Robert Hullot-Kentor
SEVERE CLEAR
September 11th, 2011
Sacrifice and Right Wishing
At 10:28 a.m.—[the exact moment when the second tower collapsed]—the public
will see a dramatic and sharp ray of light defining the southern elevation of the
Wedge of Light plaza.
Daniel Libeskind, site architect, Ground Zero
They fed their hearts on fantasies
And their hearts have become savage.
George Oppen, Selected Poems
I. SACRIFICIAL PREHISTORY
All perception is collective memory—of what is now an overtly
antagonistic, self-destructive collective. And because words inhere in all
perception, and ―words are thoughts and not only our own thoughts but the
thoughts of men and women ignorant of what they are thinking,‖ 1 what the
United States underwent in the decade following the destruction of the Twin
Towers appears in isolated words of the day, as in ―super power.‖ In the fall
of 2001, the front pages of newspapers cohered in the restatement of these
1
Wallace Stevens, ―The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,‖ in Collected Poetry and Prose, p. 663.
1
words. By September 11th, 2011 ―super power‖ was hardly to be found on a
single page of any newspaper. ―Your Great Escape‖ had likewise vanished
from vacation publicities, as also touching too closely on a nerve. During the
decade, ―surge‖ became the nation‘s technically manipulated battle cry,
though it was never once followed by an exclamation mark—not any more
than the nation could mobilize on the basis of conscription for any extended
war, let alone the wars that the attack unleashed. The wars were known to be
long lost and, considerably before the fall of 2011, unstoppable, whether the
US remained or withdrew. With the urgency of shamed disbelief in its own
felt content, ―surge‖ began its migration ubiquitously into any cognate
statement where a sense of strength might be won back, whether in a ―surge
in copper prices‖ or in ―The Santorum Surge Story Comes True‖—though
not one ―surge‖ held steady.2 The economic collapse that began in 2008 was
the familiar avowal of a burst ―bubble.‖ But, forcibly vacated of that bubble,
the nation found itself in an unprecedented, all encompassing absence of
reality. The unfathomable mass of numbers on which it had stacked up its
probity and wealth, and authoritatively spread its accounting and credit
rating systems world-wide, was seen to be no less expansively fraudulent
and meaningless, which vitally discredited the nation in its once preeminent
self-certainty. Thought that thinks achieves something more than thought,
which the country was no longer capable of. In organizing for the 2012
presidential elections neither of the two parties already competing in
September 2011 could plan to improve life for anyone; both parties, instead,
were irresistibly allied with extreme revanchist factions bearing slogans that
2
E.g. ―The Santorum Surge Story Comes True,‖ ―Rick Santorum's surge to finish in a virtual tie for first
with Mitt Romney in Tuesday's Iowa caucuses…‖ News@Pew Research.Org. Jan. 5, 2012. Rick Santorum
was a candidate in the Republican primaries for the US presidential election in 2011-2012.
2
included ―Make Us Great Again,‖ and ―Restore Our Future.‖ The single
claim raised was that only austerity could contend with the gravity of the
situation: every budget, all relief, education and form of assistance must be
―cut.‖ Economists were broadly agreed that the ―cuts‖ had already only
intensified the economic calamity, as if intentionally. But by the decennial
commemoration of the attack, the only voices that were confidently audible,
that ably held their own in debate and policy negotiations, persisted in
primordial demands on the necessity of sacrifice and the further
accumulation of self-inflicted wounds. A nation that had lived by nothing
less than a creed of the individual ―pursuit of happiness;‖ that would not
have thought it had renounced it; that characteristically addressed itself with
self-credulity as ―a consumer society;‖ a nation populated overwhelmingly
by church goers, who would more likely spend a weekend evening at a
casino than share in St. Augustine‘s tremulously devout fright that evening
would ―come upon me and inflict me with its pleasures, which I dread so
much,‖ had—by September 11th, 2011— come to speak of itself in
narrowly Aztec resonances.3
Contemporary and Lapsed Glossary. To the extent that this brief glossary
is accurate of a decade‘s experience, it poses the question of whether the
lapsed but seminal insight of the whole of radical modernism could be
recovered: the insight into the primitive in us.4 For while the enlightenment,
as a social dynamic, is the history of the domination of nature and the
emergence of human autonomy that, in the name of civilization and in the
anathema of the primitive, obliterated whole peoples and cleared continents,
3
Cite. Augustine‘s Soliloqies, p. 51.
4
Cite Adorno, Begriff der Philosophie.
3
it would not be possible to say one word of this unless the critique of
domination were inextricable from this same history. This is decisively
apparent in the self-reflection that, potentially, called a halt to the mayhem:
the reflection in which the enlightenment recognized the boundary it had
carved out over centuries—in distinguishing itself from the primitive—as its
very own sculpted silhouette. The recognition of the primitive in us was the
enlightenment‘s most self-critical and emancipatory insight. Adorno
considered it nothing less than the achieved seminal insight of Western
thought, ―To understand the primitive in us and in reality, this was the
definitive step that Western thought made.‖ The whole of radical
modernism, what modern means beyond a category of swept back furniture,
developed out of the impulse of this insight. Adorno was speaking as part of
an entire generation for whom this insight was urgently productive, not as
a—but as the—revolution in thought. As Adorno continued: ―The horizon of
knowledge has been infinitely expanded; layers have come into our field of
vision that were hidden.‖ 5
Depth of Field/Translation of the Primitive. This claim to an infinite
broadening of the depth of perception in the recognition of the primitive in
us may startle. And it may startle again to realize that every degree in the
broadening compass of this depth of field was marked out by the developing
understanding of the breadth of the primitive itself and that, to this moment,
the perception of historical depth remains inextricable from insight into the
primitive. This is so distinctly the case that presenting any part of its history
may easily be confused, initially at least, with an effort to set out a
5
T. W. Adorno, Der Begriff der Philosophie. Emphases added. I have discussed this passage in Adorno in ―The
Exact Sense in which the Culture Industry No Longer Exists,‖ in Cultural Critique, ―A New Type of Human
Being and Who We Really Are,‖ in The Brooklyn Rail and ―What Barbarism Is?‖ in The Brooklyn Rail.
4
periodization of Western thought, which the developed insight into the
primitive ultimately contravened. The word itself, primitive, first came into
the English language in the Reformation, as the very first word in English to
differentiate a past that was recognized as fundamentally and irretrievably—
if also longingly—of another age, and by that same measure subject to
historical research and examination.6 Actual historical conquest no less than
actual historical research continued to expand the idea of the primitive, for
instance, in the recognition that the ancient Greeks, whom the Renaissance
had known as the pristine origin and luminescent source of the anathema of
barbarism itself, were themselves primitive—the insight that marked the
utter terminus of Renaissance thought.7 It was, again, further scientific
conquest of nature that, in Kant‘s pre-critical scientific studies, momentously
enlarged the range of the primitive—this time, by eons— in recognizing the
unfathomable, yet researchable historical-geological origin of the earth, no
less of our own as “the dark abyss of time,” the insight into the historical
reality of nature from which Romanticism itself altogether emerged.8
The translation of the primitive into the present, in us and in reality, as
occurred in Freud‘s concept of the unconscious—which may be the most
profound and challenging insight in the whole of human thought—is the
decisive event that Adorno invoked as the infinite deepening of perception.
