Writing Linear Times

Abstract

In the previous chapter we got our first insight into the significance and functions that claims to a privileged knowledge of time performed within the Bush administration’s unfolding War on Terror. As we saw in that discussion, representations of 9/11 as a bringer of new insecurity, new war, and a new American public were integral to the framing of this conflict as an inevitable, necessary, and legitimate response to those (ostensibly unprecedented, exceptional) events. They were central, also, in opening space for subsequent expansions of this conflict beyond its initial targets of terrorism and those aiding or supporting terrorist organisations, and in introducing coherence into a multifaceted and dynamic discursive formation through facilitating the linkage of otherwise dissociable policies, developments, and political choices.