Issues and problems faced by contemporary world in the Post-9/11 scenario

On September 11, 2001, nineteen young men, most of them from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt, and one from Lebanon, hijacked four US airliners on domestic flights. Then, they flew two of the planes into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, one into the Pentagon building near Washington, DC, with the last airplane, in which a fight between the hijackers and the passengers broke out, diving into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania without reaching its intended target. Nearly three thousand people were killed in the attacks. The suicide bombings of the WTC buildings, taking place in broad daylight in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, were the most spectacular and visible of all. The instantly and repeatedly broadcast images of the planes hitting the towers and the tall buildings collapsing soon became a symbolic stand-in for the tragic loss of that day. What happened appeared like nothing the United States or the world have ever seen (calling to mind, perhaps, and uncannily, only the spectacular special effects of Hollywood disaster movies). What ensued—the various interpretations of the event, its many political consequences, cultural symptoms and social effects—is the general subject of this study. The large number of academic and popular writing on September 11, 2001 proves how every attempt to understand 9/11 as a discrete event inevitably leads to complex inquiries into its meaning and place in history. The significance of 9/11 can, except in terms 2 of human loss, certainly be measured by the impact the event had both on a global scale and in the local context of the US political and legal system. Virtually all critics agree that in both respects the event occupies a significant position. One of the goals of my project is to understand how this position, often described in terms of a "watershed moment" or "turning point," was culturally and politically negotiated and constructed. In order to untangle these complex issues, in which questions of mourning and loss are joined by those of US global domination, I focus on a "9/11 archive" that, while having the September 11 attacks at its heart, also includes some representations of the changes that took place in the country in the aftermath of the event, as well as representations of the ongoing US-led war in Iraq, which was, at least initially, justified in relation to the September 11 terrorist attacks. While the central part of my corpus, which is itself only one segment of the archive, primarily consists of selected literary texts, on its margins it also includes media images, films and works of visual artists. This cultural work, that with various degree of explicitness refers to the 9/11 attacks, needs to be located within the larger 9/11 archive that also encompasses the cultural representations of a post-911 America and its debates about the "global war on terror." These remarks clearly point to the problematic issue of limits that arises when approaching this historical event. The most obvious question, of where and when the analysis should begin and end, mirrors the difficulty of demarcating the boundaries of the event itself. The issue of limits is also ethical, and begs the question of how to approach an event that is fundamentally marked by others' suffering. While I do not pretend to offer definite answers to these problems, I think they can most constructively be approached by way of a layered analytical perspective, that could both set a heuristic framework for the unavoidable sense of expansion of the event and account for its concentric and palimpsestic contexts. The September 11 attacks, the death and destruction of their immediate impact, the modalities of 3 mourning, of the victims, their families, and the nation, the changes in US domestic legislation due to increased demands for security, the globalization of the event's impact through the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—all these inevitably participate in the understanding of 9/11. The interest of this study might most accurately be described as being directed towards the processes through which this disruptive historical event is assimilated in its various contexts, which thus established hegemonic limits to the interpretive horizon of a historical present. Inevitably, representation of violence—or, to borrow the title of Elaine Scarry's influential book, of "bodies in pain"—has been in many ways central to the organization of political space in the post-9/11 United States and informs one of the focal points of this study. The centrality of this topic in the 9/11 archive is hardly surprising, since this was an event of mass violence followed by, at the time of this writing, ongoing wars. However, it is hardly necessary to argue that the forms of cultural representation of violence do not simply reflect a violent reality, but are contingent on governing relations of power and its uneven social distribution. In what follows, I try to take a more specific view on the representations of violence in the 9/11 archive and approach it critically by way of the concept of trauma, a notion that was used variously (and perhaps somewhat indiscriminately) in many depictions of the event. Since talking about trauma means entering a quite large and contested critical terrain, I would like to offer a brief introductory qualification to my usage of the term, with more explanation in the chapters dedicated to the topic. Generally, in my usage throughout this study, the trauma of 9/11 refers not (only) to the physical and psychical injuries of the victims of the attacks, but to a specific cultural encoding of the historical event, or, in Dominick LaCapra's words "sociopolitical uses and constructions of trauma" (2004: 95). Arguing in favor of the pertinence of fundamental psychoanalytic concepts ("such as 4 transference, resistance, denial, repression, acting-out, and working-through") to the study of collectivities, LaCapra has claimed that these "undercut the binary opposition between the individual and society," making "their application to individual or collective phenomena [...] a matter of informed argument and research" (1998: 43). These concepts, with trauma included, are then intrinsically social, since they "refer to processes that always involve [...] orientation toward others" (1998 43). It is this socially, ethically and politically inflected aspect of trauma in its communal inscriptions that I look into in my analysis of the 9/11 archive, as subsequent chapters will illustrate. One of the more general questions posed here is also about the assumption that posits trauma as a foundational event or an originary moment that can unequivocally ground identity. In my view, it is useful to view this assumption in the context of the common conceptualization of violence, by which scar and injury affirm a straightforward materiality of the body, thus guaranteeing authenticity of historical experience. Although it is certainly reasonable to insist on the irreducible uniqueness of such experience, positing its more extreme forms—such as trauma—as the grounds for an isolated subjectivity inaccessible to others is an exceptional political strategy. That is why historical trauma, with its demand for representation of an unreachable kernel of experience, can be compellingly politicized. As the aggressive appropriation of 9/11 by the US government showed, such unconditional politics of violence can easily come to perpetuate violent politics.