anniversarial ramble

Music: Wilco: The Whole Love (2011)

When one gets to the dissertation stage in graduate school, life becomes gradually, almost imperceptibly, solitary. About half-way into writing hundreds of pages one looks up to see the days stretching behind her in a monotonous---even comforting---routine: get up and make coffee; review the pages written yesterday in front of the morning shoes news; read something to jump-start thinking; be at the computer by 10:00 a.m.; break for brunch; back to the computer screen; stop writing; print; proofread; make dinner or get out to see a friend. Rinse. Repeat.

At some point in the process you realize you are alone, that writing really cannot go any other way; you have to push through, and be perspicacious enough (namely, about your own tendencies) to schedule social things so that your absorption in your writing does not become totalizing. The absorption of mania, in whatever form, is often productive; the cost, however, is a certain withdrawal from the world.

September 11, 2001 was a routine day like any other. Since high school I had watched the Today show, drinking coffee as I readied for school. Dissertating mandated a regression to the same morning ritual of my younger youth, since there was comfort in routine. Tuesday. The nondescript day, a purgatory of the week’s punctuation in which something must get done, because the excuse of Friday fun was three days away. The cats were perched on the radiator, as usual, and it had already turned a chill in Minnesota. A black-and-white throw blanket my grandmother made me for Christmas was draped across my lap. She was inspired, I think, by my kitchen curtains, which she saw a picture of once and remarked that she liked (I said one day I would have a kitchen with a black and white checkered floor). I was grazing through Richard Kearney’s The Wake of Imagination to get the brain working, take notes with a red Pilot pen and an eight-inch, clear plastic ruler. The whirr and buzz of television news faded into and out of consciousness as Kearney traced the passage of the imagination from creation to reflection; Katie Couric and Matt Lauer coupled me to hard news at the top of each hour for ten minutes. Sip. Coffee. Sip. Kearney. Sip. Sip. Refill.

“. . . and I’m cold for my father/ frozen underground/ jesus, I wouldn’t bother / he belongs to me now . . . .”

Televisual occupancy is an odd thing, the charge of what Raymond Williams called “flow” carries the sound of other bodies breathing through small speakers on each side into your space, as if to convince one’s brain, at some level, you are with others while working alone. A coffee shop in your living room. A book in your lap. Two pets addicted to the radiator. Sip. Coffee. Sip. Kearney. “And it appears, we’re getting reports that, a small plane has mistakenly flown into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.”

What? Coffee. Sip. No one seemed alarmed, just confused. The speculation from Lauer was that it was a hobby plane, eyes fooled by the ground-level perspective of something so high. Live footage. Smoke trickles, then billows, out of the building. All cameras were pointed to the World Trade Center, and so when the second plane hit, many of us watching television saw it. At least, I remember seeing it, though memory is choosey (eating watermelon in the alley, she recalled discarding the husk). Memory is choosey and perhaps it’s just as likely I remembered seeing it because of the instant replays played relentlessly over the next week. Coffee. Sip. Kearney could wait.

The phone rang. It was my friend David Beard. “Are you watching television?” he asked. I was, I said. David and I had an essay in review about the shift of television news toward “real time” coverage, in 2001 still then yet a novelty. Around-the-clock coverage of unfolding events was expensive and not as routine as it is today. Our essay located the push toward “real time” coverage with the Columbine High School Massacre in 1999, when all the major television networks interrupted regular programming to cover the event. Drawing on the theories of Paul Virilio, we argued this kind of coverage would become routine (we were right, two graduate students whom few wanted to listen to, but we were right). We tried to think through how real-time could be economically viable for media corporations, since it flies in the face of the then dominant business model of selling advertising tied to programming. We argued the economic advantage was in engendering melancholia, a suspended state of wonder and horror that amplifies a sense of lack in the spectator. That heightened sense of lack could then, of course, be used to encourage consumption. Columbine. Real time. The sense of need engendered by trauma.

“Our essay is going to get published now,” I remember saying (it was, see “On the Apocalyptic Columbine”). But we didn’t just talk about how validating the news-coverage was to our “theory.” We also just talked about our feelings, what was going on, what it meant. I don’t remember how long our conversation lasted, I just remember long pauses on the phone as we watched our televisions.

The towers collapsed.

Writing the dissertation was a solitary feat. But as a witness to televised terror, I was not alone. David was on the phone. I will never forget that moment, with one of my best friends’ voice, seeing something apparently unreal made realer and realer as the day progressed. The telephone figures prominently in my memories of that day, ten years ago.

