from september 11th, 2001 to 9-11: from void to crisis

From September 11th, 2001 to 9-11:From Void to Crisis1

Jack Holland

University of Warwick

This paper draws on interviews conducted in the days and weeks afterthe events of September 11th, 2001, analyzing the transition from ‘‘Sep-tember 11th, 2001’’ to ‘‘9-11.’’ That is, from the discursive void thatimmediately followed the acts of terrorism in New York, Virginia andPennsylvania to the apparently self-evident crisis that the events came torepresent in the following days and weeks. First, the paper redressespersistent oversights of discourse-oriented work by recognizing andinvestigating both the agency of the US general public and the contextthat official responses were articulated in. Second, the paper serves todenaturalize the construction of 9-11 as crisis, questioning the first andpre-requisite stage of the emerging discourse of the ‘‘War on Terror.’’Theorizing void, crisis and their relationship enables an understandingof how the War on Terror was possible and opens a critical space for itscontestation.

There are two common responses to the events of September 11th, 2001 (hereafter9-11): First, the notion that 9-11 was a date on which everything changed, andsecond, the notion that 9-11 was a date on which nothing changed at all. Timethen seems to be central to thinking and talking about 9-11, even when temporalconceptualizations are left implicit. These two antecedent tendencies are preva-lent among official, media and academic responses. However, for the vast major-ity of the US general public 9-11 clearly represented a temporal rupture. Notingthis, two principal concerns are investigated and addressed throughout thepaper. First, issues of temporality and rupture are considered at a cultural anddiscursive level; the cultural shock and discursive failure 9-11 induced during the‘‘void’’ and the strategic writing of temporality in the construction of 9-11 as cri-sis.2 Second, the paper deals with issues of agency—especially that of the generalpublic—considering issues of framing and resonance in an unusual post 9-11context that was both selective and informing.

The term ‘‘void’’ suggests a ‘‘phase’’ and connects to wider debates on thetemporality of 9-11. It represents the immediate post 9-11 confusion experiencedby the vast majority of ‘‘viewers’’ as language failed to adequately or consistently

1I would like to thank the staff of the Folklife Center and John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress,particularly Ann Hoog, alongside Matt McDonald, Stuart Croft and two anonymous referees for their insightfulcomments and suggestions. This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

2The notion of ‘‘void’’ derives from David Campbell’s (2002) recognition of a ‘‘void in meaning.’’ Here, itimplies a lack of homogenized meaning. Clearly, this paper departs from Campbell (and Edkins) by bringing incrucial insights from Colin Hay and Stuart Croft. While all approach the questions raised here with distinctconcerns and from differing theoretical perspectives, their ideas are far more commensurate than may initially beassumed.

� 2009 International Studies Association

International Political Sociology (2009) 3, 275–292

regulate the meaning of the unfolding events.3 Although it is possible to statethat the void generally began once viewers had ‘‘witnessed’’ the events, it is notpossible to state when the void ended; it ended at different times for differentpeople. For some, it ended abruptly; for others, it was replaced slowly as compre-hension gradually became possible. Attempts to fill the void, frame events andload 9-11 with meaning began almost immediately as news channels ran sugges-tive rolling headlines. On the evening of 9-11 President Bush delivered his first‘‘considered’’ articulation of what would become the dominant ‘‘War on Terror’’discourse. At this time, even Bush was struggling to find the words to create acompelling narrative (Frum 2003:125). By September 20, however, building onthe growing and solidifying official ‘‘response’’ discourse, Bush was able to deli-ver a crucial and compelling framing of 9-11 as crisis, simultaneously filling theevents with meaning and articulating the solution to the underlying morbid con-dition they represented. As such articulations began to resonate with the popula-tion, the incomprehensibility of 9-11 that characterized the void was replaced bythe harmonization and hegemony of meaning production that characterized theconstruction of 9-11 as crisis. In articulating 9-11 as crisis, the act of its construc-tion was erased from memory and the void it filled was partially forgotten as itwas retrospectively re-imagined.

It is imperative to de-objectify and ‘‘soften’’ the constructed temporality of‘‘9-11’’ as rupture, revealing the writing of discontinuity that the discursive con-struction of 9-11 as crisis entailed. It is also imperative, however, to question andrefute the notion that nothing changed on 9-11. Arguably, to imply such a sce-nario fails to acknowledge the agency of those ‘‘viewers’’—the US general pub-lic—who experienced considerable trauma on 9-11. A genealogical approach,tracing discursive continuities from Clinton’s (and earlier presidents’) employ-ment of pre-emptive arguments through to the language of the War on Terror,would risk overlooking the significance of the context that informed the selectiveand strategic re-articulation of such earlier arguments. This is not to argue thatthe void was a natural, objective condition. Rather it is to argue that the void wasan organic cultural condition that logically followed from events which existingdiscourses failed to regulate. Had US foreign policy culture and ⁄ or discoursebeen different, the void may well have not occurred. But given the existing USsecurity culture and the failure of language to adequately ‘‘manage’’ 9-11, it isunsurprising the events generated a void within which the construction of 9-11as crisis would have to occur.4

Within the context of the void, the agency of practitioners, the media and thegeneral public was brought to the fore. The agency of the media and foreignpolicy practitioners was especially crucial in framing 9-11 given the lack of com-peting discursive structures. The agency of the general public was similarly signif-icant, initially as the level of meaning production shifted to the individual—with‘‘latent narratives’’ emerging as the dominant sense-making mechanism—andincreasingly as ‘‘viewers’’ evaluated cultural expectations with reference toemerging official framings of 9-11. While startlingly widespread, resonance was

3The term ‘‘viewers’’ incorporates those who experienced the events either at the scene or on television,whether live of repeated, drawing on the ‘‘Witness and Response’’ collection’s own identification of ‘‘first handaccounts’’ and what it meant to ‘‘bear witness.’’ Of course, the collection’s use of terms such as ‘‘bear witness’’reflects wider drives to memorialize and remember 9-11. As will be shown, however, this memory was increasinglyshaped by particular and contingent framings of 9-11.

4A security culture is a shared body of assumptions, belief and norms, as well as associated practices, related tothe security of the state and ⁄ or other social actors. Security cultures are thus ‘‘patterns of thought and argumenta-tion that establish pervasive and durable security preferences by formulating concepts of the role, legitimacy andefficacy of particular approaches to protecting values. Through a process of socialization, security cultures helpestablish the core assumptions, beliefs and values of decision-makers’’ and the general public about ‘‘how securitychallenges can and should be dealt with’’ and, more fundamentally, about what is a security challenge or what islikely to become one (see Williams 2007:256).

