Terror in Global Narrative

Representations of 9/11 in the Age of Late-Late Capitalism

George Fragopoulos, Liliana M. Naydan, George Fragopoulos, Liliana M. Naydan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319406534
• eBook ISBN: 9783319406541
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

This is a collection of interdisciplinary essays that examines the historical, political, and social significance of 9/11. This collection considers 9/11 as an event situated within the much larger historical context of late late-capitalism, a paradoxical time in which American and capitalist hegemony exist as pervasive and yet under precarious circumstances. Contributors to this collection examine the ways in which 9/11 changedbotheverything and, at the same time, nothing at all. They likewise examine the implications of 9/11 through a variety of different media and art forms including literature, film, television, and street art.

© The Author(s) 2016

George Fragopoulos and Liliana M. Naydan (eds.)Terror in Global Narrative10.1007/978-3-319-40654-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: “Like an Artwork in Its Own Right”: Artistic Representations of 9/11 in a Late-Late Capitalist Age of Terror

Liliana M. Naydan¹ and George Fragopoulos²

(1)

Penn State Abington, Abington, PA, USA

(2)

Queensborough Community College, New York, NY, USA

End Abstract

Erected amid criticism in a mid-century modernist style and once the tallest buildings on the globe, New York’s Twin Towers emerged as haughty symbols of American capitalism in what Henry Luce deemed the American Century.¹ The buildings officially opened in 1973 and soon came to signify not only the dominance of America’s ideology of exceptionalism, but New York’s emergence as the center of capital’s global reach. The towers survived a terrorist bombing on February 26, 1993, but they would fail to survive a second attack—one that killed three thousand people and one that, according to artist Damien Hirst, held an aesthetic dimension. For Hirst, the attack on September 11, 2001, was “kind of like an artwork in its own right” because the terrorists “devised [it] visually” (Allison). Indeed, on 9/11, with uncanny parallels to the aesthetic features of Hollywood disaster movies that cost exorbitant amounts of money to produce, two planes hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists flew into the north and south towers respectively, and within two hours, both towers collapsed into vast piles of rubble, or the Pile, as cleanup crew members came to call it. What resulted is an iconography that established and continues to establish a connection between the literal and figurative stuff of capitalism and art.

This collection of essays puts capitalism and art into conversation with one another much like the attacks themselves put them into conversation. We consider twenty-first century art as it exists in dynamic interplay with late capitalism and as it persists following the conclusion of the American Century. Authors in this collection come from the humanities, arts, and social sciences, and they contemplate the degree to which capitalism shapes art, is shaped by art, and is critiqued by artists and authors who seek to address ethical, social, and political concerns that are coming to define the times. They focus on the aesthetic products of 9/11, post-9/11 culture, and the global Age of Terror, considering a range of literary, visual, digital, and multimodal texts produced in and by the late-late capitalist moment—a moment at which perhaps everything changes with regard to history and capitalism’s place in it, as Don DeLillo posits in saying that the attacks transformed “the world narrative, unquestionably” (Interview with David L. Ulin E1), yet also a moment at which perhaps “nothing epochal happened”, to quote Slavoj Žižek’s commentary on 9/11 (58). Moreover, they suggest that to represent 9/11—to create some artistic commemoration of it or response to it—artists and authors must observe changes and lack thereof, and they must thereby engage with the sort of paradox that characterizes terror, an act that attempts to reorganize the world order while leaving parts of the world in utter disorder.

The Paradox of Late Capitalism After 9/11

Long after Frederic Jameson published “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” in 1984 in The New Left Review, famously suggesting that capitalism’s hour had grown late, the interplay of American capitalism and aesthetics still in many ways works to shape contemporary art and literature across modes and media. As Jeffrey T. Nealon argues in Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-In-Time Capitalism, post-postmodernism, a term akin in ways to late-late capitalism as we theorize it here, constitutes “an intensification and mutation within postmodernism” (ix). According to Nealon, we do not live at the end of the postmodern or late-capitalist moment, but at a moment characterized by the continuation and intensification of postmodernity and of late-capitalism. Building on Nealon’s argument, we argue that post-9/11 late capitalism—or late-late capitalism—constitutes intensification, yet it also involves paradox. Paradoxically, post-9/11 late capitalism both emerges as fresh and endures as stalwart in the aftermath of 9/11, and this paradox functions as the backdrop for post-9/11 art that is produced about and amid the post-9/11 capitalist times. Furthermore, even as capitalism endures, it has also never felt more precarious, more threatened by both its own forces—such as the economic crises of 2008 and beyond—and forces outside of it—political movements such as Occupy, the indignados of Spain, and even the Arab Spring, an event that may, at first, not seem connected to the rhythms of global capitalism but which is clearly an extension of it. To live in the age of late-late capitalism is to be part of this political and economic reality.

