University of Iowa
Iowa Research Online
Theses and Dissertations
Summer 2013
Rhetorical Encounters with the Exigence of 9/11:
Witnesses Rewrite the Rhetorical Situation
Niko Poulakos
University of Iowa
Copyright 2013 Nikolaos Poulakos
This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4899
Recommended Citation
Poulakos, Niko. "Rhetorical Encounters with the Exigence of 9/11: Witnesses Rewrite the Rhetorical Situation." PhD (Doctor of
Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2013.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4899.
Follow this and additional works at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd
Part of the Communication Commons
RHETORICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH THE EXIGENCE OF 9/11:
WITNESSES REWRITE THE RHETORICAL SITUATION
by
Niko Poulakos
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the Doctor of
Philosophy degree in Communication Studies in the
Graduate College of
The University of Iowa
August 2013
Thesis Supervisor: Professor Emeritus David J. Depew
Copyright by
NIKO POULAKOS
2013
All Rights Reserved
Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL
_______________________
PH.D. THESIS
______________
This is to certify that the Ph. D. thesis of
Niko Poulakos
has been approved by the Examining Committee for the thesis
requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Communication
Studies at the August 2013 graduation.
Thesis Committee:
____________________________________
David J. Depew, Thesis Supervisor
____________________________________
David B. Hingstman
____________________________________
Bruce E. Gronbeck
____________________________________
Ronald W. Greene
____________________________________
Timothy J. Havens
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am thankful for those who guided my thoughts and words in order to make the
production of this document both possible and fully realized. Certain people are simply
foundational in their support and I could not do without their help. I cannot thank David
Depew enough. He continues to help me make the transition from being a philosophical
thinker to becoming a rhetorical scholar. My committee members offer the sharpest insights
imaginable and have helped me in this transition too. I thank David Hingstman, Bruce
Gronbeck, Ron Greene, and Tim Havens.
I also owe a great deal of thanks to those who helped produce insights through many
provocative conversations: Barbara Biesecker, Dwight Codr, Megan Foley, Atilla Hallsby,
Paul Johnson, Meryl Irwin, Michael Lawrence, Jason Moyer, Jane Munksgaard, Jason
Regnier, and Chad Vollrath. Of course, I would not have the courage and strength to say
much of anything worthwhile without the dissoi logoi of many Poulakoi.
I thank you all.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
“AUDIENCE” AND “EXIGENCE” IN THE RHETORICAL
SITUATION OF 9/11
1
From Rhetors to Rhetorical Criticism
Critics Read Bush’s Construction of the Exigence of September 11
From Rhetorical Critics to Rhetorical Theory: The Rhetorical
Situation Model
Methodology: Audience Viewed as the Discourses of Witnesses
Chapter Outline
12
24
34
THE TRAUMATIC EXIGENCE OF 9/11 AND ITS IMPACT
ON THE NOTION OF ‘RHETORICAL SITUATION’
37
9/11 as a Traumatic Event
Definitions of Trauma
Reading Public Discourses of Trauma in News
Reading Personal Witness Testimony
Witness Testimony and the ‘Traumatic Situation’
The Indeterminate Audience in the ‘Rhetorical Situation’
37
42
49
54
67
82
IT’S ‘LIKE A MOVIE:’ THE REAL, UNREAL, AND SURREAL
IN WITNESSES’ DISCOURSES ON THE EXIGENCE OF 9/11
91
Introduction
Enter Critics of the Reality of 9/11: Baudrillard and Zizek
Rhetorically Reconsidered
What is Virtual Trauma?
‘Like a Movie’ as a Fantasy Theme
Conclusion: Relational Audience and Dynamic Exigences
in the Rhetorical Situation
CHAPTER THREE ‘HOW COULD THEY?’: ‘MAGNITUDE,’
‘INCOMPREHENSIBLE,’ AND ‘SPEECHLESS’AS FIGURES
OF THE SUBLIME
Introduction
Audience Analysis
A Brief History Of The Sublime
History of the Sublime Continued in its Linguistic and
Post 9/11 Context
The Limits of Speech and Figures of ‘Amazing’ and ‘Awe’ as a
Rhetoric of the Lyotardian Sublime
9/11 Narration as Deconstitutive Rhetoric
iii
1
6
91
103
115
125
139
157
157
158
178
198
206
217
CHAPTER FOUR
CONCLUSION
WRITING 9/11 AS A RHETORICAL EVENT
226
Introduction
Audience Analysis: Experience and Expression of the Event
Critics Define the Event of 9/11
Naming as a Rhetorical and Evental Act
Events and the Rhetorical Situation
226
227
246
254
264
LIMITATIONS OF THE RHETORICAL SITUATION BY
DISRUPTION OF DISCOURSE AS AN EVENT
271
Discourse and Signification as Evental
280
BIBLIOGRAPHY
297
iv
1
INTRODUCTION
“AUDIENCE” AND “EXIGENCE” IN THE
RHETORICAL SITUATION OF 9/11
From Rhetors to Rhetorical Criticism
When President George W. Bush addressed the nation a little over a week after the
attacks of September 11, 2001, he began his speech with the line, “In the normal course of
events, Presidents come to this chamber to report on the state of the Union.”1 But President Bush
was not present to make the typical report. This was an unusual moment. His remarks
comprised a unique declaration given to a special joint session of Congress and to the American
public. In effect, the substance of Bush’s address was to define the events that took place on
September 11 as themselves exceedingly rare and atypical, an interruption of the routine course
of daily events. According to Bush, an extraordinary historic event called for an extraordinary
moment in which to pause, reflect, and reread America’s role and place in history.
Bush positioned the United States as having suffered a grave injustice, the likes of which
had never been experienced before. Even within the context of previous wars and surprise
attacks, September 11 was different:
Americans have known wars -- but for the past 136 years, they have been wars on foreign
soil, except for one Sunday in 1941. Americans have known the casualties of war -- but
not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morning. Americans have known surprise
attacks -- but never before on thousands of civilians. All of this was brought upon us in a
single day -- and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under
attack.2
1
President George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American
People,” September 20, 2001. < http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/
2001/09/20010920-8.html>
2
Ibid.
2
The world in its entirety, Bush claimed, had been altered in this moment. The future would be
different. Curiously, though, Bush contrasted this sense of 9/11 as a radically new event in the
history of violent incursions with the notion that this attack was very much like other forms of
motivated violence. As other atrocities in the name of supposed higher purpose, this attack too
was “evil” because its perpetrators were. It was analogous to, and understandable as, previous
instantiations of terror:
We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They
are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human
life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow
that path all the way, to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.3
Bush’s remarks, in both his September 20th address and in his later State of the Union
speech, were beset by this tension. It echoed in his juxtaposition of a clarion call for assistance
and participation to defeat terrorism while at the same time narrating the impossibility of
terrorism to succeed. On the one hand, Bush noted of the perils of terrorism, “My hope is that all
nations will heed our call, and eliminate the terrorist parasites who threaten their countries and
our own.”4 He appealed to the audience clearly and boldly, “We can’t stop short.”5 On the other
hand, success in defeating this real and embodied evil was inevitable since “the forces of terror
cannot stop the momentum of freedom.”6 The risk that terrorism posed, for Bush, was at once
urgent and doomed. It called for the recognition that the United States had “been offered a
3
Ibid.
4
George W. Bush, “President Delivers State of the Union Address,” January 29, 2002.
< http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html>
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
3
unique opportunity, and we must not let this moment pass.”7 Yet, while the course of action
used to defeat it might be unknown, the “outcome is certain.”8
Running through this narrative tension that Bush balanced in both his September 20th
speech and his State of the Union address four months later was his contextualization of the 9/11
attacks as an historical exigence. The attacks demanded that speeches be made, that sides be
taken, that roles be assigned, because the event itself, in Bush’s rhetorical phrasing, asked this of
us. The attacks of September 11 were not just an extraordinary event in the pain they inflicted
on the denizens of New York City or the American public; they communicated something to us
and about us. As an historical event, 9/11 called us to action. On September 20th he noted
“Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom.”9 In his
subsequent State of the Union address, he pressed this point with far more urgency in tone:
“History has called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and our
privilege to fight freedom’s fight.”10 And in concluding with a full gravitas of the moment, Bush
conjectured, “In a single instant, we realized that this will be a decisive decade in the history of
liberty, that we've been called to a unique role in human events.”11
Suddenly in the spotlight with the newly found ethos of a self-proclaimed “war
president” and very high popularity ratings, Bush’s rhetoric transformed his role and mission as
7
Ibid.
8
Bush, Sept 20, 2001.
9
Ibid.
10
Bush, Jan. 29, 2002.
11
Ibid.
4
President.12 The discourse he used to define the events of September 11th, his new role, and the
purpose of the nation, came under much scrutiny. Rhetorical critics, accordingly, have combed
through Bush’s proclamations about how 9/11 impacted us and changed America as a nation.
They provide insight into the varied ways Bush used his pulpit to define the attacks, to outline
the landscape of the present conflict, and to position the audience for tasks to come. I will
explore some of their arguments and findings. But it is in encountering some of this work, much
of which I find productive, that I deviate to investigate something mentioned, but less frequently,
in critics’ conversations about post 9/11 rhetoric. Whereas several scholars have honed in on
President Bush’s addresses to the nation as a very successful set of appeals, strategies, and
identifications, I ask about the audience’s own discursive engagement with the exigence of the
9/11 attacks.
This dissertation enters into a conversation with current critics who have written about
9/11 as a thoroughly rhetorical production. I do not argue against the validity or significance of
their findings. Rhetorical critics are correct to zero in on Bush’s rhetoric as important and
impactful. As John Murphy notes of his study, “I believe that President Bush has done a
remarkable job of defining the attacks of September 11 to his advantage and that his rhetoric is a
key factor in his success.”13 How Bush did this, according to Murphy, though, is curious to me.
Bush was successful in that his rhetoric was able “to dominate public interpretation of the events
12
Some argue that Bush’s post 9/11 speeches legitimated his jocular, anti-intellectual,
and unimpressive style. See D. T. Max, “The Making of the Speech: The 2,988 Words That
Changed a Presidency: An Etymology,” New York Times Magazine, October 7, 2001, 32–37.
13
John Murphy, “Our Mission and Our Moment”: George W. Bush and September 11th
Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (2003): 608.
5
of September 11.”14 I ask: how does Murphy know that Bush’s interpretation of the events of
9/11 is the dominant one for the American public en masse? What evidence cites how the
American public thinks or responded to the events themselves or to Bush’s rhetoric about them?
As other critics often do, Murphy demonstrates how Bush positioned and constituted the
audience. Bush showed audience members the path toward becoming a “true American”
because his speeches were “saturated with models for good conduct, examples that taught us how
to be American in the days after 9/11.”15 Did Americans follow these examples and adopt the
persona according to how Murphy read it in Bush’s speech? For me, critical work that reads
Bush’s rhetorical texts to say something about the composition of the audience in the aftermath
of 9/11 prompts a question worthy of a dissertation: What do actual audience members have to
say about their own roles and constitution following the 9/11 attacks, and can their discourses
count as evidence that helps define the kind of context and rhetorical situation in which they, the
actual members of the public, find themselves?
A simple version of this topic would investigate responses from members of the
American public either in agreement with or antagonistic to Bush’s rhetoric. This would provide
a good answer to the question of how Bush’s rhetoric was actually received. This, however, is
not my task. It would automatically make President Bush’s discourse the official and legitimate
discourse most worthy of investigation and public responses secondary. This dissertation
reverses this traditional approach. I turn toward the unofficial discourses of actual audience
members who claim to have witnessed the attacks of 9/11 through mass media and sought to
define them as an exigence. Just as Bush and members of his administration did, audience
14
Ibid., 608.
15
Ibid., 621.
6
members witnessed events unfold and offered rhetorical productions to define the kind of
exigence and historical moment accordingly. Some of these discourses took into consideration
the more or less official language offered by Bush, government officials, news outlets, and more.
These official texts are important but not the primary focus on the dissertation. Instead, I turn to
a set of self-described “witnesses” and their discourses in order to analyze the ways in which
their texts provide an alternative conception to the rhetorical landscape to those forth by critics’
explication of Bush’s conception. In the following sections of the introduction, I explore a few
critics’ findings, define and defend my proposed critical contribution to the field of rhetorical
criticism – a critique of the “rhetorical situation” model as a way to understand context – I
explain my methodology for reading “witness” testimony, and preview the chapters of the
dissertation, giving a brief outline of the whole.
Critics Read Bush’s Construction of the Exigence
of September 11
Several critics who have analyzed Bush’s speeches post 9/11 have mentioned the
audience that Bush addressed. Such critics approach the audience in two important respects –
the American public is considered to be uniform and collective (there is only one audience) and
this entity is essentially passive (it consists of the recipients of discourse rather than producers or
circulators of it). Rhetorical criticism, having framed the audience this way, is then focused
squarely on the Bush administration’s political and ideological agenda. Murphy, whom I used as
an example earlier, noted how “Bush created an audience, endowing it with the qualities needed
to support the war on terror.”16 The rhetoric that Bush used was successful in defining the
rhetorical landscape of a new American politics in which freedom and fear were at war. The
16
Murphy, 620.
7
stage for war with Iraq was set. This conclusion was reached by others too. Nicolaus Mills
found that the Bush adminstration’s rhetoric not only precipitated intervention into Iraq but
defined the post 9/11 cultural atmosphere in just these tendentious ways: “The 9/11 culture that
emerged in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon owed much to the
Bush administration’s maneuverings…”17 Bush is cast as a rhetorical manipulator, crusading for
a war agenda. He won the day and persuaded the American public to embrace this cause since
“U.S. political leaders—particularly presidents—can exert substantial control over political and
media environments, especially in times of national crisis.”18
To legitimate claims of success, high poll numbers in support of the president are
sometimes mentioned. Usually, off-handed references to popularity are considered sufficient by
way of evidence to establish the merit of Bush’s persuasive prose. In investigating the audience
further, some critics speak even more explicitly about the kind of collective audience the
American public comprises in supporting Bush. Elizabeth Anker investigates what she calls an
“American collective identity” constituted by melodramatic media coverage.19 Michael
Butterworth explores how quasi-religious rituals at baseball games “provided comfort to millions
in shock” by imbuing the audience with a sense of “national unity.”20 In these accounts,
17
Nicolaus Mills, “Leaving Iraq.” Dissent, Spring 2009, p 15.
18
Sue Lockett John, David Domke, Kevin Coe, And Erica S. Graham. “Going Public,
Crisis After Crisis: The Bush Administration And The Press From September 11 To Saddam.”
Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 10, No. 2, 2007, pp. 195–220. P 197.
19
Elisabeth Anker, “Villains, Victims and Heroes: Melodrama, Media and September
11,” Journal of Communication 55, no. 1 (March 2005): 22-37.
20
Michael L. Butterworth, “Ritual in the ‘Church of Baseball’: Suppressing the
Discourse of Democracy after 9/11,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 2
(2005): 107-29.
8
individuals become a unified audience with renewed consensus through rhetorical address or
practices.21
Lurking beneath these treatments of the audience, however, is a fundamental supposition
that the moment was right for such speech and unification as a result. The attacks themselves
created an opportunity for rhetorical unification. As Herbert Simons put it:
For most Americans the 9/11 bombings were a tragedy; for neoconservatives bent on
invading Iraq they were also an opportunity, providing what David Zarefsky calls a
kairotic moment. The administration’s rhetoric fueled and channeled the fury already
aroused by the attacks themselves.22
Simons makes the overarching claim that “President Bush was right when he said that 9/11 was a
turning point in American history.”23 And this is true in part “given the shock and severity of the
attacks.”24
It was, then, the attacks themselves that situated the moment for Bush and his nation.
9/11 was a rhetorical opportunity designed for a President armed with a discourse of faith to do
battle on a rhetorically crafted Manichean stage. Robert Ivie makes this very point:
Such a rhetoric would self-destruct were it not a rhetoric of evil. Indeed, the
administration was floundering before 9/11, lacking political traction and public support.
It took a devastating terrorist attack on Manhattan and the Pentagon by radical Islamists
from the Middle East to sanction and sanctify American imperialism in the name of
civilization but in the service of globalization.25
21
Ibid., 109.
22
Herbert W. Simons, “From Post-9/11 Melodrama to Quagmire in Iraq: A Rhetorical
History,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10, no. 2 (2007): 183.
23
Ibid., 183.
24
Ibid., 183.
25
Robert Ivie, “The Rhetoric of Bush’s War on Evil.” K.B. Journal, Volume 1, Issue 1,
Fall 2004 < http://www.kbjournal.org/ivie_Bush>
9
An entire forum in Rhetoric and Public Affairs was devoted to the rhetorical constructions of
“evil” as well as the theological and political landscape created by Bush immediately after
9/11.26 The analysis of Bush’s effectiveness in bifurcating combatants on both sides of a post
9/11 world solidifies the American public on the side of the good. But beyond the success of his
strategies to persuade or constitute the collective audience through purely discursive maneuvers
is the fact, or presumed fact, that a moment had arrived for the audience as much as it had for the
President. 9/11 was a kairotic moment not just because official representatives were speaking,
but because members of the audience were listening.
To this point, critics usually imagined a tragic stricken audience plagued by an awful
event. The moment of the attacks intervened wickedly to create a peculiar crisis. A
corresponding need for rhetoric was high, and in this “state” a rhetor could thrive. Figured in
this way though, the audience, according to rhetorical critics, were themselves part of the crisis.
Confused, perplexed, shocked, traumatized, they turned to leaders for answers. In a thorough
description of the situational elements of 9/11, Michael Hyde puts it succinctly:
This horrific situation brought to light in vivid detail just how important heroes can be to
those caught up in immense tragedy. Indeed, the extensive literature on 9/11 is filled with
narratives detailing the courageous acts of all sorts of people: firefighters, police officers,
physicians and nurses, clergy, airline personnel and passengers, construction workers.
The list could go on. In adding the rhetor to this list, I subscribe to the argument that the
events of 9/11 defined a monumental occasion for would-be rhetorical heroes to display
their talents as they sought to disclose the truth, make sense of the horror and chaos at
hand, and thereby help in the treatment and guidance of an anxious and terrified
American public.27
26
Notable participants in this conversation include James Aune, Dana Cloud, Rosa
Eberly, Robert Hariman, and James McDaniel. See Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6, no. 3, (Fall
2003).
27
Michael J. Hyde, “The Rhetor as Hero and the Pursuit of Truth: The Case of 9/11,”
Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 1 (2005): 4.
10
The “situation” of 9/11 is conceived by Hyde as one in which an anxious and terrified audience
awaits a rhetorical hero, even though there are no texts used to cite how this anxiety and terror
were conveyed. In several other readings of 9/11 – not just by public sphere intellectuals but by
academics in rhetorical studies – audiences are figured in similar situations. Their states and
dispositions are read generically as “lost” and in need of rhetorical grounding. In reading the
consequences of this state, Herbert Simons calls the audience’s desire for a rhetor part of the
“immediate expectations” and “needs of the moment.”28 Bostdorff writes in this vein: “In times
of crisis, citizens expect to gain verbal reassurance from their leaders.”29 9/11 is thus an
exigence that calls forth a discourse from a rhetor because the audience “needs” one. The event,
the tragic attacks, creates the situation of an audience in search of what only a rhetor can provide:
September 11 called for a definition and understanding of what had happened. The
aftermath of the terrorist attacks also brought a need for creating and sharing
community.30
Bostdorff echoes her own claim in later works on 9/11 suggesting generally of audiences that,
“During national crises, the need for a shared sense of identity is especially keen.”31 Hyde
furthers this argument by defining the function of rhetorical discourse as that which orients the
audience in the face of an exigence: “People in a state of crisis and anxiety are in need of
28
Herbert W. Simons, “From Post-9/11 Melodrama to Quagmire in Iraq: A Rhetorical
History,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10, no. 2 (2007): 190.
29
Denise M. Bostdorff, “George W. Bush’s Post-September 11 Rhetoric of Covenant
Renewal: Upholding the Faith of the Greatest Generation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no.
4 (2003): 300.
30
31
Ibid., 297.
Denise Bostdorff, “Epideictic Rhetoric in the Service of War: George W. Bush on Iraq
and the 60th Anniversary of the Victory over Japan,” Communication Monographs 78, no. 3,
(September 2011): 299.
11
discourse that can help them make sense of the horror and chaos at hand and that can also lessen
the trauma of their not feeling at home with their environment.”32
Rhetorical critics thus established two interesting points about President Bush’s speeches.
On the one hand, he succeeded at defining the events of 9/11 as part of a larger conflict with
terrorism – a “War on Terror” which would demand intervention and military action. On the
other hand, he succeeded because his words were timely, hitting upon ears of those who were
ready to listen. Bush defined an event for an entire public but in part because the event itself
defined the position of the audience. What is this “position?” How did the attacks themselves
affect the audience prior to a rhetorical discourse that addressed the audience? I realize that this
is perhaps the Bush administration’s official position – terrorist attacks in fact terrorized the
public and they needed reassurances. But Anker, Bostdorff, Hyde, Ivie, Murphy, and other
rhetorical critics appear very much in line with Bush on this point that the attacks themselves
traumatized and terrorized the public. How? Is there no evidence needed for this point? To me,
this argument sounds suspiciously extra-rhetorical in nature. An audience – an entire collective
audience that is the American public – is stipulated as attuned to Bush since it had been
subjected to an unwanted psychological state. Rather than political charlatan or theological
crusader, critics could have just as easily claimed Bush to be a kind of medicine man, attending
to the “needs” of the ailing audience. It is this supposed pathological need on the part of the
public that I wish to interrogate.
Regardless of findings, whether or not Bush used lofty theology rhetoric to commune the
masses or a folksy style to appeal to and further constitute an American spirit of camaraderie,
critics’ found that Bush thrived where he had previous failed. His discourse resonated, however,
32
Hyde, “The Rhetor as Hero,” 9 (my emphasis).
12
because of a special kairotic moment that gave him access to the audience. By making this overt
claim, or implicitly relying upon it by referring to the attacks as eventful and momentous
themselves, critics’ harkened back to a model of criticism that reads events as extra-rhetorical.
This model is the “rhetorical situation” delineated and advanced by Lloyd Bitzer. I take up his
definition and defense of this model, along with some of its criticisms, in the following section.
From Rhetorical Critics to Rhetorical Theory:
The Rhetorical Situation Model
When President Bush appeared atop the rubble of the collapsed World Trade Center
Towers on September 14, 2001 with megaphone in hand, he commanded the audience’s
attention. There were in fact at least two audiences in this moment – those in the immediate
shared space with President Bush and those who tuned in to watch him on television. In his
amplified address, through his speaking position and the bullhorn, he uttered a seemingly
unscripted remark that resonated with both of his audiences, “I can hear you.” Applause erupted
and people cheered. This was certainly a moment of communion, the stuff that builds ethos.
President Bush created a miniature kairotic moment by addressing the murmurs in the crowd, the
voices that called out to him in the middle of his speech. Bush, interrupted, talked back. He
broke from a formulaic speech to engage in a conversation. In so doing, the audience changed in
tenor. What started as a diaspora of voices full of desultory remarks during the beginning of his
speech suddenly united after his direct personal address in a chant of “USA!”
What made this moment possible was Bush’s recognition of the immediate audience’s
position. The standard, impersonal, abstract discourse of tragedy and prayer were seemingly
ineffective in this venue on top of collapsed buildings and buried corpses. Direct, interpersonal,
impassioned speech was far more moving. This opens a question: what did the audience “need”
13
in this moment that was not met by standard remarks? Had they already grown tired of the usual
modes of address a few short days after the attacks? Did the audience have other expectations
for address unknown to Bush and other official rhetors? I find these significant questions that, if
answered, would provide a better understanding of the rhetorical moment of Bush’s address in
this example – its success in the immediate environment in which he spoke and the possible
further success Bush may have enjoyed with a televisual public.
Rhetorical critics investigating the discourses of 9/11, however, seem to have preferred a
mode of analysis that privileges the rhetorical text divorced from a detailed context that would
read the specific ways members of the public themselves clamored in the aftermath of 9/11.
Instead of a robust set of voices and texts, the post 9/11 American public was analyzed as a
substantive, non-discursive, and extra-rhetorical entity that awaited discourse from a rhetor. In
contrast to detailed analyses of the rhetorical text in the form of televised public address, the
audience was often reduced to a set of polling data and popularity indicators. As my analysis in
the previous section showed, critics supposed the audience to be a collective, uniform, mass
subject in a shared psychological state. This state of mass subjectivity was postulated as the
effect of the attacks themselves and stipulated as an important precursor to rhetorical address.
The collective audience was supposedly in “need” of rhetoric.
In arguing that the event of 9/11 caused a particular state in the audience, critics rely on
the traditional notion that an external event, an “exigence,” is responsible for setting the stage for
rhetorical address. Sometimes, events happen and rhetors respond to them. To “see” and define
an exigence in this way is to explain a specific way in which rhetoric takes place. This method
of reading rhetoric, a way of practicing rhetorical criticism, is best explained by its original
advocate, Lloyd Bitzer, who offered a way to read an exigence as itself the originary event of a
14
“rhetorical situation.” In 1968, Bitzer inaugurated the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric with an
article explaining how rhetorical discourse can be read as part of a rhetorical situation.33
Importantly, Bitzer maintained that not all discourse was rhetorical. Rhetorical discourse is a
special kind of speech comprised of two main qualities. One, it is pragmatic not descriptive.
Rhetoric is pragmatic because it is a “mode of altering reality” through the “mediation of thought
and action.”34 Two, rhetorical discourse can only be understood as a “response” to a situation.
When Bitzer says that rhetorical discourse “comes into existence for the sake of something
beyond itself” he means to say that it exists for a purpose that calls it into being.35 This purpose,
the reason for speaking, is a “situation.” Bitzer argues: “Rhetorical discourse is called into
existence by a situation.”36 Much like an answer to a question or solution to a problem, a
discourse exists because of the “problem” to which it responds.
For Bitzer, a rhetorical situation is context, a set of elements of a scene in which speaking
is taking place, that helps one to understand the function of discourse in a setting. If there is a
hunt by a set of primitive people, to use Bitzer’s example, one understands phrases such as “stop
here” and “throw the net” only in light of the exigence of a hunt. But more than mere utterance,
rhetorical discourse, such as the Gettysburg Address, attempts to change behaviors, attitudes,
actions, not just convey understandable phrases. Presidential speech, then, is not everyday
discourse for Bitzer since it attempts to do something pragmatic and modify the situation in
which it takes place. Conducted paradigmatically in special sites devoted to public address, this
33
Bitzer, Lloyd. “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1, 1968.
34
Ibid, 3-4.
35
Ibid., 3.
36
Ibid., 9.
15
discourse often exists to sway the audience. With this idea in mind, Bitzer defines a rhetorical
situation accordingly:
Rhetorical situation may be defined as a complex of persons, events, objects, and
relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially
removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or
action as to being about the significant modification of the exigence.37
The exigence is crucial for understanding a rhetorical situation in Bitzer’s terms. He
states, “In any rhetorical situation, there will be at least one controlling exigence which functions
as the organizing principle.”38 An exigence is “an imperfection marked by urgency; it is a
defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be.”39 If
an exigence can be modified, then discourse attempting to change it can be considered rhetorical.
Discourse about an exigence that could not be changed would not be rhetorical. Also
characterizing discourse to make it rhetorical is that the modification of an exigence would be
performed by an audience who responded to the address (in established ways that validated the
nature of their response). An audience is a collection of “persons who function as mediators of
change.”40 Change or modification of the exigence must overcome “constraints” – those
elements that impinge upon the ability to persuade, act, and modify (either on the side of the
rhetor, such as speaking style, or on the side of the audience, such as prior attitudes).41 If
discourse responds to an exigence, addresses an audience, attends to constraints, and then
persuades, the discourse and the situation may be deemed rhetorical.
37
Ibid., 6.
38
Ibid., 7.
39
Ibid., 6.
40
Ibid., 7.
41
Ibid., 8.
16
For Bitzer, then, an exigence is a real, objective, and materially present “thing,” like a
state of affairs. It exists apart from anyone’s perception or subjective relation to it, even though
perception of it necessary to recognize and attend to it. The exigence, along with other existing
things in the world – persons, events, and relations – are what a critic can find when he or she
discovers “objective and publicly observable historic facts in the world we experience.”42
Clarifying his notion of exigence in a follow up piece on the nature of the rhetorical situation,
Bitzer draws an analogizes: “If drinking water contains a very high level of mercury, then surely
an exigence exists even though no one is aware of the factual condition.”43 The exigence, the
cause for concern and the focus of the rhetor’s attention, is a materially real state of affairs prior
to a discourse about it. Alan Brinton also sees the exigence this way, arguing that the exigence is
an objective defect in the world. 44
This is a significant ontology to which Bitzer commits himself. Other critics commenting
on Bitzer’s stance demonstrate the repercussions of holding that an external circumstance, a real
exigence, invites utterance. Regarding Bitzer and his followers’ views on the ontological status
of the exigence, Carolyn Miller notes: “Bitzer’ s use of demand-response language has made it
possible to conceive of exigence as an external cause of discourse and situation as
deterministic.”45 Miller leaves open the space that one might not necessarily have to read Bitzer
42
Ibid., 11.
43
Bitzer, Lloyd, “Functional Communication: A Situational Perspective,” in E. E. White,
ed., Rhetoric in Transition (University Park: Penn State UP, 1981), 21-38. P 31.
44
Alan Brinton, “Situation in the Theory of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 14
(1981): 234-48, see pages 243-4.
45
Carolyn Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” in Freedman, Aviva, and Peter Medway.
Genre and the new rhetoric. London Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis, 1994. P 24.
17
as entirely deterministic, but I submit that most critics in the field of rhetorical studies do in fact
read him this way and that they are not wrong in doing so. Even if Bitzer were to say that he
never intended his position to be taken so strongly, the ontological framework he uses carries
with it this unwanted implication of a determinism of meaning. While it might behoove us as
careful readers to pause and consider the possibility that Bitzer has been misread as a strong
ontologist, it is hard to square Bitzer’s views with anything other than a firm commitment to the
external reality of a situation as prior to discourse. This is especially true given his definition of
rhetorical discourse being not only compelled by the situation but in the situation’s demand for a
“fitting” response.
In the context of an event that strongly invites utterance, not just any utterance will do.
The reason a rhetor speaks, according to Bitzer, is to address the audience with the “right”
remarks or a “fitting response.”46 A rhetor must conform to this because “situation must
somehow prescribe the response which fits.”47 Take Bitzer’s example of a real exigence – the
assassination of JFK:
The clearest instances of rhetorical speaking and writing are strongly invited – often
required. The situation generated by the assassination of President Kennedy was so
highly structured and compelling that one could predict with near certainty the types and
themes of forthcoming discourse (my emphasis).48
A situation is responsible for rhetoric in that it “calls the discourse into existence.”49 Moreover,
it calls for discourse of a certain kind, of or relating to a certain topos, because not just any
46
Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” 10.
47
Ibid., 10.
48
Ibid., 9.
49
Ibid., 2.
18
discourse will meet the audience’s demands and constraints, so much so that the one that fits is
predictable.
If Bitzer is correct, President Bush would count as a great rhetor in responding the
situation of 9/11 if he were to identifying correctly what kind of imperfection the attacks were
and what the audience needed to hear. If the situation called for a discourse of mourning to
modify the exigence from pure shock into a context of grief and tragic loss, a solemn discourse
might suffice. If, however, the situation demanded this kind of discourse and President Bush
attempted to modify the exigence of 9/11 incorrectly into say, a declaration of war or harsh
speech against Muslims, he could be judged, in Bitzer’s terms, as possibly not even speaking
rhetoric. This is hard to accept either as common sense or within the more formalisitc tradition
of Aristotelian rhetoric that simply defines rhetoric according to the type of text, mode of
address, and proper venue.
For this reason and others, Richard Vatz provides a formidable challenge to Bitzer’s
definition of the rhetorical situation. Vatz takes the ontologically opposite view to Bitzer. He
argues: “Meaning is not discovered in situations, but created by rhetors.”50 Vatz reverses
Bitzer’s view of the situation as objective, prior to, and determining of the rhetoric that follows.
First, there is rhetoric, second, a situation defined from that rhetoric. Vatz states, “No situation
can have a nature independent of the perception of its interpreter or independent of the rhetoric
with which he chooses to characterize it.”51 Thus, “Rhetoric is a cause, and not an effect of
50
Richard E. Vatz, “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 6
no. 3, 1973. p. 154-161, p 157.
51
Ibid., 154.
19
meaning.”52 Accordingly, an exigence is meaningful only in so far as a rhetor addresses an
audience and defines that exigence. Consequently, a situation is rhetorically constituted, and the
rhetoric employed determines the meaning of the exigence and the “situation’s impact.”53
For Vatz, it is decidedly not the case that the exigence and the objective facts of an event
come first and then the rhetoric of a fitting response second. A context for something complex
like the Vietnam War does not come into existence as a situation demanding a specific rhetoric
to address it. Rather, rhetorical discourse creates the situation as it defines the exigence. In
speaking about the Vietnam War, Presidents create what it is in its entirety. Hence, Vatz states,
“Political crises…. are rarely ‘found,’ they are usually created.”54 All at once, then, a rhetor
addresses an audience to create the meaning of an exigence, and in creating this meaning by way
of situating it within a context, creates the salient aspects of a context too. Vatz astutely points
out that facts are interminable. “One never runs out of facts to describe a situation” and so “one
never runs out of context,” he argues.55 In choosing to make certain facts salient to the situation,
a rhetor defines the exigence by whichever facts he or she chooses; the meaning of the exigence
and its situation are thus crafted rhetorically. Through this, the audience is given a meaning for
an exigence and rhetorical situation: “To the audience, events become meaningful only through
their linguistic depiction.”56
52
Ibid., 160.
53
Ibid., 160.
54
Ibid., 159.
55
Ibid., 156.
56
Ibid., 157.
20
These two oppositional models yield very different conclusions about the exigence of the
9/11 attacks. For a Bitzerian critic, the attacks are an exigence and part of the rhetorical situation
that calls a discourse into being. President Bush’s addresses to Congress and the nation are in
this vein an attempt to provide a fitting response to the occasion that calls for a modification of
this imperfection in the world. For a Vatzian critic, there is no specific meaning of the “crisis” of
the attacks of 9/11 until President Bush himself creates this meaning by speaking about it. In
arguing about how imperfect the attacks are, Bush is defining the meaning of the exigence and
situation for the audience. In either perspective, both Bitzer and Vatz hold views in which the
audience is little more than a constraint on the speaking situation, and whatever pre-exists or is
brought into being is still only a state of affairs demanding the audience respond in a certain way.
For Bitzer, audiences are entities with attitudes, beliefs, dispositions, opinions, and are only able
to hear and respond in certain ways based on the logic of the situation they have been positioned
in according to the external reality of the exigence. A tragic event calls for pathos-laden
rhetorical discourse. Accordingly, Bitzer holds that the audience is automatically put in a tragic
mindset, expecting, therefore, a rhetorical discourse premised on this topos. Vatz, on the other
hand, claims that the rhetor is solely responsible for imbuing the audience with a sense of the
tragic. They have no expectations or meanings of an event prior to a discourse that renders it
meaningful, and instead of the situation providing this meaning for an audience, a rhetor does.
But in the end, the result is the same.
In light of these two contrary perspectives, actual criticism of rhetorical discourse about
the “exigence” of 9/11 is noteworthy in that much of the analysis of the official rhetoric, as I
analyzed previously, attempts to show how Bush defined it for an audience. However, whether
Bush gave a fitting response or manufactured the essence of 9/11 itself, the audience is, in any
21
case, rendered inert from the onset. Only Bush’s discourse is relevant. What kind of exigence it
is and what relationship the audience have to it themselves, before, during, and after rhetorical
discourse, is lost. Bostdorff exemplifies this tendency to define the vague yet “meaningful”
moment of the exigence of 9/11 by stating that “an unexpected tragedy or time of crisis calls for
leaders in the community to explicate the meaning of such events…. Bush’s rhetoric attempted
to make sense of the 9/11 attacks.”57 Explored here is the classic rhetorical thesis concerning
“the situation of having to endow a crisis with meaning.”58 Rhetoric as an act of sense-making is
privileged: ‘‘In times of change or crisis, nations look to the past and infer a narrative that erases
all confusion and contradiction…”59 What is the litmus test for making sense, though? And who
is the audience that renders this judgment of now being in a position of understanding?
Regardless of whether the attacks themselves caused the situation of a tragedy to which rhetors
came to rescue or the rhetorical situation was defined entirely by rhetors who exploited the
pathos of tragedy to define a political or cultural context, 9/11 is rendered sensible only through
the event or the speaker. The perspective of the audience is omitted. A deeper insight into the
relationship between audience and exigence that might help one to understand the nature and
efficacy of rhetorical discourse as practiced is not advanced.
The perspective of the audience is necessary for two reasons. First, if examined along
with the other constraints and elements of the rhetorical situation, critics would have a keen
insight into the ways in which rhetorical discourse was structured to appeal to certain aspects,
57
Bostdorff, “Epideictic Rhetoric in the Service of War,” 299.
58
Bostdorff, “George W. Bush’s Post-September 11 Rhetoric,” 307.
59
Jean Pickering and Suzanne Kehde, “Introduction” in J. Pickering and S. Kehde (Eds.),
Narratives of Nostalgia, Gender, and Nationalism (Washington Square, NY: New York
University Press, 1997), 3.
22
attitudes, ideals, and opinions of the audience. Persuasion, identification, and constitution, in
effect, could be understood more thoroughly. Second, and more importantly, the exigence itself
must be seen as itself incongruent or problematic according to different perspectives before
persuasion, identification, or constitution take hold. When rhetorical discourse and audience
attitudes, opinions, and actions align – when an audience begins to modify an exigence based on
the definition of it by a speaker – we can say there is persuasion since there is agreement on what
the exigence “is.” But this alignment, on the very question of the meaning of the exigence and
what is being talked about, cannot be said to exist in advance first. Arthur Miller notes the
difference of perceptions of the exigence between speaker and audience:
…hearers—as well as speakers—operate under constraints. When a speaker’s constraints
combine with his perception of an action, phenomenon, or fact, the result is the speaker's
perceived exigence. This perception becomes the basis of the speaker's intentions toward
his hearers as revealed in his speech to them. On the other hand, when a hearer’s
constraints combine with his perceptions of actions, phenomena, or facts, the result is the
hearer's perceived exigence: the basis of his expectations as he listens to the speaker.60
Miller argues that there are different exigences based on where one looks or to whom one turns:
“Obviously, then, perceived exigence will not be identical for the critic, for the rhetor, and for
the hearer, nor can the rhetorical situation seem the same for them.”61 Should a critic turn to the
audience, though, in the attempt to state what the audience’s perception of the exigence is, the
critic would run the risk of stipulating the state of the audience and their needs based not on the
audience’s understanding of the exigence but the rhetor’s own understanding of it. If there are
two different accounts, or multiple accounts of the exigence to begin with, we have different
texts to interpret, different subject positions and relations to the exigence.
60
Miller, Arthur B. “Rhetorical Exigence.” Philosophy & Rhetoric Vol. 5 Issue 2, Spring
1972, p 117-18.
61
Ibid., 117-18.
23
For this reason, Carolyn Miller refers to the exigence as “social knowledge.”62 The
exigence is a kind of discursive space where private perceptions meet cultural knowledge and
shared language. But these perceptions meet interpretations and linguistic conventions from the
starting point of a rhetor who approaches the exigence and from audience members who
approach it. For this reason, the exigence is far from stagnant. It is dynamic.63 Even Bitzer
seems to agree to this point. Situations are said to “evolve.”64 They can sometimes “mature and
persist – conceivably some persist indefinitely.”65 If the exigence is dynamic, I argue that it
needs a dynamic account. In the next section I lay out my argument for how I approach a
reading of the exigence of 9/11. I identity an archive, and argue for a close reading, of texts
produced by those who count typically as audience members (everyday citizens and member of
the public). I explain this archive, delineating what can and cannot be found therein. I then
outline a methodology that closely reads audience members’ texts and focuses on the dynamic,
shifting, often confusing and contradictory nature of the exigence as defined in their own words.
By reading audience members’ discourses, members of the public who describe themselves as
perceivers and interpreters – as “witnesses” – of the exigence of 9/11, I read the social space
where their “private” testimony enters into the social space of circulated ideas to offer a kind of
knowledge, perspective, and insight. Lastly, I outline the four chapters of the dissertation, each
of which is focused on a small cluster of recurrent terms found in texts produced and deposited
by self-defined television witnesses in my archive.
62
Miller, Carolyn, op cit, 24-26.
63
Ibid.
64
Bitzer, 1968, p 13.
65
Ibid., 12.
24
Methodology: Audience Viewed as the Discourses
of Witnesses
In this section, I set forth a methodology for studying discourses responding to and
defining the events of September 11. A few main points guide my investigation and help clarify
the aim of the dissertation. I pursue the following lines of thought and defend these choices: 1) I
read the discourses of actual audience members who have written about the attacks of September
11. Audience members are those individuals who wrote about their encounter with the attacks as
they watched the events unfold live on television. Found in a digital resource dedicated to
compiling everyday citizens’ responses to the events of 9/11 – “The September 11 Digital
Archive”66 – I highlight vernacular, everyday discourse, as opposed to official texts, such as
those from President Bush. 2) I define my object of study, reading strategy, and answer possible
objections in advance. Most importantly, I defend close reading of texts, not the psychological
state of subjects. I examine vernacular discourses from many individuals but focus on recurring
linguistic terms, small clusters of discourse, in order to make arguments about the very idea of a
rhetorical situation, the history and problematic aspects of which I have outlined in the first and
especially the second section of this Introduction. I read statements stemming from speaking
positions, not psychology and agency. 3) I argue in this connection for reading texts from the
archive as a form of self-described “witness” testimony. I take subjects’ entries to indicate a
construction of their written contribution as a kind of testimony. Reading texts from those in the
subject position of a witness allows a critic to see statements as more active, engaging, and
66
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” Compiled by Center for History and New Media
and American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, 2011.
<http://www.911digitalarchive.org>
25
productive rather than an effect or material “trace” of an external event, thereby challenging the
notion of rhetorical situation as used in criticism and theorized by some rhetorical scholars.
Vernacular Discourse
The “audience” is a text. A number of people come together to form a group, collective,
or public, but how that assembly is read as a situated entity receiving or responding to a
discourse makes the critic’s reading of that entity a rhetorical act, an interpretation. According to
John Dewey, a public is an assemblage of coexisting people who together express “shared
interests.”67 A public is a real thing, a product of people who come to together around or against
an issue that animates them. In contrast to this material conception of audience based on a logic
of presence, Michael McGee offers the idea that a “people” is a rhetorical notion more than an
actual phenomenon.68 The “people” are less an actual “mass” than a supposition or theorization
by a critic. These two options, however, force a critic who wants to study an audience of people
to choose between an extra rhetorical, non-discursive reality and a rhetorical myth. Not
accepting either option, Gerard Hauser makes a case for studying the vernacular public.69
According to Hauser, one can read subjects who produce rhetoric, which consists of their own
“discursive practices.”70 In looking not at who the people are but what they produce, Hauser is
67
Dewey, John.The Public and its Problems. New York: Holt, 1954/1927, 14-15.
68
McGee, Michael Calvin. “In Search of ‘The People’: A Rhetorical Alternative.” QJS
61.3 (1975): 235-249.
69
Hauser, Gerard A. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.
70
Ibid., 32.
26
able to make the case for interpreting how “publics are emergences manifested through
vernacular rhetorics.”71 Through what they produce and exchange, an audience comes to be.72
In other rhetorical work privileging and studying vernacular texts, Kent Ono and John
Sloop define their study as that which “entails engaging in talk about everyday speech,
conversations in homes, restaurants, and ‘on the corner.’”73 Ono and Sloop argue that reading
vernacular discourses – texts, fragments, and cultural objects from specific communities – helps
us “to understand how discourses produce complex representations … which are not simply
unidimensional.”74 Though argued from a perspective that privileges the specific discourses of
oppressed and marginalized communities, they also aver that a general move away from reading
canonical speeches toward audience discourses promises that “new tools and new critical
capacities will be shaped as a result of such studies.”75 Beyond new insights from a shift in the
object of study, then, close reading of audiences’ practices and production of discourses enables
new approaches and theoretical orientations for rhetorical scholars. As Ono and Sloop argue, “It
is not a matter of simply adapting rhetorical criticism by focusing on vernacular cultures with the
71
Ibid., 14.
72
Several variations of this idea are offered by critics. However, their point is to define a
specific kind of audience, a “public,” which is not my task here. For a thorough consideration in
which production, exchange, and circulation create and maintain different “publics,” see Michael
Warner, Publics and Counterpublics. Cambridge: Zone Books, 2002. Also see Rob Asen,
Counterpublics and the State. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.
73
Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,”
Communication Monographs, 62, (March 1995): 20.
74
Ibid., 38.
75
Ibid., 40.
27
same methods we have used in the past, but rather that as a result of such studies, the entire
rhetorical project may be reshaped.”76
For this reason, some rhetoricians have overtly called for more nuanced readings of
actual audience participants in the ways they deliberate and exchange vernacular discourses.77 I
agree with these scholars and others calling for a focus on the actual discourse of audiences. The
dissertation heeds this call. However, if Ono and Sloop are correct in resuscitating one of the
foundational premises of ethnomethodological research – which is that patterns, categories, and
designs for study emerge out of the object of study, rather than exist to have a method imposed
upon it – then something conceptually new, and not just new empirical subject positions, may
possibly emerge from vernacular texts. Hence one is not forced to rely on traditional models or
situational analyses and impose them on statements. If anything, a study of vernacular discourse
finds its value in contributing to the possible development of new theoretical perspectives.
Defining the Archive and its Texts with Caveats in Mind
As I turn to the September 11 Digital Archive and read direct statements by selfdesignated writers who have chosen to share their words, several problems arise. They are:
1) These statements are all electronic. This is a “digital” archive. Those who provided
an “entry” have been to a museum, a museum’s website (such as the Smithsonian National
76
77
Ibid., 40.
See Vanessa B. Beasley, “Identity, Democracy, and Presidential Rhetoric,” in Politics,
Discourse, and American Society: New Agendas, ed. Roderick P. Hart and Bartholomew H.
Sparrow (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 32. Also, for work with respect to
audiences of 9/11 specifically, see Rosemary V. Hathaway, “‘Life in the TV’: The Visual Nature
of 9/11 Lore and its Impact on Vernacular Response,” Journal of Folklore Research, 42.1, 2005.
28
Museum of American History78), or have emailed their statement to the archive directly. The
context in which people write is a unique one where there is only electronic communication in
“action,” not typical interaction or transaction. About this electronic environment, another critic
studying electronic discourses about 9/11, Rosemary Hathaway concedes that there is a “lack of
contextual elements that can help mediate meaning: recipients cannot rely on nonverbal, visual,
or auditory cues to help assess the message’s intent.”79 She argues, and I agree, that these
statements are “electronic communication events” that have very little “context” and are difficult
to describe as “situational.”80 This communication is thus different from the interactive, process
oriented communication that Ono, Sloop, and Hauser see as transacting a collective or a public.
For me, there are only “disconnected” statements.
2) These statements are fragmentary. Their fragmentary nature is owed to their form and
organization. While sometimes they respond to a “prompt,” or to a question posed to which
people can respond in writing, sometimes they are more free-floating. One can simply visit one
of several websites, find the area in which to submit an entry, and send an electronic statement at
any time or from any accessible spot. In either case, remarks are often brief, non-linear, and
make claims or proclamations without evidence or warrants. In other words, these are not fully
developed arguments or narratives. They are mostly only one to two paragraphs long, filled with
emotional content. They are seemingly not proofread, as many spelling mistakes and
grammatical errors indicate. This explains why I have chosen to quote all texts in their original
format, errors and all. This information serves as the basis for my interpretations. For example,
78
In person or through the website, one may share their story by uploading statements. A
link to digital archive is provided. <http://amhistory.si.edu/september11/tellyourstory/>
79
Hathaway, “Life in the TV,” op. cit, 36.
80
Ibid., 36.
29
I leave in place excessive capitalization and exclamation marks as this seems relevant to
depictions of excessive emotional content.
3) These entries contain little information about their authors. In fact, those entering a
statement directly in the digital archive can check a box to avoid inclusion of any information
about oneself. All that can be said of participants is that they have entered their statements based
on a desire to submit their testimony. The only pathos involved is the urge to record something
for the public, an urge, we will see, that has formal rather than psychological significance.
Nothing else of the audience – demographic information, context for responding, amount of
knowledge regarding the attacks – is known.
4) The figure of the “witness” encapsulates the position of the speaking/writing subject as
simultaneously audience member and rhetor. A motive to write entitles these individuals to the
position of rhetor. Just as President Bush does, they too produce a discourse. This fact must be
juxtaposed with the content of statements that turns on subjects figuring themselves selfreflexively as purely an audience member. This significant fusion of positions demands a
separate section to analyze it.
The Rhetorical Position of the Witness
Some critics regard witnesses as a special kind of subject because of their experiences.81
This is not my claim. In Chapter One, I argue against this notion and prefer to interpret, as I
advocate here, reading “witness” as a speaking position. There are several reasons for this move.
Primarily, it is out of the vernacular discourses themselves that I call attention to this designation.
Subjects who write – of the attacks, their experiences, the world in which they live – regard
81
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992).
30
themselves as witnesses, which for them means both having observed something significant and
something of such significance that it compels communication. I turn to several examples of
how witnesses themselves perform this designation.
Self-described witnesses remark on their own context, sometimes with an explicit set of
motives, for writing. The dissertation in general, reads their words and analyzes specific clusters
of terms. Here, I note the use of this term by our ‘witnesses.’ Subjects use the word ‘witness’ to
distinguish their observations from all other ordinary acts of spectatorship. The events of 9/11
are not simply watched; they are watched in an intense, reflective manner. The term ‘witness’
speaks to the act of watching something atypical in atypical fashion itself:
… yes, humans had killed in massive numbers before. But what happened on Tuesday
was, and remains, completely in its own category. And it happened live, on TV, for all
the world to witness.82
On the one hand, witnessing seems to describe one’s position in terms of how the events are
watched on television: The mediated nature of their witnessing seems not to qualify the intensity
with which they report what they are witnessing:
My most remembered thoughts of that day were how I had just witnessed a history
making change in my life and of the entire world. I kept thinking to myself, 'nothing will
ever be the same'.83
Witnessing of this sort appears to recognize that others might be in this position too. A discourse
of witness is put forward as a statement about oneself and potentially others:
We were all standing there still when the Towers began to fall, and what had been shock
and disbelief transformed into grief and horror. Many people walked out then, unable to
bear any more; but after a while they'd come back, needing to bear witness to history,
compelled to watch their world change before their eyes (my emphasis).84
82
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” 2011.
83
Ibid.
84
Ibid.
31
As compelled as subjects are to watch, according to their own testimony, they figure themselves
as compelled to communicate. The significance of the events demands a response:
LET ME START BY SAYING THAT IT'S NOT LIKE ME TO EXPRESS MY
FEELINGS IN ANY WAY, ESPECIALLY TO TOTAL STRANGERS. HOWEVER, I
FEEL THAT IN A TIME LIKE THIS, ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE WORST
TRAGEDY THAT I HAVE EVER WITNESSED IN MY SHORT 27 YEARS, AND
CERTAINLY ONE THAT I WILL NEVER FORGET FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE, I
NEED TO SAY SOMETHING.85
Indeed, thoughts come into focus through the act of writing. Witnesses note how writing can
perform a function for them:
I later went back to work and then went home to watch more coverage on the TV. I
watched, cried and prayed. At some point I started writing things in a journal to help me
put things in focus. The grief and destruction that I saw on television was something that
I had never witnessed in my life of 49 years (my emphasis).86
Several themes accompany these discourses of witnessing. Overall, though, as these
examples show, the moment of encountering the attacks on television, even if it doesn’t qualify
the status as witness, or precisely because it does not, refers to a very special moment. A set of
extraordinary terms are deployed to convey a sense of the extraordinary. Chapters of the
dissertation take up several clusters of terms that all show, in various ways, the non-normal
nature of the event. Some terms explicitly take up, as we will see in more detail, the notion of
witnesses reflecting on their own unusual experiences having watched television coverage. The
coverage is a crucial aspect of witnessing. Most subjects who write about 9/11 write from the
perspective of one who has witnessed the events live on television:
85
Ibid. Capitalization in original.
86
Ibid.
32
The TV was tuned to either CNN (or MSNBC) and the first image I saw was an airplane
hitting one of the towers. I couldn't move. All I could do was stare, in disbelief, of what I
was witnessing.87
Television viewing presents audience members with a meaningful encounter of the reality and
unreal quality of the attacks – they are a non-fictional event yet through a medium often
associated with fictive representations. I take up this problem and how witnesses work through
this apparent tension or even contradiction specifically in Chapter 2. Critics of the discourses of
9/11 note that just as first hand eye-witnesses provide testimony of tragedy, so television viewers
provide similar discourses: “Faced with the September 11 attacks, people seem fundamentally to
have responded in the same way regardless of whether they were direct eye-witnesses to the
events or secondhand viewers of it on the television screen.”88 While one should be careful not
to generalize “the television experience,” television critics rightly point out that TV has the
capacity for an “immediacy” of presentation that is able to call a subject into the position of a
“witness.”89
Subjects who have watched television coverage of the attacks, figured themselves as
witnesses of something unique, and offered a fragmented testimony sent out into the digital ether
are thus doubled figures of an audience member who is also a rhetor, and who I call, according to
their own preferred terms, a “witness.” By reading witness testimony, rhetorical insight is
gained. It is possible to read testimony pertaining to idiosyncratic experiences, but this is not my
task. It is true that discourse that figures those experiences uses terminology with cultural
significance. Kelly Oliver clarifies: “Testimonies, particularly when they are produced as part of
87
Ibid.
88
Kari Andén-Papadopoulus. “Visual Culture, Photojournalism and the September 11
Terrorist Attack.” NORDICOM Review 24, No. 2 (December 2003): 90.
89
Corner, John. Television Form and Public Address. London: Edward Arnold, 1995, 30.
33
a larger cultural movement, express the discourse or discourses valued by society at the moment
the witnesses tell their stories as much as they render an individual experience.”90 I do not wish,
however, to say what is happening culturally in terms of a “movement” or anything like that in
advance of the testimony that figures it. The events of 9/11 are not for me already part of a
political, historical, or ideological set of meanings into which I read testimony as either in accord
or discord, assent or dissent. I begin instead with the more simple and humble view, expressed
succinctly by Alan Feldman, that “the historical event is not that which happens, but that which
is narrated.”91 It begin, that is to say, with language.
If the events of September 11 are an exigence, I examine the ways in which clusters of
terms are used by witnesses to name, define, and call into being what this event is. In so doing, I
will have not only found a set of useful and revealing terms, but have said something about the
rhetorical resources drawn upon (metaphors, analogies, aporias, poetic phrases, paraleptic turns)
that identify and, in turn, contextualize the attacks. In this way, in my role as critic, I am a
listener, a hearer, an interpreter, and a kind of responder to the discourses of response. I engage
in what Krista Ratcliffe calls “rhetorical listening,” or “rhetorical negotiation” with the witness.92
In the moment of rhetorical listening, a critic helps craft the meaning of what a witness has
stated. A critic negotiates intersubjectively the meaning of the text. Hearing, a reception
process, turns into an inventing process, a process of production. Listening to a witness’ words,
one’s communicative act of “invention,” is a productive reading of that act. Wendy Hesford
90
Wieviorka, Annette. The Era of the Witness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.
91
Feldman, Allen. “Political Terror and the Technologies of Memory: Excuse, Sacrifice,
Commodification, and Actuarial Moralities.” Radical History Review 85 (2003): 58–73. P. 60.
92
Ratcliffe, Krista. “Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a 'Code
of Cross-Cultural Conduct.'” CCC 51.2 (1999): 195-224.
34
notes how this makes witness testimony rhetorically active: “This negotiation speaks to the
rhetorical dynamics of witnessing and the intersubjectivity of testimonial acts.”93 By following
this path I am reasonably confident that I can say something new about the concept of rhetorical
situation, the language of which as normally used by scholars is at odds to a considerable extent
with how our witnesses speak about 9/11.
Chapter Outline
Chapter One demonstrates how audience members engage with the exigence of 9/11 by
forming their own discourses and texts about it. I read news coverage of the 9/11 attacks to
show how official discourses attempted to speak for members of the audience by asserting that
the American public in its entirety was collectively traumatized. I look to witnesses’ texts and
read closely a cluster of terms closely related to trauma, ‘shock’ and ‘disbelief.’ I find that while
witnesses adopt a “speaking to trauma” style within the form of a “trauma aesthetic,” I argue that
their rhetoric does not warrant judgment of having been collectively traumatized. In contrast to
rhetorical critics who adopt the psychology of trauma to label the audience in extra rhetorical
fashion before any discourse addressed them, I read audience members’ discourse to see how
they positioned themselves qua audience members. In so doing, I read the category of
“audience” as a dynamic linguistic process of self-generation rather than as an effect of the
exigence of 9/11.
In Chapter Two, I argue that neither does the exigence of the 9/11 attacks as a spectacular
televisual image-event determine the discourse, position, or situation of audience members.
Baudrillard and Zizek, who imagine the collective audience in a certain state because of the
virtual reality of the attacks, do not and cannot speak for the actual audience of television
93
Hesford, Wendy S. “Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the Spectacle
of Distant Suffering.” Biography, Volume 27, Number 1, Winter 2004, pp. 104-144. P 108.
35
witnesses. I show how witnesses use a cluster of terms related to television viewing to define the
exigence of the attacks in complex and contradictory ways. Reading discourses of the ‘real’ and
‘unreal’ alongside how witnesses found the attacks to be both like and unlike a movie, moving
them into or out of ‘dreams’ or ‘fantasies’ as they put it, I find that witnesses’ conflicted
testimony continuously produces complex social “knowledge” of the exigence instead of moving
toward a collective resolution or “truth” of the exigence. Witnesses’ phrases about reality and
virtuality are more contradictory than “fitting” a prescribed trajectory of talk, thus exemplifying
how discourse can turn an exigence into the ongoing, open-ended process of defining it.
