The Age of “Amok” - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

The Age of “Amok”

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In the early hours of August 1, 1966, after murdering his wife and mother,
Charles Whitman began to assemble equipment for further action: a transistor
radio, bottles of water and gasoline, a flashlight, a compass, an ax, a lighter, a
hunting knife, deodorant, alimento, toilet paper, adhesive tape, gloves, as well as sever-
al handguns, a carbine, and a hunting rifle. Shortly after 11 a.m., the twenty-five-
year-old loaded a footlocker packed with these supplies into the back of his new
black Chevrolet and left his small, single-family home for the campus of the
University of Texas at Austin, where he was enrolled as an engineering student. Él
brought the footlocker into the thirty-story Main Building Tower on a two-wheeled
dolly, took the elevator to the observation deck, killed the receptionist, y luego,
around lunchtime, opened fire on the campus below, killing thirteen people and
injuring thirty-one more, before being fatally wounded in an extended shootout
with the police, Texas Rangers, and armed bystanders.

If this mass murder was instantly disseminated as a mass media event, if it was
proclaimed “the crime of the century” and arrayed in a series of similar cases
before and after it, this is not only because it transformed a prominent scene of
public and civil order into a battlefield and the landmark at a model university
into a monument of terror.1 Rather, it advanced directly into the ranks of those
infamous deeds in which an interpretive impasse in the face of events is mirrored
by an excess of meaning manifested in those same events. The conditions of the
criminal act itself were surrounded by a penumbra of meaninglessness. A pesar de
Whitman had once sought psychiatric counseling, although the autopsy of his
corpse revealed a brain tumor, although his suicide note spoke of “violent impuls-
es,” “unusual and irrational thoughts,” and “mental turmoil,” the transition from
disconcerting feelings to a carefully planned attack remained an uncomfortable
conundrum.2 A medical commission convened to uncover causes, investigate cir-
cumstances, and suggest preventive measures could only establish the impossibility
of a clinical diagnosis: Nothing in Whitman’s previous history signaled his later act

1.
Punto: The American Mass Murderer (Westport, CT: Preger, 1997), páginas. 167–68.

“The Madman in the Tower,” Time, Agosto 12, 1966, páginas. 20–25; Richard D. Kelleher, Destello

2.
Murders (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1997), páginas. 92–93, 255–58.

Charles Whitman, quoted in Gary M. Lavergne, A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman

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oCToBeR

of violence. Despite the breadth of the nosological spectrum on offer in the wake
of this and similar attacks (up to the most recent shootings in Las vegas,
Sutherland Springs, and Parkland), the various labels, such as psychosis or para-
noia, dissociative disorder or psychopathy, could do little to bridge the striking
gap between deed and doer, between the deranged act and its more or less ratio-
nal agent. Those who hoped that these egregious actions might be reflected in the
gloomy souls of their perpetrators would be disappointed. At best one could resort
to pleonasm, declaring such incidents to be “sudden mass murders,” “episodic
losses of control,” “periodic breakdowns,” or “explosive disturbances.” Charles
Whitman, his actions, and their variants remained a nightmare of psychiatry.

And so it comes as no surprise that the mysterious substance of these crimes
would be sought less in familiar regions than in exotic ones, where one could
hope to find, if not a real explanation, at least a dependable pattern. In the specif-
ic mixture of attack, commando operation, and mass murder, a kinship with “run-
ning amok” was recognized, one that associated Western acts of violence with
eastern customs.3 “Amok” is a Malay word that means something like “rage” or
“frenzy,” and over a long period of time “running amok” was a grave concern in
Southeast Asia. Since the early-modern period, european travelers had told of
amucos, eso es, of “mad men” who, in Southern India, on the Malay Peninsula, en
java, and other islands of the archipelago, suddenly took up arms and, in a kind of
bloodlust, began to kill indiscriminately, only to die themselves or, from the nine-
teenth century on, to be placed in psychiatric institutions. These reports begin at
the start of the sixteenth century, reach their apex around 1900, and then fade
away starting in the 1920s.

