Memorializing Memory

The first question I asked was why I even wanted to see the World Trade Center site today. I don’t think I had a clear reason, but I wanted to start making sense of the strange contradictions I’ve felt towards the terrorist attacks. On one hand, I feel as I always have, that the attacks were little more than a prop for a more terrifying agenda, and that any discussion of the meaning of the actual attacks should be weighted towards a macro-political stance. However, seeing a few pictures of New York before 2001, and my feeling of being (minimally) present in NYC has mad the event more vivid, if not real. There are places and people around the city that really make September 11^th feel like a loss as much as a movie.

So, that’s the first real question that’s raised: how do you discuss the politics of September 11^th, while still recognizing the loss (of place, of people, of politics) produced during the attack. The site of the WTC deliberately leaves that open: it seems strained between creating a grand narrative of the attack (and thus something to at least discuss politically), and of leaving the space a memorial for families (largely cutting off discussion). Most of the memorials seemed to be half-efforts to compose lists of names and photos into a coherent picture – the word ‘heroes’ was everywhere, and names imposed on images of flags or the towers dominated the memorials. Mostly gone were individual pictures or sites of mourning – a few were left at the PATH station, a few more around the barrier-fence, but the most prominent and peopled memorials were compositions of names and images displayed under a title or banner of some kind.

Everything about the site shifts and flickers: it’s the only way to memorialize an absence. The most dominant visual feature – the huge twin spotlights pointed into the sky – embodies this most fully. First, the lights are different on closer look: they aren’t on the site of the WTC, but rather a block or so away, mounted on buildings. So, the lights go from resurrections of a dominant visual feature from afar, to inadequate attempts to represent the loss up close. This mirrors the meaning of 9/11 in general, as a simulated event, played out on TV screens, isolated in a space where our eyes and ears are drawn away from the actual event and towards glowing re-presentations of video. The lights themselves flicker – they cannot be shown in the daytime, at best a nocturnal embodiment of loss. Most of those who died at the WTC were commuters, so the lights remaining are memorials for a visual embodiment as seen by most New Yorkers, not so much those who died. They once again show the near impossibility of representing a loss fully – the irreducibility of loss experienced during an event like September 11^th.

The space itself seems part crime scene, part construction site, part memorial. Signs of construction are everywhere: cranes, ramps, signs warning for hardhats, etc. However, no signs of construction seem present – no scaffolding or raw materials are on site. In fact, the fence surrounding ‘ground zero’ is largely covered by a green fabric which prevents people from congregating and looking – making meaning of what remains. Access still seems restricted, the details still secret. The points where people seem to gather generally remain shielded. One spot I found where the tarp isn’t is off to one side, almost in an alley, a carefully restricted perspective. The end result is that people end up wandering, looking for something to see, to hold on to that would make sense of what was lost or emerging. Memorials appear at random intervals, entire parts of the site remain functionally invisible. People remain moving, occasionally pushed into the street by disappearing sidewalks or generally lost in the meandering boarded walkways sandwiched between fence and walls. The movement makes the memorial site a disoriented, transitory place, hindering introspection or contemplation. Never do you get a sense of having seen something- it remains an elusive absence.

Significantly, these features prevent the use of the site as a political tool except on the level of the symbolic, primarily played out through the endless tapes and movies about September 11^th, 2001. Representation of the space remains a private and regulated process – you must climb one of the surrounding buildings to get an aerial view, and this is something controlled by the owners of the buildings. The other representation depends on access to the global media systems which defined the event for the majority of the world.

The uncertain meaning of the memorial and the aftermath leaves the history and meaning of the event relatively uncertain. The appropriation of September 11^th into politics has been surprisingly fragmentary. The images and idea of memorialization has been the justification for peace groups, war-mongers, and whatever the Alex Jones contingent calls itself. On one level, this is due to the difficulty of appropriating the attacks as an attack on anything in particular: the government calls the object American values, the opposition calls it capital. Both could potentially be true depending on the position of the listener. The memorial embodies this difficulty, divided between the desire to create a national monument and the need to develop a huge part of the most valuable land on earth. To what end: the space of images which memory of September 11^th resides is a space of manipulation and a-historical reality. Thus, the first task of filmmakers (relatively successfully) challenging the supposed master-narrative of September 11^th was to establish a history, brandishing rumors and dossiers from the past into what appears to be a coherent history of deception that would prove their conspiracy. Similarly, the global war narrative relies on a perceived history of entrenched ideologies battling on an epochal scale. Both appropriate certain images to create an otherwise absent or fragmented history, and define the conditions for memory in a post-September 11^th world.

