The Map and the Territory: ontological and epistemological questions about terrorism
Keywords:
Map/territory relations, terrorism, ontology, epistemology, rhetorics , subjectivityCopyright (c) 2016 Relaciones Internacionales
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The paper argues that the principle that “the map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named”*, essential to any system of human communication, must be applied to terrorism as well. In between the terrorist act and its naming/writing there is a process of classification by which reality itself is transformed. Terrorism acts as a catalyst to confuse various semantic categories between the factual and the feigned, the real and the bluff, in basic performance frames such as “war,” “threat,” “play,” or “ritual.” The dialectics between terrorism and counterterrorism is plagued with such confusions between map and territory. The Thing itself of the events situated in the frame “this is war” and “this is play” are categorically different. The mutual denial and mutual constitution of such dialectics is at the center of the reality of terrorism. It is argued that a valid ontology and epistemology of terrorism must take into account the basic principle of the map/territory relations (for which a theory of play and fantasy might be as relevant as theories of war); furthermore, it must analyze the mythological aspects of the figure of the Terrorist. Far from comparing fantasy with the “non real”, for the psychoanalytic theory, fantasy represents a basic dimension of the subjective reality. The manipulation of the time axis (waiting for the future terror, the military theory of prevention) is another important key to the study of the ontology of terrorism. Eventually, there is also to be considered the edge between terrorism/counterterrorism the decisive reality simultaneously stigmatizes and constitutes both antagonistic surfaces.
* BATESON, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Nueva York, Ballantine Books, 1972.
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