Sowing the sea: Visualizing terror, time, and Osama bin Laden

Abstract

Because of their speed, suddenness, and disturbance of the rhythms of everyday life, terrorist attacks are defined by temporal disruptiveness. Hence, a crucial part of what the United States has had to do after September 11th is repair time by constructing linear narratives about terror. Sometimes, visual media have aided in this mission, but this paper explores an instance where a film confounded it. Drawing on insights from visual culture studies, political philosophy, and trauma studies, I analyse the visual dynamics of terror and temporality surrounding Osama bin Laden's September 2007 video, ‘The Solution’, in which bin Laden appeared to be younger than he was in 2004. Despite clear textual evidence that the video was current, media and state agencies puzzled over its date because its visual content was so incomprehensible. The perplexity that followed revealed America's need to launch temporal strikes against terrorism, and also the difficulty of doing so. In 2010, the FBI offered a rejoinder to ‘The Solution’: age-progressed images of bin Laden. This virtual, ephemeral victory was the only temporal corrective available at the time; bin Laden's death and, more specifically, burial at sea offered a corporeal, permanent fix to the temporal/visual dilemma he created on 9/11.

Notes

 1. Campbell is echoing the observation of the Australian novelist Peter Carey.

 2. On the temporality of the glance, see Casey (1999).

 3. For a discussion of the phenomenology and politics of speed in modernity, see Duffy (2009).

 4. The ‘past-ness’ of the photographic scene does not automatically equate to ‘over-ness’. ‘The Photograph’, writes Roland Barthes, ‘does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been’. (1980, 85).

 5. The literature on the role of time in the nation-state is voluminous. Among the relevant works are Anderson (1998), Balibar (1991), Bhabha (1990), Chakrabarty (2000), Johnson (2001), McClintock (1997), and Renan ([1882]/1992).

 6. For a discussion of how this progressive understanding of time has been used by Western nations to vilify Islam as ‘premodern’ and justify violence against it for that reason, see Butler (2009, 101–36).

 7. This sense of time as linear and forward-moving would have resonated with late-nineteenth-century viewers as this period entailed the ‘conceptualization of time as an “arrow”’ (Doane 2002, 112), a perspective influenced by advanced understandings of thermodynamics.

 8. The Abu Ghraib photos can be put to other uses as well, by the state or those who criticize it. Andén-Papadopoulos (2008) argues that the meaning of the Abu Ghraib photos is not fixed, but rather variable according to the way that they are framed and the contexts where they appear, which are often different from the ‘dominant news frames’ through which they were first publicized.

 9. The meaning of ‘terrorism’ is relative and contingent. See Merari (2007) for a detailed disambiguation.

10. Mainstream media and government sources are often consonant in this way during wartime. Griffin (2010) offers a detailed history of this convergence in American wars of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which suggests that media accounts of warfare tend to bolster government discourse even without being mandated to do so.

11. Al Jazeera English (2007) used this term somewhat bemusedly to characterize American government and media efforts to interpret bin Laden's facial hair.

12. Haven (2007) cites a number of terrorism experts who suggest that bin Laden's decision to release the 9/11 anniversary video was a matter of ‘timing over substance’, that his main objective was to make a movie in which he appeared vital and relevant.

13. On the spatial and temporal coordinates of absence in photography, see Cadava (1997, 8).

14. UK paper The Telegraph ran an article about the video with a caption citing bin Laden's darkened beard and describing him as ‘Image Conscious’ (Shipman 2007).

15. Dowd's use of a confused temporal metaphor here is telling.

16. Here, I disagree with Andrew Hill (2009), who argues that government and media officials were eager to take ‘The Solution’ as evidence that bin Laden was alive because he provides a compelling enemy. This analysis is thought-provoking but does not reflect the content of American responses to the film. Hill suggests that bin Laden was likely dead, and claims that there was almost no analysis of how bin Laden looked. Hill also claims that the video shows no movement (140–1). This is incorrect if he is referring to ‘The Solution’.

17. Cremation would have been similarly efficacious, but Islam prohibits it.

18. They can be viewed through The New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/world/asia/08intel.html.