Remembering, Reluctantly

As we put together our syllabus for Introduction to Women's Studies, my colleague, Susan, noted that we would be teaching today and wondered if we perhaps should set aside some time to talk about the events of September 11, 2001. Of course not, I replied. September 11 is a forced memory, a manipulated event to inspire fear and racism and to attach people to an illegal war.

It may be all those things.

But that's not all it is.

And I say this not simply to recover the momentary sense that the market isn't everything, that it can be stopped--as it was for the rest of that week. Rather, I say this because I had not considered the differential effects of the event on people who were young at that time and what those effects might mean for politics.

Our first-year college students were in seventh grade on September 11th. Some described confusion, not really knowing what the World Trade Center was. "It's the Twin Towers," was offered as explanation, but one that didn't explain very much. Some described schools that didn't tell them anything and the fear that arose as hysterical parents came to pick up their children, leaving those who remained wondering what had happened. And some described sitting in classrooms in front of televisions as their teachers cried and panicked--"they are bombing all the cities on the East Coast--we're all going to die!"

A number of the women in our class broadened their recollections of the event. They mentioned the humiliation of racial profiling in airports on class trips. With quite pride they told us of their fathers, firemen who "went to September 11th to volunteer, to help." They spoke of conversations whispered in hallways, "that boy's father died." They voiced fear of the armed soldiers in airports, they everywhere those first months, and the reassuring calm of mothers promising that these were the safest of times to fly.

And some told us how they grew up. Encountering the confusion and helplessness of the adults around the, they acquired a knowledge that grown ups might not be able to protect them, that there are things that we do not know and may not understand. And rather than responding by embracing something like fate or authority or cynicism or despair, as have too many American adults, who should have known better, these college students are okay with the knowledge they gained about the world as seventh graders. For most of the women in our class, their confrontation with vulnerability and limitation seems a new opportunity, an opportunity to act and move. They don't expect invulnerability, predictability, and certainty. They know the world isn't like this. Knowing this, they expect the possible of themselves.

And anything is possible.

Comments

[badiouian]

I think what you are trying to do is what Badiou calls the naming around the event. You are trying to see how, when the market stops, we are exposed to the other side of ontology-- and new truths are produced. For the truth to live on you have to name it.
But this is a misguided attempt at naming for a few reasons. First of all because 9/11 was the opposite of an event. Secondly and relatedly, because calling 9/11 an event ignores what Gibson calls the "indeterminacy" or the time in between, and uses the sophistical rhetoric of eventitude to butress the monsterous state.
First of all, how was 9/11 not an event? For someone my age to say that is outright heresy-- every novel reviewed by Kakutani seems to be the author's post-9/11 meditations. From Claire Messud to Don Dellilo and into the world of Art Speigelman, did anyone NOT respond to 9/11?
To butress my first claim I will shift immediatly to the second one-- calling 9/11 an event is sophistical. For Badiou the "state" is something displaced by the event. Namely, new politics arise to radically reform the state. The truth procedure of art, as Gibson argues, is more about the in between times than about the radical politics. So the fact that the literature has faked an orgasm can be dismissed-- they are still describing the same pre-9/11 reality, but with a sort of angsty backdrop of hand wringing about the darker skinned folks. The event of politics, meanwhile, seems far far away. Even the supposed Democrats want to continue the way of counting established by the state without acknowledging its own unnamable, in this case (and this is explicit Badiou) the san papiers, mexican immigrants, and generally the nameless people who are included under the term "disenfranchised"
In a speech I heard from Badiou he said that we need a politics with less of a fetish for numbers and more of a fetish for poetry. A politics, he argues, which names the unnamable. If I am correct about the post-9/11 turn in literature then this need has not been met. Indeed, the opposite is true, as the dominating features of the state have colonized the poetic landscape. Badiou sees humanism as an affectation of monsterous capital. How is Claire Messud ruminating over psuedo-intellectuals having sex while watching the towers fall not part of this same affectation? If infinite alterity is just what exists, then even those who protest Abu Ghraib and other abuses (can I put Agamben in this category?) are still not radical enough.
If you talk about 9/11 do it mournfully. Lament the event that was not and resolve to continue on towards the event that must be.

