Associations: The World Trade Center

There is an elephant in the room. We have danced around it all semester, but it is time to take stock. I am talking about the former World Trade Center.

For many, the World Trade Center is primarily associated with an event: that fateful day in 2001 when the twin towers collapsed. When asked to think about the World Trade Center, many will respond with a narrative: where they were when they heard the news, or, how it affected them (or their loved ones). There is a tendency to personalize the events of September 11. People appropriate the World Trade Center as part of a personal history. It ceases to be a pair of buildings or even an event in its own right and becomes a player in a drama of identity construction. There is something very telling about this response. It betrays a coping mechanism; one that is infinitely revealing in its machinations.

In the first place, the internalization of the event that brought down the twin towers codifies the World Trade Center as an event. But, at the same time, it is equally an impossible event: it could not have happened (1). By making it our own, we take from the event everything that might constitute it as an independent occurrence. It does not exist outside of us. It did not happen, but to us. We could pass this off as a coping mechanism; a repression of sorts that never escapes in the abreaction that gives voice to it. However, I don’t think that’s quite it. The World Trade Center, as an event, can be universally internalized precisely at the point at which it ceases to be an event. Two buildings did not fall; all of American hegemony fell. Thus, it did affect everyone. It affected us in a manner in which we explain away with a story about two buildings falling.

The World Trade Center also ceases to be a thing at the point where it becomes an image. In “The Spirit of Terrorism,” Jean Baudrillard highlights the role that images played in commodifying the destruction of the World Trade Center. Baudrillard says:

“The role of images is highly ambiguous. For, at the same time as they exalt the event, they also take it hostage. They serve to multiply it to infinity and, at the same time, they are a diversion and a neutralization […]. The image consumes the event, in the sense that it absorbs it and offers it for consumption. Admittedly, it gives it unprecedented impact, but impact as image-event.” (2)

In our ability to absorb its tragic demise and in our fascination-repulsion for it, the World Trade Center is a fetish. At the heart of the event there is indeed a thing and, as such, it is consumable. However, that thing is an image; a spectacle; almost a fiction (3). As such we are desensitized to its violence. In our storytelling—our personal reiterations of the event—the brutality of the terrorist attack is indeed neutralized. It figures marginally, if at all, in the versions I’ve heard. We can observe the same process at work in the crystallization of the images of the live television broadcast, which instantaneously offered up the image-event for consumption.

Perhaps it is because I am an art historian—a chronicler of images and things—that my gut reaction is to think of the World Trade Center as an image. The first place I go is to film. It is a natural link; the moving images of the image-event have conditioned us to this type of portrayal of the World Trade Center. As Petar succinctly pointed out a few weeks ago on this blog, we, as a culture, have become ravenous for images of Manhattan under the duress of disaster. Post-9/11 Hollywood movies have turned the image-event of Manhattan’s destruction into a lucrative commodity.

To end on a lighthearted note; maybe that’s the best we can hope for. My image of the World Trade Center is a little different. I picture it in a moving helicopter shot, swooping in from the south just as the credits are about to role on a film or television series from the 1970s or 80s. I have latched on to a mythic past World Trade Center. The primal scene. That’s my coping mechanism. What’s yours?

Tuesday November 23 at 6:30, artist-in-residence at Apexart (291 Church Street, Tribeca) Donghyun Min will discuss the vision of New York he garnered from the movies and how that vision has tempered his experience of the city. I will be going right after class if anyone wants to join me.

--Matthew Teti

(1) This is suggested by Jean Baudrillard in the essay “The Spirit of Terrorism.” My commentary is here is influenced Baudrillard’s multiple essays on the World Trade Center. See Jean Baudrillard. 2003. The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays. Translated by Chris Turner. London; New York: Verso.

(2) Ibid., p. 27.

(3) Ibid., pp. 29-30.

Virtual Cityscapes

“If you’re looking for what is in reality more real than reality itself,

look into the cinematic fiction”, Slavoj Zizek (The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, 2006)

How do the movies and TV inform and structure our reality? What is the role of fictional representations of places, landscapes, and cityscapes in our actual experiences of them? In what ways are our perceptions of reality affected or generated by virtual things? We have seen a recent emphasis in archaeological theory to look not only at contemporary, but virtual material culture as well (e.g. Harrison 2010). Virtual materiality is especially a relevant subject for the questions of how fictions, media and visual representations shape the ways in which we see and interact with material things in their ‘actuality’. Slavoj Zizek points out that movies play a crucial role in the constitution of our realities, and that this fantasy element of movie fiction is integral and inseparable part of what we call reality. “If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you loose reality itself”, he argues in his 2006 documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.

Godzilla’s approach to contemporary material culture. Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla (1998).

Thinking about Zizek’s ideas on the interplay between the imaginary and the real becomes especially interesting when we look at how a place such as New York City is being perceived in relation to its virtual representations. For all those people visiting the city for the first time, walking around midtown and taking loads of pictures, there is a perspective of pre-experience (or virtual experience), that is, the expectations and knowledge of the place that comes from various media (novels, newspapers, TV, films, etc). In such encounters with the actual materiality of New York City, our ideas, impressions, and experiences are often formed and defined in relation to those virtual experiences that have already been generated through visual and/or textual media. It is to a large extent due to its virtual culture, particularly the one regulated by TV shows and movies, that New York is seen by many as one of the most exciting cities. One hears all too often ‘it’s like in the movies’ type of reactions to NYC, or finds comments on facebook photos such as ‘it’s so Sex and the City!’ It’s also interesting to observe how with facebook, especially with the sharing of photos and comments, our experiences which have already gone through virtual and actual stages, return back again to a virtual medium. Looking at how material things are differently and/or similarly discerned at the levels of our virtual and actual encounters with them could be another interesting question in the archaeological approaches to contemporary materiality.

Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes (1968): A New York story after all.

But going back to Zizek’s ideas about the movie fantasy forming our reality and reflecting our desires, how can we think about these topics in regard to New York City and its representations in the movies? I was especially thinking about the science fiction-horror-apocalyptic type of films that are so often set in New York City, and what could be the connection here with Zizek’s arguments, both in the sense of what makes the city such a frequent choice for the catastrophic and apocalyptic scenarios, and how could we relate this kind of cinematic fantasy with our actual envisioning of the city? What do the movies like Escape from New York, Godzilla, Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, King Kong, Cloverfield, I Am Legend, and others, reveal about our imaginary worlds and how do such fantasies connect with the real world? Where does the virtual New York City meet with the actual one? In its virtual space, the city has had difficult times avoiding meteors, floods, glaciations, aliens, giant apes, monsters of all sort, etc. Whereas in our actual New York City experiences we might not witness the same kind of movie-awesomeness (that is, if one finds Godzilla talking a stroll down Manhattan to be an awesome sight indeed), the more subtle links between the fictive and actual New York cityscapes still remain apparent.

-- Petar

References:

Harrison, R. 2010 Exorcising the ‘plague of fantasies’: mass media and archaeology’s role in the present; or why we need an archaeology of ‘now’. World Archaeology 42(3): 328-340.

Related links: 20 Movies That Destroy New York: http://www.premiere.com/Feature/20-Movies-That-Destroy-New-York