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not unanimous. Important dissenting voices were heard. In a democracy suchas the United States, going to war is such a costly exercise that it requires‘‘widespread public consent or at least acquiescence’’ (Jackson 2005:8, 20).Official framings drew upon the cultural condition of the void and widely under-stood foreign policy traditions to, very effectively, maximize popular resonance.As the construction of 9-11 as crisis gained popular resonance, harmonizing andregulating the meaning of the events, the void was filled and 9-11 retrospectivelybecame a moment the world changed.

This paper theorizes, explicates and denaturalizes the construction of 9-11 ascrisis. In the first section, the discursive void heralded by 9-11 is investigatedand analyzed. A number of arguments are made, including that: during thevoid, 9-11 was relatively meaningless due to a failure of language; where partialmeanings were achieved they were highly individualized, with viewers fre-quently drawing on popular cultural sources; and that the events of 9-11 werenonetheless shocking as they seemed to shatter the pre-existing ‘‘truths’’ ofUS security culture. Having explored the ‘‘nature’’ of the void, its impact isassessed. It is argued that the discursive vacuum not only heightened thesignificance of attempts to frame foreign policy, but also that the ‘‘nature’’of the void enabled, shaped and constrained attempts by politicians andthe media to frame events. Crucially, the initial incomprehensibility thatcharacterized the void was seized upon as 9-11 went from being incomprehensibleto inexplicable.

In the second section, the first stage of the framing process—the constructionof 9-11 as crisis—is theorized by drawing on the work of Jenny Edkins, StuartCroft, Colin Hay and Gerard Toal. It is argued that through the construction ofcrisis the events of September 11th, 2001 became ‘‘9-11,’’ whereby 9-11 serves asa somatic marker of crisis. As a somatic marker, ‘‘9-11’’ circumvents possibilitiesfor critical reflection or debate, bringing to the fore a range of highly reductivetacit geopolitical assumptions and arguments. In tracing and theorizing the shiftfrom void to crisis, this section thus serves to denaturalize the first and prerequi-site stage of the response to 9-11, enabling an understanding of how the ‘‘Waron Terror’’ was possible and opening a critical space for its contestation. Bothsections draw extensively on quotations taken from interviews—held in theLibrary of Congress’ Folklife Center’s ‘‘Witness and Response Collection’’ and‘‘September 11, 2001, Archive’’—that were conducted with ‘‘witnesses’’ in thedays and weeks after 9-11.5

Theorizing Void

The Failure of Discourse: 9-11 as a Personal Experience

Why is it that analyses of 9-11 so often begin with personal reflections andrecollections of the events which unfolded that day (e.g., see Gaddis 2004;Shepherd 2008)? It is unusual for academic analyses to begin in such a way.First, perhaps, it is because the (immediately perceived and retrospectivelyafforded) scale, significance and nature of the events are such that 9-11 is adate for which people can recall what happened, where they were and theirpersonal experience of the day. Crucially, however, this importance has cou-pled with an explanation of 9-11 founded on the (paradoxical) assumptionthat the events are inexplicable. Bulent Diken and Carsten Lausten lament thefact that 9-11 has been elevated to a level of Absolute Evil, similarly to the

5These interviews were conducted by an extensive network of amateur, semi-professional and professionalfolklorists, ethnographers and anthropologists throughout the United States. A demographically, socially and geo-graphically diverse range of interviewees are represented. The interviews were ‘‘read’’ for emerging and stabilizingmeanings of 9-11 within a broader appreciation for developing ‘‘official’’ discourse(s).

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Holocaust (Diken and Lausten 2005). This elevation places the events beyondthe potential for understanding. Once regarded as pure evil, analyzing andexplaining 9-11 is seen as futile, impossible and even as apologizing for theconduct of evil (see Krebs and Lobasz 2007:427–429). It is thus possible to seehow, in the weeks and months after 9-11, attempts to understand the eventsbecame equated with a lack of US patriotism (Butler 2004:xiii–xxi; Crockatt2003). Perhaps in implicit anticipation of a cacophony of disapproving voices,citing a lack of patriotism (the ultimate post 9-11 sin), authors have attemptedto circumvent criticism by ‘‘proving’’ that they too recognize that the eventscannot be ‘‘understood’’ through ‘‘objective’’ analysis and that they must revertto the smallest scale of understanding, the individual, in order to recreate theevents of 9-11. In short, because (as will be shown) 9-11 has been constructedas inexplicable, analyses have tacitly recognized this through an unusual ten-dency to begin academic inquiry with personal accounts and recollections ofthe day.

Second, analyses of 9-11 are personalized because that is how the events were‘‘lived.’’ 9-11 was not widely foreseen; it came as a shock to the American peo-ple.6 Established truths of US security culture were disproved as symbols of USpolitical and economic strength were ‘‘successfully’’ targeted. Witnessing large-scale carnage on US soil invalidated notions of anarchy and chaos existing out-side of America. Whether the outside had permeated the inside—and historyhad returned to the United States—or the inside was turning in on itself was notimmediately known (Croft 2006:37). This incomprehensibility, the lack ofcertainty over what the events were—what they meant, symbolized and implied—arose due to the difficulty, and often impossibility, of subsuming the eventswithin existing frameworks of intelligibility.

The lack of appropriate discourse(s) to make sense of 9-11 in its immediateaftermath meant that where cues were taken they came from unofficial sourcesand ‘‘lower’’ levels of cultural life. Religion, films and personal forms of knowl-edge were drawn upon as ‘‘viewers’’ struggles to comprehend 9-11 took place atthe level of the individual in contrast to the more commonplace intersubjectiveunderstandings that are produced through discursive regularities. As LeneHansen (2006:18–23) summarizes, discourses regulate the production of mean-ing in a relatively systematic way where language becomes comparatively stable.Unable to be incorporated into existing discourses, the events of 9-11 werequite literally ‘‘unspeakable’’: language failed (Steinert 2003:651–656). Personalunderstandings substituted for the lack of a discourse capable of persuasivelyarticulating the events and fixing a shared meaning. As Kathe Callahan,Dubnick, and Olshfski (2006:562–563) argue, ‘‘in lieu of a clearly posited narra-tive, human thought is structured by the latent narrative that emerges from theindividual’s underlying story about the way the world operates. Thus one’s ownlatent narrative emerges as the sense-making mechanism if no other coherentnarrative is proffered.’’ These latent narratives drew upon personal experiencesalongside wide and varied popular cultural sources in an attempt to inscribemeaning onto events. Personal accounts of 9-11 and the heightened use of pop-ular cultural sources to generate meaning thus reflect the fact that both themedia and political elites fell silent in the face of an event which could notreadily be incorporated into pre-existing foreign policy discourse(s). Succinctly,personal accounts are symptomatic of the discursive void induced by 9-11 andthe subsequent re-construction of that void that occurred with the elevation of9-11 to a position of Absolute Evil as part of the articulation of crisis. Thispaper will go on to unveil and denaturalize the construction of 9-11 as crisis.

