Reconstruction 11.2 (2011)
Return to Contents»
Introduction to Reconstruction 11.2, “Cultural Productions of 9/11”
Avatars of 9/11 / Christopher Schaberg and Kara Thompson
<1> In proposing this issue of Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, we faced a paradox: how to write about the subject of 9/11 without reproducing the very mythologies that we set out to critique. We were all too aware of the profusion of references to September 11, 2001, and of the ways that the entire world had supposedly changed after that day. As David Simpson aptly describes it in his contribution to this issue, the date has come to stand in for “an event that thereby took on a certain automatism: one plane, then the next, one tower, then the next, all seen at a distance as if in the virtual environment of the cinema or video game....” How could we ruminate on 9/11 without falling into a trap of repetition, and thus implicitly (re)asserting the exceptional status of this monolithic date stamp? Uncertain about how to avoid this catch, we nevertheless felt the need to account for a wide range of subjects, and to work through some of the motifs readily identified as post-9/11.
<2> Between proposing this issue and now its publication, there have been numerous events that—each in their own moments of production and consumption—feel immediately relevant and even urgently related to “cultural productions of 9/11.” To mention only three: James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), the global box-office phenomenon; the dissemination throughout 2010 of new and potentially intrusive TSA screening rituals that prompted a pre-Thanksgiving National Opt-Out Day; and most recently, and arguably most dramatically, the killing of Osama bin Laden by the U.S. military on May 2, 2011. While Avatar is indisputably different and seemingly less relevant than Osama bin Laden’s death, and while airport security is one of many banal reminders of the long shadow of “the war on terror,” we are interested in how such events actually signify—or not—a transformation, the consecration of “9/11.” By way of introducing the wide variety of approaches to post-9/11 culture explored in this issue, we want to linger on these three events as avatars of 9/11. In this opening bid, we reflect on how mundane entertainment becomes spectacular, how the monumental becomes normalized, and how national security and individual sacrifice are caught in an awkward bind.
<3> For all of the praise of Avatar’s purported message against ongoing environmental degradation, the film nevertheless barrages its viewers, especially those watching it in 3-D, with militarized violence that culminates in the destruction of the Na’vi’s “Tree of Souls.” This protracted scene features aerial bombers and helicopters shooting relentlessly at the tree until it finally slowly falls, sending Na’vi running for their lives amid smoke and falling debris. Why does a viewing public revel in seeing (yet another) imposing edifice fall, dramatically and definitely? As Joyce Goggin suggests in her contribution to this issue, “willfully or not, various media have kept the pain of 9/11 alive and real. This rupture of ruptures is like a wound that is kept open and exposed so that the healing process can never begin, hence the threat remains imminent, and the public remains traumatized.” Several of our contributors take up the question of how (or whether) cultural productions can mitigate “the pain of 9/11”—or if such attempts are always agitating just that “wound.” For instance, the following essays focus on specific genres, including fiction, television, music, and film, to grapple with the potentially aporetic effects (and affects) of 9/11 on, and in, cultural production: Bidhan Chandra Roy explores the 19th- and early 20th-century American literary conventions of passing and the trope of the tragic mulatto through H.M Naqvi’s Home Boy and Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist; Pamela Mansutti brings into relief the theme of revenge in her essay on Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs; Trimiko Melancon’s essay “Words Never Said” parses the “metalanguage” of race in two texts drawn from post-9/11 pop culture; and Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen Lugo invite us to scroll through a 10-year film history of the “post-9/11” film genre, including Avatar.
<4> While Avatar has been also heralded as a critique of U.S. militarism and imperialism, it unquestionably reactivates and reifies old and all-too-familiar national fantasies in which a primitive, exotic, and nature-loving people must rally against a race which is positioned as technologically advanced, yet ethically questionable. In the world of Avatar, Natives are rendered aliens and America is a metonym for the Earthly—exactly what or who constitute home is scrambled. As our contributors attest, this sense of locational uncertainty is a common theme across cultural productions of 9/11. And while this scrambling is certainly no new sensation, it takes on an important function around narratives that depend so heavily on what are supposed to be firm notions of place, nation, and identity. This is what Christine Muller, in her contribution “Enduring Impact: The Crisis Fetish in Post-September 11 American Television,” addresses in terms of “pervasive unsettlement,” or a widespread ambivalence about the “existential insecurity” that permeates post-9/11 culture. On the one hand, this condition provokes a certain horror and hesitation before spectacular violence; on the other, it is a productive condition, and thus the spectacle of violence is ongoing (even when, as in a TV series, it ‘ends’).
