The Domination of Fear.

221 Pages·2010·0.964 MB·English

by  Mikko Canini

The Domination of Fear
At the Interface
Series Editors
Dr Robert Fisher
Dr Daniel Riha
Advisory Board
Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Dr Martin McGoldrick
Professor Margaret Chatterjee Revd Stephen Morris
Dr Wayne Cristaudo Professor John Parry
Dr Mira Crouch Dr Paul Reynolds
Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Professor Peter L. Twohig
Professor Asa Kasher Professor S Ram Vemuri
Owen Kelly Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E
Dr Peter Mario Kreuter
Volume 70
A volume in the At the Interface series
‘Fear, Horror and Terror’
Probing the Boundaries
The Domination of Fear
Edited by
Mikko Canini
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3084-8
E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3085-5
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Printed in the Netherlands
Table of Contents
Introduction vii
Mikko Canini

PART I Cultural Materialisation of Fear, Horror, Terror
Carnographic Culture: America and the Rise of the
Torture Porn Film 3
Beth A. Kattelman
We’re All Dirty Harry Now: Violent Movies for
Violent Times 17
Thomas Riegler
The Gothic Topography in Scandinavian
Horror Fiction 43
Yvonne Leffler
Getting Medieval: Bodies of Fear, Serial Killers
andSe7en 53
Shona Hill

PART II Fear, Horror and Politics
Clash of Nihilisms 79
Ali Riza Taskale

Long Term Terrorism in Turkey: The Government,
Media and Public Opinion 105
Banu Baybars-Hawks

PART III Fear, Horror and Literature
Into the Woods: Little Red Riding Hood and
The Wolf 129
Cynthia Jones

Solar Midnight: Traversing the Abject Borderline
State in Rudyard Kipling’s The City of Dreadful
Night 147
Lizzy Welby
The Laughter of Horror: Judgement of the
Righteous or Tool of the Devil? 173
Maureen Moynihan

Trash Mob: Zombie Walks and the Positivity of
Monsters in Western Popular Culture 191
Simone do Vale