[Seb]

RE: Growing up... once when I was in a state of classic teenage despondency, I asked my mother if "it ever gets any easier." Without missing a beat, she replied matter-of-factly, "No." I can't tell you how much grief & lost sleep this one-word reply has saved me in the time since.

One side-effect of the "growing up" force-fed to kids by 9/11, though, is that they fuckin' scare me, man. Honestly, there's a recklessness to a portion of the youth these days that I don't know existed before, and it kinda terrifies me. (Older friends have confirmed that this isn't just my paranoia.)

As for 9/11 itself... if it seems like an "event that was not," that's because, for everyone outside of NYC, it didn't really. All the reactions expressing the uncanny observation of something "like out of a movie" had a lot to do with the fact that we DID witness it all like any other silver screen disaster, yet somehow had to convince ourselves that THIS time, the shit was real. But it wasn't - not for those of us didn't cough on the chalky, asbestos-laced air wafting across the Hudson.

The comedian David Cross has often performed bitterly vindictive bits about the "ownership" of 9/11 ("Do you think the employees of the New York New York Hotel in Vegas... FELT it a bit more than other Nevadans?"), but he does have a point. As much as it's bandied about as "America's tragedy," it isn't.

As a result (and I'm kind of loathe to put it this way), 9/11 has become the nation's favourite rape fantasy. For those who actually experienced it, their reality will always bear a schismic scar. But for everyone else, all we're left to do is ruminate, imagine, enjoy the "faked orgasm" in our impotence (no pun intended) to (re)live the event. I agree with Badiouian that most, if not all, of so-called "post-9/11" culture fails to reflect any new truths. But how could it, really?

(That's an honest question. If anyone has an answer, please, speak up. Heck, I can ACT like a junkie going through withdrawal 'cuz I watched "Trainspotting," but that doesn't mean I know what it IS to be a heroin addict.)

[Jodi]

These are interesting responses. For now, I have a question for Seb: why is mediation and lack of immediate presence separate from actual experience? Why not view mediated experience as itself experience. At the risk of invoking what is by now a cliche, it strikes me as a little too metaphysics of presence to premise feeling on 'actually being there.'

So, my students described the effects of how the day and weeks that followed were mediated and their responses to this mediation on others and on themselves. My colleague described the first 10-15 minutes of television as so filled with shock, profanity, screams, confusion, and falling bodies as to create its own impact. I was in Vienna and part of the experience for me was and remains indelibly connected with other aspects of separation, isolation, being apart (I was going through a divorce and my family sided against me; no one called me to connect). At any rate, I don't accept the idea that the only experience that matters is one that is somehow immediate--everything is mediated and we respond to mediation.

[badiouian]

My fiancee just pointed out that Badiou's truth procedures correspond to the LAPS test of what is or isnt pornography!
Literary, Artistic, Political or Scientific value.
Although AB has indicated that there can be other truth procedures (he wants to include the psychoanalytic-- imagine what this would do to porn!)

[patrick j. mullins]

"At any rate, I don't accept the idea that the only experience that matters is one that is somehow immediate--everything is mediated and we respond to mediation."

