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