And although this new depth of field—in us and in reality—was itself no
more representable than it was an ultimately comprisable depth; and while it
required thinking that could no longer claim given foundations for itself or
6
cite
7
cite
8
cite
5
be satisfied with producing intellectual conviction by argumentative means;
while its approach would be paratactical, yet logical—it was a more
humanly binding, interpretable, comprehensible and dynamic depth than had
ever before been known. Under its impact, the senses themselves were
spiritualized. Adorno‘s ―micrological‖ studies, Minima Moralia—the
possibility of writing, for instance, that ―taste is the most accurate
seismograph of historical experience‖ 9—no less than the emergence of nonobjective art, are evidence of this.
Regression since Hesiod. Of decisive importance, this translation of the
primitive into us and into reality indicated the first decisively new meaning
in the concept of regression since Hesiod. A point of comparison is needed:
The earlier concept of regression is instanced in an American observer‘s
pronouncement in 1818 that, whereas other countries had gone from
barbarism to civilization, ―in the settlement of North America the case is
reversed. The tendency is from civilization to barbarism.‖10 The remark is
not without truth, but it is unable to make good on what is true in it insofar
as it owes what is vital in its astounded irony to what that irony can only
condescend to in rejecting as any part of itself. This is the measure of its
inability to recognize its civilizatory participation in the dynamic of
regression. What it fails to comprehend was beyond anyone‘s interpretable
understanding prior to the insight into the primitive in us. Given this
recognition, regression could no longer be conceived as a bewildering return
of the present to the past—or as a decline of the high to the low—but only as
the return of the past in the present as the vertex of the depth of the archaic
9
Cite Eric Kahler. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 95?
10
Quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, p. 311.
6
in which conflicts that were masked but never left behind become manifest
in the developing crises of these conflicts. Except in terms of this radically
modern concept of regression, there is no other way meaningfully to
understand what is occurring now in the United States, not least with regard
to the contemporary demand for sacrifice. It may not seem like much to
preoccupy a lifetime‘s work to consider that the whole of Adorno‘s writings,
some forty volumes, was an effort to shape the possible perception of
regression in just this sense. But, on the other hand, as Adorno wrote in the
Dialectic of Enlightenment, ―If enlightenment does not assimilate reflection
on this regressive moment, it seals its own fate.‖11
Extinguished Perception/ Right Wishing/ Generic Theory. But the
process that made this pivotal reflection on the primitive in us and in reality
possible, extinguished it. The implications of the translation of the primitive
into the modern—of the archaic into the present—were no more carried
through than the word ―present‖ now makes any sense at all under our eyes;
no more than the social emancipation implicit in the idea of the primitive in
us—of nature itself in us, as us—was achieved. Theory, which, when it is
theory, is a longing for the right thing that presents the weight of history in
constellations of concepts as the capacity to distinguish what might be from
what is, as right wishing—instead became ―theory,‖ a generic object.12 It
seems to have had no choice but to pursue a logic of equality conceived as
interchangeability—the historical achievement of the nation‘s own concept
of equality13—in which terms the differential of the ―primitive‖ would be
11
DdA, English p. xvi
12
Adorno. Also Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, p. .
13
cite.
7
detected as if on radar as a prejudicial attribution to homogeneous time. Any
mention of the word was perceived as if it inflicted an immediate sting and
universal injustice. The idea of the primitive that had radically overcome the
anathema of the primitive itself, which could understand the primitive as the
destruction of the primitive, and in this insist on an end to destruction, itself
came under a taboo. The confident invocation of the prohibition, which
might consider itself leagues beyond the clever haughtiness of the American
critic of 1818, would be beyond it only insofar as it had overcome all that
was alternative to it. With the purging of insight into the primitive, historical
depth was itself eliminated, as if the past might, for instance, only be a
switching out of inherently equal narratives; as if all that has gone up
through factory smokestacks in the twentieth century were someone‘s story.
―Theory‖ became a newly layered stratum in the bulwark against historical
comprehension. What might make reality break in on the mind that masters
it, by comprehending what weighs on that mind, instead became of a part
with something bordering on the inconceivable idea that thinking in the most
emphatic sense had indeed come to a halt, and, if so, that something could
only be an historical dynamic that more than bordered on the
catastrophically inconceivable. What remained as possibility, then, in
seeking any binding insight into what was transpiring, narrowed to the
examination of one word and the next; to the impulse of causing to collide
those words we must say with what we must be saying, so that these very
same words might slightly say something else than that—however averse to
reflection the language as such had become.14
14
Cite Adorno, Elemente; cite Moishe Postone.
8
Historical conquest. What that one word and the next voiced in the midst of
the decennial commemoration of the destruction of the World Trade Center
Towers, on September 11th, 2011 was shaped by a nation that over several
centuries had hardly been prepared by its triumphs to take historical account
of itself. For unlike the Romans who marked their victories over conquered
cities with historical monuments, the United States in its expansive modern
history had marked its victories—and most of all its victory over this
continent—as a triumph over history itself. It is a matter of principle:
―Where we have been, there history shall not be.‖ The historian and
philosopher Lewis Mumford was commenting on this principle—a principle
of equality in the factual commerce of time—when he remarked that, with
the important exception of the self-consciously defeated South, the United
States had characteristically shown only the most limited interest in
memorial efforts and monuments.15 After World War II, a suburban midwestern town could affix a medallion to the wall at the local VFW as all that
was needed to bring public chronology up to date, while the nation as a
whole increasingly busied itself with other things. What the nation did
occupy itself with is apparent enough when one considers that there is now
no single remaining national holiday that is not preeminently the celebration
of a sale day or dependently adjunct to one. Providing confirmation for this
claim, however—of the asymptotic convergence of somber commemoration
and commerce—demands confirmation of what needs none and thus can
only amount to the comic marshaling of evidence for all that is self-evident,
the whole of what we exclusively have in common. It is not edifying,
theoretically, but read anyway that, for instance, this past Memorial Day,
15
Lewis Mumford, The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 482.