A dual transformation can be observed over the course of the centuries. En
the early-modern period, “amok” or “a-muck” first described tactics of war, ritual-
ized military behavior, and suicide attacks by elite indigenous warriors. During
their assaults, as one sixteenth-century report states, amucos slew “many men,
women and children before they themselves were killed.”4 Gradually, under con-
straints of european colonial rule, amok stepped out of its martial frame. It was
individualized and privatized, mutating, under the gaze of modern medicine, en
an isolated, erratic act, in which an indeterminate brooding or depressive malaise
led to a sudden eruption of unmotivated and indiscriminate violence. Qué
entered into the psychiatric discourse of the twentieth century as a “culture-bound
syndrome” concerning Southeast Asia finally found an occidental application in
evaluations of Charles Whitman, who had “run amok” as the “Mad Man in the
Tower.” By the time “amok” entered into the glossaries of health organizations

3.
“Ansteckend wie Masern,” Der Spiegel, Agosto 8, 1966, páginas. 81–82; jin-Inn Teoh, "El
Changing Psychopathology of Amok,” Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes 35
(Noviembre 1972), páginas. 345–50; and j. Arboleda-Florez, “Amok,” in The Culture-Bound Syndromes: Folk
Illnesses of Psychiatric and Anthropological Interest, ed. Ronald C. Simons and Charles C. abrazos
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1985), páginas. 251–62.

4.
Prensa universitaria, 1988), pag. 12.

Gaspar Correa, quoted in john C. Spores, Running Amok: An Historical Inquiry (Atenas: ohio

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The Age of “Amok”

and medical associations, it had become a ratified component of contemporary
typologies, designating “an outburst of violent, aggressive, or homicidal behavior,"
an “indiscriminate, seemingly unprovoked episode of homicidal or highly destruc-
tive behavior.”5 “Running amok” had been transformed from a martial ritual to a
psychiatric incident, transporting exotic excess into affluent Western societies.
And if the reverberation of the Far east did not bring any advances in the explana-
ción, comprensión, or interpretation of Whitman’s killing spree, it did at least
provide a rough schematic: A long, historical, and geographical migration of war-
like attacks found its most up-to-date form. In the days of the escalating war in
vietnam, Whitman’s “amok” extended the trace of past and distant wars into the
heart of an apparent peace.

What made this uncanny proximity to exotic military violence particularly
disturbing was the mundane setting in which it presented itself. This resulted in a
curious portrait. Por un lado, one could not fail to notice that Whitman had
proved himself a prototypical all-American boy: an excellent pupil, a good son, un
altar boy, a decorated Boy Scout, a successful college student, a likable colleague, a
dear friend, a loving husband, a model citizen, and an ex-Marine (with training as
a sharpshooter and an honorable discharge). According to reports, he was appre-
ciated by all who knew him as “nice,” “likable,” “funny,” “smart,” and “ambi-
tious”—all in all, a completely “normal” young man.6 on the other hand, su
actions confirmed the grave concerns of counselors and psychologists, who for
some time had been referring to “potentially dangerous individuals” and “hostile”
students with “the means (usually firearms) to act out their fears and wishes with
deadly efficiency.” The average American face of normality and success was evi-
dently not without its dark side, and what was now defined as “Whitman
Syndrome” brought a “globally hostile student” into view in whom “antisocial
ideas,” “resentment of all authority figures,” and simply “hate for all people” or
“the world” were combined. Whitman was “oozing with hostility”: “I am going to
explode,” he wrote.7

As little as the Whitman case and its variants could be explained and interpret-
ed, it gave rise to a curious surplus of meanings and images. In the “Whitman
Syndrome,” a dangerous normality was discovered, a situation in which social cata-
strophes erupted not from blind spots and peripheries but suddenly and without
warning from the middle of society, carried by inconspicuous, ordinary citizens who
are “everywhere . . . driving cars, going to church with you, working with you.”8
Normality itself became a hallmark of threats embedded in the fabric of middle-class

5.
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) (Washington: Americano
Psychiatric Association, 1994), pag. 845; WHo, The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders
(Geneva: World Health organization 1993), pag. 177.

“The Madman in the Tower,” páginas. 20–25; Lavergne, A Sniper in the Tower, páginas. 50–63.

