The Uses of Terror and the Limits of Cultural Studies

The plot of the Event of September 11—the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center by terrorists—might have been written by Hollywood, or by Baudrillard. So fantasmatic, so familiar was the scenario that it fitted seamlessly into the manichaean agenda of the Pentagon hawks planning the next American war, and the next. Indeed, a perfectly plausible paranoid response reads this plot as a plot on the part of those who have most thoroughly benefited from it.

How do we take fantasms seriously when they come true?

The word “case” names the genre of legal, medical, or moral story in which the singularity of the story-incident is set in relation to a general principle which in some sense informs it or can be derived from it. André Jolles, defining the casus as one of nine “simple forms” of discourse, sees its characteristic structure as the problematisation of the normative scheme it instantiates. ² Unlike the example, it is anomalous with respect to that scheme and gives rise to a set of questions about it. It thereby mediates between the contingency of its occasion and the generality of a principle, and initiates procedures for weighing the one against the other. In the case of the legal case this involves a dialectic between the code of the law (or the sedimented code read from precedent cases which have themselves become a form of law) and the exceptional circumstances (and they are always exceptional) shaping this particular story. ³ The medical case, or case history, similarly sets the complexity and thus the partial inscrutability of the body or the life against the abstract scientific principles governing bodies or psyches in general. The tradition of the moral case study developed in jesuitical casuistry is concerned with the application of ethical principle to the complexity of human circumstance. ⁴

James Chandler’s rigorous analysis of the genre makes it clear that the case is always a matter both of particularity and of generality. To say that “x is a case (or instance) of y” is to point to the relation of instantiation itself and thus to the problem of the representativity of the case insofar as it is a case of something else (Chandler 200, 85n). In the same vein, Kenneth Burke speaks of the case as a “representative anecdote” which acts (as it does somewhat later in Kuhn’s account of the shaping of scientific agendas) ⁵ as an epistemological “paradigm” or “prototype.” Burke’s interest is methodological: every scientific or philosophical vocabulary, he writes, is built around such representative cases which shape what can be known in a particular field because the case “contains in nuce the terminological structure that is evolved in conformity with it. Such a terminology is a ‘conclusion’ that follows from the selection of a given anecdote. Thus the anecdote is in a sense a summation, containing implicitly what the system that is developed from it contains explicitly” (60). ⁶

But if the case may implicate an epistemological or moral generality, its structure of representativeness may also have a historical force. This is Chandler’s argument concerning Romantic historicism: that the historical typicality of the case “involves the identification of cultural conjuncture in terms of the chronological code” (and gives rise to the concept of the “historical situation”) (228). In this paper I use the concept of the casus in this sense to refer to a story or a story-image which works with overwhelming power to crystallize an explanation of what the world is, historically, like.

Any such story may assume different degrees of specificity, and may be more or less universal in its implications: “Vietnam” was a casus, but so were the images of a napalmed child or an executed Viet Cong prisoner. The casus may be a national or global event (the sinking of the Titanic, the O.J. Simpson trial, the assassinations of John Kennedy or Martin Luther King) or a matter of very local reach (an act of violence in one’s neighbourhood). At its most powerful, it imposes an interpretation (or...