9
2011, a New York City exercise club ran an advertisement in the New York
Times for a ―pre-memorial day SALE‖ that urged readers to ―get in shape for
other Memorial Day sales.‖16 Or, again, on the Fourth of July this year
national heritage was characteristically invoked with the encouragement to
―Celebrate your independence with these great deals!‖17 And, in September,
was the admonishment not to miss the weekend‘s ―great Labor Day Sales at
Sears.‖
Not to be missed. The necessity of the comic, here, is an aspect of the
problem of considering one word and the next without sacrificing thought to
what, for instance, makes ―cultural studies‖ an obligatorily plural concept no
less than it would otherwise, in the singular, be unanimously repulsed. What
Adorno called the ―tendency in the material‖ 18—a material that can hardly
be understood as anything but raw material in space, and therefore without
any determination in thought, and thus without any tendency other than
corpuscular movement—needs to be heightened, not obscured in the
pretense that we already know how to survive it. What is coercively made
comic, not in the sense of the funny but as the category of what has no
bindingly legitimate claim to be taken seriously, must not be missed in this
discussion. Yet the tendency that ineluctably produces the comic, against
which thinking must measure itself, no less violently disintegrates the
tension in thought—just as in the arts the same tendency of the whole
inheres omnipresently as an impulse to destroy art‘s essential muteness by
demanding that the mask be tossed off even before it can be put on. A
16
New York Times, May 10, 2011.
17
July 4th Sales 2011, http://www.july4thsales2011.com.
18
Cite, Adorno, Philosophy of New Music,
10
dialectical theory of society—as Adorno presented it—requires that society
be comprehended on the basis of its own concept in such a way that its
irrationality is understood as being an aspect of its concept, of its own
essence. A theory is only true in that it understands what escapes it, knowing
it as what actually escapes it.19 This dialectical element was already
instantiated almost two hundred years ago when Tocqueville commented
that ―in America the majority has enclosed thought within a formidable
fence.‖20 That fence—here, the comic surface, the quintessential, the smell
of that smoke off of those factory towers, what interrupts any argumentative
coherence—is all that thought can find to be interested in, while trying to
figure out how to tolerate knowing that what is being discussed, the only
words we have, is of aversive disinterest unless possibility can be perceived
as lodged exclusively in restriction, in the closest experience of the limit,
and not in any claim to reaching beyond it, as if praxis—doing the next right
thing—would itself be an afterthought to be appended.
Flag Shrouded One Day Sale. We have then a flag shrouded evocation of
the destroyed towers to consider. It is hardly conceivable that after
September 11, 2001, advertising executives for Macy‘s convened to capture
the opportunity of the moment by drawing up a publicity campaign in
startlingly somber likeness to what had just transpired. It is, moreover, selfevident that the image that was in fact designed—a spectrally illumined
building constructed of patterned stars and stripes, tilting back vertiginously
at its pinnacle from the picture plane—was by no means an act of
19
Cite, Elemente einer Theorie der Gesellschaft, pp. 130.
20
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 255.
11
imagination, but strictly a work of fantasy.21 For this is what was to be seen
the Saturday morning prior to the 10th anniversary of the attack on opening
the New York Times to the full page spread of the publicity which presented
itself as if it were part of the commemorative weekend: An effulgence of
light defines the locus of a targeted concussion where a nexus of stars
luminesce in pulsing reciprocation, now as piercing wound, now as radiant
badge of glory. Adjacent ranks of stars are cast in a sentimental,
retrospective unfocus of flag and courage in damaged pride. Stand up, step
forward, and be counted. Save the ship, win back our honor, and win back
your own. The aggrieved nation, which, as any nation, is what there is to die
for, nevertheless as a modern nation has its
legitimacy exclusively in the economic
opportunity it provides to those who somehow
constitute it. Thus, it solicits help the only way it
can, as a chance for individual advantage, in this
instance, as a one day sale. Those called to the
rescue, however, are all the same aware that they
must bury the sense of having been cheated. For
the carney show pitch is not itself adequate to
deceive, but only to speak to the heart as a power
of self-deception, as a spurious chance at
remaindered loot, excited submission to what is
after all not the nation but a corporation‘s
Illustration I. Macy‘s ―One Day
Sale‖ advertisement, weekend of
September 11, 2011.
antagonist self-interest, and a wish for safety in
doing what is being done and to which there is no alternative. – But, does
21
Cite Stevens, ―The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,‖
12
what has been said so far about a Macy‘s one day sale itself only amount to
fantasy? Is it imagination deprived of reality no less than of any possible
gratification, the telos of which also only exists inseparably from reality?
This circumscription to fantasy could be deduced directly from
Tocqueville‘s observation that here thought is restricted by a ―formidable
fence.‖ More contemporary evidence of that fence, if demanded, could itself
be deduced by anyone having read in the business press, in the same days
prior to the 10th anniversary of the attack, that the unexpected spike in
advertising revenue that week had caused media executives to ask
themselves candidly ―how much American audiences can stomach, and how
much such a solemn occasion should be viewed as a business opportunity.‖22
Exactly “How much”? Who wouldn‘t want to know exactly ―how much
American audiences can stomach‖? When does the ratio of solemn occasion
to business opportunity become intolerable? If the answer were not in the
puzzle there would be nothing to solve. The clue given is in the whiff of
sacrilege at the perceived corruption of a solemn occasion by a business
opportunity. It indicates the underlying primitive landscape. What transpires
on this terrain becomes evident in the recognition that the solemn occasion
and the business opportunity are by no means mutually extrinsic, as if a
tincture of one immediately debases the other. For the piety of every solemn
occasion to date—every holiday—revolves around an act of sacrifice that
proceeds with the same substitutional cunning as does the studied solemnity
inherent in every business transaction. What once occurred in ancient Greece
22
Jeremy W. Peters and Brian Stelter, ―Media Strive to Cover 9/11 Without Seeming to Exploit a
Tragedy,‖ New York Times, September 4, 2011.
13
at an altar stone to which an unblemished white ox had been led; where it
was made to bow and raise its head in following the movement of a basket
of feed lowered and raised under its nostrils; the pious affirmation completed
in the slash of the blade under its throat; the terrifying and arousing scream
of the women masking the sound of the animal‘s groan; the men sharing in
the blessing of the propitiatory splash of blood in substitution for the penalty
demanded by their own guilt; the carcass split out over the flames guarded
by the priests; the inadequacy of the sacrifice that always demands the next
sacrifice—now occurs across a countertop in the silence of the systemimmanent equality of exchange, in the however sublimated splash of coin
and appropriated profit, while, in following the movement of groceries
across the bar-code scanner, someone is being cheated. 23
The figure is necessarily comic, though not funny. The sacral ―giving in
order to get‖ at the altar became the pieties of the surrendered laboring day
that amounts to working in order to buy.24 What satisfies guilt in the
individual payment of the debt, an act of defense, is a moment in the
reproduction of the guilt of the whole in the form of the structurally renewed
demand for more sacrifice on all sides. The exchange across the counter top
mediates itself as do tit for tat, an equivalence of retaliation that
demonstrates the primitive content of all equivalence.25 All that there is to
remember of that life is a fright barely kept at bay. What holds it together,
tears it apart and masks the toll taken.26 Nothing is remembered, because all
23
Burkert, Greek Sacrifice.