Duncan

Old Post #2 - gargling guggenheim

Written Saturday

I visited the Guggenheim museum in New York yesterday and I enjoyed the experience much more than many other museums I have visited. What stood out for me was the architectural layout, which contrasted with other museums in allowing an openness of meaning in the art itself. The interior is a uniform matte white, with 6 ‘levels’ of art, unified by a spiraling mezzanine. Generally, it avoids flat walls and corners at right angles. The layout operates in two moves. The first creates an economy of attention, the second shows where to focus that attention. The meaning of the space is connected to other spaces with similar functions: it stands out as an expression of fluidity, and a desire to break with uniformity. Essentially, the physical building draws attention to the space itself, makes the space a point of consideration in the experience of the art on the walls. Then, the color of the walls redirects that focus by erasing itself: the white signifies a lack of attention, or at least a desire to avert eyes from itself. Rightly, the space recognizes its participation in creating meaning, and then takes steps away from that power.

Part of what makes art enjoyable is its openness to interpretation, which allows a potential point of identification for a number of viewers while at the same time drawing them together around a particular expression. My favorite art at the Guggenheim drew attention to different forms of meaning: methodological, as well as visual elements other than that on the surface. The building opens the art by avoiding strict genre and historical divisions, while levering open the spatial divisions which divide other museums. The central rotunda that links all the galleries is ringed by a spiraling ramp that avoids stairs and walled off spaces: the walkway allows each gallery space to be experienced as a progression of movement, rather than abrupt transition. The associations between individual works, artists and sections remains available for interpretation, rather than having those associations negated by more abrupt walls or doors.

Duncan

Old Post #1- C.R.E.A.M.

Wrote this over 2 days last week-

Nietzsche said that the value of an idea did not solely concern its status as truth. In the same vein of ideas, the value of a political project may not have anything to do with its status as authentic, unified, or concrete. Sometimes, the meaning of a movement or activist project may have nothing to do with the established measures of meaning. The typical tool for social empowerment and ‘opportunity’ for disenfranchised people (such as the homeless) is money. However, an equally valuable (by any measure..) tool can also be mutual support systems, contacts with industry, self-fulfillment or even just a sense of accomplishment. In the inverse, donations of money can have an impact other than the merely monetary. Panhandling is a process that makes homelessness inconveniently visible to people who otherwise may not directly encounter abject poverty. The attempt to remove panhandlers is an overt example of erasure of homelessness without an effort to remedy the problem. However, there can be other forms of erasure: the attempt to prevent giving money to panhandlers, treating them as irresponsible or incompetent also erases the way that money acts as a form of communication. Money in transactions, like metaphor, connects two otherwise disconnected acts of labor. It designates particular people and acts as worthy of compensation/reward, and so also acts as a social sanction in its own right, independent of the disciplinary effects of capital. The non-economic becomes economic, the economic, non.

Attempts to constrain the meaning of acts of (non)compensation (particularly the designation of ‘waste’) delineates the social and the economic, and by implication, what remains open to politics. Moreso, it tells us what we think about ourselves as social beings. If we believe certain acts to be non-economic, it presumes the separate domain of the economic to consist of relationships between autonomous individuals, acting on rational principles. The implication of social, non-economic relationships in economic transaction demonstrates that economics and industry also run on social connections, norms of behavior, and a particular form of agency ensured by social networks. Similarly, in projects for social change, the domain of the corporate and capitalistic should not be totally excluded: ‘by any means necessary’ includes the means of power. Purchases, donations, endowments, etc. aren’t merely excuses to avoid ‘real’ change, but also function as symbols of allegiance and identification, which can be valuable in their own right. The use of corporate power expressed through donations (corruption), should not be seen solely as the outer limit of power in capitalism, but rather a specific strategy by a company, individual or industry to achieve a particular goal. A response that attempts to restore ‘genuine’ democracy by way of revolution cuts off struggles from empirically effective tools of change (money, advertising, PR are working, though perhaps for the wrong people) using a vision of political life that always was an illusion: the myth of genuine democracy born out of interpersonal debate.

Duncan