The distinction of terrorism is that it is an event which happens primarily in the sphere of representation. The act of destruction itself is secondary to the purpose, even if that purpose is to inspire fear of destruction. As Mark Jurgensmeyer pointed out in his Terror in the Mind of God, terrorism is a kind of speech act, though actually it is a speech act folded in upon itself. It is an act which, through its mediated representation, becomes speech. This is, in itself, not very remarkable. To use Austin’s concept of the speech act, the statement must then accomplish some change in the world, it must create a new situation. This is what the mediated terrorist act does — it is transformed into a statement, but then that statement, much like the decree of a judge, effects a change in reality. That change actualizes the narrative of the act. In most cases of terrorism, the myths at work are primarily nationalistic — they insist on the recognition that the terrorist body represents an ethnos, and not simply a criminal element. However, in the case of the World Trade Center attack, it is a narrative of holy war. Suddenly, an act, which has become a mediated representation, has again become an act, because it has (if successful) drawn its target into the narrative of a existential and metaphysical struggle.
The most interesting problem with Terry Jones’ “bonfire of the pieties” is that it is isomorphically identical to an act of terrorism. It is a speech act which threatens to create a situation of violence, and the use of such a speech act as a threat is usually referred to as blackmail. Whether the preacher from Gainesville intended to blackmail the United States or threaten US soldiers and diplomats overseas is irrelevant; his (now aborted) statement is formally identical to the terrorist act, except that the promised violence is a consequence and not a cause of the mediated statement itself. The order of operations is transposed, but the relationship is intact: it is an act of speech of which incites a climate of fear, nudging the polity toward a state of war. That this act involves no illegal destruction of property or persons should not cloud or analysis — it is only a sentimentalism which would prevent us from seeing that the importance of the September 11th attacks has nothing to do with downtown real estate or a few thousand lives. It effectively inaugurated an era in which terrorism is no longer a criminal act, but an act of war, over which law (domestic and international) has only a tenuous grasp.
The importance of such a speech act is that the war it attempts to fight is not a physical war; it does not seek the corporeal destruction of the enemy, at least not by acts of terrorism. It seeks, instead, to engage the enemy in symbolic war, to draw them into a particular world view. So, as the United States tries to dismantle terror networks, invades countries which supposedly shelter terrorists, and attempts a spatio-geographic containment of radical Islam, it is in some ways fighting a different war. The symbolic and the material war are connected, but often with very different strategies. One might argue that we are very much winning the war on the ground (exemplum gratii), but losing symbolically; our own logic is moving steadily closer to that of our enemy’s. Instead of criminalizing terrorism (the modus operandi against Timothy Mcveigh and still the weapon of choice against Christian, anti-government terrorism), we have increasingly understood terrorists as existential enemies, without political goals or negotiable aims. We have positioned terrorists at the very edge of the flat world of communicative reason; we cannot negotiate because we literally cannot talk to the enemy. This leaves Liberalism no choice but eradication: even a good center left liberal like Michael Ignatieff is forced to conclude that, in the absence of a common ground of secular humanism, carthago delanda est.