7.
john L. Kuehn et al., “Management of the College Student with Homicidal Impulses—The
‘Whitman Syndrome,’” American Journal of Psychiatry 125 (Puede 1969), páginas. 1594–99; Lavergne, A Sniper in
the Tower, páginas. 44, 64, 69.

“The Symptoms of Mass Murder,” Time, Agosto 12, 1966, pag. 18.

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existence, articulated in status-seeking mentalities and American dreams like
Whitman’s: “I have great plans and dreams . . . I AM ReSoLveD THAT I SHALL
WIN THe ToMoRRoWS BeFoRe Me!!!”9 This portrait of Whitman fit well with
analyses in which the American character had become more and more problematic
to itself. It bears many of the features that David Riesman and his colleagues in the
1950s had ascribed to the “other-directed” type in contemporary mass and consumer
societies. According to Riesman, this specimen belongs to the middle class, populates
the suburbs, excels in consumption, seeks social harmony, strives for recognition, y
reacts sensitively to the expectations and preferences of others. Sin embargo, considera-
tions of conformity create friction, diffuse apprehension, and engender a self-posi-
tioning in which the problem is always “the others.”10 It is no surprise, por lo tanto, eso
many sought to decipher in Whitman’s attack the fingerprint of a societal crisis,
which manifested itself in a precarious conglomeration of social modernization, el
promise of success, the obligation to perform, the pressure to adapt, and the desire
for normality. Desde esta perspectiva, Whitman’s murderous hostility is only the other
side of the motivational slogans with which he addressed himself again and again:
“Grow up,” “Show respect for seniors,” “Know your status and position and conduct
yourself accordingly,” “CoNTRoL your anger,” “SMILe Its contagious,” “PAY that
compliment,” “CoNTRoL your passion,” “If you want to be better than average,
YoU HAve To WoRK MUCH HARDeR THAN THe AveRAGe.”11

Here we see not only a new social type with a great future but one that would
reproduce itself in diverse forms, from murderous employees to unhappy high-
schoolers, bringing devastation to the peaceful world of office parks, malls, and class-
rooms. A remarkable turn has taken place: Unlike in dramas of jealousy, crimes of
pasión, or murders involving rape or robbery, the inexplicable event has itself
become an explanation. out of the portrait of Charles Whitman, pieced together
from countless commentaries, expert opinions, descripciones, and self-descriptions,
the eyes that stare back at us are not those of a disturbed perpetrator but of a telling
social figure. In them, it seems, one could recognize the condition of American post-
war society, one in which the civilian public sphere was now crisscrossed by battle
líneas, where suburban idylls were permeated with hostility and middle-class milieus
boiled with resentments. Contemporary American culture had interpreted itself in
the Whitman case, cual, with its diagnostic potential, took on the quality of a repro-
ducible cultural script. Not for nothing were the attacks, starting in the 1980s, eso
“disgruntled” employees made on workplaces, office buildings, and especially post
offices discussed in terms of Reaganomics: privatization, the deregulation of the work
ambiente, downsizings, and the erosion of former reserves of security. (por supuesto,
“going postal” has since become synonymous with “running amok.”)12

Lavergne, A Sniper in the Tower, páginas. 44, 121.

10.
Changing American Character (nuevo refugio: Prensa de la Universidad de Yale, 1950).

David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the

11.

Lavergne, A Sniper in the Tower, páginas. 88, 121; Arboleda-Florez, “Amok,” páginas. 258–59.

12.
Columbine and Beyond (Nueva York: Soft Skull Press, 2005).

Mark Ames, Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s

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The Age of “Amok”