6‘‘Shock,’’ ‘‘shocked’’ and ‘‘shocking’’ were repeatedly used by interviewees to describe the events of 9-11.


However, this construction was inevitably informed by the context of the void inwhich it occurred. Investigating the nature of the discursive void wrought by9-11 is a necessary first step toward an understanding of how the War on Terrorwas possible.

Shattered Security Culture and Silence

Suddenly, a sleek silvery flying object appeared from the left-hand side of the TVscreen, approaching the other Twin Tower. Before the eye could recognize it asa passenger airplane (or even if it did, the mind obstinately refused to acknowl-edge it), it violently penetrated the upper third of the building and disappearedin a red-orange-and-black ball of fire surging against the crispy blue autumnalsky. (Arva 2003:64)

The official assessment of 9-11 records the fact that the events could happen as‘‘a failure of imagination’’ (Kean and Hamilton 2004). Arva recalls that even asthe events unfolded they were hard to imagine. First, for ‘‘viewers,’’ thisgenerated disbelief: ‘‘I didn’t know what was going on’’; ‘‘I didn’t believe it’’(Gospodarek 2001; Hayden 2001; Melody 2001). Second, it inspired denial:

I was overwhelmed. It seemed like something from a movie. It could not be real;it had to be something from a movie…. I knew it was real, but a part of medidn’t want to believe it. (Ginn 2001)

[I]t couldn’t be true, it had to be Hollywood. (Farrell 2001)

Having ‘‘no correspondence in the existing discourse of the time,’’ eventswere met with a mixture of disbelief and denial (Peker 2006:34). This led to asituation in which, although clearly significant as they contradicted the widelyheld view that the United States was ‘‘exempt from this kind of violence,’’ theevents could not be articulated and were thus relatively meaningless. As oneinterviewee described it, ‘‘the weight of imagining’’ was too great; there were nowords (Farrell 2001):

It was unspeakable. (Hiller 2001)

[It] made it difficult to talk… speaking clearly wasn’t really happening at thatpoint, it was very difficult. (Bisson 2001)

The effect of this inability to articulate the events was to prevent an under-standing of them. Confusion, numbness and a void in meaning dominated theimmediate experience of 9-11 for many watching Americans:

[It was] so unbelievable that it didn’t want to sink in. (Day 2001)

At first I wasn’t angry, because I couldn’t believe what was happening.(Dominguez 2001)

I felt nothing because I couldn’t understand. (Sato 2001)

Where partial understandings were achieved, rather than from foreign policydiscourse, they were generally taken from popular cultural sources. Science fic-tion, horror shows and movies, as well as songs, poems and religious faith wereall drawn upon to fill the events with meaning.

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[It was] so sci-fi. (Anderson 2001)

[M]y mind went to ‘‘War of the Worlds.’’ (Farrell 2001)

I didn’t believe it at first.… I was waiting for the lights to go up and some direc-tor to say ‘‘cut’’ or something. It was like out of a movie; like IndependenceDay. (Hayden 2001)

Citizens turned to personal levels of understanding and popular culturalsources of meaning due to the lack of prevalent discourses capable of adequatelyarticulating the events. ‘‘[I]n countries such as the United States and the UnitedKingdom, the media are a part of the co-production of security discourse’’ (Croft2006:388). ‘‘In the immediate aftermath of 9 ⁄ 11, however, commentators strug-gled to establish adequate historical frames of reference, that is, to place ‘‘mediatemplates’’ over the unfolding coverage to shape explanations’’ (Hoskins2006:455–466). In fact, the incomprehensibility of 9-11 was reinforced by themedia, through images of witnesses ‘‘looking speechlessly… in lieu of language’’(Morris 2004:401, 404).

Voiceless media images were compounded by elected representatives as a‘‘strangely ominous silence filled the discursive space where political declarationswere expected’’ (Agnew 2003:61). Both the media and political elites refrainedor were unable to place the events into a meaningful and coherent discourse;thus, the two principal (and expected) generators of meaning fell silent. Thislack of an appropriate language, the silence of elected representatives and theresulting sparsity of background understanding for witnesses to contextualize theevents left Americans ‘‘baffled’’ (Lipschultz 2007:23). John Troyer (2001), writ-ing only seventeen days after 9-11, encapsulates the nature of the void and thefeeling that ‘‘September 11 strode onstage without lines, without script, withoutcharacter’’ (Lincoln 2004:140):

I have read the same story, in different news sources, attempting to create alanguage that adequately describes the events. While every term imaginable todescribe violence, death, grief and anxiety is still in use by most Americans, thewords are not helping to make sense of the situation… this persistent repetitionof language [generates] a frustration about the inability to accurately define a17-day-long stream of transient information. The language of everyday life seemsentirely irrelevant given the inability to even categorize Sept. 11, 2001, asanything other than Sept. 11, 2001…. Sept. 11, 2001, is a singular day thatresides in the present without a proper name, embedding no specific meaningsother than that words do not adequately articulate the shock.... The accustomeduses of language to make impossible events seem real for the American publicvia television, newspaper and radio sources are breaking down. (Troyer 2001)

With hindsight, Troyer raises three important points. First, he recognizes thatattempts in the media to cover and understand events fuelled incomprehensibi-lity. As the Bush administration set about narrating the response, and construct-ing crisis, ‘‘incomprehensibility’’ became a widely accepted feature of 9-11 andwas incorporated into the official foreign policy discourse of the response. Thevoid—as a void in meaning—was actually used in the construction of theresponse as, through foreign policy discourse, 9-11 went from being incomprehen-sible to inexplicable. Second, in noting the breakdown of ‘‘the accustomed uses oflanguage,’’ Troyer highlights the failings of ‘‘official politics’’ and the shift to‘‘the political’’ that 9-11 wrought (see Edkins 1999:2). Third, Troyer’s use of‘‘Sept. 11, 2001’’ is striking in its unfamiliarity. The dominant shorthand abbrevi-ation has become (an almost universally adopted) ‘‘9-11.’’ ‘‘9-11’’ has come toact as a somatic marker of crisis (Toal 2003). Before turning to explore the


second and third points in theorizing the construction of crisis, the first observa-tion requires further elaboration.

