Course Blogs 4 & 5

 As you may well know, I have been very sick and foggy minded in the last week and a half. I decided to clump these two posts together so I could get them to you all as fast as I could, though I still think I'm late! Everyone else said such engaging things on our readings, though, so I don't think anyone was at a loss for my input.

Since this is extra long, I've put it under a cut

Addendum: Synecdoche not surrogate

I apologize in advance for what is far too long to be a blog post. 

In class today, I broached the idea that perhaps some of the diverse issues we have with taking a critical approach to 9/11 could be attributed to a rupture in Joseph Roach's theory of surrogation. I posit that we may have followed a course of synecdochial behavior instead, and this course is one that does not allow for distance and critical interpretation.

Let me begin with a reiteration of my understanding of Roach (please do let me know if I'm misrepresenting here). He argues that when a society suffers a loss - through death or absence - "survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates. . . . The process requires many trials and at least as many errors" (2-3). When this process is unsatisfactory, "selective memory requires public enactments of forgetting, either to blur the obvious discontinuities . . . or to exaggerate them in order to mystify a previous Golden Age." This process is a continuum and therefore involves steps forward and backward toward forgetting/accepting, toward creating a narrative of the time before the surrogation was necessary. 

Now, let's examine the process of remembering 9/11. As we discussed in class today, there was very little forgetting. Rather, images of the event (Debord-style) were everywhere, leaving the event open, fresh, and unsentimentalized. The memorials were representative rather than replacements: the twin lights shining up, pictures of the actual people who were lost, sculptures of falling people. These weren't surrogates - they were synechdoches. This is even clearer when one considers the fact that actual pieces of the buildings, twisted metal and concrete, were used for memorials around the country. True, there were also images of the first responders, so perhaps my model isn't perfect, but I maintain (with little data at hand) that those images are generally site-specific and represent specific groups of firefighters, specific people. (One exception would be this statue, but as it was commissioned before the attacks and adopted by the city in their honor, I'm not sure it fits either.)

Following this line of reasoning, we are never allowed distance from the event. When we see its representations, we see the actual event, the actual people's images, not their replacements (setting aside the argument that an image is a kind of replacement). Does this constant returning to the day, as opposed to the effects of the day, explain why we have trouble with critical distance? Just consider the way we've named it. We define it with data - the date 9/11 - not with a name like "D-Day" or "Pearl Harbor." A date invokes universality - a "where were you?" conversation. This is opposed to the name of a place, which is only as evocative as how well you know it. 

Harry Elam, Jr., in his entry to the Forum on Tragedy, discusses the fact that many of those who were lost were never found; the site became an actual tomb rather than a memorial (like the Vietnam War memorial, for example). He says that the "visible invisibility of this communal entombment captured our collective sensibilities" (102). I would argue that there is no invisibility - this entombment is always present, always visible. When we visit Ground Zero, we are visiting the dead. To return to Amy's question, I don't know that there is a shared language for such an experience, but if we ascribe to Roach's viewpoint, perhaps we should start with a process of surrogation? Perhaps we should rethink our images of the day not as towers and falling people but as something (I realize this is too vague to be productive) more abstract, yet still respectful and meaningful? 

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.

Blog 4: 9/11 [Sara]

Though many of the readings for today grappled with definitions of tragedy, I was particularly struck by Marvin Carlson's unabashed discussion of genre in the Theatre Journal forum piece. Having only just taught a lesson on genre to my undergraduates earlier today, I, much like Carlson, grapple with the merits of making distinctions between categories of performance that seem, to the average spectator, to be above the realm of categorization. Acknowledging the aesthetic frame that shapes a story often seems, in my students' eyes, as an excuse to pigeon-hole personal stories and make a mockery of "truth" and "humanity" through my heartless clinical detachment. In my lecture I attempt to nuance genre, question its usefulness not only as a tool for script analysis but of cultural study, contrasting the OED definition with the one in our textbook:

Genre, n.
a.  A Kind; sort; style.
b. spec. A particular style or category of works of art; esp. a type of literary work characterized by a particular form, style, or purpose. (Oxford English Dictionary)

“Genre relates to the kind of emotional response a play creates in the audience.” (Wainscott and Fletcher, Theatre: Collaborative Acts 104)

The OED makes note of genre's affiliation with purpose, but Wainscott and Fletcher name that purpose "emotional response." Taking this to heart, I ask them directly:

1. What can genre tell us about the plays that we write [or performances we create] in a given period and their desired effect on the audience?