On the one hand, this post-9/11 version of late capitalism emerges as fresh in that the 9/11 novel, to give but one example, arrives and the feeling that things have changed after 9/11 arrives along with it. It emerges in that authors such as Don DeLillo come to claim that we live, now, in an “Age of Terror” (Interview with Ulin 1), and it, too, emerges in that globalization comes to function as a watchword across disciplines. On the other hand, late-capitalism, once such a new phenomenon, endures as stalwart because history is fast forgotten, even when it involves the ever-memorable image of burning towers. As a result, capitalism still very much sets the terms for contemporary art and narrative as artists and authors aim to critique capitalism just as they did in the postmodern period. Just as things went back to a relative albeit eerie degree of normal soon after 9/11 when, in Thomas Friedman’s words, George W. Bush called on Americans to address the shaky condition of the American market by “go[ing] shopping”, art of the twenty-first century does not look too radically different from that of the twentieth, as evidenced, for instance, by Jess Walter’s The Zero, a 9/11 novel that attempts to satirize violent acts much like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 did, but a novel that Jess Walter had hoped would distinguish itself from twentieth century fiction—even if he lacked a sense of how it would distinguish itself. As Walter puts it in a brief entry in “The Zero Journals”, on July 22, 2004, notes he took about his time spent at Ground Zero, “[m]ove past cold war irony and sarcasm to … what?” Whether or not he managed to move past that irony is for his readers to decide.

News media and American government officials likewise helped to shape the paradoxical character that we identify as creating the backdrop for the post-9/11 art that this collection examines. For example, government officials and newscasters alike told Americans that a notably new kind of war emerged after 9/11: a War on Terror, as George W. Bush and members of his cabinet termed it. This war, Bush told Americans, would be a different kind of war, not one fought against another nation or an easily identifiable target. Rather, Americans would fight this war against an enemy that possessed a radically different ideology—one that involved resentment toward American freedoms, hatred of American successes, and anger about America’s standing in the world. Many Americans came to fear a new kind of Other and “a new kind of terrorism”, in the words of The 9/11 Commission Report (71)—a terrorism that came from parts of the world that most Americans knew little to nothing about even though issues involving representations of Islam and Middle Eastern Others have circulated for decades.² A new language appeared in order to represent the features of this new war and this new historical moment. Newscasters used an array of terms and phrases heretofore unfamiliar to many Americans, among them waterboarding, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, drone, al-Qaeda, and Axis of Evil. The Office of Homeland Security led by former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, satirized by John Updike in Terrorist, likewise introduced new terms as it gauged threat levels and communicated them to the American people via a color-coded system. Whether the news identified the threat level as green or red, Americans could know the day’s level of risk. However, much, too, remains the same. A new kind of global War on Terror simply took the place of the Cold War as the mass media fixated on it up until a decade prior to 9/11. Paranoia about nuclear annihilation simply turned into paranoia about terrorist attacks and anthrax scares. Life in ways stayed the same even though a new nomenclature appeared.