The void that 9-11 created resulted from two primary factors: the shattering ofthe foundational myths of US security culture and the resulting silence of boththe media and political elites. ‘‘Violence of this magnitude collided with, andmutually excluded, almost two hundred years, the subconscious reality andawareness of being isolated from a chaotic world’’ (Peker 2006:33). The securityculture of the United States had propagated a belief in invulnerability. Shelteredbehind two vast oceans, the United States as a self-perceived ‘‘island exemptfrom this kind of violence, witnessing it only from the safe distance of the TVscreen’’ became ‘‘directly involved’’ on 9-11; ‘‘old security seemed to be momen-tarily shattered’’ (Zizek 2002:45, 49; Gaddis 2004).

The shattering of American security culture was foremost in shaping the reac-tions of the general public to 9-11. As interviewee Eric Offner (2001) noted, theexperience of 9-11 ‘‘has to be set off against what one has been conditioned to.’’People were ‘‘completely shocked it was a terrorist attack’’ precisely becauseAmericans ‘‘had no contact with that’’ (Fan 2001; Gospodarek 2001). The factthat 9-11 occurred in America was what generated much of interviewees’ incom-prehension:

I can’t believe it… it’s happening here, in the US. You see these things outthere, but not here in your own country. (Senor 2001)

I’m still in a state of shock; I don’t believe this could happen on American soil.(Farley 2001)

Americans were accustomed to seeing images of chaos, violence and terrorism‘‘out there,’’ but not ‘‘here.’’ American security culture located the dangers ofanarchy away from the United States both geographically and historically.Often, images of 9-11 were greeted with spatial or temporal distanciation, per-ceived either as ‘‘news from some other country’’ or with the assumption that‘‘it was something in history’’ (Castello 2001; Waters 2001). Although witness-ing the destruction of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on fire, the eventsremained difficult to comprehend, as no overarching official discourse existedto fix meaning to them. Rather, US security culture was dominated by an illu-sion of invulnerability that had flourished during the ‘‘interwar years’’ follow-ing the Cold War (Choller and Goldgeier 2008). ‘‘The indispensable nation’’was increasingly accustomed to enjoying the confidence and security of its‘‘unipolar moment.’’ This confidence culminated in the myth that the UnitedStates was untouched and untouchable (Grayson 2001). 9-11, interpretedaccordingly, destroyed that myth, and shattered the truths of American securityculture.

I did not really believe it because we live in the United States and basicallythe whole concept of living in the United States is freedom, living in a verysheltered world where you just never would think of a war, or attack…. I havealways felt safe in America… [now] I don’t know if I could necessarily say if Iam safe… a lot of people in America were feeling so secure, they were feelinglike the US is invincible… we are not invincible… we need to get out of ourbubble and realize that we are just in the same ballpark as everyone else.(Bauch 2001)

[I] couldn’t believe it; these are people, these are Americans…. Americans thinkwe’re invulnerable, we’re like superman, you know? We’re too good for that…we, as anyone else, can be affected by these events. (Thomas 2001)

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[T]his has made everyone open their eyes.… We are not invincible. (Moe 2001)

We no longer appear to be chosen people. We are just as susceptible to massdevastation as any other part of the world. (Anderson 2001)

That such enduring, deeply held tacit assumptions about the nature ofAmerican security were so obviously disproved caused widespread alarm andmade talking of the events difficult. ‘‘The emergence of events which could notbe domesticated, symbolized or integrated within the discourse’’ caused both for-eign policy practitioners and the media (the two expected sources of meaning)to fall silent (Peker 2006:33). However, as the response was formulated thisincomprehensibility—the impossibility of incorporating 9-11 into the logic of anexisting foreign policy discourse—was seized upon. The media and foreign policypractitioners worked in symbiosis to transform an incomprehensible event intoan inexplicable event. 9-11 went from making no sense, to being beyond anyjustification and impervious to understanding. As Morris summarizes:

Repetitious broadcasting also made [the events] resistant to analysis. Saturatingevery television screen, they seemed to testify only to the incomprehensibility ofthe event ⁄ image. This was quickly mobilized for ideological effect, so that theincomprehensibility of the image ⁄ event also became a way of conveying the ideathat the terrorist act is that which exceeds moral calculation... the event quicklybecame its image, and questions of causality were consequently deferred alongwith the need for reading. The substitution was made possible by virtue of thoseother substitutions on which photographic logics rest: of appearance for truth,of what can be seen for what can be known. (Morris 2004:405)

The manipulation of the void by foreign policy practitioners and the media inthe discourse of the response is an important and infrequently acknowledgedmove. Where scholars, such as Diken and Lausten, do criticize the policing of‘‘acceptable knowledge’’ of the events, rarely are the initial factors that gave riseto this situation considered. The context of the void—as a void in meaning—pro-vided the situation in which such a construction was possible. Drawing on thewidely perceived belief that 9-11 defied existing understandings (of America, theworld and their relationship), the construction of 9-11 confirmed that the eventswere indeed beyond the parameters of understanding. By transforming 9-11from an incomprehensible event to an inexplicable attack, numerous features ofthe response were naturalized. This transformation was one, particularly impor-tant, framing of 9-11 that underpinned a series of subsequent discursive moves,which rendered a contingent response common sense. The paper now turns toconsider the first stage of the response; reaffirming the mastery of politics overthe political by constructing 9-11 as a somatic marker of crisis.

Theorizing Crisis

Crisis as a ‘‘Political Moment’’: Reinstating ‘‘Politics’’

‘‘Politics,’’ for Jenny Edkins (1999:2), marks the arena of ‘‘elections, politicalparties, the doings of governments and parliaments, the state apparatus, and inthe case of international politics, treaties, international agreements, diplomacy,wars, institutions of which states are members and the actions of statesmen andwomen.’’ ‘‘The political,’’ on the other hand, ‘‘has to do with the establishmentof that very social order which sets out a particular, historically specific accountof what counts as politics and defines other areas of social life as not politics.’’‘‘September 11 has been one of these situations of the political that suspended,though temporarily, the stable arena of politics’’ (Peker 2006:4). For Peker, the


9-11 void saw ‘‘the disintegration of discursive structures, social meanings, andsubject positions; where hegemonic intervention to rearticulate them surface[d] asan urgent necessity.’’ It was, for Peker, ‘‘the moment of global crisis overcomeby the act of founding a new harmony.’’ This interpretation, however, belies theconstruction that resides in the identification of crisis; constructing a crisis was,in fact, the first stage of the response, not the condition upon whichthe response was formulated. Moreover, it was only with the founding of a new‘‘harmony’’—the articulation of a new trajectory—that 9-11 was retrospectivelyconstituted as crisis.