In Chapter Three I read witnesses’ statements as a search for new idioms and narratives
into which to position themselves. Witnesses report in ways that are difficult to miss on the
excessive ‘magnitude’ and ‘incomprehensible’ nature of the attacks that left them ‘speechless.’
These terms, I will show, bear the marks of a well-established discourse of the sublime. The
sublime is always something that cannot be said plainly in terms of language that is available.
Accordingly, our witnesses search for a new way to describe what happened to them but are
unable to find new terms and stories to help make sense of their lack of understanding. This
narrative move I interpret as a kind of rhetorical sublime. I use it to theorize a notion of
“deconstitution” – a break in a narrative that occurs before a new subjective constitution, as
theorized by Maurice Charland, can occur. I demonstrate how audience members’ discourses of
the sublime can be said to participate in these operations of narrative deconstitution en route to
possible reconstitution. Witnesses’ rhetorically sublime depictions of the 9/11 attacks as
‘amazing’ and ‘incomprehensible’ demonstrate a narrative instability that in turn frames the
exigence and situation of 9/11 as itself unstable and dynamic.
36
In Chapter Four, I argue that discourses depicting the “event” of 9/11 – terms such as
‘historic’ and ‘world changing’ – demonstrate that witnesses employ a seemingly ontological
discourse about large and sudden shifts in time and place. These discourses, I argue, refer once
again to fluctuation in self-sustaining narratives and fantasies. Instead of using language that
would place them back into the rhetorical situation as confused subjects awaiting clarification
from a rhetor, I show how witnesses’ phrases are themselves textual events – encounters with the
exigence through writing about it – that unravels a routine and regular context. Rather than
finding themselves automatically within a “situation,” in other words, I demonstrate how phrases
considered as events are themselves acts of reimagining context and reconstituting the situation
in which audience members are an entity at all.
The conclusion offers a conceptual approach to reading discourse as an event itself.
Rather than a situational approach, which places phrases within predetermined contexts in which
to make meaning out of discourse, I argue that phrases can sometimes, albeit contingently and
unknown in advance, alter the context in which they occur. Phrases have rhetorical force as
events because they do things, but act in a way that makes them more significant and impactful
than ordinary “speech acts.” Drawing from previous work on material rhetoric and recent work
in evental rhetoric, I argue that discourse events make possible ruptures in routine
understandings of situated contexts. As a paradigmatic case study against a rhetor-message
approach of reading official texts, my findings challenge the very idea of a rhetorical situation
model used to read context while helping to enhance the current trajectory of message-audience
rhetorical criticism and theory.
37
CHAPTER ONE
THE TRAUMATIC EXIGENCE OF 9/11 AND ITS IMPACT
ON THE NOTION OF ‘RHETORICAL SITUATION’
9/11 as a Traumatic Event
When several prominent buildings in the United States were struck by a multifaceted
terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, American news outlets sought to convey the shocking
sense of America as an entire body politic struck by a sudden series of devastating events. Not
just a set of buildings in New York and Washington were hit. Rather, reports came in of
“America under Attack.”1 Headlines reached beyond mere description of the attacks to intimate
a sense of suddenness and shock.
It was not out of the ordinary to read a headline brandishing
emotional content such as “America in Agony”2 or “Nation in Anguish.”3 This was news as
reaction to news.
To investigate this sense of shock, news organizations soon turned to various experts on
trauma. In the pages of newspaper stories and in live television news broadcasts, statements by
experts in the field of psychology generally and trauma specifically were offered to a public
figured by the media as in the midst of both panic and grief. The reports and findings by experts
seemed to fit the suggested script of what a trauma expert might say; the effects of attacks were
clearly an instance of trauma and not much evidence for a contextualization of this conclusion
was offered. With the attacks already described as ‘horrifying,’ ‘stunning,’ and ‘sudden,’ experts
suggested that a nation of people was immediately struck with trauma and predicted that such a
1
CNN offered this phrase as a titular infographic in live news broadcasts.
2
“America in Agony.” San Antonio Express-News September 12, 2001.
3
“Nation in Anguish.” San Diego Union-Tribune September 12, 2001.
38
sensation would persist for quite a long time. The headline of a newspaper on September 12
read: “Trauma experts last night said the World Trade Centre outrage will haunt the world
forever.”4
Other experts not affected directly by the events of 9/11 made similar statements.
Predicting a possible international outbreak of traumatic symptoms given that the attacks were so
devastating,
Dr Michael Isaac, a consultant psychiatrist at London's Maudsley Hospital and a senior
lecturer at King's College in London, warned that people across the world would now be
at risk of post-traumatic stress disorder. He said: ‘Anyone who has watched the pictures
on TV can hardly fail to be affected by it. Once people go beyond shock they often
develop post-traumatic stress disorder. People will re-experience the trauma through
repeated nightmares or daytime flashbacks.’5
An official discourse, accordingly, appeared to preside over and speak for the particular brand of
suffering most Americans surely must have been feeling. Reporters themselves played the role
of expert at times too. Not only did they adopt and offer a descriptive style that spelled out the
material carnage, but they also offered much in the way of a prediction of what such devastation
would entail psychologically for everyday citizens. Like experts, they spoke to an uneasy feeling
for the future of a traumatized public:
The images themselves will be burned deep into the minds of people everywhere. Over
and over the trauma will be re-enacted, the twin towers falling, the faces of pain and
panic a permanent part of a new landscape. There is a deep wound not just to the
American psyche, but to the North American psyche. A wound that, like here, manifests
itself in mute silence. But that will surely change into anger.6
4
“America Terrorist Attacks: This Will Haunt Us Forever.” Daily Record (Glasgow)
September 12, 2001.
5
6
Ibid.
Llyoyd Robertson, “Horrific images of today’s attack.” CTV Television, Inc. Ctv News,
September 11, 2001.
39
Another reporter speculated not only the reality of the trauma but its inevitable spread to
the collective psyche of the American public. The reporter who uttered the following words
positioned himself as spokesperson for the collective experience of a nation:
Whatever international lawyers choose to term it, this was an act of war - wicked in its
meticulous planning, and brilliant in its appalling execution. This will cause a bigger
collective sense of national trauma than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and not just
because so many more people died yesterday than perished in 1941.7
Terry Gross, a well known commentator for National Public Radio, began a segment of her
reporting with the premise that Americans collectively felt the psychic wound of the attacks,
stating “You know, Americans are feeling traumatized.”8 Even if nothing else in the midst of the
crisis was certain, a diagnosis of trauma was indisputable. News anchor Peter Jennings
commented:
Treat that as you do all information we give you today as being preliminary at best,
sometimes wrong. I think we've been pretty good about it today, and certainly confused,
because listening to the mayor, listening to the governor of the state, both of whom we
talked to, listening to the senator in charge of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
listening to all of our analysts, listening to everybody, the country is still very much in the
middle of, if not immediate post-event chaos, certainly in terms of trauma and trying to
get a handle on what the hell has been going on here.9
Whether or not the “chaos” Peter Jennings refers to in this passage is the cause or merely
the adjacent unfortunate reality of the trauma is an interesting question. For my purposes here,
though, it will suffice to point out that while the facts of the attack remained highly uncertain,
describing the effect as a trauma appeared far less a controversial a point to make. From the
start, even when the facts it were uncertain, the effect of a traumatic wound to the American,
7
Stephen Robinson , “This outrage will hit Americans harder than Pearl Harbor Terrorist
onslaught was a wicked act of war.” The Daily Telegraph (London), September 12, 2001.
8
Terry Gross, “Effects and investigation into yesterday's attacks on the WTC and the
Pentagon” National Public Radio (NPR). Talk of the Nation September 12, 2001.
9
Peter Jennings “ABC News Special Report: America Under Attack” ABC. ABC News
September 11, 2001.
40
North American, even perhaps global public was taken as having already been established in the
immediacy of the attacks.
In this chapter I show that, while the discourse and diagnosis of trauma played a role in
the public construction of 9/11, as in the passages I have cited, the discourse of trauma also
played another, perhaps more significant, role for an audience composed of people who
portrayed themselves on web sites and other social media as direct witnesses to, and hence
vicarious victims of, the attack. Accordingly, there are two distinct discourses of “trauma” to
explore – one immediately supposed by official discourses in the media and the other actually
lived by members of the public who consider themselves to have “been there,” even if only as
virtual witnesses. My aim will be to show that exploring a contrast in these registers poses a
challenge to how rhetorical scholars understand the notion of a “rhetorical situation.”
Characterizing 9/11 as a traumatic event makes it, I claim, into an exigence, an occasion
that compels action-oriented speech.10 In the Introduction, I have already shown how this
exigence has been thoroughly identified and explored in a political-ideological context in order
to show how official discourses of the state, namely those of President Bush, offered culturally
specific meanings to the exigence of 9/11 for political ends including motivating acts of war.
Rather than retrace these findings, I aim to explain in this chapter how reading specific
witnesses’ testimony offered at various lengths of time afterward, and in reference to, a traumatic
event set against the backdrop of a previously media-framed occurrence of national trauma,
raises a question: How do I, and other critics potentially, contend with the fact that there are
several audiences and different representations of traumas for each of them? The exigence of
9/11 is not only one for official speakers and listeners but also one for members of the public
10
In the conclusion of this chapter I will explore further the notions of exigence advanced
by Bitzer and Vatz as cited and discussed previously in the introduction.
41
who have responded to the exigence in various terms, and do so still to this day. Each time
members of the public respond to a supposedly traumatic event, they may in fact reconstitute the
meaning of the event itself. Admitting that the exigence of 9/11 is one for multiple groups,
constructed along various timeframes, and for different purposes allows one to see that the
presumptively “traumatized” audience of 9/11 is in fact fractured, continues to be fragmented,
and can best be understood as a rhetorical text in need of continual interpretation and
configuration. A broader dimension to witnesses’ testimony about the shocking and
unbelievable reality of 9/11 makes the categories of exigence and audience, in some significance
contexts, more unstable than previously imagined.
In the successive sections of this chapter, I perform four readings en route to explicating
the kind of trauma that constitutes the uniqueness of the exigence of 9/11 for self-described
witnesses. First, I offer various definitions of trauma as an event for a witness. I place myself in
conversation with theorists of trauma and attempt to explain the complexity of trauma as both an
external event and as a rhetorical mark of a disrupted self in search of meaning. Second, I offer a
reversed reading of publicly circulating official discourses depicting 9/11 as shocking and
traumatic. I analyze the construction of newspaper headlines and various on-air broadcasts
beyond the analysis in the opening of this chapter to show the ubiquity of a supposition of
trauma in media outlets that makes the trauma (ironically) very plain and understandable rather
than obscure and calling for an understanding. Third, I turn to lingering discourses from
audience members of the terrorist attacks – self-defined witnesses who consumed these official
depictions of trauma through mediated viewing – to uncover how their portrayals persist rather
than stagnate in their personal tragic reflections made public in textual fragments circulated
through digital media in the months and years after the attacks. I find that while this audience of
42
witnesses uses the same terms as news stories – ‘shock’ and disbelief’ most prominently – the
audience deploys them in radically different contexts that complicate interpretations of their
circulating texts. Fourth, I read Lloyd Bitzer’s argument theorizing the rhetorical situation and
show how discourses that “speak” to trauma destabilize the supposition of a collective or
consubstantial audience that is built into his notion of the rhetorical situation.
Definitions of Trauma
Trauma is a Greek word meaning cut, injury, or wound to the body. Those working in
the fields of psychology and psychiatry from the 19th century to the present have appropriated the
term to describe harmful effects to one’s psyche, either in addition to or in replacement of harm
to the corporeal body. The term has expanded from describing the merely visible external
wound to incorporate the notion of the invisible internal injury. Historically, the most significant
work in establishing the analogy from physical injury to psychological one has been that of
Freud, especially in The Aetiology of Hysteria.11 Theorizing the origins of hysteria, Freud
explained that such a state could only come from previous, overwhelming psychic disturbances.
These disturbances, however, could be caused by purely psychological events, hence traumatic,
even if not physically injurious.
The term “trauma” arrives at the present, then, with a medical history that has gradually
morphed into a social scientific account. Many understand it today in terms of an analogy
between physical cut and psychological wound:
Clinically, trauma is an acute injury. The term comes from the Greek word for a wound,
and the analogy to a physical wound has influenced thinking about psychological trauma.
Clinical definitions posit overwhelmed psychic defenses and a destabilized nervous
11
Freud, Sigmund. “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic
Publications, 1896. 187-221.
43
system.12
Establishing the more precise nature of the psychological injury – the symptoms as well as
overall effects of trauma – has been the work of clinical psychiatrists and psychologists.
Important in this regard is that work today on defining “trauma” keeps alive a medical/clinical
perspective. The brain and the nervous system are theorized in such elaborations. Psychic
injuries leave a substantive trace that one may read and account for. The most recent 4th edition
of the The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders offers the following definition
of trauma:
direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened death or serious
injury, or other threat to one’s physical integrity; or witnessing an event that involves
death, injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of another person; or learning about
unexpected or violent death, serious harm, or threat of death or injury experienced by a
family member or other close associate (Criterion A1). The person’s response to the
event must involve intense fear, helplessness, or horror (or in children, the response must
involve disorganized or agitated behavior) (Criterion A2).13
While the traumatic event must involve a level of experience that differentiates it substantively
from other kinds of intense experiences, many different causes may account for the experience of
“trauma.” Today this has many who work on trauma debating the factors and events responsible
for a properly traumatic experience. Some consider trauma a condition that can be caused by an
extremely wide range of events:
The issue of whether an event has to satisfy current diagnostic definitions of trauma in
order to be, in fact, “traumatic,” is an ongoing source of discussion in the field. Our own
conclusion is that an event is traumatic if it is extremely upsetting and at least temporarily
overwhelms the individual’s internal resources.14
12
Farrell, Kirby. Post Traumatic Culture, 5.
13
American Psychiatric Association [APA], The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders, 4th ed. 2000.
14
Briere, John. Principles of Trauma Therapy: a guide to symptoms, evaluation, and
treatment. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications, 2006. P4.
44
Importantly, among possible causes the author lists for traumatic experiences are
(watching) mediated episodes of international violence such as the Oklahoma City bombing in
1995, the terrorist attacks of September 2001, and the attacks on the London mass transit system
in 2005. These events, according to an expert of trauma, transfer trauma to individuals. These
events are, accordingly, all “obvious cases of mass trauma.”15 The conclusion reached by this
expert is that if an event can be traumatic for an individual, then it is possible to speak of an
entire collection of subjects as traumatized en masse.
To understand a subject, whether a sole individual or one person as a part of a collective,
as having undergone an experience such that they are traumatized is to explain generally a
subject in a peculiar, overwhelming, disturbed psychological state.16 This is a meaningful state
(it has serious implications for an affected or afflicted subject) because meaning itself is
threatened. Coming to grips with the “meaning” of trauma is “precisely” what makes the
experience of trauma so difficult to handle and articulate: “In designating certain experiences
‘traumatic,’ the meanings of those experiences are understood to be elusive or impossible to
grasp.”17 The impossibility of determining or assigning a meaning to the experience is crucial
for constituting an event as traumatic as opposed to horrific or tragic. Terror or loss may happen
with frequency but it is only when such experiences in the subject confound understanding and
meaning that the experience then becomes traumatic. Hence, as many agree, an event reaches
15
Ibid, 5.
16
Significant in this example is that trauma can be said to occur in those who witness
events mediated and from a great distance. This idea of watching violent events and experiencing
trauma through television footage will be taken up in Chapter Two.
17
Radstone, Susanna. “The War of the Fathers: War, fantasy, and September 11.”
Trauma at home : after 9/11. Judith Greenberg ed. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press,
2003. P 117
45
the level of the traumatic when a subject encounters “resistance to categories and conventions for
assigning them meanings.”18 While the term ‘trauma’ is rich in meaning then, the notion of
labeling anything “traumatic” carries with it the implication that the event cannot be fully named
or described. It is in effect so meaningful that its meaning does not register. This is why trauma
is often thought of experientially as inaccessible for it “can be grasped only in the very
inaccessibility of its occurrence.”19 Furthermore, this inaccessibility of the experience entails an
impossibility of its full representation.20 Just as there is linguistic confusion in categorizing the
meaning of the experience internally, linguistic confusion persists in expressing it outwardly to
others.21
A basis for labeling something trauma, then, is a dissociation between an experience and
its disrupted meaning. An event producing this gap somewhat immediately in its occurrence is
often referred to as a “shock.”22 According to several theorists and medical experts of trauma,
the experience of shock is a constitutive element of contemporary forms of trauma.23 A sudden,
18
White, Hayden. The Persistence of History: cinema, television, and the modern event.
Vivian Carol Sobchack ed. New York: Routledge, 1996. P 21.
19
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. P 19.
20
Some psychologists and psychiatrists work with individuals to probe deep into “lost”
meanings in order to restore them. Meanings may be “recoverable” but it is an intersubjective
construction between the clinician and traumatized subject rather than a pure excavation of an
actual object-meaning that is simply lost and found.
21
Robinett, Jane “The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience.” Literature and
Medicine, Volume 26, Number 2, Fall 2007, pp. 290-311 p 290.
22
Mick Broderick and Antonio Traverso. Interrogating Trauma: Collective suffering in
global arts and media. New York: Routledge, 2011. P 6.
23
Some suggest that shock can be considered as the very basis of trauma. See Pusca,
Anca. “Shock, Therapy, and Postcommunist Transitions.” Alternatives 32, 2007: 341–60 (the
46
jarring, and shocking event overwhelms the subject to such an extent that s/he cannot process,
register, and understand fully what has happened. It is both literally and figuratively a “mind
blowing” event “that destroys a conventional mind-set and compels (or makes possible) a new
worldview.”24 Trauma thus not only deeply affects the subject but incapacitates the subject’s
rendering of the experience because of the “shattering” damage it does to “fundamental
conceptual systems.”25
The turn toward explaining trauma and its effects is then, or at least has become, an
interpretive turn. The term “trauma” – having escalated from body to mind, from individual to
collective, and from direct to mass mediated experience – is used today not just to diagnose
subjects clinically but to understand and explain subjective experiences according to a logic of
the traumatic. In this way, “trauma is also psychocultural, because the injury entails
interpretation of the injury.”26 Critics in the humanities position themselves as speaking for
others in this regard and as testifying to those who might be considered (mass) subjects of
trauma. Here, one may turn to works – literal autobiographical accounts or other figurative texts
– and “address cultural representations of a response to trauma.”27
Reading and explaining trauma is, in this respect, rhetorically critical work. Given what
author reads Walter Benjamin’s definition of “trauma” as synonymous with shocking experience,
p 346). “Shock” is also related to trauma specifically through watching film and television. The
notion of a cinematic experience of watching shocking images on a screen is further developed
by E. Ann Kaplan and others. See Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 24. The specific ways in which
spectators write about screened images of 9/11 as “shocking” and part of a possibly traumatic
experience I take up in Chapter Two.
24
Farrell, p 19.
25
Robinett, p293-4.
26
Farrell, p 7.
27
King, Washed in Blood, p 7.
47
trauma does to complicate the rendering of meanings, a reader or critic must make meaning out
of texts that one finds to reflect trauma. While multiple kinds of rhetorical work are possible for
meaning-making in reading trauma, two general approaches stand out as staples.
First, one may read firsthand accounts to explicate the cultural significance of trauma as
accounted for by witnesses. This is an act of “rhetorical listening” or “rhetorical negotiation” in
which the critic sensitively listens/reads and responds to depictions of traumatic experience.28
Trauma texts, so construed, are not only encountered but co-created. Intersubjectively, a critic
finds the (cultural) meanings of traumatic testimony by moving back and forth from reception
process to an inventional production process.29 If the traumatic testimony is one born out of an
inaccessible experience that is also impossible to represent, trauma cannot simply be excavated,
but must instead be interpretively formulated by the critic.
Second, however, one may look to more general styles of traumatically themed texts as
they circulate through public culture.30 One can explore “sites as disparate as presidential
rhetoric and popular cinema” as a venue for traumatic discourse.31 A critic here lays out the
“political-ideological context within which traumatic events occur”32 and explains the ways in
which political forces, often represented as culturally sanctioned “responders,” intervene to
28
Hesford, Wendy S. “Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the Spectacle
of Distant Suffering.” Biography, Volume 27, Number 1, Winter 2004, pp. 104-144. P 108.
29
Hesford develops the work of Krista Ratcliffe here. See Ratcliffe, Krista. “Rhetorical
Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a 'Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct.'” CCC 51.2
(1999): 195-224.
30
King develops this notion as a distinct genre of trauma scholarship arguing that this is
what many refer to as “trauma culture.” See King, Washed in Blood, p 7.
31
32
Ibid, p 7.
Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: the politics of terror and loss in media and
literature. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2005. P 1.
48
“manage” this cultural or collective trauma.33 One finds here the ways in which “traumatic
events may affect the discourse of an entire nation’s public narratives.”34 The injury to the body
politic of the nation is analyzed as an instance of collective harm through which cultural objects
such as presidential speeches, television shows, and films respond, redefine, and ideologically
reconfigure the meaning of the traumatic experience. For example, the rash of films tending to
the Vietnam War in the 1980’s (Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, First Blood, et al.)
can, in this sense, be read as cultural encounters with the enduring trauma left over from
(collective) experiences of the war itself.
Whereas much attention has been paid to the latter, more general political-cultural
approach, fewer rhetorical critics have tackled the former approach by reading firsthand and
secondhand accounts of seemingly trauma-inflected discourse given by audience members and
witnesses themselves. I propose to follow witnesses’ discourse production. The bulk of
discourse analysis in this chapter comes from my reading of testimonial accounts of actual
members of the public reacting and responding to the ongoing exigence of 9/11. First, however,
I set the background for such a reading by turning to more news reporting on the traumatic
aspects of the terrorist attack. In reading these news stories in the following section I interpret
these accounts not to establish the immediate public “reality” of the event as traumatic. Instead,
I unearth the characteristics of trauma - specifically “shock” and “disbelief” – in headlines as a
kind of national testimonial to the supposed traumatic exigence of the terrorist attacks. These
terms construct specific meanings for the nation in their deployment in news. In so doing, they
narrativize trauma. In personal reflections from witnesses who use these same terms, however,
33
Ibid, p 66.
34
Ibid, p 66.
49
‘shock’ and ‘disbelief’ indicate the fracturing of a narrative that resists a smooth integration into
a collective narrative of shared experience.
Reading Public Discourses of Trauma in News
The word ‘shock’ and variations of the word ‘disbelief’ are terms that circulated widely
in the immediate wake of September 11th, 2001. As we have seen, several headlines, stories, and
reports mention these terms overtly in connection with the notion of “trauma” in order to frame a
shared national sentiment of tragedy. On the day of the terrorist attacks, and for several days
thereafter, terms of trauma were spoken on the air and published with great frequency. These
terms did not only circulate these as mere descriptors; they were often deployed as categorical
terms of judgment to encapsulate the overall condition of the body politic in the face of the
attack. An aura of judgment stood in for news reporting. In several of these sorts of reports, a
sense of the nationally tragic was deployed in and through words that gave them a diagnostic
twist. This section of the chapter explores how these terms were produced and circulated in
public discourse, thus giving rise to a broader notion that the public was in fact a traumatized one
and in need of management or even “treatment” – an invitation to public officials to give it one.
Newspaper headlines and stories, along with 24 hour a day news program coverage, as
we noted at the outset, turned to trauma discourses in order to speak for a body politic that had
experienced something momentous, meaningful, yet not fully describable. While undeniably
significant, the attacks of 9/11 were discussed as though they were not yet fully grasped and
possibly not even finished. The momentous and significant quality of the attacks, however, was
considered obvious. News coverage was itself excessively spectacular in response to the attacks.
On air, news shows covered the events repetitively and unflinchingly for days on end. In the
realm of newspaper coverage, the day of September 11 and September 12, 2001 saw huge
50
headlines. The boldness with which they leapt off the page appeared as an attempt to match the
severity of events of that day. Sometimes several inches high, headlines towered over images at
the top of the page. Across many front pages were images of the calamity – crumbled buildings,
smoke and rubble, shocked onlookers, mourners, and more. Above this sizable imagery, when
editors attempted to characterize tragic scenes such as people looking for loved ones they turned
to language of trauma, a discourse that rendered sensible an entire context with a few short
words. In this respect, a cluster of terms including ‘shock,’ ‘panic,’ and ‘terror’ were offered up.
These emotionally descriptive terms supplemented more physically descriptive headlines and
stories. The San Francisco Examiner created a minor stir by running the bold, one word
headline, “Bastards!”35 A violation of the reportorial rules of writing evidenced the magnitude
of the event. Such reactive proclamations, seemingly editorial statements offered as headlines,
were not all that unusual. From local to national to international levels of news, headlines of
‘shock’ circulated. The Manassas Journal Messenger headline read “State of Shock.”36
Nationally, the USA Today website offered the headline “Wave of Terror Shocks Nation.”37 And
on the international stage CNN prompted its audience with “World Shock Over U.S. Attacks.”38
Bold and pithy headlines emphasized the ‘shocking’ nature of the attacks from the supposed
perspective of the audience itself.
Alongside these headlines and stories, various terms connoting disbelief were offered by
news programs and media outlets covering the attacks. The Newark Star-Ledger led with
35
“Bastards!” San Francisco Examiner, September 12, 2001.
36
“State of Shock” Manassas Journal Messenger, September 12, 2001
37
“Wave of Terror Shocks Nation” USA Today, September 11, 2001.
38
“World shock over U.S. attacks” CNN online, September 11, 2001
<http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/09/11/trade.centre.reaction/>
51
“Terror Beyond Belief” on September 12, 2001.39 Other publications on the day after the attacks
placed a bold headline on the front page exclaiming “Beyond Belief.”40 In addition to the notion
of that which is beyond belief, newspaper headlines turned toward figuring the attack as that
which was beyond imagining. Outside of the realm of the possible, the day’s events were
“unimaginable” as some headlines read.41 Several publications the day of 9/11 and the day after
simply led with a bold headline at the top of the page, “Unthinkable.”42
Discourses of trauma in news, along with the associative terms of shock and the
unbelievable, express an assumption of a tragedy experienced collectively. Significant are two
points. First is that this sense of the traumatic is assumed to be uniformly nationwide and
comprises a national mood or sentiment.43 Second, terms of trauma seem to be among the best
available discursive resources to express something that was only beginning to foment. From
reports and newspaper stories one gains a clear sense that audience agreement of the attacks as
traumatic is stipulated in advance. And even if they were not fully traumatic in the immediate
39
“Terror Beyond Belief” Newark Star-Ledger, September 12, 2001.
40
“Beyond Belief.” Quad City Times, September 12, 2001: extra edition. “Beyond
Belief.” St Paul Pioneer Press, September 12, 2001.
41
“Unimaginable.” Daily Southtown, September 13, 2001.
42
“Unthinkable” Arizona Daily Star, September 11, 2001. “Unthinkable.” Salt Lake
Tribune, September 12, 2001. “Unthinkable.” Courier Times, September 11, 2001: extra edition.
“Unthinkable.” Register Guard, September 12, 2001. “Unthinkable.” Patriot News, September
11, 2001. “Unthinkable.” Lowell Sun, September 11, 2001.
43
One finds almost no alternatively themed reactions that would downplay the
significance of the tragedy let alone celebrate it. This stands in contrast to other historical
examples such as the reported applause, cheering, and terms of “joy” those in Dallas and the
American south voiced when hearing of the assassination of J.F.K. See Moser, Bob “Welcome
to Texas, Mr. Obama.” Texas Observer August 4, 2010.
<http://www.texasobserver.org/welcome-to-texas-mr-obama/>
52
wake of their unexpected arrival, reports led us to believe that these acts of terrorism were at
least the beginning of what will have become trauma.
This language of trauma reported in news is ironic. While “trauma” marks the loss of
meaning generally, the term implies that a particular kind of meaningful experience has
established itself among members of a consubstantial public as understood within the context of
media circulation. Meaning should be what is lost in trauma, not what is established. News
ironically ascribes clear meaning to the attacks through a language of lost meaning, the language
of the traumatic experience. One critic explains the irony of labeling the event of 9/11 as
traumatic, stating that “in designating such events as traumatic, they are, in fact and
paradoxically, being assigned particular meanings – meanings that follow from their being
designated as traumatic.44
Accordingly, blanket statements about trauma experienced by a collective, such as “the
nation,” risk a kind of reduction in the significance of this term. The notion of collective
suffering of the nation stretches the term ‘trauma’ in a way that may make sense metaphorically
but only at the cost of depreciating the explanatory, or even descriptive, value of the word.
Nations, some argue, correctly, do not feel a kind of painful experience in the body – a
precondition for a traumatic experience – and thus cannot be the physical or substantial subject
of trauma. 45 Rushing to judgment metaphorically to speak for and encapsulate the experience of
the nation is, some critics say, part of “the profligate ways in which the concept of trauma is
being deployed and the damage this does to our understanding of the relations between the
44
Radstone, Susanna. “The War of the Fathers: War, fantasy, and September 11.”
Trauma at home: after 9/11. Judith Greenberg ed. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press,
2003. P 117
45
Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley, “Trauma, discourse and communicative
limits” Critical Discourse Studies Vol. 6, No. 4, November 2009, 237–249, p 239.
53
individual and the collective.”46
The notion of “trauma,” when deployed in media coverage as an attribute of the nation, is
part of a narrative frame that encourages a kind of sentimentality in viewers. It calls for a sense
of tragedy in which a symbol is injured, a symbolic “body.” The nation has taken a “hit.” Was it
to the face of the nation? Its head? Its spine? Its reproductive organs? Stories about the
wounded body of the nation call for a sympathy but one in which a member of the public might
not know exactly where to attach one’s feeling. For this reason, trauma theorists such as E. Ann
Kaplan consider media coverage of 9/11 as encouraging a sentimentality best described as an
“empty empathy.”47
This sentimentality, while innocent on an individualistic level, perhaps, also makes
possible a set of strategic rhetorical responses by official state agents. As I demonstrated in the
Introduction, citing several scholars in the field of rhetorical criticism, the exigence of the
terrorist attacks described by ostensibly analytic commentators was placed within an ideological
frame wherein the tragedy called forth a supposedly united and consubstantial response. The
discourse of a nation collectively traumatized supplements this narrative and further makes
possible a collective military response to a supposed collective harm:
This leaves a large opportunity for the nation’s leaders to pursue the agenda to which
they are committed and to pass it off as the response to the time’s hard necessity. In our
self absorption over the wound of September 11, we have given our leaders a nearly
blank check to do their mischief.48
46
Ibid, 239.
47
Kaplan, 93.
48
Brooks, Peter “If you have Tears.” Trauma at home: after 9/11. Judith Greenberg ed.
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. P51.
54
Media coverage of the event plays into and helps set the stage for a “highly partisan political
agenda” wherein “September 11 is an excuse for policies that are ideologically motivated” as an
antidote to the terror.49
This gloss on news coverage begs two important questions that demand us to follow them
further. First, for whom do reporters speak exactly? Perhaps the public does share the same
exact sentiments that reports mention and the events of September 11 are indeed nothing other
than collective tragedy and trauma. But maybe not. Maybe they’re something less than that and
maybe they’re something more. Second, does trauma automatically proscribe and circumscribe
audiences’ sentiments in advance and necessitate or compel a corresponding discourse? If an
external event is traumatic, does this mean that members of the public will exhibit symptomatic
discourses necessarily reflective of the event?
Answering these questions demands that one turn to the discourses offered by members
of the public themselves. I do this in the following section.
Reading Personal Witness Testimony
Individual members of the public reflecting and writing about the attacks of September
11 have much to say when reflecting and writing about their experiences of 9/11. Many who
watched the events unfold “live” on television have offered journal entries, emails to websites,
and digital entries left at art and museum exhibits as meaning making accounts of their
experiences. Whereas all of these discourses can be said to be unified in topic it is much more
difficult to assert that they are exactly the same in terms of the meanings they offer. Making the
attempt to find similarity in meaning difficult is also the fact that witnesses’ accounts are often
textual fragments more than complete narratives readily available for rote rhetorical
49
Ibid, 50.
55
interpretation. Witnesses’ responses are short, fluid in form (or formless perhaps), and do not
follow clear patterns of temporality in story telling. It is unknown exactly when some were
written, what aspects of the attacks they were responding to exactly, or when they were
submitted/catalogued into the digital archive. It is impossible to say what exact subject position
witnesses write from. Are they mostly white? Middle class? One can only stipulate that they
are mostly literate Americans with some access to media technology. Witness testimony thus
enters the public circulation of discourse and reaches its audience of readers with the problem of
locating their own spatio-temporal coordinates. To what extent these testimonials themselves
clarify the audience position into which they ought to be inserted is a question. So, I ask what
kind of speakers and audience should I, as a critical reader who co-constructs the meanings of
their under-disclosed texts, configure these witnesses as?
I read witnesses’ discourses to show, in the first instance, that as in the case of news
reporting and media coverage similar terms of trauma such as ‘shock’ and ‘disbelief’ are
deployed. Unlike media coverage, however, which I have argued makes meaning of the
meaningless, I show the complex and contradictory modes of expression members of the public
offer when writing about an encounter with intense, shocking, and potentially “traumatic”
experiences. In witness accounts, there is a lack of a monolithic narrative undergirding their
language choices, a fractured sense of narrative, and an inchoate speaking/writing position and
style. I will show how these findings might mean something significant for rhetorical critics
attempting to configure audiences.
‘Shock’
In written accounts of the attacks of 9/11, the word ‘shock’ is a salient term repeated
thousands of times. I turn to ‘shock’ because of the historically established association, in both
56
popular culture and cultural criticism, between this word and the word ‘trauma.’ As several
theorists of trauma have argued, the sensation of a shock is a constitutive element in any
experience deemed traumatic.50 Indeed, it is often claimed to be the precipitating cause of
trauma. However, in reading witnesses’ accounts and critically explicating findings, I do not
intend to discover the “nature” of the traumatic experience through the discourse of shock.
Rather, I wish only to read how the term ‘shock’ is deployed, paying close attention to whether
or not its meaning is varied or uniform, and in what ways this might be the case. Overall, I find
that spectators of the attacks turned witnesses use the word ‘shock’ for a variety of purposes. It
depicts the stunning nature of the televisual imagery while also using it to elaborate upon a
bizarre set of sensations in response to it. ‘Shocking’ connotes meaning in several different
ways. It may refer indiscriminately to the immediate striking imagery and/or to an experience or
reaction to it. An object or subject can be shocking/shocked.
As I read this term, I am myself struck at how it performs multiple kinds of rhetorical
work. On the one hand, the term ‘shock’ figures an immediately striking quality about an
experience. On the other hand, it connotes shifts in meanings over time. Hence in contrast to a
generic, agreeable, and conventional depiction of the scene of 9/11 as ‘tragic’ or ‘horrific,’
‘shock’ is more variable and polysemic. What follows is an elaboration of some of these
different senses of shock as interpreted in witnesses’ writings.
First, ‘shock’ points to an overwhelming sensation. The term describes a feeling
surprising in its immediate intensity – a substantive sensation rushes in suddenly and strikes the
subject as overwhelming and unique. Almost physically abrupt in its impact, an excessive
50
The previous section on “Definitions of Trauma” makes this point.
57
amount of reality is said to “hit” the author. Its magnitude and instantaneity are over-stimulating
and almost too difficult to accept. Hence, some stipulate it as shocking:
I was watching T.V. at the time it happened and when they broke in with the news flash, I
was lost for word, I just could not believe that it was real. And when the second plane hit,
that is when it finally hit me, this is real. I think of that day often, and each and every
time it still shocks me and brings tears to my eyes...51
While the plane impacts the building, self-appointed witnesses write about a seeming impact
upon their own bodies or sense of self. The moment of the second plane hitting is described in
ways that make it appear as an impact on one’s body. Though the attack might be of an
unknown origin or something bewildering in the moment, it is expressed certainly an impactful
moment in which the body, much like the building, is struck:
I took a closer look and right then I saw the first plane hit. I was so shocked, that I fell to
floor and cried. I couldn't breathe. All of the kids were either crying or staring in
disbelief. That really hurt me bad.52
Several accounts make overtures to ways in which the body, the actual corporeal body, is
affected by a viewing of the attacks. Phrases pertaining to “collapse” and the notion of falling to
one’s knees are ubiquitous in witnesses’ statements. As objects are struck, witnesses recall the
ways in which they as subjects felt the impact and fell to the ground, collapsing from something
shocking themselves:
I had just dropped off my son at school and had come home when the phone rang, I
answered it and it was my Husband. He had asked me if I had the TV on and I said no
why? He said that you might want to turn it on , because the World Trade Centers had
been hit by Planes, at the time I told him I am sure that you didn't hear the news right , so
I turned on the TV and was so shocked by what I saw that I fell to the floor of my house
in Disbelief. Then the news started telling us what had realy happened , that Terrorise had
Hyjacked 3 Planes and that a fourth was being hyjacked , I thought to myself how can
51
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” Compiled by Center for History and New Media
and American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, 2011 ed.
http://www.911digitalarchive.org.
52
Ibid.
58
this be ? Then before I could think clearly the World Trade Centers come crashing down
on TV, I just couldn't get up off the floor.53
The verbal movement of these reports of bodily shock from uncertainty at first sight into
descriptions of the shocking nature of the reality of the attacks (once further processed and
absorbed) indicates a kind of sudden shift. This shift in register appears to remark upon a kind of
horrific realization that, while expressed at the level of facticity, is not qualified further as
cognitively processed and saturated with a robust meaning. When witnesses state a personal
emotional response, then, such as having tears brought to one’s eyes or proclaiming something
collective like the “United States was irreversibly changed forever,”54 the shock of realization
they express does not merely identify the manner of viewing events; it attempts to qualify the
nature of a shift from one sense of reality to another. In other words, attributions of ‘shock’ may
be read, on the one hand, as indicative of a discourse surrounding significant personal sensations.
On the other, statements of ‘shock’ may be read as a much larger amalgamation of emotional
responses including confusion in moving from one perspective to another – from disavowal to
acceptance, “uncertainty” to “certainty,” “unreal” to “real.” The word “shock” testifies to both a
specific sense of realizing (being “hit”) as well as a lack of realization (I couldn’t believe it was
“real”).
While discourses of shock can present accounts of specific sensations, another more
indeterminate sense of the word is deployed as well. In the latter sense, the term ‘shock’ is
stipulated as the beginning of a process of experiencing an “unreality.” Persons describe the
sudden and striking nature of the imagery of the attacks only to explain how such a shock did not
fully register. Instead, it is denied:
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid.
59
At first i believed this whole deal where a plain hit the building to be an accident. Within
the hour when i saw a second plain run into the other twing tower i was in shock. I had
never seen anything so horrifying. It was just so unreal. I couldnt believe that anyone
would have the nerve to do such a thing to the United States. Later when i saw the
buidlings crumble this whole thing just seemed impossible.55
In this respect, a feeling of the impossible made real is expressed not in terms of a ‘shocking
reality’ but rather in terms of the shock of the “unreal.” For some critics, myself included, this
mode of expression introduces a theme of dissociation. As discussed earlier in the section on
definitions of trauma, it may be said of some experiences that the intensity is severe so as to not
register right away. Significant to a discursive analysis of dissociative terminology, however, is
not the characteristic or quality of the event itself so much as a structuring of the experience
itself. Events do not automatically cause dissociation. Rather, witnesses themselves construct a
meaning of the attacks as that-which-did-not-register. Their rhetorical phrasing of their
supposed experience in this way matters. Though something “real” is witnessed, it is kept at bay
and disavowed. This discursive choice of processing and understanding one’s own shock as a
distanciation from the experience itself is not lost on these speaking subjects themselves:
Our family is obviously grieving, as is the whole nation, for what has happened today. I
personally--I think I'm in shock. I'm exper--in--in some type of denial.56
In this example, the experience of grief is both admitted and denied. One can say here
that simply speaking in terms of grief does not cover the complexity of experience for this
particular individual. In order to reference this movement into and out of grief, this observer
categorizes the experience as a shock. As with many other examples, the statement displays
orthographical struggle in its very expression. The tone is more speculative, approximate,
tentative, and halting rather than straightforward, plain, and propositional. The form of the
55
56
Ibid.
Jim Ogonowski, brother of an American Airlines Pilot, quoted in “CBS News Special
Report,” CBS, September 11, 2001. Dan Rather reporting.
60
phrasing coheres with this as well. Words are stopped and restarted. Especially in connection
with the invocation of oneself in the form of an “I” statement, coherent expression is a problem.
It is in this formal sense of the expression as articulated that ‘shock’ illustrates something
significant. In the midst of self-described shock, subjects slip in their use of words to figure their
own experiences. Indicating the movement from one time to another, from a banal moment to
one infused with a great amount of significance, is not easy task. Other statements reveal this
difficulty of articulation and slippage while in the midst of an “I” in shock:
Let me just add just as a matter of--of possible interest to you, it was a shocking
experience for me today because I happened to be in my Washington--in my office in
Washington, and I was listening to the reports of the plane going in to the World Trade
Center, and when that second one went in, or when the--actually I guess when the first
one went in it was pretty--it was pretty--almost certain that it was a terrorist attack. And
then I'm looking out my window and it looks right out across the river, and I see this
plumb of smoke begin to rise from just about where The Pentagon is, and it's--it's right-I'm looking out there at the very--at the very time that airplane goes in to The Pentagon,
and it was a shock, a real shock to see that.57
This personal account of the Pentagon crash by a public figure speaking in a less formal
capacity is full of starts, stops, and restarts. Phrasing becomes disorganized and
discombobulated and can be read as evidence of a struggle in description. The statement is
framed at the beginning and end as an instance of shock. It incipiently displays a verbal
performance or enactment of the shock itself. Intriguing, however, is that saying it only one time
does not seem to suffice. Repetition is felt to be necessary in the passage. Once at the beginning
and twice at the end the shocking nature of the attack is noted. In the final sentence, shock is
qualified as “real” shock in an apparent attempt to superimpose an additional layer of
significance on the type of shock that it is for this individual.
57
Former Secretary of State James Baker, interviewed on “NBC NEWS Special Report:
Attack on America,” NBC News, September 11, 2001. Tom Brokaw Reporting.
61
In these instances and others, ‘shock’ is a significant term that works to convey a sudden
overwhelming experience that threatens or destabilizes the full presence of the witness to herself.
More specifically, the discourse of shock can be interpreted as either an index of an excessive
experience in and of itself or an expressed movement of experience in which a witness constructs
him or herself as slipping from one register of “reality” to another. Hence, descriptions of shock
may be read as figuring the experience as an initial reaction or as the summation of the
significance of the entire range of reaction in retrospect. Put simply, this is why one finds the
style and phrasing of witnesses testimony sometimes disjointed, discombobulated, or confusing.
It is not the case, at east in this instance, that shocking events directly cause a state of
bewilderment. Rather, subjects speak in multiple registers about their reactions, at once
remarking upon discrete states and using the same terminology to describe a shifting range of
experiences. By this I mean that people describe their ‘shock’ as a specific event as well as use
the term to generalize many sensations and meanings. For example:
I live in St. Louis, MO. At the time I was unemployed and I slept late that day. I woke up
still in a daze turned on the TV and saw what was happening. At first I thought it was just
one of those afternoon movies. I then went to my computer to get on Monster.com. I had
signed onto AOL and there it was on the Welcome screen. Thats when I was jolted out of
that dazed state. I think I just stared at the TV for like a hour. About 2 minutes into it I
just started crying. I just couldn't believe what was going on. I was in total and udder
shock at what was happening. I sat online reading the news about while the TV was
running. I would say about after 3 hours of watching I was just completely numb… For
days I was in shock and still to this day I am in shock at what happened that day. I know
that is one of the days in my life that I will never forget. Right now as I am righting this I
just can't believe that it has been three years since. Honestly I just can't believe that it
happened.58
With expressions of sadness, numbness, and radical change, the author returns several times to
the jolt and shock of the news in an attempt to consolidate the meaning of those various
emotions. When an emotional or cognitive state is described, here sadness and disbelief, it is
58
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” 2011.
62
mentioned in parallel to a state of shock. Additionally, though, the attribution of shock describes
the lasting effect of the episode for this person while various other emotions seem to be
occasional within this state. ‘Shock,’ then, is figured as both a specific, momentary sensation
and a lasting state. It is both a sudden “jolt” and something that lasts “still to this day.”
The passage also expresses a sense of shock that lingers to this day as unbelievable (a
repetition of “can’t believe”). What does this discourse of deferring and denying the experience
say to readers? For despite the multiple ways in which the expression of the experience seems to
be made real for the author and her audience, the entire meaning of it is apparently excised with
the line “Honestly I just can’t believe that it happened.” Meaning appears to be both worked for,
aimed at, even elucidated a times. Yet it also appears as that which is figured in the final
analysis as that which is not there, cannot be found, elusive.
An important question is raised in this and other examples. Why are figures of shocking
experiences – those which people refer to as “real shock” – paired with a sense of the
“unbelievable?” Why is the expression of the excessively real so often framed as that which is
not to be believed? To this question I now turn.
“Disbelief”
The movement from a state depicted as confused into acceptance of the “reality” of the
terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 is sometimes a plain and simple narrative. A stunning
sense of “disbelief” strikes the viewer, but immediately gives way to an acceptance of a harsh
and tragic reality. As discussed previously, this movement sometimes begins and ends instantly
for some spectators with the sight of the second plane hitting the south WTC Tower. A
suddenness rushes to the witness as she from moves from watching an ambiguous tragedy into
the recognition that she is witnessing a stunning, overwhelming, intentional event. The shocking
63
moment is stipulated as a kind of realization, however confusing, that comes once the attack is
identified:
One of our customers came running in the door screaming the WTC was hit by a plane!
In disbelief, we all immediately turned our television on to CNN and yelled for the
Doctor's to come see, as we thought we were watching a re-play when in fact it was the
second plane striking the WTC! The office stood in horror, we were shocked, didn't
know what to think.59
Here disbelief – a lack of comprehension – and shock are articulated together. They read
as synonymous. In other cases of witnessing the episode unfold on TV, though, this view is
complicated. In these other accounts, disbelief is mentioned in parallel to shock and seems to
describe the entire scene of watching the televisual event. “Shock” is here a term that imparts
the sense of a sudden recognition of an interruption that actually changes the scene completely.
The complementary feeling of disbelief testifies further to this sense of horrific interruption:
As we watched, the other plane came slicing through the sky, and that moment - that
horrible moment that I'll never forget for the rest of my life - when that plane disappeared
- making the silhouette of its now ruined frame in the body of the building and bursting
out the other side in a black belch of horror. The orange flame, the black smoke - my
gasp - the shock. My husband and I, both 24 years of age, innocent, looking at each other
in disbelief - I don't ever remember feeling so forlorn, lost, strange. No one in the entire
world could answer my question at that moment - why?60
Journal entries in this vein seem to focus on an interruption of the “real” or an intrusion of these
events into an otherwise uninterrupted or removed scene. The evidence of horror is apparent but
descriptions do not seem to assuage the sense that the scene has been so interrupted, so far from
routine. Expressed reactions to the attacks figure these events as real yet strange and “otherworldly” (or ‘surreal,’ which we will see in more detail in the next chapter) in how they impinge
violently on the city and impact the viewer:
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid.
64
I woke up and turned on the news and was in total disbelief. I went into the house and my
family had yet viewed what was going on, I stayed glued to the tv all day long crying. At
age 27 this was the first time that terrorism seemed real, I think people of my generation
had never really knew the magnitude of acts of war and the pain and suffering that it
would cause.61
In contrast to this view, however, some spectators go to great lengths to describe a sense
of their disbelief in terms of the ‘unreal.’62 This is done both with respect to the sight of the
destruction and the lingering wonder that it happened at all, even when written from the temporal
distance of several years later in some cases. In phrasings along this line, disbelief and the
unreal seem synonymous: “It was an unreal feeling; A sense of disbelief.”63 An experience of
shock is often coupled not just with a species of doubt (epistemically not believed) but with a
mode of displeasure (a desire for the attacks not to be real and therefore not in need of being
believed). The distance the viewer places between herself and the imagery, a discursive
positioning of the shock as that which seems to separate the viewer from the event, is expressed
in a language of dissociation. Figuratively, words and phrases such as ‘couldn’t believe,’
‘unbelievable,’ and ‘disbelief’ seem not to index a specific psychological state but point to an
incapacity, or perhaps a certain unwillingness, to state with precision the event and its meaning.
My son called me and I came down and I turned on the television, and I saw the flames
coming out of the building. And at that stage, you know, recognized the magnitude of
what was happening. But, in my wildest imagination could never believe that those
buildings could be destroyed. I mean, the Trade Center itself is like a small city. Thirty,
35,000 people work there every day. Countless thousands of people visit the World
Trade Center. The restaurant atop where I work, Windows on the World, is probably one
61
Ibid.
62
I explore further the senses and meaning of the terms “real” and “unreal” in Chapter
Two in order to get at the filmic, almost fictional sense in which the attacks really happen but
seem unreal in their screened or imagistic appearance.
63
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” 2011.
65
of the most recognizable restaurants in the world. I--I just couldn't believe I was sitting
here watching the buildings collapse. It was--it was a nightmare.64
In the struggle to find a descriptive terminology that summarizes the quality of the experience
here, this witness juxtaposes the magnitude of the attack (its extant reality one could say) to its
unbelievable status (a nightmare). In this manner of description, the events of 9/11 are not
fleshed out in terms of what they are but talked about as though their reality is decidedly not
desired – the images are not just shocking but a “nightmare.” Other statements make this
abdication of the reality of the images quite apparent:
As I watched the second plane hit live on national TV, I became numb. I slouched to the
floor in disbelief. It quickly turned into denial, and my brain and body simply shut down.
The Towers that I had grown to know and love...were gone.65
Some statements push this sentiment further and almost refuse the experience in its
entirety. Disbelief, and other expressions of doubt or confusion, depict a problem of categorical
judgment – the specific, particular instance of the happening does not fit cleanly into any
universal or stable category of understanding. Though recognized as really having happened, the
sense making act of constructing the meaning of the attacks positions them as atypical and
falling outside the realm of typically “real” events. The attacks are real but do not fall cleanly
under the general category of real events. Whereas they register and are “realized” in a way
then, they are not reconstructed as fully comprehended:
When I heard about the 9-11 attacks, I was surfing the web. One of my friends hat told
me that a plane had went into the Pentagon. I thought that she was lying until I turned on
the news, and saw them replaying the planes hitting the WTC. I couldn't, and still really
64
Mr. Jules Roinnel, Manager of the World Trade Club at the World Trade Center,
quoted in “NBC News Special Report: Attack on America,” NBC News, September 11, 2001.
Tom Brokaw reporting.
65
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” 2011.
66
can't grasp the concept that some one could hate a group of people enough to take so
many innocent lives. It stills seems like a movie to me, it's just to real to be real...66
In these instances where ‘disbelief’ expresses a sense of what is unreal, disbelief seems to
resonate with bewilderment. The attacks are beyond the scope of previously imaginable frames
of reference, especially normative frames. A frame appears to be sought after through desultory
writing that attempts to name and explain the event and motive. Back and forth, witnesses write
with one eye on clarification and the other on confusion. Making analysis even more difficult in
the present moment is the recognition that any critic reading such testimony must wrestle with
the thorny issue that confusion is doubled – sporadic accounts of 9/11 years after the attacks
destabilize the meaning of 9/11 on the day it transpired as well as in their own present context.
The point is that these inquiries and analyses by self-professed witnesses remain open, not
closed.
Having analyzed meanings of two terms closely associated with ‘trauma’ thus far,
‘shock’ and ‘disbelief,’ I now move to place these findings in a larger context of understanding
better the audience of 9/11. I read journal entries and digital submissions from an audience of
witnesses as wrestling with the issue of clearly communicating the meanings of 9/11 not only to
other audience members but to oneself as well. Intimately related, analogous, but not equivalent
to language symptomatic of traumatic experience, witnesses’ testimony demonstrates two
themes – (1) a lack of an immediate meaning as well as a presently deferred meaning of the
attacks, and (2) a fractured rhetorical form that demonstrates an unstable subject position that
does not cohere cleanly to the category of a collectively traumatized and politicized audience.
Witnesses’ discourse, while not causally determined by the seemingly traumatic experience of
viewing the attacks of September 11, represents a set of experiences constructed around
66
Ibid.
67
traumatically themed language choices. Traumatic terminology is clearly meaningful. But we
must be particularly careful in assigning “trauma” automatically as the meaning behind the
discourse. Instead, by viewing the audience as members of the public who are active in
configuring their own experiences and seeking their own readings rather than passive recipients
of an event that forces an experience and a corresponding position of “traumatized” on them, I
am working to understand better how subjects refuse common frames – from media outlets and
official state discourses – interpellating them. To read audience members as traumatized is to
read subjects exactly as official news reports and ideologically motivated speakers would have
them be read. In the next section, accordingly, I explicate the two themes I have found in
witness testimony, delayed meaning and fractured form, and begin to explain how an active
audience of witnesses configures itself through traumatic terms but as something more than an
aggregation of collectively traumatized subjects.
Witness Testimony and the ‘Traumatic Situation’
The rhetorical negotiation between a critic’s reading practice of interpreting discourses of
“trauma” (an act of listening) and the texts of an audience of witnesses composing an account of
traumatic experience (an act of invention) offers a possible explanation for complex and
contradictory discourse production in the aftermath of 9/11. In reading the language of witness
testimony and finding specific clusters of terms historically associated with trauma (“shock,” and
“disbelief”) I do not mean that witnesses suffer actual trauma and ought to be diagnosed
medically as such. It is not the aim or intention of this critic to pathologize authors and/or read
testimony symptomatically or pathologically. Discursively, I find that texts “speak” of and
within a rhetorical form. This fragmented and fractured rhetorical form, in which meanings are
written about, searched for yet ultimately not obtained or represented, is attributable, I hold, to a
68
rhetorical act, which I call “speaking-to-trauma.” Speaking-to-trauma is a “meaningful”
discourse wherein meaning itself becomes the site of an ongoing problem for interpretation
rather than the production of meaning fully realized.
In this section I explore significant ramifications of this point. I argue that testimonial
texts demonstrate that the subject position of the audience is not a stable category. Fragmentary
trauma texts display the swirling and disjointed discourse of subjects who waver, oscillate in
positions, and do not operate under the logic of a “unified,” “collective,” or “mass” subject. In
demonstrating this in several ways, I then argue how such findings contribute insight to the
“rhetorical situation.” The notion of an “audience” in the model of the rhetorical situation can
and should be amended to include exceptional cases, such as 9/11, that challenge the notion of a
consubstantial audience presumptively articulated as a collection of individual subjects. The
case of the discourses I have analyzed to this point challenge the notion of “audience” as
conceived by the two standard bearers of the rhetorical situation, Lloyd Bitzer and Richard Vatz.
Before placing my findings within the idea of the rhetorical situation itself, I make a case that
witness testimony complicates a traditional perspective of audience as consummate and
collective. I make this case in three points.
First, fragments analyzed previously in this chapter are almost entirely retrospective
reflections and recollections back on the sense of the attacks. In exploring the initial impressions
of shock and disbelief witnesses testify to previous experiences as well as fluctuations in beliefs
or attitudes. Fragments admit of a kind of temporal dynamic in which they appear to waver back
and forth between the past and present, revisiting if not reliving the original episode of trauma
some time later in the immediate context of when they write. The impact of the event – its
supposed shocking nature – is often posited as cause for its ongoing explanation; it is retrieved
69
and revisited. The discursive act of retrieving past experience in order to configure it
discursively in the present moment is fundamental to the operation of what many psychologist
and psychoanalysts refer to as “working through” trauma. While critics may read testimony and
call it this, it is impossible to say unequivocally that all testimony exists for this reason. I use
this term with great caution, then, noting that discourse appears to operate in this vein without
stipulating a specific psychological state or subjective purpose behind it. In this way, the
ongoing recollection and reconfiguration of the experience of 9/11 is a “working through” in that
it presents a shifting landscape of meanings for audiences. “Working through” connotes process,
not product, and therefore suggests an ongoing set of possible changes. It is an act by those who
write. The meaning of this act may be configured by interpreting a partial automatism and
trajectory of of terminology rather than by imparting intentions on authors. Language choices
made by witnesses should reveal what kind of rhetorical process develops rather than persist
unequivocally as indexical signs of trauma. Readers of witnesses’ testimony may encounter
rhetorical “work” but this work does not necessarily reflect the standard operations of working
through traumatic experience in advance of what witnesses actually have to say for themselves.
The specific terms through which audience members themselves perform a kind of
rhetorical “work,” then, speaks to the possibility that these terms mark an ongoing oscillation
between self-clarification and obfuscation of meaning. Witnesses struggle to make their own
meanings in parallel to and sometimes in connection with other official rhetors articulating a
national ideological agenda for a supposed mass audience. Official speakers and witnesses use
terms laden with a historical association of trauma. But while the terminology of these two
groups might be the same, their uses are different, thus complicating the degree to which these
two groups or their terminology can be said to “interact.” The fact that this shared language may
70
emerge from and circulate via state actors and commentators does not mean it is taken up by a
public and circulated the same way. Not all audiences who stipulate themselves to be in ‘shock’
are automatically consubstantial with the same demand for an address by official speakers who
position themselves as providers of that address
A second point is this: witness statements exist mostly as “fragments.” These very small
anecdotes and recollections enter the archive of public discourse on 9/11 through specific
channels of communication that circumscribe their form from the onset. They are comprised of
journal entries of websites, emails to collectors of small stories or thoughts, reactions left after
visiting an art exhibit or a media installation surrounding the events of September 11th, as well as
a few other contexts that shorten the text. Most entries are only a few paragraphs in length.
Some are but a few lines of text. The rhetorical form of these discursive fragments does not
typify a narrative structure. This broken form has too often been overlooked as only indicative
of the exigence of 9/11 itself into which audiences were positioned as in the throes of “crisis”
and feeling “anxiety.”67 Said to be without the right words, audience members are construed as
passive and dependent upon a rhetor to receive a narrative into which they can place themselves.
