Homegrown. Piotr M. Szpunar
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produce a monstrous Double. Historically and today the Double (re)emerges in and through anxieties concerning the development of a “world of perpetual light.”59 Chapter 2 illustrates the ways in which a wide variety of media and communications technologies (e.g., books, airplanes, bombs, websites) placed in ubiquitous digital and analog networks (intimately connecting virtual spaces, foreign lands, and the living rooms of ordinary Americans) are implicated in the discourse of the Double and the securitizing practices it facilitates.
Bringing the Double into the context of the collective and, more importantly, the collective at war in its contemporary form begs the question of what exactly the invocation of the Double facilitates. What does framing an enemy as a circulating potential within ubiquitous communication networks and brought to life through experiences and pressures common to everyday life (as per theories of radicalization) do to notions of belonging? What is the utility of constructing a threat “like us” and proclaiming that this “highly energized and potentially dangerous” figure is loose within the collective?60 An understanding of the function of the Double begins with addressing its status as potentially dangerous.
The simple appearance of one’s likeness, whether in vision, voice, or manner, and however disorienting, does not fully explain the horror of the narrator’s experience in “William Wilson”—tottering knees, lack of breath, and reeling mind. The Double motif is not a priori tied to terror. Not only was the Double once employed for comic effect, but in some of its earlier usages the figure signaled different variants of immortality. In Judaic tradition, the Double’s appearance was considered proof of the soul’s existence and thus man’s immortality.61 In the burial rights of Roman emperors, the use of and ritual around an effigy of the deceased signaled that “while the king may die, the King never dies.”62 However, what was once a guardian angel would come to be viewed as a harbinger of death. The presence of one’s Double took on the meaning that one’s soul had departed the body, signaling one’s ultimate doom; hence, the reference to the Double as “the fetch” in Scottish folklore.63 In literature, those who come across their Double, like the narrator of “William Wilson,” eventually, and often quickly, meet their demise. Here, the “unfamiliar” is not simply another body or figure, but an otherness sensed in the presence of the familiar, in their conflation. When Freud states that the Double conceals something under the veneer of agreeability, the implication is that what is kept from sight is ominous, disturbing, and dangerous (its potency due to its inseparability from the familiar).
The Double, pace Freud, is underwritten by the logics of not only splitting and duplication, but also doubt and duplicity, giving the many forms of likeness embodied in the Double a peculiar valence. The Double is no mere facsimile.64 In the pangs of discovering the Double’s face, the narrator refers to Wilson’s gait, voice, habits, and manner as “sarcastic imitation.” However, he otherwise admits that through these, Wilson presents an “exquisite portraiture … [that] could not justly be termed a mere caricature.” Moreover, in the climactic finale in which a mirror appears in place of Wilson, the narrator utters in response to the image in it, “Thus it appeared, I say, but was not.” Here, the narrator communicates the ambivalence of the Double motif and how it works precisely to put into doubt any clear distinction between one and one’s double. Doubt and duplicity are also evident in the multitude of terms the narrator employs to describe Wilson: brother, namesake, twin, companion, imposter, and antagonist.65
In a collective context, particularly that of homegrown terrorism, the effect of the Double translates into an inability to tell friend from foe: “the phenomenological problem posed by [doubles such as Stevenson’s] Hyde is that his deformity is unnamable. The monster cannot be expressly distinguished from normal forms,” only intensifying the existential threat the figure presents.66 The Double populates and generates what Schmitt calls “wider spaces of insecurity, fear, and general mistrust.”67 Like the narrator’s unease about when and where Wilson might turn up—doubly reflected in the narrator’s claim that their shared name is so unremarkable and ordinary that it is the “common property of the mob”—the discourse of the Double injects a similar anxiety into contemporary America. Family, friends, and neighbors of Americans who are charged with terrorism-related offenses or attempt to join ISIS exclaim in surprise at the revelation—“If he’s a terrorist, he’s the nicest terrorist I ever met in my life!”68
The Double unsettles and prevents closure: “what captures and entraps—what seems inescapable—is none other than an ever changing tendency to shift and defer, ad infinitum.”69 What this entails is, again, best illustrated in contrast to the functionality of the other. The other establishes clear boundaries and sutures a collective’s identity. It circulates within what Foucault calls relations of disciplinary power. Discipline is a modality of power that lets “nothing escape,” utilizing strategies of enclosure, confinement, and observation that materialize in a variety of spaces: the prison, the clinic, the asylum.70 All of these disciplinary spaces divide the normal from the abnormal and structure what is permitted and what is prohibited. The present-day use of communication management units (which place extreme limits on contact with the outside world) in federal prisons, Guantanamo Bay, and various other black sites in which many brown, Arab, and Muslim men (marked as other) are held without charge or chance of release is a poignant reminder of the continuing relevance of disciplinary power, however modified by the logic of the exception.
The Double, on the other hand, could be said to simultaneously underwrite and exceed what Foucault terms biopolitical strategies of management that operate through a calculus of ratios and probabilities and in which pathologies are immanent rather than confined. Taking into account a whole constellation of variables, this modality of power is visible in theories of radicalization that, rather than always employing clear categorizations (though many do), consider a broad and ever-expanding list of cognitive, affective, and experiential variables in calculating what may take an American outside an acceptable curve of normality.71 In search of and in anticipation of the dangerous individual, this logic of security “works on the future” and focuses on the uncertain and “tries to prevent [violence, crime, terror, etc.] in advance”—an urgency fed by the political costs of a terrorist attack occurring on one’s watch.72 The anticipatory calculus of uncovering an enemy that might materialize in the people and places one would least expect is an intrusive one. In “William Wilson,” the true horror of the Double is uncovered only through covert action, penetrating the only private space Wilson has in the school—his bedroom. The narrator’s discovery of the Double (in the sense that they share a physiognomy) occurs by casting a secretive light into a private space. In the context of homegrown terrorism, this practice takes two interrelated forms: first, sweeping modes of surveillance that penetrate into the most intimate dimensions of everyday life, such as the NSA’s PRISM; second, the use of informants. Government informants, however, do much more than monitor and surveil; their function exceeds the biopolitical. Unlike discipline, which lets nothing escape, Foucault asserts biopower “lets things happen.”73 The Double requires that this be taken further and facilitates strategies that “make things happen”—it is a preemptory and “incitatory” figure.74 Informants explicitly aid in the “radicalization” and mobilization of US residents and citizens, the practices and consequences of which are examined in Chapters 2 and 3.75 The informant is himself a double—the inversion of the enemy-Double—illustrating just how the figure and discourse of the Double is not simply a threat to be confined, but a construct that is part and parcel of contemporary modalities of conflict.
If the Double marks the abandonment of the form of “originary [external] difference intrinsic to the Western logos,” it does so in a temporary and oscillating manner and works in conjunction with other strategies.76 Importantly, the Double does not negate the consequentiality of the other. The racism, violence, and discrimination faced by American Muslim and Arab communities serve as constant reminders. The move from the other to the Double, much like that of discipline to biopower and conventional to absolute hostility, is only a shift “in emphasis” (much like the imbricated histories that make up the genealogy of homegrown terrorism).77 Moreover, forms of hostility overlap and biopolitical modalities embed