6 - The Theatre of Everyday Debt-Cruelty: The Enfleshed Threat, Missing People and the Unbearable Strange Terrorist Machine

Summary

A debt system or territorial representation: a voice that speaks or intones, a sign marked in bare flesh, an eye that extracts enjoyment from the pain … a savage triangle forming a territory of resonance and retention, a theatre of cruelty that implies the triple independence of the articulated voice, the graphic hand, and the appreciative eye. (AO, 185)

Introduction

In this chapter, I map the cynical flow of threat codes by considering the savage triangle of terrorism and counter-terrorism as a strange ‘despotic machine’ (AO, 198), threat as ‘infinite debt’ (AO, 217) and Muslim schoolgirls as ‘missing people’ (Braidotti 2018). Building on Seigworth, I ontologise the threat (of terrorism/counter-terrorism) as new ‘lived socialities of debt’ (Seigworth 2016: 16) to argue that the cynical overcoding (AO, 198) of threat in its ‘new alliance and direct filiation’ (AO, 223) with terrorism and counter-terrorism de-/reterritorialises Muslim schoolgirls into the affective and material racialising relations of indebtedness. I explore how threat can be worn as a ‘debt-garment’ (Seigworth 2016), how living-with-threat weaves through and between human and more-than-human bodies gradually and continuously altering the atmosphere of existence; as a garment it can be worn loosely or tightly, but cannot be easily got rid of (Seigworth 2016: 15–16). I follow threat as it is experienced by participants in my PhD research, in their everyday, ordinary, walking through London’s Underground, then into university spaces, teaching halls and conferences. We walk and map our entanglements with threat and the terrorism capitalist-machine. Text boxes and images throughout the chapter show another layer of mapping the thinking, feeling, becoming with threat.

The Infinite Debt and the Terrorism Capitalist-machine

The Prevent policy as ‘the appreciative eye’ (AO, 185) of the terrorism capitalist-machine has extended its ‘graphic hand’ (AO, 185) into UK schools and students’ lived, embodied and embedded experiences. As an anti-radicalisation duty and a security imperative enforced in UK schools (since 1 July 2015), it obliges teachers and school staff to be vigilant for signs of, or potentiality towards, extremism in students (HM Government 2021) and, if deemed necessary, to refer them to Channel. The aim of the government’s Prevent strategy is to disrupt what it believes to be a ‘process of radicalisation’ by strategically identifying and capturing ‘would-be’ terrorists at the beginning of this process, and rooting out extremism from its inception (HM Government 2021; Kundnani 2012).