<5> The news coverage in the weeks following Osama bin Laden’s death remind us how bin Laden himself has been transformed into an avatar. The rampant speculations about his death, including the Obama administration’s final (for now) decision not to release photos of his body, come to signify the ways that bin Laden has always served as a representation of something else, something beyond himself. Most recently, he has become a paradoxical figure, a foreign terrorist and also quietly “domestic.” The New York Times featured an extensive graphic to explain and contextualize bin Laden’s family history, along with an article in which Scott Shane muses: “As with Hitler or Pol Pot, you want to understand whether his bizarre combination of grandiosity and viciousness carried over to domestic life—in Bin Laden’s case, whether he perhaps was an eerily ordinary parent, complaining about what was for dinner, nagging the kids about their homework” (our emphasis). Shane’s glib references to white American middle-class heteronormativity underscores how ordinary the “terrorist” has become. Can we still count on irony, or is Shane actually serious? In “Re-writing Ourselves in the Wake of 9/11,” Mark Noonan argues that irony and satire have given way to an ethos of “bearing witness” in post-9/11 popular fiction.
<6> Turning bin Laden into a quotidian family man after his death oddly contrasts with the series of emasculating images of him right after 9/11. Moreover, the CIA encryption of Osama bin Laden as “Geronimo,” a prominent figure in Native American (specifically Apache) history is yet another confusing mix of national mythologies. This particular evocation works multiply. Coding “Public Enemy Number One” (as he was described by ABC News) into Geronimo aligns disparate histories of colonization. Much like Avatar, this code name transposes an indigenous figure into a fantasized atavistic enemy who is no match for U.S. military technology; at the same time, coding bin Laden as Geronimo effectively undoes the nation’s identification with indigenous pasts and its fantasies of inheriting a certain indigeneity. In other words, the name Geronimo hints at a vexed relationship between the nation state and a subject who can represent both a threatening Other and a protected (valuable) N/native. Bin Laden qua Geronimo illuminates a predicament that rather accurately (if unintentionally) characterizes the U.S.’s fraught history with bin Laden himself.
<7> Perhaps one of the most stunning examples of bin Laden’s “eerie ordinariness” (to recall Scott Shane’s words) is a video captured in the raid, and later released by the Department of Defense, of bin Laden watching videos of himself. Seeing Osama bin Laden in this heavily mediated context is no clear and simple matter, for the viewer adopts the position of an uncanny spectator behind the camera watching bin Laden watch himself. The viewer watches from the same subject position as whomever is filming—even, in a way, watching the watcher, as it were. These viewing practices are at once familiar and unsettling, intimate and detached, home-video quality yet taken from a secret hideaway. The image pans and zooms in and out multiple times, focusing on the television, bin Laden, the wall, the tangle of wires on the floor, then back to the television and bin Laden several more times. The zooming is mostly precise and steady, but moments of jumpiness and camera adjustment remind viewers they are watching an amateur recording, and not a well-edited cinematic production. While the proximate distance between bin Laden and the spectator(s) shifts, the viewer falls into a continuum of shared experiences with bin Laden, even as the viewer may also be driven to see him as the most abject human. He is simply watching himself, one of many subjects that flit across the television screen—like any television screen.
<8> In this multiply visual event, we ask: How are we called upon to watch? What are we looking for, and should we be looking at all? By exploring the ethical challenges of visual witnessing, Wendy Kozol’s contribution “Looking Elsewhere” provides a critical methodology for approaching these vexing questions. Kozol calls on her readers to look at the spectacles of violence and suffering from the war on terror, rather than to avert or direct our gaze elsewhere. In other words, instead of seeking “viewing practices that somehow resist neocolonial structures of power,” Kozol argues that taking post-9/11 visual culture seriously means that we must look at the impacts of the U.S. war on terror; in other words, we must look beyond ourselves. One risk in looking elsewhere, though, is that of mobilizing the popular narrative in which U.S. troops move in to rescue those oppressed by tyrannical regimes, a narrative that only bolsters American exceptionalism. By interrogating the politics of looking elsewhere, Kozol’s essay prompts us to ask in turn: What does it mean to practice ethical spectatorship with the home movie of Osama bin Laden watching himself? How are American citizens hailed in the very act of viewing?
