Seeing the Present,Remembering the Past: Terror’s Representation as an Exercise in Collective Memory

The terror of the current moment prompts easy reflections on what appears to be the singularly grotesque nature of its media representation. With beheadings, immolations, assassinations, and other instances of harm and death filling most mediated spaces, today’s violence appears unusually graphic and unprecedented.

But the orientation to terror’s singularity obscures the mechanisms by which we lend meaning to what is shown. Collective memory—an intricate set of cues by which the past is invoked to make sense of the present—systematically crafts our engagement with terror’s representation. Seeing violence in the present thus depends on which violence from the past we use to make it meaningful.

Today’s violence fuels a wide representation of acts of harm. Although Islamic State leads the current display, it is by no means alone: by 2015, terror attacks were taking place in almost a hundred countries, nearly doubling the amount two years earlier (“Patterns of Islamic State-Related Terrorism, 2002–2015” 2016). When the idea of terror is broadened as a category, it encompasses too the dangerous conditions facing refugees, police killings, and domestic hate crimes occurring across otherwise democratic nation-states. Contemporary terror brings inexorable and often spectacular pictures of violence and human suffering to mind. The tendency, then, is to delineate certain moments of intensity, recognize them as events, shower them with coverage, and retrospectively focus on what has been shown.

To be sure, focusing on moments that can be made visible has been intellectually productive, with the prism of media events offering a fruitful means of contemplating the representational contours of mediated terror (Dayan and Katz 1992). Its elaborated connection to a broad spectrum of events (Couldry et al. 2010; Dayan 2008; Katz and Liebes 2007) gave rise not only to understanding terror as an orchestrated theater of violence—dependent, in Margaret Thatcher’s oft-cited view, on publicity as oxygen—but also to nuanced ways of considering the generic contours that shape terror’s representation (Nossek 1994; Weimann 1987, 1990). Nossek (2008), for instance, pinpointed how media narratives of a beleaguered society mobilize public involvement that defuses terror’s disruptive nature.

Thinking about media events as a genre is useful because generic traits are never found solely within one isolated text or event. Because genre “offer[s] a way to control the tension between similarity and difference inherent in . . . production” (Feuer 1992, 142), it necessarily orients to the relationship between what is being made visible and what is not. Such a relationship is quixotic: when Islamic State distributes beheading videos globally, it diminishes attention to the visuals of state-building not regularly shown in the West (Zelizer 2016); conversely, when Boko Haram releases some of the three hundred schoolgirls it took captive in 2014, it enhances recognition—and discussion—of numerous unseen others still in custody (Stein 2016). Accommodating genre thus not only underscores the unstable relation between what is and is not shown but also pinpoints the strategic nature of making certain events visible through representation. Forces beyond the event are instrumental in its shaping, with representation’s partial nature hinging understanding of what one sees on cues that strategically remain unseen (Zelizer 2010).

Thinking about media events as a genre orients toward temporal cues. Because generic patterning is about time, genre necessarily underscores the temporality of an event’s mediation. Regardless of mode or nature of circulation, generic representation brings to the fore temporal impulses—continuity and discontinuity, linearity and simultaneity, acceleration and pause, duration and rhythm, repetition and tempo—that produce schematic and formulaic portrayals crafted in time. In Koselleck’s (2002, 30) view, “what happens is always unique and new, but never so new that social conditions which are pregiven over the long term will not have made possible each unique event.” This gives “a definite relationship to seemingly unrelated phenomena and makes them bleakly identical” (Nora [1972] 1983, 16), ensuring that representation depends on the outside for fuller understanding. In this regard, mnemonic schemes are important because they situate the particular moments highlighted as media events within a larger temporal flow.

In a sense, collective memory studies and event analysis have always acted as something of a repair for each other, completing the intellectual labor that the other leaves undone. Despite bursts of engagement—Nora ([1972] 1983, 5), for instance, launched his massive collective memory project with a discussion of the “monster event,” arguing that the media “are the very condition upon which events are dependent for their existence”—events have long been understood as current, drawn through what Sonnevend (2016, 10–11) identified as analysis of the past that “froze events in time . . . as if they were from the present.” Presentism undergirded Dayan and Katz’s (1992) original emphasis on “liveness” as a central trait of media events, though that emphasis was modified in their discussion of the history events foster and then dismissed elsewhere as unnecessary (Hepp and Couldry 2010). However, presentism goes beyond media events’ discussion. Most scholarship on social movements, argued MacAdam and Sewell (2001, 90 and 102), “betrays no temporality whatsoever,” with “the analytical fascination of the event” resting on “very brief, spatially concentrated and relatively chaotic sequences of action” and “durable, spatially extended and profoundly structural effects.” Even Badiou’s (2005) associated notions of the “eternal present” and “atemporal instant,” with all of their paradoxical relations to time, continue to have one tense at heart—the present—and its core status is reasserted in his reading of Deleuze: “the event is neither past nor future. It makes us present to the present” (Badiou 2007, 39).