Of course, the mediated one also matters, but it is not the SAME as the non-mediated one, and it is not true that 'everything is mediated.' I'm mostly with Seb on this, because the falseness was that yes, you could call it an 'Attack on America' as CBS did, with Dan Rather crying on one of the talk shows, but I mentioned in the thread the other day that the sympathy from the rest of the country was apparent, if superficial, and definitely full of jouissance at New York, with its swagger (you can find this sort of thing in the opening of Mike Davis's 'Dead Cities', although it's of no interest to me to hear such things anymore: The way I see it 'So we got the swagger? and you don't like it? Then KILL us already? Till then, shuddup, or go talk to somebody else...), getting a check on its center status. (I should include, while I'm thinking about it, that it is rarely noted that the attacks only made New York enormously more famous, and discussions of the NY/LA competition which went back to early Woody Allen, ceased and crawled back into crevices without daring the slightest whimper--although I did get a drunk in LA in late 2005 who gave me a sermon on how nobody cares about New York and its subway strike, that it was ONLY L.A. now. The irony in this is that New York got a fame boost, but not a boom boost--but neither did L.A. continue to gain. The frightful horror, nearly impossible for me to assimilate, is that Las Vegas has become the boom town, almost as if the sister city to Shanghai.)

I find the Badiou talk about 'event' to be quite barren and useless, I can see nothing in it whatever.

What has happened of interest to me in writing is that there is now appearing in fiction--I'm thinking right now of DeLillo's 'Falling Man' and Gibson's 'Spook Country' which thwarts some of the 'end of history' things that are very prevalent in the various rehashings of everything, in the forms of merchandising in every possible salable form--of a movie, for instance, or music--so that there is never one or even just a few versions of something. There's even been the re-appropriation of everything old at much greater speed. The tendency to be unable to create new work through the increasing opacity I used to notice more in the Broadway theater, where there were more and more revivals and then spinoffs of other television things, etc., that changed the whole dynamic of that form. But even the traditional things are released, as books, for example, in as many collections as possible.

That's part of it. But a mediated experience as being as profound as the non-mediated experience would need to mean that a far greater reality of hyperreal had truly taken place than has. The various kinds of talk of 9/11 'made for TV' is actually proof that to actually see it off the TV was important and opposes a virtual 9/11 in the same way as virtual sex is not the same thing as physical sex--otherwise, give up your partner's body and just get on one of the sites where a chat roomy says, all of sudden slyly 'Cam?'

All right, I'm going about this rather obliquely, but if my point is not understood, I expect to go on living. In any case, the DeLillo novel, by far the greater of the two, is very adept at placing history AS IT WAS in the years since 9/11, so that for those of us who always live with the image of it pretty close at hand can see how, as in the description of the little boy who in the first months talks about 'Bill Lawton' (Bin Laden), gradually forgets about it, and new developments that we all knew were happening in real time, such as anti-Iraq War marches taking place, and people dying of natural causes is carefully pointed at the reader, because, for example, within the hour after I saw the North Tower fall, I saw a woman go into a doctor's office for her regularly scheduled appointment--and it seemed strange. And I found that I wanted these new strange sensations coming out of the experience for it to make sense to me. I only saw the woman go into the doctor's office because half an hour after the second collapse I went to the barber and got a haircut. My roommate went to Cafeteria Restaurant in Chelsea with her boyfriend that afternoon, and complained that the waiters didn't like them because 'we weren't gay.' She was forced to go to work at her children's shop the very next day. When the networks went back to regular programming, I watched an afternoon soap for the first time in decades for a few days. No attempt was made to include anything with the attacks as context, although they were filmed during the first few days afterward (Big Brother did show a scene of the 'house guests' being informed of the attacks--I recall that one of the girls seemed to linger on 'Pennsylvania' even though she was not from there.)

This point is important though. No matter what people say should have happened or not as a reaction to 9/11, even the wrong things proved how stimulating, to put it in neutral terms. it was. Almost everything has reacted to 9/11 and continues to. And even though 'the end of history' was already being talked about for some time, 9/11 gave this a new hue and what was come up with was new shapes of history. Because talk about equality doesn't have anything to do with what really did happen, even if it has to do with what should happen, according to some criteria. For example, the 'non-reality-based community', which could be the Bush Administration among other things, was able to develop itself due to 9/11 quite thoroughly and continues to do so. One can lament this, and one ought, because it truly is quite 'wrong', at least much of it including the Iraq part is. But that it has happened is a fact, and one of the things that the sensation of a 'post-9/11 world' seems to have as a very pronounced characteristic is that there DOES seem to be a post-9/11 world--even if it's proved to be 'artificial' that doesn't really matter much if the effects are still so powerful.