Horror and the Politics of Fear 203
Mikko Canini
Introduction
Mikko Canini
*****
Perhaps the representational trope of contemporary fear, horror and
terror is the grainy televisual screen as its channels are rapidly switched: a
disheveled man speaks from behind a mass of microphones – a rodeo cowboy
is thrown from the back of a twisting horse – revellers dance at an Afghan
wedding – protesters fight off police dogs in black and white – the
undercarriage of a bomber in flight as its payload is released – a shirtless man
brandishing a pistol glowers at the camera – the slow motion immolation of
crash test dummies shattering a windscreen – a close-up of a woman’s eye.
The rhetorical power of this trope can be attributed to the overdetermination
of meaning produced by the conflation of disparate images, the vertiginous
telescopic slippage from macro to micro, the anarchic presentation of
potentially synchronic yet incommensurate contexts. Television, that
atrophying medium from the previous century has informed and shaped our
fears, diagnosing threats big and small as we negotiate our place in an
uncertain world. Indeed, if one lists the multifarious loci of fear, each appears
pre-presented by a televisual image: international terrorism, nuclear winter,
global warming, economic collapse, disease (pandemics, cancer, AIDS),
crime (juvenile, paedophiliac, racial), biotechnological catastrophe, corporate
monopoly (economic, agricultural, Statist), antibiotic resistance, over-
population, peak oil, peak water, religious war, environmental disaster
(megatsunamis, supervolcanos, hypercanes), manufactured micro black
holes, 2012 apocalypticism, biblical eschatology, colony collapse disorder,
cosmic threats (meteoroids, magnetic field reversal, hypernova radiation),
societal collapse, extinction (animal, botanical, cultural), rogue states,
famine, drought, deforestation, desertification, mass migration…
1. Risk Society
Reading the list above, it is hard to disabuse oneself of the
commonplace that the contemporary subject is marked by fear. From the
films of Michael Moore, to pronouncements from political parties of all
stripes, to critical-theoretical texts, the idea that fear dominates our shared
affective reality is widespread. This analysis finds its roots in the early 1990s
work of Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, who perceived an evolving
future-oriented social organization preoccupied with the regulation and
mitigation of risk.1 Insofar as the types of risk that concern the social
formation identified by Giddens and Beck are ‘manufactured’, that is,
produced through human agency, they arise as the consequences of
viii Introduction
______________________________________________________________
modernisation. For both, risk is an embedded component of contemporary
social life – an irreducible recognition of the potential global consequences of
technological progress that both mitigates, and produces, new social
phenomena.
One of the principle consequences of risk society, according to its
theorists, is the production of an intense reflexivity in which the individual
assumes a position of continuous reassessment of their ideological positions,
beliefs and social roles. This reflexive position is the result of the widespread
critique of previously (that is, prior to the advent of modernity) uncontested
areas of social and political concern, and has resulted in loss of belief in the
traditional forms of ideology as well as in the authority ascribed to traditional
institutions. The subject in this characterisation is anxious insofar as they are
required, by rapidly transforming technologies and socio-political conditions,
to make decisions fraught with potentially devastating consequences, all the
while reflexively acknowledging the impossibility of either anticipating
outcomes or of grounding them in a meta-narrative of progress or ideological
necessity. According to Beck, this anxious reflexivity has become the
organizing principle of a society in which ‘the commonality of anxiety takes
the place of the commonalty of need’.2
There are three aspects in the analysis of risk that are essential for an
understanding of contemporary fear. The first is the ‘low-probability, high
consequence’ nature of these new risks. From the sterilization of men due to
the pollution of water supplies with oestrogen expelled from contraceptive
pill users, to the development of self-replicating molecular nanotechnologies
that transform the planet into grey-goo, the possibility of a worst-case,
eschatological event makes all calculations of probability appear inherently
irrational. This problem is exacerbated by risk society’s reflexive uncertainty
about the motives and truth-claims of traditional institutions, which make it
difficult to determine whether fear about this or that risk are justified or
paranoid. As Peter Knight notes, ‘a permanent, low-level and sceptical form
of everyday paranoia now seems to be a necessary and understandable default
approach to life in risk society’.3
The second essential aspect is the separation of time and space from
locality, termed ‘distanciation’ by Giddens, in which interaction and
interdependence between remote social systems is increasingly a significant
feature of life. This has two effects. First, it adds to the complexity of a
previously localizable, and therefore circumscribable, consideration of the
sources of risk, which are now increasingly influenced by distant events.
Second, the potential consequences of risks are not only no longer restricted
to a place (e.g. a nuclear accident will affect many other locales) but neither
are they to time (this same accident could have grave repercussions for future
generations). Risk, in this sense, is both unpredictable and uncontrollable –
Mikko Canini ix
______________________________________________________________
not an isolated disruption, but an inescapable fact of the functioning of what
Beck terms ‘second modernity’.
The third aspect is that of the intensifying complexity produced by
the net effect of distanciation, evolving technologies, and multiplying fields
of knowledge. In describing the reflexive subject produced by risk society,
Giddens states that, ‘social practices are constantly examined and reformed in
the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus
constitutively altering their character’.4 However, this dynamic also describes
the behaviour of risk itself. For example, in the May 2000 outbreak of the
‘ILOVEYOU’ computer virus, which spread from Asia to Europe to America
in a matter of a few hours, not only were network servers clogged up with
email traffic generated by the virus itself, but they were also clogged by
reflexive effects: people trying to download anti-virus software, emailed
warnings about the virus, forwarded hoax warnings, follow-up emails
warning that the first emails should be ignored and not circulated, etc. This
third aspect of intensifying reflexive complexity has consequences not only
for the smooth functioning of the internet (in this case), but for all processes
that engage with the dynamics of globalisation. The anxiety that attends this
complexity can clearly be seen in the wild fluctuations of international
markets in response to the collapse or near-collapse of various American
financial institutions in September 2008, and in the behaviour of legislators
and central banks racing to secure deals in an effort to stave-off reflexive
feedback loops that risked total economic ruin.
2. A Cosmopolitan Future
This reflexive complexity also has consequences for the exercise of
power. The U.S. Department of Defence’s 2003 Information Operations
Roadmap (declassified in 2006 under the Freedom of Information Act) stated
that:
information intended for foreign audiences, including
public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed by
our domestic audience and vice-versa…PSYOP
messages…will often be replayed by the news media for
much larger audiences, including the American public.5
This is the kind of problematic secondary effect produced by the dynamics of
modernism that disrupts all traditional boundaries, up to and including those
of the nation-state.6 Beck argues that this structural disintegration of
boundaries has lead to the ‘cosmopolitanisation of reality’:
an unforeseen social consequence of actions directed at
other results in a context of global interdependence and its