This conference stems from the fact that both “terror” and “the inhuman” are prolific yet undertheorized terms in present-day discourse – terms that share a decisive investment in troubling the legacy of the human that has long reigned over Western thought. If critical theory has long emphasized the notion of “difference” — including differences between, within, and against “humans” — then the overdetermination of images of “terror” and “the inhuman,” typically figured as almost “natural” oppositions to those of the human, represents fertile terrain for today's theories and operations of meaning and culture.
We seek to develop new lines of exchange between these diverse – yet inescapably interrelated – figurations and theoretical concepts, asking: What critical work do “terror” and “the inhuman” do for media studies and cultural theory? How does terror traffic in and through the inhuman? What distinguishes terror, along one train of association, from other anxious forms of affect such as panic, fear, horror, and shock, and, along another, from other modes of political violence such as war, revolution, and insurgency? And finally, how do literary, photographic, televisual, cinematic, and digital media represent the inhuman as well as focalize and mobilize anxieties over the inhumanity and terrorization of technical media as such?
One answer to the questions posed above is that terror designates the affective experience of prolonged anxiety and uncertainty, or the insurgent use of violence that takes place outside of the law; it is thus a concept that seems to perform in theory what it provokes in practice. Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben have all (if in quite different ways) theorized terror as an instrumental form of violence, with states appropriating power through threatening others. This is somewhat different from “terrorism,” or the systematic use of terror as a means of coercion, which always instrumentalizes according to moral or ideological ends. It is often said that individual or sectarian terrorism emerges in response to the terror of the state – the “exceptional” violence intrinsic to modern political sovereignty. From the “Reign of Terror” that punctuated the emergence of mass politics in Revolutionary France to the terror of rulership inherent in the sovereign state’s “monopoly on legitimate violence,” terror bears decisive associations with the will to political dominance. In the realm of semiotics, terror has been associated with the apparatus of subjectification: the subjection and subjugation of the individual to the symbolic structure of language and culture every time s/he finds agency as an “I.” Roland Barthes has famously associated terror with the trauma of linguistic slippage, underscoring the terror induced by every instance of the indefinite: “In every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs” (Image-Music-Text, 39).
The relation between the deployment of terror as the basis of “legitimate violence” and terror as the underside of linguistic subjectivity remains acutely felt, yet underexplored. As a concept implicated in sovereignty’s “state of exception,” the subject’s perpetual interpellation in symbolic regimes, the phenomenological realm of public affects, and the arena of media aesthetics (in film, TV, video games, literature, journalism, digital media, etc.), terror calls for sustained, interdisciplinary interrogation.
Concomitant to the circulation of terror through our present-day cultural imaginary is the figure of the inhuman. Derived from the Latin inhumanus, meaning the negation of the human, on the one hand, and cruel or barbarous conduct, on the other, the inhuman names a tension between the constitutive outside of the human and the human’s mode of internal differentiation. Cut but never cleaved, the inhuman exists in a perpetual field of contact with anthropos, both outside and inside the human, making the human at once possible and impossible. To evoke the inhuman is to recall the terrors of domination faced by those abjected populations positioned beyond the register of humanity while also drawing attention to that which is improper to the human but nonetheless conditions its emergence and sustains its endurance. The inhuman as technê (Stiegler), as animal (Agamben), as thing (Heidegger), as Black (Césaire), as terrorist and as queer (Puar & Rai) prompts us to ask what precedes and what exceeds the human. It compels us, in other words, to confront the political, ethical, and theoretical task of critique in the wake of antihumanism, posthumanism, and what is now being called the nonhuman turn in critical studies. While the question of the human has generated much scholarly interest in recent years, we seek to intervene in these conversations by foregrounding the ghosted substrates, the forgotten others, and the hidden monsters that constitute yet always threaten to undo the human – which is to say, the inhuman. The rise to prominence in recent years of the related yet distinct idioms of bare life, the multitude, speculative realism, media archaeology, the affective turn, netwar, the parasite, and nonorganic life suggests just such a renewed interest in the critical purchase of the inhuman.
