repetition compulsion (nine-eleven nine-eleven nine-eleven . . . )

Music: CNN Headline News In compliance with a the Court of Appeals ruling, yesterday New York authorities released a portion of the city government's Nine-eleven audio archive to the "general public": nine hours of emergency personnel recordings and oral histories—23 CDRs in sum—detail the confusion and heroism of the victims of the attacks. I've written about the cultural function of recorded voices in panic and close to death already (click here for a pdf file), so I won't go into the melancholic/haunting dynamics of this continual need to return to the captured voices of the dead.

What I haven't touched on before is the institutional motives behind the clammoring for dead voices: the introduction of new vocalic ghosts is the consequence of a legal battle initiated in 2002 by The New York Times under the banner of the "Freedom of Information Act." The paper claims that its efforts are to serve the "families of the victims," who were demanding to hear the tapes of emergency personal, which would presumably lead to a stronger sense of closure. Dead voices, however, always function ambivalently: the sound of a deceased loved one—especially if in pain or on the verge of death—may give one an intellectual sense of standing (viz., a sense of what happened), but the sound of the cry also stirs a sense of emergency (if not outright dread). Reporting always strives for a sense of the un-grey and singular motives, but the write-up in the paper is certainly interesting for what reporters and the editorial staff chose to highlight about the new batch of recordings:

They [emergency personnel] spoke of being unable to find anyone in authority to tell them where to go or what to do. Nearly from the moment the first plane struck the World Trade Center, they had little radio communication. As their leaders struggled to set up ordinary procedures for a "mass casualty incident," the crisis gathered speed by the minute.

With the lines of command sundered, many of those interviewed said, they became their own bosses. They found themselves shepherding crowds away from the towers, serving as trauma counselors, bandaging people inside a bank lobby, and packing their ambulances with the dazed, the bleeding, the burned.

It should come as no surprise reporting the loss of authority (of a sense of the sovereign) is the first revelation of the tapes: Don't you remember what it was like to feel helpless? Haven't you seen War of the Worlds yet? That feeling is all the more reason for supporting phallic governance and the imperialistic leadership! I'm so very tired of watching/reading the news media prop up this administration with in trauma—by continually and constantly reminding us we live in a permanent state of exception.

Fortunately, my sweetie comes for a visit tomorrow and so I am going to forget the world for a week [edit from 8/19: talk about a "state of exception!"]