Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Disrupting meaning
- 2 Deconstructing the second American 9/11
- 3 The decisive intervention
- 4 The institutionalisation and stabilisation of the policy programme
- 5 Acts of resistance to the ‘war to terror’
- 6 The discourse strikes back
- 7 Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
5 - Acts of resistance to the ‘war to terror’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Disrupting meaning
- 2 Deconstructing the second American 9/11
- 3 The decisive intervention
- 4 The institutionalisation and stabilisation of the policy programme
- 5 Acts of resistance to the ‘war to terror’
- 6 The discourse strikes back
- 7 Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The crisis process developed in this book suggests that at, some point, the dominant discourse becomes the subject of contradictions, and that the culmination of those contradictions lies in another socially constructed crisis. The way in which the war in Iraq came about, and the way in which it was conducted, led to enormous opposition. Was this the beginning of the onset of contradictions to the ‘war on terror'discourse?
A collection of essays written by Pierre Bourdieu was published in 2000 under the title Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time. The contributions were written before the second American 9/11; their target was neoliberal economics and its discursive consequences. However, one essay –‘The train driver's remark’–was written in the aftermath of a bomb attack on a train, when the driver had refused to condemn French-Algerians or Muslims, and instead, according to Bourdieu, had said straightforwardly: they are ‘people like us’. He wrote:
This exceptional remark provided the proof that it is possible to resist the violence that is exerted daily, with a clear conscience, on television, on the radio and in the newspapers, through verbal reflexes, stereotyped images and conventional words, and the effect of habituation that it produces, imperceptibly raising, throughout the whole population, the threshold of tolerance of racist insults and contempt, reducing critical defences against pre-logical thought and verbal confusion (between Islam and Islamicism, between Muslim and Islamicist, or between Islamicist and terrorist, for example), insidiously reinforcing all the habits of thought and behaviour inherited from more than a century of colonialism and colonial struggles.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Culture, Crisis and America's War on Terror , pp. 165 - 213Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006