Traditionally, terror and humanism have been viewed as antinomies. But one may easily forget their memorable coupling in the title of a 1947 work by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror — no longer an either/or construction but an emphatic and. As Merleau- Ponty writes, one can no longer choose between humanism and terror, between “the Christian absolute ‘Yea’ or ‘Nay,’ or Kant’s moral imperative,” but one might instead accept a degree of terror on the way toward a greater, more enlightened humanism. That is, our conference is not only committed to the examination of terror and inhumanity — of how terror traffics in and through the inhuman — but also interested in the uncanny conjunction of each term with their logical opposite: Western humanism.
Of course, we will also examine some of the everyday uses of the terms in question: for example, “terrorism as the inhuman”; inhuman forms of torture of and by “terrorists”; the “terror” associated with horror and thriller films; the prevalence of “inhuman” characters (such as vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and cyborgs) in so many of today’s television series; and the “animation” (literal and figurative) of the inanimate involved in gaming and cosplay. Simultaneously, however, we want to see these “common sense” formulations approached in relation to a body of thought that Slavoj Zizek provocatively calls “anti-humanist (or, rather, inhuman) terror.” For Zizek, a return to terror and the inhuman at the “core” of the human does not necessarily denote regression but, rather, a revolutionary potential.
We have invited a number of paper presentations that will revisit and rethink the various kinds of links — of complicity, inseparability, causality, opposition, or even incommensurability — constructed between these terms by politicians, the media, philosophers, artists, and critical theorists from various disciplines. To our conference participants and to our audience, we ask: what does it mean to value terror now and from an inhuman perspective? What is the history of this valorization? How does it account for the stasis or the shifts in contemporary global politics and nodes of power? What are the limits of the ideological work performed by the disciplinary divisions, mediums, and examples used in these formulations? How important is the role of historical and geographical specificity in this pro-revolutionary resurrection of terror and the inhuman? What is its link to the popular: why do mass audiences increasingly find themselves enthralled by representations of war, rape, torture, and international terrorism as well as by quotidian and seemingly banal forms of “terror” and “the inhuman?” And, last but not least, how should we pose the issue of “human rights” against or within the realm of anti-humanist terror?
Sidney Frank Hall, Room 220
6:30 pm • Conference Welcome and Opening Keynote
Jared Sexton {University of California, Irvine}
“Unbearable Blackness”
introduction by Joshua Neves, Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
reception to follow
Crystal Room, Alumnae Hall
9:30 am • Light Breakfast
10:00 am • Session One • Theorizing the Terror-Inhuman Complex
Chair: Debbie Weinstein, Assistant Director of the Pembroke Center, Brown University
Karisa Butler-Wall {Minnesota}
“‘A crime against the whole human race’:
The Sexual Politics of Anarchy and the Cultural Production of Terror”
Wendy Kozol {Oberlin}
“Archiving the Inhuman: Visual Atrocities in the War on Terror”
Mrinalini Chakravorty {Virginia}
“Good and Bad Indians: Outsourcing & Terror”
Maryam Monalisa Gharavi {Harvard}
“On the Hauntology and Anti-Humanism of the Covered Face”
12:00 pm • Lunch {on own}
1:30 pm • Session Two • The Terrors of Film: Aping, Voicing, Embodying the Medium
Chair: Meredith Bak, Pembroke Center Postdoctoral Fellow, Brown University
Mal Ahern {Yale}
“Monkeys and Movietone: The Inhuman Body of Early Sound in Close Up (1927- 1933)”
Valeri Whitmer {Baruch College, CUNY}
“Sonic Terror: Atrocities and Aliens in Pre-World War II Radio Drama”
James Hansen {Ohio State}
“The Shudder of Preservation: Luther Price’s Fancy (2007)”
Liana Ogden {UC Berkeley}
“Into the Body: Scenes of Slaughter and the Sublime”
3:30 pm • Break
3:45 pm • Session Three • Inhuman Rights: State Terror and the Law
Chair: Philip Rosen, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
Suzanne Daly {UMass Amherst}