As days became weeks, months, and years, I became particularly interested in how Nine-eleven evolved into a node in the popular imaginary, how various discourses mobilized popular affect and political policy around a shared sense of trauma. My research trajectory changed, decidedly, toward understanding the relationship between human affect and the political, broadly construed. Looking over my scholarly production this past decade, I can see how influential Nine-eleven has been to my thinking: from Bush II’s orchestration of a decade-long death machine, to the “death-match” politics of contemporary statecraft (the Tea Party would not have been possible without the permissibility of public righteousness rooted in collective trauma). One thing I noticed about the media coverage of Nine-eleven was the repeated use of recorded voices, panicked phone calls to emergency personnel, especially. On behalf of the “families of victims,” The New York Times fought the city government to publically release the phone calls of victims trapped in the towers (they eventually won), and this because, the paper argued, the families needed to hear the recorded voices of their loved ones to properly mourn. Each anniversary, the memorial ceremony has featured the “reading of names”---almost 3,000 of them. In other words, it was the collective mourning responses to Nine-eleven that pushed me toward my present interest in human speech as an object, as a privileged point of focus, as this strange meeting place of language and the body, the spot where feeling gives way to meaning. I’m writing a book about it.

Today on the tenth anniversary I have been listening to NPR all day. I’ve been listening to people telling stories, relaying memories, of recalling that day and what it was like. When I woke and turned on the radio this morning, I was treated to the sound of our president reading a Pslam, which for some irrational reason angered me instantly. I’ve been thinking through this anger today: why did I get so aroused?

In part, I think I got angry because of the collapse of mourning Nine-eleven into politics (as if, of course, the two can be kept pure). So much awfulness was introduced into our lives as a result of a trauma-envy made possible by that day: a war waged via deception, another waged (however justly) as a result of that deception, airport security theatre, thousands dead to avenge the dead. And for what? A a parade of illusions, a collection of abstractions and resolute projections. The critique here, of course, has been “done to death,” too.

My friend Rosa wrote something poignant today: “don't let all the remembering, no matter how important it is---and it is important---seduce you into forgetting to remember how to think.” How soon we forget that Nine-eleven marked a new battle in the so-called culture wars. Higher education was accused, almost immediately, of brainwashing students in “liberalism” and the move was on to silence critique or the frequent (and true) suggestion that U.S. foreign relations and policy was in some sense responsible for the attack. I vividly recall a “teach-in” in which John Mowitt, a graduate teacher I very much admired, led a discussion about the new attacks on the academy. It’s a long argument to make (and I’m too tired to unfurl it here), but, much of the assault on higher education today coming from the Right is drawing on the collective trauma of that day to bully-up “reforms” and “accountability measures.” I recognize such a statement sounds a bit conspiratorial in the key of Michael Moore, but I do think there is some truth to it. Challenges to the academy are presently made in the name of recession, but Nine-eleven lurks there in the heart, because the teaching of critical thinking has more common cause with “the terrorists” than our mandate as educators. To be critical of the status quo is to be “against America.” Of course. Coffee. Sip.

I was in a rented living room sipping coffee and preparing to write my dissertation when the attacks on Nine-eleven happened. My friend phoned to share a sense of shock. It’s no mystery, then, that Nine-eleven is yoked to academic pursuit in my head. Nine-eleven represents, to me, why the personal and the professional cannot be separated; motive doesn’t discriminate its outlets. And this is why, I reckon, I smell the political machinations underneath apparently earnest attempts to mourn and memorialize, that I sense grief is being used towards murderous ends. The ritual of memorialization too easily lends itself to mass catastrophe precisely because there is nothing inauthentic about the experience and rememory of pain.

I recoil with disgust from the thought that my sense of togetherness in shared trauma, the human community made real by a shared shock, can be swerved so easily into a blind acquisition. But this is what Nine-eleven has become: an affective invocation toward the non-critical acceptance of reactive evil. I’m heartened by the recollections and stories of people who witnessed, first hand, the massive catastrophe of these attacks. I just resent someone using that heartening toward killing other people “in the name of.” This has been a strange, ambivalent day. How to feel community while resisting a mobilization to war? How to be one without excluding the Other? Without using the Other to orchestrate a heartening toward the Same?

Big questions. Perhaps pretentious, at least on some level (so why blog about it at all, right?).

These are the kind of big questions I started asking myself as a teenager. In my AP English class my senior year in high school I opted to read Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea for a final report. I was taken by the character of the “Self-Taught Man,” a person whom the protagonist meets, a smart fellow who spends his days in the library. The Self-Taught man confesses a principled love of humanity, but this love is abstract. Through this figure, of course, Sartre critiques the figure of the fascist. Roquentin challenges the Self-Taught Man or “Autodidact” to name a specific person for whom he has love, and he cannot. His love is abstract, and in that abstraction the Self-Taught Man can excuse atrocity (it is implied) toward the greater good. The reading of names in Nine-eleven memorials is an attempt to prevent this sort of abstraction. As is the day-long story-telling on NPR. How to keep this level of specificity? How to locate the affective tie without grouping feeling into some higher level of a love of country and the wars it wages on congeries of particular lives who sip coffee and talk on the phone and have dinners with friends who want nothing more than to get by and raise their children?

Why is peace an impossible thing between creatures who have the capacity to feel each other’s pain? That’s a naïve question, I know. But on this ambivalent anniversary, I never want to lose the childish bewilderment that motivates the question. “Why?” I would ask my parents. “Because I said so” was too often the answer. “Because I said so” is the problem of humanity, too often voiced as “because God says so.” And after Nine-eleven we have to ask, who is God, anyway? Abstract nouns are deadly.