The concept of ‘‘crisis’’ is most welcome in this sense because it represents asituation in which our everyday beliefs of how the world works are rigorouslydisrupted by an event that is out of our control. In that sense, it can becompared to trauma, i.e. a situation that is hard to describe and yet demands tobe communicated. (Edkins 2002:7–8)

This ‘‘demand to be communicated’’ and the ‘‘urgent necessity’’ of articulat-ing—despite being ‘‘outside the frameworks of normal social reality and thusoutside the linguistic and other symbolic tools we have at our disposal for mak-ing sense of the world’’ (Edkins 2002:8)—are central to an understanding of9-11 as crisis. In and of itself 9-11 was not a crisis. Initially unregulated bydiscourse, the ‘‘events’’ did not mean anything for certain. Instead 9-11 became acrisis through a process of discursive construction which reinstated ‘‘politics’’over ‘‘the political.’’

Using Edkins’s (1999:7–8) terminology, 9-11 was a ‘‘political moment.’’ Apolitical moment is a founding, open and contingent moment in which thepolitical order and community are constituted. In this moment ‘‘acts’’ are foun-dationless; they are just ‘‘acts.’’ Crucially, however, the constructed meaning of‘‘acts’’ and the newly forged political reality are veiled in the writing of history;the openness of the interregnum ends with the re-establishment of politics overthe political and this re-establishment demands the process of establishingbecomes retrospectively invisible. To become invisible, foundational myths of thenew political reality must be widely accepted (see Edkins 1999:8; Jackson 2005:8,20). With such resonance, the ascription of meaning to acts, the re-establishingof politics over the political and the very contingency of the interregnum are for-gotten. Re-opening the contingency of the 9-11 void is an important step tounderstanding how the new political reality of the War on Terror was possible; itrequires an appreciation of the process of constructing 9-11 as a crisis, a processwhich filled the ‘‘acts’’ with meaning and, crucially, articulated the solution.

So what is a crisis? 9-11 was not, self-evidently, a crisis. 9-11 became a momentof crisis. However, as I have argued, 9-11 did herald a discursive void as the‘‘American post-cold-war security order discourse collapsed under the new chal-lenge’’ and the ‘‘expected sources’’ of meaning fell silent (Croft 2006:55). ForStuart Croft (2006:54, 55), despite the silence that followed such a stark disprov-ing of the previously perceived certainties of US security culture, 9-11‘‘demanded resolution through a new understanding.’’ This demand was metthrough a ‘‘discursive shift... initiated by those with social power [and] repro-duced by others.’’ The new policies of the War on Terror were set under waynot by the ‘‘acts’’ or ‘‘events’’ of 9-11 themselves, but through the discursive con-struction of 9-11 as crisis by those with social power. Elected representatives, asforeign policy practitioners, acted as issuers of statements in a Foucauldian sense;they acted as ‘‘experts’’ whose words spoke truth. These statements drew on eachother, supported each other and together comprised a logical and coherentsystem of statements that regulated meaning in a coherent way (Hansen2006:18–23). This system of statements (an emerging and solidifying discourse)

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proffered foundational myths and meta-narratives capable of subsuming theevents, re-constructing the political order and the political community. All of thiswas crucial to the unfolding War on Terror. It belies, however, the double articu-lation at the heart of the initial construction of 9-11 as crisis: the simultaneousidentification of both the problem and the solution. 9-11 was a political moment;sovereignty, which had been so bluntly put into question through the use of ille-gitimate violence, was reasserted and performed. It was also, however, retrospec-tively constituted as a moment of both dusk and dawn (Hay 1996b:255); 9-11became an historical moment, a moment of crisis, when events marked the endof one era and the start of the next. 9-11 was interpreted and constructed as aday when the world changed. Articulating this change and the new era requireda decisive intervention, without which 9-11 could not have been constructed as acrisis.

Crisis as a Moment of Decisive Intervention

The term ‘‘crisis’’ is frequently deployed, rhetorically rich and attention-grasping;it ‘‘has an immense lay, media and academic currency’’ (Hay 1996a:2, 1999:318).However, the term is also ‘‘illusive, vague, imprecise, malleable, open-ended andgenerally unspecified’’ (Hay 1996a:2). Hay (1999:318) suggests that the term’subiquity may even derive from ‘‘this notorious imprecision.’’ In social and politi-cal academic literature, the term is frequently understood as ‘‘an accumulationof contradictions’’ (Hay 1999:317). To understand crisis as a process and prod-uct of discursive construction, Hay (1996a:2) turns to consider the etymology ofthe term in an attempt to ‘‘inject some (long overdue) conceptual clarity.’’ Trac-ing ancient Greek usage of the term, Hay (1996a:3)notes that crisis was invokedto describe ‘‘the moment in the course of the disease at which it is determinedwhether the patient will recover.’’ Thus the ‘‘contradictory constellation, is how-ever, held to represent an opportunity for a healing transformation.’’

Crisis appears perhaps most frequently in Marxist, neo-Marxist and post-Marxist state theory. It is here that crisis is most frequently identified as a self-evident accumulation of contradictions. Hay (1999:323) rejects this ‘‘dominantand purely objectivist view of crisis, which conflates, and in certain cases actuallyequates, contradiction and crisis.’’ In tracing the etymology of crisis, Hay identi-fies crises as a moment of objective contradiction and subjective intervention.While the assertion of ‘‘objective contradiction’’ derives from Hay’s ontologicalposition, the crucial point is that a seemingly contradictory event such as 9-11can sustain numerous conceptions of crisis. Thus, a crisis is a strategic moment;the events of 9-11 had to be perceived and constructed as a rupture, but simulta-neously, 9-11 was ‘‘perceived as a moment in which a decisive intervention can,and perhaps must, be made’’ (Hay 1996b:254, 1999:323). This perception mustoccur at the level at which the crisis is identified; by actors capable of deliveringa response to the problems they identify. In short, to be constructed as a crisis,9-11 required a decisive intervention to be made, which articulated the events ‘‘as‘symptom’-atic of a more general condition of crisis’’ (Hay 1999:323) and a Waron Terror, conducted through the agency of the US military led by PresidentBush, as the solution to the impasse.