That we are dealing, in these and analogous cases, with events that could be
called “diagnostic crimes” is further demonstrated by the series of attacks that
began in American high schools and colleges and have since become global in
alcance. Apart from the fact that these media events generated further media
events, acts reproducing themselves in reports and reports in acts, we can recog-
nize the different varieties of school shootings as both carriers and imitations of
models.13 Characteristically, the most prominent case, which to this day is emulat-
ed in other assaults and celebrated by fan clubs, was executed as a minutely
planned program. The attack on April 20, 1999, in which Dylan Klebold and eric
harris, seventeen- and eighteen-year-old students at Columbine High School in
Littleton, Colorado, shot and killed twelve fellow students, a teacher, and then
ellos mismos, was not merely a bizarre masquerade, carried out along the lines of a
military commando strike. It was an act intended, through its imitation of models,
to elicit a further imitation of models. First-person shooters like Doom and
Wolfenstein 3D, films like The Matrix, Natural Born Killers, and The Basketball Diaries,
and bands like Rammstein and KMFDM (Kein Mitleid für die Mehrheit) provided
them with scenarios, training routines, procedural protocols, patterns of action,
sartorial codes, and slogans. The plan of attack called for the ignition, on the
arrival of journalists and news teams, of propane bombs, which were to take an
additional six hundred lives. Harris and Klebold meticulously anticipated the
effects of their attack, and as much as it would later be spoken of in terms of psy-
cho- or sociopathy—of crises in the family or childhood, in the school or the
media, in society or socialization—this diagnostic activity already circulated in the
students’ own notes in the run-up to the event: “I wish I was a fucking sociopath so
I didn’t have any remorse, but I do,” and “It’s MY fault! Not my parents, not my
hermanos, not my friends, not my favorite bands, not computer games, not the
media, IT is MINe!” “Someones [sic] bound to say ‘what were they thinking?' . . .
so this is what I am thinking. I have a goal to destroy as much as possible so I must
not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that. . . . I have to
turn off my feelings. Keep this in mind.”14

El 946 pages of records that the attackers left behind proved to be diagnos-
tic in a more literal sense as well. Products of close-knit middle-class families and
good or average students, Harris and Klebold survey a number of crisis areas, rang-
ing from education and parenting to political scandals, mindless television shows,
and the questionable character of norms and rules to the toxic climate of their
own middle-class existences. Against this background, the texts focus more and
more on the coming action. This is reflected not only in the increasingly concrete
plans for the procurement of equipment and weapons, for the selection of the
date and the execution of the assault, but also in the rising hostility and the prolif-

13.
(july 2015), http:/dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0117259.

Sherry Towers et al., “Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings,” PLoS ONE 10, No. 7

14.
http://www.acolumbinesite.com/reports/cr/900columbinedocs.pdf; and Ames, Going Postal, pag. 186.

Columbine Documents, ed. jefferson County Sheriff’s office, jC-001-026012,

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erating declarations of animosity that accompanied their plans, moving outwards
in concentric circles from fellow students to the population of Denver, los unidos
Estados, “people,” “the world,” and finally society and humanity as such: “I HATe
PeoPLe,” “I want to burn the world, I want to kill everyone,” “If I could nuke the
world I would, because so far I hate you all,” “I say ‘KILL MANKIND.’ no one
should survive.”15

The writer of these notes, who once imagined a way out by fighting in the
Kosovo War, positions himself as a public enemy of the most extreme form. Names
and individuals appear in these plans only as the representatives of a system, de
sociedad, against which the perpetrators advertise themselves as globally hostile stu-
abolladuras. The hostility that they articulate is as concrete as it is arbitrary and total.
Thus they seem to occupy a vacant but historically fraught position: that of the
absolute foe of humankind. If these crimes are legible without straying into per-
sonal hermeneutics, then it is only as a military or pseudo-military incursion, un
unhinged assault, and a final, irrevocable animosity against civility as such. If one
can speak of madness here, then it is a madness in disguised but immediate prox-
imity to war.

This is the reason why such stereotypes are shot through with the names of
historia, seeking kinship with the most depraved of characters. Abril 20, one will
recordar, is Hitler’s birthday, and in Harris and Klebold’s texts references accumulate
that can easily be situated as historical indices of varying scope and nature: refer-
ences to Charles Manson, vietnam and napalm, World War II and the Nazis, el
oklahoma City bombing and the riots in Los Angeles. Germanness and the
German language have a special status: “I love the German language and the
‘BRUTe’ stuff.”16 All this refers not only to the dark cult of the swastika, SS runes,
and the Iron Cross; German is also understood here as the native language of his-
tory itself. In this language, all the atrocities that make up the raw material of his-
tory are, as it were, encoded: murder, mass murder, genocide, and their grim
renown constitute the territory on which the killers claimed for themselves the
place of utmost depravity, an outpost of political abjection.