[sixfootsubwoofer]

Today I passed through the WTC train station and a guy tried to sell me a 9/11 flip book, showing the planes flying into the buildings and the subsequent collapse. I was struck with a paradoxical impulse to both punch the guy and to have the disgusting object as an ironic plaything. When I looked around myself at the billion or so tourists at the site, I noticed no one seemed to think the book distasteful, in fact I saw a few of them buying it.

Badiouian- This is a bit off-topic, but I've been planning on taking on "Being and Event" this winter. But, being an autodidact, I was wondering if you could name a few books that I might read in preparation? Is it hubris for an autodidact to take it on?

I've searched around the net for syllabuses for classes on "Being and Event", but havent found anything of much use. I'm brushing up on Hegel, Rousseau, Deleuze and Descartes, and I've procured some Liebniz and Spinoza. Anything else I should get?

I've read more than a few articles and essays by the man. His "Theses On Contemporary Art" solidified much of what I've been thinking for years, and I'm very excited to dig into "Being and Event". But I've learned from reading Zizek and others that going into such a massive tome unprepared can be tough going.

BTW, why don't more universities put their syllabuses online for free? I find this a little alarming.

It's not like I couldn't just stand outside Columbia or NYU and persuade, charm, or seduce a student to let me run off a copy, but I was hoping someone here could save me the hassle. A few aqcuaintances I have seem slightly offended when asked for help by an interloper.

[badiouian]

SFSW I am not an expert
but Peter Hallward, Badiou: a subject to truth
and Andrew Gibson, Beckett and Badiou have both been helpful
How wise is it to go through EE in one sitting? I dont know as Ive read different parts; never the whole thing.
Do you know ZF set theory because I sure cannot help you there, though Hallward gives basic summaries and bibliographies.
Since Hallward is cheaper and more useful I would say to let him be your friend and then maybe look at EE. From your posts here it seems like you might enjoy Ethics more than EE, so that might be something to consider as well. Also smaller books like St Paul can give you entree into the system even if they dont recapitulate the whole picture like EE does. In any case I wish you luck and invite you to consult with the owner of this blog and other scholars who are more qualified to discuss these issues than me. And make sure to look at Hallwards bibliography, which is useful as anything.

[sixfootsubwoofer]

Thanks, badiouian. I'm taking your advice. See you on the other side....

[Seb]

Man, am I glad Patrick's around to make my arguments with far greater immediacy & depth than I could. What he said!

Now, I will admit, Jodi, that there are two things colouring my reactions to 9/11. The first is that I'm a notoriously bad empath. Just the other day, I stepped on the social landmine of admitting that I DON'T support the troops. Not a wise thing to say when you're trying to make friends. I have a tendency to internalize, which by definition means I extend no emotional volatility to include those around me. Perhaps I'm just a callous bastard.

The other factor is my cynicism. While I don't question the validity of any of the myriad of subjective experience, I also don't accept them as all being equal. To quote Patrick directly, "Of course, the mediated one also matters, but it is not the SAME as the non-mediated one, and it is not true that 'everything is mediated.'" Part of this has to do with my disgust at how so people have ghoulishly tried to one-up eachother's 9/11 experience: "Omigawd, if I was still going to Barnard, my dorm would've been, like, right there!" "Yeah, well my dad knows someone who died!" Blah blah etc. Yes, I was spooked and confused like everyone else, but there's no way I could claim to have been viscerally changed the way certain people could. Hell, if you want a perfect example of how mediated experience can produce rather invalid & misguided reactions, I've got two words: Toby Keith.

[Jodi]

But the non-mediated event or experience is not identical to itself. I mean this in 2 ways. First, Patrick's own examples are of people reacting differently--the woman who goes to the doctor etc. Second, the mediation becomes immediately part of the event for those in NYC, different parts of NYC, as well. Their reactions and responses and feelings are not only to the planes crashing into the towers and the towers falling, they are also to the capturing and replay of these images, the meanings made and failures of attempts to produce meaning connected with the event, the NYT coverage of the stories of the victims, the emailing and blogging of the event and their responses to it.