2. What does that "desired effect" tell us about ourselves as a culture?

In his analysis of the replays of the 9/11 news coverage Carlson seems to pose the same questions, not to students of the theatre, but to newly formed spectators of the 9/11 narrative. As Taylor glibly notes, the yearning for engagement and desire to participate in that narrative transformed many, perhaps against their will, from witnesses to spectators and in that new role they began looking at the television and seeing that what had first appeared to be a tragedy was quickly shifting to something that more closely fit the schematic of melodrama. No sooner had the dust settled and that army of flags been raised to half-mast was President Bush transformed from the proverbial tragic hero with his glaring hubris and (though perhaps yet unseen) fatal flaw to a freshly spangled defender of the united-we-stands complete with white horse and Stetson hat. While so many others regarded the post-9/11 world as being gripped tightly by a moment of "sacred authenticity" or, even the recently minted "New Sincerity," Carlson dismissed this saccharine sentimentality within the year, pointing to genre conventions and the performance frame. He makes note of the role of our spectatorship in a new world order or, at the very least, a return to the Manichean religiosity of the Cold War era. Urging "us" to engage in a little Davis-style theatricality, he poses another question to a country on the brink of a war of false pretenses:

"What will happen to both sides when the clear-cut world of the melodramatic imagination encounters the complex, ambiguous, shifting, and dangerous world of contingent reality that will inevitably occupy our attention for the forseeable future." (Carlson 134)

And now standing on the other side of that war with a decade's worth of hindsight, I say to Carlson, "I'm still not really sure." Although we've traded in one fearless leader for another who espouses "Change," I don't know that much of the narrative has. Living in a world where "General Motors is alive and Osama Bin Laden is dead," one might expect the catharsis that is meant to come with melodrama's promised poetic justice, but still the war in Afghanistan rages on--a bit of background noise in the news cycle that still seems to be pitting the good guys against the bad. Like Carlson, I too feel that,

"What seems clear at present, nevertheless, is that however frequently the term tragedy may be heard today, there is at least so far very little evidence of tragic insight." (Carlson 134)

Perhaps our only Hope of redemption might be to capitalize on the momentum of evil's defeat and shift our genre again. With the introduction of the possibility of marriage equality on the platform this year, we as a nation have an ever increasing chance of making a comedy out of this spectacle after all.

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. 

Course Blog 4: 9/11 and Realism. [Lusk]

I was in seventh grade when September 11th happened.
I went home sick from school early in the morning with a bad stomach ache... due to a history test that I just wasn't prepared for.
The nurses thought that perhaps I was feeling sick because of what happened.
When I asked what happened they told me.
I didn't know what the twin towers were.
And since we take Government in 8th grade, the pentagon was a mystery to me.

I laid on the couch watching the news with my mom that morning.
My mom was quiet the entire time. She wasn't sad. She wasn't angry.
She was confused. I think we were all confused.

The thoughts of, how could this happen?
IS this REALLY happening?
These are things that you just hear about... they don't happen to us.
It was (as Elam quotes Kushner's Angels in America) "very Steven Spielberg".

But this power of empathy Jill Dolan brings up in her article fascinates me.
Because that is not the reaction I had to this event at all. I understood what happened, yes. I understood that this was terrible- that much was clear. But, being such an immature human (development wise) I found my lack of empathy startling. Everyone was having the reactions that Dolan did. They would sit in silence with their eyes fixed on something in the distance, putting themselves in the employee's position, or the flight passenger's shoes. My father became angry with the mere thought of an instant of an impulse that these people had. My mother was frightened for the anticipated retaliation.

And I was still trying to make sense of it all.
I couldn't empathize. I could understand. But not empathize.

Dolan wonders if her training in theatre has conditioned her to feel this way: "Has performance trained me for such painful empathy? Here, I found the world stage the place that drew my subjectivity, that unsettled my presumptive security by putting me in the souls of the dying, imagining their choices, their resolve, their final moments."

What a fascinating thought. Perhaps this conditioning of realism that we discussed in class before, is something that could be harnessed for outside the theatre. Perhaps the method isn't for actors to perform their empathy, but to have that empathy to then understand, and then to act. 

Is there a danger for an actor to act their empathy?
It's true for them, but will it ring true for the audience?
What if one of the survivors is watching this performance? 
How ungenuine would that performance then become, if at all?  

It took several years for me to wrap my head around what happened that day. It took maturing and development. It took the desire to want to know. And the desire to empathize. And I remember one moment, very clearly, that clued me in on that day. 

