Crisis, Conspiracy and Rights: Imaginaries of Terrorism in Documentary Film
Crisis, Conspiracy and Rights: Imaginaries of Terrorism in Documentary Film
Crisis, Conspiracy and Rights: Imaginaries of Terrorism in Documentary Film
Yiannis Mylonas
University of Copenhagen
yiannis@hum.ku.dk
Abstract
The dispersed character of terrorism as a practice became more coherent to the Western
realm through the operationalisation of counter terrorist discourses. The media played a
major role in that in the sense that they provided public ‘visibility’ upon the potentiality of
terrorist threat. What this essay would like to discuss is the way such representations of
threat negotiate a number of issues evolving around ‘civil rights’; discrimination,
intensification of surveillance or militarization legitimacy of a state of emergency; and how
public discourses of broader issues of ‘rights’ are contextualized in the aftermath of a
terrorist attack. The case study is a documentary produced shortly after a terrorist event
that embraces the question ‘why bomb London?’ regarding the London public transport
attacks of 7/7/2005. The analytical paradigm used is based on Critical Discourse Analysis
which provides a structure that can respond to different questions of ‘how’ the signification
of emergency is constructed.
This paper is part of a broader project that casts a critical look in the context
of modern crises. Other than existing realities, those crises are
communicated, comprehended and understood as discursive contexts,
organised by different and often conflicting social groups, networks and
interests.
Giddens (1990) defines the conceptualisation of ‘crisis’ as modern; according
to his description, crises do not have the form of an ‘interruption’, but of a
rather continuous state of affairs. Giddens identifies four crises of modernity
that Critical Theory should be engaged with; these include issues of human
and civil rights, war, the impact of the industry upon ecosystems and global
poverty.
The meaning making construction of a crisis defines the processes of
resolution of a crisis, which relates to broader political processes of ‘change’.
The concept of ‘change’ itself is a definite characteristic of modernity (Bauman
2003); the context given then is important as not only does it define the
actions but also the popular consent that will legitimise the policy or counter
actions towards crises, or structure the scope of ‘change’. Historically, points
of shift or social change have become ‘real’ primarily by discursive practices
through which the appropriate imaginary around each change was mediated.
‘Change’ has the form of an imaginary restoration or order. Meaning
construction is therefore crucial in the clashes of interest that occur within the
spectrum of political conduct; meanings suggest their ‘ideal’ publics, upon
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As implied earlier, the role of text is morally productive for publics. The
multiple and often controversial informational choices offered today by a
variety of mediums and genres can produce fragments of knowledge or
disposition (Chouliaraki 2006). As several scholars have noted, media texts
are susceptible of creating ‘moral panics’ (Cottle 2005) to publics that cannot
make full sense of the often contradictory character of informational flow.
Without intending to reduce the public reception of information into
deterministic conclusions, and without implying that the conclusions of text
analysis conclude the audience’s dispositions, the importance in studying the
informational fragment itself lies in its presupposition of an ideal audience.
As for the final choice (or not) in respect to the individual spectator is not
discussed by the findings of this paper.
Discourse is the concept that connects the elements that constitute mediated
texts. Discourse is understood as a social practice itself, taking place in a
dialectical relation to other forms of the social:
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The interest in this sort of cultural production lies primarily in the very nature
of documentary as a genre; it has the purpose of representing the historical
world and of responding to the audience’s epistephilic concerns. A basic
viewers’ expectation is that the documentary bears a close relation to the
historical world; this then leads to a common sensual understanding of a logic
cause/effect linkage between sequences and events along with the gratification
in the end of knowledge acquired from viewing of it. These two public
anticipations are internally related, as they deal with an acquirement of a
‘historic lesson’.
In Ellis’ (2002: 53) words, documentary ‘is based on a fallacy and exists due to
a desire’. The fallacy is related to its claims upon truth and the desire is that of
the public for ‘complete’ information on a particular issue; in contrast to
fiction, documentary seeks to represent events as ‘reality’. But how, or under
which perspective is this ‘reality’ defined? The writing of history has been to a
large extent a political construction and the contribution of documentary in
this sense is crucial in terms of the political stance it deploys, even by often
denying its political role. Van Leeuwen (2004) observes that a great deal of
contemporary political discourse can be found more in the broader film
industry than in newspapers or parliamentary debates. In that sense then,
documentary reflects dominant discourses of society as claims for objectivity
imply a belief in the evident nature of things; as such they may entrench
political assumptions relating to the legitimacy of market economy, the
confidence in experts, and the distrust in dissidents. In those cases
‘objectivity then masks the institutional face of authority itself’ (Nichols 2001:
142).