24
Cite Moishe Postone
25
Cite Grundrisse, English, p. 157, approximately.
26
Cite Adorno, Elemente
14
that there is to remember is the calculation of every event in terms of the
need to obliterate what preceded it. That is the uncanniness of the collective
antagonistic memory in the perception of the ―present‖ under our own eyes.
History repeats itself not because the lessons of history have gone unlearned,
but because to date history has only taught one lesson: that of sacrifice as the
form of self-assertion; as the only technique—the concept of technique
itself—by which what is weaker can master what is more powerful in
making itself like what was once terrifying. Every exchange quotes up the
actual reoccurrence—and not as any return to the past—of the primordial
sacrifice in which a nascent humanity was first overwhelmed by what it
beheld, and, to master itself, inflicted on itself what it was at the mercy of.27
This self-inflicted sacrifice developed as substitutional forms of exchange,
as, for instance, in the ―one sale day,‖ which is itself an archaic offering of
things said to be sent up in smoke, in prayerful publicity. As in all prayer,
exact calculation defines the devoted promise made to an ―audience‖ that
must be mastered according to the principle of substitution, just as once
Prometheus sought to work on his audience, Zeus, in switching out the fat
for the bones of the sacrifice.28 There is no other way for what is weaker to
overcome what is stronger than by making itself like the latter in identifying
with it sacrificially. The bargains themselves are presented on open shelves,
in pious surrender, always cheaper, there for the taking, every item a steal, in
the apparent disavowal of the right to revenge, itself always venged. The
aggression lodged in every prayer reproduces the pleading necessity of every
next prayer, whatever the merchandise presented. Conformity and docility
27
Adorno, DdA
28
Cite Hesiod: Prometheus was matching his intelligence against Zeus‘s.
15
vie in outbidding each other in a struggle to be made whole in a battle of
constantly reinflicted wounds.
From Hesiod through the 18th-century enlightenment, the self-assertion in
sacrifice was never a secret and could not have been because it is the logic of
every secret ever kept, and, as such, effectively known to all in the sensed
claustrophobic structure of the inwardness of the self. But it was not until the
reflection on the primitive in us and in reality that enlightenment was able to
recognize not just, for instance, that the Greeks themselves were primitive;
not just that sacrifice itself is a ruse; but that the logos, the ratio—
enlightenment—generic theory itself, as substitutional reason, is the
sacrificial power of the primitive.29 It is only possible to comprehend how
we have the powers over nature we have achieved, and no less the level of
catastrophe in which we are now immersed, the two in lockstep, unless
nature itself—our nature as part of it—was mastered sacrificially.
29
Cite DdA
16
II. Ground Zero
Illustration II. Freedom Tower. [Permission: Studio Daniel Libeskind]
17
Wedge of Light. The construction of Ground Zero requires the
consideration that fantasy is real, even as it fails reality. The ground plan of
the construction was defined by the impulse to construct a Wedge of Light
plaza that would be fully illuminated on every next September 11th. No
matter how many people would arrive on that date to congregate in
memoriam—whatever the number of surviving families, no matter which of
the three thousand children who lost a parent in the catastrophe would stand
in attendance—the Wedge of Light was engineered for that moment—to the
exact minute at which the planes struck
the towers—to be fully illuminated in
aeternum. This was to be assured,
according to Daniel Libeskind, the
architect of the site‘s master plan, by the
refulgent facades of a series of buildings
rising progressively in height to the
pinnacle of the 1,776-foot Freedom
Tower, itself modeled on the upstretched
posture of the torch-bearing Statue of
Liberty. On every next September 11, the
southerly orientation of these massive
surfaces, situated along the central plaza‘s
perimeter, would cause the sunlight to
Illustration III. Architect‘s sketch for the
illumination of the Wedge of Light/ Park of
Heroes, ―marking the precise time of the event.‖
[Permission: Studio Daniel Libeskind]
reverberate onto the plaza and, in the
18
architect‘s own much-quoted description of this utter illumination, the ―sun
will shine without shadow.‖30
Tacit Certitude. The plans for the plaza‘s illumination were necessarily
based on a complex calculus, especially given the many preexisting adjacent
buildings downtown competing for airspace and light. And it may not be
surprising that the architect‘s claim was challenged or that, in the ensuing
controversy, Libeskind was obliged to revise his statement several times.
But it is remarkable that in the many
discussions of the contested and shifting
topography of the construction of
Ground Zero—in which every detail of
the plan was examined and struggled
over, including the light‘s focus,
duration, intensity, and even the
existence of the Wedge of Light plaza,
which in more recent plans has been
displaced by a transportation hub that is
also said to serve to capture the reflected
rays—no one ever once queried the
Illustration IV. Architect‘s rendering of the
illumination of the Wedge of Light plaza on
every next September 11th. [Permission: Port
Authority of New York and New Jersey]
assumption that each next September 11
will regularly call down undiluted sunlight on Ground Zero. By utter
contrast with the biblical prophets, who limited their pronouncements to
30
―At 8:46 a.m. [when the first plane hit the first tower] the facades of the buildings which form the Wedge
of Light will throw the sunlight back into the plaza, illuminating the three-dimensional space of the plaza.
The public will see clearly, in the fullness of sunlight, that the buildings on the north side cast no shadow
onto the plaza. At 10:28 a.m.—[the exact moment when the second tower collapsed]—the public will see a
dramatic and sharp ray of light defining the southern elevation of the Wedge of Light plaza.‖ Quoted in
Edward Wyatt, ―Spotlight Is on Wedge of Light, Symbol or Not,‖ New York Times, May 2, 2003.
19
forebodings, specifically of eclipses and plagues, and whose warnings were
generally ridiculed and dismissed, Libeskind‘s no less biblical behold! ―the
sun will shine without shadow‖ was greeted with tacit certitude and, in
whatever fashion, continues to be accepted. All concerned, even the city‘s
zoning board, continue to envision any future September 11th as a radiantly
sunny day.
And why question it? Why blunt the expectation of a past darkness banished,
even in the form of a self-manipulated miracle? Isn‘t sunlight a symbol of
hope? And isn‘t it our first responsibility to
make life livable? Let‘s think: given that
most any adult alive in New York City on
that day, and still alive today, somehow
needs to bear having in mind what any of
those passengers felt while being forced
back into their seats by the sickening
momentum of the plane‘s accelerating lift
into the side of the tower; given the
bewildering grief that must be borne by the
relatives of the 1,123 victims of whom no
remains have been identified; given that and
the rest of what we know and have to feel
from that day, why not—if it gives any
comfort—wish in tacit certitude for
luminously clear skies on any next
September 11? Only because making life
Illustration V. Architect‘s sketch of the
ground plan of the tower foundations. ―The
Heart and the Soul: Memory Foundations.
