Terror, Territoriality, Temporality: Hypermedia Events in the Age of Islamic State

Abstract

Considering the group that calls itself Islamic State (IS) as a “war machine,” an ever-shifting combination of humans and technology, this article articulates, from a Deleuzian perspective, terror, territoriality, and temporality as constitutive of events. It explores terrorism as a hypermedia event that resists conceptual containment in Dayan and Katz’s three categories of “contest,” “conquest,” or “coronation.” It builds on work that recognizes the globality of media events. The article uses the rise of IS to explore events as a peculiar articulation of space and time, and draws on the global “network-archive” that IS created (its digital footprint), the referentiality of which means that we experience IS depredations as one continuous “global event chain.” In this analysis, media events are a productive force that articulates territoriality and temporality through affect.