[Seb]

I had taken that into account: that, for example, someone watching the towers fall from atop their apartment on Flatbush in Brooklyn would have a different experience (mediated by physical distance) than someone running for their life on Murray Street. Again, I'm not trying to act as an arbiter of the truth of one subjective experience weighed against another. But what bothers me about the way people discuss 9/11 is how it becomes this pageant of emotional toil: for whom was it the most affecting? And I think some gradient of grief, some scale of trauma needs to be acknowledhed, because it didn't actually hit MOST people as hard. I include myself in that, as I was sitting in the student commons of a Toronto campus, but I also include every hawkish pundit who sat miles away in some studio or office, and I include every macho Bush-voting roughneck who watched it on TV from the sunny climes of the south.

So yes, I'll concede that, by virtue of the fact that we are all distinct beings reacting to different conditions & stimuli at every moment, every experience IS somehow mediated. But then it HAS to be true that some experiences of an event (or "happening" or symbol or however you prefer to name it) aren't as traumatic as others.

[Jodi]

What does your trauma gradient prove? Venality and exploitation of an experience are not necessarily factors of physical distance and proximity. Not everyone in a camp became a Muselmann, not every survivor was a Kapo. Those who are abused as children have different reactions; some remember, some repress. I don't think a trauma gradient or scale or authenticity meter is helpful here. But, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief and ask: how would such a measure or gradient be produced? who would establish what would count as pure authenticity or what the signs of authentic trauma are? and, if we have such a gradient, are we in a position to tell people who might speak of their experiences that they aren't traumatized enough?

To my mind, the perception of the need to establish authentic trauma is linked to the presumption that there is a politics that can be grounded in experience alone, that experiences prove or lead to a specific politics. This was a debate on several blogs--K-Punk, Antigram, Pinocchio Theory--during the summer. My skepticism toward an authenticity meter--my experience is more Real than yours--is connected with my rejection of the notion that experience can ground politics.

[Seb]

"how would such a measure or gradient be produced? who would establish what would count as pure authenticity or what the signs of authentic trauma are?"

I honestly don't know. And while I believe that certain experiences produce tendencies towards certain politics, it's true that there is no provable formula in terms of a political cause-Vs.-effect. Your skepticism is well-founded.

A lot of my thinking on this matter stems from a frustration that the oft-cited "lessons of 9/11" are patently false and misleading (or misled). The wrong people make the wrong claims from the experience. The whole thing reeks of missed opportunity - for what exactly depends on what goals are in mind, but for it all to have produced a lot of useless hand-wringing and not a lot more is infuriating.

I can't remember who, but someone mentioned shortly thereafter that this marked the emergence of a new breed of terrorism: one that didn't make explicit demands, but rather acted out of a visceral need to make America (the paramount of power, luxury, media, commerce, etc.) suffer. Obviously, there are specific ends Osama bin Laden has in mind, and he's said as much, but again there's been quid pro quo explicitly offered. (E.G. "Shut you Saudi bases, and no more car bombs.") Perhaps my attempt to guage the Realness of various Americans' experience of 9/11 is rooted in trying to assess whether or not the attack was, by terroristic standards, a "success."

[badiouian]

SFSW; when you are done with Hallward (or read it twice, as I did) maybe we can do EE together, if you are really in NYC. Or perhaps some shorter newer stuff; I want to look more at St Paul, not to mention the Century, which looks awesome.
Would be great not to talk to the wall.

[patrick j. mullins]

"Perhaps my attempt to guage the Realness of various Americans' experience of 9/11 is rooted in trying to assess whether or not the attack was, by terroristic standards, a "success.""