Concurrently, memory studies have been uneven in figuring out where events fit within memory’s consideration. Regarding the past in service to the present, most studies focus more on one event’s relation to the past/present connection than on illuminating its fitful positioning alongside other events. In Wagner-Pacifici’s (2016, 5–6) words, memory studies tend to “analytically cauterize events . . . [assuming] that the events being memorialized are finished, and thus that the memorials are not, themselves, actual elements of the event.” Recent work addresses more fully the broader mnemonic function and nature of events: Wagner-Pacifici (2016) reimagines the event’s boundaries as eternally restless and dynamic, shifting in afterlives that introduce new sources of contingency; Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Neiger (2015) demarcate erratic temporal orientations at play in news events; and Sonnevend (2016) reconceptualizes media events as acts of collective remembrance. These efforts are emblematic of an attempt, directly or indirectly, to move conceptions of the event beyond that of revolutionary upset—“the grain of sand in the machinery, the accident which throws us into confusion, takes us by surprise” (Nora [1972] 1983, 12)—and beyond orientation to an event’s locality (Badiou 2011, 76). They recognize that events are unable to sustain an entirely free-floating state and even the recognition of disruption or rupture is itself dependent on mnemonic work.

This nexus functions like a perfect storm for accommodating terror as a media event. Like other kinds of violence, terror boasts a “peculiar temporality,” where “it is only clear that it was really violent in retrospect” (Thornton 2002, 43). Although the distance between now and then shrinks in today’s digital environment, wresting meaning from representations of violence thus depends on temporal impulses that feed into and emerge from media events. Although it is never clear which collective memories matter and to whom—U.S. police killings have been seen both in the context of twentieth century lynching and black activism of the 1960s and 1970s (Burrough 2015)—in each case, deep mnemonic mind-sets are at play in giving shape to complex and difficult unfolding events.

Importantly, mnemonic schemes allow for a strategic broadening and narrowing of the category of terror. Particularly in response to events otherwise seen as ordinary and quotidian, on one hand, or atypical and noteworthy, on the other, memory acts as an equalizer that accommodates terror’s flexible discursive invocation. It does so, paradoxically, by playing against what is seen and thickening engagement with the event, strategically engaging cues of invisibility that introduce particular temporal flows to help explain what transpires. Taking the role of what Nora ([1972] 1983, 12) called “a reducer of uncertainty,” memory both undercuts the spectacular by qualifying the nature of what is shown and heightens the everyday by rendering it extraordinary. In both cases, memory distills the event’s capacity to be understood solely on its own terms.

Although different mnemonic mind-sets undergird current engagement with mediated events, the Cold War—as it unfolded primarily between its two main antagonists, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)—offers a mnemonic scheme that paradoxically displays growing relevance to today’s terror. Cold War mindedness evolved in the late 1940s, went underground when the Cold War ended in 1989, and surfaces periodically when difficult events in need of meaning occur, offering a set of interpretive tenets for making sense of the complex and ambiguous violence of contemporary public life. Because so much of global media flows draw from and/or mimic U.S. media, these interpretive tenets are of substantial relevance worldwide.

Significantly, the Cold War did not involve a war per se but was more a label or idea, making representation crucial for its continued recognizability for more than four decades of prosecution. Although invoking it required sidestepping concurrent wars in Korea, Vietnam, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and elsewhere that did not merit inclusion in the category, the idea of the Cold War allowed for the appellation of terror to be attached indiscriminately, involving both those who escaped the label—such as the war’s chief prosecutor in the West, the United States—and those who bore the brunt of the label’s burden—such as American citizens labeled traitors by McCarthyism. Repairing to terror helped sharpen the ideological conflict, but only when applied strategically, and the fearful specter of its potential spread was critical in giving the Cold War longevity. Importantly, as laid out in U.S. diplomat George Kennan’s theory of containment, the U.S. approach to Russia “required long-term patience and resourcefulness, without expectations of sudden triumphs” (Pell 1985, 202). This makes Cold War mindedness a rich mnemonic scheme, a repressed memory waiting to pounce into relevance, whose traits have been creatively used in lending shape to terror’s contemporary representation.

