Fear Factor, Revisted: On the 20th Anniversary of September 11

This Saturday is the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center that set off the 20-year war in Afghanistan (with a side trip to Iraq) from which the United States has theoretically been extricating itself. (Whether we will ever be totally out remains to be seen.) I was living in New York City on September 11 (Brooklyn actually, Carroll Gardens to be exact) while getting my MA in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research. I wrote a first draft of this piece as part of a class I was taking with Christopher Hitchens, who soon after began using the term "Islamofascism" to stake out his position as a "left hawk," ultimately to advocate for regime change with the invasion of Iraq. (For my take on Hitchens, see my PopMatters review of his memoir, Hitch-22.) I updated the essay a couple of years later when Sherry Hendrick asked me for a contribution to Alley Culture AC News. It appeared in volume 6, number 2 in spring 2005 under the title "Fear Factor" and is reprinted below.

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World Trade Center as seen from Brooklyn on 9/11/2001 (Image: Michael Foran, Creative Commons CC-BY-2.0)

Before dinner on September 11, 2001, I walked from my apartment in Carroll Gardens to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights. Still dazed from that morning, I stood at the railing that overlooks the East River with hundreds of men, women, and children, watching the sunset over Manhattan.

It was nearing the end of a picture-perfect autumn day. The air was crisp, the sky a brilliant blue and nearly cloudless. There was nothing to suggest anything amiss but the hole in the New York City skyline where the Twin Towers once stood and from which an enormous stream of dark smoke now issued, billowing over the Brooklyn Bridge seemingly into infinity.

It was almost eight hours since the first tower collapsed; yet papers and other debris still fluttered down from above. A charred document settled beside me; I caught another in my hand moments later. Another came down behind me, and I turned to pick it up.

The first document was a foreign exchange letter between Citibank in New York and Bank of America in San Francisco, setting the currency rate in US dollars for a business deal going down in Australia. The second was a page from the balance sheet of an English automotive supplier, presented in pounds sterling as part of its Lloyd's of London proof of insurance certificate. I recognized these things as the mundane yet essential tools of empire, evidence of the global capitalist network within which New York City is a command center.

The third sheet gave me a chill. Through the scorched-brown tinge, I made out a webpage with information about an orthodontist practicing in New Jersey. Next to the doctor's name was jotted a note to look into whether it was the same person the note's author knew in high school.

Did whoever had written that note get out? I wondered. Did he or she have any idea what was happening at the time of the attack and in its immediate aftermath? What of the family and friends? What were they doing right now? Did they know anything more about the fate of this person whose perhaps last thoughts I held in my hand? In the flash of an instant, the day's global and personal implications crystallized.

Unease turned into dread over the next few days, not because I feared for my life; although, I did change subway cars one time when I noticed a gaunt olive-skinned man with a beard sitting across from me holding a backpack I could swear was ticking.

Rather, it was because the first order of business I heard Congress pick up when it reconvened wasn't to ask what the hell went wrong but to pass legislation protecting the airlines from lawsuits surely to result from lax security that let suicide pilots with box cutters get through undetected.

Even more unnerving was the President, who on TV vowed vengeance on our behalf while exhorting us to max out our credit cards as part of the newly declared War on Terror. But the War on Terror quickly turned into the Reign of Terror as compulsory nationalism replaced independent thought and the USA PATRIOT Act rendered notions like habeas corpus and due process quaint. As the first anniversary of September 11 drew close, Condoleeza Rice, then National Security Advisor, brought tidings of a fearsome new specter – Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud that could do more harm than 19 Jihadists with hijacked planes could ever dream of.

Through it all, the Homeland Security Advisory shifted between Yellow, a significant risk of terrorist attacks, and Orange, a high risk. We were encouraged to be ever vigilant, to take notice of and report any suspicious person, thing, or activity to the authorities.

In 1984, George Orwell writes about a country where perpetual war is used to foster hate and fear, allowing its authoritarian regime to control the domestic population. Is it paranoid to think that a collateral benefit of the Reign of Terror is to keep us in line while providing cover for tax cuts for the rich, giveaways to Big Business, and now perhaps a rollback of the New Deal to the days of the Robber Barons?

On November 3, 2004, I couldn't help noticing the pall that settled over Manhattan as people faced a reality more ominous than the one they awoke to on September 12, 2001 – where, in a strange land called Red State America, they so loved Big Brother they actually re-elected him.

Vince Carducci lives in exile on a small island off the coast of America.

9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster

I remember the week after September 11, 2001, when the subway from Brooklyn into Lower Manhattan was back in limited service, getting off at Broadway-Lafayette and feeling somewhat disoriented when my usual landmark indicating south, the World Trade Center, was missing from the downtown skyline. The specter of the World Trade Center was soon enough evoked by Art Speigelman in his September 24, 2001, New Yorker magazine cover of the Twin Towers as black silhouettes against a black background. The Twin Towers haunted the New York skyline again a few months later in the Tribute in Light installation of 88 search lights configured in the buildings' original footprints and projected upward into the night sky.

The tremulous memory effects of the World Trade Center is the subject of Thomas Stubblefield's 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster. It examines, on the one hand, the cultural industries' attempts to put the World Trade Center disaster down the memory hole by erasing its image in media representations while, on the other hand, galvanizing its persistence as a kind of visual undead with deep ideological significance in the collective consciousness.