Which it, of course, was--and hugely. I see that Jodi used the term 'mediation' more generally and yet more subtly than I had originally thought. But talk of an 'authenticity meter' can only be answered with giving a rough one: Those who died in the attacks have the most authentic experience of it, and you've completely left those out of the whole business. Secondly, those in the buildings who got out probably come in 2nd. DeLillo is very sensitive to this kind of persons, and there is a very poignant romance between two people who meet in the ensuing weeks as a result of a briefcase one of them took coming down one of the stairwells and brought it back to its owner--their bond could not be understood by anyone else as they began to try to heal their wounds. Thirdly, the people in the most immediate area who had to run out of the area through the smoke--I had two friends who did this, including one who ran up to my apartment, and another whom I spoke to on the phone that afternoon and sounded as if nothing of much importance had happened despite the fact that she couldn't see where she was going--she has not even noticed that she has never recovered at all over the years. The first friend had been at the American Stock Exchange and had to go back to work there in one week. Maybe fourthly, those who saw the planes hit or photographed them like the Daudet Brothers, who are the only ones to film the North Tower hit, and/or were close enough to see the flaming buildings and knew from the radio that people were jumping and tried to make out the bodies but weren't quite close enough, like me and another friend, but also lost someone in the attacks; there are several versions of this. Fifthly, everybody else who could at least see the buildings from a distance in the city, and finally--everybody else in the city and one more--everybody else in the world. Your point about the way it affected different people in the city is excellent, but that also proves that a trauma meter, if you are going to use a term that almost reminds one of L.Ron Hubbard's e-meter, is in form of question that must be answered.

Holocaust survivors with the most authentic memories are obviously those who escaped from concentration camps, although even they are not as authentic as the ones who died in them. Those who have seen 'Judgment at Nuremberg' or 'Schindler's List' or 'Lucie Aubrac' (like me) do not really register on the Holocaust Trauma Meter. Zizek's statement that 'it is a blasphemy to compare the 9/11 attacks with the Shoah' is quite crude: It is not so much that it is inaccurate, but that it is moralizing, meaningless, and rude--to both events.

There is natural human tendency to 'own these events' on the part of those close, closer, closest, etc., and you needn't expect them to cede any territory to those wanting to make some smart new formulations about them. And even though I know what Seb is talking about with those people who said things like 'what if I had been in such and such a place'--yes, it's all very banal, but all very human too. The manager of Windows on the World restaurant whom I knew rather distantly, slept late that day, only to find out later that he had survived the attacks but that all of the people who worked for him were dead. Maybe you don't like to hear any more of these firsthand stories, but they are there. And there are still remnants of what can be called a 9/11 Folk Culture in the immediate area. One of the most beautiful (to me) is the reconstructed Globe Sculpture, perhaps 95% intact, in Battery Park, which used to be in the World Trade Center Plaza. I finally got down to see it only a few weeks ago when I also saw 7 World Trade Center, and was astonished at how little press it's gotten--most New Yorkers don't know that a whole new building has been finished, that's incredible. I had worked at the World Trade Center in 1988, and once I sat by the Globe Sculpture in the Plaza and had two Bass Ales at my lunch to relieve the trauma of having a temp job as a file clerk. One of my coworkers reported this to our supervisor, who questioned me 'have you been drinking?' I told her no, since it was certainly nothing that would make incapable of the extraordinary challenge of packing up Shearson Lehman files to send off for storage in Piscataway, New Jersey, but she said, in Jamaican bureaucratese "You stink of drinking!" So I told her I was quitting, not liking to be told I stank. She said 'we are adults, I have the right to tell you if I find something about you that is offensive'. 'In that case', I said, 'I smelled your breath the other day and I found it offensive!' She said 'I WILL CALL YOUR AGENCY!!!' I said 'You go right ahead.'

Anyway, Jacques Derrida, who is of little interest by now to me, did talk about 'cinders' in writing about the Holocaust, didn't he? And Zizek then does write about 'the New Yorkers' and the way they held on to the smell of the death smoke as part of the experience.