Cold War mindedness guides the public in how to think about hostility, the wars it fosters, and the media’s role therein, and it is driven by some combination of three elements: a clear binary positioning of enemy formation as an uncrossable divide between us and them, a counterintuitive notion that one does not have to see war to act as if it exists, and a largely uncritical reliance on the media to realize the war’s aims across the territory of the other side (Zelizer n.d.). These notions prevail as a mind-set that successfully tinkers with terror’s public understanding, embedding the representation of discrete media events within a mnemonic environment drawn from the Cold War.

This can be seen fruitfully in considerations of the so-called war on terror—the West’s ideological war against Islamic terrorism—which, though declared over, continues to the present day. Begun after the events of 9/11, this war “has no boundaries in space or time, and no prospect of ever ending” (Dudziak 2012, A31), fifteen years hence resembling what it looked like “still in its opening act” (Emmons 2016, para. 3). Although its players have changed over the past decade and a half—pitting al-Qaeda, al-Shabab, and Islamic State, among others, against the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Belgium, among others—it has generated multiple media events that stretch from the 2004–2005 bombings of the Madrid train system and London subway to the 2015–2016 attacks on Paris and Brussels. When seen solely through its various events’ mediation, the war on terror appears to be a series of “black swan moment[s] when democratic values and institutions are being challenged frontally,” whose mediated form remains “calculated, cold-blooded, daringly simple and staged in the heartlands of the secular West, for a global audience” (Keane 2015, para. 17).

Because black swan events combine high impact and low predictability (Taleb 2007), seeing the war on terror in their reflection disrupts the war’s narrative: if the war is going well for its Western partners, why do its discrete events repeatedly demonstrate internal setbacks alongside unpredictable negative impact from the other side? As Mother Jones observed early in 2015,

From September 2001 to January 2015, no war, invasion, occupation, intervention, conflict, or set of operations, no matter how under-armed or insignificant the forces being taken on, succeeded in any lasting or meaningful way. (Engelhardt 2015, para. 12)

Because “the event bears witness less for what it expresses than for what it reveals, less for what it is than for what it sets off” (Nora [1972] 1983, 14), memory is useful for patching up its incongruities. Thus, the Cold War, as an earlier ideological war prosecuted patiently over decades, offers a clear way to minimize the war on terror’s short-term failures. Its mnemonic patterning offsets the disruption that the war on terror’s black swan events keep raising.

Each tenet of Cold War mindedness diminishes the specter of fear raised by the war on terror. The enemy formation of “us” versus “them” draws from a centuries-old dichotomy between “East” and “West” that easily mapped onto Cold War notions of “the United States” and “USSR,” and then reproduced itself in subsequent conflicts. With dissident and alien elements eradicated from both sides of the collective imaginary, conflicting factions are represented in simplistic, uniform, and internally consistent ways: “we” are virtuous, compassionate, tolerant, fair; “they” are extremist, brutal, primitive, despotic. The war on terror depends on this binary, drawing distinctions between the West and what the Bush administration called “the axis of evil.” Already after the 2004 Madrid train bombings, experts warned against a “friend-or-foe categorization of war” (Fallows 2006), but it prevailed: The 2015 Paris attacks brought warnings of “a war of modernity against medievalism, of civilization against barbarity” (Editorial Board 2015, para. 12), while the 2016 Brussels attacks produced cautionary notes about “terrorists that are coming for us and our way of life” (Schoen 2016, para. 10). Fueled by a shared mission to save the free world, long-standing binary notions of enemy formation linger in the air between events, waiting for an opportunity to combust. The identity of enemies becomes murky, as Szpunar (2017) showed in his analysis of homegrown terrorists, and historical time becomes deceptive, a point discussed by Wagner-Pacifici (2008, 474) in her analysis of the 9/11 Commission Report when a U.S. Air Force pilot remembered having “reverted to the Russian threat” when scrambling on 9/11 (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States 2004, 45). In Politico’s view, even the 2016 U.S. presidential election rolled toward the past: “Welcome back, approximately, to the world just after 9/11, when terror hung in the air, fear was raw and palpable and Islamophobia was . . . rampant” (Hirsh 2016, para. 5). Not only does dichotomous enemy formation offer clear-cut understanding of whose side one needs to be on—forcing an either/or embrace of terror, even when its perpetrators are unclear—but it links it to the decades-old U.S. mission to save the free world. Lost from consideration is where such dichotomies begin and end and for whose ends they prevail.

Invisible war—the idea that war does not have to be seen to elicit response—supports the war on terror by fostering the impression that unseen war is real if enough people with power will it so. Although its centrality to the Cold War was concrete because no battles, corpses, or skirmishes between the United States and USSR offset what was primarily a mediated information campaign, in the war on terror, it also rides upon the invisible dimensions of many of its events. With few familiar attributes of traditional war—recognized governments or symmetrical rules of military conduct—and with new aspects of unseen war provided by smart bombs, drone attacks, digital monitoring, and virtual war, each media event highlights only partial moments in the war’s prosecution. Thus, the graphic violence associated with Islamic State comprise much of what the world sees, even though it constitutes only 2 percent of its mediated relays (Coker and Flynn 2015), and comes at the expense of depictions of “markets, service provision and agriculture . . . [which are] left wholly ignored” by Western media (Winter 2015, 32). Focusing on brutal spectacle “fatally derail[s] mainstream understanding of the organization and its appeal” (p. 7) and hides the fact that Islamic State’s use of spectacle comprises a message reserved for particular audiences. From the U.S. side, as Wagner-Pacifici (2008, 475) showed, it offers the illusion that its own “monopoly of legitimate violence literally encompasses the globe.” The slippages associated with invisible war thus allow both Western coverage and Islamic State to push what each deems relevant (Zelizer n.d.), while the grounding given by the Cold War to the war on terror levels their uneven impact.

An uncritical assumption of media influence—the idea that media reach is equivalent to media impact—undergirds much about the war on terror. Central to the Cold War notion that winning the war meant simply making contact with those under the grip of the other side, the idea that the “struggle for the minds of men” would be accomplished via the activities of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and journalists across the media fueled support for information outreach, and consolidated the belief that all involved would inevitably “sense the inherent truthfulness of US news” (Cooley 1952, 44–45). Coverage of today’s war is driven by a deep belief in media impact, in Foreign Policy’s words invoked to “win the hearts and minds in the Muslim world” (Helmus and Kaye 2009, para. 1). It is, though, on the whole naturalized and refracted more in lamentations over the problems associated with both conventional and social media coverage. Thus, the 2015 attack on the Paris club Bataclan received widespread media attention—what Variety characterized as “wall-to-wall coverage” (Lang 2015), with The Nation offering its view of why such coverage mattered:

Countries are moved to protect individuals (within and beyond their borders) by pressure from citizens. Citizens can only pressure their government to act if they are aware of the hardships facing those who are imperiled. And citizens (and policy-makers) rely on media to keep them informed. (Darling-Hammond 2016, para. 7)

Despite discourse equating reach and impact—also underscored by a lawsuit filed by one victim’s family against Facebook, Twitter, and Google on the grounds that their “material support” assisted those plotting the attack (Johnson and Reyes 2016)—left relatively unaddressed was a terror attack in Beirut one day earlier, raising the question of which events were most relevant to upholding belief in impact.

The war on terror thus depends actively on media events for representational shape, but it silently makes those media events meaningful by drawing upon a deep mnemonic mind-set that mutes questions about the viability of the war’s prosecution. The relevance of the Cold War in this regard—an earlier war prosecuted solidly and patiently across time for ideological dominance through the media—illustrates how terror’s representation as an ideological war can be assured, even when its main media events seem to underscore the war’s failure. The Cold War’s resurfacing exemplifies the return of the repressed, where the unspoken deep-seated reliance on “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant” containment of the enemy (Kennan 1947, 576) counsels the media to stay the course. In one view, “the Specter of Communism has been seamlessly replaced by the Specter of Islamic Terrorism, and the Cold War supplanted by the War on Terror” (Hopkins 2016, para. 10).

As an exercise in collective memory, then, the Cold War mind-set shows how entrenched parameters of enemy formation, invisible war, and media impact play a vital role in keeping the war on terror alive, demonstrating how “in its search for ‘security,’ the United States has actually become a force for destabilization” (Engelhardt 2015, para. 28). As an exemplar of the role of collective memories more generally, it raises the broader question of how much collective memory plays into our engagement with current events and what our lack of recognition of its role does to our response.

In discussing the temporal structure of modern enterprises, Koselleck (2004, 274) wrote that “the lesser the experience, the greater the expectation.” Collective memory diminishes the impulse to regard acts of terror from anew and ensures that their reliance on mnemonic templates facilitates particular a priori modes of understanding. Because that understanding is lodged deep in the past, it imports parameters for contemporary engagement, regardless of how irrelevant they might be. Current anxieties over terror, however, deserve consideration not only on terms from the past. The longer this takes, the more that expectation, rather than experience, will continue to shape what we know of it.