Rather than pathologize the audience as stagnant, lost, and awaiting the grand narrative that only
an official rhetor can provide, I argue that witnesses engage their own imagined public audience
as rhetors in order to conceive themselves as a more complex and fluid type of audience. The
contradictory and fractured threads of discourse witnesses produce point to the potential
construction of an active and fluctuating audience.
67
I have in mind the work of Denise Bostdorff (2003) and Michael Hyde (2005), which I
have discussed in the Introduction and take up again here in the conclusion. These critics
position the audience of September 11 as a universal public in panic and without a “proper”
subject position, and in search of a rhetor in order to feel complete once again.
71
Third, the operation of writing or speaking-to-trauma is a thoroughly mediated one. Most
witnesses experienced the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in a mediated way, watching on television
from the safety of their home, school, or office. In this respect, any interpretation of traumatic
terminology must take seriously the notion that the construction of experiences and meanings
was framed from within the context not of immediate danger and harm but instead in watching
the attacks as a spectacular event to behold. As well, their narrative reconstruction of these
events is thoroughly mediated since these notes were often written and submitted electronically
to an imagined public.
The third category of context is so significant that it demands and will receive an entire
chapter. It will be taken up in Chapter Two where mediated trauma discourse will be analyzed
as “virtual trauma” or “vicarious trauma.” The rest of the present section moves into the first
two points concerning trauma discourse – temporal delays in processing experience lead to a
complex struggle in meaning; and lack of narrative form shows a conflicted subject position. I
look at each of these points in order to establish that the discourses of trauma analyzed
previously complicate a standard mode of ideological criticism.
In previous descriptions of “trauma,” I explained how different events possibly do or do
not precipitate trauma. While a natural disaster, an act of war, or loss of a loved one may all be
disturbing and horrific to one person but entirely traumatic for another. The difference is not
knowable in advance. In other words, actual clinical trauma can never be fully known in advance
of those who speak about it. While I am not interested in finding and locating trauma itself, I
wish to make the following point about those who do engage in such a reading strategy: it makes
little sense to speak about events as automatically traumatic before hearing or reading texts as
evidence. Becker makes the point that trauma is possible only when a subject talks about it:
72
“Trauma can only be understood with reference to the specific contexts in which it occurs.”68
The context of a subject’s discourse is essentially relevant to trauma. According to Becker,
Caruth, and other scholars of trauma, then, one should not speak generically about any event as
traumatic but instead with reference to the “traumatic situation” in which a subject experiences
and speaks about it.69
I draw on this notion of a “traumatic situation” in this sense to speak about the discursive
context of witnesses discourses instead of their personal psychological states. My purpose here
is to piece together what can be known about an overlapping set of discourses recollecting the
events of 9/11. Do discourses of witnesses fit and function within a specific “model” of a
traumatically themed writing? Do these discourses say something particularly significant about
the kind of event 9/11 was for those who attempted to represent it and “work through” it? The
answer to both questions is yes. The discourse fragments analyzed previously are instances of a
speaking-to-trauma, a discourse of trauma that demonstrates a group of witnesses presenting
themselves as a unique kind of audience for a public event – the very thing that Bitzer and Vatz
profess to elucidate generally but in this case taking on a specific set of qualities not anticipated
in their discussion. The discourse through which this particular audience composes itself takes
on the forms of belatedness in meaning making and fractured narrativity. I turn next to these two
compositions.
68
As quoted from Kaplan, Trauma Culture, p39, referencing David Becker, Conflict
Transformation. See Becker, David: The Politics of Trauma: the relevance of psycho-social
dimensions for conflict transformation. Institute for Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding
Switzerland (ICPS). <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCP5yRMmpIY>
69
Ibid
73
1. Belatedness of meaning-making
Specific statements articulated around an avowedly unbelievable and shocking
experience of watching terrorism live testify to something momentous and overwhelming.
Whereas news outlets labeled the events as “traumatic” right away in an attempt to instantiate
and solidify the reality of this shocking experience, individual writings about the experience
were not nearly as quick to do so. The immediacy of the event perhaps made it unexpected and
overwhelming to many at first. But the cataloguing and rendering of this experiential event as
such took time for many. To note this disconnect is not to say that spectators were traumatized
first and returned later to make meaning of the event. While one might advance this point as a
trauma “expert” or any other formal reading expert, one can also show how witnesses use the
form of traumatic testimony without conforming to the entire set of supposed meanings that
determine the subject position of the audience in advance. I choose this latter reading and claim
that the belated meanings constructed by audience members years after the event displays
evidence of rhetorical work and meaning production that overlaps with a logic of traumatic
writing but departs from customary ways imputing it as such.
I must make an important point about my reading of these texts not as the content of
formalized meanings guaranteed in advance by trauma but instead as the site of contested
meanings. Personally voiced witnesses have addressed me at an equally personal level and in a
specific context. Witnesses write an uncertain kind of testimony to an unknown audience, a
notion of the public. Personally, as a member of the public encountering these statements, I do
not get the sense of a coherent and well structured narrative form. Instead, I read the words
‘still,’ ‘years later,’ and ‘to this day’ alongside terms of trauma as retrospective descriptors.
When witnesses write of still not ‘knowing’ or ‘believing’ 9/11, I see a belatedness of meaning
74
still unfolding. I, like may other critics who more or less presume 9/11 to be a traumatic event,
suspect that there might very well be evidence of a “reason” many members of the public feel
they need to return and revisit the experience of 9/11. I cannot and will not in encountering these
discourses, however, find that specific reason (or instance of trauma). What I witness myself in
these texts is a discursive operation in the form of a return to the supposed “traumatic”
experience in order to struggle with meanings and recontextualize oneself as subject qua
audience member of this unique event.
Trauma is not, in any case, something that simply happens immediately to a subject since
it is necessarily made sensible in belated fashion. Only after some time has past and a particular
experiential event is reflected upon is there a possibility for an experience to develop and be
traumatic. Meanings of the trauma, or lack of meanings, are necessarily deferred and the
“trauma” is uncovered later through a discursive meaning making operation. Trauma is trauma
as such because it is stipulated to overwhelm the senses to the point where instantaneous
meaning making of the event is not possible. To render the event meaningful at all is possible
only later in one’s life. In other words, trauma, even when made entirely medical, is not
“locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way its
very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to
haunt the survivor later on.”70 The meaning of trauma is necessarily one that is delayed. This is
why “the impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness”71 and why we should be
suspicious of automatically labeling events such as 9/11 traumatic.
While one can understand belated explanation as involving memory in trauma – recalling
70
71
Caruth, 1996, p4.
Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: explorations in memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995, p8.
75
and recounting a previous event in order to make sense of it later – it is more accurately, too, an
issue of forgetting. One can say that a traumatic event is overwhelming precisely because it
overtakes the capacity to place the event into a discrete and concrete memory. Trauma is in this
sense a rupture of a linguistic, self-constituting process. One sees here
a subject constituted by forgetting. The inner world of the traumatized subject is
characterized… by dissociated memories—traceless traces. Though the subject of trauma
theory cannot be restored to coherence through acts of remembrance, a belated
acknowledgement of that which has been forgotten is a possibility. The traumatized
subject can remember its having forgotten, if you like—can acknowledge the gaps and
absences.72
This insight is significant for understanding the way in which a possible traumatic experience is
recalled and gestured toward. Discourse of and about trauma does not necessary fully “recover”
the experience in talking/writing about it. Instead, the discourse constructs trauma by reaching
back to the past toward that which is and remains “forgotten.”
If we say that remembered experience is constitutive of our successive selves as these
inform our sense of identity through time, what is psychologically distinctive about
traumatic experience is that it leads to a denial or severe inhibition of this process. The
repression of memory as a self-protective response to trauma then makes forgetting rather
than remembering decisive for the human subject. Memories which are submerged in this
way may find expression in screen memories, or may seem suddenly to erupt in terrifying
flashbacks, and when minds are troubled and disturbed, what connects traumatic
experience and repressed memory is the inability to assimilate the experience into
conventional narrative, to give it expressive form and make it storyable.73
What are audiences doing when they write this way? Are they simply reliving trauma or
are they speaking something into existence? As I read the terms of ‘shock’ and ‘disbelief’ I find
that they do not describe clearly the given experience of 9/11. Rather, these terms ironically
demonstrate the inability of describing the quality and characteristic of experience. Words are
not the index of a trauma per se but a sign of something that has been “forgotten.” These terms,
72
Susanna Radstone reads here a few staple works or trauma theory, and specifically the
work of Cathy Caruth. See Radstone, op cit., p 20.
73
Pickering, 238.
76
in other words, are the material stuff of a trace, a traceless trace. But to trace them back
precisely to trauma is to relieve them of their floating signification and pin them down to an
exact set of meanings, thereby violating their rhetorical act of meaning making. While one may
in fact read such terms and believe oneself to have found the kernel of the experience itself,
something real, trauma theory, especially when understood as linguistically inflected, instead
informs a critic of the possibility that such a finding is an illusion. Words allude to such an
unrecoverable meaning, but not to the meaning itself. Hence, even if terms are actually the
“stuff” of trauma, one should still not be able to say what precise meanings are found in writing,
for those words would center around that which could not be represented anyway.
The small anecdotes and stories offered by authors of these trauma discourses are, then,
however difficult to understand as conveying any concrete set of meanings, meaningful
rhetorical productions. If specific terms are not indicators of concrete units of meanings but
instead markers of “traces,” one may read the statements that expound upon these forgotten
traces as a fractured narrative. The words are not, as Pickering states, the stuff of a story; the
narrative here is not “storyable.” What makes the discourses previously analyzed rhetorically
rich is that this sense of not being able to be a story is consciously conveyed through the terms of
the discourse themselves. Witnesses do not merely relay the story of a shock of something
unbelievable and unreal; they convey the struggle in knowing and believing the “reality” while
not being able to fully admit to it. Terms used then are as much indicators of an ongoing
struggle as they are mere descriptors of an event. Meanings, like members of the audience
themselves, remain unsettled.
These belated returns to wrestle further with the meanings of 9/11 shows the difficulty of
pinpointing their context of production. The context in which a supposed traumatic exigence has
77
occurred is itself a negotiated notion in and through the discourses of audiences. The real proof
of this is that astute critics, and indeed self-described witnesses too, themselves testify to this
point, troubling their own findings:
Here is another problem with September 11: namely, how my own interpretations of the
events have changed over time and how they continue to change… What I have perhaps
recorded as “my” responses may in fact be responses produced culturally in the place
where I was at the time. This complicated question about how emotions are produced in
specific contexts, about individual and collective trauma and their interpretations and
reinterpretations over time, remains to be explored in another context.74
The relationship between the exigence and the audience of witnesses changes over time. As
well, the relationship between the exigence and the critic can waver, especially since the critic is
always a reflective component of the audience him or herself. Such insights should complicate
and question the stability of an ideological discourse to congeal and stabilize a set of meanings
about the terrorist attacks.
2. Fractured narrative form
Let us summarize. The discourse fragments analyzed in this chapter show a variety of
perspectives and meanings centered around identifications of ‘shock’ and ‘disbelief’ instead of
finding a collective experience of trauma. However, the process of formulating words to
describe the experience of any supposed trauma is in my estimation more productively described
as a struggle rather than a closure. Discourse is unhinged; this does not make it hinge on trauma.
As my reading critical reading in the previous section argued, the most significant rhetorical
work to be performed by the critic is not to claim that the event of 9/11 is traumatic and show
how a corresponding discourse is guaranteed, but rather to show how the production of discourse
is similar to, but not exactly the same as, traumatic writing. Stylistically, witnesses “work
through” a formulation and configuring of experiences. In psychoanalytic circles, to “work
74
Kaplan, Trauma at Home, 102-3.
78
through” trauma “entails the self-conscious repetition of a traumatic event – in actions, dreams,
words, images – coupled with sustained efforts towards interpretation, in order to integrate the
trauma into a psychic structure, a symbolic order.”75 Put more plainly, however, working
through trauma is a self-reflexive attempt to make sense of the experience at some later moment
in time. This conscious struggle is contrasted to an unconscious “acting out” with respect to a
traumatic experience. In this instance, one returns to the experience of trauma linguistically, in a
random and repeated manner, to re-experience it without conscious struggle to affix meaning.
Hence, “Acting out… is repetition as compulsion, an obsessive fixation on the traumatic event, a
manic re-enactment of it without any hermeneutic attempts.”76 According to this Freudian
dichotomy of how different individuals “cope” with trauma, “working through” trauma is
considered “mourning” while “acting out” is technically understood as a “repetition
compulsion.”77
The notion of a “repetition compulsion” is helpful in clarifying critical commentary on
mass media messages of trauma. Television networks, while attempting to produce a stable
narrative frame for attacks through a discourse of trauma, actually did very little at first to
accomplish this feat. Indeed, they undermined sometimes. Coverage, at least for the first day or
two, turned compulsively toward shocking imagery and a barrage of desultory news reporting,
75
Anden-Papadopoulus, K. “The Trauma of Representation: Visual Culture,
Photojournalism and the September 11 Terrorist Attack.” NORDICOM Review 24, No. 2
(December 2003): 89.
76
77
Ibid, 89-90.
For more on the original distinction form Freud, see Freud, Sigmund (1914/1958)
“Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” in Strachey, J. (ed.) Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works, vol XII, London: Hogarth Press. Also, Freud, S. (1917/1963)
“Mourning and Melancholia,” in P. Rieff (ed.) General Psychological Theory, New York:
Collier Books.
79
showing news commentators themselves in shock at times: “This notion of shocked subjectivity
and compulsive repetition applies to September 11: the television networks seem to have
functioned much as a traumatized psyche, invaded by and helplessly repeating the gruesome
images without being able to integrate them into an interpretative framework.”78
One could claim in this case that witness testimony about the events of 9/11 provides
little more than evidence of acting out through a repetition compulsion. Notable psychoanalytic
philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek claimed exactly this by being too quick to ontologize
and psychologize what various audiences of 9/11 were experiencing. He argued that those who
watched television coverage of the attacks (incessantly and repeatedly he presumed) were all
“forced to experience” the “compulsion to repeat.”79 For him, the event was so overwhelming
that it (vitually) guaranteed the audience’s position. Discourse, whether traumatic or some other
kind, played no part in the analysis. However, in writing reflexively about past experiences, an
audience of witnesses, as we have seen, demonstrates complex attitudes that work through
possibilities pertaining to the meanings of their experiences. Discourse fragments show
witnesses struggling with admitting the reality of the events, moving from denial to acceptance
of the tragedy, wavering between believing the attacks are fictional or non-fictional, and
worrying about whether experiences such as terrorism could have ever happened. They evince
their agency in doing so.
These discourses demonstrate, then, conflicted testimony and testimony that media critics
tend to miss. Not only are testimonials different from one person to the next, they reveal
dynamic internal conflicts, including self-doubt, instability, and weariness in the subject. One
78
79
Anden-Papadopoulus, 90.
Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, (London and New York: Verso,
2002): 12.
80
sees many problems as well as an uneasiness of meaning making; an air of shakiness and
uncertainty about what conclusions can be reached pervades and undergirds testimony. The
reality of one’s world is written about in no certain terms. Instead, “shock” and “disbelief”
linger to give the impression that fundamental conceptual systems of meaning making have been
shaken to their core. Content in this instance mirrors form. Shock, for example, strikes us
readers as an interruption. The excessive use of the word ‘shock’ along with exclamation marks
helps portray a schism and fracture in the text. The exclamation mark itself interrupts the text. It
completes a line and breaks it off from something else. Sometimes, it stands out at the end
closing the entirety a passage abruptly. It is itself a bit of shocking text or rupturing of the text.
In either sense, one encounters a textual fragment that is about an incompleteness or gives off the
overall sense of something unsettled that is claimed vociferously yet ambiguously through the
trace of a mark, an exclamation mark.
The form of narrative here is fractured. There is a distinct lack of linear progression in
anecdotes. They jump around in time frames, speaking in terms of shock and disbelief as it
pertains to the past and the present sometimes coextensively, sometimes simultaneously, but very
often ambiguously. These texts display what Kaplan calls a “trauma aesthetic” since they take
on the peculiar form of “narration without narrativity.”80 This aesthetic form of a fractured text
seems to portray an author in the throes of an uncontrollable, unassimilable experience. This
could be the case; the author can herself be read as fractured. However, one should be attentive
to readings of witnesses’ “broken” subjectivity as an ideological maneuver. Rhetorically savvy
scholars note how trauma experts can sometimes too readily position witnesses as passively
determined through their disruption.
80
Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 65.
81
To posit a subject that has been shattered or broken by trauma is to image (and assert)
that a complete and finished subject existed in the first place. Claiming a ‘before’ and an
‘after’ in relationship to perceived injury, trauma rhetoric reinscribes a fiction of
subjectivity as a thing itself, discounting (if not disavowing) the extent to which
subjectivity is a fraught, incomplete, and contingent process of becoming. The imagined
timeline of traumatogenic injury, thus, implies that the unified subject imagined to have
existed before trauma can be retrieved and made whole again.81
To argue that they are ruptured from the unbearable nature of the event can, to an indefinite
extent, be deemed true in some cases.82 But it cannot reasonably be claimed to constitute the
entire breakdown of a collection of subjects without placing them into an ideological context of a
passive audience in need of management and reparation. Analytically “freezing” a collection of
subjects in place, or claiming that the entirety of their discourses reflects but one destructive
operation of being shocked into trauma, implies the loss of the complementary constitutive
operation through which a collectivity ought to be reclaimed. Even if some members of an
audience are in fact traumatized, then, trauma is not an event that happens to an audience.
Trauma is that which is rendered through the traces of discourse in the belated construction of
the event by someone who is said, by herself or others, to have undergone the experience.83 The
rhetorical question, for traumatized subjects or subjects writing in an analogical discourse of
trauma, is thus one that asks what kind of constructing discourse this is. Is it an actual traumatic
experience or indicative of something else? I argue in the concluding section that witnesses’
texts exhibit a fragmented audience that ought to be approached more like a text for a rhetorical
negotiation of meaning than as an extra-rhetorical collection of traumatized individuals who are
all traumatized by the same event in the same way. Seen from this vantage, the “audience” poses
81
King, 9.
82
Kaplan even opens her book with the notion that “trauma can create new subjects.” See
Kaplan, Trauma Culture, p1.
83
For more on the critique of the passive subject, see Radstone, Trauma at Home, 121.
82
a rhetorical question more than provides an automatic guarantee for the advancement of
ideological criticism.
The Indeterminate Audience in the ‘Rhetorical Situation’
In the concluding section of the chapter on trauma discourses of 9/11, I will argue that the
complex and indeterminate meanings found in witnesses’ texts that speak-to-trauma undermine
traditional understandings of the category of “audience.” Specifically within the ‘rhetorical
situation’ models advanced alternatively by Lloyd Bitzer and Richard Vatz, the “audience” of
witnesses who respond to situated discourses on the exigence of the attacks in the ways I have
already described refuses conscription into a category that would position members as
collectively in “crisis” and in “need” of rhetorical address. In their fractured and belated writings
in the style of a “trauma aesthetic,” witnesses demonstrate their slippage out of a dominant
narrative seeking to unify them as one collective entity. I explain in this section how an audience
of 9/11 witnesses differs from how rhetorical critics have formulated them as a generic
consubstantial audience, and how this alternative conception of the audience challenges
traditional models of the rhetorical situation.
While the exigence of September 11, 2001 was admittedly massive, tragic, and historic, it
hit audiences in different ways and at different times. Many commentators, pundits, and official
voices scrambled to call the event into a particular being upon its arrival. While it was certainly
a phenomenal event, it was also what Michael Hyde has ingeniously called “a rhetorical
landscape” before even a single word about it was uttered.84 To turn to official channels and
voices in order to render the phenomenon into a meaning is an understandable desire. Perhaps
many spectators felt this urge from the effects of the attacks. But the way in which these effects
84
Hyde, “Rhetor as Hero,” 4-5.
83
were themselves rendered through torn and ruptured discourse fragments, have never been
completely synonymous with official discourses that reduce the event categorically to national
tragedy and collective trauma. Critics ambitious enough to mix readings of official language
with vernacular voices struggling to name the attacks encounter a stark dichotomy.85 The
discourses of everyday citizens turned witnesses demonstrates a lack of agreement and a refusal
to be consolidated, either aesthetically as a formal category or ideologically as a group acting in
concert. The (discursive) aftermath of 9/11 reveals a fractured audience.
September 11 blew apart not just our sense of home but our psychological unity as well.
If not literally, then internally, it tore many of us into fragments. There was much talk of
the unity that was created in the aftermath, but in actuality much was ripped asunder. I
felt divided from – rather than unified with – both those who could analyze the situation
with critical detachment and those who suffered greatly. Anxiety, the psyche’s defense
from further fright, tore into me. Dreams of plane crashes, bombings, and attacks and
fears about the subway (and, for a time, the mail) appeared, as psychoanalysis would put
it, to shield me. Although public rhetoric focused on how all Americans suddenly joined
the same side, in private, isolation and distance grew on both individual and international
levels.86
Critics such as Judith Greenberg here give us fresh insight into how personal experiences
can be at such variance with an ideological perspective reading a collective trauma at the
national level. While there might very well be feelings of unease and anxiety that resonate with
the experience of trauma, these personal reflections are not necessarily the same as traumatic
experience. Other critics working in this creative vein to at once blend personal perspective with
cultural insight note similar findings. E. Ann Kaplan finds a world of rhetorical difference
85
As explained in the Introduction with the work of Ken Ono and John Sloop (“The
Critique of Vernacular Discourse,” 1995), “vernacular” discourse refers to the everyday talk and
writing of (local) citizens as opposed to official voices and texts from state institutions and
through mass media. I develop here a reading of vernacular discourses in line with this
distinction. However, I do not define vernacular texts in advance as marginalized or oppressed
voices. My aim is instead simply to read discourses closely in order to configure how an
audience should be deemed “syncretized,” or collectivized, if at all.
86
Greenberg, Judith. “Wounded New York.” Trauma at home: after 9/11. Judith
Greenberg ed. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. P 24.
84
between official media voices who made it clear that “national ideology was hard at work
shaping how the traumatic event was to be perceived” and what she witnessed herself from
voices on the street.87 Kaplan elaborates on this disparity of unofficial voices to those in mass
media:
On the streets, by contrast, I experienced the multiple, spontaneous activities from
multiple perspectives… Things were not shaped for a specific effect, nor apparently
controlled by one entity. By contrast to what I witnessed locally, the male leaders on
television presented a stiff, rigid, controlling, and increasingly vengeful response…
While a ‘disciplining’ and homogenizing of United States response was at work through
the media, on the streets something fluid, personal, and varied was taking place.88
The personal, fluid, and varied responses by witnesses, or witnesses of witnesses like
Greenberg and Kaplan, who offer testimony fall within this realm of unofficial discourses. In
what way do these vernacular voices and texts add up to an “audience?” Answering this
question is difficult when audiences are, for the most part, assumed to be preexisting entities
rather than rhetorically constructed ones. How have audiences of 9/11 been assumed and
consecrated as “the” audience as such? In a double move by both official media discourses and
by several critics who have analyzed those discourses, a hermeneutic circle of an ideologically
motivated audience who receives the ideologically motivated message has been advanced and
preserved. In framing the collective audience of 9/11 as those individuals who turned to official
discourses in order to become or reassemble as the national audience of citizens, Americans, and
patriots, both official speakers and critics retain an extra-rhetorical view of the audience as
psychologically disturbed, destabilized, and in need of rhetoric. While critics accurately
explicate the sinister ways in which an ideological message reaches the audience in “need,” my
point is that positioning the audience in this passive state guarantees a contradiction in
87
Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 13.
88
Ibid, 13-15.
85
ideological criticism from the onset. The audience often becomes “the” audience in that it serves
the scholastic purposes of analyzing the official discourses that speak to it. Ideological criticism,
in other words, serves its purposes well. However, guaranteeing its success as a reading strategy
by making the audience an essentialized ideological entity prior to discourse makes any such
analysis tautological and itself ideologically suspicious too.
To spell my argument out more specifically with the example of a discourse that labels
the audience as “traumatized,” let me take up the case of mass media framing in news reports
first. As we have already seen, a mass media account framed the audience as a single body
affected by tragedy and trauma. In this way, news reports dwelt not on the incomprehensibility
of the attacks but instead framed the events as indicative of a specific kind of national crisis in
need of discursive redemption. National news accounts thus substituted a more thorough
reflection upon the devastation, destruction, and possible traumatic loss of meaning with what I
have already shown to be the case – an ideologically reaffirming rhetoric of “trauma.” An astute
media critic spells out this distinction:
In its rush to label, to define, to interpret, to assign meaning and to commemorate, the
media refused traumatic encounter with the event. In so doing it substituted its own
traumatic structures of re-presentation and repetition.89
Let me also return to the ways in which rhetorical critics have positioned the audience as
traumatized in advance of a rhetoric that addresses them. Rhetorical critics have offered much
insight into instances of ideological framing by focusing on the rhetoric of President Bush and
other official voices. As cited and discussed in the Introduction, these critiques have fleshed out
a nuanced picture of rhetorical appeals and ideological constructions built around assuaging and
constituting the audience. In this way, some critics have presumed the audience as both sharing
89
Meek, Allen. Trauma and Media: theories, histories, and images. New York:
Routledge, 2010. P 188
86
in an experience and lacking a rhetoric that addresses such an experience. Elizabeth Anker,
Denise Bostdorff, and Michael Simons argued shrewdly that Bush’s rhetoric helped construct a
particular vision of post 9/11 America.90 In so doing, however, the audience was posited
presumptively to desire a frame to begin with. The attacks of 9/11 comprised the extra-rhetorical
event that called forth a fundamental need for rhetorical appeals. Bostdorff talks about the
audience’s “need” for forms of address and how a people “expect” verbal reassurance.91 Simons
uses the specific language of “needs” and “expectations” of the audience.92 Michael Hyde
argues that the trauma of 9/11 instantiated a deep desire for rhetorical address: “People in a state
of crisis and anxiety are in need of discourse that can help them make sense of the horror and
chaos at hand and that can also lessen the trauma of their not feeling at home with their
environment.”93
This need, as figured by these critics, is also presumed as shared. Bostdorff argues that
“During national crises, the need for a shared sense of identity is especially keen.”94 She also
claims that the attacks directly caused “a need for creating and sharing community.”95 Bruce
Gronbeck writes about the audience in the immediacy of the attacks as feeling “mass confusion
90
I have in mind these scholars work on Bush’s rhetoric and other official mass media
discourses, which I have taken up and cited in the Introduction.
91
See Bostdorff, “Epideictic Rhetoric,” 299 and Bostdorff, “George W. Bush’s PostSeptember 11 Rhetoric,” 300.
92
Simons, “From Post-9/11 Melodrama to Quagmire in Iraq,” 190
93
Hyde, “The Rhetor as Hero,” 9 (emphasis mine).
94
Bostdorff, “Epideictic Rhetoric,” 299
95
Bostdorff, “George W. Bush’s Post-September 11 Rhetoric,” 297.
87
and shared bewilderment.”96 In these examples, rhetorical address does not compose the
audience as a collective; it is already collective. As well, the rhetoric does not create a need or
desire in the audience; it already has one.
Assumed in these critical interventions is the idea that 9/11 is an exigence that places
demands on speakers and listeners alike. Hence critics speak about the momentous impacts of
the attacks as though they were thoroughly extra-rhetorical in nature: “September 11 called for a
definition and understanding of what had happened...”97 The event does the calling and is
therefore outside of the speaking situation. In Bitzer’s terms, 9/11 is a classic case of an
exigence. Again, according to his view, an exigence is something phenomenal in and of the
external world that imposes itself upon people’s discursive world. It is “an imperfection marked
by urgency” that demands attention and address from a rhetor.98 The evental situation of 9/11 is
that which calls forth a rhetor since, like other exigencies, it “strongly invites utterance.”99
But what is it, exactly, that invited utterance on September 11? Critics have shown how
speakers such as President Bush answered this extra rhetorical invitation and provided a
discourse. Rhetorical address performed this task and shaped meaning where once confusion
and bewilderment reigned. A “meaningless” exigence was made meaningful through rhetorical
address. Along this line of thought, one clearly sees the way in which speakers create the
(meaning of the) exigence. Richard Vatz elucidates this view, arguing for a perspective of
rhetoric as that which identifies, names, and calls an exigence into being. Ontologically, Vatz
96
Gronbeck, “Rhetoric of Redemption.”
97
Bostdorff, “Covenant Renewal,” 300.
98
Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1, (1958): 6.
99
Ibid., 5.
88
reverses Bitzer’s view of an extra rhetorical exigence first and discourse second, claiming
instead: “No situation can have a nature independent of the perception of its interpreter or
independent of the rhetoric with which he chooses to characterize it.”100 Meaningful events do
not happen and then call discourse into being. The opposite is the case: “Meaning is not
discovered in situations, but created by rhetors.”101
Critics of Bush’s rhetoric seem to abide by this view of discourse too. Whereas the
events of September 11 were utterly confusing, Hyde’s rhetor as hero, for example, constructs a
narrative in which an audience could feel at “home” once again. Through discourse, meaning
was created. In Bostdorff, Simons, Murphy, and other ideological critics’ work, war was
justified through an ideological discourse. Whereas the attacks were a real, non-discursive
exigence placing the audience in a certain state, this state of “trauma,” “crisis,” and
“bewilderment” defined the pure lack of meaning of the exigence. Critics finding the audience
in “need” of a rhetor also found a rhetor in a unique position to define that which had no
meaning, the attacks of 9/11. In this way, the exigence of 9/11 was not a typical “meaningful”
situation calling for a discourse, it was devoid of a meaning and was only what a rhetor could
define it as. It was utterly discursive with an audience awaiting an infusion of meaning.
There is an apparent contradiction here: At one and the same time, 9/11 is analyzed as
preexisting and real, yet admits of no precise meaning and must be defined as an exigence
rhetorically. In other words, it is a necessarily extra-rhetorical exigence before anyone speaks
about it yet it exists as an open ended rhetorical possibility for the ideologically motivated
100
101
Ibid., 226.
Richard Vatz, “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” In John L. Lucaites, Celest M.
Condit, and Sally Caudill (Eds.), Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader. (London:
Guilford, 1999 [1973]), 228.
89
official speaker. The dichotomy between the official speaker and the audience is presumptively
maintained, perhaps even widened. Speakers are those who see and work with rhetorical
possibilities since they are those with official voices who have something to say. Audience
members are constructed to be passively affected by the exigence and in need of someone to
speak to them or for them. They are determined both by the occasion that situates them and by
the speech that addresses them. It is not contradictory and illogical to assume that the events of a
major exigence such as 9/11 were both rhetorical and extra rhetorical. But this noncommittal
disposition and lack of clarification about the status of an event exacts a price. The price is the
obfuscation of the status and role of the audience. Its active role in meaning making and
discursive participation in its formation is overlooked in either perspective since, according to
Bitzer’s view of exigence as automatically meaningful or Vatz’s view of rhetoric as constitutive
of a meaningful exigence, the audience exists as a slate onto which meanings are imposed.
One must be mindful of Michael McGee’s insight that the “people” are always
themselves a rhetorical construction.102 This construction, however, is a complex one in that it is
simultaneously real and rhetorical. Instead of a mere aggregate of individuals, groups become
“people” fictively, which is to say that a narrative situates them as a collective. In then taking on
this fictive or mythical characteristic, though, “people” are “conjured into objective reality.”103
Accordingly, one can and should see the “people” as “an essential rhetorical fiction with both a
‘social’ and an ‘objective’ reality.”104 A construction of any group that becomes the “people”
transpires in both of these realms, sometimes in the process of forming as a new political group,
102
McGee, Michael Calvin. “In Search of ‘The People’: A Rhetorical Alternative.” QJS
61.3 (1975): 235-249.
103
Ibid., 345.
104
Ibid., 344.
90
and sometimes acting in concert as an established entity. In either case, McGee steps back to
note importantly that “’the people’ are more process than phenomenon.”105
McGee’s point helps raise a question about the real and rhetorical nature of audience
formation. To what extent does the real phenomena of the attacks determine a collectively
shared experience of the audience as opposed to a rhetoric that addresses them? My point here is
not to answer this question but to argue that the answer cannot be given in advance. This
question can and should be answered by investigating discourses from actual audience members
in the given rhetorical situation. Having made this move, I have established in this chapter that
an audience of witnesses offers significant strands of discourses that give readers insight into
their complex process of formation. Paradoxically, witnesses show that they participate actively
in the process of meaning-making and self constitution, yet do so by demonstrating how meaning
is elusive thereby defying easy categorization as a collective audience. Whereas I have
established these points with respect to a general problem of meaning, I turn next to the specific
problem of witnesses speaking to the problem of establishing their own context. In the following
chapter I take up witnesses’ discourses about the context of viewing the 9/11 attacks through
television.
105
Ibid., 345.
91
CHAPTER TWO
IT’S ‘LIKE A MOVIE:’ THE REAL, UNREAL, AND SURREAL
IN WITNESSES’ DISCOURSES ON THE EXIGENCE OF 9/11
Introduction
The previous chapter explored how rhetorical critics working on public address to an
American audience figured the audience as a substantive entity pre-existing the discourse that
addressed them. Agreeing with a circulating mess media discourse defining the audience as
“traumatized,” critics supposed the collective audience as having undergone a uniform
experience of the exigence of the 9/11 attacks. Arguing that this made the audience too passive
and uniform, I demonstrated how actual audience members, self-described and reported
witnesses, entered into a rhetorical negotiation to name and define the exigence. In contrast to
both Bitzer and Vatz whose models constrain the audience into limited roles, I showed how their
texts make “audience” into a rich text itself to be read. Witnesses who “speak to trauma,”
instead of actually being only the victims of trauma, the “people” are constituting themselves
through a discursive relationship to the exigence as much as they are defined by official speakers
and channels of communication.
This chapter demonstrates how witnesses further develop a discursive relationship to the
exigence of the attacks of September 11. Importantly, I review the exigence in its mediated
context and note how witness testimony takes into account a closeness to the ‘real’ of the event
yet separation from the ‘unreal’ nature of the image-event, usually watched on a television
screen and described as ‘like a movie.’ Tracing discourses that comment on this strange and
bifurcated nature of television viewing, I read discourses that move in and out of self-described
‘fantasies,’ ‘dreams’ and ‘nightmares,’ and analyze them as shifting narratives that complexify
92
audience members’ relationship to the exigence. Reviewing literature on the implications and
controversies surrounding the audience’s role in the rhetorical situation, as well as rhetorical
scholarship on how audiences make sense of spectacular events on television, I find that
witnesses’ discourses help us understand how audience texts organically define an exigence as
an ongoing, conflicted, and negotiated process rather than a purely material reality prior to
discourse (image-event) or a purely rhetorical construction by a rhetor (definitions of the event
that appeal to unification of the audience).
‘Like A Movie’
In journal writings about the events of 9/11, several witnesses make use of the phrase
‘like a movie.’ Self-described witnesses are not uniform or unanimous in their meanings of this
simile. While the mentioning is the same, the use is different. In this section I identify and
characterize a few significant strands of meanings that witnesses deploy through this phrase.
On the one hand, 9/11 is described as ‘like a movie’ since it appears as if it is a big
budget production. Indeed, it is sometimes compared to a disaster movie, sometimes to an action
movie. The destructive toll of the New York City attack is compared to specific films depicting
the destruction of the city, such as Independence Day.
Staring out the window, watching the hole, and the smoke, and flames, it looked more
like a movie set, like Earthquake or The Towering Inferno, or even Independence Day.
Couldn’t possibly be seeing what I was seeing.1
Along these lines, witnesses make reference to movie stars, stating that they half expected to see
a hero figure like those played by Arnold Schwarzenegger to enter onto the scene. As someone
1
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” Compiled by Center for History and New Media
and American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, 2011 ed.
<http://www.911digitalarchive.org>
93
stated succinctly, “The whole time I was watching the event unfold, I kept thinking Bruce Willis
was going to run up the street and save the day...”2
On the other hand, the movie-like quality of the terrorist attacks as seen on television is
sometimes depicted as incredibly low budget. The live action, still camera frame elicits a
conclusion that the scenes are from a movie without much production value. Hence, it appears to
some as a ‘made for tv movie’ or is described simply as a ‘bad movie:’ “As each event unfolded
I felt like I was watching a made for TV movie.”3 The notion that what is being watched is
fictional instead of actual permeates the descriptive language in coming to terms with the attacks.
Instead of depicting a sense of immediate reality while watching news footage documenting the
attacks, witnesses tend to describe the stark and blunt video footage as a low quality fictional
narrative. They render a story-like frame for how they consider themselves to be watching the
televised scene. Accordingly, a witness remarks:
It is so hard to grasp that it is real it seems like a made for TV movie that would show the
mother and child getting on the plane that gets high jacked, then flash to the politicians in
Washington, then to someone working at the World Trade Center, then to some stupid
news commentator saying can we pin down exactly where the President is…4
Beyond mere classification of the sort of event that is being watched and assigned a high
or low production value, spectators are doing different things in speaking about 9/11 as a movie.
It should be noted, first, that 9/11 is often compared to a movie in order to express an error in
one’s judgment. Though it may have seemed like a movie at first, the realization of the “reality”
of the situation usually overtakes the viewer and results in describing the live televisual events of
9/11 as far from a fictional film:
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
94
We thought we had somehow turned into a movie. Within a few minutes, we saw the
second plane hit! As we watched in horror and disbelief, it began to sink in that this was
really happening and it was happening live.5
Several accounts of 9/11 take up this task, explaining the gradual dissipation of a fictive
narrative into a non-fictional account. More intriguing are examples in which this move is not
made. Instead, in some instances, the move toward a recognition and depiction of the attacks is
not only avoided, but decidedly disavowed. The attacks, seen in plain sight on live television,
simply cannot be real.
What I remember thinking is: This really isn’t happening. It’s like a movie. These two
huge buildings aren’t both on fire, with holes in them. These thousands of people not far
away aren’t really dead or doomed to die.6
In almost the exact opposite mode of viewing, some persons recount the act of witnessing
the unfolding of 9/11 as though it actually were a movie. In this manner of description, the
reality of the events is itself movie-like in its appearance and remains as such throughout the
experience of watching:
It was like watching a movie in slow motion! It wasn't reality to me! Actually looking
back one year later it still isn't reality for me!7
Just as it is described in the first instance as being like a movie, it is described throughout
replays as watched in similar fashion. The reality of the spectacle unfolding on the television is
not only a problem of appearance in its initial viewing. Witnesses persist in describing the
attacks years later as movie-like. The reality of the attacks appears to be repeatedly kept at bay:
The events of 9/11 will never feel real to me. After that day we heard nothing about it for
the remaining 4 months of training… When ever I see replays of it now it’s like I am
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid
7
Ibid.
95
watching a movie. I keep expecting some hero to come in and save the day, but that never
happens (my italics).8
These descriptions of 9/11 as a movie, even under the rubric of disavowing its reality, are
made through self-reflexive terms. While witnesses may in fact realize the attacks are real they
deploy a discourse that sometimes omits direct reference to that reality and even circumnavigates
around that sense of reality at times. In electronic entries that perform this form of utterance, the
reader senses a certain amount of uneasiness in the writing. Witnesses struggle to recognize and
describe the significance of the attacks while using a language that renders them fictional. But to
describe the attacks as fictional carries possible connotations of discounting or dismissing the
severity and significance of the event. So some witnesses wrestle with this dilemma and make
this dialectic overt in their writing. Self-reflexively, they comment upon their own language
choice of rendering the attacks as like a movie. In the following example, someone substantiates
the depiction of the movie-like quality of the footage by justifying it as part of the process of
working through the sensations of shock and disbelief. The witness writes:
I watched in horror at the sight of a plane hitting one of our most prized buildings in
America. It hit and I saw the explosion take place like it was out of cartoon or an action
movie. I went through what would normally happen to people in a time of shock or
sadness. I went through a moment of disbelief where I thought this whole charade was
simply a hoax.9
Significant here is the attempt made to justify the mode of watching 9/11 like a movie. The
author seems to attribute the perception of 9/11 as a movie to the difficulty involved in
processing and coping with the shocking level of realism, as if needing an excuse.
Juxtaposed to those who viewed 9/11 on TV are those who witnessed the actual events
unfold in close physical proximity to the destruction. Here too, self-described spectators
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
96
interpret the reality of the scene immediately before them as though it were a film. In the
attempt to depict the odd nature of that moment, witnesses turn to the notion of a movie to
convey an awareness of themselves as in a bizarre position of spectatorship:
It was like watching a war movie or an 007 drama unfold before you and you are an
‘extra’ player. It was surreal. People just stood there...unable to utter real words, much
less sounds (my italics).10
Similarly, another spectator notes how “it felt that we were unwitting extras in a disaster
movie.”11 In this sense, witnessing 9/11 is described as more than the act of merely watching; it
entails watching as if the position of the viewer has undergone a change. Noting the events
through a discourse of film renders the feeling of a shift in the viewer. The position of oneself as
a spectator even as one is also figured as a participating witness is under consideration and
configuration. Several spectators write in this vein, an attempt to figure themselves as newly
positioned subjects given the large scale significance of what was witnessed:
When I saw that collision and fireball, 5% of me marvelled at how it was like an action
movie. 90% of me felt that deep, monolithic and appropriate feeling of horror and grief
for those who died. This was a feeling I'd never had before; it must be the kind of thing a
soldier experiences on the battlefield. And the other 5% of me pondered how I--someone
who'd grown up watching action movies and playing video games and had always
revelled in the fake war and death so prevalent in our entertainment culture--experienced
a reaction entirely different from when I watched those movies. And I was glad that this
horrible event had exposed so clearly and definitively my true humanity, which is so
often obscured in the entertainment-centric nature of our everyday lives.12
More than confusion about what the “appropriate” (or perhaps moral) sensation and judgment of
the attacks ought to be, the perceptual line between of the “real” and the “fake” is itself troubled
in such fragments. Some readily and completely embrace the sheer horror of the reality of
attacks in distinction to witnessing it erroneously as a movie at first. They figure themselves as
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
97
fully moral subjects in so doing. However, others wrestle with the ongoing sensation of it as a
movie. Witnesses describe this sensation as lingering, sometimes throughout the entire viewing
experience, and sometimes well beyond that. Expressions that grapple with the awareness of this
give us readers a look into a subject struggling with a question of how to make sense of a feeling
that both recognizes the reality of a televised spectacle rationally but “refuses” it experientially.
In sum, in reading the distinct and various discourses of those who describe the events
of 9/11 as ‘like a movie,’ I find self-described witnesses wavering in confronting and naming the
reality of the event of September 11. They position themselves between the real, the unreal, and
the surreal.
‘Real,’ ‘unreal’ and ‘surreal’
The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center were more than real. To describe them
as appearing fictive at first only to be understood as very real later is a legitimate perspective that
some do express. However, journal entries and other textual fragments grappling with how to
depict the sensation of viewing the attacks are fraught with the confusing problem that their
fictive, movie-like, or “unreal” quality seems to linger in spite of their coming to grips with their
experiences as real. As spectators express their experiences of the spectacular acts of destruction
and devastation, they reveal a complex set of contradictions that, as they say or imply, sit
uneasily within them as viewers, further complicating the stability of their reporting and selfunderstanding. As witnesses to televisual events, these audience members do not proclaim the
attacks as something stable, fully known, and completely rendered. They demonstrate how the
attacks, reflected upon and written about from days after the attacks and years after it too, remain
something inordinately complex whose meanings are still worthy of grappling with in an
ongoing way.
98
At first glance into witness testimony, one can readily see how using the term ‘reality’
to describe the terrorist attacks is useful but incomplete. Many supplement the excessive nature
of the real attack itself with a hyperbolic language to make up for its inadequacy. The ‘real’ is
added to, exceeded, and superseded with allusions to the ‘all too real’ and ‘actually real.’ As
well, the reality of the attacks is sometimes punctuated excessively. Persons describe the events
as ‘real!’ and ‘REAL!.’ In this manner, an extra dimension of significance and ontological
address is conveyed through the style of depiction that the simple unadorned word ‘reality’ does
not seem capable of conveying. In this vein, some turn, ironically, to a discourse of the ‘unreal.’
When speaking about realizing that the attacks are streaming live, that they are not a movie, and
that they are undoubtedly happening, this realization often meets with a self-described desire for
skepticism; it is too much reality to handle at once and so is somewhat eschewed:
So sharply was the whole scene set against the clear blue sky, it seemed unreal, as if
against a special effects blue screen, and I half expected the towers to flicker and revert to
normal. My eyes just couldn’t take it all in.13
For some, the physical act of perception is simply “too much” in the context of 9/11. It
overwhelms the senses. In these cases, one reads a stipulated aversion to witnessing the events at
all. As the witness above puts it, there is an expectation, perhaps enthymematically a wish, to
“revert to normal.” Consequently, discourse of the real experience of the events is expressed in
terms of the ‘unreal.’ Witnesses speak in terms of a sudden move from misrecognition to
recognition, and with this the production of a tension in the subject – one between a knowledge
of what has happened and a desire to have what is known not be the case. The symbolic sign of
this tension can be read in use of the word ‘unreal:’
I fell back asleep while watching it, and when I woke back up, I saw the second plane hit
the tower, and I wondered what “movie” I was watching. Then I found out it wasn't a
13
Ibid.
99
movie, and I just sat up in bed for the next 2 hours with my mouth hanging open. It was
unreal!14
Subjects sometimes struggle in complex fashion to resolve this tension of discursively
dwelling upon the reality of the attacks on the one hand while speaking to their appearance as not
real on the other hand. While the attacks are described as ‘real,’ ultimately this does not seem to
settle witnesses. Turning from a depiction of the ‘unreal’ to the ‘real’ does not, against
expectation, close the issue. On the contrary, an uneasiness lingers in the writing. A grounded
judgment about the reality of the attacks does not firmly ground the issue:
I spent all day at the TV with my family. It was like it wasn't real, a movie that was stuck
and repeating not ending. I was numb for days. This event was all consuming. I had to
see and hear about survivors, I spent days watching and waiting in front of the TV,
waiting, praying, sharing with the news reporter and his or her interviewee, feeling every
much they're pain and fear. I watched for new footage as more and more became
available to make myself realize this was real ... it was happening before my very eyes.15
Discourses of the ‘real’ sometimes fail to categorize completely the meaning of the event.
Witnesses talk of being confronted by what is really the case and yet describe themselves as too
unsettled or confused to leave it at that. The line between the real and unreal is often described
as unresolved. Furthermore, and by way of proof that what I am reporting is true, witnesses
themselves write self-reflexively about this tension:
NBC and the other stations had quickly decided that the morning’s events needed a name.
At the bottom of the screen, above the ticker, we were suddenly “America Under Attack”
or “America Under Siege.” Everything seemed real but unreal. I was shaking
uncontrollably yet also felt almost displaced from what was happening, as if I was
watching myself react rather than truly reacting.16
These depictions present a subject fraught with a feeling of instability. One might think that a
judgment on the reality of the attacks ought to do some work to “ground” the viewer, to settle the
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
100
discursive wavering and oscillations in naming and figuring the attacks. The reality, one
expects, should set in. Instead, the witness claims that this is not happening as expected. There
is too much to pin down, to make known. Moreover, with new information and speculation
hurled continuously at the spectator, a self-reinforcing dynamic problem sets in. As a result,
witnesses, such as the one quoted in the previous passage, not only judge the televised scene as
excessively real or unreal, but waver between these two descriptions (“everything seemed real
but unreal”).
A witness experiences multiple confusions possibly. Vagueness permeates the diction
as sensations and distinctions multiply:
Also, the feeling that this is just too unreal came over me once again. The fear was so
real, yet the situation was not.17
The ‘real’ meets the ‘unreal’ quite frequently in descriptions of the spectacular imagery of the
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. The expressed contradiction of recognizing both
sensations – the use of both terms – strikes authors themselves and they follow up on this. The
witness writes in an agitated voice and further statements elaborate upon their reflexive view on
this disquietude.
As part of linguistic maneuvering to work through this felt contradiction, others
describe the events of 9/11 in excess of their reality by turning to other terms related to the word
‘real.’ For some, the attacks are “surreal.” This term is apt. What they have seen supervenes
onto the “real.” The term ‘surreal’ describes something more than stark reality, something in
excess to the reality of a situation but nevertheless not as real itself.18 The term is packed with
17
18
Ibid.
The term ‘surreal’ is generally thought to have been coined by the poet/art critic
Guillaume Apollinaire in the early twentieth century. Originally exalted as mode of accessing
registers of the unconscious and other realms of “inner” reality, the notion of the “surreal” was
101
multiple meanings. At one level, surrealism entails a confrontation with the radically unfamiliar.
The peculiarity of something new can be ‘surreal’ in this regard. The surreal may also indicate
sensation of tensions or contradictions in reality. In this second manner, articulating the surreal
is a way to describe not just the unfamiliar and “the shock of the new” (as art critics call it), but
to name the multiple feelings that arise through the recognition of the “real” and the “unreal”
occurring together:
The horror was surreal. At once, an incredible feeling of dread and disbelief erupted
while at the same time my mind tried to rationalize that I had seen worse things on TV
before.19
Expressions of the surreal are often made alongside an articulation of the reality of the
attacks. In this way, the excessive amount of reality conveyed in the footage of the attacks is
highlighted through a discourse around the notion of surrealism. As in cases where ‘real!’
punctuates one’s reaction to the images to depict an excessive quality, the term ‘surreal’ appears
to note something in excess of the scene and beyond a plain description that qualifies the manner
of viewing. While a witness’ remark on the surreal quality of the scene can be a mere expression
of an overwhelming experience, then, ‘surreal’ also depicts a shift toward another kind of
relationship between the image and the viewer. ‘Surreal’ describes not only imagery but the
scene of watching imagery itself. What it means usually to have witnessed something appears to
be the subject of a negotiation through a discourse of the surreal:
By this time the surreality of the situation was just mind numbing. One of the people
sitting around me picked up that day's edition of the New York post and pointed to the
picture of whom I think was a baseball player on the front page. He said something like
developed in writings and other artistic endeavors today associated with the Dada movement.
“Surreal” is today the idea of an artistic expression that is anti-formalist, non-traditional, and in
celebration of contingency. See Mary Caws, Surrealism, (London, New York: Phaidon, 2004).
19
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” 2011.
102
‘..and this was on the front page today...’ Someone else replied with ‘...It won't look like
that tomorrow...’20
A shifting landscape is explored and expressed. This shift, however, is not complete; witnesses
are in the middle of it, part of the dynamic process to articulate it, and make it what it will soon
be. Tomorrow’s headline is about to be written. No one knows what it will read but some are
certain that it will be unlike headlines in the past. The routine of the past has been figured as
shattered, its continuity with the future broken. This is more real than a reportorial discourse of
news can say.
As in cases where the movie-like qualities of the attacks are commented upon selfreflexively as disturbing the viewer in the act of watching, comments on the unreal or surreal
nature of the attacks indicate a similar negotiation of the subject position of the witness. The
‘surreal’ indexes this reflexive moment of the author’s struggle. Rather than a judgment about
the reality of the images, however bizarre, the very oddity of actually sensing them and what it
means to have witnessed them becomes the “real” question that endures to the present of writing:
The sense of surreal continues. On the news they barely mention the cleanup in New
York (4,600 still missing). Instead it’s all about anthrax and the latest hoaxes and on-line
polls about whether or not we’re afraid, then maybe a little bit of news about the
bombing, which always seems to be the same: we’re “making progress.”
This is why people are not healing - the terror continues. It’s almost as if real life is on
hold and we’ve just been drafted to run around, react, and put out fires. I am not really
afraid. I’m just upset this is happening to our country. Some days all of this seems either
horribly bleak or bizarre.
Every day I think of the World Trade Center. And the planes. I wonder if there will ever
be a day when I don’t. And if I’m like this, I can’t even fathom being a New Yorker, or
having lost family or friends.21
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.
103
Enter Critics of the Reality of 9/11:
Baudrillard and Zizek Rhetorically Reconsidered
In the previous section I provided a discussion of the significant ways in which witnesses
struggle discursively to judge and name what they have seen. Having watched news footage of
the attacks mostly on television, witnesses’ discourse commented upon not only the reality of the
attacks but the oddity of their appearance as a live event the content of which is usually found in
a fictional medium. In this section, I turn to a few significant and widely disseminated critical
reflections of the 9/11 attacks as a televised media spectacle, a reception mode that qualifies and
complexifies my earlier analyses. Specifically, I turn to the work of the European intellectuals
Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek. I review their two pieces, “The Spirit of Terrorism”22 and
Welcome to the Desert of the Real,23 respectively. I then show how a few other critics working
from a psychoanalytic framework offered similar readings and also raised the possibility that
“mediated trauma” (a trauma through watching television) was to blame for the shock and horror
experienced by the public. I review all of these critics in order to demonstrate that they do not
offer specific and contextual readings of members of the audience and instead opt for a
deterministic theory of image-events that impact the viewing audience uniformly.
Baudrillard and Zizek stand out as noteworthy cultural critics of 9/11 in that they chimed
in very soon after the attacks to interpret the cultural and political significance of the events of
September 11 with a specific emphasis on the nature of the political event as a media event.24 In
22
Jean Baudrillard, “The Spirit of Terrorism.” Le Monde, November 2, 2001.
23
Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, (London and New York: Verso,
2002).
24
As far as timely academic publications go, both of these pieces circulated quite soon
after the attacks. Baudrillard’s article in Le Monde ran only 6 weeks after 9/11. While Zizek’s
104
so doing, these critics revealed certain assumptions and attitudes about the American public. I
make plain the main claims of the two pieces in order to demonstrate that no close reading of the
American public itself was offered. Baudrillard and Zizek both defended a deterministic reading
of the image-event as the cause of an undifferentiated collective experience by the public en
masse, even more than in the ideological-rhetorical readings I reviewed in Chapter One.
In “The Spirit of Terrorism,” Baudrillard advances the thesis that the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, the “mother of all events,”25 was a singularity in the political economy of
symbolic exchange that was so massive and mind blowing it could not be absorbed into the
everyday experience of media consumption. As an image-event beyond being merely real, the
attacks were overly symbolic and could not be simply understood as yet another instance of
terrorism.26 They were instead a symbol of a kind of “suicide” of a first world power.27 Among
several premises used to support his perspective, Baudrillard claimed that the attacks tapped into
a fantasy of wishing to witness a destruction of power. Not just a portion of the American public
held this sentiment, though. Baudrillard imagined an entire public of the Western, “globalized
order” who fantasized about the destruction of that very order. Baudrillard spelled out this
peculiar wish, arguing that
…malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share (this order’s) benefits. An
allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive power is happily universal, and the two
towers of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally
book, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, was published the following year, his musings on 9/11
were circulated only a few weeks after the attacks in the form of a lengthy message that was
posted in various online forums to be read and discussed.
25
Baudrillard, “Spirit,” 2001.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
105
twin-ness), this definitive order. No need for a death wish or desire for self-destruction,
not even for perverse effects. It is very logically, and inexorably, that the rise to power of
power exacerbates a will to destroy it. And power is complicit with its own destruction.28
A theory of collective unconscious fantasy drives Baudrillard’s argument. The generic
American audience, one supposedly universal in its relation to power, media consumption, and
the experience of the attacks themselves, is said to have felt something very real but repressed.
Baudrillard made explicit this frame of latent psychic formations happening in the minds of the
public:
The fact that we have dreamt of this event, that everyone without exception has dreamt of
it – because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any power that has become
hegemonic to this degree – is unacceptable to the Western moral conscience. Yet it is
fact, and one which can indeed be measured by the emotive violence of all that has been
said and written in the effort to dispel it. It is they who did it, but we who wished it.29
The secret of the “success” of the terrorist attacks, how it elicited such a massive shock as a
mediated image-event, is that the event relied on a complicity within the viewing audience in
which the public harbored a secret and “prodigious jubilation engenderd by witnessing this
global superpower being destroyed…”30 In this way, Baudrillard avowed a determinist and
downright “fatalist” view of the American public.31 Rather than any rhetorical negotiation of the
meaning of the event, the audience was merely stupefied by the images of destruction and unable
to search for meaning let alone find any. It had a bizarre, pleasurable feeling of a fantasy come
true – witnessing destruction – but was unable to analyze this feeling or anything else
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid.
31
The term ‘fatalism’ as a description of Baudrillard’s views on 9/11 is explicated by
Richard Kearney, “Terror, Philosophy and the Sublime: some reflections on 11 September”
Philosophy and Social Criticism vol 29, #1, 2003.
106
conceptually. On this point, which is prejudicial in assuming an ignorant public, Baudrillard
strictly foreclosed the possibility of interpreting the meaning of the event:
One tries after the event to assign to the latter any meaning, to find any possible
interpretation. But there is none possible, and it is only the radicality of the spectacle, the
brutality of the spectacle that is original and irreducible.32
Baudrillard’s notions of virtuality and symbolicity exist in advance of, and determine, the
subject position of the viewing audience. In the final analysis of the 9/11 attacks, there was for
Baudrillard only the brutal singularity of the spectacle. Along these lines of privileging the
power of the image in advance of the audience members who negotiate its meaning, Zizek also
argued that the 9/11 attacks were less a “real” attack than a media spectacle. Adhering to
Baudrillard’s thesis of the determining force of the imagery, Zizek maintained that the attacks
were performed precisely for their mediated effects:
For the great majority of the public, the WTC [World Trade Center] explosions were
events on the TV screen, and when we watched the oft-repeated shot of frightened people
running toward the camera ahead of the giant cloud of dust from the collapsing tower,
was not the framing of the shot itself reminiscent of spectacular shots in catastrophe
movies, a special effect which outdid all others, since – as Jeremy Bentham knew –
reality is the best appearance of itself?… This is the element of truth in Karl-Heinz
Stockhausen’s provocative statement that the planes hitting the WTC towers was the
ultimate work of art: we can perceive the collapse of the WTC towers as the climactic
conclusion of the twentieth-century art’s ‘passion for the Real’ – the ‘terrorists’ did not
do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but for the spectacular effect of it.33
This spectacular effect admits of no particular context for Zizek. The public is imagined to be an
indiscriminate universal in its response to the images of the attacks. Zizek positions this
audience as a monolithic body undergoing a uniform psychic process. Similar to Baudrillard,
Zizek holds that the latent psychic response of experiencing shock and awe while watching the
32
33
Ibid.
Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, (London and New York: Verso,
2002), 11.
107
attacks is premised on a feeling of jubilation. More specifically, the American viewing audience
experienced collectively not a feeling of moral disgust but of jouissance:
…we can see the collapse of the WTC towers as the climactic conclusion of twentiethcentury art’s ‘passion of the real’ – the terrorists themselves did not do it primarily to
provoke real material damage, but for the spectacular effect of it. When days after
September 11 2001, our gaze was transfixed by the images of the plane hitting one of the
WTC towers we were all forced to experience what the ‘compulsion to repeat’ and
jouissance beyond the pleasure principle are: we wanted to see it again and again, the
same shots were repeated ad nauseam, and the uncanny satisfaction we got from it was
jouissance at its purest.34
‘Jouissance’ is a specific term in the history of psychoanalysis and literary theory that
means, most generally, an orgiastic state of enjoyment. The term is difficult to define and
understand completely, however, in that it derives from the work of Jacques Lacan and is often
left untranslated in English editions of his work.35 Fundamental to any understanding of
‘jouissance,’ however, is the basic idea that there exists the possibility that a subject can
experience enjoyment beyond routine pleasure. Whereas ‘pleasure’ may be achieved as a normal
state in day-to-day life, it is a limited sensation since it can happen only according to moral codes
and social conventions. ‘Jouissance,’ on the other hand, is precisely the idea that one may
experience a kind of enjoyment that exceeds traditional, everyday, and socially acceptable kinds
of pleasures.36
Zizek further explains the supposed enjoyment in being reduced to a speechless gaze,
staring at the television, and absorbing the shocking reality of the event. Making the exact same
argumentative move as Baudrillard, Zizek explains that the American public secretly got what it
wished for – that the destruction seen in fictional disaster films would become actual and real.
34
Ibid., 11-12.
35
Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London New
York: Routledge, 1996.
36
Ibid., 94.
108
Zizek picks up on the “often-mentioned association of the attacks with Hollywood disaster
movies: …in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise.”37
Accordingly, the spectacular images of the attacks succeeded in shocking the public. It was not
just a revolting set of images; it was more than that. Our fantasy of destruction came true right
before our eyes. This was the “real” shock of the event.
Rather than read these shocking events as an intrusion of the real into our collective
world of routine images, then, Zizek reverses the standard reading to suggest, like Baudrillard,
that the singular images disturbed and destabilized our everyday reality. He explains:
We should therefore invert the standard reading according to which the WTC explosions
were the intrusion of the Real which shattered our illusory Sphere: quite the reverse…It is
not that reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality (i.e. the
symbolic coordinates which determine what we experience as reality).38
Let me explain a bit further. The “symbolic coordinates” are the forms of sense-making one
normally uses to understand a crisis such as the attacks of 9/11. Symbolic stability, according to
Zizek, came under attack. As in Baudrillard’s account, the power of the imagery not only
situated spectators by interpreting their psychic apparatus as overwhelmed. It glued them to the
tv and compelled them to watch ad nauseum. It forbade their capacity to develop a nuanced and
negotiated meaning of the attacks themselves. The spectacular effects fulfilled a fantasy and
shattered reality.
On a positive note, Baudrillard and Zizek began a significant line of inquiry into 9/11 that
speculated on the qualities of mediated viewing. Vast numbers of the American public did in
fact watch the events of September 11 on television in the mesmerized way that Baudrillard and
Zizek suggested. They watched safely from a distance. Baudrillard and Zizek watched the
37
Zizek, Welcome…, 15-16.
38
Ibid., 16.
109
attacks from an even safer perch. They theorized from an even greater distance. This distance
is spatial in that Baudrillard and Zizek did not reside in and watch the attacks on U.S. soil. But
the distance from which these critics viewed the event was also perspectival. They brought a
strand of highly intellectualized European thought to bear on the event. From a critical distance,
they read a large-scale political event and speculated about a general, consummate, homogenized
American public as an audience. To their detriment, then, they made no gesture to understand
the specific and varied contexts in which Americans dwell, how they consume media, and the
terms they used to negotiate and make sense of the attacks.
Other critics working from a psychoanalytic perspective echoed the lines of thought of
Baudrillard and Zizek. In line with the power of the imagery and symbolic nature of the events,
Neil Leach argued that the disappearance or “loss” of the World Trade Center towers was a
symbolic loss, similar to the death of a loved one, that struck at the heart of the public and “had a
radical impact on the American psyche.”39 He explained further:
The attack struck at the very heart of the American psyche, since it was an assault on one
of the very iconic references around which an American way of life had been formulated.
The attack on the building was equally an attack on American national identity.40
The radical event entailed an equally radical impact. Losing an iconic building resulted in a loss
of an aspect of national identity, since, according to Leach’s argument, the role of “loss” is
“constitutive of any process of forging an identity.”41 Constituted in the (symbolic) destruction
of the towers is “a collective sense of identity.”42
39
Leach, Neil. “9/11,” 76.
40
Ibid., 85.
41
Ibid., 85.
42
Ibid., 76.
110
Looking at the symbolic nature of the attacks, Howard Stein offered a reading of the
destruction of the towers in which the attacks were interpreted “psychodynamically.”43 In this
way, Stein argued that “the events of September 11 resulted not only in immense destruction and
loss of life, but in an assault on the American cultural sense of self and of group boundaries.”44
As Leach argued for an impact on the American psyche write large, Stein found that the attacks
resulted in “a sense of violation and humiliation” in which war was an attempt “to reverse that
experience and restore group pride.”45
Baudrillard, Zizek, Leach, and Stein draw from a psychoanalytic perspective. They begin
from the premise that groups/collectives experience events similarly and arrive at the conclusion
that the 9/11 attacks had a drastic effect on collective experience. For all of these critics, the
event is determining. The attacks do not just cause material damage; they result directly in a
uniform national experience of an audience watching this destruction. Destruction of iconic
symbols is a powerful symbolic act; the minds of viewers cannot help but be impacted on a
symbolic register. Accordingly, symbolic destruction impacts the symbolic coordinates of the
psychic apparatus. Herein, a general, elegant, simple way to see the effect of the attacks is
gained. But, I maintain, a close up, specific, nuanced reading of the discourses of actual
members of the public experiencing the tragedy is sacrificed.
These readings are significant and valuable but only at the level of the broadest possible
context used to understand the attacks. They operate at a critical distance from the public. In the
case of Baudrillard and Zizek’s responses, interpretations of the attacks are written speculatively
43
Stein, “Days of Awe.” 187.
44
Ibid., 187.
45
Ibid., 187.
111
and from a vantage point literally and symbolically very far away. Kaplan argues that it is this
very fact that textures a European intellectual account. Making much of this point, she writes:
The problem lies in people’s different standpoints vis-à-vis the attacks in their literal
closeness or distance from ground zero. Some European scholars immediately took a
very abstract and theoretical approach. A typical example of the broad generalizations
that arrived promptly via the internet is Slavoj Zizek’s email posting, “Welcome to the
Desert of the Real.” Looking at the events from a distant intellectual perspective, Zizek
in his article overstated the political/psychic symbolism of the attacks. On some level, I
agree that the attacks broke through an illusory haze in which many Americans may have
been living. I appreciate his argument that in some ways the United States had already
anticipated the event in many movies about uncannily similar catastrophes – as if
unconsciously aware of the illusion they were living as repressed knowledge of danger
emerged in film fantasies. But this thesis does not exhaust or actually get close to the
specificity of the event for those of us living close by… The discourse of the United
States and “the desert of the real” is orthogonal to the experience of those of us close to
the attacks. Both levels need to be taken into account.46
Kaplan herself has taken both perspectives into account. Her book, Trauma Culture, explores
both a sense of the national public’s reaction and the localized, personal ways people made sense
of the attacks. In so doing, she has exalted and explored a rare term, ‘vicarious trauma,’ in order
to explain the significance of a mediated televisual distance from the attacks. For her, watching
the events of 9/11 unfold on television was a significant context to which other critics did not
fully attend. However, while Kaplan struggled to articulate the possibility of a unique context,
she relied on the metaphor of trauma to explain variations on the same general effect. Her notion
of vicarious trauma is more or less a way of talking about the possibility of experiencing trauma
indirectly through the mediated images of a traumatic event instead of being in close physical
proximity to it. She elaborates:
Equally important about trauma is one’s specific positioning vis-à-vis an event. For this
reason, it is necessary to distinguish the different positions and contexts of encounters
with trauma… People encounter trauma by being a bystander, by living near to where a
catastrophe happened, or by hearing about a crisis from a friend. But most people
46
Kaplan, in Trauma at Home, 99.
112
encounter trauma through the media, which is why focusing on so-called mediatized
trauma is important.47
Put plainly, people can suffer the effects of a trauma just by watching traumatic events on
television instead of experiencing them in person.
Kaplan does qualify this notion of distant traumatic effects: “Only in rare cases may a
spectator be so overwhelmed by the images of extreme suffering or of violence that his or her
cortex is bypassed and cognition is prevented.”48 Actual trauma through the media is qualified
into obscurity. Only personal context can determine if watching a mediated event is traumatic or
not. And in this way, one is given a simple binary opposition through which to understand an
event – it is either traumatic or not: “One spectator may suffer secondary trauma effects while
another does not.49
To me, Kaplan offers an important corrective to the work of European intellectuals: One
must take into account specific experiences of mediated distance when discussing the effects of
watching the attacks. However, mediated distance, for Kaplan and some other scholars of
trauma, does not change the kind of effect that members of the public experience and write
about. Instead, mediated viewing simply whittles down the number of people who have
experienced and in some cases worked through actual or literal trauma. While they may offer a
unique, personalized, and local experience in reaction to the traumatic event – different styles of
writing, memorialization, and interpersonal interaction – witnesses are reduced to the context of
having suffered or not. The notion of trauma, even when qualified as a mediated type, then, still
determines the context of the witness. A witness is said to have been shocked, overwhelmed,
47
Kaplan, Trauma Culture, 2.
48
Ibid., 90.
49
Ibid., 90.
113
and psychically stricken if and when traumatized. Kaplan and others here explain by referencing
the determining force of the television screen. Testimony from witnesses “confirms the force of
visual images to trigger symptomatic effects of vicarious trauma…”50 For Kaplan, images
contain a force similar to the “real thing” they represent. As events happen directly to an
individual and cause trauma – loss of limbs, a loved one, etc. – so do representational images of
those kinds of calamities, even if about other people, cause trauma. Images of other people can
be experienced vicariously and can strike a person psychologically in much the same way as
witnessing a real event in person.
I return to ‘trauma’ as Kaplan does for two important reasons. First, critics continuously
apply the idea of trauma as an explanatory model. The term ‘trauma’ is stretched to apply to
unusual contexts such as television watching. Other critics note this trend, claiming that
“whereas catastrophic events such as 9/11 are doubtless traumatic for many who experienced
them directly or as part of a family, personal relationship or community, the mediated nature of
such events has allowed the notion of trauma to be generalized in new ways.”51 This turn is
understandable because of the elegance involved in the explanatory force of a theory of trauma.52
There is something morally, intellectually, and aesthetically satisfying in these directions
of thought. They suggest levels of experience deeper than language and consciousness,
and this is comforting because it confirms what we feel. There is no language for that
moment of pain and dissolution; but gradually language forms around it.53
50
Ibid., 89.
51
Meek, Trauma and the Media, 12.
52
Recent empirical studies have attempted to link television watching to the notion of
“distant traumatic effects.” The American Psychological Association has sponsored studies
specifically on terrorism that attempt to find traumatic effects in second hand viewing of events
on television and other media in addition to traumatic effects experienced first hand in close
physical proximity to events. See Meek, Alan. Trauma in the Media, op cit.
53
Berger, 52.
114
The second reason I have returned to the term ‘trauma’ is that it epitomizes the
psychoanalytic framework of the pieces reviewed in this section. “Trauma theory” exalts the
importance of the impact of the event over the formation and production of language by
witnesses. I have already shown in Chapter One how this approach – a determining theory of the
event – pathologizes the audience far too much and makes the audience too passive. Yet, I do
not take a directly contradictory position and say that there is no explanatory value in ‘trauma’ or
that models of the event as determining are intellectually too distant to the actual experience of
witnesses to be of value. To do so would be tantamount to arguing that intellectuals such as
Baudrillard and Zizek are so wildly off the mark that they cannot be relevant at all. They are.
There is something justifiable about making an honest attempt to name the forceful effect of an
event. Shocking images do affect some people after all. A few are even traumatized in any
recognized sense of the term. However, unlike Kaplan and other scholars of trauma who insist
that a clinical discourse of trauma can be extended metaphorically to understand the particular
contexts of actual witnesses, I argue that trauma is not and should be considered fully
determining. I make my own intervention into this critical literature by walking a fine line
between the power of the mediated image and the ineluctable power of the witness to name that
very power. To do so, I explain witnesses’ discourses and fragments (‘like a movie,’ ‘unreal,’
and ‘surreal’) to show how the notion of trauma itself can be reimagined through witnesses’
discourses. In the next section, accordingly, I develop two concepts that help explain the
simile/metaphor of ‘like a movie’ in witnesses’ account of mediated viewing of 9/11 – “virtual
trauma” defined in a substantive way and “unconscious fantasy.” These phrases are related to
the idea of trauma but differ significantly from the clinical understanding of trauma in that they
115
take into account the specific context of watching tragic event such as terrorism through a media
lens.
What is Virtual Trauma?
In this section I argue that witnesses’ use of the phrase ‘like a movie’ reveals a unique
contextual relationship to the specifically televisual images of the attacks. In the previous
section, I argued that psychoanalytic or psychodynamic theories rely too heavily on a determinist
theory of image-events. I now re-appropriate and re-imagine the phrases, ‘virtual trauma’ and
‘unconscious fantasy’ in my own analytic idiom. What exactly do these phrases help clarify?
They give us, I maintain, a way to understand the role the audience plays in locating its own
context and relationship to the exigence to which they respond and which they construct. As I
showed in Chapter One, the audience does not have a stable meaning for the exigence of “9/11.”
When looking at the ways witnesses negotiate the mediated nature of watching the events, we
confirm this claim and can gain further understanding of how members of the audience name,
create, and complicate an exigence.
I have argued in the previous chapter and in this chapter that the 9/11 attacks did not
yield a universal experience of trauma by the audience. Yet as Baudrillard, Zizek and other
critics have argued, the image-event of the attacks on television was powerful enough to shock a
great many viewers. This kind of shock needs to be clarified in order to understand better what
kind of exigence the attacks were for witnesses. If extra rhetorical – a traumatic bolt from the
blue that “forced” itself upon the audience – then the object, or loss of the objects in this case,
would determine the meaning for the audience fully, and clinically as it were – an effect that is
presupposed but never defended by Baudrillard et al. If it were a traumatic event, this trauma
would literally rob witnesses of meaningful language and make the content of what they say
116
symptomatic at best. If at the other end of the spectrum the attacks themselves are without prior
meaning or determinate effect that could be specified by official speakers in the media or by
semi-official commentators, witnesses’ perspectives would be reduced to confusion or lack of
meaning. Their discourse would be meaningful only if and when they eventually responded –
positively or negatively – to public address by a rhetor who steps literally into the situation or to
a commentator who presumes to take their place. In this case, however, the witness would be
responding not to 9/11 but to the discourses of 9/11. Evading these fates is what authors who
position themselves as witnesses do. The rhetorical “truth” of the antinomy of an audience’s
meaning-making of an event lies somewhere in between these alternatives. Between the
determining force of an event and inarticulate meaninglessness one finds the negotiated aesthetic
relationship of the audience to the image-event, which is a discursively negotiated process of
coming to terms with (the name of) the event. I turn to the aesthetic category of witnesses’ own
discourses on the movie-like nature of the event’s appearance to identify their negotiated
responses as a “virtual trauma” in a very specific way.
Virtual Trauma. Witnesses use the phrase ‘like a movie’ for a variety of purposes and
meanings, including an expression of immediate shock and disbelief about the reality of the
events, a disavowal of that very reality, and a strange self-awareness of moving back and forth
between accepting and denying that reality. Witnesses wrestle with discourse to name the
image-event they have perceived and to help position themselves as viewing subjects who can
negotiate these fluctuations of meaning. In producing a discourse that locates them as a spectator
of a movie-like event, witnesses very often develop a notion of context. This context has a
contradictory spatial quality. The speakers are both physically very close and yet at the same
time far away from the attacks.
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To refer to the attacks with the simile ‘like a movie’ implies a comparison that fits, yet
not all the way. The simile names a metaphorical idea that puts that very notion under erasure.
Something is like something else only to the extent that it is somewhat like it yet is not fully that
other thing. Logically, an analogy is also a dis-analogy. Following Kenneth Burke, one could
say that a simile or metaphor shows the sharing of substance.54 But the sharing of this substance
through the similarity identified – a framing exploited by official rhetors – makes sense only in
so far as they are also different substances and disanalogous. In other words, what a thing is said
to be like is also a way to express what it is not.55 To say that the attacks are like a movie is to
argue enthymematically that they are also not like a movie. In this way, the force of the
comparison is forever held in check, disallowing itself from being an exact description. The
rhetorical power of a simile is circumscribed by a possible failure, the opposite meaning implied
in the inexactitude of the metaphor itself.
Following this clue, ‘like a movie’ stipulates that the images seen are real and not real at
the same time in ways we have heard our witnesses expressing. We have already seen the ways
in which witnesses discuss the attacks as like a movie in relationship to the reality of the images
they watched. Witnesses negotiate contradictory sensations – that what they are witnessing is a
fake event, a hoax, or a movie, and that they are in fact a seeing a live, real, catastrophic event.
In discursively moving back and forth to describe one sensation and then the other, they do not
simply waver between the fake and the real or a sense of the true and the false. More precisely
described, witnesses take up in turn or alternation different vantage points with respect to the
54
Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press,
55
Ibid., 23.
1969).
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exigence in front of them. Negotiated here are competing notions of aesthetic distance. As a
rhetorical scholar notes, “the simile ‘like a movie’ signifies artifice and aesthetic distance… yet
also the collapse or rupture of distance (in being not a movie but like one, this ‘event’ is
something else, something unnameable except by figure: a “monstrously” real virtuality, as Marc
Redfield dubs it56
Two proximities to the attacks exist at the same time – a spatial distance separating the
witness from the reality of the attacks (at the World Trade Center most notably) and a closeness
to the virtuality of the television screen emitting these “real” images of horror. As Redfield
explains it to us in the previously cited passage on “aesthetic distance,” the image of the attacks
is a rupture that presents an audience of witnesses with an excessive amount of reality in a virtual
space. In this space of viewing, the real becomes artifice by presenting something at a distance
that closes off that very distance. The aesthesis “hits” close to home because it comes into our
home. That which is in front of our face is something felt tangibly, or as Redfield puts it,
monstrously in the sense, among others, of being out of place. Witnesses’ discursive maneuvers
of looking for and working with terminology beyond the word ‘real’ speaks to this dynamic.
The ‘real!’ and the ‘all too real,’ ‘surreal,’ and ‘unreal’ figure the shift in watching something
that moves from physically distant and psychically “removed” to up close and horrific in effect.
The “real” becomes more real but only insofar as it comes to the spectator in the aesthetic form
of the virtual.
56
Redfield, Marc. Rhetoric of Terror. P 33. The topos of ‘aesthetic distance’ is a
commonplace of twentieth century British aesthetics. See Bullough, William, “’Psychical
Distance’ as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle.” British Journal of Psychology, Vol. 5
(1912), pp. 87-117 for the locus classicus.
119
Several stories about encountering the attacks of 9/11 in New York City turn on a double
witnessing of the event of this sort: seeing the actual destruction with one’s own eyes while also
tuning into television coverage. Televised images supplement firsthand witnessing. In the midst
of a chaotic scene and in the attempt to make sense of the attacks, witnesses write about turning
away form the real live imagery to watch the attacks live on television:
Like many others, I went inside to turn on the television, trying to find sense in what I
was seeing. I could not assimilate it, either 'live' or on TV. As in a sports stadium, I
watched both at the same time.57
Televised images do not substitute for the real event, though. Witnesses move back and forth
from one to the other. Curiously, neither is “preferable” or better in the process of meaningmaking. A witness in New York City on September 11 remarks:
In a perverse sort of omniscience, I was able to watch that plane eviscerate the tower
from two completely different angles simultaneously. My own view out the window
coupled with the south-facing view that CNN's camera was shooting, offered me a unique
view of this impossible event. It is a vision that will forever be burned into my mind's
eye. Every time I close my eyes, I still see it -- this most horrible of disaster movies.
Now a sense of panic was washing over me, starting with the hair on the back of my neck
and rapidly moving downward. My first instinct was to run, to grab my keys and get the
Hell out of there, but I couldn't move. The CNN reporters were in a complete frenzy now,
replaying the crash hundreds of times while I just stared at the carnage not a quarter-mile
away from my window.58
One might be tempted to argue that the unreal imagery on the television screen is more
enticing than actual firsthand perception of the attacks. One could claim that, based on witness
accounts of turning away form the reality of the plane crashes toward television coverage
demonstrates the seduction of the virtual over the actual. Were this my argument, however, I
would be guilty of proposing something a little too close to Baudrillard’s thesis of hyperreality,
57
Diana Taylor. “Lost in a Field of Vision; Witnessing 9/11.”
<http://www.nyu.edu/fas/projects/vcb/case_911/extremecloseup/taylor.html>
58
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” op cit, 2011.
120
according to which simulation has replaced substance; reality – as that which is prior to
representation – has been replaced by a virtual set of images standing in place of the real.59 By
this Baudrillard means that the power of the image no longer derives power from its
representation. It is not a resemblance anymore. Instead, it exists as a “truth” in its own right.
In this way, the hyperreal is “a real without origin or reality.”60 Accordingly, Baudrillard argues
that today we have reality only as simulation – war, for example, is real only insofar as it is
fought and understood through its simulation/appearance on television.61
Yet, in my analysis of witnesses’ discourse I do not claim that the images of 9/11 shock
spectators to the point where one can make sense of the attacks as nothing but unhinged reality.
To the contrary, I find that witnesses’ discourses directly contravene Baudrillard’s thesis of
floating signification and imagery. By oscillating between the presentational (immediately
representational) quality of the image and its possible fictional status, by writing, that is, about
the belief in a reality that the images portray and then the possibility that they do not, the divided
discourse demonstrates an indeterminacy of the images. While witnesses attest to the awesome
power of those images, they also speculate about how truly believable they are. The reality that
the images index, rather than displace, is very much under review as witnesses write and recount
the events. Some state that the search still continues to this day. But an indeterminate something
has been presented to them, and the indeterminate meaning of this presentation – a conflation of
experience, imagery, representation – cannot simply be traced back to the originary power of the
59
For a full development of this argument see Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and
Simulation. The Precession of Simulacra: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
60
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. The Precession of Simulacra: University
of Michigan Press. p. 1
61
Baudrillard, Jean. The Gulf War did not take place. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1995.
121
image as itself the cause of that indeterminacy. To do so, as we have seen some do, makes the
hyperreal image, the image without origin, originary, and it is not.
The production of discourse takes an active role in the formation of the meaning of the
event despite its indeterminate status. The terms ‘shock,’ ‘disbelief,’ and ‘unreal’ point to a
struggle to articulate a kind of experience of something surprisingly “real” in a moment. But as
this horrific reality comes close to the witness and a description focuses in on it, an acceptance of
that reality sometimes gives way to a deferral or disavowal. In this mode of a graphic encounter,
witnesses turn away from that which they do not want to find in the televisual. Recall that in the
section of this chapter examining witnesses’ use of the phrase ‘like a movie,’ specific statements
disavowing the reality of the attacks are made, such as “it still isn’t reality for me” or that the
events “will never feel real to me.” While writing about it, rhetorically shaping it into a
recognizable and understandable event for themselves, witnesses both push toward and pull
away from that reality (“The fear was so real but the situation was not”62). Closeness and
distance are actively negotiated. More specifically, a horror and danger in opposition to a
neutrality and safety is directly discussed. The terror of terrorism is real and virtual at the same
time. Were everything real – the imagery and what it represents – one might encounter too much
shock and feel traumatized. Instead, witnesses both engage and withdraw from this possibility.
They are not automatically traumatized by the events. In this respect, it is fitting that they are
involved with the possibility of something that is justly called a “virtual trauma.” The virtual,
historically, refers to what is almost real, or so real that one cannot tell the difference. The
power of a substance works so powerfully, or virtuously – ‘virtue’ used to mean power, after all
– that it can produce its own, non-standard appearances. In late medieval philosophy and
62
This is part of a text fragment previously quoted in this chapter. “The September 11
Digital Archive,” op cit., 2011.
122
theology the ghost of Hamlet’s father is the original meaning of virtual reality. Accoringly, the
following is a correct observation:
“Virtual” tends to suggest the trembling of an event on the edge of becoming present: one
that is not fully or properly ‘actual.’… Such virtuality therefore functions as both
consolation and a threat, retaining the power to haunt, sharing something of the force of
the kind of wounding we call ‘traumatic.’ Yet, of course, we who watched TV were not,
as a rule, traumatized in the technical, psychological sense or even in the more broadly
idiomatic sense of having suffered abiding psychic damage – and if we then affirm that
no real trauma can be said to have been produced in such a context, well, that, of course,
is the principal connotation we now grant the adjective ‘virtual’: something mediated,
technically produced, not properly real.63
Television, seen in this light, plays two roles with respect to the mediated distance
between the viewer and the event. On the one hand, it bridges an emotional gap allowing a
robust set of reactions to foment. On the other hand, it damps down that possibility by
distancing the spectator from the reality of the events. Boltanski has commented upon this
dynamic, which he sees as inherent in television itself, but has looked specifically at the ways
audiences respond to images and frames of suffering with pity or apathy.64 Specifically in terms
of 9/11, Barbie Zelizer has explored the ways in which media frames of suffering (mostly news
photographs and images of traumatized victims in the aftermath of the World Trade Center
attacks) have shocked or soothed viewers.65 These critics echo Redfield’s point in the passage
quoted above and attest to the possibility that media do not just frame events for emotional
reactions but provide a buffer between them and the viewer. While media events may be
shocking in some sense, a screen sometimes places a witness in a safe context. The phrase ‘like
63
Redfield, Rhetoric of Terror, p 2-3.
64
Boltanski, Luc. Distant suffering: morality, media, and politics. Cambridge, U.K. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
65
Barbie Zelizer, “The Voice of the Visual in Memory,” in Framing Public Memory, ed.
Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004), 163.
123
a movie’ registers this buffer, rendering the trauma virtual rather than real. Meek elaborates on
this for the case of 9/11:
Yet if, on the one hand, the simile ‘like a movie’ emerges out of a specific historical,
cultural, economic, and technological context – one in which a certain kind of high-tech,
highly capitalized, globally distributed cinematic product becomes associated with the
technical production of scenes of spectacular destruction – it is clear that this simile
functions above all to communicate the speaker’s sense of the seeming unreality of the
event being described… Catastrophic experiences outstrip understanding: disrupting the
habitual ways we make sense of the world, they feel unreal precisely because they are
overwhelming. Not that those who saw a ‘movielike’ spectacle were necessarily
undergoing trauma in a medical sense – indeed, probably very few were. Those who
suffered genuine traumatic shock would surely in most cases be those who, either
physically or psychologically too close to Ground Zero, did not have the luxury of seeing
a spectacle that was ‘like a movie.’ The simile posits the viewer at a critical (if in some
cases physically minimal) distance from the buildings; furthermore, as a simile, it both
registers something shocking and cushions the shock, assimilating the unassimilable to
the known.66
There’s a cushioning to the shock that witnesses write about that creates a space for their own
agency in describing, sometimes at length, the shock they feel. Their discourse reaches towards,
grabs, and concretizes a frame into which the event can be placed. That context is sometimes the
idea that one is at a safe and mediated distance form the event. That it is ‘like a movie’ and
‘unreal’ to an indefinite extent is a style witnesses use actively to distance themselves from a
reality of the scene. While the event might still appear as shocking, and its reality commented
upon as entirely ‘real,’ it is said to appear ‘like a movie’ and ‘unreal’ so as to contextualize the
events as more appearance than reality even if only for a moment. It is a discursive breath, a
conceptual pause, a phrase that says, in effect, “wait a minute... I don’t want to think of these
events as entirely real and, rhetorically in this space of writing, I don’t have to I this moment.”
As seen previously, some witnesses write to extend this moment indefinitely, suggesting that
they will never accept the reality of the events.
For this reason, the imagery can be shocking and not overwhelming. Witnesses’
66
Redfield, Rhetoric of Terror, 28.
124
discourse of ‘like a movie’ is a rhetorical shield with which some may prevent the imagery from
taking over reality entirely, thereby sliding between Baudrillard and Zizek on the one hand and,
on the other, senses of virtual trauma that make it run too close to, or become parasitic on, real
trauma. Though there is the ability for the images to traumatize, this abyss is looked at but not
fallen into. Hence the image-event is aptly described not as ‘trauma’ per se but as ‘virtual
trauma.’ Witnesses self-reflexively write about the term ‘trauma’ as not entirely the most apt
word to describe the scene of the attacks. The surreal aspect of the imagery makes the search for
the right vocabulary problematic:
There’s a lot of grief in America right now. Yes, people die on massive scales in
earthquakes and natural disasters, and the country in which it occurs is traumatized also,
but this is different- someone actually inflicted this grief on purpose. This act was a body
blow to America. And to their very American sense of pride, to their positivism, their
optimism, and their confidence. America has a “hero culture”; the need for heroes is an
integral part of the collective American psyche…67
The witness continues and points out the difficulty of representing the violence and victims of
the attacks. A hero narrative, the sort pervasive in action movies, is superimposed onto another
narrative of national identity and security that the attacks of 9/11 tarnished, thereby keeping both
in play:
There was no Superman or Arnie Swarzenegger: no-one to help as the destruction, fear
and panic unfolded. Hollywood movies suddenly (or not so suddenly) seem so childish
now. I wonder how audiences will react to “save-the-day” blockbusters after this. (Or to
violent movies. What was witnessed on that day was a kind of super-violence. The
images, and the imaginings of what it must have been like for those on the planes or in
the buildings, like those poor souls who chose to jump to their death rather than be
consumed by flame, will live on in people’s minds. Violent movies may not enjoy the
same acceptance and popularity of before.) Yes, there were many heroes that day, from
firemen to businessmen to nursery school teachers. Many, many heroes. But there were
also many, many victims. Concentration on the hero element as opposed to the victim
67
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” op cit., 2011.
125
element bespeaks a psychology which may delay people’s ability to terms with the reality
of that day.68
The simile comparing the televised attacks of 9/11 to a movie renders a frame through
which to understand the actions in the unfolding scene. While the simile helps describe the
scenic elements – the imagery of destruction – it does not render the plot or the story sensible.
Like other witnesses testifying to the fact that no action hero (Bruce Willis and Arnold
Swarzenegger are mentioned most often in this regard) leapt out of the movie to ‘save the day,’
this witness speaks to how the attacks are both like and not like a movie.
The phrase ‘like a movie’ explains the power of September 11 imagery without making
members of the audience who receive it entirely passive, determined, or unhinged. Witnesses
use this phrase not only to describe the reality of the attacks but to do something with a sense of
that reality, namely, to work through a new narrative that contextualizes the excessive violence
of the attacks while also buffering that reality from their viewing position. I turn next to how
another specific way in which the attacks of 9/11 were written about and contextualized. I argue
that the phrase ‘like a movie’ and a sense of the ‘unreal’ demonstrate how members of the
viewing audience struggled to articulate competing discourses on the basis of shared fantasies.
‘Like a Movie’ as a Fantasy Theme
Witnesses’ discourses analyzing the attacks of 9/11 as ‘like a movie’ and ‘unreal’ or
‘surreal’ conjure up for some critics a notion of subjective experience and the psychological state
of the public seen as a consubstantial subject. As seen in Chapter One, some rhetorical critics
have performed readings of this sort by claiming the public as such and as a whole was
“traumatized” or at least in a state of “confusion” or “crisis.” I have pointed out some dubious
assumptions about such readings. In this, I have, thus far, shown how Baudrillard and Zizek
68
Ibid.
126
have provided a similar analysis of the public by focusing on the overwhelming power of the
symbolic imagery. Instead of finding painful psychic states, however, as critics focused on
unqualified trauma do, they found that the American public collectively experienced forms of
“pleasure” in their spectatorship of the images of destruction. In the last section I analyzed that
claim in ways that qualify or even undermine the premise from which both of these claims, the
painful and the pleasurable, spring, using the mediated notion of virtual trauma as a clue. In this
section, however, I concede that witnesses’ discourses reveal that both of these “fantasies” or
“rhetorical visions” (the pleasurable one and the painful one) have an element of validity.69 Still,
finding the objective truth of either perspective is neither possible nor desirable. The important
point I will make in this section concerns the fact that both strands of imagined fantasy are linked
by the shifting, fluctuating, and therefore, impossible-to-write narratives that witnesses take
themselves to be recording. Authors as witnesses present readers with a problem for
interpretation, namely, that their discourse is not easily placed within the context of a shared
fantasy. What is widely shared as a rhetorical theme is a self-reflective discourse attesting to the
fact that typical and common narratives themselves, such as tragedy or horror, will not suffice.
A new kind of narrative is needed and the speakers invite their hearers to indulge in what that
might mean. This exigence cuts across witnesses who might dominantly depict the movie-like
event of 9/11 as a symbolic “pleasurable” disruption of routine everyday life or who refer to it as
simply shockingly horrible.
To make this argument, I look again at the specific discourse fragments of ‘like a movie’
and the ‘unreal’ to show how they are articulated with discourses and images of fantasies,
69
I define and use these terms in the forthcoming analysis in this section. I draw from
Bormann, Ernst. “Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision: The Rhetorical Criticism of Social Reality.”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 58, no. 4 (December 1972): 396-407.
127
dreams, and nightmares. I do not attempt to unify the audience into one collective rhetorical
vision about the exigence of 9/11. That is the last thing I propose to do. Instead, I show how
shared fantasies are themselves rendered an exigence and the problem of the rhetorical situation
in which audience members, like speakers, find themselves. The notion that a shared story of
being an audience for events links people together is precisely that which becomes
problematized through witnesses’ words. Drawing from Bormann’s “fantasy analysis” and
Freud’s concept of “unconscious fantasy,” I demonstrate that witnesses’ discourses of fantasies
reveal an audience unraveling as opposed to unifying. Their discourses enact this dynamic
while, or in the very act of substantively reflecting on it. The potential unraveling of their shared
nature is a dynamic rhetorical exigence they actively speak to. This is a key point. For it shows
that even if there are, or precisely because there are, official rhetors calling all subjects into
consubstantiality our witnesses are in rewriting the script in order to resist just that kind of
interpellation.
Before invoking fantasy as an explanatory concept, it is worth noting the simple
rhetorical point that no subject is entirely free from accumulated context. People bring previous
experiences, narratives, myths, and frames of understanding to an event. This is not different in
the case of watching the attacks of September 11 on television. Stein explains this point
generally and specifically with the case of 9/11:
Just as people make meaning of disasters, they also bring meaning to disasters. We not
only create meaning afterwards, but, at least to some extent, we “know” the meaning
beforehand. What is occurs as it should according to fantasy and its cultural
representation. Reality serves as embodiment and repository of unconscious wish. Here,
projection is anticipation, and reality is confirmation… It is as if we are unconsciously
poised to give form to events before they occur. Events follow story lines, and become
woven into them. If the attack is itself a thrust by terrorists into the United States, so too
are the American accounts impositions (projections) upon the event.70
70
Stein, op cit, 188-189.
128
True, events might “burst onto the scene” suddenly and come seemingly “out of nowhere.” But
this is a hyperbolic manner of describing them. Narratives pre-exist events in order to place
them in a context. ‘Fantasy’ is a rhetorical tool that gives the critic a way to investigate and
translate those personal narrative contexts to potentially shared public narratives (which is not
the same as all members of the public sharing the same narrative). Contrary to ‘trauma,’ which
erases the previous context of a narrative frame by imposing the structure of the event upon the
subject, ‘fantasy’ is that which structures the event to and for the subject. Radstone clarifies this
distinction:
Events do not come out of nowhere, and neither do they leave their mark on a previously
blank page. The “problem” with trauma is that the subject it proposes – the victim – is
too absolutely passive… Trauma suggests an unreadable scar that might, with difficulty,
be accorded some meaning. Fantasy, on the other hand, shifts attention to the activities
of the fantasizing subject or nation and to the processes of meaning making (albeit
unconscious) that give rise to scenarios that shape minds, cultures, and events.71
Fantasy may be thought of pychologically as a subjective state of mind. It may also be
viewed as a rhetorical construct. In the first case discourse is analyzed as part of the unconscious
while in the latter interpretation discourse is actively built up in to themes or topoi by
interlocuters who deploy linguistic resources. With respect to the former notion Freud clarified
fantasy by distinguishing it from trauma. Some have even suggested that he in fact “abandoned”
his theory of trauma for a more nuanced theory of unconscious fantasy.72 What, then, does (or
would or should) Freud mean by unconscious fantasy? Most basically, a fantasy is “a product of
the imagination in the form of a script in the theatrical or cinematic sense deployed in support of
71
72
Radstone, in Trauma at Home, 121-122.
Walter C. Young. “Observations on Fantasy in the Formation of Multiple Personality
Disorder.” Dissociation, vol 1, 3 Sept 1988.
129
a wish-fulfillment.”73 One may have daydreams and thoughts that occur sporadically and
randomly and are mostly conscious. These are “wishes” that develop early in childhood.
Freud’s most famous example is the wish-fulfillment fantasy of the “Oedipus complex.” After
time, however, these fantasies exist but become repressed into the unconscious. As Freud puts it
more accurately, “Unconscious fantasies have either been formed in the unconscious; or – as is
more often the case – they were once conscious fantasies, or daydreams, and have since been
purposely forgotten and have become unconscious through ‘repression.’”74
Freud helps us move toward understanding the personal contexts that witnesses bring to
tragedy. This context of fantasy, however, is not necessarily hidden and entirely unconscious
since, in moments of self-awareness and reflection, witnesses of disturbing events offer sensemaking discourses that take into account their own previous imaginings and fantasies. Hence,
Freud’s point can and should be made rhetorical. Through a rhetorical lens, fantasies can be read
as those themes and topics constructed through discourse. In this way of thinking about fantasy,
witnesses’ discourse about events in the social realm are not merely words that point to the
context of the mental state, rather, “the words are the social context” because they are made out
of common language.75
73
“Fantasy.” International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Alain de Mijolla. Vol. 1.
Gale Cengage, 2005. eNotes.com. 7 Apr, 2013 <http://www.enotes.com/fantasy-99219reference/>
74
Freud, S. “Hysterical fantasies and their relation to bisexuality.” Standard edition of the
complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 9, pp. 159-166). London: Hogarth Press,
1959 (Original work published 1908).
75
Bormann, Ernst. “Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision: The Rhetorical Criticism of Social
Reality.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58, no. 4 (December 1972): 396-407. p 400.
130
Bormann’s fantasy theme attempts to do this. It helps make clear the way in which
individual agents can “chain” together or literally articulate shared visions through discourse in
order to create a shared social reality.76 He explains:
The dramatizations which catch on and chain out in small groups are worked into public
speeches and into the mass media and, in turn, spread out across larger publics serve to
sustain the members’ sense of community, to impel them strongly to action (which raises
the question of motivation), and to provide them with a social reality filled with heroes,
villains, emotions, and attitudes. The composite dramas which catch up large groups of
people in a symbolic reality, I call a “rhetorical vision.”77
This kind of analysis is useful in understanding how audience members directly relate to,
or even participate in, speeches, take part as adherents to organizations, groups, and causes, and
together create social symbolic worlds. A core assumption driving the analysis is the active coconstitution of a shared symbolic realm by individuals themselves. A rhetor, in other words,
need not, indeed probably cannot, create it for them entirely. Donald Shields and Thomas
Preston explicate this tenet:
Through conversations, speeches, and messages, people build a shared view of reality
that, while not necessarily objective, is created symbolically. People often initiate,
embellish, and evolve an explanation of events that can catch fire and chain-out through a
collectivity of people. Eventually, such a symbolically created explanation may
encompass greater and greater numbers of people into a common rhetorical community
possessing a prevalent rhetorical vision.78
Applied to the discourses of 9/11 by witnesses, one can readily see the circulation of
chains of fantasy themes. While it is impossible to claim that witnesses have literally shared
discourse, it is in any case unnecessary since one can still see that themes arise from their
expressions. I now turn to these expressed themes, which are reflexive discourses witnesses
76
Ibid., 397.
77
Bormann, 398.
78
Shields, Donald and Preston Jr., Thomas. “Fantasy Theme Analysis in Competitive
Rhetorical Criticism.” The National Forensic Journal, III (Fall 1985), pp. 102-115. 102-103.
131
offer about their own context of having experienced the attacks by watching them live through
mass media channels.
First, I take up how a seemingly “pleasurable” fantasy of the images of attacks is
rendered. We have seen that witnesses’ discourse moves back and forth from ‘real’ to ‘unreal.’
While lingering in a sense of the ‘unreal,’ self-construed witnesses often rely on the analogy of a
blockbuster film, specifically mentioning the genre of “disaster movies.” Clearly distinguishing
the reality of the attacks from their appearance, witnesses thus carve out a rhetorical space in
which they can dwell on a pattern of imagery shared between films and 9/11. It is a free space
for fantasy to play. To the extent that the images of the attacks simulate something fictional and
presumably pleasurable, and screen off the actual experience on which they are meditating, can it
be said that spectators therefore relish in the images? To what extent can it be said that witnesses
even “wished” the devastation, as Baudrillard and Zizek assert? This state is impossible to
evidence; critics can only speculate on the basis of symptomatic readings of discourse. But
witnesses do overtly refer to their dreams, wishes, and fantasies in rhetorically interesting ways,
giving us more access to at least a discursive reflection and representation of psychological states
of pleasure and displeasure. In these reports, they speak about a transition into something
‘unreal’ that deserves a discourse that figures it as such. ‘Movies,’ and the idea of a change in
the “script,” serve as this tropic figure.
On the one hand, witnesses figure their encounter with the events of 9/11 as a fantasy.
They move into a different kind of discursive space or context by doing this. A previously
fictional script reserved only for the kinds of movies suddenly seem to provide a real script.
Fantasy is said to become reality. This scene of witnessing is depicted as fascinating yet jarring
at once in the following fragment:
132
Science fiction had been a significant piece of who I was for most of my life. I had
conceived of flying vehicles being used as deadly missiles against high-rises and had
even drawn such ideas over a decade before such fantasy became reality. Having one of
my fears realized was an incredible shock.79
Other witnesses make similar moves by talking about the events as transporting them into a
world of fantasy. The discourse of dreams and the “stuff” of the imagination is used as a
rhetorical resource to portray images that appear unreal. One witness writes, for example, “It
was a feeling of unbelief, yes fantasy and fairytale that caught me…”80
The context of sitting in front the television or computer for hours or days on end,
absorbing the ‘unreal’ imagery, leads some witnesses to dwell on the nature of their own
fascination with the events. This, too, is the self-described space of a species of “fascination”
with the image-event. Witnesses write at length about being “glued” to the television or to
coverage of the event:
The events of Sept. 11 unfolded right before our eyes that day and from that moment on I
couldn't turn away. That day at work, not one person came in. We watched t.v. all day
long and I continued to do so when I got home that evening. I didn't stop watching until
the news channels stopped reporting on it. I don't know if it became an obsession, but I
couldn't turn the t.v. off. It became so that I felt that because I hadn't lost a friend or loved
one in the tragedy, that I had to atone for it; that by watching t.v. I was in a way there in
N.Y.C. and I could share the burden of mourning for those lost. For the months after 9/11
all I did was watch t.v.81
On the other hand, our witnesses also speak about watching and discovering the attacks
unfold in terms of the fantasy theme of transporting as that term figures in science fiction
scenarios. They discuss their movement into and habitation of another realm in their virtual
encounter. While the reality of the attacks may in fact be wretched, and that notion may be
79
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” op cit., 2011.
80
Ibid.
81
Ibid.
133
acknowledged and discussed by witnesses in separate paragraphs. lines, or fragments, the
seeming unreality of the attacks still transfixes the viewer:
I sat glued to the TV and suddenly everything seemed very surreal...like I had gone into
some sort of time warp from which I would emerge and the events unfolding before me
would somehow disappear. I would heave a sigh of relief and I would tell my husband
what a horrible dream I had had.82
I offer a more robust discussion of this kind of “fascination” in Chapter Three around the
aesthetic signifiers that figure in 9/11 discourse. In this section I am concerned with how
witnesses contextualize something as real in terms of what they have already dreamt up and
classified as a fantasy. Critics help clarify the particular contextualization of 9/11 as a fantasy
realized. Carlo Rotella writes of a kind of cultural imagination that many witnesses may have
had in understanding the events as like a movie:
… we have been rehearsing the events of September 11 for those same twenty years in
our popular fantasies--quintessentially in the action movies that have perfected the
formula of explosions, collapsing buildings, malign perpetrators, and special-effects
bystanders sent pinwheeling by gouts of orange flame. The action movies of the 1980s
and 1990s stink of hubris and ingratitude; in retrospect, they seem to suggest that a whole
culture was asking for it (which is not the same thing as deserving it when it happens)
(my italics).83
Prior to the events of 9/11, catastrophe had already been entertained, thought about, dreamed of,
considered. That it might turn real and that life and limb may be at stake has always been a
possibility. But this possibility can only be said to have existed as a fantasy. The narrative
preceding the devastation and disaster of 9/11 is, according to Rotella, one of a “rehearsal”
meeting the “real thing.” Some suggest this is a generally accepted tenet of the American public
fantasy: “Culture always anticipates and rehearses for later reality, even for reality for which its
82
83
Ibid.
Carlo Rotella: “Affliction.” The American Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa Society, 2002.
<http://www.flatheadreservation.org/index.php/phs/affliction/ >
134
members feel unprepared.”84 We are perhaps never fully ready for a catastrophe but
unconsciously we are always at work on being ready. But the confessional phrases referring to
hubris and ingratitude mark an inflection of the fantasy theme marked by the reality of what it is
supposed to help describe. While this might explain witnesses’ discourse that moves from not
realizing the reality of the events at first to the eventual acceptance of their reality, it still does
not give a complete account of the amount of “unreality” on which witnesses dwell. The phrase
‘like a movie’ is expressed along with terms that refer to the excessively real to show just how
pressing and shocking the imagery is above and beyond a discourse of the ‘real’ to name it. Talk
of the ‘unreal’ and the ‘surreal’ goes hand in hand with discourse pertaining to the movie-like
appearance of the attacks on television. None of this can be easily reduced to the unqualified
gratification and simple notion of repressed wish to which Baudrillard and Zizek refer.
As discussed in the previous section on virtual trauma, as witnesses move toward the
virtuality of the screen they buffer themselves from the reality of representation. There is a
respite in this move, a (temporary) relaxation of the shocking nature of the imagery. A dropping
of the jaw, a sitting and staring, a muttering not of full words but small phrases like strings of
expletives or “oh my god” – all these reactions frame a substantive response as much as they
reveal a situation in which witnesses find themselves caught in a slowed down, suspended
encounter with a television set. Discourses of disavowing reality are connected to descriptions
of the attacks as ‘like a movie’ by aligning descriptions of the events as ‘unreal’ with assertions
of escaping from routine viewing as witness feel or report themselves transported toward else
that enraptures them. Witnesses may be read, accordingly, as thoroughly engaged with the
portrayal of the attacks. But they are presumptively engaged as pathologically traumatized or
84
Stein, op cit., 190.
135
ideologically moral spectators. Witnesses are engaged with a set of images they articulate as
movie-like and unreal, however, as a set of aesthetic descriptors separate from and at right angles
with the discourse of moral judgment. There is what Kant was the first to call free play of the
imagination too willingly attended to be moralized but at the same time too freely engaged in to
correspond especially well with Baudrillard’s and Zizek’s form of unconscious wish-fulfilled.
This does not go unnoticed by our writers. As witnesses they seem to some critics explicitly to
attend to their own voyeuristic fascination with the attacks:
Whereas the role of witness offers a space of identification for viewers, implicitly
humanizing catastrophic events, the direct presentation of extreme forms of suffering
may not invite identification or even empathy, allowing the viewer to adopt a position of
voyeuristic fascination or emotional disengagement… Certain events are designated
traumatic by the media through representations of witnessing, whereas other events
which are equally or more horrific, are not.85
Witnesses who watch others – bystanders, innocent victims, other witnesses crying and
suffering – should not be thought of as automatically thrust, accordingly, into a position of
identification. In fact, describing the images of the 9/11 attacks as ‘unreal’ and ‘like a movie’
demonstrates a way in which witnesses stop short of full identification. One can say that the
“space” witnesses carve out for themselves is in some sense (emotionally) disengaged.
However, it is difficult to move directly from this to pure “voyeuristic fascination.” This is the
very argument Baudrillard and Zizek advance. There is some truth to it. Yet, this “truth” lies in
another fantasy: of their own wishing to imagine the public as shocked out of an idea of
American exceptionalism and into the reality of a globalized politics.
I now take up the notion that witnesses’ discourses also participate in an interruption of a
fantasy whereby their own exceptional quality is depicted as coming to an end. In addition to
entering a fantasy by watching the attacks, it is also the case witnesses describe a loss of a
85
Meek, Trauma and the Media, 180.
136
fantasy. They make this discursive move through discourses of disavowal and contextualization.
Phrases such as ‘like a movie’ and ‘unreal’ push against acceptance of the attacks as real. What
witnesses describe through this disavowal is the desire to maintain another fantasy still: a fantasy
of invincibility and innocence. Discourse that denies reality on its face – that the attacks “can’t
be real,” that they’re “unbelievable,” and that “I couldn’t believe…” – attempts to keep alive an
aura or a fantasy that the author seems to not want to have broken. Radstone speculates on how
witnesses perform this in the case of 9/11:
What rendered these attacks unimaginable was precisely what had previously been
imagined. The dominant cultural imaginary of the United States has been shaped, in part,
by fantasies of impregnability and invincibility and, dreadful as the events themselves
were, it was also the puncturing of these fantasies that contributed to the shock of
September 11.86
Radstone probes into the psychology of the audience to find what members of the public clinged
too secretly. Discourses of disavowal are, for her, symptomatic. A rhetorical way of considering
her point is that the attacks of 9/11 altered a narrative script of safety and innocence for its
audience. Attacks, destruction, terrorism, and the like, may have all been previously imagined
but, according to witness testimony, such thoughts had previously been relegated to a realm of
the absurd, impossible, fantastical. Upon the attacks “breaking through,” however, previous
reveries of devastation suddenly become premonitory, depicted as substantial and real
possibilities of the world. One witness remarks in this vein on how previously imagined
ruminations on such dreaded devastation became real:
So I went back into the house, and looked at the TV. I saw something I had dreamt of for
many years. My nightmare had come true. The planes crashing into the huge towering
skyscrapers. People crying, in horror, everything.
86
Radstone, 121.
137
I stood there motionless. Speechless. My fears consumed me. And I didn't want to believe
those images of the planes crashing into the towers. I was hoping this was another one of
my nightmares. But it wasn't. I was awake and it was real.87
I read this passage in line with other testimony that portrays the attacks as “nightmarish.”
Similar to a discourse of the movie-like appearance of the attacks, I find that witnesses’
discourse revolves around themes of shifting context, transitioning out of one kind of world—a
secure, innocent, but no less fantasized world--into another.
Ironically, this move into a different “real” world is itself articulated through a
terminology of nightmares. The nightmare is the realization of an alternative kind of
social/political order in which the idealized distance between the United States and the rest of the
world is abruptly cancelled. A fantasy of innocence – a dream of being able to be disconnected
and far from catastrophes of the world – is now something that can no longer be relegated to the
realm of the imagination. Witnesses struggle to articulate this very shift:
I couldn’t believe what i had just seen. I was overcome by a sense of helplessness that i
had never felt before or since then.
As they replayed the scene over and over again, all i could think of was that this MUST
be a scene from a movie, that something like this could never happen in the US, that
these types of things happen in Kosovo, Israel, etc but not here in my own backyard (my
italics).88
Another witness writes reflexively about disruption of an assumed world that made sense and
implies that he or she not have to be writing what they are trying to attest to:
It was absolutely unbelievable. And then the second tower was hit and they both fell to
the ground one after the other, live. I started crying without being aware of it. It was like I
was watching the end of the world on national T.V.. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t talk, all I
could do was stare at the television screen not being capable of believing or
understanding what was happening. I remember asking myself: ‘How was this possible?
87
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” op cit., 2011.
88
Ibid.
138
Wasn’t U.S.A. the most powerful country in the world? If it got stricken and wasn’t able
to prevent it, what would the rest of the world do in this kind of situation? (my italics)’89
Or another:
I was reminded immediately of Hollywood blockbuster disaster films like “The Day
After Tomorrow”, and thought how reality had just surpassed fantasy like a long-shot
racehorse outpacing the favorite in the Kentucky Derby. No Hollywood scribe had
imagined this one.90
To the extent that this rhetorical rearranging of the figural world must take place as the witness is
“forced” to reimagine the landscape of the world he or she now inhabits, it is a felt injustice to
the fantasy, and to those entertaining it, that they are not relieved of this work or obligation. A
discourse testifying to a previous fantasy being shattered or revealed as a myth speaks to the
tragedy and displeasure of an imagined world no longer being the case and so showing how hard
the refiguring of the world is. The temptation, accordingly, is to linger in the experience of loss.
While the imagery of the attacks is cast as itself a fantastical rupture, witnesses report that
the movie like imagery has destroyed the way in which they have cast their own previous
fantasies, making them transparent as unsuccessful myths and calling, perhaps fruitless, for new
ones. A witness who could not “accept” the unbelievable and shocking reality of the attacks
found him or herself clinging to a more innocent view of tragedy: “I was still stuck in a fantasy
land where all of the tragedy was accidental.”91
It is in the foregoing vein that witnesses repeatedly ask, “How could this be?” as a
rhetorical question. The question expresses not only passive disbelief but performs the
illocutionary act of active disavowal by implying that “I do not want this to be the case.”
89
Ibid.
90
Ibid.
91
Ibid.
139
Testimony is rife with questions of “how this could happen here?” with the “here” coming up for
interesting rhetorical renegotiation. Witnesses ask “what kind of world we live in.”
In Chapter Three and Four I take up more strands of discourse and review the ways in
which witnesses name, classify, and invent the kind of “event” the exigence of 9/11 is. Having
reviewed some of the ways in which witnesses write about the attacks of 9/11 as moving into and
out of themes of dream, nightmare, and fantasy, let me conclude this section by observing once
again that a critical perspective reading only the psychological state of the audience en masse
misses the nuances of how audience members themselves struggle to find or even make the
context in which they are situated. This struggle is rhetorical work not only at the level of
expression; it is importantly part of a more robust conceptualization of the exigence and the
rhetorical situation. Accordingly, in the final section of this chapter I will argue that witness
discourse about the exigence of 9/11 gives the critic a way of seeing exigences more generally as
relational and the rhetorical situation as an ongoing process of negotiation rather than a discreet,
pre-given moment.
Conclusion: Relational Audience and Dynamic
Exigences in the Rhetorical Situation
I have argued in this chapter that a detailed description of the exigence of the attacks of
September 11 is not to be found in determinist readings of the mediated event over and above
what the audience of witnesses rhetoricizes. While overwhelming imagery is definitively the
focus of witness testimony and an undeniable part of the exigence that comprises the rhetorical
situation, attributing the motivation of discourse to the power of the extra rhetorical image-event
is to evacuate the rhetorical nature of the audience to express and define the exigence. This
conclusion parallels arguments about the notion of rhetorical situation that has been among the
140
most important tools of rhetorical critics and theorists for several decades. I end the chapter,
accordingly, by reflecting on how what we have learned about self-described, but usually
mediated, witness accounts tell us about controversies about the very idea of a rhetorical
situation.
The rhetorical situation provides a set of critical tools by which to read a speaker’s
address to an audience. In bringing this topic to bear on the subject of 9/11 rhetoric I am not
alone. Several notable pieces of rhetorical criticism of texts delivered on the subject of 9/11, as
I argued in the Introduction and in Chapter One, have relied explicitly or implicitly on this or that
model of the rhetorical situation to understand better the modes of address and techniques of
persuasion used by speakers to define and move the public. This body of scholarly work – by
authors from a diverse set of perspectives such as Anker, Bostdorff, Hariman, Hyde, Ivie, and
Simons – advances critical knowledge of and reflection on texts largely addressed to a
“rhetorical audience,” that is tantamount to the (American) public as “actual audience.” Such a
public audience can be distinguished from the “situational audience.”92 I will make much of this
distinction and argue that rhetorical criticism will benefit from understanding identification and
persuasion more clearly if critics look to the discourses of situational audiences’ perceptions of
an exigence. By looking at the discourses of witnesses, who are a situational audience, critics
can gain a more fluid, dynamic, and “organic” perspective on the rhetorical situation.93 More
fully than most of these uses, I will also take into account a rhetorical notion of media effects.
92
David Hunsaker and Craig Smith, “The Nature of Issues: A Constructive Approach to
Situational Rhetoric,” Western Speech Communication 40 (1981): 148-152.
93
Mary Garrett and Xiaosui Xiao, “The Rhetorical Situation Revisited,” Rhetoric Society
Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Spring, 1993), pp. 30-40.
