Response to 9/11 (Courtney)

What is the temporality of September 11, 2001? In Diana Taylor’s “Lost in the Field of Vision: Witnessing September 11” temporality is one of the primary points at which the ability to process, both intellectually and emotionally, the events of September 11 becomes available. The problem of temporality played out in two different spheres: that of the media coverage of the events and that of the personal responses of the witnesses. In the media coverage during the initial moments of the attack, especially those between the collapse of the first tower and the second tower, “time itself seemed to have stopped, conjured into fixity perhaps by the TV’s invocation of the first strike, then the second” (Taylor 240). Once the towers both fell, the media becomes “trapped in the traumatic loop,” repeating the images of the towers being hit and falling ad nauseum (Taylor 241). As time passed, state ideology as expressed through the media became a matter of grasping to contain time and the succession of events within a pro-USA narrative. The media latched on to certain images--the fall of the towers, processions of male servicemen, groups of mourning women--and repeated them both in the real world and in media representations. In this repetition time seemed to stop and the public media-represented conversation was restricted to these particular topics. At the same time, the site of ground zero became a strange place where time seemed hidden. It was not that time stopped nor that time continued here, but that that space, and the time of that space, were hidden from public view. “Signs went up prohibiting photography near ground zero, which had been turned simultaneously into a battle zone, a crime scene, ‘a tragedy site,’ and a sacred site. The Mayor accused us of ‘gawking’” (Taylor 258). Time in relation to September 11 was inextricably tied to place, and the most important and most hidden place was ground zero.   

But how was the individual witness (whether in New York or otherwise) to make sense of these events? The personal was the second sphere in which temporality became problematic. Taylor describes the feeling of shock and confusion that overtook the first week of the experience. In the broken time of traumatic experience, events failed to have a full or intelligible meaning for Taylor. At the moment of the event, and even in the following weeks, there was never enough time to fully process what had happened.  “I wondered,” writes Taylor, “if my inability to make sense of what I was seeing had been conditioned by the dominance of this virtual repertoire of images, characters, plotlines. I had seen it all before on computer and television monitors. Did this blinding signal the failure of the live as a means of knowing?” (239). Taylor is not the only of these responders to react in this way. Marvin Carlson writes, “I cannot count the number of times that I heard some variation of the phrase ‘It seemed like a film’ from people attempting to articulate their reaction to images of the disaster. Indeed it did seem like a film.” Even in personal experience the language of the media, that of images and film, becomes one of the only significant ways of processing information. This is, I believe, where the power of performance studies and performance itself comes into play.

As Guy Debord wrote in his Society of the Spectacle, “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (12). Whether or not one takes it as far into the bleak projections of Debord, it seems clear that there is something about the contemporary mind that desires to thematize experience, particularly traumatic experience, in the language of the image or film, or in Debord’s language, the spectacle. In this sense, play and performance becomes a way of mimicking the atemporality of the media, an atemporality that is integral to the organization of information and meaning for the individual, without (hopefully) the hegemonic and structural containments of the news media itself. If the spectacle or the image has taken over our ability for understanding, then the theater is the a valuable space for taking back the ability to create meaning. Performance studies and performance theorizations seem aware of this, as many of the astute reactions to September 11 have shown. Theories of performance as a whole also bring attention to the importance of temporality and different types of temporal spaces to epistemology. (Here I am thinking of Bertolt Brecht’s sense of theatrical time, or Peter Handke’s rupturing of theatrical time in Offending the Audience.) The privileged place of time in the theater locates it as a significant site for the exploration of the meanings of real world events.