“Prophylactic Incarceration and the Instrumentalism of Imperial Terror”
Nicholas Brady {UC Irvine}
“The Flesh-Grinder:
Prosecutorial Discretion and the Quotidian Terror of Mass Incarceration”
John Paul Narkunas {John Jay College, CUNY}
“Translating Atrocity:
Rethinking Translation, Terror, and Crimes Against the Human Status”
Munia Bhaumik {Emory}
“Inclusion and the Inhuman: Moby-Dick as Monster and Non-Citizen”
9:00 pm • Magic Lantern Terror and the Inhuman Showcase
Cable Car Cinema, 204 South Main St
Sidney Frank Hall, Room 220
9:30 am • Light Breakfast
10:00 am • Session Four • Global Technoscience and its Discontents
Chair: Aniruddha Maitra, Five College Predoctoral Fellow, Hampshire College
Erin Obodiac {Cornell}
“Robots at Risk: Transgenic Art and Corporate Personhood”
Andrew Weiner {California College of the Arts}
“Readymade Revolutionaries and Televised Insurrections”
Josh Neves {Brown}
“Pirates and Drones: Media and Global Necropolitics”
Kartik Nair {NYU}
“Zombies, Fans, Terrorists:
Michael Jackson’s Thriller and a Speculative Reading of the Pirate Image”
12:00 pm • Lunch {on own}
1:30 pm • Session Five • The Human Question Revisited: Antagonism and Decoloniality
Chair: Matthew Tierney, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University
Calvin Warren {George Washington}
“Onticide: Toward an Afro-pessimistic Queer Theory”
Nikolay Karkov {SUNY Binghamton}
“After Man, Yet Not Toward the Post-Human,
or Why It is Important Not to Jump Steps in Theory”
Kara Thompson {William and Mary}
“Trafficking in Terror”
Gautam Basu Thakur {Boise State}
“‘The Devil's Wind’: Imperial Panic and Objects of the Indian Mutiny”
3:30 pm • Break
3:45 pm • Session Six • The Human Measure: Taxonomy and Corporeal Calculus
Chair: Michelle Cho, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern Culture and Media and East Asian Studies
Leon Hilton {NYU}
“Autistic Perception and the Terror of an ‘Unhuman’ Aesthetics”
Poulomi Saha {Dickinson}
“‘Become a Thinking Bomb’:
Abjection and the Corpsely Life of the Female Terrorist”
In Hye Ha {Illinois}
“Reading the Elephant:
the Aporetic Presence of the Elephant in the Long Eighteenth Century”
5:30 pm • Closing Keynote
Adriana Cavarero {University of Verona}
“The Excess of Horror: Political Theory and the Inexplicablity of Evil”
introduction by Evelyn Lincoln, Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture and Italian Studies
reception to follow
Terror and Inhuman Screening
How can we represent “terror” and “the inhuman” in film and media? And how do each of these terms make the other intelligible? Taking up these questions from multiple angles — and thinking through the mutable and shifting boundaries of both terms — this program charts some of the ways in which “terror” and “the inhuman” converge. These films and videos seek to imagine how we represent and remember genocide, to remind us of the dehumanization of black bodies, to understand how war and terror are connected to consumer products and services, from pop music to plastic surgery, and to examine how fantasy, from animated worlds to Internet and gaming cultures to post-apocalyptic speculative fictions to the atmospheric conventions of horror movies, reveal the entanglements and oppositions between the “human” and “non-human”. These works, taken together, point to both the promises and limitations of the workings of “terror” and “the inhuman” as concepts which constrain and define the legibility of bodies and things beyond or outside normative ideas of the “human” just as they make legible the instability of such norms.
Leslie Thornton, Peggy and Fred in Kansas, 1989, video, 11.00
Leslie Thornton’s Peggy and Fred in Kansas is a multi-layered work and a sinister companion piece to the Wizard of Oz where two parentless children contently play house amidst a post-apocalyptic wasteland of cultural detritus, junk and outmoded electronics. Thornton refuses to cast Peggy and Fred’s existence as necessarily utopian or dystopian. Instead, the film explores what might be after the “terror” of apocalypse, a world beyond our social imaginary where representational and linguistic coherence has broken down.
Martha Colburn, Meet Me in Wichita, 2006, 16mm, 7.00
Martha Colburn’s Meet Me in Wichita takes the Wizard of Oz as its starting point in a frenzied animation where Osama Bin Laden is re-cast as every villain Dorothy encounters along the yellow brick road.