A crisis is therefore itself constructed in and through social interaction. It isgiven meaning through social processes, through a decisive intervention whichgives meaning to the situation and which also provide a route for future policy.That is, there are no objective ontological criteria that a crisis must fulfill to be acrisis: a crisis is one when it permeates discourse, and creates new understand-ings and, thereby, new policy programmes. (Croft 2006:5)


Drawing extensively on Hay (1996b:255), ‘‘[c]risis, then, is a moment andprocess of transformation;’’ the shifting of historical epochs is written in the con-struction of crises. ‘‘If we are to understand’’ the project of the War on Terrorthat followed ‘‘we must start by considering the moment of crisis itself.’’ Crisis,like the subsequent stages of the response that would lead to Afghanistan andGuantanamo, is ‘‘subjectively perceived and hence brought into existencethrough narrative and discourse.’’ The possibility of the state imposing a newforeign policy trajectory ‘‘resides not only in the ability to respond to crises, butto identify, define and constitute crisis.’’ The ‘‘right’’ and ‘‘ability’’ to impose such anew trajectory relied upon the success of the articulation of the events of9-11—as symptomatic of a wider crisis—and on the success of the articulationof the decisive intervention that deemed a War on Terror as urgent.

To be ‘‘successful,’’ constructions of crisis that compete with one anothermust achieve resonance with key populations. Bush achieved considerable reso-nance in narrating a crisis discourse; he did ‘‘a remarkable job of defining theattacks of September 11 to his advantage,’’ framing a crisis discourse that was ‘‘akey factor in his success,’’ elevating him from a perceived poor leader to anincreasingly popular wartime President (Murphy 2003:608). This resonance wasaided by the scale and shock of 9-11 combined with the relative paucity of alter-native crisis narratives; the void strategically selected in favor of the constructionof crisis mobilized by the Bush government. Hay (1996b:255) notes that ‘‘crisisdiscourses operate by identifying minor alterations in the routine texture ofsocial life,’’ iterative changes are recruited by the discourse and presented assymptomatic of the general condition of crisis. Just as the void operated as ahighly individualized lived experience, as is reflected in the nature of personaltestaments and widely located popular cultural sources of meaning, the 9-11 crisisbecame lived in the terms articulated in the crisis discourse (e.g., Barker 2001).With 9-11, clearly social life was impacted, and foreign policy practitioners did nothave to work hard to accrue incremental changes in everyday life symptomatic ofa wider crisis condition; the hole in the cityscape and trauma that followedensured a sense of rupture was easily established. The crisis, like the void beforeit, was lived at a relatively (unusually and surprisingly) personal level. The majordifference from the void to the crisis arose in the harmonization of meaningacross the population; if on September 11th the events of the day were relativelymeaning-less, in the days that followed, the meaning of 9-11 was increasinglyhomogenous and hegemonic. Only three days after the events, the general publicbegan to read and articulate 9-11 through the emerging official discourse:

[It was a] crime against humanity. (Gospodarek 2001)

[It] was an attack on our society, on our way of life… an attack on free life ingeneral. (Kyriagis 2001)

Even though 9-11 was initially meaningless, the ‘‘nature’’ of 9-11 selected inand out certain constructions, in exactly the same manner as the wider contextof foreign policy culture and the domestic political landscape (Hay 1999:325).Just as Gerard Toal (2006) notes that it was unsurprising for Bush to reach intoforeign policy culture and re-articulate enduring or forgotten foreign policy dis-courses, the attacks, while contingent, made certain courses of action more likely(and possess a greater chance of resonating widely) than others. ‘‘Discursive con-structions of crisis are doubly constrained by the ‘symptoms’ it must narrate andby its ability to find resonance with the experiences to which such symptoms giverise’’ (Hay 1999:323). This is why the incomprehensible nature of 9-11 in thevoid fed so well into the inexplicable nature of 9-11 constructed in the crisis dis-course. The success of a crisis discourse depends not on an ability to accurately

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map the complexity of perceived webs of causation—it is of course to the con-structions of crisis, not some extra-discursive ‘‘reality’’ of failure that narrativesmust attest to—but ‘‘on their ability to provide a simplified account sufficientlyflexible to ‘narrate’ a great variety of morbid symptoms whilst unambiguouslyattributing causality and responsibility’’ (Hay 1999:335). In this, the War onTerror, as a discursive project, has excelled.

The first events that the emerging and increasingly hegemonic discourse hadto account for were previous instances of ‘‘terrorist evil.’’ The 1993 World TradeCenter bombing, the 1998 attacks on US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, andthe 2000 attack on the USS Cole were quickly incorporated within the emergingdominant discourse. The construction of a chronological lineage of events lead-ing up to 9-11 was so strong that interviewees noted it was ‘‘startling [that peo-ple] didn’t link [the] previous… pattern of activities’’ (Barker 2001). Cruciallyhowever, certain ‘‘morbid symptoms’’ were deliberately excluded by the officialdiscourse. The agency of the general public to interpret, modify, reject and resistthe official response is of course important to acknowledge. While the officialdiscourse was widely accepted, alternatives were proffered. Those voicing alterna-tive takes on 9-11 were more likely to draw parallels to the 1995 Oklahoma Citybombing than instances of ‘‘foreign terrorism’’ or even Pearl Harbor (e.g.,Johnson 2001).

The agency of the general public was at times particularly erudite in itsresistance of the emerging official foreign policy discourse:

[All President Bush] uses are buzz words like evil, good, resolve and you’d thinkhe was talking about a Star Wars movie or something. (Merson 2001)

Bush said…. ‘‘War on Terrorism’’… [it’s a] contradiction in terms. (Anon.2001b)

Nonetheless, the emerging official discourse resonated widely in both its abilityto fill the void with meaning and to incorporate new events within it. Elementsof official discourse were widely repeated by interviewees when discussing theUnited States and the new enemy; nationalism and unity were paramount,opposed to a denigrated, subhuman enemy:

I never really understood what the American flag stood for…. I’m very proud tobe an American; that’s what I learnt from this. (Gospodarek 2001)

We’re dealing with people who have the mind of a snake; not human beings….We’re in a different world; we’re in a free world… we don’t think that way… verycowardice… there’s no sense of humanity whatsoever.... We’re not barbaric;we’re just not that sort of people. (Hiller 2001)

How can they live among us and not see kindness? (Chapman 2001)

They’re substandard people… they’re subhuman… anti-human… from adiseased corner of the world… with a diseased mindset. (Madison 2001)

The strength of patriotic feeling generated after 9-11 was reflected in the ques-tion, ‘‘If not, why are you not flying the flag?’’ (Dunn 2001). Flying the flag wasnow the default position. Not doing so made a larger and louder statement thandoing so.7 Nevertheless, although ‘‘unity’’ and ‘‘freedom’’ were increasingly usedin opposition to ‘‘terror,’’ there was a risk that the emerging official discourse

7When asked, interviewee Jack Donald (2001) embarrassingly admitted he had taken his flag down in the badweather and forgotten to put it back up. He promised that he would be putting it back up shortly.


would lose its grip with time. Two and a half weeks after 9-11, one intervieweenoted that ‘‘it’s kind of wearing off… people are getting more… it’s hit themalready… and they’re slowing down… nothing else has really happened’’ (Anon.2001a). The start of October, however, brought a series of ‘‘anthrax attacks’’ andnumerous ‘‘white powder scares’’ across the country.