What you seem to be describing here comes across as a strange combination of wanting to minimize the importance of the attacks and the 'bigness' in which the day continues to bask even without nearly as many mourners at the site this year, while also wanting to claim an equal authenticity of the 9/11 experience in something of the same way Sontag tried to do it (admittedly, you are incapable of being purposely offensive yourself, so don't take that too seriously; I wouldn't even be talking to you if I thought you reeked of Sontagian tendencies); people do have more 'traces' of experiences than others do. To take an easy example, I cannot have as authentic an experience of raising kids as you do: I haven't done it, and you have. You know that this serious matter of daily parenthood is a part of everything you are, and I don't know anything about that. Which doesn't minimize your own actual experience in Vienna--but the attacks mark even that, because you remember it well, and I can certainly sympathize when family won't understand your position in vital personal moments such as a divorce.

One of the singular difficulties of 9/11 is that it really won't be put in a category that includes any other event (I'm going to call it that, given that it's such an innocuous term, without caring what Badiou wants to go on and on about. There are plenty of others, but any of the quotidian ones ought to do, and long discussions about why 9/11 was an event or was not an event are of interest to no one who has any real understanding of the serious nature of a situation--it is just talk, as I see it. If I'm wrong, just ignore this and keep talking about it, as I won't discuss things I find as silly as that. Peculiarly, I haven't read a single thing by Badiou that impressed me at all--especially not that artistic manifesto, which is typical of non-artist smart people pontificating to artists. So that this singular category for 9/11 is proved, though, about equally by those who hold its memory sacred because of their closeness to it, and also by those who 'just wish it would go away' and take its place beside 'other terrible events.'

[badiouian]

patrick, Badiou is not unavoidable-- even according to his own calculus there will be people who see his stuff and not useful, and that is ok.
Although for 9/11 it is a rich and productive way of looking at things.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

"are we in a position to tell people who might speak of their experiences that they aren't traumatized enough?"

Perhaps, if they ask it in such a form, we may do so with or without being in a 'legal' position to do it, as it sounds a bit supercilious. I'm guilty of doing this sort of thing when somebody else has suffered a tragedy more. But this happens with all tragic events, and I recall the strangest thing in the NYTimes a few months after the attacks, and this referred to the families of the survivors themselves and the sense of SCORN and social excluding they felt. I hadn't thought of this, because although the attacks are in a sense always with me, having had the buildings in view of my apartment for some 25 years, and now the blank space--but that's not the same as those who had people incinerated, of course. So again, the 9/11 families themselves have the more authentic experience, and why would the terminology matter really? It's obvious that they understand the horror better than those who were distanced, just as a person with a physical deformity definitely understands it better than the one who pities him or even adopts or funds him, etc. And the adopter or funder does not NEED to understand it that way--he/she needs to keep walking and using his hands even if the thalidomide child has grossly malformed arms and legs that are useless or whose hideousness have excluded him completely from normal life.

Of course, I am not nearly 'traumatized enough' by Iraqi deaths, whether of Iraqi civilians or American soldiers, because I am not so close to it, and do not pretend to be able to empathize at great distance in a very emotional way with nameless abstract people. Of course, if my nephew, a paramedic at one of the bases, gets killed, I'll be able to feel it a bit more in the skin, and not even particularly because people on one of the Socialist blogs do a countdown and cheerleading section with each new American soldier killed in Iraq. So in another sense I don't think people further from the event are not 'sufficiently traumatized', and I am glad they are not. Would we be better off if everybody was constantly traumatized as are the 9/11 families, Anne Coulter's obscenity the other day notwithstanding, this lowest form of human with her filth? No, and we do not even need to have everybody constantly traumatized about everything. Face it, we need people to still enjoy life even as other people continue to suffer and get killed. That's what's always happened, and life has to go on. It's just usually not said that at some point we all healthily selfishly ignore other people's suffering (because at least somebody is always suffering), blissfully forget it, and go find some sort of enjoyment of life. In that sense, 9/11 is not different from anything else. The difference is in authenticity, which you brought up, but that applies to all situations as well.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

"but that's not the same as those who had people incinerated, of course."

should include that although I did have one person incinerated, I was closer friends with his wife, who would have a more authentic experience of 9/11 than I did. I don't think she's recovered all that well either, but she's younger than the other one.