I was going through my Ani Difranco phase (still am) and listened to her poem, Self Evident. 

It was this performance of her poem that finally helped me understand now what I could not then. It's an angry, upset, sad, regretful, and mournful tail spin of her trying to make sense of what has happened. Her imagery of turning people into poems. To words. To pieces of paper that could fly through the air or get burnt... that was the clincher. 

But, as a performance and a performer, she wanted me to understand what was happening. She wrote her poem with such aggression that she, not only insisted for empathy from the audience, but she demanded it.

But, unlike an actor using the method, she took her empathy for that day, she processed it, made choices of what words to use where, what tone of voice, what cadences the end of sentences should have. And she performed it.

The actor of realism, doesn't take this time to process. Part of the method is FIGHTING that processing. They act. Instinctually. And, for a tragedy such as this on these proportions, I think perhaps that is irresponsible. 

So, not to retract from my previous post on how realism is just the worse, but perhaps there is something inside this method we have yet to extract... and Dolan has found it.
The method is all about empathy. That's what it is. Theatre goers and theatre practitioners though have complicated it. And wanted to make it this system. But it boils down to us wanting to understand each other. Wanting to know what we are all going through. And, I think, the events of September 11th, made us face just how necessary that all is. 

9/11 Response (Whitney) - Can we find a balance over time?

It seems to me that the most useful contribution of theatre and performance to the circumstances of 9/11 has altered dramatically as time has passed from the date of the event. I’m still not sure, as Jess writes in her post, that enough time has passed to truly represent the event through art in any sort of productive, critical, or successful way (I’m not even sure what those would look like). But I do think that there has been a shift in art’s response to the event over the past eleven years.

At first, in the days and weeks immediately following the event, it did seem like “escape” might have been the most useful function of theater and entertainment. But maybe not a normal type of escape – the theatrical trance that Brecht abhors. The escape offered after 9/11, as is evident from our readings for this week, had an important and necessary memorial element to it. The examples from the NY Times article, “Lights On, Broadway Dispels the Dark,” of casts singing songs like “God Bless America” with the audiences before and after the shows, or Jon Stewart’s apology for “another entertainment show beginning with an overwrought speech of a shaken host” – these performances importantly did not ignore what had happened. Rather, they paid homage to the event and the country during the difficult time, but then went on entertaining. Sure, as A-J Aronstein points out in his article on SplitSider, comedy in the immediate aftermath was much more subdued and was grounded in a sense of sincerity that we might not normally associate with it. But Broadway was back up and running in two days. Jennifer DeVere Brody, as she writes in the “Forum on Tragedy,” went to the theater literally the same day she visited ground zero for the first time. I’m not at all arguing that Brody or Broadway are somehow being disrespectful to the sacredness surround the events of 9/11. In fact, I think performance, in the immediate aftermath of the event and because of its acknowledgment of and reverence for what happened, provided a very important outlet for people throughout the country to immerse themselves in sheer entertainment.

Now that eleven years have passed, though, I believe (or hope) we’re starting to gain a different, more critical perspective to the events that occurred. Very shortly after the events, in her 2003 book The Archive and the Repertoire, Taylor points out many of the problematic patterns surrounding the political response to 9/11 – “Women were noticeably absent that first week…Should the instant feminization of loss surprise us? Or the masculinist rush to save the day” (Taylor 244). Similarly, the responders in the “Forum on Tragedy,” published a little over two months after the event, are already able to maintain enough critical distance to evaluate whether or not we should be labeling the event as a “tragedy.”

However, this temporal distance might already be doing the memory of this event a disservice. In her article “The Theater of 9/11,” Diep Tran articulates her response to the “Pieces of Paper” multimedia piece by Michael Simon Hall: “I experienced a quiet thoughtful evening that did not inspire tears but rather, a feeling of wonder; wonder for that universal sense of human compassion and how effective art can be in contextualizing, making sense of tragedy and eventually moving forward from it.” First, I cannot believe that this single piece of performance art allowed Tran to effectively “make sense of the tragedy and move forward from it.” It seems reductive to believe that one piece of art could effect such a transformation. Second, the “sense of human compassion” that Tran describes might very well have been a factor in the large-scale volunteer movements immediately after 9/11 that “Pieces of Paper” memorializes, but by describing this sense as “universal,” I worry that we’re already starting to idealize the national response to the event qua Roach. “Selective memory requires public enactments of forgetting…more desperately to exaggerate [the calamities] in order to mystify a previous Golden Age, now lapsed” (Roach 3). There were plenty of American reactions after the event that seemed to have very little to do with human compassion. Isn’t it equally important that we remember and reflect on those reactions?

