Imaging terror: logos, pathos and ethos

Abstract

As verb, code and historical method, terrorism has consistently been understood as an act of symbolically intimidating and, if deemed necessary, violently eradicating a personal, political, social, ethnic, religious, ideological or otherwise radically differentiated foe. Yet, as noun, message and catch-all political signifier, the meaning of terrorism has proven more elusive. After the Cold War terror mutated from a logic of deterrence based on a nuclear balance of terror into a new imbalance of terror based on a mimetic fear and an asymmetrical willingness and capacity to destroy the other without the formalities of war. This imbalance is furthered by the multiple media, which transmit powerful images as well as triggering pathological responses to the terrorist event. Thanks to the immediacy of television, the internet and other networked information technology, we see terrorism everywhere in real time, all the time. In turn, terrorism has taken on an iconic, fetishised and, most significantly, highly optical character.

Notes

Based on techniques first developed in the 1870s by the founder of eugenics, Francis Galton, in which photographs of criminals were superimposed into a ‘natural kind’, Burson's digitalised images of the 1980s subverted the notion of ideal types, for example in ‘Warhead’ and ‘Beauty’ (a composite of Hollywood actresses Jane Fonda, Brooke Shields, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton and Jacqueline Bisset).

‘The art of deterrence, prohibiting political war, favors the upsurge, not of conflicts, but of acts of war without war.’ See P Virilio, Pure War, trans M Polizotti, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983, p 27.

See J Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Miltiary – Industrial – Media – Entertainment Network, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001. It is also worth remembering the Pentagon's secret effort to model seven post-cold war ‘war scenarios’, including the rise of a Resurgent/Emergent Global Threat (regt) by 2001, which was authored by Paul Wolfowitz. See P Tyler, New York Times, 17 February 1992, p A8.

See R Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of the image’, in Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans S Heath, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977, pp 32 – 51.

White Sands (1992) starring Willem Dafoe, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Mickey Rourke.

W Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in H Arendt (ed), Illuminations, New York: Schocken, 1969, pp 241 – 242.

W Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H Eiland and K McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp 462 – 464.

I would like to thank Tom Levin for the gift of the phrase, ‘Age of Adobe Photoshop’.

M Dowd, ‘A world of hurt’, New York Times, 9 May 2004.

R Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Vintage, 1982.

F Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans RJ Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1968, p 55.