nine-eleven as mundane thing
Music: Lanterna: Desert Ocean (2006)
Anniversaries seem to participate in a kind of thing-making that, amplified, become exemplars of "reification"---the thingification of something essentially human in origin or the attribution of agency to something wholly abstract and conceptual. Treating people as pieces of shit that stand in the way of your consumptive habits, or wars waged against abstract nouns, are familiar examples. Reification is a certain form of alienation: people become alienated from each other and de-subjectify the other as an object (even one to be consumed, as when people-watching at a club or something). Or, we're so out of touch with the dynamics of events that we isolate moments as things with agency.
For the past six years the United States foreign policy has been built upon a reified concept: "terror." Like Reagan's "war on drugs," the U.S. armed forces have been fighting an abstract noun that is, presumably, a real and deadly thing.
As I watched the commemorative sing-song athem-izing and silent prayers on television this morning, I was trying to discern whether the events of September 11, 2007 have become reified, or if reification is the proper term for it at all (my Lukács is at the office, and I'm at home today, and google doesn't yield any relevant passages, but I seem to recall some "events" are reified too). For years I have written as if this was the case I have taken to writing "Nine-eleven" in order to underscore the consumerist thing-if-fiedness of an event-cum-agent. I'm tempted to say Nine-eleven, because it is imbued with an agency of its own, is also a special form of reification (and thus alienation---alienation from cause, we might say). Nine-eleven stands for a series of objectified/frozen social relations, predominantly that of paternal sovereignty and a victimized citizenry in the most abstract, down to certain commercial ventures, deployed troops, and so on. Nine-eleven stands for a kind of spiritual transformation of the "born again" or "Phoenix from the flame" variety. Nine-eleven stands for a seeping wound that continues to justify aggression. And Nine-eleven stands for the fantasy of immortality.
As a form of mourning, the reification of Nine-eleven was inevitable. With the souring of support for the occupation of Iraq, among other things, the repetition compulsion that fueled an ever-consuming, melancholic citizenry has given way to the truly mournful American Subject. Yesterday the general's report was measured; this morning there were no lengthy speeches, no pleas for more troops. Disney still attempts to trigger the melancholic impulse on the ABC network (Extreme Home Makeover on Sunday was about Nine-eleven families), but in general it seems like Nine-eleven is a dead motivator. That is, it is fully or completely reified, like death and love.
I'm not quite sure I'm using the concept correctly, but I think if I ain't it can be stretched to accommodate the New Surrealism of our Object-centered lives today. It's not the cyborg we need to worry about so much, the afeared standing-stockness of the human that discussions of reification originally focused on. Maybe we should fear the moment when the mourning becomes mundane---when Nine-eleven now becomes a somber agent of its own, slogging through the day, year after year, like an exhausted sleepwalker bumping into this or that object and foreign policy, a necessary touchstone everyone acknowledges but fails to question anymore.