141
Previous critics working to define and extend the rhetorical situation model have
maintained that perception is a crucial dynamic of the exigence and situation. This point is most
obvious when considering the work of Lloyd Bitzer. Marylin Young reviews Bitzer’s arguments
on the rhetorical situation, both his original 1968 inaugural piece for Philosophy and Rhetoric
and his clarification in 1980.94 Young claims that Bitzer “makes clear that the true exigence is
an objective, factual defect in the world that can be modified through rhetoric.”95 The exigence
must be perceived to in fact be the exigence that it truly is; only then can discourse about the
exigence become rhetorical. For example, a presidential assassination is, for Bitzer, echoing
Burke, a material phenomenon that requires a discourse to address its imperfection and shape
that address into a “fitting response” for an audience who can presumably modify the exigence
and repair the imperfection.96 Hence, the rhetor must perceive the situation “correctly,” which is
to say in a way that conforms with how the audience sees it if he or she is to succeed. While
critics of Bitzer and the rhetorical situation more generally disagree about whether this “correct”
perception is descriptive or normative, agreement of perception between the rhetor and the
audience is nevertheless crucial for successful rhetoric.97 Young explains:
94
For Bitzer’s response to critics of his rhetorical situation model in his piece on its
“modifications,” See White, Eugene E. Rhetoric in Transition: studies in the nature and uses of
rhetoric. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980.
95
Young, Marylin J., “Lloyd F. Bitzer: Rhetorical Situation, Public Knowledge, and
Audience Dynamics.” In Kuypers, Jim A., and Andrew King. Twentieth-century roots of
rhetorical studies. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2001. 288.
96
97
Bitzer, 1968.
Pomeroy argues this indeterminacy is inherent to Bitzer’s argument. He states: “At
some points in Bitzer’s theory . . .his discussion of the quality ‘fitness of response’ sounds
descriptive, suggesting that it functions as a defining quality of any rhetorical discourse. At other
points, however, his discussion sounds normative, suggesting that ‘fitness of response’ functions
as a standard or norm for effective rhetorical discourse.” See Pomeroy, Ralph J. “Fitness of
142
The issue is one of perception: the rhetor’s perception of the situation and the audience’s
perception of the situation. When they converge, by Bitzer’s analysis, persuasion occurs.
This is, in many ways, quite similar to Burke’s notion of identification and
consubstantiation.98
This conclusion has not gone uncontested. In contrast to Bitzer – or at least Bitzer as explicated
by Young; there are other readings – Richard Vatz argues that no correct perception of the
exigence is needed at all. Since the rhetor is free to define the exigence in its entirety, the notion
of an objective reality governing a fitting response for the audience is part of the myth of the
objective rhetorical situation itself. Yet, curiously, Vatz holds that “one cannot maintain that
reports of anything are indistinguishable from the thing itself.”99 Were one to watch an event,
such as a presidential assassination on television, it would be ontologically flawed to consider
the event and the coverage as the same “thing.” An exigence is distinct from any rhetoric that
defines it or any medium in which that rhetoric is enacted. Assassination is real, words about it
are rhetorical. While Vatz gives the rhetor a great deal of flexibility in creating the meaning of
an event, there is still an element of uncritical realism in Vatz. The creative rhetor is still
constrained by the audience in that audience members would have perceptions of exigences and
expectations of fitting responses to which the rhetor must appeal or manipulate. For Vatz, a
rhetor can create, shape, and manage these perceptions and expectations. Quoting Murray
Edelman helps Vatz make this point: “Political beliefs, perceptions, and expectations are
overwhelmingly not based on observation or empirical evidence available to participants, but
Response in Bitzer’s Concept of Rhetorical Discourse.” Georgia Speech Communication Journal
4:1 (1972), 42–71.
98
Young, P 280.
99
Vatz, 160.
143
rather upon cuings among groups of people who jointly create the meanings they will read into
current and anticipated events.”100
I agree with Young that both Bitzer and Vatz distinguish the exigence of the event from
rhetoric that makes meaning of (or from) it. The difference between them, accordingly, is less a
fundamental disagreement over what an exigence is than a difference of perspective in how
much shared meaning a rhetor can “cue” in the situational perception of the audience. Other
critics, such as John Patton, share this view by holding the agreeable and moderate point that
“The meaning of rhetorical situation is a dual process, partly a matter of recognition, i.e., clarity
and accuracy of perception, and partly a matter of intentional, artistic, human action.”101 Such a
view also resonates with Scottt Consigny’s attempt to bridge the gap between Bitzer and Vatz.102
Consigny heuristically introduces the idea of “topics” as a way to show to mediate between the
determining power of the exigence or the rhetor. There is not, according to Consigny, a pure
tabula rasa upon which to heap meanings of event. Previous scripts must be used. Topoi, the
antecedent rhetorical forms of persuasion and identification used in similar situations, are drawn
upon to craft a message to an audience who presumably has genre expectations. An
assassination of the president would “demand” a discourse fitting of the tradition of speech on
such occasion. It is not the case that anything could be said and function as persuasion:
The rhetorical situation is an indeterminate context marked by troublesome disorder
which the rhetor must structure so as to disclose and formulate problems; hence Bitzer
100
Edelman, Murray. Politics as Symbolic Action: mass arousal and quiescence.
Chicago: Markham Pub. Co. 1971, p 32.
101
Patton, J. H., “Causation and Creativity in Rhetorical Situations: Distinctions and
Implications.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 65 (1979): 36-55. P 49.
102
175-86.
Consigny, Scott. “Rhetoric and its Situations.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 7.3 (1974):
144
errs in construing the situation as determinate and predetermining a ‘fitting’ response.
But the rhetorical situation is not one created solely through the imagination and
discourse of the rhetor. It involves particularities of persons, actions, and agencies in a
certain place and time; and the rhetor cannot ignore these constraints if he is to function
effectively. . . . Not every strategy proposed by the rhetor will be fruitful and functional
in a given situation, and the rhetor must be responsive to what Kenneth Burke calls the
‘recalcitrance’ of the given situation…103
Kathleen Jamieson puts the issue more elegantly and articulates the need to take into account
previous rhetorical traditions and topics:
I do not wish to deny Bitzer’s contention that rhetorical forms are prompted by
comparable responses to comparable situations. What I do wish to suggest is that
perception of the proper response to an unprecedented rhetorical situation grows not
merely from the situation but also from antecedent rhetorical forms.104
I find it reasonable to claim that a presidential assassination, for example, is for American
citizen-subjects a major event and an exigence demanding discourse and accordingly necessitates
public address on the basis of rhetoric about similar events, i.e. other assassinations, attacks, and
other responses to these. However, I reach an impasse, a necessarily categorical impasse, in
applying the idea of a topos to the events of September 11. How does anyone know which
previous rhetoric speaks to the event of 9/11 without first identifying the events to which it is
similar? How can a rhetor or critic argue that the exigence of the 9/11 attacks is of a certain
“identifiable” topic in advance of the audience that negotiates the very problem of how to
perceive and identify the event itself? In this case, and perhaps more cases that we have
overlooked, the audience is more generative and depositive than the rhetor. Most attempts in the
conventional rhetoric of 9/11 to do so have a hollow quality to them (I have in mind the
examples of Pearl Harbor and Antietam).
103
Scott Consigny, “Rhetoric and Its Situations.” Landmark Essays on Rhetorical
Invention in Writing, ed. by Richard E. Young and Yameng Liu. Hermagoras Press, 1994.
104
Jamieson, Kathleeen Hall. “Generic Constraints and the Rhetorical Situation.”
Philosophy and Rhetoric 6, 3, Summer 1968, 163.
145
To argue for the genre or rhetorical form of an event is, in fact, not to “discover” the
objective situation of the event prior to discourse but presuppose that situation and offer rhetoric
about it. To define the perception of an event is of course a legitimate task for a rhetor. As I
have mentioned, where perception advanced by a rhetor meets an agreement of perception by an
audience, persuasion and/or identification is formulated. To understand whether or not a
discourse elicits an audience’s agreement is the artful task of the rhetor. It is not a function of a
genre that is stipulated in advance by the critic. The rhetor must know what the audience
perceives, thinks, and feels in order to address them successfully, not only identify the correct
genre of speech in advance. Arthur Miller makes this distinction:
Clearly, both rhetor and critic must be concerned with the rhetorical exigence and with
the constraints of those persons perceiving exigences. The rhetor must know the
constraints of his hearers before he exercises any option in attempting to harmonize his
and the hearers’ constraints. The critic must, of course, determine the constraints of both
hearers and speaker as well as the options available to the rhetor before he can make an
intelligent judgment about the rhetor's excellence.105
I have examined the discourse of witnesses in order to understand the ways in which they
have made meaning of the events of September 11 in their ongoing perceptions of those events.
While this could be useful for an extrapolation of the constraints of the audience for the speaking
situation, I instead argue that witnesses of the sort whose testimony, albeit belatedly and written,
provides a robust way to understand an exigence as a negotiated rhetorical form by taking 9/11
as a tough case. If that case is taken as paradigmatic, the exigence is that which a situational
audience, the perceivers of events, negotiates rhetorically to name and define it as an exigence.
This negotiation is not unidirectional and temporally confined. It does not gradually emerge,
form, and then stabilize. The set of discourses I have analyzed in this chapter demonstrates
105
118.
Miller, Arthur. “Rhetorical Exigence” Philosophy and Rhetoric 5, 1972. 111-118. P
146
otherwise. Echoing Carolyn Miller, I avow that an exigence, if 9/11 is an exemplary one, or at
least one that any fully general theory of the rhetorical situation must on pain of falsification take
account of, is more process than either a prior given or a product of discourse. Miller argues,
“Exigence must be located in the social world, neither in a private perception nor in material
circumstance. . . . Exigence is a form of social knowledge.”106 Knowledge is an ongoing product
of rhetorical input and negotiation. The production of the “knowledge” (this is one term among
many that we may call a negotiated settlement of a named event) of an exigence is rhetorically
messy. I have analyzed the discourses of witnesses around the idea that the process of naming
and defining the attacks of September 11 has been, and continues to be, a process of figuring the
perception and experience of the attacks. In looking at the specific phrases ‘like a movie’ and
‘unreal’ in the context of their actual usage, I have demonstrated how witnesses struggle to settle
upon a uniform or shared meanings. The point is especially salient because this negotiation
might be ongoing in order to truly count as an exigence that is not betrayed by materialist or
constructivist misconstruals of the general idea.
This point deserves to be explicated in the current context of rhetorical criticism that
attends to the problem of television viewers in particular. When Bitzer and Vatz set the stage for
a difference of perspectives on the rhetorical situation, they argue not just generically about an
audience but an audience of Americans who watch television and enter into a relationship to the
exigence through mediated viewing and receiving discourses of news reports. Their paradigm
cases show this. They speak about and argue over popular events/topics such as the
assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, and the Cuban missile crisis. In this way,
106
Carolyn R. Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, 1984,
151–167. P 161.
147
the event itself has in a way already met its rhetorical presentation. The problem of intellectually
understanding this difference yet experiencing the blurriness of this division is inherently “the
visual power of television.”107
Some critics have taken up the particular context of viewing what I have termed
spectacular events through the lens of television and accordingly have analyzed audience
discourses as part of this kind of viewing experience. The general literature on this genre of
scholarship form the perspective the production and dissemination of images, “media events,” is
far too vast to cover here.108 I am concerned only with the role and function of discourse that
replies to or itself situates the event. To that end, rhetoric scholars make meaningful
contributions to understandings of media events that incorporate the perspective of the audience.
Daniel Boorstin and Murray Edelman, for example, do this for politically minded readers of
“staged” rhetorical and public address.109 Bruce Gronbeck does it by paying more attention to
the concerns of communication scholar, stating that “telespectacle, for better or for worse, is the
center of public politics, of the public sphere . . . we must recognize that the conversation of the
culture is centered not in the New York Review of Books but in the television experience.”110
107
Young, 281.
108
For a significant treatment of the idea of “media events,” see Dayan, Daniel and Katz,
Elihu. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1992.
109
While Boorstin coined the term “pseudo-event” as that which is politically staged to
be read as a seemingly legitimate media event, both Boorstin and Edelman explicate the
significant impacts of this idea in political practice. See Boorstin, Daniel. The image: A guide to
pseudo-events in America. New York: Vintage, 1961. And Edelman, Murray J. The symbolic
uses of politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.
110
Gronbeck, B. E., “Unstated Propositions: Relationships Among Verbal, Visual, and
Acoustic Languages”, in S. Jackson (ed)., Argumentation and Values: Proceedings of the Ninth
SCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation, SCA, Annandale, VA. 1995, p 235.
148
Kevin Deluca responds to this prompt with an analysis of the spectacular image-event. Deluca
and John Delicath provide an analysis of the spectacular image-event in its mediated presentation
to understand its rhetorical dimensions. They argue for the audience’s involvement with the
imagery rather than make the image determining of the meaning of the exigence. They offer an
overarching explanation of how an image-event can be analyzed with respect to the audience’s
capacities for invention:
We suggest that image events are an argumentative form characterized by fragmentation.
Image events communicate not arguments, but argumentative fragments in the form of
unstated propositions, indirect and incomplete claims, visual refutation, and implied
alternatives. These fragments constitute inventional resources capable of assisting public
argumentation and deliberation. That is, images provide fodder for argumentation and a
source for generating arguments. In one sense, inventional resources are quite literally the
elements (claims, data, warrants) with which to formulate arguments. In another sense,
inventional resources are those materials that serve to inspire argumentation and provide
ammunition for novel and innovative arguments.111
While I agree with Deluca and Delicath that an image-event can be used and interpreted by
audiences as an “argumentative form,” I do not conclude that every image-event is a fragment
made sense of only in terms of aspects of an argument. This is particular true of our case study.
There is little about it analogous to deliberation, judicial decision making, or morally
interpenetrated epideixis – except in the official rhetoric of political figures who hogged the
stage almost from the start and moralized endlessly in terms of the discourse “evil” that
unfortunately argument-inclined rhetorical critics bought into almost as quickly. One hears little
of that discourse in witnesses’ fragments. The confusion that audience members express about
the mediated events of 9/11 is in terms of ‘movies, ‘dreams,’ ‘nightmares,’ and other aesthetic
terminology figuring the fundamentals of perceiving and categorizing the exigence that has been
111
Delicath, John and Deluca, Kevin. “Image Events, the Public Sphere, and
Argumentative Practice: The Case of Radical Environmental Groups.” Argumentation
17: 315–333, 2003. P 322.
149
witnessed. Witnesses maneuver discursively as members of the audience of a telespectacle.
Whereas Baudrillard and Zizek argue that the 9/11 attacks were carried out in the name of
creating a televisual spectacle, and that the spectacle itself imparts meaning upon the audience,
other rhetorical critics show how audience are more active in their interpretations of spectacular
image-events. I turn to the work of Michael Halloran and David Proctor on the dynamic role of
the audience in perceiving and interpreting spectacles. While a plethora of literature on media
events, or image-events through the media, could be read as relevant to this study, I limit the
scope of my review of reflections of mediated image-events to these critics since they write
specifically about the audience’s rhetorical role in watching and negotiating the meaning of
spectacular mediated events.
Halloran offers the fundamental insight that the lived experience of a spectacle is always
more than the rhetorical text.112 Against the more common interpretation that spectacles produce
a displacement of genuine experience, an individuation effect, Halloran finds that spectacles are
authentically lived experiences. In an engagement with the dynamic text of a spectacular
display, audiences find themselves not only visually provoked but symbolically transformed. By
this, Halloran means to say that audience members viewing a spectacle react in such a way as to
feel themselves become a spectator for a text and a participant through a felt encounter of it; in
and through this significant level of experience, persons become a fashioned collective. As
Halloran puts it: “Members of the audience become rhetors through their visible and audible
reactions, transforming the event as it transpires into an enactment of their social order.”113 This
aligns with the intuition that rhetorical performance, in the case of epideictic speech for example,
112
Halloran, Michael. “Text and Experience in a Historical Pageant: Toward a Rhetoric
of Spectacle,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 4, (Fall 2001): 5-17.
113
Ibid., 6.
150
is carefully watched and critically evaluated to the extent that the speaker forges a “connection”
with the audience. Audience members and speakers find themselves in a relation of reciprocal
influence, symbolically co-constituting a shared code.
On this account, audience members function in two roles yet become one unique entity;
they are an audience (receivers) and rhetors (speakers) at the same time. Understood
collectively, they become an entity that enacts a social order, a unique kind of group, body, or
public. Rather than theorizing how the rhetorical negotiation of this unique kind of experience
manufactures this bifurcated mode of subjectivity, though, Halloran suggests that the dynamic
nature of the spectacle performs the work of unification. He concludes: “The spectacle itself is a
rhetorical experience quite apart from the speech text because it involves symbolic action that
engages the mind, the passions, and the senses, symbolic action that bonds its participants and
constitutes them as the ‘we’ so often invoked in speech texts.”114 Halloran argues convincingly
that the performative aspects of spectacular display do more work than the abstracted text or
information conveyed. The spectacle is in fact always more meaningful than the text. Though
his point is made specifically in relation to spectacles of the spoken word, Halloran concludes
generally that form is in essence more meaningful than content. Audience reception is a unique
structural form of the spectacle and as such it determines meaning far more than the text; the
crowd as audience is an integral function of this meaning production. Beyond this already
acceptable claim, however, Halloran advances the significant point that “lived experience”
cannot be accounted for in the rhetorical text, that its meaning exceeds the text. In this, Halloran
implies that the dynamic form of audience engagement with a spectacle reveals a blindspot in
rhetorical criticism, namely, that criticism is unfortunately not attentive enough to experience
114
Ibid., 14.
151
and fails to take it into account. By paying attention to symbols, messages, and codes of
meaning, rhetorical criticism misses the characteristic effect of what produces a magical kind of
connection between speaker and spectator, or image and viewer. What makes a rhetorical act a
unique kind of event or special “moment” is not something rhetorical scholarship is designed to
find in the form or bond between the participants and action that unities them. Criticism thus
continues to miss what it seeks by clinging too traditionally to the textual object. In effect. then,
a call is made to perform criticism from a different vantage point, one that sees the experience of
audiences, not speakers, as the nexus of reception, circulation, and meaning production:
I do argue that rhetoric is in essence a lived experience, and that as rhetorical scholars we
must do what we can to understand experiences that may be reflected quite imperfectly in
the texts we study. This means taking into account the material conditions under which
rhetorical action transpires, and it may also mean calling into question some of the
fundamental concepts we have traditionally used to understand rhetoric.115
This dynamic mode of reception that yields active participation by the audience also
motivates the work of David Proctor on spectacles. Arguing against the treatments of spectacle
by Tom Farrell and Murray Edelman, who see spectacles as merely choreographed displays
effective at producing visually pleasing aesthesis as intended116, Proctor explores the dynamic
interplay between receiving a spectacular event and enacting it symbolically into a social
order.117 In parallel to Halloran, Proctor advances two fundamental conclusions.
115
Ibid., 7.
116
For more on spectacle as a “choreographed display” see Thomas B. Farrell, “Media
Rhetoric as Social Drama: The Winter Olympics of 1984,” Critical Studies in Mass
Communication 6 (1989): 158-182. For Murray Edelman’s work on the subject, see
Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
117
David Proctor, “The Dynamic Spectacle: Transforming Experience into Social Forms
of Community.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76, no. 2, (May 1990): 117-33.
152
First, he argues that spectacles are an essential characteristic of community experience.
Communal spectacles, those dynamic events in which audiences become part of the text such as
a parade or public address, “become a touchstone for community building.”118 Like Halloran,
who claims that in spectacles one finds the “germ of a public,”119 Proctor argues that spectacles
produce “community-building through symbolic struggle.”120 Since spectacles are “dynamic
events” that unleash a flurry of rhetorical activity in response, a kind of co-constitutive activity,
they exist as “symbolic forms which interpenetrate the social forms of community.”121 For
Proctor then, the “lived experience” of a spectacle is thoroughly rhetorical. Since “we do not
experience most events personally, but rather learn of them through the spoken, written, or visual
constructions and reconstructions of others,” the spectacle is always already understood
symbolically.122 Accordingly, spectacles are “dramatic accounts of material experience which
occurs beyond our personal purview and which we receive only through symbols developed by
some interest group.”123 As such, they exist in so far as they fall within a rhetorical/symbolic
form (a common form of address like a sermon) and a social form (an identity group such as
protestors).
Second, Proctor holds that the dynamic event of a spectacle is a unique kind of exigence
in that it demands contextualization. Sometimes, events such as the Challenger explosion “burst
118
Ibid., 119.
119
Halloran, “Text and Experience,” 6.
120
Proctor, “The Dynamic Spectacle,” 118.
121
Ibid., 119.
122
Ibid., 119.
123
Ibid., 119.
153
upon the public consciousness, [and] present a rhetorical exigency…”124 A dynamic spectacle is
accordingly that which is not readily known and elicits a collective “call for cultural
explanation.”125 Though it takes place and is symbolically negotiated through rhetorical and
social forms, its meaning is not secured from the outset. Hence, there exists a “need” to argue
over the meaning of the rhetorical spectacle itself. Proctor elaborates upon this point:
These events, whether turbulent or celebratory, demand explanation and
contextualization. Rhetors with different ideologies step forward to provide
interpretations of the event. Their interpretations or accounts of the event are the
spectacles and within these spectacles exist the dynamic rhetoric of community, those
symbolic forms which interpenetrate the social form.126
Spectacles are negotiated symbolically from the vantage point of different social positions;
rhetorical analysis can investigate these kinds of cultural explanations and contestations.
Both Halloran and Proctor hit the rhetorical mark within the received framework of
seeing major events, like 9/11, as spectacles. They attune us to the notion that the experience of
a spectacle is more complex than the perception of a mere exigence of the sort we find in
everyday political deliberation. The dynamic nature of the event and the circulation of
witnesses’ discourses in reaction to it are not knowable entities that the critic may simply
decipher. Instead, dynamic events exceed the landscape of context and exist through a rhetorical
process of audience interaction and interpretation that continuously influences, alters, and
reorganizes the meaning or even the existence of a (what counts as) spectacle.
In another respect, however, these authors miss the conceptual mark. Both argue that
spectacles are an essential touchstone for community building and collective identity. But this
124
James F. Klumpp and Thomas A. Hollihan, “Debunking the Resignation of Earl Butz:
Sacrificing an Official Racist.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 65 (1979): 2-3. As quoted by
Proctor, op. cit., p. 119.
125
Proctor, “The Dynamic Spectacle,” 120.
126
Ibid., 120.
154
begs a significant question. How and why does an exigence set in motion a rhetorical
negotiation that aims at communal identity? Why do events demand contextualization
specifically in the social form of an identity structure? The problem here is the nature of a
theorized “demand” for audience response. If spectacles disrupt a routinized mode of perception
and set off a flurry of rhetorical discourse, the search for a form through which to understand a
spectacle cannot and should not be guaranteed by the exigence itself. A spectacle that penetrates
the social form – the space shuttle Challenger exploding in front of thousands of school
children’s eyes, for example – may in fact “demand” the circulation of rhetorical discourse that
seeks a cultural explanation. But explanation does not by necessity move toward a
predetermined and desired endpoint. In other words, this explosive and spectacular episode may
“cause” a fluctuation of discourse but it may not make demands in advance of the audience who
negotiates it. Spectacles are not automatically phenomenal disruptions in search of symbolic
solutions. Nor are the explanations they provoke successful. This would be to ascribe the
particular social form of a desire for collective identity as existing prior to the dynamic spectacle.
It would provide both the rhetor and the critic something specific to look for that already exists.
Though productive perhaps, it is also a fabricated way to guarantee rhetoric its role in negotiating
identity transhistorically. Yet, as Proctor requests, the task of rhetorical criticism is precisely to
perform this work. The object of the critic is a focus on the “rhetorical processes of converting
or transforming experience into social forms that subsequently organize community.”127 The
purpose of the critic is as follows:
The concept of a dynamic spectacle provides critics with a rhetorical frame through
which to examine the symbolic processes of community-building… The study of
127
Ibid., 120
155
community, then, becomes the analysis of the rhetor’s confrontation with the particular
moment and the transformation of that moment into social form.128
While Proctor and Halloran both warrant their respective investigations into spectacles as
significant cultural moments around which discourse circulates to form social bonds and unify
collectives, their warrants suffer from a moralized task of the critic to search for and find the
symbolic processes of identity formation and group rebuilding. No one thinks the explosion of
the Space Shuttle Challenger was a good thing. However, it is not automatically the case that
rhetoric about it should aim at modifying this exigence into collective identification and
community building. As I showed in Chapter One on speaking to trauma, we in fact saw the
ways in which vernacular and critical voices testified to the feeling of being fractured from the
collective despite an official discourse attempting to unite them. Disturbing spectacles on the
magnitude of the Challenger explosion or attacks of 9/11 might disrupt common narratives and
become, for an audience of spectators, more than the text addressing the exigence can itself
constrain, define, and reorient for audiences. To understand that toward which these discourses
“aim,” if at all, is to read them closely in the context of their own reporting style and diction.
A reading of those discourses gives us clear evidence that witness do not share “lived
experiences” of the text that is the spectacular mediated attacks as seen on television. As well,
audience discourses do not necessarily produce the social “knowledge” that speaks to one kind of
collective wisdom about the attacks. Instead, slipping into and out of fantasies, dreams, and
nightmares, witnesses produce discourse that shifts in many different ways, changing from one
story that positioned them previously as a subject into another. The exigence of what they
identify with – being an American citizen and safe from the horrors of war and surprise attack,
for example – is a narrative under review and revision. Subjectivity is under a self-contestation
128
Ibid., 120.
156
and renegotiation in instances such as these possibly. It is to these kinds of examples, where
discourse names and identifies narrative shifts, that I turn to next in a chapter on discourses of
the sublime.
157
CHAPTER THREE
‘HOW COULD THEY?’: ‘MAGNITUDE,’ ‘INCOMPREHENSIBLE,’
AND ‘SPEECHLESS’ AS FIGURES OF THE SUBLIME
Introduction
The discourses used by witnesses to reflect upon their sense of the terrorist attacks of
9/11 as mediated are complex, varied, and sometimes contradictory. The previous chapter
explored a few significant terms clustered around a theme of ‘real’ yet ‘unreal’ suggesting that
the mediated image of the attacks was ‘like a movie,’ a ‘fantasy,’ and a ‘nightmare.’ My
analysis demonstrated that explanations of this imagery as constitutive of subjects’ experiences
proved too deterministic to account for witnesses’ discourses that struggled to name the exigence
of the attacks. The term ‘spectacle’ illuminates the subject position of a spectator but
oversimplifies a much more complex process of linguistic experience and expression. I argued
that witness accounts and descriptions that come to terms with perception and experience offer
ways to theorize the dynamic process through which witnesses encounter a spectacular text,
entering into the fluctuating positions of audience member and rhetor. By arguing that audience
members comment upon multiple exigences in their descriptions, I found that the rhetorical
situation model needs a more thorough account of audience members’ texts since they expand
the meanings of what counts as a situation.
This chapter investigates discourses in reaction to the spectacular terrorist attacks of 9/11
by asking whether they may be understood as a rhetoric of the “sublime.” As in the previous
chapters, I follow a three step process of investigation. First, I pinpoint and explicate several
terms and phrases that appear to indicate intense and usually contradictory forms of expressions
that can be linked to discourses of the sublime. Terms for analysis in this chapter include various
158
words referring to ‘magnitude,’ ‘incomprehensible,’ and ‘speechless.’ Second, I review the
critical literature on the concept of sublimity as well as the work of critics who argue that the
attacks of 9/11 presented a sublime moment to witnesses. Third, using contemporary literature
on the sublime, I argue that actual discourses of 9/11 complicate previous models of sublimity. I
conclude by offering a reading of witnesses’ discourses as “rhetorically sublime,” and define this
notion as the search for a new idiom when a previous narrative or script fails to define the
audience member’s subject position. The reconfiguration of a witness’ narrative, I argue, is
related to Charland’s notion of constitutive rhetoric. But by focusing on the failure of a previous
narrative en route to a new one, I supplement Charland’s account of constitution with a prior
notion of deconstitution. Sublimity is significant to the rhetorical situation since it demonstrates
actual audience members actively involved in forming new narratives for a subject position that
presents itself discursively as having been shattered. A witness in search of new narratives is not
only in a psychological state within the context of a pre-existing rhetorical situation, as has been
previously argued, but is a vexed subject with multiple or even contradictory relations to an
event, hence making the exigence unclear and the subject’s narrative position unstable.
Audience Analysis
9/11 is a big event. To call it a singular event, though, is really to summarize several
events into one “thing.” The attacks that day were multiple – two attacks on the World Trade
Center towers, one on the Pentagon, and one thwarted attempt presumably on the Capitol
Building. The event extends into discourses of victims and lost loved ones at “Ground Zero.”
Political statements and actions in response enter into the event too. Additionally, news
coverage of all of these is actually part of the event. The magnitude of September 11 is thus hard
to pinpoint, reduce, or summarize. Witness testimony from the archive we have been analyzing
159
speaks directly to this problem and gives the reader a sense of impact and great magnitude at the
limits of discourse. To understand the ways in which witnesses speak a discourse of magnitude
condensed under the category of an ‘event,’ and what this means for coming to terms with an
exigence, is the subject of Chapter Four on how audiences’ name and define an “event”
rhetorically. Presently, I argue that witnesses’ discourses naming and articulating the
significance of World Trade Center attacks beyond words or terms of measurement figure these
attacks as sublime. This is significant for the rhetorical situation in that a discourse of sublimity
displays an audience member who is unable to reach clear judgments and is in the throes of
narrative instability, possibly fluctuating in identity and audience position. The “audience” is not
only unsettled as a collective entity, though. The audience as a text is one that fails to be
“hailed” into a coherent subject position through an anchoring narrative framework by speaking
to itself and constituting itself as outside typical narratives. Audience members note this
disconnect between a typical frame of reference for a tragedy and the attacks of 9/11 by turning
to a discourse of size, scale, and magnitude.
‘Magnitude’
In reflecting on initial impressions of the World Trade Center attacks, many witnesses
note the ways in which the attacks did not make sense. I have investigated this in terms of a
discourse of immediate impressions (‘shock’ and ‘disbelief’) in Chapter One. I found that these
terms meant more than simply indexing a traumatic experience. A discourse of magnitude
grapples with applying a descriptive term to that which is extraordinary and more than merely
“big” or “major.”
Rhetorically speaking, when witnesses articulate the attacks with the specific term of
‘magnitude’ (as well as related discourse of largeness, greatness and size) this maneuver may be
160
called an aporia. Like the term ‘event’ itself, which I take up in the next chapter, ‘magnitude’ is
a word that names something incredibly meaningful, momentous, yet not fully capable of being
rendered through words. ‘Magnitude’ describes while pointing to its inability to describe. In
this way of reading the term, ‘magnitude’ is more aptly understood as a term of catachresis rather
than purely observational or descriptive. There is no “right” word or even appropriate word at
the time. Only the closest term can suffice even though it is recognizably flawed or insufficient
in its use.
In a more plain and clear use of the word by witnesses, ‘magnitude’ focuses on the
qualities of an excessive display. A discourse of ‘magnitude’ is often applied by witnesses to the
size and scope of the destruction at the site of the World Trade Center, the loss of the buildings
themselves is bewildering and makes the calamity more sizable than any other disaster.
There was a hush that day- even the traffic was subdued. I finally wandered home,
contemplating the magnitude of what I'd seen. They were gone- those two cheeky towers
which had stuck out like giant thumbs over the Manhattan skyline.1
Themselves enormous and magnificent, the hugeness of the towers normally overwhelmed the
Manhattan skyline. Their disappearance is at odds with the very meaning of New York City to
many. The magnitude of the attacks lies in something of great magnitude not existing as such
anymore:
My strongest memory of the day was my inability to comprehend that these magnificent
buildings were gone. Having seen them when I walked toward my meeting in the
morning only to witness them disappearing by the afternoon will remain with me forever.
To this day and for the rest of my life the vision of that gaping hole will remain etched in
my memory.2
1
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” Compiled by Center for History and New Media
and American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, 2011 ed.
http://www.911digitalarchive.org.
2
Ibid.
161
The term ‘magnitude’ points not only present things such as the viewing of the act of
terrorism, the grandeur of the buildings, and the size of the explosions or plumes of smoke.
‘Magnitude’ reveals witnesses’ struggle to articulate that which is meaningful, huge, but absent.
In figuring the meaningfulness of the loss of the twin towers, witnesses paint a picture of the
scene as so significant so as to not be able to put into words. This discourse is an index of an
emotional response. Sizable is the experience as depicted in juxtaposition to the otherwise
everyday:
The footage of the collapse of both towers of TWC is nothing short of horrendous.
Having been there (at TWC) , the size and magnitude of the disaster is overwhelming.
The buildings are so close together and it is close to Wall Street and the ferries to the
Statue of Liberty. It is just incredible, unbelievable and horrifying. I cannot imagine what
the City of New York will like after this. The usually stoic New Yorkers can never be the
same. TWTC was such a part of the NYC skyline that it is hard to think of city without
them. Amazing, just amazing...3
In figuring the size and magnitude of the devastation, the witness refers to the incredible and
unimaginable nature of the event. ‘Magnitude’ is a term of size and scale, yet it is more often
used to speak about the way in which the events supersede a discourse of size and scale. Grand
size and scale is addressed but the rhetorical force of utterance lies in what is not mentioned
directly. The discourse is classically paraleptic is some instances. ‘Magnitude’ and discourses
of size address a presumed topic, material bigness, but really finds its rhetorical force in figuring
that which is “omitted” from the text, a discourse of an experience of something previous
unimaginable and thought to be impossible. Self-reflexively, though, witnesses figure
themselves to be in the throes of such an excessive experience. This emotional discourse is not
decorously concealed or omitted. One witness, for example, shifts in describing the magnitude
of the devastation to the magnitude of emotions:
3
Ibid.
162
I had never experienced emotions like this. Their magnitude dwarfed anything I had ever
known. I was ready to kill Osama bin Laden myself. I would have put a gun to his head
and gladly shot him in cold blood. I would still do it now, from sheer justice if not fury.4
The enormity of the events is rendered meaningful through an overwhelming impact on the
subject. Substituted for a discourse of purely external magnitude is a discourse that figures one’s
internal state as an index of the size of the calamity:
This past week my feelings have been like a yo-yo--shock, horror, sorrow, sadness, fear,
anger, helplessness, compassion, frustration, concern--as Im sure yours were too. There
was an intensity of emotions colliding with the depth of our feelings, overwhelmed by the
magnitude of these tragic events.5
In this way of reading the term, ‘magnitude’ is exactly that which ironically grasps at the
enormity of the event by pointing to something that cannot be measured in size or scope.
Witnesses draw upon this idea directly as evidence for the magnitude of the attacks. They are
obviously big, which is to say significant, and not measurable by ordinary means. One witness
makes this contrast directly:
Casualty numbers are not in, nor are they important. The numbers great or small do not
change the magnitude of what has happened and how the United States of America has
been compromised.6
The tragic event of the attacks is inexplicable, yet its ‘magnitude’ is obvious. It is made obvious
by the problem of not knowing exactly how to describe it. The word ‘magnitude’ is the term
used to describe the significance of the immeasurably large attacks as well as the word used to
point to this sense of the indescribable:
The horror of this event was inexplicable. But it only increased in scope and magnitude.
21 minutes after the plane crashed into the Trade Center Tower, another jet liner, laden
with fuel for a trans-continental flight missiled into the second of the trade center towers.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
163
The results were the same but the effects, the horror, and the fright that this second
intentional crash generated were exponentially greater. Both towers are now gone.7
Witnesses figure the attacks as extraordinary and “amazing” in terms of the size of the
destruction. The sight of skyscrapers, considered “magnificent” and full of “magnitude”
themselves, razed to the ground is meaningful. Witnesses also deploy ‘magnitude’ and related
terms as way to discuss what is sizable and momentous beyond typical terminology of doing so.
Pointing instead to their own reactions of the destruction, witnesses figure their experiences as
full of magnitude as a way to parallel a discourse of internal explosion of sensation with the
externally viewed tragedy. In another iteration of the term, witnesses use ‘magnitude’ to
reference the size of the event at the limits of discourse and comprehension. Witnesses curiously
talk about the attacks of 9/11 in terms of a magnitude of the moment that is present yet lost at the
same time. Stories reflecting back on it grasp at it but never pin it down. Its magnitude is thus
indexed by the very inability to articulate it fully:
In our attempt to comprehend the sheer evil and terror of the Attacks, I tell my story to
those who inquire. But I can never convey the magnitude of the moment, nor do I want
to, for that one day in mid-September shook the very foundations of my world; to explain
my account so as to do it justice would require that I divulge much of myself. I neither
wish to be so candid with every person that asks, many of whom I don’t know very well,
nor do I wish to recount my experience so thoroughly and so often as it is a painful one.8
What makes 9/11 full of magnitude is that this magnitude can never be rendered completely.
The “situation” of impossibility through description is itself taken into account in witness
testimony. In this way, audience members figure the general sense that 9/11 could not be put
into words as part of its magnitude:
It was truly a surreal scene - one I still have trouble contemplating more than a year later.
People were on cell phones talking about what was going on with people at home that
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
164
had access to the news. I overheard different reports. “It was two planes, another plane,
the Pentagon has been hit, terrorism.” The magnitude of the moment was beyond me.9
Lastly, the magnitude of the attacks of 9/11 is figured as that which is out of time and
place. While I speak about this point at length in the next chapter, it is worth noting that
‘magnitude’ is deployed as that which is not directly identifiable and measurable but instead as
that which breaks “form” through being immeasurable and indescribable.
All i could think was “this can't be happening” theres no way this is real. I've grown up
my whole life and nothing of this magnitude has ever come about. I sat their in awe
watching as they showed the replay over and over again.10
The magnitude discussed in this text points to a suddenness, an unexpected interruption, an event
out of joint. ‘Magnitude’ describes a severity of contrast between the insertion of a new
trajectory or new possibility (but one that was all too real) and a prior frame of reference that
fails to accept it as even possible. The script of possible events is, accordingly, described as
changing in an instant. This change in the narrative, previously analyzed in Chapter Two as a
traditional “fantasy” of living in an invincible and innocent space, is shattered. This change, we
may now note, is marked as full of magnitude:
I do not believe that either of us completely understood the magnitude of what took place
until we made it home and turned on the television. As soon as the television turned on,
all we saw on the screen was a barrage of firey images and screaming people. The
images we were witnessing were surreal to us, we could not wrap our minds around what
was happening. It was as if in that instance, our childish innocence was ripped away
from us forever. We no longer carried the belief that the world was a happy, joyful place.
Instead, the prevalence of the evils of our world became apparent in our eyes.11
Discourses of magnitude, for many witnesses, then, point to this severe “ shift” in narrative
script. What makes the event momentous is not only the size of the buildings, the reality of the
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.
165
destruction, or the unreal and amazing imagery or the emotion evoked by that, but the sense of a
change that is either underway or about to come. There will have to be, we are told, a narrative
re-evaluation to accommodate for such an egregious and unexpected attack. The attack is thus
momentous and the feeling of having to account for it with a possibly new narrative is part of
what makes the event full of magnitude:
I woke up and turned on the news and was in total disbelief. I went into the house and my
family had yet viewed what was going on, I stayed glued to the tv all day long crying. At
age 27 this was the first time that terrorism seemed real, I think people of my generation
had never really knew the magnitude of acts of war and the pain and suffering that it
would cause. I think for everyone Sept 11th made us all re-evualate what was important
in life (my emphasis).12
In these fragments of magnitude, the term is applied to something external; the fiery crash of the
planes, the collapse of the colossal towers, the devastating loss of life. But ‘magnitude’ is also
used to describe internal sensations and reactions to the attacks – overwhelming feelings, loss of
innocence, and other instabilities in one’s narrative of subjectivity. It is very likely that the term
‘magnitude,’ not used very often in ordinary discourse, enters into common usage because of the
unusual nature of the attacks. A discourse that remarks upon this sensation of the highly unusual
and significant with an emotionally charged language could be understood as a discourse of
aesthetics, or more specifically, a discourse of the sublime. Large, sizable, and significant things
that effectuate feelings of fascination and fright are very often, and have been for a long time,
analyzed critically as the “stuff” of the sublime. On this simple account, the attacks of 9/11 as
witnessed on television are explained to be sublime according to some critics. For example:
The extraordinary sight of wide-bodied Boeing airplanes speeding like bullets down
Manhattan Island at near the speed of sound, a mere 500-800 feet above the busy streets,
then smashing into the city’s tallest buildings, eventually reducing them to rubble—these
sublime acts of terror stunned the world. In a sense, we witnessed two types of the
sublime… the terrifying and the splendid. The terrifying arises from the great power and
12
Ibid.
166
speed of these projectiles carrying helpless, unknowing passengers, and the dreadful toll
in lost lives; the splendid results from the magnificence of the airplanes and the
remarkable, gargantuan architecture of the twin towers.13
I argue that this rendition of the sublime, while highly relevant, does not take fully into account
witness testimony that is vexed with the problem of representation. This critic’s judgment on
the sublime assumes a pure correspondence between an excessive event and the supposedly
appropriate sensation. He deals merely with a static sublime, not a dynamic sublime, to use the
Kantian terminology just introduced by this critic himself. This correspondence, however, is
exactly what witnesses speak about and work through as a problem. How witnesses struggle to
make meaning and depict the attacks, and how this engenders further discourse about this very
problem, complicates traditional understandings of the sublime, introduces a rhetorical element
to its role in figuring discourse, and challenges traditional conceptions of the rhetorical situation.
To get a handle on the dimension of the sublimity that the discourses of magnitude introduces
into discussions of 9/11, I turn, first, to self-described witnesses’ discourse representing the
‘incomprehensible’ and ‘speechless.’
‘Incomprehensible’ and ‘How’
Much commentary judging the magnitude of devastation on 9/11 revolves around
spectacular display of the twin towers razed to the ground. The magnitude of this scene is as
much constituted by a discourse of what is witnessed (a crash) as it is by the loss of the towers in
their disappearance (a crumble). With so much destruction from the World Trade Center attacks,
along with their unexpected and sudden occurrence, many witness reports remark on the
“impossibility” of such a scenario unfolding, according to an ordinary system of measurement.
13
Vernon Hyde Minor. “What Kind of Tears? 9/11 and the Sublime.” Journal of
American Studies of Turkey # 14 (Fall 2001 [2003]), pp. 91-96.
167
As in the case of previous examples of ‘magnitude’ the term ‘incomprehensible’ is deployed as a
discourse of problematic or wavering judgment in response to the unfolding events. As a similar
term of aporia, ‘incomprehensible’ describes the indescribable. Beyond just descriptive, though,
witnesses write with an active sense of incredulity. While ‘disbelief,’ analyzed previously in
Chapter One, attempts to describe yet disavow the attacks, spectators note a further sense of the
incomprehensible character of the attacks in that they were performed by an agent, not by nature
or any other powerful force. Their description of this agency appears as agentic as an
incredulous response.
That an agent has caused such a catastrophe – that it is not a mere mistake, accident, or
natural disaster – renders the even scene more significant and harder to fit within a typical
narrative frame. Witnesses turn, accordingly, toward a rhetoric of the incomprehensible in order
to indicate the ‘amazing’ amount of significance at the limits of their ability to describe it:
I guess it took about 10 minutes for it to actually get on and finally another plane had hit
the other tower and I realised that it was not a mistake. Someone was doing this on
purpose. It was amazing. I could just not believe it. It was more than I could comprehend
(my emphasis).14
The attacks are rendered ‘amazing’ in the sense of not comprehensible. That which is
beyond comprehension, however, is also figured as fascinating in some respect. Just for this
reason, this is significant when noting an operation of a sublime discourse. The intentionality of
the acts is what fascinates and complicates the scheme of interpreting them. They are now not
only to be disbelieved in that they happened, but in how they occurred. Incomprehensibility, in
turn, is expressed in two senses – toward imagery depicted as real and non-fictional, and with
respect to the fact that someone intentionally caused the catastrophe. Just as the
14
Ibid.
168
incomprehensibility is linked to amazement, it is also expressed in terms of awe – a constituent
aspect of the experience of the sublime:
I was staring in awe, not quite comprehending what was happening, when my friend
came up behind me and said, “That was one of the Twin Towers. It just fell.” Neither the
words nor the pictures registered in my mind at first. It was such a shock, and I couldn't
get my mind around the fact that a plane had flown into the building and that it had just
collapsed before my eyes. And then to see, the plane crash into the second building a
short time after was more than words can describe. It was awful, hateful, and inhumane.15
Descriptions of the inhumane purposefulness behind the attacks appears more pressing in this
passage than the devastation itself. That an unknown group of individuals effectively carried out
such attacks is both beyond comprehension and rather amazing. An affective excess, as opposed
to a mere lack of knowledge motivating the discourse, seems to seep out of the discourse of
incomprehensibility. Another witness similarly articulates the ‘amazing’ quality of the attacks to
their incomprehensibility as follows:
This event is so tragic that I really can't say much about it. I am so amazed that such a
thing could happen. Who in their right mind does such a thing or plans such a thing and
is willing to die just for this to happen?16
Facing intentional events and asking questions, spectators-turned-locutioners offer
rhetorical questions not merely to judge something as incomprehensible, but also to begin a
process of making sense of what has transpired, an inquiry that turns into, I will argue, a
regressive enactment of sublime non-comprehension. Discourses of the ‘how could they’ and
the ‘incomprehensible’ open up an area of questioning in which many possibilities are
considered – not just the scope of the attacks and the motivation behind them, but larger
questions about politics, morality, religion and more. Recounts of the attacks often linger in this
space of “non-understanding:”
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
169
Shock, disbelief, surreal. It couldn't possibly happen. Reality abruptly woke us from our
naive sense of security and threw us into the harsh reality of vulnerability. My 11 year
old son and I watched the news that night of videos of the attack. Over and over and over
again as though we were trying to MAKE our brains comprehend the unimaginable.17
What function does the return to, and lingering within, a space of incomprehensibility
serve? Fortunately, the self-reflexive discourses we have in our archive, even if retrospectively
constructed, provide insight into witnesses’ lines of questioning. Journal entries sometimes
probe inwardly on the very need to comment upon the attacks and describe the experiences that
result:
People just needed to talk about this. That’s probably why I felt compelled to write. The
scope of this disaster is so far beyond my comprehension, so far beyond precedent. I hear
comparisons to Pearl Harbor and I can’t imagine how this attack on innocent people isnt
so much worse. I don’t want to forget the depth of fear and disgust and pit-of-thestomach sickness I felt today.18
In both of the previous passages it is the quality of experience itself that is commented
upon. And in both, the significance of what is expressed lies in the attempt to reconcile a
contradiction – that what is understood as being sensed is not what can be understood as a kind
of making sense. In the first of the two entries, the attacks are undoubtedly a harsh reality and
yet it is a reality that cannot be comprehended since it is unimaginable. In the second entry, fear
and disgust are readily apparent, and yet comparisons to Pearl Harbor, which recur in the
archive, do not perform the rhetorical work necessary to categorize this kind of experience. 9/11
remains, for the witness, a disaster beyond comprehension.
Representing the “nature” of the experience in these cases both succeeds and fails at the
same time. Subjects recognize and depict a significant experience immediately, and yet part of
its significance is that it cannot be fully understood and described as such. On the one hand, the
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
170
experience, as discussed, draws upon a wealth of available discourses about the object (spectacle,
destruction, death, etc.). On the other hand, the subject of the experience finds no available
discourse to make sense of that experience. Pushing toward the object and pulling away from it,
witnesses express themselves with terminology that aims but not at the target of full description.
They search for, yet do not seem to settle upon, a coherent category under which the attacks may
be placed, subsumed, and catalogued.
Our witnesses themselves recognize this problem. Categories are not found and this
continually confounds the act of writing itself. Depictions sometimes spiral off into a plethora of
problems of comprehending the attacks:
It was too much for anyone to even comprehend at that time. I felt so many emotions that
I couldn't feel anything. I was numb. I wanted to tear myself away from the TV and I just
couldn't. I couldn’t help but watch the horror unfold. My safe world had just been shook
beyond belief. I sat in that conference room glued to the TV almost all day.19
The experience of 9/11 is portrayed as so full of feeling as to be numbing; it is the height of
aesthesis such that its effect is characterized as anesthesia – the negation of the same word. And
curiously, it is both undesirable (a wish to turn away from the television set) as well as too
fascinating to tear oneself away from it (one is glued to the television).
That the attacks did not “register” immediately and were not understood is a frequent
topic of writing and reflection both on the day of September 11 and thereafter. In addition to a
sense of bewilderment though, a hyperbolic tone of incredulity in witness accounts jumps out off
of the written page. A pathos demands to be heard in these instances:
A guy in the room then joined our conversation. “They were trying to hit it. They meant
to hit the tower!” That alone made tears come from my eyes. I was sad, but couldn't
completely comprehend as to why. I was sitting there staring at the T.V. seeing what was
going on, but none of it was registering. How could it? It didn't make ANY SENSE!
Then as if the whole room was coached on it, a gasp and then a large handful of “Oh MY
19
Ibid.
171
GOD”’s filled the room. I looked up in time to see the second plane plummet into the
second tower. My jaw dropped and all I could think was “Oh my god. What the hell is
going on?”20
The rhetorical question at the end of this passage is a performative illocution that judges,
which is to say meaningfully renders, the scene as too difficult to put into accurate language or
categories. This discourse of incomprehensibility appears in several other phrases with
rhetorical questions that begin with an inquisitive ‘how.’ For spectators, it is a question usually
in the form of ‘How could they…’ Confusingly, the question produced is one that both demands
and at the same time refuses a response. A judgment of feeling, as Kant calls aesthetic
experience, has been made. The question demands to know how the attack possible while at the
same time expressing angrily that the attacks should not be possible:
I instantly burst into tears and almost felt like I was dreaming until I got up and turned on
the T.V., distruction everywhere, Oh my dear Lord how could ANYONE do this terrible,
maliciuos act against the United States. HOW COULD ANYONE BE SO INHUMAINE
to kill all those precious innocent people?21
The hyperbole with which the question as posed evinces its performative or explanatory function
over and above its propositional content. The question is much more of an illocutionary
statement. Yet, both senses of the question are salient to their deployment:
9/11 was a horrendous, senseless, hate-filled act of terrorism. More than wanting justice
or retribution...I just want to understand. Why? How could you? How could we let you?
Where do we go from here? Mostly, just WHY!??22
These examples begin to show a witness not just seeking information and understanding
but in the throes of a discursive dilemma to depict that which seems to escape understanding and
description at all. As such, a kind of rhetorical space opens up not only for questions to be
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid.
172
asked, but one in which questions themselves precipitate more questions. Questions intervening
to stabilize meaning produce more instability! Even a simple question such as ‘What’s going
on?’ can express both a relation to the event as it unfolds before one’s eyes and ears and an
internal questioning of the audience member him or herself. To ask “What’s going on?” is to ask
simultaneously what’s happening in the external world and what’s happening to the witness.
Journal entries often slow down and focus in on the problem of sorting through questions
and contradictions. How to describe conflicting sensations that are taking place is a common
theme of journaling. But when issues of scale and magnitude are added in, what is often
described is substantively as indescribable character of what has happened. In effect, there is
much writing about what cannot be written, much speech about an unspeakable horror. This
contradiction is not just at the level of analysis but is something performed by flow of words,
sometimes even a torrent of terms, or logorrhea:
It’s been over a year since, and i don’t there are any words to describe that day in my
opinion, I’m at a loss for words when i think about, it was to enormous, the pictures,
didn't do it justice. i can’t even imagine the horror that those people had to deal with. I
wasn’t even in New York or Washington, and that day has totally changed me. I think
about it everyday, and just can’t even comprehend it.23
This performance of an incomprehension demonstrates a significant kind of encounter
with the exigence of the attacks. This encounter is impossible to describe fully but is rendered
through figures of the sublime. Rhetorical questions and reflexive testimony about the
incomprehensibility of the attacks point to a complex relation between the witness and the
exigence. Contradictory discourses of sublime experience, those demanding answers yet
eschewing explanations, move toward yet away from figuring the exigence. The definition and
23
Ibid.
173
description of the exigence by witnesses is thus left for a reader to interpret by reading
statements of incomprehensibility as illocutionary.
‘Speechless’ and ‘Unspeakable’
Witnesses who offer statements in response to the overwhelming events of 9/11 do so in
the attempt to both describe and index a disturbing subject position. The complex “object” for
analysis, the terrorist attacks and the consequent devastation, are together often categorized as
‘unspeakable.’ In turn, the “unspeakable” act of terror is posited as the cause of a lack of
discourse. In noting the ‘unspeakable,’ witnesses often comment upon their frozen stature in
front of the television screen. In effect, they figure themselves as ‘speechless’ since figuratively
devastated by the attacks. They render themselves discursively as part of the “aftermath.”
Discourses pertaining to the lack or loss of words seem to fall within a subject-object distinction
in which the subject is “speechless” because of an “unspeakable” object.
In terms of this object, or what should properly be referred to as witnessing the loss of an
object, several discourses on tragic loss are offered by audience members. The “episode” that
has unfolded live on TV in front of them, most often the event of the planes striking the towers
and the subsequent crumbling of both towers, is retold and referred to as ‘unspeakable.’ Though
there exists plenty of analysis, speculation, and figuring of the attacks along with their effects,
this analytical discourse is supplemented with an intriguing, contradictory one as well, namely,
the desire to speak about what is unspeakable:
I was consumed with a burning need to speak with my three children who were at school
in Nassau county. The overwhelming fear and uncertainty that further attacks were
imminent was palpable. After all, the unspeakable had occurred--the landmark beacons
of New York City had been attacked and destroyed. Life as we knew it was gone. My
174
need to reach my teenagers wasn’t fulfilled until the end of the school day when they
returned home to stare dumbfounded at the television images they saw.24
In addition to the performative contradiction of speaking about that which is figured as
unspeakable, there is here another fascinating contradiction pertaining to the desire to speak
about that which seemingly has no available discourse or “sense” to it yet. In this example and
in others, the events of 9/11 are incomprehensible to such an extent that subjects are left
speechless, without words, and staring silently. Yet, in stark opposition to this, a desire to
communicate is expressed:
All kinds of thoughts went in my head. What happened? Who did this? Where are the
people who worked there? Then, I saw the second plane. I couldnt say anything. I just
broke into tears and I called my mom.25
Immediately juxtaposed to the lack of words is the desire to talk on the telephone. And while on
the telephone, usually cell phones, it is sometimes the case that no words are actually spoken.
Communication in this respect is figured as either non-existent or unintelligible:
I was working from home on September 11, 2001. My husband called me and told me to
turn on the television. We were both silent as I watched the image of Tower 1 burning. I
cannot recall what we said after that. I do recall thinking about my friends and family
who worked and lived in or near Manhattan. The next thing that I remember was seeing
the image of the first tower falling. As I fell to my knees, wailing, I dropped the phone. I
could not imagine that what I was seeing was real. When I found the phone again and
uttered something unitelligable I got no response. There was no one there. I hit the hang
up button and ran to get my address book. I dialed numbers over and over and never got
through.26
Though it may appear odd that witnesses reacting to 9/11 often express a contradiction of
wishing to communicate even while not having the words to communicate, stranger still is that
many spectators self-reflexively find themselves aware of this predicament. They pick up on the
24
Ibid.
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
175
oddity of desiring to communicate and to “be in touch” even when this does not entail the actual
act of dialogue or interaction:
It wasn’t until I got home that I saw the horrific images of the plane crashes and the
towers collapsing!! I stood in amazement at what I was seeing!! I remember thinking
“What kind of world I am bringing a child into?” In the meantime, I begged my husband
to come home [but he couldn’t], so I remained on the phone with my mother and aunt -nobody saying anything but needing to be in touch somehow!27
What does it mean to be “speechless” in the context of a desire to “speak?” To “speak” is
not merely one to talk, cry out, or utter something. It is in this context self-reflexively figured as
a desire for a communicative act when the conditions of possibility for such acts, words
themselves, are not available. It is in jst this manner that spectators of the events of 9/11 refer to
themselves as “speechless.” More than the mere loss of language for a moment, speechlessness
is figured as a felt problem of wishing to interact without the means to do so effectively:
Who would dare do such a thing to us, and why? HOW were they able to pull it off?
What did they want? What were we going to do in response? Was there more coming?
All sorts of thoughts were cycloning through my head, as I am sure they were in the
heads of the others around me. We were all just speechless. I have never heard such an
utterly eery silence on campus.28
The silence here is peculiar. Beyond just an experience of speechlessness, the recognition of a
shared speechlessness appears to add a strange “depth” to the context of the entire group.
At one level, “speechless” is an adjective that describes the subject’s relation to the
exigence. It is said that nothing can be said. One often mentions this dilemma, however, en
route to describing it further as a sign of something else. It is either part of a second sense that is
taking place – a feeling of awe and/or amazement. Or it is sometimes a part of a larger moment
of shared speechless – an eerie sense of silence. At this second level of speaking about
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
176
speechlessness as a sign for something else, the deployment of the word “speechless” pertains to
the kind of audience that has now come to be. In using the term, a witness does not address the
cause of speechlessness (the attacks) but rather addresses the new context that this
speechlessness itself has rendered. In this light, speechlessness is now analyzed as itself the
cause of something new:
I looked around to see if I was the only person stunned and trying not to go down to my
knees in horror, surely to God it was a dream, a nightmare I was in ... as I looked back
into the corridor and room ... no less than 150 people were standing there crying, hugging
one another, speechless substantiating the fact that this was true cold reality .... I'll never
forget the overall silence of disbelief and I will never know the innocent life of the days
before September 11, 2001 again. A very dramatic statement I know ... but the truth.29
That the speechlessness has taken place is now supplemented by the additional
fascination of what it means. Speechlessness is not just an indexical sign, a material trace of
what has caused it. Its deployment is also a speech act. As the previous passage indicates, to
reflect upon the speechlessness and remark upon the silence is to offer a “dramatic” statement in
response to the attacks. The notion of speechlessness and silence are ways of not only describing
the scene but of developing a claim, an interpretation, or reading of the moment. Though not
entirely thought out and comprehensible as statements, text fragments on speechlessness can be
read as a kind of rebuttal or rejoinder to the images witnessed. As in the case of statements of
the ‘incomprehensible,’ there exists a kind of space for inquiry that opens up here. Internal to
this space of self-questioning, speculation, and analysis, discourses of ‘speechlessness’ and the
‘unspeakable’ denote a kind of performative utterance in which one “speaks” of speechlessness
as an act against speechlessness. However, it remains profoundly unclear, to readers of their
journal entries and to authors themselves, what kind of performative utterance and speech act
29
Ibid.