If one takes these words and deeds together, as they appeared before being
processed into case studies, they offer a diffuse spectacle of turmoil, revolt, y
rebellion. one of the two students appropriated the motto of his educational
institution—“Columbine High School, Home of the Rebels”—signing his notes
with the cipher “ReB.” Much as Georges Bataille spoke of amok as a “rebellious
whim” and André Breton saw an “absolute revolt” in “dashing down the street,
pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the
trigger, into the crowd,” the killers in Littleton seem to have imagined a “total
acción,” confirming the literal sense of re-bellum, taking on the role offered them
and turning ruthlessly “back to war”: “We’re going to kick-start a revolution, a

15.

16.

Columbine Documents, jC-001-026003, 026010, 026012, 026013, 026015.

Columbine Documents, jC-001-026856.

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The Age of “Amok”

revolution for the dispossessed.”17 on the one hand, the violent act and its dis-
cursive framing leave no doubt that these were the most universal declarations of
revolt, which themselves evoked other declarations of the same kind. on the
otro, one can discern in this dismal program a dynamic that manifests itself as a
politicized death drive. The extermination of the other, of the social, of the sym-
bolic order was directed against a life that had become unpalatable (“i HATe my
life”),18 laying out converging lines of flight—dying, killing, and being killed,
and thus a path of annihilation. Such is the latest, most hideous, and perhaps
sole remaining grimace of rebellion.

If it is true, as Michel Foucault once argued, that we must investigate the
realms of madness to understand what a society considers to be health, that we
must analyze the domain of lawlessness to know what legality is, and that we must
observe forms of resistance to discover how power relations function, then the age
of amok can illuminate how the relation between the demand for order and trans-
gressive challenges to that order is organized in contemporary societies.19 The fla-
grant public outrage at such events can likely be explained by the failure of preven-
tive strategies and intervention tactics in these cases. For insofar as the cultural
script of these attacks dictates that they should erupt suddenly and unexpectedly,
and that they should target conspicuous zones of civility, they provoke the desire
for security of modern preventive societies. Societies of this kind, which date back
to nineteenth-century penal reforms and culminate in the current debates about
criminal-risk law and general preemptive needs, represent the latest phase of social
modernization characterized by a displacement of the target of possible sanctions
from real occurrences to pure potentialities. Respectivamente, after the attack on
Columbine High School, in addition to banning trench coats and displaying the
Ten Commandments publicly in schools, guidelines for the “prevention of school
attacks” and the “management of dangerous situations” were developed by a strate-
gic partnership between the Secret Service and the Department of education.20
The pertinent categories within this hybrid of pedagogy and intelligence profiling
are “threat” and “danger”: They demand a systematic orientation of precautionary
measures according to vague perpetrator profiles and prospective cases of harmful
comportamiento. The critical scrutiny applied to “potentially dangerous individuals” is gov-
erned by the concern that the possibility of future attacks grows precisely within
forms of inexplicit conduct. It doesn’t matter what one has or hasn’t done, pero
rather what deeds one might someday be capable of.

17.
eric Harris in a video diary, quoted in Ames, Going Postal, pag. 149; see also Georges Bataille,
“L’enseignement de la mort” (Puede 1952), Oeuvres complètes, volumen. 8 (París: Gallimard, 1976), pag. 208;
André Breton, Manifeste des Surrealismus (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1977), pag. 56.

18.

19.

Columbine Documents, jC-001-026390.

Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,”Investigación crítica 8 (Verano 1982), pag. 780.

20.
Threat Assessment in Schools: A Guide to Managing Threatening Situations and to Creating Safe
School Climates (Washington: United States Secret Service and United States Department of education,
july 2004).