Just as certain past events, such as embassy bombings and the USS Cole, wereincorporated within the increasingly dominant discourse, so too were new events.The official discourse was capable of narrating these new ‘‘morbid symptoms’’ aspart of the underlying condition. It is with the anthrax scares that it is possibleto see the dominant discourse becoming increasingly hegemonic. Far away fromNew York and Washington, DC, ‘‘white powder scares’’ were experienced, madesense of and commented on through the wider discourse of the emerging Waron Terror. By mid-October in Newfoundland, Canada, after being detained inresponse to a ‘‘white powder scare,’’ one interviewee observed, ‘‘the war reachedhere… [we could] see it from the inside’’ (Tulk 2001). Successfully narratingthe anthrax scares as new symptoms of the identified terror threat solidified thedominance of the official War on Terror discourse at a time when alternativeswere forming in opposition to intervention in Afghanistan.8 The ability of theemerging official discourse to narrate old and new symptoms of crisis ensured itssurvival and dominance.

‘‘9-11’’ as a Somatic Marker of Crisis

Drawing on William Connolly’s research in neurophysiology, Gerard Toal(2003:857–860) argues that ‘‘9-11’’ has come to act as a somatic marker. Suc-cinctly, Toal argues that through our ‘‘biophysical’’ encounters with the world,humans mix the cultural into the corporeal. Where these mixtures of the cul-tural and corporeal come together somatic markers may occur. For Connolly(2002:35 cited in Toal 2003:858), a somatic marker is a ‘‘a culturally mobilized,corporeal disposition through which affect-imbued, preliminary orientations toperceptions and judgment scale down the material factored into cost-benefitanalyses, principled judgments, and reflective experiments.’’ Thus a somatic mar-ker underpins higher-order thought and deliberation as an organizing and cate-gorizing capacity. As a mixture of the cultural and the biophysical, a somaticmarker operates ‘‘below the threshold of reflection and structured by affect-saturated memory and ‘gut feelings,’ it simplifies and speeds the process ofcalculative reasoning so that every decision is relatively instantaneous, ratherthan a rational-choice marathon’’ (Toal 2003:858).

Here we come full circle as we see that the elevation of 9-11 to a position ofAbsolute Evil is facilitated through the somatic marker of ‘‘9-11.’’ Connolly(2002:35 cited in Toal 2003:858) makes his argument by drawing on the exampleof the intense collective memories of the Holocaust held by many EuropeanJews. The term ‘‘Holocaust’’ acts as a somatic marker conjuring ‘‘complex mem-ories on the higher, linguistic register and taps into the visceral dimension ofthe trauma, an intense set of feelings that gather in the gut, the muscles, andthe pallor of the skin.’’ The intense collective memories held by many Americansof 9-11, experienced through the shared position as ‘‘viewers,’’ have frequentlybeen triggered and invoked in the ensuing War on Terror. ‘‘When people withsuch intense collective memories face new circumstances that trigger them, a setof dispositions to perception, feeling, interpretation, and action are called intoplay’’ (2002:35, cited in Toal 2003:858). The set of dispositions to perception,feeling and action generated by the somatic marker of ‘‘9-11’’ serve to promoteparticular policies while marginalizing others.

8Several interviewees questioned the logic of killing Afghani citizens, drawing parallels with 9-11.

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In the War on Terror, speaking of 9-11 is to invoke ‘‘an obsessive collectiveexperience of trauma and loss’’ that operates without the need for higher-ordercontemplation (Toal 2003:858). Speaking of 9-11 in the War on Terror has beento unleash an ‘‘affective tsunami’’ (Toal 2003:859). The dominance of officialUS foreign policy discourse in the War on Terror, including the hegemonicframing of 9-11, has ensured that speaking of 9-11 brings to the fore issues ofresentment and desire. Speaking of 9-11 is to speak of the desire to avenge aninstance of Absolute Evil through the muscular reassertion of US sovereignty;9-11 as a somatic marker is fixed with and brings forth the truths of JacksonianAmerica (Toal 2003:860–864).

Space prohibits a detailed discussion of Jacksonian foreign policy tradition(for discussion, see Mead 2002). However, it is important to note that interven-tion in Afghanistan followed a Jacksonian logic of the counterpunch: of defend-ing American honor. The principal tenets of Jacksonian foreign policy thinkingwere central to the official foreign policy discourse of the Bush administration.Those who had failed to obey the rules were no longer protected by them; theymust be brought to justice and they could be brought to justice by any means asthey had forfeited their rights by decree of their actions. 9-11 as somatic markernot only brought to the fore the notion of an instance of Absolute Evil, it alsobrought forward the solution: fight terrorism and kill terrorists (Toal 2003:859).9-11 as a somatic marker, memorializing a moment of crisis, invoked both thetragedy and the solution to prevent its reoccurrence. In the War on Terror, 9-11could be invoked to justify a hyper-masculinized, warrior culture in society andin foreign policy thinking. The effect of 9-11 as somatic marker thus mirrors thewider societal shifts Susan Faludi (2008) astutely documents. These shifts werereflected not only in the (later) need for John Kerry to ‘‘prove his metal’’ byattempting to out-hunt President Bush, but also in the increasingly harmonizedmeaning of 9-11 and the solution to the crisis it now represented. As themeaning of 9-11 began to harmonize, interviewees frequently espoused distinctlyJacksonian views:

Get revenge on these people. You know? Literally kill these people. Kill thesepeople who did this. (Gospodarek 2001)

This event spurned a lot of anger in me.… I hope they get him, I hope theytorture him.... As discomforting as it is for me, I want them to bomb the hell outof Afghanistan... kill them all. (Kyriagis 2001)

If I was twenty I’d be signing up for the army.… I feel that we should deal withthem accordingly, as to what they have done to our country… that type ofpeople do not deserve to live.… I think we should attack and take those peopleout of this world.… I don’t think they deserve to live after what they have doneto our country. (Hiller 2001)

