Blog 4-Jenna

As I was reading Taylor’s piece on 9/11 as well as the other material for today, I was reminded of a comment Jess made in class last week about memorials, specifically the new MLK memorial.  During her comment, she expressed frustration with how memorials generalize the subjects they memorialize in order to emphasize the aspect of the subject that the memorializer believes to be the essential element of the memorial. When looking at memorials, Jess wondered if the subjects may have liked pizza or if they were lactose intolerant. She’ll never know. As I was reading Taylor’s narrative of her need to photograph aspects of 9/11, the streets, the people, the buildings, other people’s photographs, I thought, they are erasing the pizza.

I found that the Taylor, Jon Stewart, “Pieces of Paper,” and the sincerity and irony readings held a common thread, the need for containment and framing during moments of trauma. I haven’t caught his sentence in its entirety, but Jon Stewart eloquently stated while apologizing for the redundancy of television that such repetition is “something we do to drain the whatever abscess is in our hearts and move on…but we haven’t been very effective lately.” Taylor similarly described a need for repetition in media when she discussed photography. She writes, “Inundated in images, we created our own. Thousands upon thousands of photographs flooded the public sphere, some highly professional and aesthetically compelling, but many more of them like mine, undistinguished and indistinguishable snapshots of the Towers, the fliers, the memorials” (255.) She spends pages describing the plethora of images that appeared throughout New York City, throughout the nation, within the media. She similarly includes a wide variety of photographs in her article. She writes on page 255, photography “allowed people like me to formulate our own take in response to those circulated through the media. Maybe, too, it allowed us to confine disaster to pocket-size dimensions, 4X6s and 8X10s,” In moments of trauma, “drain[ing] the abscess of our hearts” and “confin[ing] disaster to pocket-size dimension” is the standard way to memorialize the sweeping emotion provoked by moments of tragedy like 9/11.

I agree with Taylor’s questioning of the appropriateness of the word tragedy in situations like 9/11. I agree that the word has become colloquial. Her assessment of tragedy’s aesthetic components is useful She writes, “As an aesthetic category, tragedy turns around the challenge of containment…. Yet, tragedy is not just about containment, it functions as a structure of containment. Tragedy cuts catastrophe down to size. It orders events into comprehensible scenarios. Aristotle specifies that tragic events are of a certain magnitude, carry serious implications, and have an air of inevitability about them…(261).” Art, performance, theatre, articles, and testimonies all function as structures of containment. Using these forms to create memorials erases aspects of events in order to emphasize others. Taylor writes, “using tragedy in its aesthetic connotation not only structures events but also blinds us to other ways of thinking about them” (262). I find 9/11 is a difficult event to memorialize as every memorial seems too small to capture its unbridled panic. Yet, without structures of containment, how can we create the aesthetic distance necessary to process chaotic moments of terror? Jon Stewart mentioned that, “Chaos can’t sustain itself. It’s too easy and it’s too unsatisfying.” While they attempt to control chaos, 9/11 memorials are somehow both too easy and too unsatisfying. They elicit a specific emotion and trap us there. 

When discussing Adam Smith, Davis writes, “A bystander, like an unengaged spectator, does not contribute to making meaning because there is no participation, whereas a sympathetic spectator ‘changed places with the actor though emotional participation” (141). 9/11 memorials attempt to create such sympathy through specifically confined emotional participation- Photographs, billboards, sentences of sentiment. I hope I’m not confusing sympathy with empathy, but could sympathy be the factor preventing 9/11 memorials from escaping the structures of containment Taylor insists blinds us to other ways of thinking about them? Is sympathy too easy and too unsatisfying? I don’t know how to capture the anti-performance Taylor maintains was the connective thread behind the need to capture as many images as possible, the moment of “a click in the face of the impossibility of doing,” but I’m not sure we can find it through sympathetic means.