Similarly, issues surrounding the cleanup of Ground Zero and the commemoration of 9/11 as newscasters reported on them shaped the post-9/11 paradox to which we refer, and they deeply involved the interplay of the stuff of art and that of capitalism, as much art about the post-9/11 period does. The aesthetic future of Ground Zero—or what it would look like based on some combination of communities’, politicians’, and designers’ decisions—initially appeared somewhat stunted in its obliterated condition due to what the New York Times characterized as “political lassitude and financial squabbling” (“Sept. 11, 2010: The Right Way to Remember” A18), suggesting that everything changed after 9/11 and would visibly remain transformed. But eventually—in 2006—costly construction on the National September 11 Memorial and Museum and the foundation of the 1,776-foot One World Trade Center or Freedom Tower began, and the site and American ways of thinking about it and about life started to show evidence of a reversion toward pre-9/11 ways of being and thinking. To appropriate the young Victoria’s words from Updike’s “Varieties of Religious Experience”, a 2002 Atlantic short story about 9/11 that Updike republished with slight revisions in My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, they do not rebuild the towers “exactly the way they were” in building the Freedom Tower (112), but they opt to rebuild in a similarly grandiose form and in the same haughty capitalist spirit. Perhaps for this reason, the street artist Banksy has called the Freedom Tower “104 floors of compromise” (“Shyscraper”). The tower, in other words, does not break with the old but simply represents a continuation of the past. In its aesthetic form and capitalism-oriented function, it fills the void that the Twin Towers left.

Even the 9/11 memorial that complements the Freedom Tower—two pools designed by Israeli-American architect Michael Arad and dedicated by US President Barack Obama on September 11, 2011, exactly a decade following the attacks—shows evidence of the degree to which capitalism and art interplay with one another in the post-9/11 imagination. The pools commemorate the exact geographic space where the Twin Towers once stood and they showcase the literal void left by the attacks. As New York Review of Books writer Martin Filler suggests in a September 21, 2011, blog post, the memorial emerged as an artistic triumph for the feelings that it produced and sustains the capacity to continue to produce amid the hustle and bustle of America’s financial district. “I wept”, Filler writes about his visit to the memorial, “but about what precisely I cannot say” (“At the Edge of the Abyss”). As Filler continues,

Whatever one’s feelings about the events of September 11, 2001 or their baneful political aftereffects, it seems impossible not to be moved in some way by Arad’s memorial. I came away with the same feeling that overtakes one after a funeral or memorial service for a relative or close friend, even though I knew no one who perished at the World Trade Center, or even someone who knew anyone who did. (“At the Edge of the Abyss”)

Filler’s evocative and at times almost maudlin description of the memorial suggests that Arad “created the most powerful example of commemorative design since Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial of 1981–1982 in Washington, D.C.” (“At the Edge of the Abyss”). Filler’s critical eye focuses on every last detail of the memorial. When writing of the font used for the names of the dead, he says the “names [are] inscribed in Hermann Zapf’s classic Optima typeface of 1952–1955 (an elegant, slightly flaring sans-serif font), with the letters cut through the bronze so they can be backlit after dark. This is a typographic tour de force” (“At the Edge of the Abyss”). Further, he notes that “[t]he names are grouped in ‘meaningful adjacencies’ to suggest comradeship among those who died together at work, as first responders in the line of duty, or as travelers who would never reach their destinations. The ecumenical indifference of fate cannot have been more plainly put” (“At the Edge of the Abyss”).

Yet in a society driven by enduring, near-automatic capitalist impulses, the memorial about which Filler writes with such pathos is unable to escape capitalism’s grip, and like the Freedom Tower, the memorial comes to represent a society that endures as unchanged by 9/11. By May 21, 2014, a museum opened at the footsteps of the destroyed towers to complete the seven-hundred-million-dollar memorialization of 9/11 and to provide further evidence of the Age of Terror’s unique aesthetic character. According to a May 13, 2014, article in The Guardian by Oliver Wainwright, “[s]corched car doors, salvaged firefighters’ uniforms, banners, toys and the hallowed ‘last column’ to be removed from the World Trade Center clearance” appear as “art objects” on display for hundreds of tourists who seek to experience or perhaps re-experience the horror of 9/11. And, of course, no American museum is complete without a fully stocked gift shop. Despite near-immediate controversy because of its “crass commercialism on a literally sacred site”, to use the words of Kurt Horning, the father of a 9/11 victim, the gift shop continues to market its “[m]ugs, T-shirts, scarves and other souvenirs” to visitors willing to pay the price—be it a monetary one, an ethical one, or some combination (Phillip...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: “Like an Artwork in Its Own Right”: Artistic Representations of 9/11 in a Late-Late Capitalist Age of Terror
• 1. Textual Representations of 9/11
• 2. Toward an Imaging of 9/11
• 3. Movie Representations, Tele-Visions, and a Web of 9/11
• Backmatter