Memorial site exposes Ground Zero all the
way down to the bedrock foundations.
Revealing the heroic foundations of
democracy for all to see.‖ [Permission:
Studio Daniel Libeskind]
livable, which is our first responsibility, requires knowing what it is that we
20
are actually wishing for in the ostensible statement of our wishes. And at this
moment in history, even if it is half platitude to say so, wishing for the right
thing is by no means assured by a consoling choice of tacit certitudes, and
nowhere more so than at Ground Zero, where the excavated commercial
foundations of the World Trade Towers are themselves known as the ―sacred
bedrock of the site.‖31
No alternative to what was coming. What, then, is
it to wish in tacit certitude for a radiantly clear sky?
It depends on the occasion. It may amount to looking
forward, no questions asked, to a pleasant day in the
park. Then there are the certitudes lodged in what
some will remember as George W. Bush‘s Clear
Skies Initiative, which, while ostensibly wishing for
clear skies, proposed legislation intended to weaken
Environmental Protection Agency restrictions on
power plant emissions. There are likewise the
certitudes of what is to be wished for in the skies of
shadowless days such as those in Flannery
O‘Connor‘s ―A Good Man Is Hard to Find,‖ in
which Hiram and Bobby Lee, pistols in hand, stand
―over the ditch, looking down at the grandmother
Illustration VI. Architect‘s
rendering of the excavation
of the tower foundations at
Ground Zero. [Permission:
Studio Daniel Libeskind]
who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with
31
Evelyn Erskine, spokeswoman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, quoted in Anemona Hartocollis, ―9/11
Relatives Oppose Plans to Put Remains in Museum,‖ New York Times, April 3, 2011.
21
her legs crossed under her like a child‘s and her face smiling up at the
cloudless sky.‖32 Then there are the certitudes that were lodged during many
years in the clear skies that radar guaranteed over what was then the Ground
Zero of Vietnam, where, by 1973, B-52 Stratofortress carpet bombing had so
harrowed a region the size of Massachusetts that a pilot described his work
as ―expensive plowing.‖33 But since the certitudes of those radar clear skies
were controlled from an invincible seven-mile altitude, the details of the
plowing below were confirmed only at debriefings, which were not always
grim: ―One briefing officer informed a crew, ‗Yesterday, you guys wiped
out 600 people, two bikes and a camel.‘‖34
And then there are the certitudes available on days marked in aviation
terminology as ―severe clear,‖ which was the report broadcast from airport
towers on the morning of
September 11, 2001, when
anyone in lower Manhattan
facing unimpeded, crystalline
skies had no alternative but to
see what was coming. One
journalist, writing in 2008 for
Forbes, explained that this is
why ―for many of us, the
Illustration VII. B-52 Stratofortress.
crisp blue sky after a
32
Flannery O‘Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1977), p. 22.
33
Quoted in Daniel Lang, ―Going to Work over Ground Zero,‖ New York Times, January 2, 1973.
34
Ibid.
22
thunderstorm always harkens us back to that hard September day.‖ 35
Aztec precision/Never forget! The slight distinction between the
journalist‘s stylized but decisive ―harkens us back;‖ between her memory of
the ―crisp blue sky‖ of ―that hard September morning‖ and the reverie of the
indubitably expected crisp blue skies under which Ground Zero is now being
constructed, is that the architectural plans were predicated on the assumption
that the only way to come to terms with an
intolerable memory is to wipe it out of
consciousness. Here the architectural plans
reiterate the nationally chorused ―Never
Forget!,‖ omnipresently asserted on truck
decals, lapel pins, and flags. Collectively this
Illustration VIII. 9/11 Never Forget pin,
designed by Steven Singer.
chorus alerts to the same fierce aversion to
remembering to which President Obama drew national attention by insisting
this past May in his speech in jubilatory celebration of the assassination of
bin Laden, as if it were a day of national emancipation, and pronounced in
the grave diction of red herring, that, ―When we say we will never forget, we
mean what we say.‖36 There is nothing important except by way of
forgetting.37 And out of the love of the past, and knowing that the dead are
gone, there is no need of any pledge of allegiance to their memory. Memory,
35
Debra Burlingame, ―‗Severe Clear‘ on 9/11,‖ Forbes.com, September 11, 2008,
http://www.forbes.com/2008/09/10/terrorism-anniversary-pentagon-oped-cx_db_0911burlingame.html.
36
Barack Obama made the statement at a New York City firehouse before attending a wreath-laying
ceremony at Ground Zero following the death of Osama bin Laden. ―The President in NYC: ‗When We
Say We Will never Forget, We Mean What We Say,‘‖ White House Blog, May 5, 2011,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/05/05/president-nyc-when-we-say-we-will-never-forget-we-meanwhat-we-say.
37
Adorno, Minima Moralia, find.
23
at this level, is involuntary; there are no memories of this kind that one can
be obliged to have—other than as they serve tactically to block out the
memories that are actually occurring and that in terror must be sequestered
outside of consciousness. If memory does not start and stop—and it does
not—knowing what it is that we are remembering certainly does. The
problem, then, is not the effort to remember, or any obligation to memory, as
the hucksterism of September 11th insists from all sides. The obligation, on
the contrary, is to master the past: to know what we are remembering. For it
is only in the mastery of the past—mastery as emancipation rather than as
the domination of nature—that our passé impensable, in Beckett‘s words,
would become thinkable. 38 The remains of history are full of memorials,
while the past itself remains withheld.39
Touchy point. So, to get to the point, which is a touchy one: What is it that
we are now remembering without being able to bear the thought of it? It can
be named as what has gone utterly unspoken: It is the catastrophic
humiliation in the experience of the intrusion on the country‘s own lands and
people; nothing less than the obliteration of the nation‘s claim to be the
center of the world as a world of commerce with the world in debt to us; a
blow that was inflicted calamitously and triumphantly with the nation‘s own
proud but stolen machinery. The reason, then, that the humiliating calamity
of the event has itself now been matched in incalculable magnitudes by the
wars that the attack occasioned, is that, in the need to drive an intolerable
38
Beckett, Le Depeupler, last page, I think.
39
In this recognition Adorno conceived of the possibility of an emancipatory memory not in terms of given
memorials, somehow improved, even with names that glow in the dark, but in a concept of beauty as it
became its modern concept in the vertex of the archaic. As Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory, beauty can
only mourn for the sacrifice that it demands, as the measure, at an absolute distance, of sacrifice as all that
history has ever demanded.
