The New York Times finishes an update on Saturday’s bombing in New York by quoting an unnamed official,
“We don’t understand the target or the significance of it,” the police official said. “It’s by a pile of Dumpsters on a random sidewalk.”
It’s a valid question - why here? So often we’ve seen terrorist attacks (and this is a terrorist attack) take on symbolic importance: two of the largest buildings in New York, a concert, a football game, an airport. We understand the choice of target and the physical location of the attack to be elements of the message being sent.
Much has been written about the special nature of terrorism as performative violence. This idea that terrorism is a conscious effort to engage an audience through violence that contains “symbolic expressive” features - such as destroying a national symbol, or by asserting a fearful presence in a previously safe location (Matusitz, 23). Like any captivating performance that requires audience input, terrorism requires the audience to both recognise that a performance is actually occurring and for the …show more content…
On one hand, they’re fallible, distant from the cold, calculating terrorist masterminds we can imagine them to me. On the other hand, our inability to understand these attacks in a wider narrative can contribute to a state of tension, even worse than that of more easily explained terrorism. This is something that ISIS-inspired attacks have utilised, targeting symbols of daily normality (a club, a public event). Even these carried their own messages inherent in the violence and recognisable to the audience. Blowing up a dumpster in a non-descript street doesn’t make sense from either the creator or the audience’s perspective. Looking at the positioning of the bomb from the perspective of an individual under intense emotional pressure may help to
“We don’t understand the target or the significance of it,” the police official said. “It’s by a pile of Dumpsters on a random sidewalk.”
It’s a valid question - why here? So often we’ve seen terrorist attacks (and this is a terrorist attack) take on symbolic importance: two of the largest buildings in New York, a concert, a football game, an airport. We understand the choice of target and the physical location of the attack to be elements of the message being sent.
Much has been written about the special nature of terrorism as performative violence. This idea that terrorism is a conscious effort to engage an audience through violence that contains “symbolic expressive” features - such as destroying a national symbol, or by asserting a fearful presence in a previously safe location (Matusitz, 23). Like any captivating performance that requires audience input, terrorism requires the audience to both recognise that a performance is actually occurring and for the …show more content…
On one hand, they’re fallible, distant from the cold, calculating terrorist masterminds we can imagine them to me. On the other hand, our inability to understand these attacks in a wider narrative can contribute to a state of tension, even worse than that of more easily explained terrorism. This is something that ISIS-inspired attacks have utilised, targeting symbols of daily normality (a club, a public event). Even these carried their own messages inherent in the violence and recognisable to the audience. Blowing up a dumpster in a non-descript street doesn’t make sense from either the creator or the audience’s perspective. Looking at the positioning of the bomb from the perspective of an individual under intense emotional pressure may help to