[We should] take care of the situation no matter what the costs may be.… WorldWar, whatever…. I’m all for war… we need to strike back ten times harder thanthey struck us… by any means necessary. (Hill 2001)

We had to do something about it; we can’t just sit back and let them punch usin the face. (Dominguez 2001)

[We should] drop nuclear weapons on ‘em.… Wipe Afghanistan off the face ofthe earth. (Hewitt 2001)

We should quit pussyfooting around… when you go hunting, when you woundsomething, you don’t leave it to suffer. (Throne 2001)


The strength of feeling in the above quotations is simultaneously startling andentirely predictable. They exemplify Jacksonian desires for retribution and theregaining of American honor through force. They also demonstrate why saying‘‘9-11’’ has been such a potent political tool during the War on Terror. Oppos-ing increased military spending, suggesting less bellicose and more dialogicalapproaches to foreign policy and arguing for the rights of those who have com-mitted acts of terrorism are incredibly difficult stances to take when the topogra-phy of the debate is shaped by a particular framing of 9-11. This framingelevated 9-11 to a position of Absolute Evil, similarly to the Holocaust.Within this framing, 9-11 is not only inexplicable, attempts at understanding andexplanation are threatening as they fail to recognize the need for assertive,pre-emptive foreign policy.

By showing that the meaning of 9-11 and the response that followed arecultural and not natural, this paper attempts to demonstrate the contingency offoreign policy. The construction of crisis identified both that 9-11 represented acritical underlying condition and the solution to confront and remedy it. Out-side of the United States (and even among minorities within) this dominant con-struction was contested. Whether 9-11 is an instance of Absolute Evil; whether9-11 can be analyzed and understood; whether 9-11 was an act of war, an act ofGod, a crime, or something else; whether 9-11 was an attack on freedom, on cap-italism, on a way of life, on a state or a civilization; whether the perpetrators werebarbarians; whether they acted alone or represented a state, a religion or a net-worked group; and whether the perpetrators and their associates are capable ofcompassion, reason or rational thought, all influence the possible, logical andnecessary response to the events of September 11th, 2001. 9-11 as somatic mar-ker operates to inhibit the possibility and need for such considerations, severelycurtailing the ability to contemplate, deliberate and realize different courses ofaction.

Conclusion: Void, Crisis and Alternatives

The wrong (the disproving of perceived security truths) and the lack (the failureto narrate) were the twin arms of the void that held Americans in a stunned,silent embrace. It cannot be happening (it is wrong, we are right) and it is notreal (it does not fit within reality as we know it, it is unimaginable) came to epit-omize these twin components of the void. The shattering of deep and enduringtruths of US security culture were compounded by the impossibility of existing,contemporary foreign policy discourses subsuming the events and the initialinability of foreign policy practitioners to narrate 9-11 from scratch. The mediatoo struggled to establish meaning, opting instead for looped images of theevents and a drive to emphasize the very incomprehensibility of 9-11. The eventsof 9-11 thus appeared to return history to the United States, shattering politicsand returning the political to American life.

Succinctly, 9-11 created a discursive void; this ‘‘void in meaning’’ acted as avacuum for the official foreign policy discourse that would follow in the response(Callahan et al. 2006:523–524). The analogy of a vacuum portrays the emptinessand the difficulty of talking in the void; it also helps us understand how whenthe official foreign policy discourse of the response was formulated it enteredthe discursive vacuum, filling it almost instantly through dissemination, repeti-tion and amplification. The void was unwelcome as the lack of meaning createdunease. Hence the desire to fill it and (re)establish a compelling narrative wasstrong, helping to create a situation whereby the words of foreign policy practi-tioners took on heightened significance. The nature of the void not only height-ened the significance of the framing that grafted meaning onto 9-11, it alsoshaped the construction of crisis as the first stage of the response.

289Jack Holland

Theorizing crisis has raised three important points. First, crises are discursivebut context dependent. Crisis is a process, in which language dominates. Crisesare not objective ‘‘facts’’ that result from the accumulation of contradictions;they are subjective and thus rely on the discursive construction of events as symp-tomatic of a wider condition of crisis. Contradiction, rupture and ⁄ or failure cansustain numerous competing constructions of crisis, but the context of the eventsand the wider domestic context strategically select for certain narrations overothers. The cultural condition that created the incomprehensibility of 9-11 inthe void facilitated the discursive construction of 9-11 as inexplicable in theemerging discourse of the response.

Second, as ‘‘the most important instrument in crisis management is lan-guage… those who are able to define what the crisis is all about hold the key todefining the appropriate strategies for its resolution’’ (t’Hart 1993:41 cited inHay 1996b:261). Defining the solution is fundamental to the construction of cri-sis. This solution depends on the display and re-location of agency through adecisive intervention; a decisive intervention and agency are central to the con-struction of crisis. Narrating the events of 9-11 had to be coupled to a vision fora new foreign policy trajectory that would prevent their reoccurrence. As Kosel-leck (1988:11–12, cited in Hay 1996b:255) notes, ‘‘the question of the historicalfuture is inherent in the crisis.’’ In writing the solution and the direction of thefuture, the agency of foreign policy practitioners is vitally important. Moreover,the construction of 9-11 as crisis served to concentrate agency at the heart ofgovernment; ‘‘crisis is a process in which the site of political decision-makingshifts from the disaggregated institutions, policy communities, networks andpractices of the state apparatus to the state as a centralized and dynamic agent’’(Hay 1999:338). The reassertion of politics over the political required the height-ened concentration of state agency at the very center of government. In sum-mary, despite being discursive, as evidenced in a decisive intervention, bothcontext and agency are central to an understanding of crisis.

Third, the importance of discourse, context and agency to the constructionof crises brings to the fore issues of framing. The Bush government possessedincredible power in ‘‘the ability to frame the discursive context within whichpolitical subjectivities are constituted and re-constituted’’ (Hay 1996b:261).Alternative framings were possible, even if the context of 9-11 strategicallyselected for certain narratives. It seems self-evident that 9-11 was intimatelyrelated to the War on Terror, but this common sense must be made strange. Itwas not inevitable that the War on Terror would follow 9-11. Rather 9-11 hadto first be constructed in a particular and contingent way. This constructionrelied upon the articulation of 9-11 as crisis. As Croft notes, ‘‘crises are pivotalpoints in understanding the development of policy’’; ‘‘the war on terroremerged as the dominant discourse through the crisis of 2001’’ (Croft 2006:57,79). Theorizing crisis is thus a necessary step toward understanding how theWar on Terror was possible and contesting the policies and practices thatcomprise it.

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from september 11th, 2001 to 9-11: from void to crisis

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