24
event out of consciousness, the only adequate power is the force of reliving
it. And because fantasy—and these wars are fantasy—cannot be quenched in
reality, there is no possible end to them other than how they will finally
disappear into history as new impulses for the next wars.
Luminescent wound/ Badge of glory. Thus the light presumed on any next
September 11th at Ground Zero—the light of that ―crisp blue sky‖—begins
to demonstrate a recognizable logic, even if this is the logic that ultimately
denies meaning to history. For if on some next September 11th the light rays
of the refulgent facades do in fact obey Libeskind‘s exacting divination and,
as he predicted, at the very instant at which the second tower once
collapsed—at 10:28 am—the gathered public were indeed to witness a
―dramatic and sharp ray of light defining the southern elevation of the
Wedge of Light plaza‖40 or of a new transportation hub instead—that searing
light cutting across Ground Zero will demonstrate what the massive labor
going on there now has undertaken to accomplish: the reconstruction of an
infliction such as for eons people who have undergone a terrible defeat have
blindly perpetrated on themselves. The need for this infliction defines the
unconscious rhythm of history by which history continually subjugates itself
to the dynamic of its own unconscious impulse. The damaged glory of the
land must be redeemed from its humiliation tit for tat with pilots whose own
last words exalted, ―god is great!‖ If the names of our heroes, those who
were drawn or rushed into the vortex, are to outlast theirs, we must discover
and repair where we failed and draw nearer in triumphant solace to deity as
nation than they.
40
Quoted in Wyatt, ―Spotlight Is on Wedge of Light.‖
25
We have long known how to proceed in this competition. For throughout
human history the nostrils of the gods have flared most broadly over bloodsoaked fields: Waterloo, Gettysburg, Megiddo, Verdun, Ground Zero. As
Walter Burkert, the anthropologist of civilizational sacrifice, writes, ―The
worshipper experiences the god most powerfully not just in pious conduct or
in prayer, song, and dance, but in the deadly blow of the axe, the gush of
blood.‖ The dead are rescued to the deity qua nation only as sacred, and they
are sacred only as what has been willingly sacrificed, that nods in
affirmation of what is next, a deed so fundamental that, in one sense, there is
no other way to act, or to understand action. Sacrifice so profoundly
structures history that etymologically the verb to act turns out merely to be a
decorous expression for the necessity of sacrifice. Burkert confirms that the
words themselves—to act—―merely cover up the heart of the [sacrificial]
action with a euphemism.‖41 The heroic ideal of praxis, as the urgency to do
whatever it takes so long as the political deed gets done, is the political
euphemism for the compulsion to do all that history has ever done. Rather
than praxis as such being the defining moment, the break from the past
ushering in the new world, it is what should be done, as we are still able to
hear the nature of modal obligation in the English—should—implied in its
archaic origin in the German Schuld, the one word—debt and guilt—still
defining the parameters of possible action: If the sacrifice is not to turn
nugatory and grow cold; if, in the argot of history‘s own commanders, the
―sacrifice of our troops must not be in vain,‖ so new troops must be marched
into battle over the bodies of the dead and the sacrifice repeated, a reasoning
41
Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans.
Peter Bing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 2, 3.
26
that anyone can trace in having heard one president and the next—Bush and
then Obama—intone on the sacred necessity of the ongoing surge.
It may then someday happen, despite the intensifying amorphousness of the
seasons, despite the autonomically inhaled residue of industrial combat,
which is now our breath, that some next September 11 will turn out to be as
brilliant a fall day as one might dream of, and that the assembled public does
witness some variation of the prophesied ―dramatic and sharp ray of light
defining the southern elevation of the Wedge of Light plaza.‖ And if so, they
will participate to the exact second in a fantasy inhabited by a scheduled
remaking of the catastrophic day, bringing it down on all heads, the wound
reinflicted, in sacred confirmation of never knowing what has happened. The
audience may well be fascinated by the sight. For the power of the
unmastered past to cast its riveting fascination is never greater than when it
is again calling for its hecatombs.
Read all about it/Sacrifice and abstraction. The labor undertaken now at
Ground Zero is claimed by steel-workers on the job to be the world‘s largest
single construction effort. That in itself—if only the compensatory
grandiosity of the claim—might inspire astute thinking about what we
suppose is occurring there. But all the same, wherever one touches on the
monumental construction, however one approaches the site, writing about it
included, one is obliged to yield up in sacrifice and add another numb layer
to what has already been said about it. This stunned absence of immediacy,
the subjective failure in considering Ground Zero, can be understood in
terms of the primacy of an object that proscribes its experience—of
experience in the emphatic sense of knowledge of an object from within.
This prohibition at Ground Zero is exercised most of all by the Freedom
27
Tower—the plaza‘s reverberant presence—which is said to have been
designed in symbolic likeness to the Statue of Liberty. But it is the
divergence between the two edifices that best articulates the transformation
that the United States has undergone in the past decade—at the same time
that it indicates the impoverishing taboo on understanding this
transformation effected by the new construction.
There, then, is the Statue of Liberty, the receptive figure and nurturing
strength of a woman—her breasts broadly draped, poised frontally toward
the sea, one arm holding up the torch of enlightenment, illuminating the way
for the fleeing and needy, the other cradling a tablet with the date July 4,
1776, as the idea of the revolution, and with broken shackles of slavery at
her feet. This figure, we know, would not possibly stand off of the Protestant
shores of the United States if another nation had not presented it to us. But
while the Statue of Liberty became a
symbol of the claim of the American
Revolution to freedom and
democracy, there are no symbols at
all at Ground Zero but only things
said to be ―symbolic‖: at the Tribute
WTC visitor Center there is the
featured ―collage of photographs and
symbolic objects‖; there is the
―perpetual scrolling of names‖ on the
video monitor, which looks exactly
like a perpetual scrolling of names,
minus the perpetuum; there is the said
Illustration IX. Statue of Liberty in Paris before
being prepared for transport. [Albert Fernique]
28
―symbolic‖ light waiting to be added to the always luminous reflections; and
the name of the Gateway to the Memorial Experience, already states prior to
any visit all that any visitor might ever experience there.42 Every aspect of
the site invariably presents the literal sign of a sign that strictly amounts to
the further mastery of an abstraction.
Illustration X. The Freedom Tower—in the distance—as modeled on the upstretched posture of
the torch-bearing Statue of Liberty. [Permission: Studio Daniel Libeskind]
In this regard as well the Freedom Tower can hardly be said to resonate
symbolically the cradled image of the American Revolutionary War. The
building is a monument to the identity of commerce and the extraction of
sacrifice—and nothing else—mounted on a twenty-story concrete blast wall
perimeter, eight feet deep; the next eighty-two stories, offices located above
the weather and serviced by super-accelerated elevators, are plated with a
skin engineered to spring back imperviously against any attempted
penetration. The buildings $2 billion expenditure has been cut from other
42
Quoted in ―Tribute WTC Visitor Center: Galleries and Tours,‖ printed pamphlet (n.d.).