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oCToBeR

Thus the preemptive coordinates of threat and emergency response have
proven to be efficacious yet indeterminate reference points for governmental
acción. They are characterized by an internal lack of measure, giving rise to a
social symptomatology that is incapable of limiting, objectively or systematically,
the realm of suspicion and the field in which “fear factors” appear. This sets off a
political catalysis of anxiety that produces security needs in the process of satisfy-
ing them, leading to a reciprocal escalation in the perception of danger and the
desire for protection. Any anxious impulse in circulation can be exploited sys-
temically, resulting in a hypertrophy of prevention apparatuses, which in turn
increases the readiness and willingness to fear. The stimulus provided by any
anxiety whatsoever—of “excess immigration,” infiltrators, sleeper cells, or latent
violent tendencies—needs neither to be justified nor concretized, because it
itself provides a reliable social and political basis for the preventive regime. El
circulation of fear has become systemically relevant, and yet this anxiety lacks an
object. Por un lado, systemic anxiety is maintained and fed by everything
that doesn’t happen, everything that has not—or has not yet—become concrete.
en el otro, concrete objects and manifest actions do not appear as the cause
of these stirrings of anxiety, but rather as floating evidence that the anxiety was
always well founded.

We can draw two conclusions at this point. Primero, the preventive regime, sys-
temic anxiety, and the category of “dangerousness” have redefined the profile of
the public enemy. In preventive optics, distinctions between guilt and innocence
and “humanist” remnants like intention, imputation, and responsibility are
replaced by a spectrum of dangerousness that refers to the intensity of a threat to
social and political security. In this way, specimens of mediocre socialization, OMS
are marked by a less pronounced loyalty to the basic requirements of social inter-
course and the norms of social harmony, come into view: Here the modern
umbrella term “sociopathy” is applicable. Simultáneamente, a gray zone is created
that locates possible acts by dangerous individuals in gradual distinctions between
crimes, acts of madness, and massacres, and precisely this ambiguous overdetermi-
nation makes the figure of so-called amok killings as problematic as it is signifi-
cant. Confused students, knife-wielding overnight converts, sinister migrants, y
suspected terrorists emerge from the same latency to find their common denomi-
nator in the greater or lesser threat that they pose to the social itself, in their “pub-
lic enmity.” To the extent that the distinction between internal and external ene-
mies has lost its meaning here, the category of “terror” itself has begun to dissolve
under the influence of a universal alarmism.

Segundo, under the aegis of preventive societies and threat management, el
social contract has been reconfigured, dissolved into security contracts that rest on a
kind of emissions trading in fear derivatives and demand the regular surrender of
certain rights (privacy, telecommunications secrecy, inviolability of the home) en
exchange for promises of security. This shapes the political dimension of prevention
and systemic fear. The investment of insecure situations with anxiety is converted

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The Age of “Amok”

into an anxiety politics of risk prevention, a general readiness to fear transformed
into a desire to be ruled better, more securely, and more attentively. one might
refer to this as the “phobogenetic” character of certain forms of power. Insofar as
zones of anxiety really are extended, with a corresponding withdrawal of legal guar-
antees (the law is, después de todo, insufficient to fulfill security needs), then we would do
well to remember that the entry of fear into the interior of political power and its
efficacy therein have always been connected to the cause of tyranny. This was point-
ed out by Hannah Arendt, who made the circulation of anxiety and fear renowned
as tyranny’s “guiding principle and criterion of action.”21

The point here is not to conjure up a new despot and the spectral return of
the totalitarian. Si, according to Arendt, anxiety and fear in fact represent “antipo-
litical principles” within the domain of politics, then this is because within them
experiences of powerlessness ally with desires for domination, undermining the
character of political action as “acting in concert.”22 Fear and anxiety generate a
“will to power in powerlessness,” that is, a “will to rule or will to be ruled.” This
extension of zones of anxiety coincides with a proliferation of politics of resent-
ment and protective police powers: Such is the “tyrannical” self-abandonment of
democratic politics.

What has been referred to for some time now as “running amok,” stretching
at the very least from the attack by Charles Whitman to today’s school shootings,
cannot simply be reduced to the erratic acts of unhappy, unhinged, or infamous
individuals. Bastante, these acts first gain currency where they break through protec-
tive layers and preventive barriers, flying under the radar and setting early-warning
systems on edge. They gain typological contour and visibility under the conditions
of the current preventive regime. every form of power programs its own enemies.

—Translated from the German by Noah Willumsen

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21.

22.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Nueva York: Schocken, 1958), pag. 467.

Ibídem., páginas. 478, 474.
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