Abstract
Inserted in the ongoing discussion about the post-9/11 cultural archive, this paper analyzes the TV series Person of Interest (CBS, 2011–2016), created by Jonathan Nolan, through Frank Furedi’s theories about the discursive formation of fear as presented in his texts Politics of Fear. Beyond Left and Right (2005), Invitation to Terror. The Expanding Empire of the Unknown (2007), The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is the ‘Culture of Fear’ Itself (2007), and Precautionary Culture and the Rise of Possibilistic Risk Assessment (2009). We make these works converse with several American and European sociological views, offering a transnational perspective over the issues at hand. With an interdisciplinary approach and with a critical-cultural methodology supported by selected instances from the first four seasons of the show, we argue that, despite timid hints at a critique of the flawed American democracy, the show feeds into an ever-growing array of media proposals of a citizenship based on precaution, contributing to the reinforcement of the post-9/11 atmosphere of fear through a logic predicated on inevitability and a deflated sense of agency on the part of common people that discourages practices of resistance.
Highlights
The Expanding Empire of the Unknown (2007), The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is the ‘Culture of Fear’ Itself (2007), and Precautionary Culture and the Rise of Possibilistic Risk Assessment (2009).We make these works converse with several American and European sociological views, offering a transnational perspective over the issues at hand
Argue that, despite timid hints at a critique of the flawed American democracy, the show feeds into an ever-growing array of media proposals of a citizenship based on precaution,contributing to the reinforcement of the post-9/11 atmosphere of fear through a logic predicated on inevitability and a deflated sense of agency on the part of common people
Political authorities insist that they will protect their citizens: Denmark’s PM surely did when she declared that her government would take care of the Jews in February 2015 after an attack on a synagogue
Summary
In almost every public or private conversation about them, we have been hearing, and maybe saying ourselves, that the events which took place in. The echoes of 9/11 in television series have been analyzed by Fernando de Felipe and Iván Gómez, who argued in their volume Ficciones colaterales that the terrorist blows of that date revolutionized our concept of reality and made us consider whether the usual narrative models would be able to reflect, predict, and exorcize the present and the future (2011: 16) They proceeded to mention over one hundred shows of different genres and styles, recognizing the contents of most of them (JAG, 24, and many others) as part of the prevailing culture of fear, and identifying a few instances of rebellion against the official discourse (e.g.: South Park or The Simpsons) and the possibility of a pedagogical use of some of the fictional products (The West Wing, Boston Public). In La década del miedo Alejandro Casadesús and Eva Parra analyze AMC’s version, discussing the American dream in the post-9/11 context
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