[Jodi]

Patrick, your comments are really interesting and are giving me pause. I don't know I agree with you, but now I'm not sure I agree with myself, either. Here's what comes to mind, though.

I didn't realize that my comments came across as trying to minimize the bigness or equalize authenticity. In part, my words are unclear because my thoughts are inchoate, messy. I'll try again.

I want to reject any notion of authenticity here (that's the extreme view and possibly too extreme to be useful/interesting). And, I also want to reject the idea that 9/11 is one thing that we can know, define, and pinpoint.

So, I don't think that 9/11 is only the towers crashing down. I am not saying this to minimize or deny the horror, the multiple, differentiated, traumatic effects of this (effects that for some are apparent in their odd absence, like the friend you mentioned who ran to your apartment). And, I'm not saying this to deny the ways in which experiences shared on that day may have connected people unexpectedly and profoundly. There actually isn't one thing that 9/11 is, one frame or image or impact or meaning. For some it is the day a specific person died (for the dead it is also that day, but actually 9/11 doesn't mean anything to them now because they are dead; this sounds awful, but the authenticity question doesn't apply to them, I don't think, because they are not party to the discussion, they are like the black holes whose pull shapes the discussion). For others, it might be a day that they sat on a tarmac wondering what was going others.

Again, at the risk of being all jumbly, what is at stake, what is achieved by ranking the experiences or interpretations in terms of authenticity?

I like your point about not everyone can and should be traumatized--I fully agree. And, it is clear enough that people react differently to different suffering. Yet, it isn't always like that, is it? There are priests and physicans and philanthropists and professors who seem more compassionate/passionate about the suffering of abstract others far away even as they remain oblivious to the feelings of those closest to them.

[badiouian]

Why do you call it mediated? It was immediate experiance of the tv 9-11 or the brooklyn 9-11. Why does death or suffering convey authenticity? And if so, didnt Mohammed Atta have the most 9-11ish 9-11 of all, what with crashing the plane into the building himself?

[Patrick J. Mullins]

"Why do you call it mediated? It was immediate experiance of the tv 9-11 or the brooklyn 9-11. Why does death or suffering convey authenticity?"

People tend to think death and suffering conveying themselves are quite enough, and we are discussing authenticity because it was brought up in Jodi's post. That they are 'death' and 'suffering' is a good bit more important than whether they're authentic. But seeing the buildings fall off-TV is more 'pithy', shall we say, has a few more dimensions, shall we say, or do you even want to argue that one gets the full impact of it from television. Do you have Smell-o-Vision? Have you get 3D instant reproductions of the actual sites? Or you coming from some of those religious realms that say that suffering and death don't exist--which might explain why we've both had jobs as cleaners and you 'enjoy' yours, while I thought it was 'suffering.'

Thanks for letting me know that Badiou is 'not unavoidable', I don't think I could have figured out that authentic fact alone. After all, I've heard that no man is an island.

[patrick j. mullins]

"It was immediate experiance of the tv 9-11 or the brooklyn 9-11."

TV experience only seems to be as immediate as direct non-screen-mediated experience. This experience on the internet is immediate but mediated (even if there is a delay, you get the gist; in a chat room room, there's little to no delay. I think you're talking New Age.

[badiouian]

"which might explain why we've both had jobs as cleaners and you 'enjoy' yours, while I thought it was 'suffering.'"
Amazing how we return to the cleaning houses thing. And maybe mine were just less messy or the owners less neurotic then yours.
In terms of mediation, I totally agree with you in the sense of the mediation of the towers falling qua towers falling. But there were other authenticities at play on 9-11.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

badiouian--okay, thanks.