9/11 Response (Cody): The Problem of "Tragedy"

As noted by the various articles and media sources assigned for tomorrow’s discussion, the events of September 11, 2001 were “tragic”—this day now marks the nation’s “tragedy.”  A scholar like W. B. Worthen would have us believe that this appellation of “tragedy” is just and perhaps constructive—that it “forces us to ask what our role in this spectacle and its resolution might be, how we may be transformed by the action, and what that acknowledgement might cost us, as individuals and as a nation, even as citizens of a postmodern, globalized polis” (“Forum on Tragedy” 100).  As Worthen subsequently concludes, “No consolation, just catharsis—the recognition of tragedy will take some time.”  While such an statement is certainly provocative from the standpoint of theatre and academia, arguing whether the Aristotelian aesthetics and poetics of “tragedy” can account for real world, catastrophic events seems to preclude many of the finer, political and pragmatic issues surrounding the events that occurred on this day and, perhaps more importantly, how the various political and media “performances” shaped and continue to shape our collective memory of this event.

With regards to Worthen’s conclusion, one of the first questions that comes to my mind is why should we, as American, be entitled to feel or experience any catharsis for the events of 9/11?

If we look at these events as a “tragedy” and, therefore, relevant to issues surrounding theatre and performance, we are immediately setting ourselves up as isolated and innocent spectators, who are able, without vulnerability, to consume these public spectacles, internalizes them, empathize (at a distance), and then finish off with an emotional release.  In effect, by viewing this event as a “tragedy,” we immediately assume no part in the event’s (etiological) existence.  We inevitably distance ourselves from the spectacle, even if, at first, our empathy allows us to "imagine" our presence in the images on screen.  As such, we absolve ourselves of any and all sociopolitical or socioeconomic (i. e. capitalistic) responsibilities.  Instead of viewing the attacks as systemic—as incited by a larger, complex structure of geopolitical relations, oppression, and domination—we view the attacks as “personal,” as a unilateral attack by the “Third World” Other on the American Ideal, on “our” way of living.  Thus, “tragedy,” by virtue of catharsis, becomes a means of self-pity and self-victimization.  Furthermore, as Taylor writes, “tragedy assures us” that “the crisis will be resolved and balance restored.  The fear and pity we, as spectators, feel will be purified by the action” (“Lost in the Field of Vision: Witnessing September 11” 261).  As such, tragedy (in a non-Aristotelian sense) becomes a narrative of heroism and of “justice”—though, mind you, these notions are merely phantasmatic since, as we have seen with our response to this national “tragedy,” we, the “victims,” have merely restored our dominant role as victimizers.

Additionally, as Taylor equally points out in her essay, the discourse encompassing tragedy is unsettlingly exclusive, that is, only certain catastrophes can be deemed or can reach "the tragic."  And, certainly, various ideological state apparatuses (in this case, primarily the media) consciously constructed/performed this atmosphere of 9/11 as "the tragic."  As we know, theatre and comedic performances were banished during the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and, in their place, the media bombarded audiences with nationalistic and patriotic (dare I say jingoistic?) imagery—for example, Taylor notes the New York Times headline which read “Bush tells the military to ‘get ready’” (244).  However, would our memory/memorialization of 9/11 be different if, say, images of the Towers and “Ground-Zero” were juxtaposed with images of “ground-zero” at Hiroshima and Nagasaki post atomic bombing, if Bush’s command for the army to “get ready” were juxtaposed with images of Afghani villages wiped out by unmanned drones, if images of our suffering citizens were juxtaposed with images of the exploitation and slavery of women and children in sweatshops in Southeastern Asia for our consumeristic benefits?  My point is, we reserve “tragedy” for personal catastrophes that are the most visible and that this understanding of 9/11 as exemplarily “tragic” is buttressed by the performances of ideological apparatuses, particularly the media, who chooses what is and is not to be made visible.  Essentially, the latter seems to be Dario Fo’s point when we wrote in the New York Times, as cited by Worthen, “The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills ten of millions of people with poverty—so what is 20,000 dead in New York?” (qtd. in "Forums on Theatre and Tragedy" 100).  The tragedy of “20,000 dead” is a "tragedy" because of presence and visibility (i.e. media performance), not because of some universally inherent essence of "the tragic" found in this event.  No one, in common discourse, speaks of the tragedy of slavery and racism; the tragedy of weapons of mass destruction; the tragedy of imperialism; the tragedy of sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism; the tragedy of capitalism—and yet, millions die yearly in the name of these repressive discourses and institutions. 

Accordingly, this semantic difference as a larger ideological performance seems to greatly influence our collective memory of the past.  The latter issues mentioned are merely misfortunes that quickly dissipate within the 24-hour media cycle, only to be mentioned again when additional bloodshed befalls us.  However, I would like to believe that performance studies offers us another outlet for agency and systemic change other than an Althusserian notion of a never-ending cycle of the reproduction of the relations and conditions of production.  My hope is that Jill Dolan's or José Muñoz's theories on the utopian aspects of performance could possibly offer such a constructive, or even subversive, outlet--as potential sites of anti-hegemonic resistance that attract a larger shift in collective conscious and memory.  For Muñoz, the performance of pedagogy becomes one such potential site, and he writes that "[p]edagogues must offer their students much needed critical tools, practices of thought that will allow them to face the present and embrace a better place and time, a future that is not structured by the violent asymmetries that led to the attack of September 11th and the devastation that followed" ("Forum on Tragedy" 123).

Works Cited:

"A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy In the Wake of September 11, 2001," Theatre Journal 54.1 (2002).

Taylor, Diana. "Lost in the Field of Vision: Witnessing September 11." The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003).