//EDITORAL 04 - Terror/Terrorism
“I see in Heliogabalus, not a madman, but an insurgent. First, against Roman polytheism. Second, against the Roman monarchy which he caused to be fucked in his own ass. But in his person, the two revolts, the two insurrections, mix, they rule all his behavior, they command his actions, up to the most shameful, during his four year reign. His insurrection is systematic and wise and is directed first of all against himself. When Heliogabalus dressed as a prostitute and sold himself for forty cents at the door of Christian churches and the temples of the Roman gods he wasn’t simply satisfying a vice, he was humiliating the Roman empire.” Antonin Artaud
Marcus Aurelius Antonius, Elagabalus, Heliogabalus or “The Crowned Anarchist” - as famously described by Artaud – was a Roman emperor from 218 to 222, who, when 18 years of age, was killed by the Praetorian guards, rumor has it, in the latrines of the Imperial palace, among blood and excrement. But his destruction had begun along time ago, since the begining or, at any rate, since he became simultaneously Emperor and worshiper of Heliogabalus or Sun God Invictus, dancing around a conical stone, to the sound of drums and cymbals. His self-destruction in the role of the highest person of the Empire was therefore the destruction of the Empire itself, or its corrosion, not from inside but from the top. Terror and terrorism in one, systematic in its anarchy, union of the sexes in prayer to the sun god or his anus.
Terror does not have a first moment, it is latent; but such indefinition can be evoked – one needs to be a wizard or shaman to extract it from the deep sleep which hides it and informs its invisibility. This evocation, a necessary possession by terror, is twisted round and salvaged – over-codified – by political systematization. This other terror, from the Latin terrere, brings firstly to mind the emergency state in Rome, terror cimbricus, panic before the catastrophic advance of warriors from northern Europe and, latterly, for the Jacobins and their ‘Reign of Terror’ of 1793-94, with en masse use of the guillotine against the nobility and the enemies of the revolution.
Halfway, and including the guillotine as a suggestion of the importance of the technological artifact in the production or evocation of terror, one should note the invention of the trebuchet as one of the most incisive terrorist apparatus: dead animals, cows, putrefied or plague ridden corpses, would be flung across the air over the walls of besieged cities to spread disease and infection, an airborne intervention, bacteriological e doubtlessly terrorizing.
Here we are building the historical past of terror and of its application. But between yesteryears cruelty and contemporary terrorism there’s a great distance, that Jarry explored so well in the famous sentence: “Before Ravachol, ravachols were there who exploded with their own strength of will”. We use as an example to explain this difference Kafka’s penal colony machine: on the one plane the necessary inscription of the sentence upon the flesh of the criminal, elaborated by an absurd and cruel apparatus, in a sexual encounter which, through death, gives life to law itself. On the other plane, disciplinary invisibility, which under the surface of humanism e civilized morals searches for an efficient sentence, imposed in space and time. Therefore, in the confrontation between two worlds, the absurd cruelty of the machine is substituted by the terror of the invisible machine; tragedy is substituted by bureaucracy and the aseptic governamentality of the population. It will perhaps be against this new invisible form of terror that today a civilizing terrorism appears, patent in Hakim Bey’s statement “The tourist destroys meaning and the terrorist destroys the tourist”, in association with the event (explosion) e the existential attempt for the production of meaning, so well portrayed by A. DaSilva O. in The Bomb-attack. Curiously, it is the same bomb-shrapnel that becomes the archeological testimony of the terrorist’s transformation, from reactionary to delirious creator. Concomitantly, this movement, perhaps bred in a profound anachronism, is immediately recoded in its demonstrativeness, terrorism placing itself as an event ‘at the end of communication and the beginning of consumption’, as we are told by Miguel Oliveira, in Terror by Idiocy, a spectacular action which has in idiocy one of its faces, as a way of ‘losing control’.
Hence, to define terrorism as a simple systematization of the use of terror isn’t easy, particularly as long as everything points to terror as the origin of terrorism, and not the opposite; terror imposes several terrorisms, which partly explains the paranoia behind the multiplicity of existing definitions. That will be the reason why, in the discussion between the members of the Centre for Research Architecture in Universal Catastrophe, it is suggested that the term Terrorism is a commodity, with certain use and exchange values, in the face of other terms such as Earthquake or Immigration. One considers that Terrorism should be understood not so much as an event but as a movement within an enlarged logic, a landscape of fears inherent to the social contract and the figure of the state. In this sense, Paulo Tavares describes in Model Attack the technological apparatus used by the British Anti-Terrorism Program, created to predict and calculate the effects of possible chemical attacks, a risk investment caused by risk, which, in the process of technologizing the air, re-instates a militarized reading of environment. It is the matter, therefore, of understanding terrorism within another terror, that of possible catastrophe, even if it never comes to be (perhaps precisely because of that), in a different way in each country, in each landscape of politically evoked fears and terror. The notations on Terrorism and Modernity by Nuno Rodrigues deal precisely with this climax, exploring the way modernity instrumentalizes and internalizes terror, inside what is, after all, a self-immunizing process.