Tony Cokes, Evil.16.Torture Musik, 2011, video, 17.00.
Tony Cokes uses pop music and appropriated text to explore how Western pop music is employed in torture.
Jesse McLean, Remote, 2011, video, 11.00
In the collage video Remote, dream logic invokes a presence that drifts through physical and temporal barriers. There is a presence lingering in the dark woods, just under the surface of a placid lake and at the end of dreary basement corridor. It’s not easy to locate because it’s outside but also inside. It doesn’t just crawl in on your wires because it’s not a thing. It’s a shocking eruption of electrical energy (McLean).
jonCates, Moviestorm Machinima Audition Tape, 2009, video, 8.40
This piece is an experimental Machinima video remix of the Moviestorm Machinima authoring software with a bootleg porn audition tape leaked on the internet and critical theories of Gaming, Algorithmic Culture, Seduction and Enchanted Simulation. as well as being distributed on the Moviestrom Machinima website, shown in Media Art contexts (i.e. Material and the Code conference at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center, The Nightingale Broad Shoulders Tour, etc) it is also released on peer-to-peer networks under the file name of the original porn audition tape so that it can be downloaded/discovered this way as well (Cates).
Tara Mateik, Operation Invert, 2003, video, 12.30
Tara Mateik examines the use of botox in warfare and plastic surgery alongside the pathologizing norms governing sex reassignment surgery in order to ask whether gender outlaws are the new biological terrorists.
Film Group, Cicero March, 1966, 16mm, 9.00
Cicero March by the Film Group documents a 1966 civil rights march in Cicero, Illinois over restrictions in housing laws and the clashes between marchers and a white supremacist group that ensues. Here, hatred becomes the force through which white citizens define their humanity and claim their territory.
Kevin Jerome Everson, Playing Dead, 2008, video, 1.30
Kevin Jerome Everson suggests that for some the only reprieve from terror is death, taking archival footage from the 1970s of an African American man who survived a racist attack by “playing dead” which Everson presents as a readymade.
Kevin Jerome Everson, Twenty Minutes, 2005, video, 3.00
In Twenty Minutes, Everson charts Leonardo Da Vinci’s design for the Pulley to its use by black workers in the 21st century, reinserting raced labor back into histories of technological progress.
Jessica Bardsley, Anne, 2012, 16mm, 4.30
Jessica Bardsley's observational video seeks to investigate how the atrocities of the holocaust are effaced through tourism.
Chick Strand, Kristellnacht, 1979, 16mm, 7.00
Chick Strand evokes the terror of the Night of Broken Glass abstractly through a poetic layering of sounds that gradually recede to silence over images of water reflecting light.
TOTAL RUN TIME: 92:00.
Opening Keynote: Jared Sexton
“Unbearable Blackness”
“Unbearable Blackness”
October 25, 2012 • 6:30 pm
Sidney Frank Hall, Room 220
Closing Keynote: Adriana Cavarero
“The Excess of Horror: Political Theory and the Inexplicability of Evil”
October 27, 2012 • 5:30 pm
Sidney Frank Hall, Room 220
The conference organizers would like to thank the following academic departments and institutions for their
generous contributions:
the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for the Study of Culture and Media
the Department of Modern Culture and Media
the Office of International Affairs
the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research of Women
the Watson Institute for International Studies
the Department of Africana Studies
the Department of American Studies
the Department of English
the Department of Comparative Literature
the Department of Italian Studies
the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies
{Conference Organizers}:
Kenny Berger, Hunter Hargraves, Maggie Hennefeld, Mike Litwack, Rijuta Mehta, Brandy Monk-Payton, Lynne Joyrich
{Special Thanks}:
Meredith Bak, Beth Capper, Michelle Cho, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Tony Cokes, Emma Cunningham, Colleen Doyle, Josh Guilford, Liza Hebert, Lynne Joyrich, Evelyn Lincoln, Ani Maitra, Richard Manning, Susan McNeil, Joshua Neves, Ellen Rooney, Philip Rosen, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Leslie Thornton, Matthew Tierney, Mark Tribe, Seth Watter, Debbie Weinstein
{Website + Graphics}:
Sister Emma Cunningham