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The analytical categories that will be examined are the stylistic choices, the
generic structure, and the audiovisual resources deployed by the film’s
discourses. Those categories will sketch out the major discourses that
organise the meanings of the film; the latter will be discussed in relation to the
initial theoretical framework and research questions.
3.1.1 Style
exposition is for those who have been given the right to participate in the
debates that may change society’ (van Leeuwen 1987: 199).
The story is being narrated by journalist Deborah Davis and unfolded within a
10 year time flashback that – according to the film - took for the bombings to
occur on British soil. This is done in a cinematic retrospective manner, where
evidence is anchored around dates of events throughout that decade,
supported by expert discourse, interviews of witnesses from various sorts of
origin and visual documentation of past events of official and unofficial origin
that relate to the time’s present (2005) situation.
The entire mode of the documentary representation possesses the potential to
have a conscious raising effect that carries on throughout the film’s duration.
This organises its claim for resolution of the crisis for the organisation of a
better future after the conclusions of a historic lesson. This is further
supported by the expository and uncompromising style of the text that
additionally organises the roles of the agents in the film.
Commonsense is organised with narration, exposition and evaluation (Nichols
1991). These aim to establish a regime of truth over the ground of the very
appealing notion of commonsense knowledge that relates to what the film
organises as ‘us’.
Discourses are constituted by the visual and the verbal as semantic entities.
They are formed by a variation of resources (historical, technical, political,
expert, witness) articulated in response to the ‘why’ question initially
addressed. This articulation is accomplished in an appealing way, while the
film’s own structure (the organisation of its rhetorical strategies and stylistic
choices) linger unseen (Nichols 1991).
How is this response though constituted in terms of the agency of the events
discussed? What a critical approach reveals is a number of semantic
reductions done in terms of the actors and the processes expressed in those
events. The use of passive voice, the use of nominal and possessive pronouns
(‘we’, ‘our’) and adverbs of place (‘here’), or generic and abstract references of
social processes (‘poverty’) ‘ground’ participants in the static order (Kress and
Leeuwen 1996) of social hierarchy, as common sense. Common sense though
fails to respond adequately to the complexity of history. The film touches
upon history but avoids getting further involved with it. As a consequence, the
explanations offered provide hints for those issues they surpass. An example
of semantic absences in text is the following extract of the film:
O.B.Laden had already helped to kick the Russians out of Afghanistan. But the
British authorities didn’t change their policy because they still didn’t consider
the West is under threat.
Who did he help to ‘kick out the Russians’? Wasn’t it the US itself in the Cold
War era, aiding the Taliban against the Soviet Union (instead of ‘the
Russians’) in Afghanistan? The geopolitical map of interests though has
changed since then. The absences are considered as semantic entities and
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Narration: ‘Political activists, many escaping from persecution from places like
Algeria, Egypt and S. Arabia. They used London as a base to continue their
struggle against their own governments’.
Evaluation: ‘At the time, the British authorities probably thought that policy was
quite smart. (the visual: footage of bureaucratic work) It was almost a mutual
understanding. The Arab radicals were free to plot all they like, provided that they
didn’t threat us. And of course, Britain was not a target. London was far too
useful as a hub for their activities. And you don’t foul your own nest. Preachers,
plotters, fighters were all allowed in’.
Those genres are later organised in chains of subgenres, consisting of
interviews, personal and official statements and archival footage of diverse
aspects of the war on terror. They propose a world view under the gravity of
the terror events of the previous decade in a genealogy of offensives that
resulted in the London bombings. London has a centripetal position as all
those other attacks are exhibited to have been either plotted in London or
related to the extremist activities based in London.
The generic constitution grounds the main focuses of the documentary’s
argument. Their point of departure is the historical moment under which the
‘shift’ of the Arab extremists took place ‘inwards’ against Britain, which was
used as their operational centre for strikes against other parts of the world.
That moment occurred after the British involvement in the war against
Afghanistan. Britain is presupposed as having a conscious part in this
conspiracy a ‘deal’ with the terrorists: ‘It was almost a mutual
understanding’. This implication signifies further the rationalisation of
events into particular meanings.
The first sign of the problem erupted was in Paris, exactly 10 years ago. A July
day, a crowded train with a bomb in the carriage seems dreadfully familiar. In
the following months, there were more attacks in the Paris metro. Overall, 12
people killed, 300 were injured.