177
this is. What kind of response and rebuttal against the attacks is offered? What kind of
“dramatic statement” is being made?
These self-cancelling statements – speech about speechlessness, a desire to speak about
the unspeakable, and compulsion to communicate with nothing to say – manufacture a
contradictory context for the subject. Reflexively, a subject is well aware of this space.
However, the purpose of making it known to oneself is yet not clear. A peculiar second-order
reflection is underway in witnesses’ texts: it is a reflection in which he or she is concerned with
finding the right words to describe what is happening, but one in which the witness recognizes
that the loss of words is such an unusual occurrence (in being for an unusual occurrence) that it
demands a new phrase be formed. This something new to be said, however, cannot be found.
So there are actually two losses, one in the failed attempt to describe the scene, another in the
loss of words to identify and name what kind of failure this is. This second sense of failure is
“remarkable.” It must be said and yet the more it must be stated the more it cannot be described.
The witness here is a subject caught up in a disturbing trajectory of discourse production,
spiraling off into questions about experience, meaning, and sense-making. To describe this as
simply a manifestation of anger, confusion, sadness, or shock, is to suggest, in a psychological
register, that this self-same subject is only temporarily outraged, bewildered, stunned, and that
such states explain a pathological subject in flux. This oversimplifies and reduces the subject to
an entity that follows a predetermined path of psychological processes. I wish to tarry with the
descriptive language instead of pathologizing subjects. It may be the case that a subject
represents him or herself as undergoing a disruptive process and that this disruption entails
transformations in how the subject figures its position and relations. In the search for a discourse
to describe the exigence, and failing to do so, a narrative attempt is thwarted. At the limits of
178
discourse witnesses produce a discourse that speaks to this failure. It is a discourse of the
sublime.
While it is clear that language used by witnesses, where I have charted it, is near that of
the sublime, witness testimony may or may not fit within existing paradigms of the sublime.
Discourses depicting the attacks of 9/11 present a rich set of textual fragments at the limits of
discourse. But it is not clear whether this is either a necessary or sufficient condition of an
attribution of sublimity. Beyond a dichotomy of either falling within the parameters of the
sublime or not, though, an explication of sublimity can help contextualize and illuminate what
kind of “speaking situation” witnesses find themselves in. For audience members who cannot
categorize their own subject position, this has implications for an understanding for the rhetorical
situation. Therefore, I explore major explications of sublimity in the works of Dionysius
Longinus, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and contemporary language theorists who have
written about it. I privilege Jean Francois Lyotard’s rhetorical account thereafter, as my main
interest is in presenting this material ad relevant to key concepts of rhetorical theory. To do so
will require a fairly substantial tour through a bit of intellectual and artistic history in the next
two sections.
A Brief History Of The Sublime
Aesthetically speaking, when and where experience is concerned, sublimity may be
considered a type of meaningful, identifiable sensation even though the “meaningfulness” of the
sensation cannot be rendered well or at all. Some theorists investigate sublimity in order to
analyze a rare experience in which aesthesis is at such a “height” that it cannot be put into words.
Exploring this “height” of experience was the late ancient Dionysius Longinus, who is
considered to have given the first full account of the sublime. In his account, the “origin” of the
179
sublime is found in the effect of speech. Fittingly, the history of the sublime begins the
relationship of speech and experience, rhetoric and aesthetics.
In his writings on hypsous, which may be translated as a kind of “height” or “sublimity,”
Longinus suggests that the sublime consists of “a certain loftiness and excellence of language.”30
This language activates “an imperious and irresistible force,” and “sways every reader whether
he will or no.”31 This force is posited by the listener as something external to him or her but
happens within the subject as he or she feels moved. If manufactured appropriately and
delivered compellingly by the rhetor to the audience, the sublime “illumines an entire subject
with the vividness of a lightning-flash, and exhibits the whole power of the orator in a moment of
time.”32
In this rendition, sublimity is a feeling but different from the pathos delivered by any
speech. Longinus details the extent to which the sublime is other than the “pathetic.”33 This is
significant because the sublime is not just an excess of feeling joy and delight. It is exclusively
responsible for a feeling (pathos) of consubstantiality that is impossible in any other medium.
Music, to use Longinus’ own example, can stir the soul, and some figures of speech can move
audiences in delight as music does. However, only a sublime moment provides a special kind of
harmony. In fact, Longinus states that there is a “unity between harmony and sublimity.”34
30
The original Greek title for Longinus’ work is Peri Hypsous. See Longinus, On the
Sublime, Trans H.L. Havell, (London: Macmillan, 1890), 2.
31
Ibid., 2.
32
Ibid., 3.
33
Ibid.,13.
34
Ibid., 75.
180
Sublimity is felt harmony between the orator and listener. This is why Longinus defines the
sublime early on as “the echo of the greatness of the spirit.”35 Echoed is the greatness of the
orator, his or her humanity in the act of speaking. George Walsh explains:
If sublimity is an echo, it must echo something audible, so that the soul itself, according
to Longinus’s figure, speaks… [S]peech directly expresses what the speaker thinks or
feels; there is no gap between thought and expression, no medium distinct from thought,
because speech is spirit.36
In sublime expression, the orator presents language that taps into the soul of the speaker. A
listener delights in hearing the greatness of the speech and feeling the wonder of the spirit of the
speaker too. There is a feeling in the listener of a consubstantiality with the orator through the
medium of language:
The theory of language that dominates On the Sublime may be called “expressive.” It
presumes a likeness, even a sharing of substance, between expression and its source. The
harmony of speech is also, by an extension that Longinus feels no need to justify,
spiritual harmony. Speech and spirit are bound together, and their affinity is especially
clear when speech is sublime, for sublimity subsists in both.37
While it is also the case that language must represent in addition to express, and that speech as
logos in the act of representation forbids a feeling of the sublime, Longinus argues that language
does both.38 In the case of the latter, sublimity enables “the relation between the speaker’s power
35
The English cognate “echo,” derived from the Greek word echos meaning “sound,” is
unfortunately sometimes translated as “image.” It is safe to assume that Longinus meant the soul
to have audible effects since he compared speech to music and argued at length about how spirit
is heard through speech. Ibid.,15.
36
George Walsh, “Sublime Method: Longinus on Language and Imitation,” Classical
Antiquity, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Oct., 1988): 260.
37
Ibid., 260.
38
Ibid., 259.
181
and audience’s experience.”39 Steven Knapp claims that Longinus’ sublime adheres to “the
crucial principle of identification.”40
Sublimity, accordingly, is a feeling of the communing of souls. This feeling is purely
“pleasing” on Longinus’ account.41 While sublimity has the effect of pleasure and delight, it also
orients the audience. Sublime feeling exalts the listener and places him or her in a certain state
or “height.” Audience members sync up with the discourse of the orator; these two things
harmonize in an ecstatic moment. The effect is to render the subject metaphorically motionless
while an internal dynamic moves them. This is why a sublime phrase makes it “hard, nay
impossible, to distract the attention from it.”42 In this state, the audience member is in a state of
“true” sublimity, giving oneself over the movement of spirit rather than merely “perusing”
language.43
Curiously, even silence can achieve this effect. Longinus provides a famous example:
“Hence a thought in its naked simplicity, even though unuttered, is sometimes admirable by the
sheer force of its sublimity; for instance, the silence of Ajax in the eleventh Odyssey is great, and
grander than anything he could have said.”44 This is possible because Ajax himself is great.
Sublimity is only thought possible if the orator is magnificent. The true sublime is “found only
39
Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge, (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985), 68.
40
Ibid., 68.
41
Longinus, On the Sublime, 12.
42
Ibid., 12.
43
Ibid., 12.
44
Ibid., 15.
182
in those whose spirit is generous and aspiring.”45 Longinus thus makes rhetoric itself a sublime
object.46 Sublimity is possible because speech echoes something great in the speaker. Lofty
speech emanates from a lofty soul. In order to occasion the sublime, discourse itself must be
beautiful and grand. More than “exaggeration” or “amplification,” speech must have a
“grandeur,” which comes from a kind of simplicity, in order to evoke the sublime.47
Consequently, Longinus exalts speech and the possibilities for magnificent rhetoric, possibly
grandiloquence, through a treatment of the sublime.
This potential of speech and rhetoric is supplemented and at the same time displaced in
modern accounts of the sublime. A virtual explosion of commentary and theorization of the
sublime erupted in the 18th century and included the substantial addition of natural objects, rather
than elevated states of character, as a primary cause. Edmund Burke provides a thorough
reflection on the subject in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful.48 He takes up a host of causes of the sublime including words, poetic images,
impressions, privations, magnitude, beasts, deities, the infinite, and more. Burke’s treatment is
explicitly a psycho-philosophical and physiological account, inquiring into the mental states and
45
Ibid., 15.
46
See Ned O’Gorman, “Longinus’ Sublime Rhetoric, or how Rhetoric Came into its
Own.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 71-89.
47
48
Longinus, On the Sublime, 26.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful. 2nd ed, (John Nimmo, 1757). In The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund
Burke, Vol. I. (of 12), Project Gutenberg, 2005 <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15043/15043h/15043-h.htm>
183
experiential qualities of the sublime.49 Burke contrasts with Longinus starkly in his depiction for
this reason. Whereas Longinus finds one cause of the sublime – speech – Burke finds many.
And whereas Longinus exalts the effect of the sublime as purely pleasurable, Burke finds a
mixture of psychological states of terror with delight. Eighteenth century commentators remark
upon this curious deviation:
It is surprizing [sic] how much Longinus and Mr. Bourke [sic] differ as to their idea of
the operations of the sublime in our minds. The one considers it as exalting us with a
conscious pride and courage, and the other as astonishing every faculty, and depressing
the soul itself with terror and amazement.50
Edmund Burke complicates the sublime. It is not the simple pleasure of beauty or pure
feeling of grandeur as Longinus argues. Accordingly, to distinguish the sublime from the
pleasure of the beautiful is Burke’s self-imposed task. For Burke, sublimity turns out to be a mix
of contrasting sensations. Predominantly, it is the feeling of fear and terror – the pleasure is
solely one effect of actually being safe, hence preserving the self from actual death. For Burke,
fear and terror present the mind with the most direct feeling of the sublime: “Indeed terror is in
all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.”51
Natural objects – such as an ocean, dark forest, or certain wild animals – do this most directly in
that they cause a fear of death. This fright is physiologically fundamental to the feeling of the
sublime:
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles
actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too, whether
49
Ryan, Vanessa L., “The Physiological Sublime: Burke’s Critique of Reason” Journal
of the History of Ideas 63, (April 2001): 265-279.
50
Edward Gibbons, Journal to January 28th, 1763: My Journal, I, II, and III, and
Ephemirides, Intro. By D. M. Low (New York: W. W. Norton, N.D.), 180.
51
Ibid., 131.
184
this cause of terror be endued with greatness of dimensions or not; for it is impossible to
look on anything as trifling, or contemptible, that may be dangerous.52
Painful feelings are inescapable on Burke’s account. He suggests that “the ideas of pain, and,
above all, of death, are so very affecting, that whilst we remain in the presence of whatever is
supposed to have the power of inflicting either, it is impossible to be perfectly free from
terror.”53 Pleasure, in contrast, “follows the will.”54 Pleasure happens in us when we recognize
things that appear to submit to us and “we are generally affected with it by many things of a
force greatly inferior to our own.”55 Smaller charming things, such paintings, flowers, and dogs
please us in that “no great efforts of power are at all necessary.”56 Dangerous and terrorizing
things overwhelm us in their direct threat. The charming dog pleases; the wild horse frightens.
Burke attributes the overwhelming feeling of the sublime not just to the fear of death and
the immediate threat to the subject. Also present is the awesomeness of the power of the object
before us. Burke states “I know of nothing sublime, which is not some modification of power.”57
This intrigue and fascination in this power is distinct from a pleasure of the beautiful. Beautiful
things are inferior to us, sublime things are more powerful than us. To feel the pain and terror of
that which is superior is to feel the forcefulness of the sublime:
52
Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry, 130.
53
Ibid., 138.
54
Ibid., 139.
55
Ibid., 139.
56
Ibid., 139.
57
Ibid., 138.
185
But pain is always inflicted by a power in some way superior, because we never submit
to pain willingly. So that strength, violence, pain, and terror, are ideas that rush in upon
the mind together.58
A consequence of feeling threatened by a superior power is to feel a kind of astonishment. A
threatened subject instinctually releases the passion for self-preservation. This is, for Burke, one
of the greatest passions possible. If one is not immediately in danger but instead captivated by
something forceful, splendid, and awesome, then one may dwell in the feeling of this passion
while admiring that which is powerful. In this position and only in this position, in front of the
terror yet at some safe distance from it, one takes “delight” in the sublime:
…if the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the present
destruction of the person, as these emotions clear the parts, whether fine or gross, of a
dangerous and troublesome incumbrance, they are capable of producing delight; not
pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror; which, as
it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all the passions. Its object is the
sublime. Its highest degree I call astonishment.59
Burke defines sublimity as a feeling, but in so doing also defines the appropriate position
of the subject with respect to power. Burke is “constituting” the subject in Kant’s sense.
Sublimity is not merely a possible state for the subject, it orients the subject. Burke makes the
subject pass through “stages.” In so doing, he orients the subject from the beginning of the
experience to its “natural” endpoint. He makes the subject move from terror to astonishment or
from fear of death to reverence.
Some of Burke’s contemporaries in the aesthetic tradition, such as Joseph Addison, were
more in line with Longinus and found the experience of the sublime to produce an exhilaration,
liberation, and sense of aggrandizement that is almost aligned with language effects and style.
58
Ibid., 139.
59
Ibid., 216.
186
Burke, however, finds it “alienating and diminishing.”60 The “I” on Burke’s account is a shaken
self that delights in an encounter with a supreme power beyond its own limits. This encounter is
contradictory in that it is a power “beyond” the self yet produced, strangely, by the powers of the
observer – a point Kant will expand on. Peter De Bola explains that Burke negotiates the
opposing sensations of a peculiar encounter, those resulting in “the expansion of consciousness
whereby the mind comes to an overwhelming experience of its own power.”61 Burke thus
diminishes the “I” while aggrandizing the “self.” Burke cleverly resolves the apparent
contradiction of subjective experience (horror and delight) by giving the subject the capacity or
power to contemplate the world from a new perspective. Steven Knapp argues that Burke makes
the spectator of the sublime a reader of the natural world.62
Burke elaborates at length on how poetic imagery can cause feelings of the sublime. He
details the sublime mental states conjured up by the writings of Milton, Virgil, and the Book of
Job. Burke also uses the curious word “conversant” to discuss that which can cause the sublime:
“whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner
analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.”63
It is clear that Burke and Addison concede to words, or at least some words, as a cause of
the sublime: “As to words; they seem to me to affect us in a manner very different from that in
60
R. Paulson, Representations of Revolution: 1789–1820, (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1983), 69.
61
Peter De Bola, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the
Subject, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1989), 71.
62
Knapp reads Burke as arguing “the sublime itself now depends on an act of reference:
the terrible object must be taken to signify a power in the self.” Knapp, op cit., 73.
63
Ibid., 110.
187
which we are affected by natural objects, or by painting or architecture; yet words have as
considerable a share in exciting ideas of beauty and of the sublime as many of those, and
sometimes a much greater than any of them.”64 Though they are sometimes only the
“representatives” of those objects in nature that are already sublime, words themselves can
sometimes cause a feeling of the sublime more strongly.65 Burke is ambivalent about words.
Though he exalts the poetic possibilities of abstract imagery, however, Burke’s Lockean
empirical inquiry into words as units of meaning (based on referents) and sense impressions
scales back the magical effect of speech on the whole. Rhetoric and poetry do have supreme
power to arouse the passions, especially in combinatory phrases that aggregate ideas because
they fly in the face of ordinary predication. For example, Burke is fond of the poetic phrase
‘universe of death’ in its poetic power – “two ideas not presentable but by language, and an
union of them great and amazing beyond conception.”66 But such a phrase has power for Burke
in that it presents something immaterial, not of the natural and physical world. Language
struggles to cause the sublime if merely describing actually existing things poetically.
Burke argues that language needs to be indistinct and bring forth unpresentable ideas in
order to cause sublimity. Otherwise, only an arousal of a passion, such as sympathy, is possible.
Rhetoric is very good at rousing sympathy, Burke says, but he does not say that it causes a sense
of the sublime.67 In fact, for Burke, no “clear expression” can ever cause the feeling of the
64
Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry, 246.
65
Ibid., 262.
66
Ibid., 260.
67
Ibid., 257.
188
sublime; only “strong expression” has this power.68 Strong expression presents the passion of
the speaker, even when what is said is not fully understood. Burke finds that “uncultivated
people,” those who do not observe things critically, often express themselves in a more
“passionate matter.”69 How they speak and the passion they exude causes sublimity, not the
words themselves.
Burke does not appear to distinguish the releasing of passion from what he means by
“passionate.” Terror releases the passion of self-preservation and this is actually necessary to
achieve a feeling of the sublime. But many kinds of passion are possible for Burke, some
intimately personal, some social. Most are feelings of arousal and not sublime. Passionate acts
are also arousing but, as artistic endeavors, confined to description and presentation.
A key point, however, is that the older Burke (several decades later after his original
direct treatments of the sublime and beautiful) clarified that passionate human activity can, on a
certain scale, cause sublime feelings. He explains the French Revolution as proof of this point:
As to us here our thoughts of every thing at home are suspended, by our astonishment at
the wonderful Spectacle which is exhibited in a Neighbouring and rival Country – what
Spectators, and what actors! England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for
Liberty and not knowing whether to blame or applaud! The thing indeed, though I
thought I saw something like it in progress for several years, has still something in it
paradoxical and Mysterious. The spirit is impossible not to admire; but the old Parisian
ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner. … What will be the Event it is hard I think
still to say. To form a solid constitution requires Wisdom as well as spirit, and whether
the French have wise heads among them, or if they possess such whether they have
authority equal to their wisdom, is to be seen; In the mean time the progress of this whole
affair is one of the most curious matters of Speculation that ever was exhibited.70
68
Ibid., 260-1.
69
Ibid., 261.
70
Edmund Burke, “To Lord Charlemont, 9 August, 1789,” Correspondence of Edmund
Burke, Ed Alfred Cobban and Robert Smith, (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 1967), 6:10.
189
In this description, Shaw notes that Burke’s exuberance for the French Revolution as a spectacle
figures it as “an event of sublime theatricality.”71 It is shocking yet admirable, violent yet
wonderful.
Burke’s writings on the French Revolution express a worry about a hysterical mob, and
hence death.72 Sublimity is for Burke a way to discuss not only his sentiments about the revolt,
but a way to imply the necessity of a subjective constitution through sublimity. Astonishment is
pleasurable in the short term but Burke seeks a lasting reverence to ground political subjects. He
writes in sublime fashion on the topic of sublimity in order to “call upon the power of the law to
transcend sublime terror.”73 Burke aims to produce the effect of constitution through reverence
and respect for the law. As Shaw notes of Burke’s views on law in light of the French
Revolution, “The British constitution is sublime, in other words, because it maintains ‘awe,
reverence, and respect’ in its subjects.”74 Burke is himself concerned with effectuating the
sublime in subjects, even in legitimate states:
Burke’s political rhetoric was focused above all on making the state a sublime fantasy,
and therefore on making it a dangerous and revered object of consciousness. That, I
submit, is why his style is so elevated and mystified.75
71
Shaw, The Sublime, 64.
72
This worry was taken up and honed in Burke’s subsequent condemnation of the French
revolution. Whereas he gazed onto the revolution with positive “astonishment” in 1789, he
called for a more conservative reinstatement of the ancien regime in 1791. In either case, Burke
is interested in political and moral subjects of the state.
73
Shaw, The Sublime, 109.
74
Ibid., 66.
75
David Depew, “Adam Smith and Edmund Burke: Texts in Context,” Poroi vol 7, no. 1
(2011): 24. <http://ir.uiowa.edu/poroi/>
190
On the question of style in Burke, David Depew notes that “Burke’s was a rhetoric of
sublimity.”76 Other commentators agree. Burke wrote of the sublime but also wished to evoke it
in his audience. While Burke seemed intent on figuring the principles of sublimity in early
writings, his later work on the French Revolution “consists of a change in Burke’s response to
sublime terror rather than a retheorisation of it.”77
Let me summarize. Burke’s writings on sublimity are important for those interested in the
link between rhetoric and aesthetics for three reasons. One, Burke formalizes the experience of
sublimity by making it flow through stages. It begins with a direct experience, moves the subject
into contemplation, and finally fashions a “diminished” and reverential subject as a consequence.
Two, Burke demonstrates through his own rhetorical performances that the link between
discourse and sublimity is present but unclear. Unclear discourse, actually, might itself be a
cause of the sublime, even though Burke does not argue this point, since his prose suggests it.
Three, Burke implies in his later writings on the French Revolution that sublime terror has a
constitutive capacity. He writes not to explain this dangerous constitutive power as much as he
attempts to reconstitute the audience through the experience of another kind of sublime that
would yield a subject in admiration and respect for the law. Important reflections on the French
revolution late in life also moved Burke to supplement the natural sublime with the recognition
that human endeavors and actions can result in sublime feeling from onlookers or witnesses.
76
77
Ibid., 18.
Susan Chaplin, Law, Sensibility, and the Sublime in Eighteenth-Century Women’s
Fiction: speaking of dread, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 109. This is a point of contrast
between the early and later Burke. Some twenty to thirty years after his original inquiry into the
sublime, Burke argues that war and violence may be seen as sublime. Commentators consider
this somewhat of a deviation from early works, though Burke does not appear to write directly
on the subject of war in early works.
191
If Burke makes subjectivity a problem when faced with the sublime, Kant aims to solve it
in a way that desublimates the political. Kant appears to accomplish this by formalizing
sublimity as nothing other than an experience or felt perception of the moral law. In this way of
conceiving it, no revolutionary subjectivity is possible. Sublimity constitutes subjects
exclusively as reverential. Kant, as I show, excludes all rhetoric, and art for that matter, as a
possible cause of the sublime. He freely discards human action as a cause of the sublime, exalts
nature, and collapses sublimity entirely into a feeling of a moral vocation. It is a direct response
to Burke.78
Kant’s analytic of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment offers us a masterful “sensemaking” demonstration of this peculiar mode of sensation.79 In the tradition of idealist
philosophy, Kant explains the subjective grounds of possibility for the experience of sublimity.
Accordingly, the sublime is not a property of objects in the world but a feeling internal to the
mind that results from witnessing special kinds of natural objects. For Kant, the objects that
“cause” sublimity are those of especially large magnitude. They may be classified as
dynamically large or mathematically so: “The sublime may be described in this way: It is an
object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to regard the elevation of
nature beyond our reach as equivalent to a presentation of ideas.”80 In witnessing the
profundity of a mountain range or the vast expanse of the stars for example, one cannot grasp the
entirety of the object in order to experience it. Kant describes the process by which this forced
78
Kant is directly refuting Burke’s naturalism. Kant attempts to establish a basis for
sublime feeling beyond a purely psychological state of the subject itself.
79
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1952).
80
Ibid., 119.
192
impossibility of understanding the object disturbs the normal operations of the mind and causes a
feeling of the sublime, along with the perception that though nature can crush us we are still
superior to it.
As Burke formalizes the experience of the sublime through stages, so does Kant.81 In the
first step in the process of experiencing sublimity, one attempts to grasp an object too large for
the senses. In so doing, the imagination generates a universal concept through which the faculty
of understanding tries to legislate the object as a particular instantiation of that concept. In the
second step, imagination reaches its own limits and gives up. Kant says of this procedure: “This
effort, and the feeling of the unattainability of the idea by means of imagination, is itself a
presentation of the subjective finality of the mind…”82 The mind cannot reach the goal of
finding a concept through which to understand an object and experiences a limitation. Finally,
unable to find or generate a suitable concept for the understanding, the imagination is forced to
“sacrifice” itself and “rob itself” of its power so that pure practical reason might take over in its
place. This leads to Kant to speak of the feeling that accompanies the sublime as a displeasing
one. Yet, in parallel to this felt sacrifice, this lack of understanding, this subjective experience of
the finality of the mind at its limits, results in a province of reason taking hold of the situation
and affords us a special pleasure, what Kant calls a “soul-stirring delight.”83
Something contradictory is happening within the mind for Kant. In a struggle between
understanding and reason, understanding loses. This hurts. When reason triumphs, however,
81
Zizek also reads Kant’s account of the sublime in stages or what he refers to as a
succession of “moments.” See Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the
critique of ideology, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 46-49.
82
Kant, Critique of Judgment, 119.
83
Ibid., 112.
193
delight takes hold. Zizek describes this as a peculiar kind of “success-through-failure” in which
the subject experiences something deeply affective.84 Christine Battersby explains further:
In experiencing the sublime, it is not fear alone that is registered, but fear mixed and
modified by reason, and in a way that means the chaotic and irrational is also
‘harmonious’ with the purposive and orderly.... Reason posits the idea of the
supersensible in relation to the sublime, and this gives the mind the feeling that it is being
‘purposively determined’ through laws that differ from those that structure the
imagination’s ‘empirical use’. The feelings of lawful ‘sacrifice’ and lawless ‘robbery’ are
experienced together, and Kant’s abstract prose reflects the metaphorics of movement
which he says the imagination endures in the experience of the sublime. Man’s empirical
imagination is simultaneously ‘thrown down’ (unterworfen) as it is subjected to the
object, and ‘offered up’ in a kind of sacrifice (Aufopferung) to the powers of reason
(CPJ: 269 corr.). The imagination is agitated as reason and the object impact on it—from
above and below, as it were. What causes our enjoyment is precisely this tension or
vibration.85
I claim that Kant himself sees this as less of a tension than a resolution. He explains that
natural objects do not cause the sublime solely in terms of a mental state of agitation. This
happens en route to a moral destination. Rather, objects seem to “transport” the mind into
another realm. The perception of a limit is actually a peering into the abyss of what might be
beyond the limits of the mind’s powers. Hence, Kant suggests that we might perceive a waterfall
or mighty river as forceful, fearful, and the cause of a displeasure. To combat this, reason
persists and we find a special delight when reason takes hold of the mind. Speaking to objects
that cause this, Kant claims that “…we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the
forces of the soul above the height of the commonplace, and discover within us a power of
resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against
the seeming omnipotence of nature.”86 He elaborates:
84
Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative, 47.
85
Christine Battersby, “Terror, Terrorism and the Sublime: rethinking the sublime after
1789 and 2001,” Postcolonial Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 74.
86
Ibid., 111.
194
In the immeasurableness of nature and the incompetence of our faculty for adopting a
standard proportionate to the aesthetic estimation of the magnitude of its realm, we found
our own limitation. But in this we also found in our rational faculty another nonsensuous standard, one which has that infinity itself under it as unit, and in comparison
with which everything in nature is small, and so found in our minds a pre-eminence over
nature even in its immeasurability.87
In sum, Kant finds that sublime sensation reveals “a faculty of estimating ourselves as
independent from nature and discovers a pre-eminence above nature that is that is the foundation
of a self-preservation of quite another kind from that which may be assailed and brought into
danger by external nature.”88 Once tactic in doing so is to once again confine the psychology of
sublimity to nature rather than the sphere of human agency. He states succinctly, “Therefore
nature is called sublime merely because it raises the imagination to a presentation of those cases
in which the mind can make itself sensible of the appropriate sublimity of the sphere of its own
being, even above nature.”89
Whereas Longinus gives us sublimity through intersubjective consubstantiality and
identification, then, and Burke gives us the sublime through near death experience caused by
both nature and man, Kant gives us a perspective on sublimity where nature and nature alone is a
stimulus to moral reflection. As Edmund Burke desires a reverence and admiration for the
political law through sublimity, though, Kant demands it for the moral law. In this, Kant
attempts to preserve the integrity of the continuous subject against its possible disintegration
posed by Burke and solved only by political subjection. Kant’s story is that reason does this
work and grounds the subject. Sublimity results in the pleasurable act of genuflection to reason’s
autonomy. In a narrative-like frame, Kant demonstrates that the clash of faculties in the sublime
87
Ibid., 111.
88
Ibid., 111.
89
Ibid., 111-2.
195
results first in the displeasure of imagination’s loss only to be turned around secondly into the
pleasure of Reason’s gain. He synthesizes sublimity under the titular phrase of a “negative
aesthetic pleasure.”90 On the one hand, the “negative” aspect is found in humanity’s relation to
the seemingly infinite power that nature or the external world commands over, above and beyond
the finite subject. Since the power and might of nature is more than the mind can handle, a
discord inevitably imposes itself between imagination’s work to generate the form of nature and
understanding’s feeble attempt to realize it. On the other hand, the “pleasure” involved stems
from an awareness of a “freedom rather as in play than in exercising a law-ordained function,
which is the genuine characteristic of human morality, where reason has to impose its dominion
on human sensibility.”91 Herein, we begin to feel the “mind’s supersensible province” and take
pleasure in “a sphere of mind which altogether exceeds the realm of nature,”92 just as in Burke’s
treatment of the sublime where the “I” is in terror and diminished. Unlike Burke’s account,
though, Kant’s subjective pleasure is more than a simple delight at nature in being free form the
threat of extinction but instead a kind of connection to the supersensible grounding of our being
beyond nature. The self is preserved and guaranteed accordingly.
Kant has moved us very far from the rhetorical origins of speech as a cause of the
sublime and limited the “limitless” thinking of the sublime as well as the potential of
psychological dissolution. Accordingly, Donald Pease laments that theorists of the sublime after
Kant have historically excluded the range of sublimity’s potential:
90
Ibid., 120.
91
Ibid., 120.
92
Ibid., 120.
196
Despite all the revolutionary rhetoric invested in the term, the sublime has, in what we
could call the politics of historical formation, always served conservative purposes… If
the sublime manifests a dual potential, a capacity to bring about a different form as well
as a power to disrupt any existent form, theoreticians of the sublime utilize the threat
displayed in the destructive power to underscore the need to believe in the prior capacity
– as its only ability. The sublime in other words gets used to negotiate power trade-offs
for contradictory historical forces.93
This insight provides a lens through which to read Kant’s ambivalence to the French
Revolution. Some commentators argue that the French Revolution, full of terror after 1791, is
also aesthetically fascinating and is therefore a “sign” of sublimity for Kant. Critics must
perform conceptual gymnastics to contort Kant’s words in into making this point. He is
undoubtedly “enthusiastic” about what the French Revolution might portend as a sign of moral
progress in the way that Condorcet thinks, though their ideas of morality are different. But the
relationship of “aesthetic enthusiasm” to the sublime is unclear. Not every instance of
enthusiasm causes sublimity. Accordingly, it can only the be the case that “aesthetic enthusiasm
(though not practical, action-directed enthusiasm) in general bears the structure of the
experience of the sublime.”94 Caveats like this must be made in order to render political acts
sublime for Kant.
The reason for this is plain and worth noting. Kant holds that no human products or
actions can cause a feeling of the sublime – rhetorical, artistic, political, or otherwise. All human
endeavors attempt to aim at some “good.” This is how Kant guarantees the historical
conservatism of subjectivity that Pease explicated previously. Longinus’ original conception of
magnificent human speech and action as the only cause of the sublime is entirely reversed.
93
Ibid., 275-6.
94
Ibid., 19.
197
According to Kant, they could never be sublime; only aesthetically pleasing and/or morally
uplifting.
Kant has shored up two elaborate and significant points. One, the terror and delight of
the sublime is only a felt connection of the subject to objects of nature and evinces the subject’s
intellectual interest and respect for the moral law. Two, no kind of terror or pleasure, from
nature or politics, could ever deviate the subject from this stance. Whereas language was once
solely responsible for a feeling of the sublime, aesthetic feeling for nature is now the only sign of
a sublime sensation. Against the terror of the revolutionary mob, and toward the enthusiasm for
rational politics, Kant ingeniously uses the historical wit of eighteenth century aesthetic
discourse to dehistoricize and universalize moral subjectivity in contrast to a rhetorical sublime
that might configure it otherwise. It is an effective moral discourse that ironically subjugates
rhetorical sublimity. Donald Pease illuminates this idea well:
Eighteenth-century aesthetics displaced the discourse of rhetoric by unmasking it as
inauthentic. As an “authentic” inspiration of nature rather than a “staged” effect of the
rhetor’s tropes, the sublime bespoke an originality inimical to the rhetor’s conventions. In
leading the rebellion from the rhetorician’s discipline to the discourse of aesthetics, the
sublime rendered every aspect of the “rules” of art synonymous with human freedom. But
it did not promote this transfer of power without cost. In authenticating the sublime at the
cost of work expended by a human subject, aesthetics literally required ethics to recover a
human subjectivity. And as we have seen in the case of Kantian ethics, the “work”
exercised by the ethical subject subdues the sublime by relocating it as the authority made
manifest in the discipline of ethics. In the final or ethical phase, the human subject
“proves” his ethical strength by mastering these transformative powers effected by the
sublime through a will become sufficiently sublime to respond in kind.95
Is the sublime forever the conservative guarantee of that which is experienced as
potentially disruptive only to find its way back to a proper context of intelligible subjectivity? I
argue in the next section that this is not the case. However, I do not, in place of this argument,
substitute my own reflections on the psychic process of subjective constitution. This question is
95
Pease, “Sublime Politics,” 268.
198
significant but more than what a rhetorical inquiry can accomplish. Instead, I am concerned with
discourses of pain and pleasure combined in their linguistic formulations – fear and fascination,
demanding and disavowing comprehension, speech and speechlessness – and reading these
discourses not as the evidence of an altogether new kind of identity formation, but the
interruption of narrative continuity that would otherwise anchor a subject’s own framing, as selfdescribed witnesses suggest. This in and of itself may be read as a discourse of sublimity. In
this respect, the attacks of 9/11 may rightly be named ‘sublime.’ Some critics have in fact
labeled them as such. Accordingly, I take up a few of these contemporary critics who focus
theoretically on the role of discourse in the sublime as well as those who apply their findings to
critical readings of 9/11.
History of the Sublime Continued in its
Linguistic and Post 9/11 Context
Several contemporary writings on the sublime keep alive the possibility of experiences
that overwhelm speech. Richard Kearney puts it succinctly, stating that “the ‘sublime’ is a
category for dealing with experiences which are beyond categories.”96 Sublimity is an
experience which escapes understanding and is “indescribable.” Certain experiences are thought
to be beyond categories such that they defy a statement proper to the experience. Phillip Shaw
explains:
In broad terms, whenever experience slips out of conventional understanding, whenever
the power of an object or event is such that words fail and points of comparison
disappear, then we resort to the feeling of the sublime. As such, the sublime marks the
96
Richard Kearney, “Evil, Monstrosity and The Sublime,” Revista Portuguesa de
Filosofia, 57 (2001): 492. Kearney attributes this definition to Lyotard. I take up Lyotard’s
work on the sublime later in this chapter.
199
limits of reason and expression together with a sense of what might lie beyond these
limits…97
Even in its most theoretical and philosophical conceptualization, then, sublimity has a
relationship to rhetoric in its challenge to straightforward situated speech. ‘Sublime’ is often a
substituted term for the ‘indescribable.’ It names a certain absence of categories and speech.
In terms of naming what is present, sublimity considered today still offers a conceptual
explanation of contradictory experiential qualitities such as pleasure and pain occurring at the
same time, at the limit of what it is possible to experience. In running up against this limit, and
in speculating on the inadequacy of language to figure what might lie beyond this limit, one is in
a position to theorize “the feeling of the sublime.”98 Sublimity is, in this repsect, a kind of
“movement at the limit” of the mind’s boundaries.99
What kind of movement is this? Is it a religious experience? Is it conceptual thought?
What is moving? Sensations and feelings or language too? We have already seen how previous
philosophers have answered these questions, pointing readers in the direction of higher purposes
toward which subjectivity “naturally” gravitates. I now take up several contemporary authors
working on the concept of the sublime in order to discover the ways in which the concept may be
understood as more than a name for the unidirectional causal effect of experience on discourse
and explain a trajectory of the subject as other than morally inclined.
Kant, as I have already shown, does not help us understand how modern mass media
subjects react to and describe a manmade scene of destruction as horrific and spectacular as
97
Philip Shaw, The Sublime: The New Critical Idiom, (New York: Routledge 2006), 2.
98
Ibid., 2.
99
John Sallis, Spacings - Of Reason and Imagination in Texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel,
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), 123.
200
terrorism. In his theory elevates the coherence of the moral subject by downplaying everything
but nature as the cause of the sublime. However, the operations of the mind that Kant puts into
play do contain a rich set of elements for critics to use in order to speak of sublime events
analogously to Kant’s narrative. Kant’s schema is a story, a narrative, a plot in which faculties
of the mind do battle. There are victors (reason and morality) and the vanquished (sensible
interests), there are roles that are played, ideas won and lost. For this reason, commentary and
critique of Kant’s system of philosophy is dense. Yet, it can appropriately be summarized as a
rhetorical reading of tropology in Kant’s theory of sublimity.
Paul De Man’s work is exemplary of this rhetorical deconstruction.100 When reading
Kant, De Man notices that there are “linguistic structures that are not within the author’s
control.”101 Faculties do battle in Kant’s account seemingly on their own accord, personified as
human agents yet driven by their own mysterious forces. While discourse itself plays little or no
part in Kant’s account, his rhetorical slight of hand lies in his narrative account discursively
constructing faculties in contest. Peering behind Kant’s discursive curtain, De Man enacts a
critical practice of deconstructive reading. Naming Kant’s account as a “play of symbols,” De
Man demonstrates that philosophers like Kant are really wrestling with symbols the whole time.
De Man thus shows how the philosophical sublime may be understood as the “textual
sublime.”102
100
De man says specifically, “we are clearly not dealing with mental categories but with
tropes and the story Kant tells us is an allegorical tale.” See Paul De Man, “Phenomenality and
Materiality in Kant,” Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects. Eds. Gary Shapiro and Antony
Sica. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 121-144, specifically 141.
101
102
Ibid., 141.
Hugh J. Silverman and Gary Aylesworth (eds.), The Textual Sublime. Deconstruction
and Its Differences. (Stony Brook: SUNY Press, 1990).
201
This literary insight is part of Weiskel’s major contribution to the sublime.103 Weiskel
argues that Kant’s systematic philosophy of the sublime is a semiotic code. In so doing, he
broaches major questions of how discourse itself is not only used to depict the sublime, but
moves while in the throes of sublime feeling. Weiskel analyzes the sublime in terms of the
relationship between the signifier (the external object) and the signified (the mind), to explain
how discourse can be “ruptured by an excess of the signified.”104 In this instance, “meaning is
overwhelmed by an overdetermination” of the linguistic elements used to identify the sublime
object.105 The mind encounters a sublime object and searches in vain at the limits of
understanding for the words to grasp it. This linguistic churning and turning is the effect of
rupture between subject and object. This is a view wherein language is “regarded specifically as
the incommensurability of the mind and objects in the world.”106 Weiskel pushes this line of
thought to suggest that “incommensurability between signifier and signified becomes itself the
signifier” which results in “a new order of meaning.”107 This is what Weiskel means to say when
suggesting that Kant’s unattainability of understanding itself “becomes the signifier in the
103
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of
Transcendence, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976).
104
Ibid., 20.
105
Ibid., 20.
106
Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: romanticism and the aesthetics of
individuation, (New York: Routledge, 1992), 19.
107
Jerome C. Christensen, “The Sublime and the Romance of the Other,” Diacritics 8,
no. 2 (Summer, 1978): 11.
202
aesthetic order of meaning.”108 The sublime, the aesthetic experience of discourse in motion,
makes new meaning possible.
In showing how sublime objects and states of the mind are possibly more the problem of
signification and meaning, De Man and Weiskel suggest that sublimity can be rhetorical in
addition to being philosophical or psychological. Other critics, however, continue to suggest that
objects or events in and of themselves, such as the attacks of 9/11, are sublime extra discursively.
The image-event does all the work. On these kinds of accounts, such as Vernon Minor’s at the
beginning of this chapter, the attacks are supposed to have “animated” witnesses and compelled
them to grasp at the impossible to describe – the sublime. This reaching was a “failure” because
it tried to grab hold of a categorical understanding and it could not. This perspective, however,
once again privileges the event over the subject’s grappling with it, making the spectacular
images responsible and determinative of psychological effects prior to discourse.
As was the case of labeling the attacks of 9/11 ‘traumatic’ an ironic instance of affixing a
culturally recognizable meaning to that which problematizes the stability of frames of meaning,
so too with applying ‘sublime’ to the attacks of 9/11. If critics “mean it” when they call 9/11 a
sublime event, they ought to have very little to say about it. Instead, the sublime episode is
elaborated as immediately meaningful through a discourse of sublimity just as the attacks were
hailed as immediately a trauma for the nation. In fact, critics versed in psychoanalytic theory
have attempted to explain the similarity of trauma and sublimity as psychic states of the mind
caused by the images of the attacks. Redfield claims that it is helpful “to invoke the tradition of
the sublime with an eye on the spectacle of 9/11, since theories of the sublime describe the
108
Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 23.
203
ambivalent pleasures of parrying this sort of widescreen-format shock.”109 Accordingly, the
attacks of 9/11 as witnessed on television are a “sublime, all-too-aesthetic spectacle.”110 The
attacks of 9/11 as witnesses through television are possibly both traumatic and sublime since
these traditions of psychological analysis are premised upon the “discourse of shock and of
shock absorption.”111 There is painful shock in witnessing the images but there is also a
pleasurable absorption of shock in how the screen “buffers” the reality of the attacks. Redfield
makes the direct comparison of the aesthetics of sublimity to the experience of trauma by
arguing that “aesthetic and traumatic experience… suffer an odd proximity, a lingering
contamination.”112
Judith Butler also links sublimity to trauma. Her book, Precarious Life, comments
broadly on the cultural and political aftermath of 9/11, paying special attention to the ways in
which media and individuals became “entranced in the sublimity of destruction.”113 Butler reads
the reaction to imagery in terms of trauma and the loss of individual and national identity. In a
significant rhetorical point, she notes what an experience of 9/11 entails for the symbolic
stability of the subject. Trauma and loss interrupt the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves
since:
…the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always
recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we
109
Redfield, Rhetoric of Terror, op cit. 73.
110
Ibid., 4.
111
Marc Redfield, “Virtual Trauma: The idiom of 9/11” Diacritics 37, no. 1 (Spring
2007): 72-3.
112
113
Ibid., 72-3.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: the powers of mourning and violence. London New
York: Verso, 2004. P 149.
204
might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous
and in control might try to tell a story here about what I am feeling, but it would have to
be a story in which the very “I” who seeks to tell the story is stopped in the midst of the
telling; the very “I” is called into question by its relation to the Other, a relation that does
not precisely reduce me to speechlessness, but does nevertheless clutter my speech with
signs of its undoing.114
Butler’s account broaches a significant question in parallel with theories of sublimity. To
what extent does the aesthetic or traumatic experience not only infringe upon a subject’s material
capacity for language generation? But Butler, in similar fashion to other critics working on
trauma, relies on stagnant theories of psychological trauma to explain how discourse is changed
by the event and identity narrative change as a result. A spectacular catastrophe shocks the
perceiver and alters discourse. In response to the shocking event, subjects do not become
“undone” but instead find routes toward self-preservation. Butler gives us another psychological
account where trauma does the work on the subject and discourse is the sign of its effects.
Words are merely those material things that rush in to fill the void left by the sublime “object,”
or sublime spectacle that is the loss of the object. Der Derian explains:
Indeed, the first reaction by most onlookers and television reporters was to deem the
event an accident. The second attack destroyed the accident thesis and as well, it seemed,
our ability to cognitively map the devastating aftermath. Instead, into the void left by the
collapse of the WTC towers and the absence of detached analysis, then rushed a host of
metaphors, analogies, and metonyms, dominated by denial (“It's a movie”), history (“It’s
Pearl Harbor”) and nonspecific horror (“It’s the end of the world as we have known
it”).115
Critics working in this vein use the notion of aesthetic and traumatic experiences to speculate
about the role of discourse production with only casual regard for the audience. The aesthetic
event is figured as injuring the audience member once again. A psychic void must be plugged by
an immediate verbal outflow in the attempt to arrest the downward spiral of meaning:
114
Ibid., 23.
115
Der Derian, “9/11: Before, After, and In Between,” 326.
205
…a torrent of words rushed in to fill the void, to contain the terror, and offer meaning to
what had just happened. Through language people attempted to wrest some control out of
the incinerating inferno.116
Butler and other psychoanalytically inflected critics writing about the role of discourse in
response to the supposedly overwhelming aesthesis discussed a significant question concerning
the way in which a discourse might alter the narrative stability of the subject. In Derrida’s and
Zizek’s vocabulary. the ability to speak and theorize 9/11 is what has been disrupted by the
event.117 For these critics, there exists a push and pull between “an abysmal crisis of meaning,
on the one hand, and the desire to bring the crisis under control, on the other.”118 The subject is
an individual who, fraught with a loss, seeks a remedy. Rather than unravel him or herself, or
experience a reconfiguration of subjectivity, however, the individual is instead reaffirmed and
stabilized through the response to a loss. As one commentator notes specifically on reactions to
the bewildering experience of 9/11, discourse about “… loss, whether it is actual or imaginary, or
experienced vicariously, can serve to reduce this confusion and reinforce an identity.”119
The link between the sublime and the traumatic used to explain an overwhelming or
shocking event that “damages” the subject and alters her discourse (about events and herself)
assumes that discourse exists for the purpose of stabilizing the subject. Supposedly, if
116
Howard F. Stein, “Days of Awe: September 11, 2001 and its Cultural
Psychodynamics,” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society 8, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 188.
117
Derrida says specifically that 9/11 radically unsettled “the conceptual, semantic, and
one could even say hermeneutic apparatus that might have allowed one to see coming, to
comprehend, interpret, describe, speak of, and name ‘September 11.’” I take up the significance
of this point in terms of 9/11 as an “event” in Chapter 4. See Jacques Derrida in Philosophy in a
Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, (Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 2003), 93.
118
Stef Craps, “Conjuring Trauma: the Naudet Brothers’ 9/11 Documentary.” Canadian
Review of American Studies 37, no. 2, (2007): 184-5.
119
Leach, “9/11,” 86.
206
“confusion” persists, something “demands” that the identity of the subject be reorganized. This,
however, is precisely what sublimity contradicts. An instance of the sublime does not, in fact,
make its demands upon the subject of Kant’s sort, pointing the subject toward what it should or
should not be, politically or morally speaking. This purposeful redirection of the sublime was
Kant’s enlightenment era infused political agenda. On the contrary, once one sees that Burke
and others were right to claim that large scale human acts could trigger it, sublimity can be said
to exist as a set of contradictory demands internal to the subject. This is Lyotard’s critical
reading against Kant. I turn next to Lyotard’s account of the sublime in order to demonstrate
how a rhetorical reading of textual sublimity – phrases and narratives in dispute within the
subject – makes possible a non-teleological subject and legitimizes the need to turn toward
audiences’ discourses to get at a more robust understanding of an open ended, as yet undefined
exigence.
The Limits of Speech and Figures of ‘Amazing’ and
‘Awe’ as a Rhetoric of the Lyotardian Sublime
Let me review some of the ground we have covered. I have shown how witness
testimony with respect to terrorism manifests difficulties in expressions. Sometimes the physical
act of speaking itself is a problem. Witnesses stutter and stammer in the attempt to form words.
At other times audience members declare with many words that they have nothing to say or
cannot formulate words. They feel and judge themselves to be “speechless.” In both instances,
the production of discourse may be read as reaching a kind of “limit.” Witnesses are very clear
about pointing to this limit even if they cannot express it clearly or overcome it. Phrasing
thoughts, the material act of articulating terms through writing, is an arduous process and is selfreflexively rendered as a negotiation of what is named ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘impossible.’
207
In this section I read this dynamic problem of producing words at the limit of the selfdescribed inability to do so as an instance of the rhetorical sublime. However, I do not
characterize this by postulating a universal audience collectively experiencing one version of the
sublime on 9/11. Similarly to the notion of trauma, the sublime should not be said to figure the
true experience of an audience en masse. I argue instead that audience statements help show
critics that a unique “area” or aspect of a subject position is active in a discourse of sublimity.
I mean by “area” a rhetorical realm in which words are doing real work. In witnesses’
discourses, terms and phrases are in dispute with one another. There is internal narrative clash. I
have already shown these terms such as ‘incomprehensible’ reveal different relations to the
events of September 11 as seen on television. They are judged incomprehensible because they
are a horrific tragedy, an amazing sight and spectacle to behold, and beyond words to categorize
and understand them. Through this figure, the attacks are rendered painful and seemingly
fascinating or pleasurable at the same time. I turn to this contradiction that exists within the
terminology itself and how its deployed by witnesses. By examining the terms ‘amazing’ and
‘awe,’ I show how these terms entail simultaneously contradictory meanings. This contradiction,
not lost on a subject who speaks of an experience of it, reveals astonishment. Discourses of
‘amazing’ and ‘awe’ as rhetorics of astonishment reveal a linguistic sublime fashioned by
witnesses instead of inflicted on them.
On the one hand, the words ‘awe’ and ‘amazing’ are deployed in thoroughly uplifting
manners of expression. In this register, they are evidently a discourse of moral praise and even
of high pleasure. Most often in reflection upon the heroism, sacrifice, and good deeds of those in
emergency response to the attacks – nurses tending to the wounded, firefighters rushing toward
the towers and civilians caught up themselves in treatment and rescue – audience members offer
208
words that indicate an unbridled respect and enthusiasm for those acting in such capacities. A
few instances make this clear:
I watched the recovery workers in awe and admiration, working through the night, the
cold, the rain. How beautiful and thoughtful of them to not leave those lost souls alone in
this vast and horrific gravesite.120
Just as ‘awe’ is deployed in this fashion, ‘amazing’ is invoked in a similar manner:
The bravery and image of these men at that time will never leave me. Everyone was
running away from the carnage and they walked forward, determined to do their job.
Amazing people showing amazing courage.121
On the other hand, these same terms are used to describe the horrific nature of the scene
of 9/11. Time and again, witnesses evoke these terms in response to the landscape of
destruction. Rather than heroic first responders as the subjects of the sublime the sheer
monstrosity of the intentional acts of the perpetrators came into view. In reference to a rather
large and reflective kind of judgment, usually in response to the entirety of the intentional acts
and calamity that has taken place, judgmental phrases offer a sweeping statement upon what has
taken place. Specifically in response to the “unbelievable” reality of the towers crumbling and
the “unimaginable” loss of life, ‘amazing’ and ‘awe’ surface. These terms predicate the scene
and judge the situation. In this regard, witnesses express what I read as a “fascination” with the
sheer facticity of the attacks. As noted and evidenced in Chapter Two, many reflect back upon
the day of September 11 in order to note the amazement in terms of feeling “glued” to the
television screen:
My dad was glued to ‘Sky news’ when i got home. I sat down and was amazed and
shocked at the scenes I was watching.122
120
Ibid.
121
Ibid.
122
Ibid.
209
In more detailed descriptions, our witnesses dwell on a sense of the unbelievable in their
accounts and testify to the sense of being transfixed or paralyzed by the imagery. They also
sometimes search for the something “real” to which they can compare the images and ground
their account of being ‘amazed:’
The buildings burned for a good 10 minutes and more and more people were jumping.
Then the reporter came on and said that another airplane had crashed into the Pentagon
slicing it apart. Then we didn't know what to expect next. We all sat paralyzed with our
eyes fixed on the screen when the unthinkable happened. The first of the 2 monstrous
buildings collapsed. We were amazed watching the enormous building crumble before
our eyes. It was like watching the demolition of old factories except when old factories
are demolished they are uninhabited.123
‘Amazing’ is the visual imagery of the attacks but so is the moment of their occurrence. 9/11 is a
spatially large image-event in its visible impacts but also temporally enormous in that it is
witnessed as a fully “present” moment and conceived as that which will be recognizable in the
future as well. Hence, several audience members refer to the amazing sense of being part of
history, living in it, as it were, while it is being made:
As time went on and it all sank in, I realized that I had witnessed something that was sure
to go down in history. This is something that would be in future history books! It seemed
amazing I suppose. Though with thousands dead it was quite tragic.124
That the attacks happened at all is written about in tone and expressed as astonishing. It is
horrific yet fascinating, compelling, and momentous at the same time. A witness remarks upon
the idea of being caught in a tragedy yet seems infused with stupor and wonder while
commenting on the supreme historical significance of the attacks. The author writes of the
magnitude of the attacks with a sense of astonishment:
It was just amazing that this was actually happening. I was living history. My dad is in
the Air Force so he got home early also. I asked my mom and him why someone would
123
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” 2011.
124
Ibid.
210
want to do this to us. I thought we were the country that everyone else loved. I was so
upset that someone could take our planes and our people and use it against us in ways we
have never experienced before.125
Related to the terminology and tone of amazement is the discourse of ‘awe.’ Much like
entries that describe the astonishment of the attacks in terms of their amazing qualities, several
entries also reflect upon the ‘awe’ of the attacks as witnessed:
I quickly turned to CNN and stood there in awe with tears rolling down my face. I could
not speak.126
As is the case with the word ‘amazing,’ the term ‘awe’ is used to indicate a tragic scene while
also used to describe a positive sensation. Also in parallel to ‘amazement,’ ‘awe’ describes a
struggle with putting into words the nature of what has taken place. Entries “speak” directly to
this experience:
It sank in fast how very real this was and that is was no accident. We stared in awe as we
watched New York panic and run in horror. The only things that managed to come out of
our mouths for the following minutes were words like, “Oh my gosh”, “Oh no,” and
“What's going on?”127
Rhetorically, invoking words at the limits of speech shows more than the absence of
words. Construction and deployment of terms in this difficult terrain of non-understanding
reveals the sublime’s productive qualities beyond its stultifying or paralyzing effects – the sense
of its pleasure, in psychological terms, for example. In addition to speech at the limits of
discourse, then, which is very difficult to read closely because one might be reading a witness
undergoing an experience of the sublime, there is also, in witness testimony, a clear set of
discourses of sublimity that are themselves the textual fabric of contradictory sentiments outside
125
Ibid.
126
Ibid.
127
Ibid.
211
of usually clear and distinct speech. The words themselves speak to a divided form, a split
narrative. Through language, judgment is in two places, or even more, at once. The exigence,
the event, is not clear. The exigence in its contradictory rhetorical manifestations now takes on
multiple relations to the subject figuring it. In sum, in naming the exigence through
contradictory discourses of astonishment, the witness can “lose” a stable subject position by
maintaining competing narratives and relations to the exigence. This subject position is
explicated well, I argue, by Lyotard’s rhetorical rereading of Kant’s sublime.
For Lyotard, sublimity is not simply the cause of a lack of speech. The lack of speech is
part of a general problem of communication that sometimes erupts as a sublime feeling, a feeling
that we should speak about but do not know what to say or how to put it into words. This feeling
is contradictory in that it asks us to speak to that which is impossible to speak about. This is a
peculiar and contradictory position a subject finds herself in: “This state is signaled by what one
ordinarily calls a feeling: ‘One cannot find the words,’ etc.”128 This antagonistic state is what
Lyotard calls a “differend.” The differend is for a subject “the unstable state and instant of
language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be.”129 This
linguistic antagonism is significant in that “the differend is to be found at the heart of sublime
feeling.”130
An emphasis on the “feeling” of the sublime can cloud the linguistic and rhetorical
significance of the concept. Critics focusing on aesthetic experience generally or trauma
128
Ibid., 13.
129
Jean Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den
Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 13.
130
Jean Francois Lyotard, Lessons on the analytic of the sublime: Kant's Critique of
judgment, [sections] 23-29, (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1994), 123.
212
specifically have, as I have shown, focused on the sensation to the exclusion of sublimity as
seeing a “rupture” in signification. Lyotard’s critique of Kant’s narrative of sublimity helps
show a feeling of the sublime and discourse as a sign of the sublime can coexist without one
being reduced to the other. Lyotard uses Kant’s terminology of the conflicting faculties to
change the moral script and explain a non-teleological process of discourse production. On
Lyotard’s account of sublimity, imagination produces concepts and terms. It reaches its limit
without success and eventually and gives up. But it does not, as in Kant’s case, throw itself
down at the foot of reason sacrificially for a noble cause and gain pleasure as a result. There is
no moral end point toward which the “feeling” of the sublime moves. That is part of the feeling
of terror. The sacrifice of imagination is itself a violent internal act of the mind: “Imagination at
the limits of what it can present does violence to itself in order to present that it can no longer
present.”131 This is why, for Lyotard, “Sublime violence is like lightning. It short-circuits
thinking with itself… the teleological machine explodes.”132 The subject is disturbed in such a
state as the limits of imagination are reached. If a subject continuously cannot find a suitable
concept, if imagination violently sacrifices itself to present to reason that it cannot represent, a
subject is in a contradictory state. This is an agitation the subject feels or a disharmonious
“vibrancy.”133 It should be noted that Baudrillard also uses the word “sublime” to refer to a kind
of “resonance” the subject has with violent images.134
131
Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 55.
132
Ibid., 54-5.
133
Battersby is right to use this word. This term, however, applies best to Lyotard’s
critique of Kant rather to a Kant’s account of the sublime. Battersby, “Terror, Terrorism and the
Sublime,” 74.
134
Baudrillard, “L’Esprit du Terrorisme.”
213
What does it mean, as Lyotard claims, for a differend to be at the “heart” of this feeling?
Rhetorically speaking, Lyotard means to say that a differend, the “core” of the sublime, is a
speaking situation. A unique kind of “demand” is placed upon the subject when in a differend.
