Copyright by Marnie Margaret Ritchie 2018

Copyright by Marnie Margaret Ritchie 2018 The Dissertation Committee for Marnie Margaret Ritchie Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation: Diffuse Threats: US Counterterrorism as an Anxious Affective Infrastructure Committee: Joshua Gunn, Supervisor Dana Cloud, Co-Supervisor Simone Browne D. Diane Davis Sharon Jarvis Hardesty Barry Brummett Diffuse Threats: US Counterterrorism as an Anxious Affective Infrastructure by Marnie Margaret Ritchie Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August, 2018 Dedication For Lionel "LJ” Palardy Acknowledgments How to thank everyone and everything that enabled this project? Giving thanks to a whole scene of invisible labor is an impossible task. Still, you’ve got to try. Many scholars made this dissertation possible. Dana Cloud continually called for me to connect my ideas to material conditions and write in the service of struggles against oppression. Dana, you have been such a force for change in the world, including in my life as I’ve grown through writing. Thank you for being there, every time. My thanks are due to Josh Gunn who taught me that performative mastery is a productive illusion that gives way to ethics—to the silly, sacred, and frustrating incompleteness that drives how we relate to others. I am grateful for Diane Davis’ fierce brilliance and kindheartedness, both of which sustained me throughout graduate school. I am indebted to Simone Browne for her insights about ethnography and her fearless academic questions. Sharon Jarvis has never failed to push my work into new areas of relevance and link it with new audiences. Barry Brummett taught me that having an object can be a wellspring of inspiration. Bradford Vivian’s sensitivity to injustice makes me proud to have been his student. Thanks also to Anne Demo, Erin Rand, M. Gail Hamner, Casey Boyle, Joshua Reeves, and Randall Harp for their considerable support over the years. David Register introduced me to the world of academia through debate and challenged me, early on, to ask interesting questions. I was fortunate to have an unstoppable support system in graduate school. If there are moments of levity throughout this dissertation, they are to Jaishikha Nautiyal’s credit. Alex Martel continues to be a treasured interlocutor. Melissa Goraj has hung in with me through the good, the bad, and the ugly—a true friend. I thank Heather Roy for making me laugh-cry at every conference reunion. I would, given the space, spill infinite ink for my group of close female friends, the (rose) gold Standards: Lamiyah Bahrainwala, Kristyn Goldberg, and Erin O’Connor. Suffice to say I mark your incalculable labors of love here. v During peak dissertation anxiety, Michael O’Brien miraculously peeled me away from work for days. For that blissful interval—for insisting I make space for myself—I will always be grateful. For all the ways you’ve had my back and all the times you’ve made me laugh throughout this process, thank you. My family Jean, Mary, Wes, Brian, and Haley welcomed me home and checked in when I needed it most. I know they were perplexed, perhaps even a little concerned, about what I was doing with my life. But, they never stopped asking me questions and encouraging me. Thanks especially to my mom for always answering the phone. I save my final gratitude for my cat Lenu and late dog Pekoe. Remembering to play, like them—that is how I wrote this thing. vi Abstract Diffuse Threats: US Counterterrorism as an Anxious Affective Infrastructure Marnie Ritchie, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2018 Supervisor: Joshua Gunn Co-Supervisor: Dana Cloud The infrastructure of US national security has never been more bloated and obfuscatory, US leaders insist that terroristic threats have never been more real and dangerous, and the US War on Terror wages in more nations than ever before. Arguably since the color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System, our post-9/11 terrorism predicament tasks us with modulating our state of alertness to meet the level of mass threat. One of national and local threat rhetoric’s most important functions is to manage public anxiety surrounding the potential for rogue citizen and noncitizen terrorists to attack the homeland. This project isolates a new object of homeland security governance revealed by these affective manipulations: the diffusion of terroristic threats. Homeland security rhetoric manipulates public anxiety about threats’ capacity to spread. This project thus charts US counterterrorism as an affective infrastructure of anxiety. It defines an affective infrastructure of anxiety as a subterranean network of intermittent interruptions in sense. Within the past 14 years, a predominant rhetorical maneuver to counter threat diffusion has become intelligence fusion, defined as the conversion of public suspicions vii into actionable knowledge through the homeland security institution of the local “fusion center.” Through ethnographic interviews and observations, this project investigates the interoperations of fusion in Texas. The ethnography reveals a host of threat matrixes, pressure points, sore subjects, anguish, failures, stupidities, and surveillance measures that comprise the local and national anxious infrastructure of US counterterrorism. It shows that the rhetorical manipulation of anxiety is an essential component of local and national homeland security strategies. To attend to anxiety within intelligence fusion, this project develops a method for closely reading affect called “sleuthing.” This method reclaims both suspicion and close reading within the rhetorical tradition for the purpose of describing the extra-linguistic. Making space for affect in rhetorical theory is challenging but essential. Affect tasks us with rethinking fundamental postulations about the coherence of texts, the role of the responsible rhetorician, and the force of persuasion. Most importantly, affect theory can show how homeland security operates through racial phobia. This project represents the first full-length study of race, policing, and surveillance in the context of local intelligence fusion. The project’s goal is to read the far-reaching effects of homeland security’s newest transformations, especially considering recent intensifications in the War on Terror. To do so, one must see homeland security not just as a technical infrastructure but a quivering mass of connected affects. viii Table of Contents List of Figures .................................................................................................................. xiii Chapter One: Introduction: Diffuse Threats ....................................................................... 1 Data and Method ...................................................................................................... 11 Anxiety’s Object ...................................................................................................... 17 Power, Surveillance, and Race ................................................................................ 25 Anxious Affective Infrastructures ............................................................... 29 Racializing Surveillance .............................................................................. 32 Chapter Preview ....................................................................................................... 35 Chapter Two: Close Reading, Again ................................................................................ 44 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 45 Close Reading in the Rhetorical Tradition .............................................................. 47 Close Reading, Again .............................................................................................. 50 Close Reading as Sleuthing ..................................................................................... 56 Sleuthing in Anxious Affective Infrastructures ....................................................... 63 CLOSER .......................................................................................................................... 66 Chapter Three: Fusing Race: The Phobogenics of Racializing Surveillance ................... 67 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 68 Biopolitics and Phobogenics .................................................................................... 72 Affective Taxonomies of “Situational Awareness” ................................................. 75 What is Out of Place .................................................................................... 78 What is Inflammatory .................................................................................. 87 Fusing Race ............................................................................................................. 93 Affective Prelogic ........................................................................................ 94 Continuous Profiling .................................................................................... 95 ix Anxiety Dosage ............................................................................................ 96 Conclusion ..............................................................................................................

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