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The term ‘terrorism’ itself is avoided and used in very few and secondary
descriptions of details around the events (i.e. ‘Algerian terrorists’). The
‘problem’ is then organised in different layers of meaning, departing from the
historical semiotics of terrorist attacks, with their roots anchored and diffused
in the everyday realm of the British capital city. Under this gravity, the
problem is analytically identified in the following main themes.
Western theorists over the structural causes of terrorism, the role of the West
on the ‘war on terror’ and so forth (Chomsky among others). ‘Anger’ surfaces
as a prime reason in the text behind the radicalisation of Muslims; it is
hierarchically located in the top of a series of reduced social processes, such as
poverty, or problems1.
‘What is happening all over the world’ is initially met in the text within a
cautious statement of an expert in Islamic studies. The absence of an agent of
‘what is happening’ organises later the clause around Muslim youth which is
introduced in the discussion of radicalism. What is happening in the world
then is a secondary feature of the main semantic entity, which is the
radicalisation of youth:
… and then on the other side you have of course those who are more integrated
and settled, but the political aspects of what is going on in the world, with
foreign policy in particular, really disturbs them.
The clause is later picked up in the film by the reporter and deployed in the
same abstract context of nominalisation that denies the relation of British
policy to global politics 2.
Due to their global impact, the issues of the war in Afghanistan, the war in
Iraq, the Guantanamo prison and the Abu Graib prison tortures could not
remain unmentioned. In the films’ economy, the gravity of those events is
rather placed upon the insurgent video production, over the insurgents’
propaganda usage of the impact of those events to humans. Such a
management, though, displays the suffering images as means to promote
religious fanaticism. The victims, although exhibited, remain colloquial
figures of a marginal, insurgent material, unintegrated (van Leeuwen 1996) to
the film’s own aesthetic or ethics. The victims are part of a ‘Muslim suffering’.
As such, ‘suffering’, a process suffocated in a nominal, becomes textually
void, subordinated as proof with no use of its own, to the factual coherence of
the film’s core argumentation.
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Since 9/11, all major presidential speeches upon the war on terror emphasise
the need to defend ‘our values’ or ‘our lifestyle’ (Fairclough 2004). The
frequent use of nominal and possessive pronouns as well as adverbs of place
focus upon a conscience-raising effort on the grounds of national unity. ‘We’
is emphasised to demonstrate unity of the British as sufferers of the attack.
But which ‘British’ in particular out of all the different ethnical communities
that inhabit Britain? This remains unclear, although a line that estranges the
Muslim community is vaguely drowned from the start of the film, with the
previous narrative and visual exhibition of ‘images of horror and carnage cut
to a religious chant’. The British nationality of this group is being reminded
even though it appears at the margins of the national unity.
‘The rules have changed’ said T. Blair on Friday ‘We are going to root out
extremism’. But is it ten years too late?
At the time, the British authorities probably thought that policy was quite
smart. Uncovering the plot to blow this place up must have given the British
authorities a real shock.
The adverb ‘probably’ in line with the ‘must have’ of the next sample suggests
presupposition, incorporating the distance between the people and the far
away ‘centres’ that manufacture political decisions. The position of the
reporter is also verified in those statements as one of ‘us’, the people that bear
those decisions.
It was almost a mutual understanding. The Arab radicals were free to plot all
they like, provided that they didn’t threat us. And of course, Britain was not a
target. London was far too useful as a hub for their activities. And you don’t
foul your own nest. Suddenly the Arab radicals they had allowed to nest so
comfortably in London weren’t just plotting attacks to far off places, now they
turned inwards.
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Finally on Friday (5/8) T. Blair said he would take action. But there’s been a
decade of government policy which allowed extremists to pour out their
message of hate. And we’ve witnessed the result.
A number of issues have been touched by the film. Through a critical glance
then, how are they organised as a solid argument? And how does this respond
to that big ‘why’ proposed and what does this suggest against the crisis? Or,
how is this argument operationalised in relation to discourses that demand
action or change? The interrelation of those questions can provide a better
vision of the imaginary construction and resolution of ‘the problem’.
To respond to such questions, it might be useful to attempt to reconstruct the
argument as a whole. What is the reason behind the attacks? A great
discussion relates the events to the broader historical and global context of the
war on terror. But this responds only peripherally to the question of the
bomber’s motives that that ‘why’ proposes. Why did this occur then? No
sufficient explanation is given upon that and as such, the argument serves the
notion of conspiracy, as it contributes to the ‘self explanatory’ base of the
motivation of the plotters as irrational fanatics, while minimizing alternative
discourses to the interpretation of events. The ‘monster’, or the ‘lunatic’ are
stressed as protagonists but never to the point where monstrosity can relate to
structural (Cottle 2006) concerns to society as a whole.
