Series Site
What was 9/11? It depends who you ask. A news anchor would call it a national tragedy; a conspiracist, an inside job; a leftist, an empire’s comeuppance; a film critic, the year’s biggest blockbuster; and your cousin, a meme. In his typical blasé fashion, Baudrillard called it, “the absolute event.” The renowned German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen controversially called the attacks, “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.” A pattern emerges: from the moment American Airlines Flight 11 was piloted into the North Tower, it has been very difficult to comprehensively define 9/11.
The attacks were encoded into the national memory over seemingly endless minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months of media coverage. 25 years later, it is tempting to think of 9/11 as a media event announcing material reality’s final, total subordination to the image—said Baudrillard, “They did it. We wished it.” Yet to conceive of 9/11 in only these terms would be to overlook the lived horrors of the day, and the insidious reverberations of a nation-wide psychic trauma. From our historical vantage, the events of September 11 seem as fundamental to our current reality as the air we breathe. There was before, and there is after.