anniversarial afterwardness
Music: George Harrison: All Things Must Pass (1970)
It goes without saying that the events of Nine-eleven have undoubtedly had a profound effect on my life and what I do for a living. I was watching the Today show in my small apartment in Minneapolis when the first plane struck the first tower. I remember I was proof reading a dissertation chapter that I had finished the previous day. I was not terribly alarmed, as I recall the newscasters were saying that it was possibly an accident, and I remember vividly the description of the plane was that it was a "small passenger plane." The screened lives were anxious, but not alarmed.
When the second plane hit I recall the cameras caught everything, and the tone of commentators went quickly from "accident" to "attack." One of my best friends, David Beard, phoned me and asked: "are you watching television?" "Yeah," I responded, not really knowing what to think or feel. We sat on the phone together, stupid, for some minutes. At some point I remember saying, "and I suspect our article is going to run now."
David and I had just revised and resubmitted an article on media coverage of the Columbine High School massacre. Drawing on the thought of Virilio and Baudrillard, we had argued that mass media outfits were deliberately prolonging a sense of trauma and emergency---elongating time---via teletechnologies of "real time." We suggested that the aesthetic, distancing effect of "real time" coverage paradoxically made it easier to watch people die. As the events of September 11, 2006 continued to unfold (as footage of people flinging themselves from windows many stories up kept repeating on CBS) it was clear to both of us that the events of this day would metamorphose into Nine-eleven: the performative spectacle of collective subject formation of our generation, and probably many to come.
How can Nine-eleven become the traumatic ground of subjectification for future generations? I think in part it is because of the way trauma seems to work. First, there here is a real need---spiritual, perhaps---to commemorate and memorialize the dead, which gets tied up with confronting the trauma of that day. In seminar last week Brooke posed the question of Freud's Nachträglichkeit as we were discussing the uncanny. Translated as "afterwardness" by Jean Laplanche, Nachträglichkeit is the notion that a given, traumatic event is re-created by a later event. What is experienced as traumatic is not the primary event, but the re-memory of that primary event. This second trauma is so much more horrible because it is the one invested with meaning. Laplanche explains:
trauma consists of two moments: the trauma, in order to be psychic trauma, doesn't occur in just one moment. First there is the implantation of something coming from the outside. And this experience, or the memory of it, must be reinvested in a second moment, and then it becomes traumatic. It is not the first act that is traumatic, it is the internal reviviscene of this memory that becomes traumatic (in Richard Rushton, "The Psychoanalytic Structure of Trauma: Spellbound).
Trauma, in other words, is a fantasy thing; it cannot be equivalent to an experience of horror (which is ineffable), but rather, is a screen reckoning of that experience.
Knowing that there is a certain "ghost effect" or temporal disjuncture to trauma, as a rhetorician it is easy to see how the cultural trauma of our time becomes an opportunity for political reinvestment (war in Iraq, anyone? Guantanamo? Secret prisons?). In the span of time between experiential shock and retroactive/retrojective re-presentation, things get inserted---ideologically invested things. This is why anniversaries of Nine-eleven are so ambivalent. On the one hand, they are an opportunity to do the good work of mourning. On the other hand, they are an opportunity to exploit pain for political and commercial gain. The two are necessarily commingled.
Last night I wept as I watched a CBS special on firefighters. Two brothers were working on a "day in the life of a firefighter" documentary when the U.S. was attacked, and captured some pretty devastating footage of rescue missions. This was aired without commercial interruption. ABC similarly aired part one of their much maligned, "partisan," dramatization mini-series of the attacks. There have also been two films in as many months released on Nine-eleven. We're in the thick of our afterwardness experience; next to football season, re-traumatizing trauma is now the media commoditization of our time. One worries about who is making the money. One should worry about the political stakes of this deep psychodynamic labor.
Wars have been waged and thousands upon thousands have died; what could possibly be worse? What looms? Should we now all become scholars and critics of political rhetoric and ideological interpellation? It seems to me, as the maudlin machines continue their Nine-eleven widget-making, that cultural critique on matters of collective memory and mourning is the most responsible direction to take for scholarship in rhetorical studies.