Historicity is explained to a public that is imaginary, organised according to
the social agents such an economy identifies; in that sense, the ‘addressees’ of
the film are primarily the British people as a homogenous whole. The
extensive use of ‘we’ affiliates the presenter as one of the audience.
Homogeneity is defined by the common suffering and appears cracked by the
British Muslim community, members of which provided the operational part
of the attacks: ‘In May these Britons chanted for their country to be bombed’.
Nevertheless, the ‘actual’ perpetrators of the events (as identified by the film,
the militants and the foreign clergy) are not addressed by the documentary as
‘they are deemed beyond argument’ (Billig 1998: 115).
By anchoring upon plotting, historical narration inevitably falls into particular
events that are somewhat inconsistent with the linear structure plotting
proposes. Inevitably due to their global impact, the events of the war in
Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the Guantanamo camp or the Abu Graib prison
tortures could not remain unmentioned. Their treatment though is somehow
asymmetrical in relation to the previous descriptions of the terrorist
offensives. A cinematic sublime then substitutes explanation of war, through
a hypermediated representation of aesthetic audio visual performance.
Different features, images and meanings mark a semantic linkage to the
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closer ones to ‘us’ being spectators and therefore a great deal of the film’s
resources focus upon it. Experts, unofficial footage, background information,
interviews with a broad range of both subcategories attempt to present a
complex examination of potential alleviatory action upon that suffering, or
their relation to what is being referred as ‘the problem’.
The ‘suffering of Muslims’ has no persecutor. It rather bears an animistic
character, of a physical response that belongs to the attributes of the physical
world. This meaning is operationalised in a new context that proposes
reflexives of fear over retaliation, other than sympathy and identification.
Polarisation is suggested in the editing of the different texts; yet such is
presented by its exposition as a characteristic of ‘the other’, the Muslim
extremists and not of ‘us’. They are the persecutors and the suffering images
displayed only from the point of view of their usage as a means to promote
religious fanaticism. The victims, although exhibited, remain colloquial
figures of a marginal, insurgent material, unintegrated (Van Leeuwen 1996) to
the film’s own aesthetic or ethics. The victims are part of a ‘Muslim suffering’;
a process which emerges out of the translation, condensation and
simplification (Harvey 1996) of those texts, that composes the course of
‘radicalisation’ of British Muslims and therefore adds a component to a
particular rhetoric on the origins of what is promoted as the greatest modern
threat: terrorism4.
‘The problem’, initially met in text as a macroscopic description of terrorist
activity, in the microcosm of the Muslim settings in the UK, here, is relocated
in generalizations over insufficiently explained life conditions. The ‘problem’
is relocated, endorsing the same agent behind a different aspect of it (poverty).
Poverty appears to be a constitutive element of a negative identity, as ‘it took a
terrorist attack to focus public opinion on what it is to be a Muslim’. In this
way, the Muslims are being confronted as a whole, as part of a social
pathology, for which they are primarily responsible (Kellner 1995). The
dimensions of ‘the problem’ then constitute the rationale upon which the
processes of ‘change’ will be built.
The management of Muslim community surfaces, with a primary focus on
British Muslim youth; both the government and the very community officials
bear responsibility over it. The radical shift of the documentary is towards the
very youth of the Muslim community instead of more fundamental reasoning.
And it is the community itself that bears the responsibility over its own lack of
internal discipline5 and the government for not being stricter in the first place.
The Muslim community is invited to a national unification against those
intruder voices that mislead youth and endanger the public safety.
The ending of the film provides a ‘to be continued’ suggestion, after a
juxtaposition of the two main figures of Muslims6. In the way put, the second
becomes the most powerful, as the first voice is emotional and outraged by a
youth already pictured in the despair of Burnley. The end suggests an
imaginary objectification of the potential terrorist attack target space. And in
this way, it pre-empts the future (Dowd 2004).
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The film proposes a chronicle reconstruction of the course of events that lead
to the London bombings, narrated from historical and factual evidence.
Theoretically, it appears to adopt the explanations provided by the theorists of
‘the clash of civilisations’, or ‘Londonistan’ that attempt to interpret the post
Cold War historic antagonisms. Their arguments are juxtaposed and
intertextually located in the film, operationalised by its discourse; in this way
the theories become dynamic and verified by the historical facts presented.
