ABSTRACT
This chapter extends the idea of “structured immediacy” by investigating methods that adversaries use to make the past relevant and consequential in conflicts. We revisit our analysis of political discourse immediately following the 9/11 attacks. We do this to document what the adversaries do as practical historians. They used two related methods. One was to situate contemporary events relative to historical antecedents, alongside other contextual particulars, and by doing this provide these events with history-contingent meanings. The other was to attempt to constrain historical understandings of the contemporary events in the future. The concept of “structured immediacy” explains how context – historical and otherwise – enters immediate settings of talk as a source of meaning. We show how historising of conflict was coordinated by the participants in the DN resulting in coordinated but disjunctive histories.