This is an exigence, but it is a self-reflexive internally situated (self-conflicted) exigence that
presents “itself” as a call to address an external exigence in a necessarily new idiom or discourse
formation. There is no clear extra-rhetorical exigence outside the subject. This makes no sense
to a witness. The external exigence is impossible to separate from the problem of resolving the
conflicted discourses in order to name it. The rhetorical situation of a differend is one where an
exigence is recognized, then, but it is recognized in the very fact that one does not have a
discourse to name it:
In the differend something “asks” to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of
not being able to be put into phrases right away. This is when the human who thought
they could use language as an instrument of communication learn through the feeling of
pain which accompanies silence (and of pleasure which accompanies the pleasure of a
new idiom), that they are summoned by language, not to augment to profit the quantity of
information communicable through existing idioms, but to recognize that what remains to
be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase, and that they must be allowed to
institute idioms which do not yet exist.135
In Lyotard’s view, “the sublime is a sign of a differend” because incomplete, incoherent, or
contradictory discourses demonstrate a subject moving toward a new idiom for resolution.136
Sublimity is a rhetorical problem for Lyotard. It is not a feeling or state that causes the subject to
cohere around it or move the subject to understanding, like Kant claims:
The sublime does not contribute to a structure of meanings that underlie a structure of
sensations. It inhibits both those structures by standing out as a privileged event.137
135
Ibid., 13.
136
James Williams, Lyotard and the Political, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 95.
137
Ibid., 95.
214
Those who argue discourses of the sublime (the lack of categories for understanding)
reveal something “meaningful” (that the attacks are traumatic, for example) are thus not only
contradicting themselves, they are appealing to orders of meaning already in existence for their
own purposes (the attacks are immoral and evil). Instead, the rhetorical sublime is perhaps best
thought of as an indicator. A sublime term points, but points at us instead of pointing out
something to us. It indicates not a “what,” but a “that.” It shows that one cannot speak to
something. A set of intensities might be coextensive with the sublime but these “intensities – the
feelings of pleasure and pain combined in the feeling of the sublime – are signs of a politically
more important event: a differend.”
‘Terrorism’ is a name for a kind of differend. Nothing can be said to those who give up
their life in an instant, and yet we feel that something must be said to them. Sometimes words
cannot describe how spectacular and unbelievable an act of terror can be. Yet a phrase must be
uttered. ‘Sublimity’ is way to say that the production of discourse “must” be made in the face of
the impossibility to do so. However, this is not to say that the sublime is a psychological
“compulsion” to testify to the event. Instead, a witness tries out new terms, lines of thought,
discourse that grasp, reach and stretch in multiple directions. A certainty is not found and a
“fitting” discourse remains elusive. There are only different narratives and phrases. These
narratives compete and have no resolution within the subject. One attempts to synthesize terms
perhaps by coming up with an organizing word for them but the attacks. Yet even broad terms
like ‘amazing’ or ‘incomprehensible’ contain unresolved tensions in their polysemic meanings.
A witness is in a discursive space of contradictions in phrases, evident in the felt inability to
resolve the contradiction. The feeling, however, is not the cause of the “damage” to the witness
to which they must respond to anchor themselves. It is an accompanying sign of a subject
215
“liberated” to search for an idiom to resolve contradictions. A subject is in the space of a
differend:
So what happens in the between—between suicide pilots bent on destroying American
monuments... and those human beings who have been attacked and, for those who are
still alive, who feel deeply that they have been trespassed against? This place of
juxtaposition, this place of alterity, this place of interruption—this is what produces the
sublime in politics, the aesthetic moment or experience which is neither beautiful nor
ugly, but grotesque, enormous, awe-inspiring, beyond dimension, beyond belief (all
characteristics of the modern sublime). As interruptions, as inscriptions of difference, the
happening of the in-between is the event of the postmodern sublime.138
The interrupting terrorist event of 9/11 is rendered through a discourse of the sublime, then, not
because 9/11 causes a feeling of difference (a “clash of civilizations”). It is not the sign of a
clash not of ideologies but of “phrases” – inscriptions of difference – through which a witness
“understands” an event. To speak of this kind of difference is to note “a ‘differend’ of a
radically profound proportions.”139 One cannot speak to this and yet does. Hugh Silverman
explains how witness testimony was a sign of the sublime in this regard:
It was unbelievable – “incredible” people kept saying, “horrible,” a “tragedy of enormous
magnitude.” Horror of horrors, this incredible event was quintessentially sublime. It had
no place in everyday life. It interrupted the continuity of American experience. As many
said, “it changed us in a way that we have never been changed before.”140
I say nothing about whether 9/11 actually changed witnesses, or witnesses’ sense of a
continuity of an American or any other kind of experience. In this way, I do not make a claim on
par with Silverman’s. But in a move similar to the discourse based observations I have been
making, Silverman highlights common witness phrases to stress how difficult it is to speak about
an uncommon event like terrorism. One must note that terrorism exists as a strange invocation to
138
Hugh Silverman, Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime, (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 2.
139
Ibid., 2.
140
Ibid., 1.
216
its audience. As an act, it is both for and against an audience at the same time. Terrorism always
admits of this strange dual function: to attack and to display the attack itself. Terrorism without
an audience is pure violence or war. Hence the terror of terrorism is found in its relation to an
audience necessary for its “performative” element.141 As one critic puts it more generally and
simply, “The attacks in New York and Washington suggest an attempt at communication via
action…”142
Whereas critics have focused on the act of communication as the originary point of
meaning, an exigence that can be clearly defined, and hence described, as traumatic, evil, tragic,
Lyotard provides us a way to read witnesses’ internally conflicted communication, to which our
fragments amply testify, as a unique exigence that demands a new kind of idiom. The felt
“demand” for this novel discourse has consequences for the stability of the subject. One can
note that typical narratives, which serve the purpose of “grounding” or orienting the subject at
times, shift within the subject as she searches for and writes a new idiom into which she inserts
her subjectivity. This makes the witness not only active in figuring the exigence to which they
speak, but active in reconstituting themselves, narratively speaking, in relation to the exigence.
It is to some degree autotelic activity. I elaborate on this point in Chapter Four. The way in
which witnesses write a new idiom for 9/11, narrating a changed world into which they insert
themselves by occupying a new subject position, is what makes 9/11 an “event.” Before I note
how the act of writing constitutes the dual act of narrativizing the event and the subject’s new
role in relation to it in the next chapter, however, I conclude this chapter by reviewing the
141
Sam Richards, “9/11 – the art, the terror, and the spectacle,” Art & Music, March 27,
142
Stein, “Days of Awe,” 193.
2007.
217
importance of a sublime conflict of narratives to a subject position defined by way of its
inherently problematic relationship to an exigence, relating it to a discussion of rhetorical
situation.
9/11 Narration as Deconstitutive Rhetoric
Interpretation and meaning-making is a problem on September 11. One could focus on
this in terms of a troubling feeling experience. Some critics do this by explaining the attacks of
9/11 as ‘sublime.’ For a witness, the sublime is as much a disturbing “feeling” as it is a sign of
contradictory discourses vying for explanatory power internal to the subject. But beyond the
experience of the imagery and the difficulty of putting this feeling into words, subjects also
encounter the problem of substituting words again and again, sorting through contradictory
discourses and attempting to find the magical words that seem there yet always escape the
subject’s capacity to name. Interest in figuring out the event meets the impossibility to do so,
and while a subject might feel powerless to speak he is dynamically involved in navigating this
felt incapacity. To theorize this as a moment of the sublime is not to confine the subject into a
particular position so that its positionality may be understood clearly and distinctly. But neither
is it an attempt to make the subject’s position meaningless. I instead use the term ‘sublime’ to
broach the possibility that a subject might exist in a rhetorically active space that is not fully
understood within traditional frameworks of a subject undergoing narrative reconfiguration.
The most useful conceptual framework of this moment for me is Maurice Charland’s
account of subjective constitution.143 Charland’s explanation is an explicitly rhetorical account
of subjective constitution through the mechanism of interpellation. Let us not forget that
143
Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,”
Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987): 133-150.
218
Althusser’s notion of interpellation, which is at work behind Charland’s account, explains the
formation of the subject through a dialectic of submission and mastery. A subject only becomes
a subject in the act of submission to being in the position of a Subject. And this submission
allows mastery to achieve the effect of freedom and of supposedly having performed the
operation “freely.”144 Charland’s rhetorical constitution of the subject follows this dynamic to
explain how individuals paradoxically submit to a discourse in order to become the “free” agent
of it. I do not challenge his theory. Rather, I suggest that Charland’s account of subjective
constitution can be supplemented with an important step of actively navigating contradictory
discourses before there is the effect of a constitution of the subject. In fact, this moment can be
an integral part of the constitutive operation of subjectivation itself, which could be called
deconstitutive. The step of deconstitutive narration, working through the textually fragmentary
space of multiple and/or contradictory threads, is the rhetorical process prior to reconstitution.
This is the space of a differend, of which sublimity is a sign.
For Charland, rhetoric succeeds in constituting subjects through identification. Subjects
are positioned through narratives and exist as subjects because they are addressed as such.
Consequently, they become effects of a text: “The position one embodies as a subject is a
rhetorical effect.”145 Charland gives the example of the peuple Québécois. They are addressed
and come to be the peuple Québécois through a narrative. Simply put, “In the telling of the story
144
Althusser says specifically “the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order
that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely)
accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection
‘all by himself’. There are no subjects except by and for their subjection. That is why they ‘work
all by themselves’.” See Louis Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy Other Essays” in Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses. Trans. Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press 1971), p 182.
145
Ibid., 148.
219
of a peuple, a peuple comes to be.”146 Constitutive rhetorics can take the form of stories that
“insert these ‘narratized’ subjects-as-agents into the world.”147
Charland solves an important problem. Narratives make coherence out of contradiction
in a subject’s world:
To be an embodied subject is to experience and act in a textualized world. However, this
world is not seamless and a subject position’s world view can be laced with
contradictions. We can, as Burke puts it, encounter “recalcitrance.” In addition, as Stuart
Hall observes, various contradictory subject positions can simultaneously exist within a
culture: we can live within many texts. These contradictions place a strain upon
identification with a given subject position and render possible a subject’s rearticulation.
Successful new constitutive rhetorics offer new subject positions that resolve, or at least
contain, experienced contradictions.148
For Charland, “narratives ‘make real’ coherent subjects.”149 Or, as Charland quotes Walter
Fischer, a narrative “give[s] order to human experience… and induce[s] others to dwell in
[it].”150 Narratives imbue the subject with an orientation anew in that he/she is given history,
motives, and a telos. And in this respect, Charland argues that “… narrative is a structure of
understanding that produces totalizing interpretations.”151
Narratives clearly do rhetorical work for Charland. However, they operate
unidirectionally and constitutively. Stories position the subject in the world ideologically, which
is to say with coherence and stability. Charland does not analyze narratives that fragment
subjects or unroot them. He prefers to read textual effects in which the subject is already
146
Ibid., 140.
147
Ibid., 143.
148
Ibid., 142.
149
Ibid., 138.
150
Fischer as quoted in Charland. Ibid., 142.
151
Ibid., 141.
220
“magically” complete. In this way, Charland positions narrative as the rhetorical solution to the
fragmentation not thrust on us by other texts but by the recalcitrance of the (non-discursive)
world. But in borrowing Kenneth Burke’s notion of recalcitrance, Charland limits the dialectical
contradictions of the subject exclusively to the verbal against the non-verbal. Charland’s small
homage to Stuart Hall and the idea of living “within many texts” should be more primary. The
verbal can exist in contradiction to the verbal itself. Indeed, making sense of the recalcitrant
non-discursive (events of) the world can only be done through different lines or phrases of the
verbal itself.
The sublime is a way to begin to theorize the verbal recalcitrance of the subject in
contradiction to him or herself. A subject can be caught within many texts, many phrases, and
experience them not only as contradictory but also as producing new, sometimes endlessly new
lines of discourse. This is a productive moment in the sublime wherein discourse may be
“treated as animated matter that produces more of the same by virtue of its inability to coincide
with itself (let alone mind and object), as the spacing within language creates words as separate
from one another (and therefore as excess rather than identity) and creates the individual as a
subject position, ‘an opening within language.’”152 A movement toward reconstitution is made
possible through this opening.
On Charland’s account, one may be internally conflicted and fraught with contradictory
sensations. External narratives are said to be adopted to resolve the subject’s experiential
contradictions. But how did the subject get into this state to begin with? And how should a
152
Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: romanticism and the aesthetics of
individuation, (New York: Routledge, 1992), 19.
221
rhetorical critic understand this moment of a subject in search of a narrative? Confused?
Primed? Traumatized? Is a subject even a substantive entity in this respect or more of a process?
My argument is that though one can name this problem of contradictory experience in the
subject as an instance of the sublime, this moment of sublimity as contradictory experience
should not be theorized as that which causes a demand for a narrative. That would be more in
line with older psychological views of the sublime previously analyzed. There is simply the
contradiction of narratives as primary. Viewed discursively as a problem of internally conflicted
phrases, as in Lyotard’s differend, rhetorical sublimity is an attempt to articulate how
subjectivity operates within this conflicted space. It is the sign of something interesting
happening within the subject but does not point to the effect of an non-discursive or extra
rhetorical exigence that is already clearly understood. The sublime here is the unsettled self in
the movement or vibration of narratives and idioms in dispute. One merely vibrates or moves,
which sometimes results in narrative coherence perhaps, but happens first necessarily within the
context of feeling the impossibility to do so. This is why Lyotard defines the sublime as the
“privation of narratives” and as essentially “non-narrativizable.”153
It is possible that one could stay within this discursive realm and not reach a resolution of
narratives, as some witnesses of 9/11 do. Recall that they use phrases, years after the attack,
about how “still to this day” the attacks are ‘incomprehensible.’ For some, the attacks are
rendered so impossible they will “never” be understood and “will never seem real.” Not all
recalcitrance is resolved. Not all subjectivity is an essence that falls automatically back into
153
Engstrom, Timothy H., “The Postmodern Sublime? Philosophical Rehabilitations and
Pragmatic Evasions.” boundary 2, vol. 20, no. 2 (Summer, 1993): 196, 191. The author reads
Lyotard as defining sublimity in contradistinction to narrative and suggests that this need not be
necessarily the case.
222
place. A narrative that does succeed in reconfiguring the subject from out of this space is, as
Charland makes clear, is a paradox and an “ideological trick.”154 An individual is made to feel
as though he or she is the author, an extra-discursive being, freely in control of the discursive
position he or she “chooses.” However, this transition is only explicable once it has already
happened. Logically prior to this taking place, a subject must rhetorically “entertain”
possibilities and search for a subject position. If not, external discourses would impose
themselves perfectly on subjects and narrate them into narrative frames, thus making them
passive recipients of interpellative rhetoric. Several scholars of rhetoric show that not every
instance of a hailing or interpellation succeeds. Audiences resist; rhetoric fails.155 Subjects
sometimes linger between rhetorical realities.
Through sublime discourses, I maintain, subjects search for a new idiom and display
“rhetorical skill.”156 The sublime explains an audience member in search for a position and
context, even if the purposive destination point of this quest is not known I advance. While I
have reviewed Charland’s case of constitutive rhetoric to show that this entails a textually
fragmented subject, this also has consequences for the subject’s relationship to an exigence. As
per the content of competing narratives of 9/11 – discourses of magnitude beyond words,
incomprehension, and senses of astonishment – the subject of those statements concerns the
nature of the exigence itself. I hold that this fact makes the event of September 11 a unique kind
154
Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric,” 137.
155
Tate, Helen. “The Ideological Effects of a Failed Constitutive Rhetoric: The Co-option
of the Rhetoric of White Lesbian Feminism.” Women's Studies in Communication, Vol. 28 Issue
1, Spring 2005. Also, Zagacki, Kenneth S. “Constitutive Rhetoric Reconsidered: Constitutive
Paradoxes in G. W. Bush's Iraq War Speeches.” Western Journal of Communication, Vol. 71,
No. 4, 2007.
156
Engstrom, “The Postmodern Sublime?,” 194.
223
of exigence. As I showed in the previous chapter on mediation of the event, witnesses who
struggle with the perception and meaning-making of an event make the exigence dynamic. I
concluded that there is no necessary “topos” under which the exigence of 9/11 falls such that
only a few, or even a finite range, of “fitting responses” are possible.
Like a rhetor without a fitting topic to draw upon, a witness seemingly vexed and replete
with discourses of sublimity is at a loss to find an “appropriate” discourse with which to name
the event. In this way, it is unclear how a witnesses qua audience members, such as the authors
of our fragments, could possibly fit into Bitzer’s rhetorical situation. However, this is not to say
that Bitzer himself fails to account for interesting cases. I am, rather, testing the viability of
Bitzerian concepts of the rhetorical situation, by Bitzer, his critics and notable commentators
who nuance key critical terms to see if they account fully for the paradigmatic case of 9/11.
Bitzer, to review, defines a rhetorical situation as “a complex of persons, events, objects, and
relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed
if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring
about the significant modification of the exigence.”157 The case of sublimity I have introduced to
further complicate Bitzer’s model is not an example from Vatz’s line of attack to reverse Bitzer
and claim that the exigence of 9/11 does not exist at all until a rhetor defines it. In between
Bitzer and Vatz’s conceptions of the rhetorical situation, Lyotard shows how the witness-subject
is working through a relation with the exigence en route to defining the exigence itself. That
subjectivity undergoes a potential process of transformation in relationship to naming the
exigence also entails that the exigence is as rhetorically non-identifiable and substantively
157
Bitzer, op cit. 220
224
unstable as the subject him or herself. The instability of narratives speaks to the unstable relation
between what has happened and where the witness fits into the world because of it.
At either end of the spectrum of address within the rhetorical situation, rhetor and
audience, Bitzer suggests that there are constraints. A speaker must understand the contours of
an exigence before addressing a crowd. In turn, an audience consists of those persons who can
“modify” the exigence, persons who are capable – either because they have been authorized or
have become self-authorized as agents to respond to the situation – of being influenced by
discourse and who become “mediators of change.”158 But in the case of the sublime discourses
of 9/11, it is not appropriate to say that understanding the exigence comes first, by either the
rhetor or the audience member, and the modification second. Sublime discourses are selfmodifying discourses that in turn produce definitions of the exigence. These discourse are
relational, not essentialist. In Bitzerian language, if you will, the constraints are the “essence” of
the exigence. Primary is rhetorical modification of the exigence. The only manner in which the
event of 9/11 is rendered meaningful through discourse is the attempt to modify oneself and
one’s relationship to it it in some way.
I have shown how discourses of the sublime complicate the traditionally conceived
rhetorical situation model by demonstrating that nothing is logically prior to the audience’s
discursive inner workings to define the exigence of 9/11. Vatz’s rhetor does not first define the
exigence en toto for the audience’s understanding second, and Bitzer’s audience does not await
the appropriate response from a rhetor first so that they may modify the exigence second.
Sublimity is a way to again make the exigence dynamic and an ongoing series of textual effects
from audience members. This unique “situation” of an ongoing definition of the exigence by
158
Ibid., 221.
225
audience members makes the rhetorical situation what I and others call an “event.” I turn to
rhetorical conceptions of 9/11 as an event in the final chapter.
226
CHAPTER FOUR
WRITING 9/11 AS A RHETORICAL EVENT
Introduction
The event of 9/11 considered from the rhetorical perspective of the audience demands
further investigation along lines not of the types of subjective states employed or the kinds of
aesthesis experienced, but the ways in which self-described witnesses figure such things
rhetorically to define their relationship to the exigence. Investigating our witnesses’ text
fragments, I have considered in previous chapters the ways in which these parts of the discourses
of 9/11 generated contradictory expressions and phrases difficult to place within a ready made
context for understanding them. In Chapter Three, I found that witnesses deployed phrases in
search of new idiomatic expressions to grasp better the meaningfulness of the event. I
demonstrated how audience members encounter the exigence of 9/11, especially in its
magnitude, more dynamically than merely receiving the image spectacle or even an undergoing
of a traditionally conceived sublime experience. The nature of this encounter shows how the
situation in which the exigence for journaling arises is not static, and thereby problematizes the
ability of the rhetorical situation model in all its previous variants, to contextualize all events.
In this chapter I follow a similar method of reading audiences’ utterances and reflections
made both on the day of September 11, 2001 and in written reflection via journal entries years
later about that day. I explore once again the dynamic of witnesses encountering 9/11 but do so
through testimony regarding the “eventfulness” of 9/11. In so doing, I first read audiences’
accounts and statements regarding the momentous impact the “events” had on them that day and
continue to have on them. Second, I turn toward a body of theoretical literature on events,
specifically with respect to readings of the “event” of 9/11, and find areas of theorization that
227
might be expanded to include the rhetorical dynamic of discourse production with respect to how
audiences witness and experience events. Finally, I conclude with a few observations about how
rhetorical critics and theorists may enrich the bourgeoning field of study on “rhetorical events.”
Audience Analysis: Experience and
Expression of the Event
The day of September 11th, 2001 poses a fundamental problem for investigators from all
disciplinary perspectives in that what is talked about – the events of that day – are more of a
problem for interpretation than a given. Spectators have many ways of speaking about the
terrorist attacks. There is no agreement about what terms best fit for a description of the day’s
events. As well, terms that express feelings and judgments vary drastically. The attacks on 9/11
are thus unclear at two levels, that of description and judgment. The televisual “object”
witnessed remains as unclear as the subjective depiction of it. The resulting sentiment of this
doubled confusion helps somewhat to explain how popular discourse settled on a term as vague
as “9/11” to describe the multitude of destruction, catastrophes, and heroics. A problem of
naming has always existed and continues to this day.
In the days, weeks, and months after the attacks, however, audience members did in fact
maneuver linguistically in attempts to define and name those attacks. In their discursive offering
of utterance and statements, they issued forth several recurring themes that resonated with
reporters, critics, and other analysts who in turn took up and circulated their sayings. Some of
the original impressions and accounts that were previously examined concern popular doxa and
topoi through which attempts were made to render the attacks sensible. The attacks, as we have
seen, were ‘like a movie,’ or ‘all too real,’ ‘incomprehensible,’ ‘unspeakable,’ and the like.
While these terms focused perhaps more on specific personal impressions of visually perceiving
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and aesthetically judging the attacks, further complexities ensue when we turn to audience
statements concerning the overall impact and significance of the attacks in broader subjective
and historical contexts.
Singular/Plural, Size and Scope
What is commonly referred to as “9/11” is a peculiar historical episode in that it unfolded
gradually over the course of a day, perhaps longer, but conjures up in most minds several
catastrophic events all at once. Four planes, four separate events, four areas where something
happened. Material destruction and loss of life, the aftermath of the attacks, is also considered,
in popular language, as part of a single day. And since witnesses watched these events on
television for several days, news coverage also defines 9/11. In sum, 9/11 is both a unique
singular event as well as several events. Audience members themselves speak of this point
plainly, shifting back and forth in reference to “it” as one thing – a catastrophe or horrific event –
and as several things – a series of catastrophes or set of events. In fact, commentators sometimes
switch back and forth, using the singular and sometimes using the plural. On the one hand, 9/11
is to be understood as a tragedy, a calamity. Struggling to speak and delicately parsing out his
words, one commentator notes, “And we--and we--we've seen just a devastating ev--event
today.”1 Moments later in the broadcast, however, the same person refers to 9/11 in another
way, reflecting on the possible implications of “these horrific events.”2 The terrorist attacks are
at one and the same time both singular and plural. They are a series or a set, one thing and a
collection of several things. As a set of things then, 9/11 actually has many parts. When
1
CBS News, “CBS News Special Report: Terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon,” September 11, 2001 Tuesday (8:48 AM ET) Dan Rather reporting.
2
Ibid.
229
speaking of “it,” people are often referring to this notion of an “absolutely horrifying set of
events.”3 On the other side, however, these separate episodes add up to something singular, as
presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin (among other more or less official commentators)
phrased it, “Oh, I think there is no question that the event is unique.”4
At times, caught up in the moment of immediate reaction, reporters themselves seem to
confuse the numbering and naming of the event(s). Speaking about those rushing out of the
collapsing towers in lower Manhattan, a reporter states:
As we say, the emergency workers now beginning to try to gather themselves over there.
You can see a police emergency service unit. They're trying, basically, now to reestablish
some kind of a safe perimeter, and many of the emergency workers, basically, just happy
to be alive, certainly that picture tells it all. Many of them just happy to be alive at this
point having survived what is an extraordinary event, the collapse of two towers.5
Two towers collapsing is, in effect, one singular catastrophe. In other reports, however, the
episode is a series of catastrophes. Former White House Chief of Staff James Baker referred to
the attacks as an “atrocious series of events.”6 Sometimes it is unclear how to separate and
dissociate one from another or even how to count all aspects of the event(s): “We have seen
through the morning three or four events which would qualify by anyone’s descriptions as
catastrophes.”7
3
NBC News, “NBC News Special Report: Attack on America,” September 11, 2001
Tuesday (1:00 PM ET) Tom Brokaw reporting.
4
PBS, “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” September 11, 2001, Tuesday.
5
NBC News, “NBC News Special Report: Attack on America,” September 11, 2001
Tuesday (10:00 AM ET) Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, Tom Brokaw reporting.
6
NBC News, “NBC News Special Report: Attack on America,” September 11, 2001
Tuesday, (8:00 PM ET) Tom Brokaw reporting.
7
NBC News, “NBC News Special Report: Attack on America,” September 11, 2001
Tuesday (3:00 PM ET) Tom Brokaw reporting.
230
Problematic is not only the multipronged nature of the attacks but the consequences of
each attack embedded into the overall sense of tragedy. There is loss of life of those who were
on the airplanes, of those in the towers at the time of impact, of those forced to jump from the
towers, of those who perished in the collapse of the towers, not to mention the additional
complexities of other sites of attack. As one reporter strung together these thoughts into a
question or prompt, “How would you describe your efforts to organize the rescue effort now
given that we saw a sequence of events this morning, a sequence of crashes then explosions, and
then the collapses.”8 Where exactly one tragedy leaves off and another begins is profoundly
unclear. Each “one” aspect is meaningful and yet taken together the singular event of all the
attacks considered in their entirety is meaningful as a single event qua meaning or lack of it.
There is, however, an unclear division of these two realms discursively, at least.
What was already difficult to discern as one unique event – the collision of a passenger
plane into one of the World Trade Center buildings – was made even more difficult understand
as more attacks occurred. The singular locution seemed most apt at the time perhaps, even with
two separate World Trade Center crashes. But a singular thing grew. It doubled in size and
scale, magnitude, and impact only to grow into more: “When we heard this morning at 8:42 that
the World Trade Center had been attacked, we thought that that was single, a solitary and
horrifying event. Not too long after that, the second one was hit.”9 At first then, a sense of calm,
routine, and ordinariness was shattered. Thereafter, while the event “grows” in scope,
complexity, and severity, witnesses struggle to articulate the explosive magnitude of a singular
turned plural.
8
Ibid.
9
“ NBC News,” 1pm.
231
The result of the event(s) on the day of occurrence is a complicated problem of quantity
and qualification, magnitude and intensity, inseparably interrelated in a jumble of discourse. The
collapse of these two registers into one realm of discourse is highlighted in phrases related to
scale and magnitude. However, rather than straightforward utterances commenting directly on
the largeness of the attacks, references to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 instead speculate diversely
about an unknown magnitude and the impossibility of speaking to its size and scale. In other
words, as I argued already in Chapter Three, discourses of ‘magnitude’ work as an aporia in that
they are a language of large measurement used to reference the immeasurably large.
Figures of aporia are used to shape discourses of 9/11 in several respects. I have already
analyzed spatial discourses of magnitude in the previous chapter and will turn to them again.
Additionally, I comment later in this chapter on language surrounding temporality or the event as
a “moment” in witnesses’ discourses. I take up the word ‘historic’ to show how statements about
the future struggle to figure the significance of what is to come. But I note from the onset that
these two discourses, while analytically separable as discourses of space and time, are often
fused in a discourse of the event. It is a “major event,” a “major moment.” It is “huge” spatially
while “historic” temporally. ‘Huge,’ ‘major,’ or ‘historic,’ as terms that struggle to understand
but do not fully reach that point, may be cross applied to either spatial or temporal confusion
under the penumbra of ‘event’ discourse. ‘Large’ could refer to historical significance while
‘historic’ could refer to size and scale. In the terminology of a ‘major event’ one does not
necessarily know where the meaning lies, spatially or temporally. One reads from witnesses
aporetically that something is happening. Big time.
Much as the words ‘size,’ ‘scale,’ or ‘magnitude,’ the term ‘event’ attempts to designate a
name for something seemingly unnameable, to understand and contain discursively that which
232
cannot be contained either in space or time. ‘Event’ consolidates expression at the self-described
periphery of understanding: “Nationwide panic as Americans try to understand the scale of
today’s events.”10 The indeterminacy of the event or events was thus a feeling in the rhetorical
atmosphere as well as that which became reported upon directly, involving apprehension of the
future. One on-air commentator noted:
I looked at some numbers, Paula. The largest number of American dead ever in one day
in this country was Antietam, the Civil War battle in Maryland in 1862. 22,000 dead. I
hope to God we don't approach that number when all is said and done, but we're going to
be possibly in that ballpark. And I think tomorrow in some ways may even be a worse
day than today, because the sheer magnitude of this event has kind of got everybody
excited and wondering. Tomorrow the reality sets in.11
While quantitative measurement in the midst of the crisis and tragedy is not exact and can only
be estimated, there is yet a sense that the magnitude, the size and scope of the event, is pressing
and undeniable. Furthermore, while the “reality” of the numbers of death and destruction have
yet to be accounted for, the immediate sense of the scale of the “impact” seems distinct,
intriguing, lingering in a way that demands to be addressed and yet with only speculation to
ground it. This speculative discourse, offered by the previous testimony and in others, is a
spatial discourse of the severity of the rupture present at hand and a temporal discourse about an
interruption of continuity. Tomorrow will not just be any other tomorrow. A journal entry,
previously quoted in Chapter Three, speaks directly to this point:
10
CBS News, “CBS News Special Report: Latest on the attacks on America,” September
11, 2001 Tuesday (7:00 PM ET) Dan Rather reporting.
11
CNN, “CNN Breaking News America Under Attack: Terrorists Crash Hijacked
Airliners Into World Trade Center,” September 11, 2001 Tuesday (19:31). Pentagon.
Jeff Greenfield, CNN Senior Analyst.
233
Casualty numbers are not in, nor are they important. The numbers great or small do not
change the magnitude of what has happened and how the United States of America has
been compromised.12
The magnitude of the event is figured as that which has altered the typical course of daily
American life. The compromise suffered is one of a major event that is said to have broken the
usual chain of events. The language of size and magnitude, itself rather big, excessive, and
hyperbolic in its attempt to index the event, both indicates the massiveness of the attacks and
speculates on a sense of history “broken” and spiraling off into an unknown trajectory.
According to some witnesses, writing about the attacks in any other way than speculative,
excessive, or novel turns of phrase about the “event” is not possible. However, I do not argue
that witnesses’ use of this type of language, or the word ‘event,’ points to a real event beyond
discourse. Nor do I claim that witnesses who speak about their experience do so in order to mark
a determined relationship between the event as cause and problems in speech as effect. To say
that the scale or magnitude of the attacks “demanded” a certain response, that speech points to
the reality of the magnitude or meaningfulness before the discourse fleshes it out completely, is
still a rhetorical articulation in that it is made by actual persons in the act of naming and defining.
Instead of the actual significance or meaning of the attacks prior to discourse as a cause of
troubled speech, I observe that witnesses not only fail to name the cause of their problems in
speech, but once again turn, in frustrated attempts of not fully making sense, toward their own
discursive problems. Having no discourse of accuracy and precision naming the “reality” of the
attacks and fraught with a sense of being forced to embellish in the melodramatic, one
commentator notes:
12
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” Compiled by Center for History and New Media
and American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, 2011 ed.
<http://www.911digitalarchive.org.>
234
There’s no other way to describe it. The language here at times, if I slip into language
which seems a little melodramatic, forgive me but this is a circumstance which is very,
very difficult to describe in many ways without sounding melodramatic. Certainly in
more than 20 years of covering horrific events, this is something that I've never seen
before.13
As demonstrated in the audience analysis section of Chapter Three, the loss of language
in the ability to speak to the size and scale of the attacks can be seen in terms of speechlessness
and silence coextensive with a feeling of the sublime. In such instances, “speechlessness” is the
subject of the utterance. On the subject of events of large magnitude, however, speech is direct
and purposeful in attempting to qualify how the significance of the event does indeed register,
though interestingly because it is fully significant with only the sense of its significance to justify
the claim. The discourse is circular in its logic. It states a claim about the eventfulness of
witnessing the attacks with only having witnessed the attacks as evidence of it being an event.
This linguistic predicament, or rather a kind of precariousness, is not lost on those who
write about it. It is, in turn, the justification for further exploration of the sense of magnitude and
eventfulness by audience members. This further discourse, which I turn to next in the look at
discourses of the historic, is a temporally charged discourse of transition. Witnesses write in
terminology that connotes interruption and a change in course. What is typical is said to have
changed in an instant. While this applies to the external environment, a notion of the ‘world’ (a
word that I take up later in the chapter) it also applies to witnesses’ sense of themselves as
interrupted and altered. This sense of having undergone something momentous is written about
as a context. Text fragments provide further evidence of this by speaking to senses of time and
history undergoing change.
13
“ NBC News,” 10am.
235
‘History’ in the Making
Often in recollections and writings about the attacks of 9/11, audience members call up
the experience of a temporal awareness. At times, before speaking to the gravity of the situation,
some note feeling that something momentous is happening. Prior to an engagement of the
historical context into which the events of 9/11 might be inserted and better understood – what
the attacks might become in the annals of history – there is yet a sense of something historical
unfolding:
I was at work on that horrific day. Every thing just seemed to stop. My fellow employees
and I were gathered around the T.V. watching history before our eyes. Our customers
(roofing contractors) were coming in and stopping their busy day to watch with us. I
couldn't help thinking this was just the beginning of something big that was about to
happen to our glorious country. I wanted to call my parents to tell them how important
they were to me.14
Two themes of writing about temporal experience seem to take place here at once – an
expression of an interruption of routine and a depiction of an experience of an historical moment.
Regarding the former, something is said to interrupt the scene rather immediately. A jarring
sense of a sudden shift occurs and subjects speak of themselves as feeling out of joint. A routine
is halted since, as the witness implies, something must be attended to.
When other witnesses write of this “moment” they make more meaning of this episode as
it has occurred to them than simply relaying the immediacy of the event changing their course
for the day. Witnesses add an imposed description of the eventfulness to add something
discursive to the attack’s excessiveness. At times, recounting one’s “discovery” of the attacks
and the absorption of them televisually are literally drawn out. Witnesses extend their talking of
this moment in the time and space of the text. Hence, with some frequency, the attacks are
stretched out textually and spoken about as having happened in ‘slow motion:’
14
“The September 11 Digital Archive,” op cit., 2011.
236
The next 90 minutes is a complete blur - eyes trained on the television in total disbelief as
reports of attacks in Washington, plane crashes in Pennsylvania and appeared on the
screen. Curiously, the entire 90 minutes - and every report, seemed to be in slow motion
and to this day, I still recall that feeling - as in some childhood nightmare as I ran from
some unknown evil force, my legs so heavy every step felt like I was dragging an
anchor.15
Statements concerning the retroactively posited sensation of ‘slow motion’ indicate a
disruptive state of experience. As “news” of the event amasses in a rare form inconsistent with
typical coverage, which is apparent to news commentators and part of their discourse as they
report it, it becomes clear to witnesses that the event is not clear. A different kind of watching
and following of the constructed narrative on television is taking place – a slowed down viewing,
an intense manner of involving oneself in the story, and a reading of the scene of the attacks and
the discourses produced (let us not forget that we saw in previous chapters how witnesses paid
close attention to discursive media frames through titles, phrase, and infographics such as
‘America Under Attack’ and ‘America at War’). This intense focus is at one and the same time a
“heightened” state of concentrated reading, yet heaped upon that which is not understandable or
to be easily articulated. There is arguably concentration but not focus, reading but not accuracy
in interpretation. The gathering of more and more information and perspectival analysis through
news coverage leaves many wondering about their sense-making frame of reality. This begets a
discourse of disorientation on a temporal level:
The rest of the afternoon seems like it was in slow motion, yet fast forward at the same
time. It’s a blur to remember where I went, or what I did, but I remember the day passed
very slowly.16
With the reality of the events portrayed as out of joint, witnesses turn attention to themselves,
their apparatuses for sense making, and write of the reality of their own senses as thrown into
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
237
doubt. According to accounts, it is as though a shift in perception of the flow of time takes place
in order to attempt to cope with the shift in the environment:
It took a few seconds for my ears to catch up with my eyes. Then I heard the voice on the
TV saying that a plane must have accidentally flown into the building. After that every
thing seemed to move in slow motion for me.17
On the one hand, this temporally disjointed “moment” of 9/11 is articulated as a
significant experience of the arrival of something precise. The event “happened” for many at an
exact locatable time, which is to say when they first watched it or learned of it. On the other
hand, while this instant in time is locatable and known, many individuals reflect on the possible
significance of that happening outside the context of their own personal experience as yet
unknown. In shifting toward an intent and intense level of awareness, the “moment” of the
attacks appears to expand, both temporally (which is to say “really” concerning the experience of
the television coverage) as well as discursively (which is to suggest that, rhetorically, the
experience of this moment has taken on more meaning).
In terms of this second mode of viewing the momentousness of the event is registered in
terms of its immediate historical significance. Often, there is little justification or rationalization
for this feeling; audience members simply “know” that they are watching history in the making:
It hit so close to home, as if it was someone from my family. In a way it was. Still this
day, anytime I read a story or see pictures of that day, the hairs on the back of my neck
stand up. I have tears in my eyes. The emotions are fresh again. I wonder how long it
will take to get over it. Then I realize that I never want to get over, not that I could. I
realized that this was history in the making, and all of us are front row witnesses (my
emphasis).18
A sense of the historical often seems fitting and is a typical manner of expression, especially
when witnesses inform each other of the day’s events. Discourse elaborating on a sense of the
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
238
historical even grows at times given that witnesses attempt to assimilate the singularity of the
event into prior frameworks and this fails. The event, as transcribed, is not “apprehended.” It is
not figured as that which is understood since it is figured instead as an interruption of routine
events that make continuity and comprehension possible. Even while self-described as not fully
knowing or feeling control of the meanings of the events, however, history is still the certain
object of discussion:
I went back to my desk, and called my best friend. I told him “turn the TV up - and stay
on the phone. You're watching history as it happens - tell me what they are showing”.19
In these instances that describe history as unfolding, there is not often a clear division
between what is taking place at a personal level and what is causing it in the larger external
frame. As these references to a moment of history might appear to indicate, history is that which
occurs external to the subject, at the World Trade Center most notably, but nevertheless in a
reality far away. Those in the comfort of their living rooms, accordingly, speak of a shock and
disorientation from this immediate intrusion into their lives. This, however, misses the extent to
which a commentary on a sense of the historical is an elaboration upon one’s subject position as
lived in and a part of history. Witnesses do not write as though events are separate from the
world in which they live. Much to the contrary, their discourse of the historic nature of the
attacks is a set of reflections on the changing nature of the world as it undergoes a “real” (as
perceived and written) transformation. In writing about a historic moment, witnesses describe a
shared shift taking place, something in the external world and something internal to them:
The first thing I did when I got home was watch the news. As I watched the planes hit
the towers on television a rush of everything that had happened to me that day came back
to me. I couldn't get away from the news, no matter how hard I tried. Even just watching
the same thing happen over and over again, I was glued to the TV like never before. I
19
Ibid.
239
wished there was something i could have done to help, and still do. But I also felt
something else, an undescribable feeling, at being a part of history (my emphasis).20
The “something else” in addition to the personal sense of intrigue, intensity, and an
otherwise set of peculiar sensations accompanying the revelations of the attacks of that day, is
something indescribable according to the spectator. Rather than something intensional (inward)
and indexical of a mental state, this “indescribable” sense of history is portrayed as being caught
up in something much more than just oneself and one’s own perceptions of the event. In fleshing
out species of this feeling, audience members speak to a sense of being caught up in history,
which means becoming part of history through an experience of an interruption in its continuity,
especially through the mere act of watching and observing in mediated form:
This was real; I no longer lived in this ideological world of good and no evil. I saw it
with my own eyes that this can happen in my lifetime, which it did happen. I always had
this naive idea that nothing could happen to me or my country that I was always safe, that
these certain historical things only happened in the past. I was living the tragic part of
history that I never thought I would experience.21
I conclude that the sense of the “historic” as it unfolds is more than just another word for
“magnitude.” The event spoken about both in terms of its recognizable scope and in terms of not
being able to be understood is put forth in a discourse not just of an experience but being in a
moment of time that is real and historical in a way that contrasts with the everyday. The
excessive “reality” of the scene is one that both hits the subject from an external vantage point
but is also one that also alters the groundedness of that excessively reality to become the entire
scene from which the subject now speaks. This is why references to the moment are deployed in
terms that place the spectator inside the scene they witness as opposed to a distance from it. In
this way, witnesses refer to the contextual situation they say to have shifted. Their writings on
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.
240
the exigence of the attacks notes a transformation not just to the scene they know as New York
City, or to the typicality of everyday television watching, but to the temporally continuous
context in which all the things usually transpire. More on the nature of this shift in the rhetorical
situation can be seen in the way witnesses depict a change in the large and significant context of
the “world” and “everything” around them.
A Change in the ‘World’ and ‘Everything’
The most elaborate manifestation of the self-reflexive depiction of a perceptual shift as it
is happening occurs in discourses concerning a change in the “world.” The physical rupture of
the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the actual external environment of the world is curiously spoken
about in terms of a temporal magnitude. While a certain amount of focus is directed toward the
spectacular nature of the images themselves, discourse about the meaningfulness, significance,
and ultimate impact of the event registers along temporal lines. Witnessing “history in the
making,” spectators write of something indescribable yet incredibly present. This sensation is
expressed in terms of history itself. The moment is placed in terms of that which will be written
about in history books. For some, the event of 9/11 marks the largest kind of change possible,
that of an entire world shifting course in a single moment:
I was glued to the tube. I immediately knew what I was seeing was history in the making.
The world I knew along with everyone else had just dramatically changed, forever. I
called my Dad and my sister (my emphasis).22
While utterances that speak to the entire world changing at once and forever might be dismissed
as rhetorical hyperbole, such discourse is intriguing in that it is echoed time and again, both by
subjects speaking in the moment to one another, as well as in reflection years after September 11.
Of that day:
22
Ibid.
241
Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I awoke to find our two of our four dogs had escaped into
the forest surrounding our home... I called my husband in complete despair at work
around 11 am... only to be told, “Margaret turn on the TV, the world has changed
today...” I could not believe my eyes.23
For some, this “shift” is depicted as overwhelming and is situated within a context that is
more interpersonal than political. Life’s daily tasks and mundane problems are reported in detail
but as broken up and overwhelmed. Witnesses struggle to position themselves within this new
moment since it is said to have “forced” a new context has penetrated into the personal realm for
many. Beyond just a feeling of something unique and tragic that might be shared and discussed,
then, witnesses ascribe power to an event affecting the relationship between persons and even
themselves:
I did not know what to do...shock...finally around 12:30pm I left the office to be with my
family. My wife and youngest son were home. When I walked in, I realized that life had
forever changed. My son Kyle 4 1/2 years old had seen the news coverage and was on
the porch recreating the events with his legos and a model airplane...how innocent yet
disturbing. I looked at my wife and decided I would go up to my older son (7 years old)
Matthew's school just to let him know that I was OK (not being sure he would realize that
I no longer worked in the World Trade Center). When I got to the schools office they
asked if I was there to take Matt home, I said “no, I just want to let him know I'm OK”.
They proceeded to call him to the office over the school's intercom...well, that's when my
emotions hit me. They built like a tidal wave and when I saw him I couldn't help but hug
and kiss him as tears fell from my eyes...Yes, the world had changed forever (my
emphasis).24
For others, the “world changing” event of 9/11 is to be found prima facie in a political
register. Like previous moments in history where the world seemed to stop and take note, 9/11 is
noted similarly:
I completely broke down...I was unable to uderstand how someone could hate any one
that much. In fear that my cousin would be in (USA armour division). I then when to
sleep...if you could call it that. That was the worst day of my life and ironicly it is the
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
242
day i remember the most clearly. It was my generations Pearl Harbour/JFK assasination.
That is how i remember the day the world changed.25
Historical comparisons abound, especially to the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the JFK
assassination. Such references are political topoi through which the terrorist attacks of 9/11 are
made sense of:
Everyone knows our world changed that day. Our grandparents had Pearl Harbor, our
parents had the Kennedy Assassination and our generation has 9/11.26
However, while it may be the case that most everyone watching the attacks on 9/11
registers and appreciates the extent to which is an historical event in the making, references to
history may also be read as yet lacking historical discourse, wrestling with the meaning and
significance of the moment but without a solid set of established, post facto conclusions about it.
Historical comparisons are thus less the propositional content of a judgment about 9/11 than a
basis from which to begin speculation, or what Kant would call reflection, about that which is
registering historically and yet seems qualitatively different than any other moment in history:
I cannot really describe the feelings I had. It was patriotic, anger and a sense of
witnessing history. I am 40 yrs old and don’t remember JFK’s death but remember
hearing people say they remember where they were and what they were doing when it
happened. I thought of that right away. I made a mental note to look around and take in
as much of the day as I could.27
The feelings in this text, as in several others, are self-reflexively identified as rather
indescribable, as the first, highlighted line of this fragment supports. This rare combination of
experiencing something historical, becoming increasingly aware of its historical significance to
such an extent that it might in fact change the context through which a political event
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
243
reconfigures the relationships between persons (even down to the level of families themselves),
and, finally, a feeling that there is no clear and presently available discourse with which to mark
the moment – all this is the height of a “world-changing” perception or realization. While this
moment is marked discursively by pointing to it, the discourse describing does not sink its
rhetorical teeth into the thing. A reader of witnesses’ texts discerns their thwarted attempt to
elaborate on something elusive:
Dan Rather was talking to us (I may have changed the channel) with the Towers in the
background when the second plane slammed into the South Tower. Right before our
eyes, our lives changed forever. I just knew, as I'm sure everyone else who was watching
did, that this was something horrible and incomprehensible and it definitely was no
accident. From there I grabbed the phone and called my mother. I knew she didn't know.
I told her what I knew, but then I had to hang up so that I wouldn't miss anything…When
the first Tower began to fall, I was standing in my kitchen and my hand went
immediately to my mouth. I started saying “Oh my God” over and over and over- I
couldn't stop. I continued to watch through pouring tears, and continued to chant my “Oh
my Gods for what seemed an eternity. I couldn't imagine who would want to do this to
“us”… September 11th changed me forever, in more ways than I could ever imagine it
would, and in some ways that I would not like to admit.28
The use of the word “forever” twice here indicates a significance of the moment more
than the actual lasting effects of the attacks. It qualifies the extent to which the person herself
discursively registers a felt shift in the continuity of the self. Beyond imagination and
comprehension, its gravity is undeniable and compelling. Be it the “world” or “forever,” the
utterances signify that which is not just the object of change – the thing or something which has
undergone transformation – but instead the very idea of fundamental and radical change itself.
Another mode of expression through which this sense of radical change occurs is the
figure of “everything:”
When I got back to my desk, I had received an email from my brother in Michigan. It
was very short and to the point. “What the f*ck is this? What's happening? Can you
28
Ibid.
244
believe this?” I wrote him back a message saying “all is ok here. Everything will
change. Talk to you soon” (my emphasis).29
This is an odd juxtaposition. Everything is ok while also totally out of joint. While it is
superficially obvious that the person here mentions that he/she is physically ok while others are
not or will not be, this kind of juxtaposition also describes the strangeness of the scene in terms
of feeling that the attacks can be sensed, understood, comprehended or otherwise made sense of
while also not being understood:
It is becoming hackneyed, but since the attacks it’s true: nothing has changed, yet
everything has changed. It’s one big contradiction. People are more accepting of one
another, more friendly; yet they are also more weary and ready to judge. Hope and
triumph are ever present, but so is fearful anticipation. I don’t even know what to think,
or hope, or even expect anymore. I guess we’ll just see.30
Part of what marks and makes the moment an historical moment as such is not only
witnesses’ testimonial statements on a sense that something unique has occurred, but rather that
what has occurred is in fact something that will be underway for a while. That is to say, the
descriptions of the event figure it as certainly in the present but uncertainly in its rippling through
the future. Its effect is coded in terms of this indeterminate relationship between this immediate
thing that will have a historic, which is to say “will have had” in the future imperfect sense,
impact of a past event. Indeterminately then, though the event may have happened and come to
some sort of finality at the end of the day, the meaning of the event will linger for some time to
come, continuing to defer its ultimate meaning. In other words, witnesses speak to the rhetorical
problem of the exigence as it is unfolding. Realizing that knowledge of the event is
contradictory and non-categorical, testimony speaks to the indeterminacy and construction that
has yet to come. A rift has been opened up such that the possible meanings have been let loose.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid.
245
What kind of fundamental change this might be for a witness who recognizes this problem is
impossible to say. As witnesses write about this perception they speak to and create this very
problem:
It seems almost bizarre if not sacrilegious to come into work today like it is just another
normal day. Paul Harvey said it best this morning. He said, Nothing has changed, yet
everything has changed. As a nation we mourn the loss of life and the horror of the
terrorist attack in New York and Washington. We mourn the deaths on the fourth plane
that was hijacked yet did not get to its target. We wonder how many more planes were
aimed at targets when they were all grounded. As individuals we wonder how this will
change our lives.31
One cannot put a finger upon the type of change that will happen; it is yet to come. There is
present in the writing the sense that it will have shifted the meaning of “everything.”
This reflection upon the significance of this shift as it is experienced manifests itself in an
oft repeated phrase concerning the nature of the “world” now reconsidered. Many reflecting on
the attacks of 9/11 pause to ask the rhetorical question concerning “what kind of world” we
inhabit. The sheer “impossibility” of the attacks occasions an open-ended question to index the
sensation of something entirely new:
I was praying to God, and at the same time screaming at him, “How could you let this
happen? How could you do this to us? How could you let me bring such a beautiful,
wonderful child into a world like this?” I tried to stay calm as I changed her diaper and
got her dressed, all the while my heart is racing. I would look at her beautiful face, her
gummy smile with the two diamond perfect teeth, and my heart was breaking, my soul
felt as if it were being torn out. What kind of a world had I brought her in to?32
Rhetorical questions abound here and help establish the sentiment of disbelief and an
experience of a momentous rift happening, a rift such that the meaning of both the daily
interpersonal world and geopolitical world through which we all relate will all undergo an
unequivocal transformation. Standing in synecdochically for the future, children are in such
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid.
246
testimonies invoked as a figure of innocence that will be lost. They metaphorically represent for
audience members the idea that subjectivity itself will be different.
Only five days old I worried for my son; a child so innocent and pure had just
experienced a horrible tragedy. A tragedy that he could not even understand. I thought to
myself what kind of world did i bring my son into.33
Buildings, symbols, and other innocent persons were thus not the only “entities” under attack on
9/11. The very idea of innocence, a mode of being or way of being a subject, has been attacked
and lost. The sense of a shift in the “world” and “everything” is perhaps a way in which
witnesses begin the process of negotiating anew what it means to be an American subject given
the new possible context of politics and interpersonal relations. In sum, audiences turn to
discourse of 9/11 as a kind of “event” even though the precise nature of its eventfulness remains
unknown. Writing knowingly of that which is unknown, witnesses create the problem of their
own context, opening up a rhetorical space to negotiate what kind of context they now are part
of. This negotiation is a reflection on the exigence, their relationship to it, and results in a
possibly new context in which they now must reimagine themselves and their situation.
Critics Define the Event of 9/11
From a cursory glance at witness reactions to the attacks on the day of September 11,
2001, and in much of the commentary in the weeks thereafter, one can readily say that there was
talk of a “major event” taking place. We have just seen how news commentators, politicians,
historians, and witnesses themselves have all used this term. Reception and talk of the “event”
of 9/11 was not only common in America, it was worldwide:
Most Americans were certain that the world had changed and that life as we had known it
was gone forever. A common refrain in the media declared that America “will never be
the same again.” In December, two months after the attack and with the war in
Afghanistan underway, a survey was taken of “275 opinion makers in 24 countries” on
33
Ibid.
247
several questions, the first of which was: “Has the terrorist attack in the United States and
subsequent war opened up a new chapter in world history or do you think this will not
turn out to be such a significant event.?” The response of Americans and Europeans was
in the high seventy percent affirming that America had entered “a new chapter in history”
and even higher for Latin Americans, Islamic, and people living in the Mid East conflict
areas.34
In previous chapters, we read critical theorists such as Baudrillard (“the mother of all
events”) and Zizek (the “spectacular effect” from “a passion for the real”) on this proposition. In
the weeks right after the attacks, Jacques Derrida too spoke of the attacks creating the impression
of a “major event.”35 I trace briefly in this section a standard, heuristic definition of an
ontological event and how many critics, especially French critics, agree that the attacks of
September 11 presented us with a primary example of one. However, not wishing to dwell in
such a perspective or explain the eventness of the attacks from such an external, object-oriented
approach, I define this perspective only to contrast my own position that events may be
approached and defined rhetorically, which entails analyzing witnesses’ linguistic phrasing and
naming of the event. Ultimately, I work toward the conclusion that encountering an exigence
without conceptual vocabulary to name and categorize it whilst struggling to find a unique,
fitting idiom for it is itself is a dynamic subjective orientation toward an exigence and a
rhetorical event. One can use the linguistic and conceptual frameworks that are a prominent part
34
John Patrick Diggins, “What Begins in Religion Ends in Politics.” Society 41, no. 1
(Nov/Dec 2003): 29. Note in this passage the work is being done by the very ld trope, deriving
ultimately from the Christian Book of Revelations, about history as a book with various
chapters--and presumably an end. That trope already exhibits a degree of sense making that is
more characteristic of official and semi-official public rhetoric than of the fragments we are
commenting on.
35
Derrida says “It cannot be denied, as an empiricist of the eighteenth century would
quite literally say, that there was an “impression” there, and the impression of what you call in
English… a ‘major event.’” See Jacques Derrida, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues
with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 88.
248
of philosophical writing as clues to rhetorical transactions without ontological commitment to the
objects named by those frameworks.
There are two reasons to talk generally about an event. One can spell out a philosophy of
events (that things in the world are “evental”) or define how any one particular event comes to be
an event. I am more interested in the latter. With respect to the first, definitional point, one
should note that a philosophy of events finds meaningfulness in its distinction from a philosophy
of substances. Lyotard’s contrast to Aristotle helps clarify this (I take up Lyotard later in the
text).36 Aristotelian substantialism is well documented and is traced back to his Metaphysics and
Categories.37 In such a world, things appear in “types” or “kinds.” “Types” behave regularly
and predictably and anything falling outside the framework explained by “kinds of things” is said
to happen “by accident.” Boiling down far too much complexity for a thorough treatment, one
can say that primary substances, objects, have secondary substances, “accidents.” But just as
accidents can be seen as stagnant qualia (color, texture, solidity, etc), they can also be regarded
as “happenings.” The word for predicates in Greek, and by extension the act of predication,
symbêkêkota, can be translated as “what happens.”38 And as changes in objects throughout time
can be anchored as part of the essential nature in substances, so too can they be seen as
happenings. A philosophy of events in contrast to substantialism is a way to theorize pervasive
change. In this case, a change in accidents is so prominent that it can call into question the very
36
For an in depth analysis of this contrast see Depew, David. “Lyotard’s
Augustine.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the NCA 94th Annual Convention, San
Diego, CA, 2013-05-06 <http://citation.allacademic.com/meta/p258308_index.html>
37
See Aristotle's Metaphysics. Ed. W.D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953. Also,
Categories and De Interpretatione, translation and notes, J. Ackrill, Clarendon Aristotle Series,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.
38
Depew, “Lyotard’s Augustine,” op cit.
249
idea of substance. As Alain Badiou, one of the most prominent theorists of event philosophy,
notes of the central tenet compelling his work, it is the “simple, powerful idea that any existence
can one day be transfigured by what happens to it, and can commit itself from then on to what
holds for all.”39 For Aristotle, substances essentially remain throughout events. For Badiou,
events change the essence of substances.
In terms of the latter idea regarding the explication of a singular event, that is, how such
events happen or come to be, theorists of the event are helpful in making categories clear.
Events are said to have characteristics and “stages.” Though many disagree about the exact
nature of these characteristics, there are at least three that comprise any so-called “event.” They
are (1) a surprise happening, (2) a difficulty in speaking or representing that happening, and (3) a
change in the situation or context in which the event took place, with the possible entailment of a
reorganization of the landscape of time, past, present and future. Events are significant not just
because they happen and effect substances potentially. They affect, indeed thoroughly
reorganize, discourse, representation, and context.
Both philosophers and rhetoricians turn to events, then, because events present us with
the unique situation of a subject faced with his or her own inability to grasp and represent the
meaning of an occurrence – a fact obscurely, spontaneously, and unreflectively indicated by the
use of this very term in our archive of self-proclaimed witness fragments.40 Something happens
39
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul et la fondation de l'universalisme, (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1997). Trans. Ray Brassier as Saint Paul: The Foundation of
Universalism, (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 70.
40
This approach to “events” as those occurrences that mystify and defy description
stands in stark contrast to approaches by modern analytical philosophers seeking to understand
everyday events in terms of “common sense” or “ordinary language” philosophy. In such
instances, typical problems of predicating actions are analyzed; the problem of events here would
concern how to qualify everyday actions – giving birth, running, hammering, etc. – in terms of a
philosophical language of substances, properties, and (causal) relations, or at least of Humean
250
such that it is neither immediately recognizable nor describable. To parse it more distinctly,
there are two immediate and consecutive “stages” to an event. At first, the “something” of the
“something happens” is an unexpected arrival of a feeling or “sensation.”41 In this sense,
Derrida notes that an event implies “surprise, exposure, the unanticipatable.”42 That which was
not thought possible suddenly arises. This sensation registers in experience as a significant
rupture in the usual terrain of the experience. Derrida notes further: “The event’s eventfulness
depends on this experience of the impossible. What comes to pass, as an event, can only come to
pass if it’s impossible. If it’s possible, if it’s foreseeable, then it doesn’t come to pass.”43
Second, there is the impossibility of adequately describing such event fully in order to
represent it to oneself or another.44 Lyotard summarizes it as such: An event is “this immediate
occurrence of the thing beyond the powers of representation…”45 Interestingly, then, “events”
surface out of an “ability” to experience them and recognize them as such but an inability to
render them and flesh them out fully. Though something relatively “recognizable” may happen
regularities. See Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1980).
