By Jenny Edkins, Lecturer in International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK
For me one photograph stands out insistently from the coverage of 11 September. That image is not the aircraft slicing into the towers, nor the collapsing buildings themselves. It is the picture of witnesses to the collapse standing with their hands over their mouths in the face of the unspeakable. They watch with their mouths covered as the impossible, the unbelievable becomes real in front of their eyes.
In London on that day word of what had happened spread quickly. Those who had heard the news were compelled to tell others about it: “They’ve hijacked four planes and crashed two into a skyscraper in Manhattan and two into the Pentagon. There’s a fifth plane flying around with 600 people on board…” It was impossible at first to believe that this was anything other than a bad joke, and then impossible to continue with the mundane activities in which one had been engaged. Outside, London appeared normal, but snatches of conversations overheard along the streets confirmed that the impossible had indeed taken place: “..at least four planes…” “they’ve evacuated the Stock Exchange…” “London is a target too..” And on the train home, the same gesture repeated: people sitting in silence, hands over their mouths, reading the account in the evening paper, thinking.
As war correspondent Michael Herr put it once in his book Dispatches, the thing about trauma is that it just stays “stored there in your eyes.” The traumatic event is one that exceeds experience. It cannot be explained or recounted. It is outside the bounds of language, outside the worlds we have made for ourselves. It can be spoken about, of course, but words always in a sense fail: they are insufficient. And their failure is precisely a failure to capture what is traumatic about what has happened. The way that what happened on 11 September is referred to as ‘the events’ and by reference to the date is symptomatic of its traumatic aspect. To go further, to describe it as ‘atrocities’, or as ‘attacks’, or even as ‘a declaration of war on America’ is to begin to put what happened into a framework. It is surprising how long the designation ‘events’ has survived. It has yet to be superseded by other terms. I would like to suggest that we hold on to that word.
Should we want to find meaning for what happened? Should we settle on a word like ‘attacks’ or ‘atrocities’, expressions that give particular meanings? One source of resistance to this-and equally a justification for it-is a feeling that this would involve admitting the reality of the events of 11 September. There are a number of points here.
First, there is no possibility of denying that what happened happened. Indeed, one of the most shocking things about September 11 was the way in which on that day a new outrage forced its way into the realm of things that exist. Horrendous events were abruptly transferred from the domain of bad disaster movies, fiction and nightmares and, to borrow Primo Levi’s words, “irrevocably introduced into the world of existing things.” In his book The Truce, Levi recounts the emotions of concentration camp survivors on liberation. Their joy was muted; they could not escape the feeling that “the scars of the outrage would remain with [them] for ever.” Once the event has taken place, once the outrage has occurred, nothing can happen that will eradicate it. Human justice cannot remove it. And it is contagious, “an inexhaustible fount of evil” that perpetuates itself in many ways, including the provocation to revenge.
Second, we should perhaps pay heed to Claude Lanzmann’s argument, again articulated in the context of the Nazi concentration camps, that there is an obscenity in the very project of understanding. Adopting Lanzmann’s approach would mean refusing to take the tempting way out, rejecting the leap to understanding and explanation. Understanding would be to slot events into a framework that was too comfortable. There should be no rationale for events so brutal, no way in which we say “Oh I understand how such and such may have led people to commit such a crime…” We should instead, Lanzmann argues, adopt a kind of selective blindness. We should be blind to the overarching explanations that are offered. Instead, we should look very carefully at the reality detail by detail, step by small step. These events happened. We need to know through exactly what small actions or inactions of which people they were able to take place. We need to enquire into the motivations at each step along the way. One of the most interesting documents to surface so far is the ‘manual’ found in the luggage of one of the hijackers-the bag that missed the flight from Boston. The existence of this manual opens up the possibility that the hijackers themselves were used as instrumentally as the passengers. They had been carefully instructed on how they were to face the imminence of their own deaths, step by step.
Finally, I think we can usefully distinguish two ways of accepting the reality of what happened. Of course, the events happened, they exist, we can’t get away from that. We have to accept that they were real in this sense. But what we can do is refuse to admit what happened into the world of our everyday social reality. This is not an argument for closing our eyes to it. It simply means refusing to change our expectations to incorporate it. I know that in many senses this is not possible. We all witnessed what happened, most at a fortunate distance. Many of us know people who witnessed events much more closely, and some know those who did not survive. We cannot forget. But I’m not trying to argue that we should forget. What I would want to suggest is that we try desperately to hold on with all our might to the feeling of utter astonishment, incredulity and disbelief that was many people’s first reaction. In that sense, we shouldn’t accept what happened. We should refuse to admit it to the everyday world of things that exist. In Slavoj Zizek’s words, we should hold on to the fact that this was something that should not happen anywhere.