Underlying the text is the assumption that our reception of the events of September 11 and its aftermath have been profoundly shaped by the military-entertainment complex and its culture-industry forebears. Hollywood cinema, particularly Cold War dystopias and science fiction; various photographic genres from fine art to journalistic to robotic surveillance; and social psychology constitute the fertile ground from which the cultural meanings of September 11 and its imagery have sprouted and grown.

According to Stubblefield, there have been two main ways of interpreting September 11 from the academic perspective, one primarily European and the other basically American.The former extends the critical analysis of spectacle society, i.e., laying bare the alienating effects of mass media under capitalism; the latter involves the more pragmatic discipline of trauma studies, the therapeutic response to dealing with disasters both natural and man-made. Stubblefield endeavors to steer a path between the two.

First and foremost is the role of the camera in representing September 11. The year 2001 was the first time digital cameras outsold film and September 11 is believed to be the most photographed disaster in history. Ironically, a good portion of the archive was not recorded on digital media but on film, especially from disposable cameras purchased after the first plane, American Airlines Flight 11, crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Another significant database of images was recorded by what in contemporary parlance we might call optical drones—security cameras, webcams, and other imaging devices of the Panopticon. In both cases, the dialectic of morbid fascination, the lure of the spectacle on the one hand, and the bracketing off of horrific experience, the need to hold trauma at bay on the other, produces what Stubblefield calls "non-seeing," a situation in which the apparatus of the camera at the same time enables us to maintain distance in space and time from actual events while ostensibly reaffirming their reality through the captured image.

And yet the reality theoretically being captured is itself up for debate. Stubblefield examines two well-known examples of supposed diffidence (what sociologist Georg Simmel terms the "blase" attitude engendered by modern culture) in the face of the September 11 disaster. The first is Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker's A Group of Young People Watch the Events of 9/11 from a Brooklyn Rooftop (2001), an image of five hipsters apparently basking in the autumn sun as black smoke from the collapsed towers billows across the East River. The photograph was cited by Frank Rich in The New York Times as representative of the American public's failure to learn anything significant from the September 11 attacks, a state of denial held to begin even as the horrific event was taking place. Withheld from publication until the fifth anniversary of September 11, the meaning of the photograph was almost immediately contested, not the least by its subjects who confessed to actually being in "shock and disbelief" about the attack rather than nonchalant as Rich asserted.

The other is Tim Soter's Self Portrait (2001), showing the artist, also on a Brooklyn rooftop, looking straight into the camera as smoke pours out from the Twin Towers in the distance behind him, an image posted for its perceived opportunism on the "wall of shame" as part of the "Here is New York" exhibition mounted in a vacant SoHo storefront not long after the attacks. Professed on one level by the photographer to provide a document of himself within the historic event for the future sake of his grandchildren, Stubblefield reads it as a prime example of photography's mechanically reproduced "euphoric blindness," its penchant for separating the photographer from the photographed.

Stubblefield doesn't cite it, but this distancing in space and time, and the slippery nature of photographic signification, is central to Siegfried Kracauer's under-appreciated 1927 essay "Photography," in which he discusses the difference between the photograph and what he terms the "memory-image." Kracauer writes: "Compared to photography, memory's records are full of gaps." A photograph captures what is within the camera's mechanical view while the memory-image is highly selective based upon an individual's perception.

But a photograph is in essence only a specter of the reality it represents, a trace of a fugitive moment that is gone the instant it is captured. The gap between the photograph and the memory-image increases over time with the signifying value of the physical trace eroding as the years go by. "The truth content of the original [photograph] is left behind in its history," Kracauer notes, opening up the possibility of broader significance through what might be termed the collective memory-image, in this case as a signifier within the visual culture of the disaster of September 11.

Contributing to the social imaginary of September 11 representation is the history of American popular and visual culture, especially as it evolved after the Second World War. Stubblefield organizes each chapter of the book by providing a genealogy, a prequel as it were, of films, photographic images, and other cultural references to frame various representations of September 11, from falling bodies and their subsequent disappearance from the public eye, to abandoned cityscapes in various post-Apocalyptic mise-en-scenes, to the erasure of the Twin Towers in media depictions of the New York City skyline.

As much as the events of day were captured visually, it is the void left behind by the collapse of the Twin Towers that reveals the ever-widening gap between the initial photographic record's truth content and the metamorphosis of the collective memory-image over time. The book's penultimate chapter is the most powerful one, dealing with failure of non-representation as exemplified by Spiegelman's graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) and Michael Arad's 9/11 memorial Reflecting Absence (2011). In both cases, the semiotic dialectic of presence/absence is ostensibly reversed—rather than the presence of the sign marking the absence of that to which it refers, the shadows and voids of the World Trade Center's silhouette and footprint are vestiges of a  wound that refuses to completely heal. This reversal constitutes a space for institutionalizing what Stubblefield terms a "national trauma" (and what we might term a pathological collective memory-image), a psychological state that early on facilitated the march to war and now continues with "counterinsurgency" measures such as NSA warrantless surveillance, CIA drone assassinations, and the militarization of the domestic police force.

Instead of heralding a new political reality or the occasion for national reflection, Stubblefield concludes, September 11 seems to have provided the impetus for continuing business as usual, only now with a vengeance. The American Imperium carries on, most recently through what Naomi Klein terms "disaster capitalism." And in that sense, Frank Rich appears to have been right.