A number of issues can be critically raised over the exclusions that a non
critical adoption of a theory poses. To begin with the initial questions raised,
legitimacy is acquired primarily by the denunciation of the event; the
discourses of national unity stress upon the threat over societal values and
interests and demand transparency and drastic change, things that were not
granted by the government. The government’s ‘inefficiency’ becomes the base
of the documentary’s argumentation; everything happened due to a political
deficit to act drastically against the known threats that were boiling within the
country. This hypothesis, though, may further serve a legitimating process of
new institutional law and order responses in the expense of civic and human
rights and to various discrimination practices among targeted groups and
populations (Cottle 2006).
Civil rights that have a profound historical place within the constitution of
freedom of speech in Britain are being colloquially disputed and challenged as
reasons behind the catastrophe. Anticipation upon governmental adequate
action is evident. The state is still on the safe side and is expected to finally
get to ‘work’ under the stress of national righteousness. This is a practice
engaged in cinematic production in the US after the defeat in the Vietnam
war, in order to promote a sense of national pride and a need of re-
establishment of dominant societal forces of gender, race and class over
subordinate ones in a manner related to an individualist ethic is proposed in
the Thatcher-Reganite simulation of former counter-cultural non-conformity
radicalism, into figures of individual entrepreneurialism, hostile to the
dysfunctional conventions of the state (Kellner 1995). In this documentary
then, civic rights are pictured under this morally diminished context. But if
argumentatively, this stands poor, how is it actually put in effect?
Psychological realism - a traditional feature of documentary film - balances
the familiar and the strange throughout the film. The familiar or proximal
may lay in the exhibition of the poor suburbs of Burnley and the working class
ethnic British youth at the takeaway restaurant. At the same time though, the
familiar is also extended to reveal its darker and unknown sides; those are
exhibited through the voyering glance of a hidden camera at the window of a
car, that travels in the background of those locations where insurgency is
breeding. Those images wrapped together with the samples of extremist
preaching, maintain the distance towards what cannot be acknowledged and
admitted within the culture that engenders it (Sartre); indeed insurgent acts
appear to be ‘boiling’ there. Such anxiety might also be raising from class
conflict worries of a society of commodity relations. All presidents conducting
the war against terror stressed the necessity to keep consuming in order to
maintain ‘our way of living’. The semiotic of the car, as an individualist
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1 i. ‘This is Burnley.
(Shots from a car driving of empty poor narrow streets and small houses, abandoned and
burned houses, miserable backyards –strange sound effects as well).
The people here say their problems have been ignored for years. It’s taken an act of terrorism
to focus public opinion on what it is to be a Muslim.
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A similar phrase is met later though in the documentary, in a different discourse and with a
different meaning. But particular semiotics of extract 1, paraphrase information taken from
extract number 2, over what ‘people here say’; what was stated in a different text by a
representative of a moderate Muslim agency on youth, is recontextualised and adapted to a
new setting, simplified, biased in a dubious generalisation (Fairclough 2003).
ii. I think that the war against terror has sort of marginalised people and that does give
fertile ground for terrorists to recruit others to their cause. (3/4 face frontal shot).
So I think Western governments have made terrorism worst. People are really angry, their
actual saying: ‘why did it have to take a terrorist attack for everyone to want to know what
Muslims are thinking?’
‘Anger’ is mentioned in both, but in a different context. Most of the themes mentioned in the
second passage are taken up in the first’s own regime of meanings (Chouliaraki 2006). But in
a semantically altered way, even if the lexical semiotics appear similar.
2 Sample of interview with moderate Imam:
-Why haven’t you controlled the extremists within your own community?
-Nobody actually leads them, or tells them to do this barbaric act. It was the environment
of what was going on in the world. They learned from them and reacted from them
according to what they learned from them.
-I am sorry but that is actually not true. There have been very influential people within
Britain, like Omar Bakri, Abu Qatada. And these speakers have operated within Britain for
at least 10 years and no-one in the Muslim community has tried to stop them. Why not?
And later on:
-When Tony Blair says that Iraq has nothing to do with the London bombs, then what is
your reaction?
-I think now, every average sensible person will say ‘this is rubbish’’.
3Some examples of expert discourse in the text upon the issue that discusses the reasons
behind the existence of Islamist extremists in London include:
Alexis Debat (historian):
‘People like Qatada are actually on the record saying ‘no, no, we knew what the red line was,
we were very careful not to cross it. And people were very happy. London is a major
financial centre, it’s a major transit point for a lot of money coming out of the Middle East.
London was a major part of the infrastructure at the time.’
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‘Islam is superior… if we live in a society where Islam is not in the ruling system we need to
work to change that’.
-What does that mean in practical terms? If Britain…
‘It means that if there is a contradiction to the Islamic law with a British law, the British
law can go to hell’.
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