Terror as potentiality – the affective rhythms of the political

ABSTRACT

The paper addresses the ways in which the cultural, the affective and the political intersect, counter and/or feed upon one another in the context of contemporary terror. Initially, building upon Machiavelli and Hobbes, we deal with the political significance of terror (and the fear it provokes), emphasizing its potentiality, which inscribes future within the present. Then we turn to an analysis of terror in the prism of securitization. Terror, in this respect, amounts to de-materialization (the enemy as spectre), de-temporalization (the erasure of the temporal difference between the present and the future), and de-territorialisation the breakdown of the distinctions between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. Following this, we observe how these three processes are dealt with at the subjective and objective (social) levels. Regarding the first, subjective, level we differentiate three attitudes as paranoid, panic and rational. Regarding the latter, we consider terror in terms of accident, risk and catastrophe. Then, discussing the rhythmic relations between these conceptualizations and their spatio-temporal consequences, we focus on the notion of catastrophe. We end with articulating the aporias emerging in this context

KEYWORD:

• Terror
• fear
• security
• war against terror
• affect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Immediately after 9/11, for instance, Bush’s popularity grew exponentially as a ‘war president.’ With later terror attacks in different settings, the same pattern reappeared. When hit by terror, the issue of security turns into the fundamental concern of politics.

2. Consider, for instance, the wall promised to be built on the Mexican border by Trump. The policy illustrates the greatest danger with Trump, the reduction of politics to passion, to fear. And in this, the cultural imagery of populism plays a significant role. But with Trump we seem to be confronted with a new, post-political version of populism. Insofar as post-politics signifies the foreclosure of politics by eliminating real dispute, by assuming that problems can be dealt with through expert systems, Trump would seem to be a reaction against post-politics. Yet, he is post-political in another way. Society is for Trump an oikos, a private business or household. Herein, in this cultural imaginary, the politics of security coincides with the tendency of ‘economization,’ which, as Foucault (2008) showed, defines the history of West since the 17th century.

3. 9/11, for example, was first inexplicable and therefore a source of anxiety. The countermove by the US government was to try to convert this anxiety into fear. Immediately after the attacks there was not much talk of ‘home grown terrorism’ or of the fact that waging war against a state would hardly eradicate an international, hybrid terrorist network. The threats were supposed to come from outside, and it seemed that they could be determined and combated, even in conventional ways.

4. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, it was seldom to hear plane hijacking was nominated as terror. Today it is rather the rule than an exception (Stampnitzsky 13).

5. It is very interesting in this respect that previous forms of terrorism reminded of war (the Russian anarchists of the 19th Century, or organizations such as BeiderMeinhoff or RAF in the 20th) and did almost everything in order to avoid unnecessary ‘civilian’ victims. Some of them (such as the Red Army faction and Brigato Rosso) perceived themselves as military units (as the terms ‘army’ and ‘brigade’ suggest).

6. But catastrophe here is not merely about the number of victims. Catastrophe is essentially the ambition of a radical upheaval of a given order. From the viewpoint of the terrorist, terror is about a radically different political or social order. This is why terrorism is punished harder than other conventional crimes. The ordinary criminal carries out his deed knowing that he transgresses the law. Hence he seeks anonymity. The terrorist, in contrast, holds his demands publicly and looks for recognition for the righteous in his case.

7. There is also an ethical problem here: the preoccupation with our own anxiety seems out of place and skewed in comparison to those who live not with the threat of terror but terror itself as part of their daily lives.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bülent Diken

Bülent Diken teaches social and cultural theory at Lancaster University & Kadir Has University. His research fields are social theory, political philosophy, urbanism, cinema and terrorism. His books include Nihilism (Routledge 2009); Revolt, Revolution, Critique - Paradox of Society (Routledge 2012), and God, politics, Economy – Paradoxes of Religion (Routledge 2016).

Carsten Bagge Laustsen

Carsten Bagge Laustsen teaches political and social theory at Aarhus University, Department of Political Science. His research fields are poststructuralism, power, ideology, violence and terrorism. His books include The Culture of Exception (Routledge 2005, co-authored with B Diken) and Sociology Through the Projector (Routledge 2008, co-authored with B Diken).