<9> Questions of viewing practices are taken up in this issue by Caren Kaplan in another way, as her contribution explores how biopower is expressed in the aerial photographs of New York City on 9/11 captured from the vantage point of an NYPD helicopter—images only released to the public some eight years later. Kaplan points out that while “airpower presents itself (and is often believed to be) transcendentally all-powerful,” in fact the apparatus of aerial perspective is “fraught by failures and uneven effects.” Yet another crux of visibility and unevenness is investigated in Marian Macken’s essay “The Event in Miniature.” Macken describes the panoramic model of New York City (at 1:1200 scale, originally constructed for the 1964/65 World’s Fair) as a site that has difficultly representing the events of 9/11. Macken traces the fascinating history of post-9/11 treatments of the city model: of course the Twin Towers were removed from the model, but the model “was actually designed to allow for an easy removal of buildings. There is no distinction made on the model, therefore, between differences in the disappearances of buildings.” By focusing on the limits of the model, Macken shows how “in omitting a site’s fallow time, the city maintains cohesion.”
<10> Joyce Goggin takes us through a different kind of city modeling in her essay “Therapeutic Gaming and 9/11.” In Goggin’s analysis of the video game that allows players to be trapped victims in the World Trade Center, we are confronted with the horrible simulation of a person jumping from the towers. This figure and its traces also appear in David Simpson’s essay on Don DeLillo’s aptly named novel “Falling Man.” Taking this figure as a spur for speculation, Daniel Ross explores the provocative idea of “landing sites”—as human paths and mortal thresholds—in an architectural-philosophical matrix informed by the work of philosopher Bernard Steigler and the artists/architects Arakawa and Gins. By way of explicating Arakawa and Gins’s concept of “landing sites,” Ross also provides us with the figure of the polyomino, which we see reflected in Lara Schaberg’s cover art for this issue.<11> In the spring of 2010, at ubiquitous landing sites throughout the U.S., the Transportation Security Administration introduced a new regime of intensive screening procedures at airport checkpoints. These included the Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT or full body scans), as well as “enhanced pat-downs” for passengers who opted out of the “Backscatter” or “Millimeter Wave Unit” devices. Almost a decade after September 11, 2001, airports around the U.S. continue to modify their protocols; these attempts often come across as comically desperate grasps at an ever elusive goal of secure air travel, meanwhile turning citizen travelers into avatars of another sort who are invested with speculative meanings and then sorted out. As the travel season ramped up prior to Thanksgiving 2010, a handful of vocal objections emerged in response to the latest changes in airport security, particularly the new hands-on alternative to the full body scans. Reflecting on these points of resistance, Maureen Dowd in a New York Times op-ed column entitled “Stripped of Dignity” decried the “over intrusive new pat-downs that some have dubbed ‘gate-rape’”; Dowd went on to quote State Representative Sharon Cissna of Alaska as saying “no one should have to sacrifice their dignity in order to travel.” The rhetoric of dignity, violent sexual invasion, and sacrifice are persuasive, if potentially exaggerated; in any case, the post-9/11 airport became a tumultuous zone for matters far beyond the scope of national security. Yet the characterization of security screening as “rape” is hardly tenable, and the TSA has been extremely sensitive to this charge, despite the unfortunate name of one of the AIT devices, the “Rapiscan”—the presumably clever elision of a d and a space in what might be a “rapid @ scan” acquires an inelegant poetic valence amid outcry about sexual violation.
<12> We might also pause to gauge the simultaneously hyperbolic and serious recourse to the concepts of sacrifice and dignity. Addressing the politico-philosophic subtleties of this language, Scott Cutler Shershow’s contribution “The Time of Sacrifice: Derrida contra Agamben” probes the quirky political rhetoric of sacrifice, and exposes “a slippage between a figure of debt that is strictly incalculable and interminable, and a figure of a debt that, by contrast, demands an endless service, a sort of sacrificial usury which plunges us ever deeper in debt the more we labor to pay it off.” Indeed, airport security checkpoints appear as one of the contemporary sites where such “sacrificial usury” is in full effect, where relentless reckoning exposes lacunae lurking everywhere: airport security checkpoints produce human avatars who can be endlessly searched, if not quite sacrificed. The bolstered security team becomes itself a threat, and the invention of the phrase “homegrown terrorist” houses a similarly incalculable danger that results in more calculation, plunging the subject into a state of depthless insecurity. As Shershow demonstrates in “The Time of Sacrifice,” sacrificial rhetoric in the wake of 9/11 is charged, and rife not only with gaffes, but also with deeply unsettling aporias that must be addressed with the utmost philosophical care and hesitation. Leaving our three avatars behind, we open now to the issue proper, for its wider scope and individually sustained treatments of cultural productions of 9/11.
Note
The guest editors wish to thank all the contributors, as well as Carole Mora and Joe McDermott for their savvy technical assistance, and Alan Clinton and Marc Ouellette for steady editorial support.
Return to Top»