Conjuring up the next attack: the future-orientedness of terror and the counterterrorist imagination

Abstract

Although terrorism is widely understood to be the politically motivated creation of fear by means of violence in a target group, the nature of that fear is seldom explained or even considered. The present article attempts to close that gap by proposing a definition of terror as the apprehension of (more) violence to come. Because every terrorist act is perceived to be part of a potential series, terror is oriented towards the future and involves the imaginary anticipation of prospective events. On the basis of this definition, I will examine the problematical role of counterterrorist discourse. As the statements of public officials and security experts in the run-up to, and during, the “War on Terror” demonstrate, the peculiar dynamic of terror is, seemingly paradoxically, reinforced by counterterrorist rhetoric. With its insistence on the escalatory nature of terrorist violence and its repeated prediction of even worse attacks, counterterrorism contributes to the evocation of terror in the sense proposed here.

Keywords:

• terror
• trauma
• War on Terror
• public discourse
• counterterrorism

Notes

1. Studies of what is alternatively termed the “culture” or “politics of fear” in contemporary America and Britain usually do not investigate the phenomenon of fear itself (see, e.g., Furedi 1997, 2005; Altheide 2006; Linke and Smith 2009). Brian Massumi’s essay on “The Future Ontology of Threat” is alone in specifying that “[f]ear is the anticipatory reality in the present of a threatening future” (2010, 54), a fact that Massumi connects with the “logic of preemption” in the discourse of the Bush administration. Counterterrorism’s privileging of the imagination over information has been pointed out by the social anthropologists Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass in their important book Terror and Taboo (1996) as well as by the sociologist Frank Furedi in his study Invitation to Terror, which provides ample evidence of how “[Western leaders] enthusiastically demonstrate to the public that they are constantly capable of imagining the worst” (2007, 9). As the present article will argue, both of these aspects – the future-orientedness of fear on the one hand and the imaginative character of counterterrorist discourse on the other – need to be considered together.

2. As one example of many, see the influential definition proposed by Bruce Hoffman (also of the RAND Corporation) in his much-cited study Inside Terrorism: “[Terrorism is] the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change. … Terrorism is specifically designed to have far-reaching psychological effects beyond the immediate victim(s) or object of the terrorist attack. It is meant to instill fear within, and thereby intimidate, a wider ‘target audience’ that might include a rival ethnic or religious group, an entire country, a national government or political party, or public opinion in general” (2006, 40–41).

3. Interestingly, however, it was only after the London bombings that a British newspaper ran an adapted version of the scenario: On 10 July 2005, The Independent on Sunday featured an article appropriately titled “What if… there was a ‘dirty bomb’ attack on London?” See Guelke (2006, 178–179).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael C. Frank

Michael C. Frank teaches English Literature at the University of Konstanz, Germany, where he currently acts as a substitute professor. His post-doctoral Habilitation thesis explores the “cultural imaginary of terrorism” from the late Victorian period to the present day. Related English-language publications include the volume Literature and Terrorism: Comparative Perspectives (edited together with Eva Gruber, 2012) as well as several book chapters and journal articles, including the essay “Alien Terrorists: Public Discourse on 9/11 and the American Science Fiction Film” in the volume Screens of Terror: Representations of War and Terrorism in Film and Television since 9/11 (edited by Philip Hammond, 2011).