29
things to provide millions of square feet of office space that will go empty in
exalting the tower‘s own stature. The 104-story building, a sealed control
claustrum, is keyed to the American Revolution exclusively at the stated
elevation of the tip of its spire—situated with brochured fanfare at 1,776
feet. There the date of the revolution functions solely as a mathematical
index to the altitude at which the tower successfully overreaches any other
building in the United States and dwarfs the Statue of Liberty. The tower‘s
height thus translates a symbolic figure into literal physical dimension. The
values of generosity and charity that the nation‘s Enlightenment founders
claimed as their own, and which were intended to displace the feudal values
of dependency and obedience, are superseded by the factual claim that being
largest is the only value worthy of acknowledgment.43 But for anyone
wanting to comprehend this development, the effort to do so is necessarily
absorbed back into a restatement of the object‘s own monumentality;
whatever there is to comprehend involuntarily becomes a legitimating
sacrifice to a barely unconscious enthrallment with the vast blast walls, all
that is piled on top of them, and the building‘s secret skin. The level of
abstraction in the construction of the Freedom Tower—freedom as the literal
number of feet to be counted in the elevation of a tower—itself impoverishes
whatever could be written about it, as it means to and someday will the city
around it. If the United States has not previously looked like Tenochtitlan, it
now begins to.
Self-inflicted Memorial. September 11th, 2011 was the decennial
anniversary of the attack, but no less the public dedication of the memorial
at Ground Zero. It may startle to realize—as a measure of the loss of
43
See Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992).
30
historical depth of field—that the dedication of a memorial prior to the end
of the conflict it memorializes is extraordinary. Consider that the public
dedication of the memorial at Pearl Harbor took place more than twenty
years after the attack, long after armistice. Not one person in attendance at
that ceremony was frisked and no one watched the horizon for a new
appearance of Japanese planes. At the memorial service at Ground Zero, this
past September 11th, every single person passed through metal detectors and
submitted to complex security measures. The pretense of the memorial
dedication that the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were something
apart from the destruction of the towers that initiated those wars, was given
the lie by a city population that on that day felt tense anticipation at the
sound of any distant siren.
It is thus as a sacred, commercial memorial that Ground Zero presides at this
turning point in modern American history in commemoration of conflicts to
which no end is envisioned. And insofar as the public dedication day‘s
prolepsis has not been remarked, it is no less a memorial to the social
dynamic that consumed the possibility of recognizing what has transpired
and, with that, the civilizational hope of centuries that civilization itself
would mean the waning of destructive conflict. The present as the vertex of
the archaic may be more than an image. For if sacrifice originated in an
infliction imposed on the self to survive what had just befallen it, to harden
itself against it—the event in which, in Adorno‘s speculation, the self was
primordially constituted—then Ground Zero, in memorializing an
overwhelming crisis, prior to the end of the conflict it commemorates,
founds anew an archaic social order. It is a primordial voice that announces
a claim to an end of conflict and no less asserts that the conflict is without
31
end. What remains are fantasies of manipulation all of which are reveries of
omnipotent sacrifice, every sacrifice always bringing an end to what there is
no end to, whether the fantasies are technical, theoretical, commercial,
financial—or, the topic here, architectural. 44
“Masterpiece at Ground Zero.” A visit to Ground Zero today would
demonstrate that much of what has been written here would not meet the test
standard of what can be seen with one‘s own eyes. Take one detail, the
Gateway to the Memorial Experience; it vanished from the site plans and
was never built. And the Wedge of Light Plaza, hardly to be passed off by
this author as an oversight, since it is the center point of this entire
discussion, itself was never built. Libeskind‘s firm was replaced by a new
architectural corporation, and the Plaza was displaced by Santiago
Calatrava‘s transportation hub. What has been so closely discussed in this
essay, as if, in Adorno‘s words, ―layers have come into our field of vision
that were hidden,‖ turns out to be a vision constricted to elements of a past
abandoned years ago, fantasies, bare origins and intentions. Didn‘t Nietzsche
properly characterize these figments of mind—in his positivist mood in
44
Background to this discussion is in Donald Winnicott‘s Playing and Reality. A passage bears the closest
affinities to Adorno‘s theory of the history of sacrifice and the critique of instrumental reason. As a theory
of fetishism, it might contribute considerably to Marx: ―As a denial of separation string [in the case of a
child he was working with] becomes a thing in itself, something that has dangerous properties and must
needs be mastered. In this case the mother seems to have been able to deal with the boy‘s use of string just
before it was too late, when the use of it still contained hope. When hope is absent and string represents a
denial of separation, then a much more complex state of affairs has arisen—one that becomes difficult to
cure, because of the secondary gains that arise out of the skill that develops whenever an object has to be
handled in order to be mastered.‖ A further discussion of this string would make an important addendum to
Marx‘s ―Chapter on Money,‖ in the Grundrisse and provide another dimension to the idea of unsatisfiable,
false need in terms of a theory of fantasy. Playing and Reality, ―Transitional Objects and Transitional
Phenomena,‖ p. 19.
32
which one can sometimes overhear the big guns of heavy German
industry45—when he wrote that all great ideas have a ridiculous origin?
Illustration XI. The National September 11 Memorial, New York City, designed by Michael
Arad. ―A Masterpiece at Ground Zero,‖ New York Review of Books, October 27, 2011.
Photo credit: Steven Rosenbaum/Getty Images
The National September 11 Memorial, New York City, designed by Michael Arad
But in accompanying the prize-winning architecture critic at the New York
Review of Books—Martin Filler—we have eyes to see with. One month after
the decennial anniversary, Filler wrote a closely observed report on what is
now to be seen at Ground Zero, ―Masterpiece at Ground Zero.‖ 46 There he
found that mix of pros and cons in which reality is reasonably secured by a
ratio that confidently knows one hand from the other, and how they are
related. On one hand, Filler admires Santiago Calatrava‘s transportation hub,
45
Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie,
46
Martin Filler, ―The Masterpiece at Ground Zero,‖ New York Review of Books, October 27, 2011, no. 16,
pp. 8-10.
33
especially for the architectural plans, which evoked ―doves of peace in
flight.‖ On the other hand, ―budget cuts‖ have ―clipped the plan‘s wings‖
and the building will ―more likely resemble a skeletal dinosaur carcass.‖
And again, on one hand, Libeskind, with his strange ideas, is thankfully no
longer the project architect. But on the other hand, there was no turning back
on the 104-story building. While it was discovered that the construction of
this, the most expensive high-rise ever built in the United States, was being
―illegally financed...through steep increases in tolls and commuter fares,‖ a
class action suit has been filed to recapture the funds. If much was wrong,
things are being set right. And altogether a plus is that what was ―once
called the Freedom Tower,‖ has been ―given the more market-friendly
moniker of One World Trade Center,‖ and the building ―retains the symbolic
1776 foot height.‖ One hand and the other.