It seems important to me that we find the right balance between acknowledging and respecting the personal trauma that we all experienced very directly or indirectly on that day, and maintaining enough critical distance to allow us to use an effective medium like performance to evaluate the political, social, and personal responses in the immediate aftermath of the event. I don’t know that we’ve succeeded in dealing with either of these perspectives on their own as of yet, so any sort of balance between the two is merely a hope for the very distant future.

Course Blog #4 (Derek): Response to 9/11 Performance

A Response to 9/11 Performance, drawing on various texts and personal experience

Derek DiMatteo

Immediately after the events of 11 September 2001, we felt we had to banish theatre and performance, banish comedy and satire, banish entertainment. At least temporarily, during the immediate period of shock. After a short amount of time, we could resume theatre, performance, comedy, satire, entertainment. In general, this was a time when people questioned the appropriateness of theatre and illusion. Why? For one, it was necessary to consume the images of the events that occurred in these two disasters: they were sublime (in the Burkeian sense), and therefore fascinating. How could you watch anything else? How could you tear your eyes away, even if you wanted to? There was the need to make sense of these images. There was a need to consume these images, eventually to digest and make meaning of them. The traumatic nature of the imagery froze us in place, glued us to the television, which burned the sights and sounds of the events into our eyes and into our memories. It was the ultimate example of Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities, everyone scattered around the country watching and reading the same things—but watching to the 10^th degree, for days on end, as the state and the media repeated and re-presented the images to us, over and over again. It was fascinating and unifying, but it was also horrifying.

The images appeared on TV in “a horrifying Baudrillardian example of the real projected as a simulacrum of an already familiar imaginary” (Carlson, 134). The simulacrum was uncanny (in the Freudian sense), which made us uncomfortable—thus the psychological (and superstitious) need to suspend theatre and illusion, lest we inadvertently conjure up more horrors. Along with this fear was also the sense of impropriety of watching or enjoying any type of entertainment (e.g. sitcoms, dramas, films, theatre) in the face of such horrific events and loss of life, which had been so quickly transformed into national loss. I witnessed the same suspension of enjoyment (really more like a self-restraint or a sympathetic self-deprivation) while living in Japan in March of 2011, as the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster froze the nation and made enjoyment improper. Therefore we felt a twinge of guilt when we went about our normal lives and consumed entertainment, far removed and relatively unaffected by the terrible events occurring within our own borders.

As regular TV programming resumed, often it was accompanied by a prologue or introduction acknowledging the events that had occurred, as if to say that the producers and networks were aware of the ambivalence within the audience: the guilty feeling that they shouldn’t be enjoying themselves in a time of national mourning, yet simultaneously desiring something to distract them from—or perhaps searching for a narrative to help them make sense of—the events and their feelings. An example of this can be seen in Jon Stewart’s commentary when The Daily Show resumed—in order for him to begin performing comedy and satire in the usual ironic vein, he needed to acknowledge publicly that he had been affected by the disaster just as much as anyone else. But there is also something more sinister underlying the need for these prefaces and prologues, these acknowledgements and qualifiers: fear of the pillory or worse.

The fear of being pilloried sometimes lies behind behavior we ascribe to guilt or propriety. But this reminds me of one of the differences between the reaction in Japan and the USA. In Japan, there is no history of McCarthyism lodged in the collective memory of, and haunting the collective unconscious of, the class of entertainers and directors as there is in the USA. Writing of the theatre during the French Revolution, Tracy Davis notes that “both dramatic enactment and spectatorial behavior were scrutinized for political conformity” (138). This was very similar to the atmosphere in the USA following the events of September 11, 2001. Thus in addition to the somber mood which precludes entertainment, as at a funeral, there was an underlying fear that anything you say or do could be held against you in the court of public and government opinion, perhaps costing your job or destroying your career. Therefore, Jon Stewart’s opening commentary (when The Daily Show returned to the air after 9/11) not only served to remind the audience that his irreverent satire is driven by sincerity and a desire to effect social change, but also served as a pre-emptive defense against conservative critics (e.g. Fox TV personalities, Rush Limbaugh, et al) who would use any perceived (or spinnable) display of dissent or unpatriotic sentiment as a way to attack and destroy liberal opponents. In his article on SplitSider.com, AJ Aronstein makes light of this perspective, calling it “cynical”, but in fact that is what happened to people who expressed dissenting opinions, including columnists, reporters, and entertainers. By the end of September, there had already been numerous casualties:

"Several newspaper editors and writers across the country have been fired for writing op/eds critical of government policy decisions made in the last few weeks; Anti-globalization demonstrations in D.C. that were scheduled for the weekend of September 29^th were canceled or scaled back; David Horowitz is criticizing students for protesting the war on terrorism and implicitly accusing them of treason; three black firefighters in Miami-Dade county were lambasted in the media for removing a flag from a fire engine to service the ladder; Clear Channel released a list of songs that their radio station program managers were advised to stop playing, including John Lennon's anti-war classic Imagine; Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show were silent and meek for weeks; The Onion waited until September 26^th before lampooning the 'war'" (DiMatteo).

Perhaps Aronstein was unaware of what was happening at the time, or perhaps he had simply forgotten during the ten years before writing his article for SplitSider. It made a big impression on me, however. The example that I will always remember is Bill Maher’s TV show Politically Incorrect and the controversy about his comments about 9/11 which he made on 9/17, his first day back on air. In response to guest Dinesh D'Souza's assertion that people who are willing to die in service to their cause, whatever else they may be, are not "cowards," Maher said: "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly." (Huffington). The controversy over Maher's comments raged both in the national media (several ABC affiliates canceled the show almost immediately) and on college campuses, including at Tufts University where I was a graduate student in the Education Department at that time. The conservative paper on campus wrote an article condemning Maher for his comments, and declared that it was time to re-form the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. Their call to pillory Maher and other dissenters echoed the general atmosphere in America. For the liberal paper on campus, I wrote an op/ed response to their attack on Maher and defended his right to dissenting free speech, noting that attempts to bully people into silence exposes the conservative belief that not all citizens have an equal voice in the USA and that political dissenters should be persecuted. In the end, Maher was fired when ABC canceled his show completely a few months later. The reason was clear to all.

                                                                                                                  

What place, then, for theory within conditions/circumstances like these? Is there any useful contribution offered by Performance Studies or the concept of theatricality? I would argue yes. Perhaps the most important thing that theatricality in particular has to offer is the ability to recognize that we are watching history unfold, as Carlyle does for Davis (132), and that although we may not understand it fully now, we should chronicle what we are seeing in order to later reflect on it more fully, as Taylor found herself doing (Taylor 240-1). When studying the phenomenon of 9/11 (particularly our consumption of media and our performance of patriotism and nationalism), the critical apparatus of Performance Studies brings us the ability to discuss and understand what happened (and what didn’t happen, or wasn’t allowed to happen). It gives us a way to engage with and deconstruct everything that happened. It gives us a way to create meaning. It frees us from our "mind-forg'd manacles" (Blake).

Figure 1. Visualizing the chain of theatricality, from factors to meaning; by Derek DiMatteo.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso. 2006.

Aronstein, AJ. "Comedy after 9/11: Sincerity and Irony." SplitSider. Web. Accessed on 2012.09.08 at http://splitsider.com/2011/09/comedy-after-911-sincerity-and-irony/ .

Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Burke, Edmund. "On the Sublime." The Portable Enlightenment Reader. Ed. Isaac Kramnick. New York: Penguin. 2003.

Carlson, Marvin. "A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy: A Response to September 11, 2001." Theatre Journal, 54.1, Mar. 2002, pp. 95-138.

Davis, Tracy C. "Theatricality and Civil Society." Theatricality. Eds. Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait. Cambridge: CUP. 2003.

DiMatteo, Derek. "In Defense of Dissenting Opinions and Against Homeland Terrorism." Tufts Observer. 3 November 2001.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Trans. David Mclintock. London: Penguin Books. 2003.

Huffington, Arianna. "Land of the not-so-free-anymore." Working for Change. 2001.09.26. First accessed on 2001.09.26 at http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=12014. Accessed again on 2012.09.08 at http://web.archive.org/web/20030312131545/http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemId=12014.


Maher, Bill. "9/11 comment Bill Maher got fired for." YouTube. Web. Accessed on 2012.09.08 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97KllcZidKQ .

Stewart, Jon. "Jon Stewart 9/11 Crying [hard to watch]" YouTube. Web. Accessed on 2012.09.08 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boEAKeXDl4A.

Tapper, Jake. "The Salon Interview: Bill Maher." Salon. 2002.12.11. Web. Accessed on 2012.09.08 at http://www.salon.com/2002/12/11/maher_6/ . 

Taylor, Diana. "Lost in the Field of Vision." The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham: Duke UP. 2003.