Television channels replayed over and over again the images of the aircraft hitting the buildings, the scenes of people fleeing, others hurling themselves from the windows, and the final unbelievable collapse. When a traumatic event happens, witnesses cannot tell the story of what happened, all they can do is re-live it, over and over again, in waking flash-backs and in dreams. They literally go through the event again, in real time, without abbreviations or condensations. This it seems is what our television channels were doing for us: an endless replaying of trauma. Why does this happen? The traumatic event is one that shatters our expectations and our preconceptions of what the world is like. Our maps of the world no longer work. Trauma is an event before which old frameworks and old languages stand helpless. In extreme cases, it literally “unmakes” our world, as Elaine Scarry argues in her book The Body in Pain. The categories we had carefully built up for dealing with experience are destroyed by something that goes far beyond them. For that reason, we don’t experience trauma at the time: we see it, but we don’t make sense of it. The traumatic moments then return, endlessly, in nightmares. In these nightmares, Cathy Caruth argues, it’s not so much that we re-live the violence, but that we relive the moment of survival. It is our surprise at our own continuing life that we need to come to terms with. Caruth also argues that “trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures.” We can all recognise, whatever our individual everyday worlds, the traumatic encounter with something that is not encompassed by them.
It was amazing how quickly, and indeed prematurely, there was a move to practices of remembrance. George W. Bush talked of help for victims and called for a moment’s silence even before the third plane had struck. A world-wide three minute silence was called for 11 am on the Friday following the Tuesday’s events. At this point, rescue efforts in New York were still at full stretch, and relatives and friends were continuing to go in increasing concern from hospital to hospital trying to find news and refusing to give up hope. ‘Have you seen’ notices posted by those desperate for information were still appearing across the city; only much later did these become private monuments to the missing. Not only did Bush and other leaders move directly to remembrance, but talk of rebuilding, not only in New York, but of world order too, began straight away. The world was being rebuilt, power and sovereignty re-installed.
Why was this rush to remembrance so hasty? What was it about what happened that prompted this immediate attempt to reclaim control, to take command of the situation? Why was there a feeling at least by many of those at a remove from events that we needed our leaders to lead? And why did they assume responsibility for action with such alacrity? What was it that made statesmen and women take charge of rebuilding our worlds? Is it perhaps that in their instrumental treatment of life the planners of the 11 September events had usurped the prerogative of the state to kill indiscriminately and deliberately in the pursuit of political ends?
The events of Tuesday 11 September were an instance where life was treated with utter contempt. The people on the planes were used instrumentally, as what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’, nothing more. Aircraft fully loaded with fuel were taken and flung into buildings like weapons, disregarding those on board entirely. We do not know whether the demolition of the towers was part of the plan, but if so the office workers were treated as pawns in the game too. David Campbell remarks that the television coverage was characterised by an absence of death. A hallmark of the instrumental treatment of life is that people are deprived of their deaths: they do not die as individuals, their bodies cannot be buried, and their relatives may never find out what happened to them for certain. The absence of death is part of the horror. On 11 September these people didn’t die, they were obliterated. They are the missing.
Those who could reclaimed their own deaths: by telephoning a last goodbye, by leaping from windows, by acts of bravery. The New York authorities put in place a mechanism for relatives to obtain death certificates without producing bodies if they wished. The rush to remembrance-the minutes of silence, the talk of memorials and the religious services-is also in part an attempt to reclaim death. However, in our haste to rebuild, recover and reclaim, there is a risk we lose sight of precisely what is being reconstructed in our names in the face of what happened. The rhetoric of war has always been the rhetoric of the state and sovereign power. The immediate invocation of war by political leaders in the aftermath of the 11 September events was very striking. Even though the idea of war had to be stretched almost to breaking point to be used, it provided the instantly available response. For many, it seemed an unlikely connection, and it was some while before the peace movement responded.
What does remembrance and talk of war do? First and most important it returns sovereignty to the domain of the government and the sovereign state. It re-makes the world as a world of state power. Practice of remembrance play a crucial role in this. The bodies of those killed, and their deaths, are reclaimed. But they are not reclaimed as people, as family members, as individuals with relationships and plans for the future. They are reclaimed in the rhetoric of the state only as bare life, as numbers of missing, as ‘Americans’. What is crucial is that the dead are reclaimed as belonging to the state. This was particularly plain from this side of the Atlantic, from Britain. We joined the numbers game, but our political leaders were particularly interested in claiming numbers of the missing as ‘British’.
The rush to war and the imposition of even greater state control in the name of security is surely not to reorder the world in any new way. As a response to trauma it is perhaps understandable. But if we are to listen to survivors’ voices in New York and survivors from past traumas, what we find uppermost in their minds is a desire not to repeat the trauma, not to impose on others what they are suffering. An alternative response, and perhaps the only response to the realisation that nowhere is safe, might be to insistently carry on with the mundane activities on which we are mostly engaged most of the time: bringing up our children, engaging in small acts of courtesy, living our lives, dying our deaths. Another lesson we can perhaps take from Primo Levi is his insistence that we not disregard the humanity of those who plan and organise unilateral, deliberate slaughters of innocent and defenceless people. Despite their utter contempt of life, they are nevertheless human like the rest of us. If we demonise them we are taking an easy way out. We need to refuse such a facile understanding-and the polarisation to which it can lead-and try to establish, step by step, the details of their guilt.
