Towering figures : reading the 9/11 archive

271 Pages·2011·1.79 MB·English

by  Cvek

Towering Figures
Reading the
9/11 Archive
COSTERUS NEW SERIES 190
Series Editors:
C.C. Barfoot, László Sándor Chardonnens
and Theo D’haen
Towering Figures
Reading the
9/11 Archive
Sven Cvek
Amsterdam-New York, NY 2011
Cover Image by Clémentine Choubrac. FDNY Firehouse Engine 28 &
Ladder 11, Lower East Side, NYC.
Image processing by Draško Ivezić.
Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
“ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3378-8
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0076-9
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011
Printed in the Netherlands
Dedicated to the memory of
Aldo Cvek (1953-2009)
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments 5

Introduction: Reading the 9/11 Archive 7

1 Enduring Event: Telling Stories
around September 11 18

2 Constant Replay: Community Building at
the Site/Sight of Trauma 39

3 Common Ground: Melodramas of 9/11 58

4 Shock and Own: Mediation and Expropriation
In the Shadow of No Towers 81

5 Globalizing (the) Nation 108

6 The Market Moves Us in Mysterious Ways:
Don DeLillo on 9/11 123

7 Cosmopolis: A Meditation
on Deterritorialization 151

8 Killing Politics: The Art of Recovery
in Falling Man 181

9 Good Mourning, America: Genealogies of Loss
in Against the Day 211

Conclusion 245

Bibliography 253

Index 265
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the first readers of this manuscript: Stipe Grgas
(who supervised its inception), Sonja Bašić and Jelena Šesnić,
my colleagues from the Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences in Zagreb. Their support and friendship surpass the
covers of this book. For her timely interventions and patience, I
am also grateful to Željka Švrljuga of the University of Bergen,
Norway.
This book grew out of the doctoral dissertation I started
working on in 2006, during my Fulbright year as a visiting
scholar at New York University. My experience in the
American Studies Program at NYU’s Department of Social and
Cultural Analysis has been invaluable, and I would like to give
credit to all the people, both teachers and students, I had the
opportunity to meet and work with there. I finished writing in
February 2011 in Berlin, thanks to a research grant from the
John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies.
I am indebted to Draško Ivezić, who helped out with the
layout, and was willing to accept olive oil in place of cash.
The people to whom I owe most are my friends and my
family, because their encouragement is unyielding.
Like other, more significant ones, this endeavor too would
not have been possible without Clem: your bravery gives me
strength.
INTRODUCTION: READING THE 9/11 ARCHIVE

Perhaps the dead can be reduced to
fixed forms, though their surviving
records are against it.1

On September 11, 2001, nineteen young men, most of them
from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one
from Egypt, and one from Lebanon, hijacked four US airliners
on domestic flights. Then, they flew two of the planes into the
World Trade Center towers in New York City, one into the
Pentagon building near Washington, DC, with the last airplane,
in which a fight between the hijackers and the passengers
broke out, diving into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania
without reaching its intended target. Nearly three thousand
people were killed in the attacks. The suicide bombings of the
WTC buildings, taking place in broad daylight in one of the
most densely populated areas in the world, were the most
spectacular and visible of all. The instantly and repeatedly
broadcast images of the planes hitting the towers and the tall
buildings collapsing soon became a symbolic stand-in for the
tragic loss of that day. What happened appeared like nothing
the United States or the world had ever seen (calling to mind,
perhaps, and uncannily, only the spectacular special effects of
Hollywood disaster movies). What ensued – the various inter-
pretations of the event, its many political consequences, cul-
tural symptoms and social effects – is the general subject of this
study.
The large number of academic and popular writing on Sep-
tember 11, 2001 proves how every attempt to understand 9/11
as a discrete event inevitably leads to complex inquiries into its
meaning and place in history. The significance of 9/11 can, ex-
cept in terms of human loss, certainly be measured by the im-
pact the event had both on a global scale and in the local con-
text of the US political and legal system. Virtually all critics

