Practical historians and adversaries: 9/11 revisited

Political Communication , 2023

Political leaders construct meanings for current events in support of their existing policy goals, but the constructed meanings do not change when policy goals change. Consequently, the established narrative of the past becomes part of the policymaking terrain, justifying existing policies and creating criteria for policy success. It must be navigated by leaders seeking to reach their policy objectives. References made by U.S. and Israeli political leaders to the event known as “9/11” from 2002 through 2019 reveal how they renegotiated its meaning as their policy goals evolved. Policy goals at the time of the event shaped the meanings made of the event. As policy goals changed, existing meanings could not be discarded or reshaped at will, nor could 9/11 simply be forgotten. Instead, leaders navigated and amended the inescapable public memory of 9/11 to support varying policy goals over a 20-year time span. For Israel, 9/11 made a chronic problem an international cause célèbre, offering potential to generate international response to a commonly marginalized threat, a narrative prime ministers sought to adapt as their policy goals changed. In the U.S. the George W. Bush Administration’s narrative of 9/11 promoted and sustained the administration’s policies and goals, making it difficult for Barack Obama’s administration to change course unless it could tell a different story. Both cases demonstrate that arguments made for or against policies are contingent upon how the past is narrated. Collective remembrance can affect the contours of public policy, for the remembered past constitutes the terrain of policymaking.

2009

Since 11 September 2001, the War on Terror has dominated global political life. Times of Terror takes a critical look at the different ways in which the George W. Bush administration created and justified this far-reaching conflict through their use of language and other discursive practices. It becomes clear that representations of time were central in presenting this war as a necessary, legitimate and coherent response to the events of 9/11. Moreover, by exploring these representations, a space is opened for a rethinking the politics of identity, violence and time beyond this particular context.

Presented to the Fourth Annual Conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Media, Universidad Nacional Autonoma (Puebla, Mexico), February 21-24, 2002

Jean Baudrillard argues that hyperreality pulls real events out of the gravity of history, to be swallowed up by the virtual. In the absence of the real, history becomes empty and collapses, and truth is displaced by simulation and simulacra. In this paper I will argue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and against Baudrillard that certain events resist the hyperreal. To make this point I will show how the gravity of history reasserted itself in a very real way on 9/11/01. I will also show how the hyperreal is itself historically grounded, which means it cannot so easily be posited as a "stand-in" for history. While this suggests that hyperreality does not necessarily trump history, I point to the aftermath of the events of 9/11 to show how the hyperreal can come to reassert itself, even in the face of such a catastrophic event. 1 This reveals an irreducible tension between hyperreality and history, which suggests that these two forces would be better understood if viewed as intertwined in a dialectical process that flows though concrete intersubjectivity.

The turn towards transculturalism engenders a focus on modes of remembrance that conceptualise memory as dialogic and diverse rather than hierarchical and linear. However, this paper expresses concern that this apparent openness will lead to the presumption that all manifestations of ‘multidirectional’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ memory are ethically-oriented, according commemorative practice a transparency that is not always merited. Particularly disquieting are overly analogical memorial endeavours that suggest unproblematic equivalence between historical events, as exemplified by the reliance upon tropes inherited from Holocaust discourse in the public memorial culture of 9/11. This paper analyses the convergence of two pre-existing cultural discourses in the American public sphere after 9/11. The first relates to the ‘Americanization’ of the Holocaust in memorial culture from the early 1990s, which critics have suggested involves a transition from viewing the Holocaust as a historical event to reading it as an affirmative national parable. The second concerns the mobilisation of the Holocaust in support of U.S. military intervention in foreign policy rhetoric in the post-Cold War period. Analysing the intersection of these discourses with the nar- rative of American exceptionalism, I question whether the prevalence of Holocaust tropes in 9/11’s memorial culture suggests a deliberate appropriation of its master narrative of loss. I argue that, in the decade since 9/11, other memorial constellations have been ignored in favour of less problematic acts of historical analogy. Ultimately, I call for greater attention to the potential consequences of applying analogical templates of remembrance without adequate self-reflexivity. I suggest that it is not always the most visible points of connection that offer the potential for ethical modes of remembrance, but the hidden histories, the forgotten memories, whose relationship to 9/11 opens the most important claims to attention.

Cultural Sociology, 2012

Narrative analyses in the neo-Durkheimian tradition have tended to focus mostly on event-specific narratives in civil society in order to study meanings, strategies, and codes surrounding those events. Analysis of comparisons between the 9/11 attacks and those at Pearl Harbor can build on this tradition by expanding the discursive locations from which to understand the construction of meanings in civil society. Through examining specific analogies, narratives, and metanarratives, I show how the comparison of 9/11 to the attacks on Pearl Harbor has led to varying meanings of 9/11 based on the employment of various genre based narratives and metanarratives of the events and the nation. Downloaded from 4 Cultural Sociology 6(1) surrounding the 9/11 attacks open. In these cases the comparison between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor was used, presumably self-consciously, as a way to show how the US was defending freedom from the 'evil' terrorists, and was also used as a defense of US military actions that occurred after 9/11. In this sense the analogy not only intensified meaning-making processes about 9/11, it also was used as a way to discuss the response of the US. The analogy provides a base for thinking about potential future actions. 'Because we went to war after Pearl Harbor, we should go to war now after 9/11,' is an example of how an analogy can not only create meaning but also provide a schema for future action.