What Filler holds most deserving of appreciation at the memorial site is
Daniel Arad‘s ―Reflecting Absence.‖ This is the ―Masterpiece at Ground
Zero.‖ The reader joins Filler as he arrives at Arad‘s memorial after passing
through a corridor of security devices. Filler notes, with an element of
dissociation, that the metal detectors, body frisks, and ―conveyor belts for
personal property scans,‖ are exactly the same as found at a ―a postSeptember 11 airport.‖ The approach to the memorial ―verges on black
comedy,‖ he writes, though certainly without meaning comedy in the sense
of ―funny.‖ But the black comedy in any case vanishes from mind as one
proceeds with Filler to the memorial pools themselves, now built into what
were formerly the twin foundations of the former World Trade Center
Towers, each 176 feet square. The setting is of ―classical Japanese gardens.‖
And the memorial pools themselves are ―so ideally balanced that they might
34
have been determined not by the disaster but by an environmental sculptor
of uncommon talent,‖ reminiscent of Joseph Alber‘s Homage to the Square
series, in monochrome. Surrounding the ―diaphanous waterfalls‖ is a waist
tall encompassment with bronze panels bearing the names of the thousands
of victims ―with the letters cut through the bronze, so they can be backlit
after dark.‖ Never forget. But when the thousands of names inscribed
become too much to bear, as they did for Filler, ―your eyes rise up to the
buildings that surround the memorial. But in purely architectural terms
[writes the architectural critic of purely architectural concerns] it is a sorry
sight: not a single building of any distinction is to be seen in any
direction‖—certainly not the ―104-story behemoth once called the Freedom
Tower.‖ Yet, Arad‘s masterpiece knows to triumph. In its abstract design,
being rid of representational imagery, every visitor, he or she can find his or
her own story in the vision: it allows ―visitors to project onto it thoughts and
interpretations of a much more individual nature than if the memorial had
been laden with prepackaged symbols of grief.‖ In the pursuit of happiness.
The writer David Simpson also made his way through ―the obligatory
security screening‖ to ―Reflecting Absence.‖ He too has eyes to see with. He
found himself by the southern most pool ―in a state of shock.‖ What he
assumed ―would be a decorous burble turned out to be a raging torrent…the
water roars and deafens—like jet engines up close.‖ The sculpture is named
Reflecting Absence, he remarks, but ―this pool does not reflect.‖ Where
Filler saw Joseph Alber‘s square in monochrome, in Simpson‘s eyes, the
pool produces ―absolute vertigo,‖
The noise and speed of the moving water is mesmerizing but threatening; the pool is
much too turbulent to reflect anything; and at the center of the pool there is another
35
vertiginous drop into a black marble-clad shaft whose bottom is just out of sight.
Standing beside the pool, I felt drawn in, tempted to destroy myself.
Has there been a failure of imagination?
Could this be the planned effect of Arad‘s design…or is it an unintended consequence of
the failure to imagine how a maquette turns into built space?
All that stands between the beholder and a 30-foot drop are the bronze
panels with the names of the dead. The guard rail of names causes Simpson
to wonder if his safety has been assured only at a cost,
I found myself tempted to speculate on the juxtaposition; have others died to keep me
safe? Am I to think that they are still presiding over my safety by keeping me from the
edge, standing up for the principle that there have been enough deaths already?
But is the principle that there have been ―enough deaths already‖ the same
that ever and again demands more deaths? The Wedge of Light Plaza was
never built; its eccentric origins are gone, but Simpson recognizes a
tendency in the material,
Does the continually roaring water capture the noise of the planes as always on the verge
of impact? Is what is to be remembered…the split second before present life turned to
death for those who were hearing similar noises and, perhaps, in a few cases, looking out
at oncoming and irresistible power?‖
The memorial relives what is always occurring as the obliterative occurrence
itself,
Does the memorial in this way function as a counter-monument, a harking back to the
split second before the tragedy, a re-creation of what it is like to be alive but knowing for
sure that death is upon us? If so, the memorial did its job, as I found myself imaging the
position of the victim, beyond affirmation or denial of anything, terrified but then
subsequently aware that I really could just walk away.47
47
David Simpson, ―Short Cuts,‖ London Review of Books, November 17, 2011.
36
Illustration XII. Wall of photographs at the Tribute WTC Visitor Center. ―Remembering September 11th,‖
Boston.com, September 11, 2009.
[Scott Lewis]
Two bicycles and a camel. The wall-long collages of photographs of the
missing and murdered at Ground Zero ask eye to eye, ―Who will remember
my memories?‖ But with eyes averted from the homogeneous fascination of
these photographs, it is possible to think that all that is left to respond to the
question that the photographs pose is a nation in which dispossession has
become the fiercest form of possession. There have already been ten million
home foreclosures, with that many front doors, through which one can guess
that at least thirty million people will have passed, also wanting to know,
―Who will remember my memories?‖ And who will remember the memories
of those whom the nation killed, tortured, and falsely imprisoned since the
opportunistically deluded wars that the calamity of the towers‘ destruction
unleashed? And what is there to remember? The war in Iraq alone has
claimed what has been responsibly estimated, by some, as more than
151,000 lives, and no less responsibly estimated, by others, as approximately
37
1,033,000 lives, which not least of all means that, apart from who will
remember their memories, not even the bodies can be counted.48 And whose
memories were those two bicycles and the camel? In a human history of
unthinkable effort, labor, fright, and suffering, the only memory at all left to
be remembered by the tens of thousands of people left stranded, staring at
the heaped debris of what took lifetimes to build in the wake of this year‘s
unprecedented storms and floods, is already the memory of life only as the
memory of a sacrifice that came to nothing. But if meaningless sacrifice
could instead be recognized as the needlessness of sacrifice, known as what
the toll is; if the meaninglessness of eons built on the infliction and
reinfliction of sacrifice were perceived, even if in this perception the
memories of the heroes must reawaken in human pain, there would be the
slight possibility of knowing what has happened, as what we might survive.
48
The estimate of 151,000 deaths, from March 2003 through June 2006, is based on the results of the Iraq
Family Health Survey, conducted by the World Health Organization. Iraq Family Health Survey Study
group, ―Violence-Related Mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006,‖ New England Journal of Medicine 358
(January 31, 2008): 484–93. The estimate of 1,033,000 deaths between March 2003 and August 2007 is
based on the results of a 2007 survey conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB), a British polling
agency. See http://www.opinion.co.uk/ Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=120.
38