1 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford and New York: Oxford
UP, 1988, 129.
8 Towering Figures

agree that in both respects the event occupies a significant posi-
tion. One of the goals of my project is to understand how this
position, often described in terms of a “watershed moment” or
“turning point”, was culturally and politically negotiated and
constructed.
In order to untangle these complex issues, in which ques-
tions of mourning and loss are joined by those of US global
domination, I focus on a “9/11 archive” that, while having the
September 11 attacks at its heart, also includes some represen-
tations of the changes that took place in the country in the af-
termath of the event, as well as representations of the ongoing
US-led war in Iraq, which was, at least initially, justified in rela-
tion to the September 11 terrorist attacks. While the central part
of my corpus, which is itself only one segment of the archive,
primarily consists of selected literary texts, on its margins it
also includes media images, films and works of visual artists.
This cultural work, that with various degree of explicitness re-
fers to the 9/11 attacks, needs to be located within the larger
9/11 archive that also encompasses the cultural representations
of a post-911 America and its debates about the “global war on
terror”.
These remarks clearly point to the problematic issue of lim-
its that arises when approaching this historical event. The most
obvious question, of where and when the analysis should begin
and end, mirrors the difficulty of demarcating the boundaries
of the event itself. The issue of limits is also ethical, and begs
the question of how to approach an event that is fundamentally
marked by others’ suffering. While I do not pretend to offer
definite answers to these problems, I think they can most con-
structively be approached by way of a layered analytical per-
spective, that could both set a heuristic framework for the un-
avoidable sense of expansion of the event and account for its
concentric and palimpsestic contexts. The September 11 attacks,
the death and destruction of their immediate impact, the mo-
dalities of mourning, of the victims, their families, and the na-
tion, the changes in US domestic legislation due to increased
demands for security, the globalization of the event’s impact
through the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – all
these inevitably participate in the understanding of 9/11. The
interest of this study might most accurately be described as be-
ing directed towards the processes through which this disrup-
Introduction 9

tive historical event is assimilated in its various contexts, which
thus established hegemonic limits to the interpretive horizon of
a historical present.
Inevitably, representation of violence – or, to borrow the ti-
tle of Elaine Scarry’s influential book, of “bodies in pain” – has
been in many ways central to the organization of political space
in the post-9/11 United States and informs one of the focal
points of this study. The centrality of this topic in the 9/11 ar-
chive is hardly surprising, since this was an event of mass vio-
lence followed by, at the time of this writing, ongoing wars.
However, it is hardly necessary to argue that the forms of cul-
tural representation of violence do not simply reflect a violent
reality, but are contingent on governing relations of power and
its uneven social distribution.
In what follows, I try to take a more specific view on the
representations of violence in the 9/11 archive and approach it
critically by way of the concept of trauma, a notion that was
used variously (and perhaps somewhat indiscriminately) in
many depictions of the event. Since talking about trauma
means entering a quite large and contested critical terrain, I
would like to offer a brief introductory qualification to my us-
age of the term, with more explanation in the chapters dedi-
cated to the topic. Generally, in my usage throughout this
study, the trauma of 9/11 refers not only to the physical and
psychical injuries of the victims of the attacks, but to a specific
cultural encoding of the historical event, or, in Dominick La-
Capra’s words “sociopolitical uses and constructions of
trauma”.2 Arguing in favor of the pertinence of fundamental
psychoanalytic concepts (“such as transference, resistance, de-
nial, repression, acting-out, and working-through”) to the
study of collectivities, LaCapra has claimed that these “under-
cut the binary opposition between the individual and society”,
making “their application to individual or collective phenom-
ena ... a matter of informed argument and research”. These
concepts, with trauma included, are then intrinsically social,
since they “refer to processes that always involve ... orientation
toward others”.3 It is this socially, ethically and politically in-

2 Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory,
Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2004, 95.
3 Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, Ithaca and London: