Between Representation and the ‘Real’: The Remaking of Terrorism in Modernity

Year 2019, Volume: 1 Issue: 2, 1 - 34, 01.10.2019

Tianyang Liu

Abstract

TerrorismStudies have long been dominated by the language of security studies. This domination obscures our understanding of terrorism as ‘a social process constructed through language, discourse and inter-subjective practices’ (Jackson 2007, p. 246).This research will examine the processes of representing and remaking terrorism in self-consciousness, systemic rationalities of sovereign state and modernity itself, by which to illuminate the distortion, alienation and mistranslation between the interpretation of terrorism and the ‘reality’ of terrorism. To this end, it will critically engage with existing literature about academic understanding of terrorism and re-categorize it into three dominant modes—mythic mode, objectification mode and re-subjectification mode. Then it will demonstrate and examine the gap between different modes of representation of terrorism and the acts of terrorism by investigating the ways in which the phenomenon of terrorism is reconstructed through modern subjectivity and mistranslated in political systemic representation of terrorism. This research will conclude by illuminating the basic trend behind the perception of terrorism; that is, the subjectivity presented in the individual understanding of terrorist threat is increasingly eroded, subordinated and dominated by the social systemic interpretation of terrorism in modernity.

Keywords

critical terrorism studies, modernity, subjectivity, systemic rationality, representation

References

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