2011

Altre Modernita Rivista Di Studi Letterari E Culturali, 2011

296 occasions, their potentially upsetting impact has provided journalists, scholars, politicians and public spokepersons with the means to employ the abstract notion of "event" to evoke a suspension of our habitual modes of existence. In philosophical terms, an event is "a unique instant of production in a continual flow of changes evident in the cosmos" (Parr 2005: 22). It signals the crossing of a threshold that subtracts predictability to the future, creating a moment of unbinding where experimentation takes the place of repetition and reproduction, demanding that we reformulate our relationship with the world. For a large number of scholars, no other phenomenon in contemporary history embodies the crisis and radical estrangement that accompany the event more than 9/11. 1 It has become commonsensical to describe 9/11 as the event par excellence: a terrorist act so great at to engender a domino effect that has involved ruptures, repositionings and displacements across a multiplicity of levels, going from the micropolitical to the macropolitical and the global. This view is entwined with, and indeed magnified by, media discourses that have turned the broadcasting of the attacks into a media event in itself, rich in spectacularization, shock and ritual. The criticism on media events, such as the televisual airing of 9/11, suggests that these are "co-productions" of perpetrators and broadcasters (Katz and Liebes 2007, 164) which produce a specific modality of experiencing critical situations. This interpretation is relevant to the present analysis in that it points to the co-implication of different actors in the explosion of a supposedly unmediated moment of production. In the hypermediated environment in which we live, events, that is, seem to be always at risk of being captured in a web of interests and relations that threaten to domesticate their potential for displacement and change. 2 Keeping in mind the event cartography of the decade 2001-11 that is tentatively drawn in the above paragraph, this essay argues that 9/11 provides a starting point to explore the uses to which the media put the concept of the event in relation to the transformations that span the beginning of the 21st century. Rather than approaching 9/11 in absolute terms, as a phenomenon unencumbered by the territorializing pull of its own geopolitical genealogy, the essay focuses on the serialization of the event and on its relationship with codification and reactualization. The underlying assumption is that, in the last decade, the event has recurred both as a discursive hook in communication and politics, as well as an ontological pull towards bottom-up social mobilization. Within this changing horizon, 9/11 surfaces as a node of performativity,

2020

, attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the US along with its allies declared War on Terror, where the binary opposition of 'Us' vs 'Them' was firmly established and channelized via both electronic and print media. The media's discourse on the war against terrorism has been an intriguing research area for linguists as well as international relations experts. This paper highlights the problematization in defining a universally accepted definition of terrorism, the idiosyncratic nature of the War on Terror and how it differs from conventional wars, and, later how media, state and non-state actors (those labeled terrorists) use language to legitimize their views. International research journal of management, IT and social sciences © 2020. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, 2014

An atmosphere of crisis enhances the power, especially of the Executive Branch, to frame and shape the characterization, understanding, and reality of conflict. This Article addresses the language, rhetoric, status, and legality of "war" by examining the complexity of decision-making for policy-makers in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It does so by looking both inward, examining presidential war rhetoric in the United States, and outward, analyzing the experience of democratic states with the legal construct of "emergency" and "war" under the relevant international human rights treaties.

2010

[monograph] How did the G.W. Bush administration manage to persuade Americans to go to war in Iraq in March 2003? How was this intervention, and the global campaign named as "war-on-terror," legitimised linguistically? This book shows that the best legitimisation effects in political discourse are accomplished through the use of 'proximization'–a cognitive-rhetorical strategy that draws on the speaker's ability to present events as directly and increasingly affecting the addressee, usually in a negative or threatening way. There are three aspects of proximization: spatial, temporal and axiological. The spatial aspect involves the construal of events in the discourse as physically endangering the addressee. The temporal aspect involves presenting the events as increasingly momentous and historic and hence of central significance to both the addressee and the speaker. The axiological aspect consists in a growing clash between the system of values adhered to by the speaker and the addressee, and the values characterizing a third party whose actions, ideologically negative, are made "proximate" and thus threatening. Although the tripartite model of proximization proposed in the book is complex at the level of its linguistic realisation, the working assumption is intriguingly basic: addressees of political discourse are more likely to legitimise pre-emptive actions aimed at neutralizing the proximate "threat" if they construe the threat as personally consequential. The book shows how language of the war-on-terror, and especially the rhetoric of the Iraq war, respond to this precondition. This second revised edition features an extended preface and a new closing chapter. "Piotr Cap's book takes great theoretical strides in critical discourse analysis, exploring the dimensions of space, time and value, and applying his model to decisive texts in the contemporary world." —Paul Chilton, Lancaster University "This fascinating book provides readers with new theoretical insights into issues of legitimisation (and representation). More specifically, the US rhetoric of war is critically analysed and explained in innovative pragmatic-linguistic ways - a methodology which could be applied to many other salient problems in our complex world." —Ruth Wodak, Lancaster University