But if the city is, then, the prime location for terrorism, its metro-political place of inscription, - which it owes to its strategic potentiality, such as it was suggested by Virilio in his introduction to Pure War “Because there you find a maximum of population and a maximum of damage can be done with a minimum of weaponry, of whatever kind.(...) Urban concentration has won over territorial geostrategy”. But from this emerges both state paranoia, and the voyeuristic and watchful state-person: the terrorist may be anyone in any place, as Né Barros seems to suggest in two untitled images, among a multitude of strangers in a public location, a necessarily suspect event once terror produces the terrorist in everything and, above all, in the other. But we shouldn’t forget one other dimension opened by the symbolic and representational charge of the city qua instituted power. It is it that confers to terrorism a sacred investment in the object, or its re-enchantment, precisely through the action of defacing, which, while taking the building-monument from its ‘suspicious unconspicuity’, reveals the totemic aura that invests it with power. It is precisely this game of power we think to be implicit in Vasco Costa’s Preamble to an Untimely Mutation, in the saturated space of sub-urbanity, in which the sacred and its profanation daily intermingle: if it is possible to say that profanation is perhaps the greatest act of terror, it is also – and consequently – the terror that haunts the contemporary terrorist, the terror of the ordinary and the vulgar.
But to recognize profanation as the prime mechanism of the pandemonic multitude, of the de-territorialized out-of-state does not solve the problem of its eternal recoding by capitalism. Quite the opposite, as Reza Negarestani suggests us in Triebkrieg, it may well be from the inside of state itself, from a ctonic depth it does not recognize, that the main terrorist war machines spring forth, radical exteriorities with the capacity to deteriorate the system from inside. It is a war conducted from the original trauma, according to Freud the cission of organic and inorganic, and that in Le Souffle au Coeur Miguel Carneiro seems to be exploring when he presents to us Sr. Pinhão being attacked by the chiken head, his alter-ego, in a putrefact blow expelled precisely from the deep of its identity. Could this unthinkable trauma be what Lovecraft describes in The Silver Key, when he refers to a “blind cosmos [that] grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again"? The question remains unanswered, but the idea that lingers is that to turn terror in to terrorism will imply a capacity of invocation, a cartographer’s wisdom allowing to recognize the nooks where it hides.
Such mapping is what Jonathan Saldanha offers us in Topology of Terror, cruising from the terror of magical initiation to that of immaterial forces, untranslatable communications captured by a plethora of telluric antennas, points of extraction, capable of catalyzing terror and make it visible, capable of extracting it from that undifferentiated abyss. Of course these points of extraction aren’t made possible by the inorganic alone, but by a machinic phylum, and so may Marcello Maggi perhaps say that also the human acts as a catalyser of terror. That is certainly the case with the mixing of Tiqqun-Tripier - ‘organizing cosmic will’, Jeanne being herself a kind of antenna conveying messages from the ‘Boreal Astral’, which, when put in contact with that insurrection to come, indicates the inevitable abolition of the apparatus. And isn’t perhaps the bizarre figure of Ricardo Tinoco’s Angel Swine precisely that secret weapon of armies to come? Isn’t that sad figure, reduced to the cruelty of the vaudeville show the last expression of the inevitable failure inherent to the attempt of terrorizing? Be that as it may be, the search for terror is a kind of psycho-ethnographical journey in search of the Heart of Darkness, of the deeply-inhuman, albeit with dangers that are not only those of the world of rubber and cruelty and the encounter with the ‘third world’, but also that of its romantic aesthetization. As Michael Taussig indicates, the political and artístic problem in thinking terror is to “maintain that hallucinatory quality, while effectively turning it against itself”.
It is left to say that it doesn’t seem to us that Heliogabalus inspired terror in the same way as Joseph Conrad’s cruel Mr. Kurtz. Because instead of hiding in the jungle’s depths, Heliogabalus unearthed the idiocy from the depths of state, allowed it to surge through him, and dropped it on the pinnacles of the Empire.
Godofredo Pereira
Pereira, Godofredo, “Editorial 04”, Detritos. Terror/Terrorismo, n.4, June 2010, pp.7-9.
