades the war on terror, is centered on cultural markers as well as behavioral ones. Chapter 3 illustrates how officials and the media communicated a frightening recognition of “something of ourselves” in Anwar al-Awlaki—an American cleric affiliated with al-Qaeda killed in a 2011 drone strike—by highlighting his familiarity and command of American culture evident in the delivery and content of his lectures. In Chapter 1, Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, was said to be hiding in plain sight, camouflaged by his US Army fatigues (he was a military psychiatrist). These two cases illustrate how a variety of markers of likeness are invoked even in cases involving physiognomies that, throughout the war on terror, have consistently been made other.
The amalgamation of self and other in one individual, or the splitting of an individual, is often accounted for in media and official discourse through recourse to technologies that facilitate access to that which has been deemed foreign.57 Paralleling Schmitt’s assertion that developments in technology (including communication technologies) have changed the nature of conflict, the infiltration of America or radicalization of Americans by a malignant otherness is often attributed to communications media, particularly digital media. The Tsarnaev brothers were said to live out their second or shadowy lives on social media. The Fort Dix Five were said to be inspired by the digital output of Anwar al-Awlaki (Chapter 2), who himself continued to exist as a digital doppelgänger after his death in 2011 (Chapter 3). This is by no means a recent development in the Double motif. The ubiquity of the Double in nineteenth-century literature was also closely linked to anxieties concerning new technologies and the novel forms of contact they facilitated with distant others.58 In Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the electric light allows Hyde to roam the streets