Blog Prompt 4: 9/11 Role of the Witness

Particularly in the first two-thirds of Taylor's article, she struggles with her role as witness. She discusses the sense of displacement, of distance she felt from the public discourse. She and the others who hadn't lost anyone but who lived in New York were suddenly outsiders. "If this was a tragedy, we were not recognized as participants," she reflects (243). In all our talk in class about the role of the spectator/witness, we have yet to read a piece from the audience's perspective. This is as close as we've come to an audience member demanding what Brecht demanded as well; he wanted the performance "to have a socially practical significance" (122). Taylor and her peers wanted to be socially practical.

The formula should have been perfect. As Andrew Dickson writes in his piece on Rupert Goold's play, Decade, the attack was al-Quaida's performance: "an attack meticulously planned for live TV, a supreme, shocking piece of political theatre." This should have worked. The performance was offensive, it assaulted the senses (Taylor remembers the smell, sounds, feel, and atmosphere), it was performed naturally, and the audience was ready to be reflective, changed, productive. But no. As Worthen says in the "Forum on Tragedy,"earning our place in that tragic spectacle... isn't easy." 

Taylor walks us through the role of spectator in the days after 9/11: trying to help, trying to donate blood, trying to find the lost, trying to give monetary support, trying to be a part of it. In the end, she felt powerless. She simply photographed, as did everyone else.

Those of us not even in New York, not even old enough to vote, what were we? "It's always possible that there's nothing to learn about ourselves here, no recognition," Worthen posits then abandons. Cody asks the question, "Why should we, as Americans, be entitled to feel or experience any catharsis for the events of 9/11?" 

Like John Stewart, I wonder if perhaps my memory of that day is as superficial as eating cottage cheese under my school desk while people suffered outside my school walls (his memory of the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot). I was not the audience here. I was not the spectator. I am reading the archive of a performance that, while it certainly affected my world, was not performed in a theatre where I was present.