41
I am using “sense” here in a general way to refer to the immediacy of feeling as
opposed to conscious reflection. In this manner, I mean to suggest that the feeling of an intensity
of sensation is what is present during an event. “Thought” may occur reflectively as in
recollection or speculation. However, in the immediacy of an event, a “thought” may refer to a
feeling that feels itself… such as the aesthetic experience of beauty or sublimity.
42
Jacques Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” Critical
Inquiry, 33 (2007): 441.
43
Ibid., 441.
44
Jonathan Bennett, Events and Their Names, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
45
James Williams, Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy, (Cambridge: Polity
press, 1998), 22.
251
as an event– the experience of a work of art, the shock of a new political revolution, a religious
conversion like St. Paul’s– its occurrence is necessarily difficult to put into language in order to
express its full quality. The obvious reason is that the past is no guide to the future, as it is in
substantialist discourses. Analytically, the experience is present yet ambiguous. In its
expression, an event is this ambiguity without adequate expression.
Third, event ontologists sometimes make the additional (but I argue unnecessary) claim
that events sometimes make real transformations in subjects and the world. Badiou explains how
“truths” of the world are produced by real “encounters” between a subject and a happening.
Fundamentally, Badiou agrees with Lacan: “All access to the real is of the order of an
encounter.”46 Badiou wishes to explain how truths come from real encounters, how something
new and real is produced in and through an event, as well as also how an encounter is primary
for any possibility of change in the world of object or subjects:
Something must happen, in order for there to be something new. Even in our personal
lives, there must be an encounter, there must be something which cannot be calculated,
predicted or managed, there must be a break based only on chance.47
An encounter is a primordial kind of event for Badiou. An event exists because it, by
pure chance – the accidental – and arguably “impossibly” according to the logic of radically
contingent events seen here, disrupts the structure that grounds our context or situation. For
Badiou at least, an event is “purely haphazard [hasardeux], and cannot be inferred from the
situation.”48 A situation is a structure that provides regulation, routine, and continuity – of the
46
Badiou, Alain. Ethics; An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Transl. by Peter
Hallward. New York: Verso, 2000, p 47.
47
Badiou, Alain and Hallward, Peter. “Philosophy and Politics: an interview with Alain
Badiou.” Angelaki 3.3 (December 1998): 124.
48
Badiou, Alain. Being and event. Trans. Oliver Feltham London New York: Continuum,
2007, 215.
252
sort assumed by substance ontologists and of the sort supposed by those working within the idea
of the rhetorical situation. Only through an event is fundamental change possible then;
accordingly, it must be the result not of a situation, but of that which appears external to or
ingresses into the given situation:
It is its evental origin that ensures that true innovation is indeed a kind of creation ex
nihilo, a chance to begin again from scratch, to interrupt the order of continuity and
inevitability. For what is encountered through an event is precisely the void of the
situation, that aspect of the situation that has absolutely no interest in preserving the
status quo as such. The event reveals ‘the inadmissible empty point in which nothing is
presented’49 and this is why every event indicates, in principle, a pure beginning, the
inaugural or uncountable zero of a new time (a new calendar, a new order of history) [my
emphasis]50
Events, according to Badiou, make new subjects, new histories, and new meanings of
events themselves possible. Events do all the work. However, in the case of a rhetorical study
on vernacular language describing the attacks of 9/11, one can make no commitment to saying
that the episode as witnesses was itself an event in the strong ontological sense of being an event.
I note only that witnesses’ language choices overlap with the language of event ontology in
terms of a depiction of an event “changing the world” and insist that this range of locutions is
significant. While I do not agree with Badiou that all events, if real encounters, are absolutely
determining – such a position evacuates all agency of subjects and capacities of language to form
and shape events, resonating with the “primordial” views of Being and Truth as prior to
humanity that led Heidegger to become the original 20th century event ontologist51 – I do
49
Ibid., 227
50
Hallward, 114-115.
51
Heidegger offers a robust and complex theory of “event.” He uses the word “Ereignis”
to discuss happenings, which for English readers is most often translated and interpreted as
“event” or “coming into view.” I am not concerned with Heidegger’s work on events, since he
works specifically with the opposite problem I am interested in – the “primordial” or “preontological” ways in which being and the event of Being is always already being understood by
253
privilege Badiou’s language of events as distinct from situations. At face value, then, one could
read Badiou and very easily conclude that 9/11 was an event that made a new time or new
history possible – a “post 9/11” political timeframe, for example. One could also say that the
attacks caused people to see the world differently and that they now live, like they say, in “a
different world.” One could claim, in effect, that 9/11 changed the very make up of the world.
However, these are not my claims. Consistent with the lines of argument in other chapters, I do
not argue that the event of 9/11 caused a shift in politics, subjectivity, or the world. The event,
whatever kind of event it is – historical, political, theological, sublime, traumatic, mediated, etc.
– is not determining. It is also not consummate and extra rhetorical, which is to say discretely its
own separate entity entirely other than subjects’ discursive encounter with it. Neither is it
completely “finished” such that there is no need to talk about it any more. Regardless, 9/11 is
not the sole cause of all effectual changes catalogued in subjects and contexts. Life goes on; so
does talk about it. The first doesn’t determine the second.
Instead, the naming of the event is the event of September 11. It is, for witnesses, a
“major” event not because it happened and changed “everything” as a result, but because it is
identified as evental. The rhetorical line – ‘everything changed’ – is an articulation of the event
that becomes evental. The act of phrasing, parsing out of fitting terms, letting loose and sorting
through contradictions in expressions – these acts are the materiality of an encounter with the
the pre-existing relationship of human being to Being. In other words, while Heidegger struggles
conceptually with how understanding is always made possible and comes into view through
events, I am interested in rhetorical cases where “events” are depicted as those happenings which
are not understood. For a contemporary look at Heidegger’s work on Ereignis, see Contributions
to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999); re-translated as Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event),
trans. by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2012).
254
exigence that make it count as evental. In simpler terms, the event of 9/11 is inherently
relational. Discourse, manufacturing the relationship of the subject to the event, produces a
sense of the historical more than history, as a supposed extra-rhetorical event, produces the
historical.52
Naming as a Rhetorical and Evental Act
The uniqueness of 9/11 is that it is presented by witnesses through discourse as a new
genre of thing. It is considered an “event” since it is depicted as an altogether different kind of
occurrence, even perhaps changing the conceptual yardstick by which to measure other events.
In a well known interview only a few months after 9/11, Derrida read the event in light of the
surrounding discourses and claimed: “Well beyond the United States, the whole world feels
obscurely affected by a transgression that is not only presented as a transgression without
precedent in history… but as a transgression of a new type.”53 This event is presented as a
“major event,” more evental than just any ordinary political problem, tragedy, or disaster.
Witness testimony corroborates this claim. As we have already seen, witnesses speak to a sense
of history itself rupturing, the world changing, innocence being wrenched away.
A sense of the unnameable permeates witnesses’ discourse but also important are failed
categorizations and comparisons. 9/11 did not, in fact, settle cleanly into a discourse of ‘crime’
over time. Nor do people commonly refer to the attacks today simply as ‘mass murder.’ As
witnesses reveal to us, ‘war’ is far more typical, but an egregious act of war the likes of which
have never been seen. Echoing the New York Times and paraphrasing several witnesses, the
52
I am referencing two different senses of history best expressed in German: the
difference between history as the entire landscape of events or historicity, Geschichtlicheit, and
Geschichte, a particular instance of that which counts or happens within history that becomes
historical (geschichtlich).
53
Ibid., 94.
255
attacks were deemed ‘impossible,’ ‘unimaginable,’ unthinkable.’ Specifically, lines of discourse
attempting to shift this sentiment toward historical comparisons and real contexts did not cohere
for the American public audience en masse.
The disanalogy to ‘Pearl Harbor’ serves as a good example. Witnesses often see a
similarity between the 9/11 attacks and the attacks at Pearl Harbor at first. Discursively, one
uses them as a marker to divide time periods or one previous era from the next. These are two
very sizable events comprising an external enemy from completing a surprise attack on
Americans on U.S. soil. At times, witnesses also casually mention Pearl Harbor to make other
tangential points. The historical event, in other words, appears as well known even if not
experienced at the time of its occurrence. However, the analogy is sometimes entertained and
then dismissed outright:
People have compared this to the event of the JFK assassination on the previous
generations, or the events of Pearl Harbor. How could this be. Pearl Harbor was an
attack on our military base. September 11th was an attack on the innocence, honor,
FREEDOM of America.54
Whereas Pearl Harbor took place in the context of military attacks, those of 9/11, we are told,
happened in the context of its surrounding civic innocence.
While both are American, witnesses position Pearl Harbor as not only temporally distant
but geographically distinct. As an act of terrorism beyond a surprise military attack, the World
Trade Center attacks are qualified as more “present.” They “hit” members of the viewing
audience in their closeness in a way that Pearl Harbor did not:
We all became more vulnerable that day, and we learned a thing about fear. Americans
have always been sheltered from that. Terrorism had always been a thing which
happened somewhere else. Even the attack on Pearl Harbor was something which
happened somewhere else. Somehow, even the bombing in Oklahoma City did not truly
54
“The September 11 Archive,” op cit, 2011.
256
wake us up. Suddenly, we felt a raw and open vulnerability which had never been there,
before.55
In fact, this testimony and others suggests a sense in which the attacks of 9/11 find their
significance in a disanalogy to almost all other events. The uniqueness of the event is described
as evental in magnitude in the attempt to register it as above and beyond anything else. Even
reporters well versed in a continuity of international terrorist events and historical episodes
struggled to make sense of the attacks by way of an analogy to Pearl Harbor. Tom Brokaw,
compelled by the mythology of WWII’s “greatest generation” he himself peddles, put it as such:
Obviously, Pearl Harbor, which triggered World War II was a horrific event as well, but
there has never been an event to match the magnitude of this one in which everything has
been shut down in terms of air traffic, the national capital has been immobilized, the
White House, State Department, Pentagon has been attacked, the financial markets have
been shut down, there is an untold loss of life here in Manhattan, the nerve center of
America, say nothing of what’s going on at the Pentagon.56
The Pearl Harbor analogy became a touchstone that day and in the weeks to come.57 It
helped to connote both the element of surprise and the magnitude of devastation. Yet the
immediate distancing from a full parallel suggests something qualitatively different about the
terrorist attacks that could not be articulated. Reporters and pundits lingered in this ambiguous
space of speculation. Repeatedly, Brokaw dwelt in this discourse of significance and
pontificated about the grave consequences for the attack:
Twenty-four hundred people were killed when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor 60
years ago this year. This attack on America, this terrorist war on America, could be more
consequential in terms of lives lost. And it could be, as well, consequential in other ways
55
Ibid.
56
NBC News, “NBC News Special Report: Attack on America,” September 11, 2001
Tuesday, (10:00 AM ET) Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, Tom Brokaw reporting.
57
For a comparative reading of reactions to Pearl Harbor and the events of September 11,
see Geoffrey M. White, “National Subjects: September 11 and Pearl Harbor,” American
Ethnologist 31, no. 3 (2004): 293-310.
257
in terms of getting this country involved around the world. Pearl Harbor, of course,
triggered World War II, one of the epic events in the history of mankind. This is not
expected to do just that, but it will change this country in--in so many ways.58
‘Pearl Harbor’ is here a discursive touchstone for making historical comparisons to the oncoming
context of war, but it also serves as a launching point of an indeterminate context yet to come. In
other words, Pearl Harbor is a way to begin statements based on a disanalogy to that which
remains unknown and seemingly impossible to contextualize. It is significant that denying the
analogy correlates with speaking of 9/11 as an event.
Like ‘history’ itself seemingly ruptured in descriptions of the attacks, the problem of
analogizing ‘Pearl Harbor’ demonstrates a specific way in which descriptive phrasing is not only
a problem but judgment and orientation language are as well. Contextualization through
categorization of the attacks as similar to ‘Pearl Harbor,’ the ‘JFK assassination,’ or any other
prior event does not appear to hold sway. It is evident that witnesses struggle to name the event.
From their testimony, it is clear that the attacks, even if not understood categorically and unique
as a singularity, still count as an “event.” I turn next to what this means rhetorically for phrases
that name, that point to something significant, yet have no clear meaning.
“Naming” an event points to a role for rhetoric. In discursive contexts in which audience
members actively work through naming and calling an event into being, an event is experienced
and identified contingently. It does not fall automatically under a recognized topos in which the
act of naming is merely a “thoughtless” act of cataloguing. Critics elucidate what subjects do in
naming, what kind of act they perform, by addressing directly the issue of naming or “saying the
event.” In “saying the event,” one may see the inherent paradox of expressing an event at all.
Beyond the inability to name the event, a notion of the limitation of the subject, contemporary
58
NBC News, “NBC News Special Report: Attack on America,” September 11, 2001
Tuesday, (10:00 PM ET) Tom Brokaw reporting.
258
theorists note of events that they mark a separation or gulf between phenomena and its
articulation. Lyotard makes this point: “In sum, there are events: something happens which is
not tautological with what has happened.”59 The “what” of what has happened cannot fully
signify that something has happened. Derrida further elaborates on what it means for someone
to speak under these conditions, what it means to “say the event” and fail to reach the intensity of
what is presented:
Saying the event is saying what is, saying things as they present themselves, historical
events as they take place, and this is a question of information. As you’ve suggested,
even demonstrated, this saying of the event as a statement of knowledge or information, a
sort of cognitive saying of description, this saying of the event is always somewhat
problematical because the structure of saying is such that it always comes after the event.
Secondly, because as saying and hence as structure of language, it is bound to a measure
of generality, iterability, and repeatability, it always misses the singularity of the event.
One of the characteristics of the event is that not only does it come about as something
unforeseeable, not only does it disrupt the ordinary course of history, but it is also
absolutely singular. On the contrary, the saying of the event or the saying of knowledge
regarding the event lacks, in a certain manner a priori, the event’s singularity simply
because it comes after and it loses the singularity in generality.60
When confined to the level of generality and the repeatable category of which every word is an
instance, “saying the event” is embedded necessarily and problematically in the generic problem
of meaning making. Words are inherently general. This is a general situational context in which
language has meaning. In situational contexts, a specific phrase, if it means well, misses not only
the singularity of the event (in general), it also fails to animate the intensity of the event as
specifically experienced by someone. The disconnect between event and saying is thus logical
and intuitive at the same time sensible and sense-able.
While Derrida and Lyotard both appear to circumscribe the powers of “saying the event,”
they both provide a counterexample very relevant to our self-proclaimed witnesses’ testimony. It
59
Ibid., 79.
60
Derrida, “A Certain Impossible…” 446.
259
concerns the case of evental speech and writing itself. Language, in its active capacity to shape
the meaning of event, might very well fail to live up the original presentation, or the “thatness,”
of any event itself. However, while some representations of events succumb to the generic way
in which they usually make sense, some reiterations say something unique, idiosyncratic, and
singular in meaning. In so doing, singular acts of discursive presentation can change the way a
reader makes sense of an entire kind of thing. In simpler terms, phrases can make common sense
of unique events and fail to capture their intensity, or phrases can bewilder and amaze like the
events they speak to, even if they amaze in a different way than the event itself. In this way,
Lyotard teaches us that phrases can offer themselves up as a “saying of the event,” which is itself
a kind of event that also defies the logic of a situation:
The phrase occurs and brings forth a presentation, but the presentation can only be
grasped when it is situated by a further sentence. This later situation can never grasp the
full potential of the initial presentation. It narrows the presentation down to a more
specific situation and eliminates many of the possibilities brought forth in the
presentation of the initial phrase. This is why phrases are events in Lyotard’s sense: they
cannot be fully understood or represented because any understanding or representation of
the phrase is a situation of its initial presentation. The situation reduces or limits the
potential of the initial presentation.61
Lyotard’s argument helps us to see failed presentation as a kind of success. It is here that
witnesses’ “failed” presentations of the “event” of 9/11 give us so much more meaning even
though it falls short of full representation. If witnesses’ phrases are themselves the event, one
begins to read them as exceeding the logic of a situation to contextualize them. I return to this
point in the conclusion of this chapter and in the conclusion of the dissertation.
While phrases about the attacks of 9/11 are admittedly confused (they describe something
historical, eventful, meaningful yet ‘unspeakable’), what a reader does with this confusion is
61
Williams, Lyotard, 76.
260
often an attempt to make sense of it. One readily finds, for example, critical rhetorical work on
figuring the meaning of the Pearl Harbor analogy. Brian Conner, for example, argues that:
…three meanings arose out of the narratives on 9/11, on the basis of the narrative genres
of romance, tragedy, and irony. These three meanings, which respectively emphasize
eventual triumph, the sadness and loss of the attacks, and a critical examination of the US
government, arose as a result of the narratives and metanarratives in which the analogy
between 9/11 and Pearl Harbor was employed.62
Conner is not incorrect in his own terms. “Genre” is a situational approach to meaning making
and can be used to contain and interpret phrases (like me, he reads witness testimony pulled
directly from “The September 11 Digital Archive”). In distinction to his approach and reading,
however, Lyotard suggests how witnesses’ phrases can themselves be the search for a new
idiomatic expression and can even create a new context in which to find themselves.
Lyotard’s point, with which I agree, is hard to prove since it is more a question of
perspectival approach. Meaning making is something that rhetors, audience members, and
critics all do. There is nothing wrong or misguided about this endeavor. But to place witnesses’
phrases and statements back into a context in which they can be understood (seemingly against
the very logic of witnesses’ perplexed statements themselves) is an act of appropriation, a
reading strategy. This strategic operation of grouping iterations to filter through a general
context (genre, analogy, trauma, etc.) reads continuity over interruption. While it is not
fallacious, it succeeds necessarily at the price of omitting another reading of the impossibility of
phrases to fit within contextual parameters. From the critic’s perspective, closing this
impossibility allows interpretive work to begin. The sacrifice, though, lies in a refusal to leave
open an encounter with what is not known, and remains unknown, unappropriable, about the
event. This opening is what makes naming the event so difficult and “eventful.”
62
Connor, Brian T. “Civil Society A New Pearl Harbor? Analogies, Narratives, and
Meanings of 9/11 in Civil Society” Cultural Sociology 6: 1, 2012 3-25. P4.
261
Simon Wortham, a Derridean who privileges the act of writing, explains how events can
be made contextual but at the cost of foreclosing the kind of “world changing” possibility
contained in events themselves. He states that seeing an event outside of the usual state of affairs
of routine occurrences:
…doesn’t simply place the event forever outside the ‘world’ which we inhabit, a ‘world’
in and of which we speak, the ‘world’ where we ‘act’ and ‘know’. Instead it is precisely
what is unappropriable in the event… that in fact charges it with world opening force.
This is one reason why ‘9/11’ leaves the impression of a major event.63
Is the event of September 11, then, just this impression? Is it an unspeakable, unknown
affective state beyond what words can describe such that it changes us? No. To say this would
be, once again, to privilege the entirety of the event as cause and (lack of) speech, or change in
the real world, as effect. The story is more complex than this. Events do not just supersede
meanings that might circumscribe them but can only count as events if one writes of the
fragmentation or rupture in the very relationship of phenomena to meaning. In a rhetorical
vocabulary, an event is the articulation of the disturbance, destabilization, or disruption of a
“context” in which it would otherwise be routinely understood. This privileges the text of the
event written about as an event. The text of an event, that which is put into discourse about the
event, initiates a rhetorical negotiation of a phrase to the event. As such, the “event” is rendered
meaningful in its destabilization and possible reorientation of the previously existing relationship
between text and context. Accordingly, one does not read the psychological state of the subject
to see how he or she has been altered or reconfigured. Neither does one have to read the changes
in the actual environment or world, as Michael Hyde does phenomenologically. He states “The
rhetorical landscape of 9/11 came into being as soon as the planes struck the towers of the World
63
Simon Morgan Wortham, Derrida: Writing Events, (New York, Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2008), 4.
262
Trade Center.”64 All at once, Hyde says, this landscape presents itself as “terrifying,”
“awesome,” “symbolic,” “epideictic,” and as a “spectacle.”65 But in saying this Hyde is having a
moment, a writing event, with the “text” of the attacks as he writes about them. He has them
take place in a context that is also up for negotiation. Were he to stay in this mode, he would be
producing text that speaks to the context of 9/11 through its significance while not making it
abundantly clear. Text and context would be in productive tension, possibly fragmented and
unresolved, but itself now a new text to explore. As it stands, Hyde collapses this kind of talk
into the rhetor as hero to solve this problem of fluctuating meanings for us.
Writing about the event indeterminately is the act that begins the task of exploring a new
alignment of text and context. Wortham notes:
…the event – precisely in order to be worthy of its name – implies an irreplaceable and
unmasterable singularity, a pure idiomaticity (strictly speaking, beyond even the idiom)
that evades its own appropriation by any given language, discourse or context, and which
therefore dislocates the interpretive horizon on which it is hoped or expected to appear.66
In the context of struggling with this problem, operating in this space of figuring that which
cannot be figured and appears to escape a discourse to render it fully, one encounters the
problem of contextualization. To write about an event, described as an event, to do justice to its
singularity yet explain its necessarily generalizable meaning, is to run up against the problem of
meaning itself. Some critics solve this problem by turning to general states of meaning. Genre
is a likely suspect and is in fact used in the case of Conner’s reading the September 11 archive
regarding Pearl Harbor analogies. In other rare moments, such as Hyde’s, a critic writes almost
64
Hyde, “The Rhetor as Hero,” 4-5.
65
Ibid, 4-5.
66
Simon Morgan Wortham, Derrida: Writing Events, (New York, Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2008), 4.
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in disarray producing something other than clear expression, and perhaps, if lucky, more than
meaningfulness. This “more than meaningfulness” is, I argue, a possible instantiation of
realigning text and context. Phrases might not “succeed” at accomplishing this simply by
speaking to the uniqueness of 9/11 in distinction to Pearl Harbor, for example. Yet, one can see
this attempt as what comprises the event-ful status of 9/11. Expressing oneself, one’s problems
of understanding through a language that too readily admits of ordinary context in which it is
deployed, is eventful in separating from it, using language in a new idiomatic expression or
toward a different end. This is the case “since the archiving of the event in precisely its
impossible transaction with the event is itself… something of an event.”67
A powerful example for the case of the 9/11 attacks is given by a professor of writing,
Richard Powers, whose encounter with 9/11 construed as an event consists of his expression of
the limitations of writing through the act of writing. He and his class are in ruins. The context of
the classroom itself has changed. It is no longer a class that he is running. It’s something else.
But it’s not “like” a wake. It is one. Adeptly, he concludes his piece on the failure of analogies:
The final lesson of my writing class came too soon. There are no words. But there are
only words. To say what the inconceivable resembles is all that we have by way of
learning how it might be outlived. No comparison can say what happened to us. But we
can start with the ruins of our similes, and let ‘like’ move us toward something larger,
some understanding of what ‘is.’68
Having shown how writing of the event of 9/11 can be considered itself the event of 9/11– or
more properly, the written evental encounter – of the attacks, I explore in the final section of this
chapter in more depth and detail the implications of an evental encounter for the idea of the
rhetorical situation. Whereas the rhetorical situation is a model of meaning making in which to
67
68
Ibid., 5.
Powers, Richard “The Way We Live Now: 9-23-01: Close Reading: Elements of
Tragedy; The Simile.” New York Times Magazine, September 23, 2001.
264
place events that are either extra-rhetorical imperfections that demand address or rhetorically
fabricated exigencies, events as phrases mark the limit case of the very idea of the rhetorical
situation model.
Events and the Rhetorical Situation
As critics attempt to “repair” context and read the event, so too do audience members.
By inserting themselves as witnesses of the event with representations of their reactions, they
attempt to figure the newness of the event by speaking to what has shifted in them or beyond
them, or to what kind of world the event might entail. As rhetors create context by tying the
exigence to a history of other events or topoi so too do audience members create context by
imagining the exigence in relation or distinction to the landscape of other known events, as we
have seen. If audiences themselves create contexts in the way that critics and rhetors do,
however, the audience may be read as itself a unique fluctuating “text.” An audience in the
midst of generating its own context provides the occasion to theorize its own unique rhetorical
situation. This kind of “situation” challenges the traditional model of the rhetorical situation by
demonstrating that in a few rare instances, such as this paradigmatic case of 9/11, witnesses’
discourses that “encounter” the exigence leave open the meaning of the exigence, suspending it
between a purely extra rhetorical event and a rhetorically manufactured event.
Realizations of this sort are not lost on insightful practitioners of rhetorical criticism.
Leah Ceccarelli offers the notion of “receptional fragments” in order to incorporate the
experiences and discourses of audiences into the reading of a rhetorical text.69 In this sense,
context is broadened to include thematic lines of discourse produced and circulated by the
69
Leah Ceccarelli, “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 410.
265
audience as crucial to understanding the meaning of the text. If President Bush delivers an
address on the attacks of 9/11, a critic may count as important to the surrounding context the
small textual fragments of audience members’ reactions (such as a quote obtained from an
everyday citizen when interviewed by a reporter and printed in a newspaper, or a simple
statement made through Twitter). Michael Leff sees the use of receptional fragments as a
significant contribution to the art of rhetorical criticism noting that it reimagines context as not
that which is discovered but itself the artistic production of a critic. In Leff’s words, “contexts
themselves are, at least to some extent, rhetorical and interpretive constructs and thus the
text/context relationship emerges as mobile and negotiable.”70
The negotiation of the text/context relationship has been traditionally conceived as an
artistic practice. Derrida reminds us that “A context is never absolutely determinable.”71
Meaning can never be fully saturated and found through a scientific application of context, that
which would determine the meaning of any text fully as the determining variable. He explains in
more detail:
To treat context as a factor from which one can abstract for the sake of refining one’s
analysis, is to commit oneself to a description that cannot but miss the very contents and
object it claims to isolate, for they are intrinsically determined by context. The method
itself, as well as considerations of clarity should have excluded such an abstraction.
Context is always, and always has been, at work within the place, and not only around
it.72
Critics must always interpret or otherwise construct a context. A context, like a situation,
is never what is simply given, but must, like the text, be read. Rhetorical scholars embrace this
70
Michael Leff, “Lincoln at Cooper Union: Neo-Classical Criticism Revisited,” Western
Journal of Communication 65, no. 3 (2001): 246.
71
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, Trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1988), p 3.
72
Ibid., 60.
266
point yet very often still strive to establish a context as that which explains, which is to say
determines the meaning of, a text. Even Michael McGee, who wrote of the text as the
fragmentation of context, did so with an eye toward a revision of context in order to see texts
more clearly. His task was to reimagine the ways in which discourse may be read in order to
“explore the sense in which ‘texts’ have disappeared altogether, leaving us with nothing but
discursive fragments of context.”73 The pluralistic, which is to say non-exclusive, point of the
analysis, however, is to render the text more sensible: “The elements of ‘context’ are so
important to the ‘text’ that one cannot discover, or even discuss, the meaning of ‘text’ without
reference to them.”74 McGee was deeply concerned with the way in which culture writ large was
becoming a series of fragments. For him, such a condition was “our” context – a rather
objectivist undermining of his own point.75
What are we to do, however, with texts that speak, sometimes clearly but often in brief,
discombobulated, fragmented fashion, about a fragmenting moment? What do we make of
discourse that constructs a text about the lack of context itself? I suggest, in arguing for the
inclusion of receptional fragments, that an archive en toto should not become just another set of
discourses provoking a critic to repair the surrounding context in order to see the “formation of
the text.”76 Rather, discourses from the archive of September 11, especially concerning the
‘impossible’ nature of this novel, ‘historic,’ ‘world changing’ event with it exceptionally large
73
Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context and the Fragmentation of Contemporary
Culture,” Western Journal of Speech Communication, 54 (Summer 1990): 287.
74
Ibid., 283.
75
Ibid., 287.
76
Ibid., 287.
267
magnitude and ‘unspeakable’ effects, can themselves be sutured together to create a novel
context. These texts concerning the fragmenting of the event, its breaking off and appearing as
other than a routine state of affairs, generates a way of seeing the context of 9/11 as the
encounter of this interruption of typical context. In other words, the context of witnesses’
discourse on 9/11 is that meaning is a problem, that contextualization is a problem that is not
separable from characterizing 9/11 as an event. This does not entail that the duty of the critic is
to fix this problem of meaninglessness, though most of them – virtually all of them in fact – try
to do so in virtue of their subject position as critic. If anything, squaring discourses into genres
and topoi in order to make them make more sense risks manufacturing specific meanings of the
exigence (“it was like Pearl Harbor”) to the detriment of those who speak of it otherwise.
McGee is insightful, then, in demonstrating how reading the larger social context in
which the operation of rhetorical criticism takes place, shows how specific fragments may do
very different kinds of work and have multiple relationships to contexts that are themselves quite
multiple. But the event of 9/11, or instead the expression of it as an event by audiences, does
something more than make it a fragment for interpretation back into a large social order in which
it can be understood “better.” If the task of the rhetorical critic is to suture together fragments, or
fragment to context, in the aim of understanding the event, the critic does an injustice to the very
idea of the fragment as that which resists this operation of meaning making:
Understanding the fragment would mean: giving it meaning. The fragment has meaning
when it can be brought into a context within which it fulfills a task. But the fragment is
what it is precisely because there is no context for it. No whole can accommodate it. The
breaking point of the fragment is the edge of meaning. Thus the fragment seems to be
hostile to meaning and resists understanding. All the attempts to explain it turn it into
something it is not and end up in contradiction with their own aim. To the extent that they
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succeed, they disavow the fragmentariness of the fragment and treat it as a whole or as
part of a whole, because this is the only way to bring what is incomplete into a context.77
Rhetorical scholars artfully figure contexts to provide meaning and shed light on texts. In
the case of 9/11, as I demonstrated in the introduction chapter, critics have relied on a situational
model of exigence to orient the reader toward understanding that something meaningful had
transpired. While it was seemingly extra rhetorical as an event, rhetors such as President Bush
crafted it rhetorically into specific meanings (evil, fundamentalism, war, etc.). This kind of
contextualization, noting the resources and constraints through which appeals are made in order
to shape meanings, employs the logic of a certain kind of situation through which to read
influences and causal effects. As Barbara Biesecker notes, whether an exigence is extrarhetorical or entirely rhetorical, the model of a situation has as its “founding presumption a
causal relation between the constituent elements comprising the event as a whole.”78
To find more than the reproduction of the rhetorical situation, then, and perhaps even
more than McGee’s context of contemporary culture, one must look at the role of the audience
differently. Within the confines of the rhetorical situation model, one finds what one is looking
for already – the effects of events and texts on passive audiences. Within this model, the
audience is not only a self-same entity, existing as a consummate “thing” external to rhetoric in
some respect, but also serves as a constraint on rhetorical discourse. Biesecker argues, “As a
collective animated by an identifiable and shared predisposition, audience implicitly figures into
discussions about the rhetorical situation as a constraint upon rhetorical discourse.”79 It is just
77
Hans-Jost Frey, Interruptions, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1996), 23.
78
Barbara Biesecker ,“Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of
‘Différence’,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22, no. 2 (1989): 114.
79
Ibid., 123.
269
here that, even in the most subtle reconstructions--say where, as in Vatz the power is given to the
rhetor rather than the situation, but merely by reversing the model--we can sense traces of the
substantialist conceptual scheme in which the very idea of rhetorical situation arose and that still
shadows it. Audience members, however, are the manufacturers of “receptional fragments.”
They meet textual fragments with fragments of their own. Witnesses who perceive and produce
are not only influenced or constituted by events, they create and circulate meanings in relation to
an event. While this may in fact be seen as a co-constitution of meaning, the fragmentary
context read as a textual formation in the style that McGee calls for, it is also possible to read this
entanglement as its own situation. This is the encounter or meeting-space referred to by
Wortham previously as the “archiving of the event which is itself a unique event,” and is so
because it is a dislocation and reimagining of context. The discourses of 9/11, as I have shown,
present a case that calls for this evental way of describing them and show the limitation, or at
best offer a limiting case, of ‘rhetorical situation’ as a received disciplinary concept.
I have shown how writing an event by audience members is complex and more than
merely a problem of clarity solved by a critic’s methodology for contextualization. To place an
event back into a schema for interpretation, a rhetorical situation, is to evacuate the eventfulness
of an event. I have suggested instead that reading the text as fragmentary – both as the form of a
disruptive encounter (writing that is contradictory, meandering, discombobulated, disorienting)
and in terms of a content that is fragmentary (itself about the lack of a context that would help
understand the event) – provides a way to understand the context of an event anew. Such a
perspective allows the audience becoming involved in the recontextualization or creation of a
new rhetorical situation instead of existing as a mere constraint on the discourse of a rhetor. But
to use the concept of rhetorical situation calls as much for a new concept of rhetorical situation.
270
Audience members sometimes help provide a groundwork, ironically through figures of a
loss of a grounding, for how to read them rhetorically. Not only do they generate discourse
useful for critics; they also appear in new roles and relations to other rhetorical agents and
categories. In an event, audience members wrestle with their own situation. I have argued that
self-proclaimed witnesses encountering an event find themselves torn between contexts,
disrupted and destabilized, which is to say in a space other than a “situation.” As Badiou
concludes for us, discourse as deployed is what transforms a situation.
Finally, in terms of language, this path of thought poses that it is the poetic resource of
language alone, through its sabotage of the law of nominations, which is capable of
forming an exception … to the current regime of situations.80
How might audiences and their statements be read such that their statements make a
difference in how events become fully rhetorical? How, too, are rhetorical nominations a special
kind of event themselves? I find these questions worthy of a discussion in my conclusion by
way of formulating the criteria for a kind of rhetorical criticism that abides by and exploits the
kind of rhetorical theory at which, using 9/11 as a test case, I have been pointing.
80
Badiou, Being and Event, 26-7.
271
CONCLUSION
LIMITATIONS OF THE RHETORICAL SITUATION
BY DISRUPTION OF DISCOURSE AS AN EVENT
This dissertation began with an examination of the “exigence” of 9/11. I have
demonstrated that the rhetorical situation model of reading the exigence of 9/11, in its variants as
either an extra rhetorical reality or a rhetorically manufactured set of meanings, falls short of
explicating the “event” of 9/11 fully. Critically, I have shown how a robust examination of
situational audience members’ expressions and statements about their experiences provides fresh
insight into how subjects complicate their positionality within the audience as well as the very
category of “audience.” Chapter by chapter, I have found and explicated the limits of the
rhetorical situation model of discourse analysis by showing the ways in which audience
members, too often relegated to passive roles in criticism, themselves contribute rhetorical
insight. While the rhetorical situation as a model permits insight into the agentic role of the
rhetor, I have shown that such a model is itself a constraint on what an audience is (it is
interpreted as a consubstantial collective) and what members can do (respond to a text as a
substantive entity subject to a logic of influence). Overall, then, as I argued in Chapter Four and
will argue more consequentially here, the rhetorical situation – even in modified views such as
Maurice Charland’s constitutive rhetoric paradigm – is premised on a substantialist or essentialist
view of the audience while neglecting their discourses as active, meaningful, and eventful.
I will briefly review my findings in each chapter to this end. Chapter One showed how
audience members engaged with the exigence of 9/11 by forming their own discourses and texts
about it. While witnesses adopted a “speaking to trauma” style within the form of a “trauma
aesthetic,” I demonstrated through close readings of their texts that such a style was not
272
sufficient enough to brandish the collective audience as actually traumatized. In contrast to
rhetorical critics labeling the audience as traumatized in an extra rhetorical fashion before any
discourse addressed them, I read audience members’ own discourse to see how they positioned
themselves qua audience members. By privileging witnesses’ texts, I read the category of
“audience” as a dynamic linguistic process of self-generation rather than as an effect of the
exigence of 9/11.
In Chapter Two, I argued that neither does the exigence of the 9/11 attacks, considered in
the form of their appearance as a spectacular image-event on television, determine the effects,
position, or situation of the audience. Reading discourses of the ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ alongside
how witnesses found the attacks to be both like and unlike a movie, moving them into or out of
fantasies, I found that witnesses’ conflicted testimony continuously produced complex social
“knowledge” of the exigence instead of moving toward a collective resolution or “truth” of the
exigence. Instead of the exigence providing automatically a constraint on how to speak to about
it in advance of discourses form rhetors and audiences, I found that witnesses’ statements made
sense in opposition to, not subsumption under, a topos or fitting set of responses. Audience
members’ phrases were, in other words, more contradictory than “fitting” a prescribed trajectory
of talk, thus exemplifying how discourse can turn an exigence into an ongoing process of
defining it.
Chapter Three read witnesses’ statements as a search for new idioms and narratives into
which to position themselves. Because of the excessive ‘magnitude’ and ‘incomprehensible’
nature of the attacks that left them ‘speechless,’ as witnesses put it in these discourses of the
sublime, audience members – following their own narrative logic of searching for a new way to
describe what happened to them – attempted unsuccessfully, but, significantly, unsuccessfully to
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find new terms and stories to help make sense of their lack of understanding. This narrative
move I interpreted as a kind of rhetorical sublime and as a supplement to Charland’s account of
subjective constitution. Rhetorical deconstitution of losing one’s narrative “place” in the world,
I argued, precedes narrative reconstitution. Subsequently, in distinction to a logic of the
rhetorical situation that would limit reading such narratives to effects imbued by a rhetor, I
demonstrated how audience members participate in a logic of their own reconstitution. I found
that discourses of the rhetorical sublime – speaking to and performing the act of searching for a
new narrative – demonstrate a relational dynamic between the audience and the exigence not
accounted for in traditional conceptions of the rhetorical situation.
In Chapter Four, I argued that discourses of the “event” of 9/11 – calling it a ‘historic’
and ‘world changing’ ‘event’ – demonstrated that audiences employed a seemingly ontological
discourse about real shifts in time and place. Tracing theories of event, I once again showed how
witnesses language referred to and helped constitute their own changing situation. Rather than
exuding language that would place them back into the rhetorical situation as confused subjects
awaiting clarification from a rhetor, I showed how witnesses’ phrases were themselves textual
events – encounters with the exigence through writing about it – that began to unravel a routine
and regular context. Rather than finding themselves automatically within a “situation,” in other
words, I demonstrated how phrases considered as events are themselves acts of reimagining
context and reconstituting the situation in which audience members are an entity at all.
There is something traditional yet also new about what this dissertation imparts to
rhetorical criticism within communication studies. From within the lineage of those who have
worked with “models” or “paradigms” to understand rhetorical communication, the dissertation
fits within the disciplinary conversation of “message-audience” rhetorical communication
274
studies. Bruce Gronbeck outlines much of the shift toward this critical approach through a
review of the work of Samuel Becker and others who in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s sought
to complicate the SMCR (source-message-channel-receiver) model in order to study audience
receptions, texts, and contexts.1 Gronbeck shows how Becker, among many insights and
perspectives, argued for understanding sets of messages in contextual structures of
communication beyond what a single rhetor did with a single message to influence a single
audience. This historical shift in approach, according to Barbara Biesecker’s reading of Becker,
turned on a move toward recognizing 1) a negotiation of meaning between a rhetor and an
audience, 2) that many things count as a text, even context, and 3) an expanded scope to read a
diffusion of texts over space and time.2 Accordingly, Becker helped pave the way for more
audience based analysis and reception driven studies. This dissertation fits within this
disciplinary paradigm since its primary object of study is audience texts and contexts.
However, while the dissertation participates in a traditional and ongoing conversation that
questions the viability of a rhetor-message model of criticism, opting instead for an investigation
of audience driven communication and negotiated readings of context, it adds something new to
the conversation surrounding the concepts of “audience” and “context” within the messageaudience paradigm. Contrary to approaches in media studies traditions of audience reception
theory (using Stuart Hall’s model of encoding/decoding as the exemplar out of which the further
1
Gronbeck, Bruce. “Rhetorical Studies Escapes Modernist Psychology: Samuel Becker
as Subversive,” Communication Studies 50:1 (Spring 1999): 63-71.
2
Barbara Biesecker, “Prospects of Rhetoric for the Twenty-First Century: Speculations
on Evental Rhetoric Ending with a Note on Barack Obama and a Benediction by Jacques Lacan;
A Response to Samuel L. Becker’s “Rhetorical Studies for the Contemporary World,” in
Reengaging the Prospects of Rhetoric: current conversations and contemporary challenges, ed.
Mark J. Porrovecchio (New York: Routledge, 2010), 16-17.
275
work of Ien Ang and Jonathan Fiske stems), 3 I depart from the question of audience members as
themselves consummate subjects negotiating over one stable set of texts. Not exploring the
psychological states, identity markers, or any other facet of the audience member qua individual
agent – facts my database cannot in any case reveal – I have focused exclusively on the
discourses of audience members to say something about how they figure themselves as audience,
and their relationship to the exigence, thereby helping to define an exigence itself. Rather than
discourses operating within a logic of influence stemming from audience members – which
would be a mere reversal of the rhetor-message model to an audience-message model – I have
shown how discourses of the exigence of 9/11 help define the very nature of an exigence.
In this way, I consider myself to have avoided the substantialist bias in the rhetorical
situation model, which reads extra rhetorical entities as agents who deploy texts within a logic of
influence – rhetors deploying a text or an audience reacting against it, at times with their own
text. Non-discursive subjects limit the capacity for language to transform or constitute those
very subjects since rhetoric, and indeed language itself, runs up against a substance distinct from
it. I develop this argument a bit more in what follows. I devote the bulk of the conclusion,
however, to the question of the transformative potential of discourse as an event, rather than a
quasi substantial occasion. Instead of reading transformation as a question of subjective
constitution, I read discourse events as transformations of context. Whereas audience based
approaches, such as those by Michael Leff and Leah Ceccarelli that I discussed in Chapter Four,
say much that is quite useful about the mobility and negotiability of the context/text relationship
as a text, I argue that witnesses’ discourses, and not just the critic him or herself, can activate this
3
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding.” In S. During (Ed.). The Cultural Studies Reader.
New York: Routledge. 1973/1993, pp. 90-103. See also Ang, Ien. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera
and the Melodramatic Imagination, Menthuen: London, 1985, and Fiske, John. Television
Culture. London: Methuen, 1987.
276
dynamic. Language, when seen as evental in its encountering and defining an exigence,
reorients the landscape of meanings through which subjects make sense of themselves as
audience members in the surrounding but muted environment in and of which they are
interpreters.
Privileging audience members’ discourse as evental provides new trajectories in
rhetorical criticism in contrast to the rhetorical situation model. The historical study of
persuasion through a situational based rhetor-message model has been productively
supplemented by theories of rhetorical constitution and reimaginings of the “people” over the
last few decades. Not only has the persona of the “people,” as rhetorically constructed, expanded
to include different definitions, but rhetorical criticism itself has broadened to include audience
texts as rhetorical products worthy of study. As I highlighted and examined in the introduction
to the dissertation, vernacular texts – explored by Hauser, Ono, and Sloop – allow us to see the
audience actively shaping what kind of entity or public it becomes. The category of “exigence”
and the “audience” have expanded accordingly.
This dissertation has reviewed and engaged in a conversation with some of this work.
Lloyd Bitzer asserts that an “exigence” is an extra-rhetorical imperfection in the world that
invites an utterance. Vatz argues that an exigence can itself be constituted by the rhetor.4
Michael McGee and Maurice Charland show how the rhetorical text not only influences and
persuades an audience but can constitute the very “people” it addresses.5 Barbara Biesecker,
however, makes an important point about falling back into the trap of substantialist thinking
4
5
Both Bitzer and Vatz are cited in the Introduction.
See Michael Calvin McGee, “In Search of ‘the People’: A Rhetorical
Alternative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61, no. 3 (1975): 235-249. Also see Maurice
Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois” cited in Chapter Two.
277
about the audience. In critiquing the classical formulation of the “rhetorical situation” by Bitzer
and Vatz, she shows how the rhetorical event of speech can constitute an audience as more than a
mere collection of discretely individuated subjects. To see the audience only as those persons to
be addressed because of an exigence impinging on them or in the attempt to create one by a
rhetor, reduces the category of audience to a non-discursive, pre-existing, extra-discursive entity,
even if it is not the critics intention to do so:
Clearly, the traditional concept of the rhetorical situation forces theorists and critics to
appeal to a logic that transcends the rhetorical situation itself in order to explain the prior
constitution of the subjects participating or implicated in the event. If the identities of the
audience are not constituted in and by the rhetorical event, then some retreat to an
essentialist theory of the subject is inevitable.6
I take my study of 9/11 discourses to “substantiate” Biesecker’s point. Both Bitzer and
Vatz cling to a logic of influence (that texts move subjects in the act of persuasion) without an
account of constitution (the creation of the audience).7 If the audience is already “created” (preexisting) it is a substantial entity outside the discursive. Such views constrain discourse to
effects only achievable within what pre-existing entities, extra-rhetorical subjects, can do by way
of being influenced and modifying exigences. I have shown, however, that the subjects’
responses to the exigence of 9/11 – easily placed within a rhetorical situation as many critics
have done – neither obey the logic of a direct causal influence of an event nor modify the
exigence in traditional and expected ways. Witnesses’ discourse engages events with speech
sometimes not reducible to an essentialist theory of the subject (a traumatized individual, for
example) or preconceived notions of the purpose of discourse (to “work through” trauma).
6
Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of
‘Différence’.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22, no. 2 (1989): 110-130, p 111.
7
Ibid.
278
Exploring witnesses’ engagement with an exigence brings us to the subject of events as
encounters once again. As a critic myself, I, too, have had my own encounter with the event of
9/11, which for me is inseparable from the phrases, stories, and other rhetorical productions
talking about it to make it what it “is.” I encountered the images of the attacks, the news in the
days following, and witnesses’ narratives in documentaries, literature, and the digital archive.
As an exigence continuously in the process of unfolding in the hands of witnesses, it is for me an
event that is constantly being inscribed and reinscribed. The dissertation itself is one of these
acts of inscription. For me, writing to define something as complex and difficult to pin down as
the events of 9/11 matters. With this vantage point in mind, to which all chapters attest, I ask
readers to allow an indulgence for me to explicate what I hope will be seen as a critical
perspective valuable to the discipline of rhetorical studies. To explain more how writing the
event matters, I turn to how discourse itself can be understood as an event.
An event, as traditionally defined in Chapter Four with the writings of Lyotard, Derrida,
and Badiou, is a surprise occurrence that cannot be represented. As a phenomenon or happening,
it is objectively “this immediate occurrence of the thing beyond the powers of representation…”8
Subjectively, it is felt as the surprise of the “unanticipatable” and yields an “experience of the
impossible.”9 Though an external event in the world erupts as an exigence, and can be said to
invite utterance, it is a rhetorical event if the external event, through its discursive representation
by the subject witnessing it, refuses to be pinned down exclusively or exhaustively as an
exigence that is already known and circumscribed. Rhetorical events, as I have shown, are
8
James Williams, Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy, (Cambridge: Polity
press, 1998), 22. Lyotard also develops his theory of phrases as events in The Differend:
Phrases in Dispute. op. cit. p 75.
9
Derrida, Jacques. “A Certain Impossible Possibility,” Critical Inquiry, 33 (2007): 44161, p 441.
279
“encounters” between a subject and a worldly event that exceeds the logic of a context or a
rhetorical situation to define it. That is why the historic discourse of the sublime is important. A
happening – a tornado, plane crash, or assassination – is not logically positioned in advance by
an antinomy of either an extra-rhetorical reality or a rhetorically manufactured “reality.” By
reading events as a fragmenting or rupturing of context, rhetorical critics find ways to read
speakers’ “receptional fragment” texts within the dynamic terrain of a shifting context. They
can, as I have done, take McGee’s advice and read the text/context relationship as itself a mobile
text.
This perspective of reading encounters as evental allows novel ways of reading and
theorizing the potency of discourse as well as what this power does for an audience that deploys
it. An exigence, as typically, or at least flat footedly, used in readings of a rhetorical situation is
often said to exist for a rhetor but not for an audience. As I demonstrated in the Introduction,
9/11 was considered by critics to be an incredibly salient and pressing exigence for speakers like
President Bush, but for audiences a mere crisis or state of confusion. Audiences, often only
mentioned and not elaborated upon, are not said to have grappled with the meaning of the
exigence. Critics analyzed them as passive recipients of rhetorical address. As Denise Bostdorff
argued, audiences suffered from a “crisis” and were in “need” of verbal reassurance.10 But as I
have shown, audience members in the midst of a crisis do more than cry out for understanding.
They offer discourse that may be read as evidencing their “dislocation” from a context and, like
rhetors, critics, and everyone else, searching for a new context in which to locate themselves.
This location is sometimes a familiar topos (tragedy, trauma, evil, etc.) but it is also, at times, a
new one (the loss of innocence, a change in the course of history, a new world).
10
Bostdorff, “George W. Bush’s Post-September 11 Rhetoric,” 300.
280
Seeing audiences in the midst of an evental encounter does not automatically add a
critical component to rhetorical scholarship. Just as an exigence does not constitute the
audience, neither does an encounter constitute the audience, however rhetorical and productive
of discourse we might consider an exigent moment or space to be. That would make the evental
encounter determining of discourse, just as an exigence on Bitzer’s view. It would pull the
evental into a logic of substance. Nor is the opposite view any more help. It would make the
subject the fully human agent responsible for negotiating the encounter and thereby risk making
the subject an essentialized, non-discursive, consummate agent. The alternative to the binary of
seeing the subject as pure effect of an event or as a substantial agent is to read a rhetorical
encounter eventally by seeing discourse as an event itself. Rhetorical power is in the words.
Writing and utterance in reaction to an external event, as the conclusion of Chapter Four
suggested by theorizing an encounter, may itself be viewed as a kind of discourse event. This
perspective views audiences in a new way and imbues their discourse with an ability to affect
context. Others have taken up this task recently.11 I advocate a variation on this theme and
explore how discourse as evental can do things, perform acts, but in non traditional ways.
Discourse and Signification as Evental
Words as signifiers have a strange relationship to the event they attempt to name. An
event does not cause any exact string of words, but a subject does not necessarily draw from the
11
Barbara Biesecker, “Prospects of Rhetoric for the Twenty-First Century…” op. cit. In
previous iterations of rhetorical events, critics such as Gerard Hauser speak of rhetorical acts as
events. Hauser says “The discontinuities that invite rhetorical acts are also events.” However,
Hauser views events as almost synonymous with exigences in the way Bitzer does. Acts respond
to events and other exigences, thereby making the discursive response, the rhetoric, evental.
This is not what I mean by a discourse event. Hauser argues for an instrumentalist reading of
rhetorical events as acts that merely respond to or are determined by other events in order to
accomplish things with symbols. I read his view as much in line with the rhetorical situation
model. See Hauser, Gerard. Introduction to Rhetorical Theory. 2nd edition, Waveland Press,
2002.
281
rhetorical resources of the immediate context to produce appropriate words from those available.
The referent of a word used to describe an event qua event, especially a sublime event, or an
excessive one, is unclear. Even Edmund Burke and Kant admitted that. Much like the event
itself, words may appear outside the logic of a preceding context. One cannot explain their
production situationally as a fitting response to the exigence. But what does “saying the event”
perform beyond an expression of the subject’s own mystification in the fragmented context of an
event? Writings on “saying the event” provide possibilities of answering this question. These
possibilities have been taken up by theorists of “evental rhetoric.”
The “name” of the event does not obey a stable logic of orienting itself solely toward the
“signified” which it attempts to name. Instead, this relationship is open, as evidenced by the
multiple and polysemic meanings of words that witnesses use (‘amazing’ for example). The
instantiation of the “name,” the archive of “names” from audiences, may be read not as part of
the normal order of operation (of making sense, of making meaning) but as part of another logic,
or semantics, that names call into being. In other words, “naming” can be a constitutive
operation of and for the event. “Saying the event” thus says something meaningful about the
event but also performs an action in doing so. There is both a description and a constitution:
Indeed, the first modality or determination of the saying is a saying of knowledge: saying
what is. Saying the event is also saying what happens, trying to say what is presently,
what comes to pass presently, saying what is, what happens, what occurs, what comes to
pass. This is a saying that is close to knowledge and information, to the enunciation that
says something about something. And then there is a saying that does in saying, a saying
that does, that enacts.12
This enactment through speech or writing, the “saying the event” that produces or helps
determine what an event becomes, is a constitutive operation of discourse. Were the discourse to
be the only variable in producing the event though – determining what it is through the
12
Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility,” op. cit.
282
categories of the subject, the doxa, topoi, and discourse it runs through – we would be guilty of
simply reversing the causal order of operation to claim that the “saying the event” is prior and
the becoming of the “event” is secondary. The rhetor (witness) would, in that case, magically
constitute the essence of the event in the way that Vatz says the speaker creates an exigence and
the same circle would ensue. The purpose of studying events is to complicate the meaning of an
exigence beyond a simple act of constitution either from an external event or a rhetor.
For these reasons, recent theorists of rhetoric have turned to investigate in more complex
fashion the relationship between events and discourse in terms of an “other” kind of reading and
theorizing of context. Events, considered rhetorically, are not simply the aftereffect of a kind of
naming, be it a notion of primal baptism or performative utterance. One cannot say that events
come about according to a certain pre-existing structure that makes their coming-to-be
“automatic.” If speech or writing is an event in itself, it necessarily has the “structure” of a
singularity. Derrida insists that meaning in the form of “generality, iterability, and
repeatability…always misses the singularity of the event.”13 Lyotard makes the same point, as
we saw in Chapter Four, about how representation can never fully capture the eventness of the
event, that it happened in such singular fashion. So how can we elaborate on a “structure” that
we cannot represent? Would its explication not contravene the singular nature of the event and
only serve to pin it down to a meaning itself? No, not necessarily. The discourse event must be
clarified through its active, but non-structuring capacity or potentiality. An act of speech can
sometimes result in something in excess of meaning, as we have seen in the discourses of 9/11.
This excess, however, should not be confused with merely a superimposed layer of sense lying
on top of its conventional meaning.
13
Ibid.
283
A singularity is not unleashed in or by a speech act. Quite the opposite – speech acts
depend on conventions for their measure of success or meeting their felicity conditions.14 J. L.
Austin himself notes: “There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain
conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in
certain circumstances.”15 Derrida, challenging Austin, places this notion in the context of events
to note how a performative utterance, though perhaps rhetorically constitutive, is still premised
on the guarantees of conventions which an event might alter significantly:
Now, just like the constative, it seems to me, the performative cannot avoid neutralizing,
indeed annulling, the eventfulness of the event it is supposed to produce. A performative
produces an event only by securing for itself, in the first person singular or plural, in the
present, and with the guarantee offered by conventions or legitimated actions, the power
that an ipseity gives itself to produce the event of which it speaks—the event that it
neutralizes forthwith insofar as it appropriates for itself a calculable mastery over it. If an
event worthy of this name is to arrive or happen, it must, beyond all mastery, affect a
passivity.16
Rhetorical scholars have drawn on the possibilities of the excessively performative
utterance to which Derrida, in the context of his argument with speech act theorists, refers.
Biesecker notes that conventional speech acts, predicated upon the prior context of conventions
14
A felicity condition is, according to J.L. Austin’s theory of “speech acts,” is a way to
understand how utterances are not judged propositionally to be true or false, or meaningful or
not, but instead a way to see speech as a successful or unsuccessful act of communication. To
understand what it means when someone “takes an oath” or “makes a bet” is to know the
conditions upon which the act will succeed or fail, or in Austin’s words, be deemed felicitous or
infelicitous. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1962). These types of speech acts have also been analyzed by John Searle as instances of
“illocutionary phrases.” See John Searle, Speech Acts, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1969). For Derrida’s famous retort, see Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, Trans. Samuel Weber
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
15
J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, 2nd Edition, ed. J.O. Urmson and M. Sbis
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 14.
16
Jacques Derrida, “The ‘World’ of The Enlightenment to Come (Exception, Calculation,
Sovereignty)” Research in Phenomenology 33, no. 1 (2003): 43.
284
themselves for understanding, are inherently distinct from speech events. Though both subscribe
to a logic of constitutive relationality over a mere logic of representation – they both do things –
speech acts succumb to the fantasy of ego-centered and object-directed communication where
statements are read clearly as related to the intentional meaning of the doer/speaker in substantial
compliance with conventions clearly in place. By relying on a situation for meaning making, a
set of quasi substantial conventions, the idea of speech act fails to see how the symbolic order
persists as “the absent cause that structures those interactions” in which persons are “integrated
into a given sociosymbolic field.”17 Only their effect, not their function, comes into view:
Almost all speech acts, then, as little more or less than verifications of a symbolic pact
that precedes all meaningful utterance; almost all speech acts do not institute but, instead,
simply bear witness—albeit typically without the speaker’s awareness—to a symbolic
relation and its concomitant mandate which lends meaning to the subject and
illocutionary force to the utterance.18
In contrast, a speech event calls forth and makes “transparent” this very arrangement by
pointing to a “void” in the speaking situation. Interpreting Badiou somewhat liberally when he
argues that “the event reveals the void,”19 I take this void to hint at, among other sensations, the
notion of the radical arbitrariness and ungroundedness of the symbolic order itself as linking
subjects and elements together in the artificial manner it does. It is just this kind of contingency
that the solid world of British speech act theory fails to account for. Adding a complexity to its
significance and singularity, the speech event, by contrast, is the simultaneous formation of a
nodal point that promises the prospect of a new constitutive operation and a rupturing of the
symbolic order’s stranglehold on meaning or sense-making. This is perhaps why, as noted
17
Biesecker, “Prospects of Rhetoric for the Twenty-First Century,” 24.
18
Ibid., 25.
19
Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 88.
285
previously, recognition of an event seems, qua event, perennially to include that sensation of the
“anguished confusion” that our 9/11 texts show. Understanding is thwarted. Failure to
comprehend the meaning of the speech event is paradoxically a mark of its success. Here, a
listener or reader is in the throes of a “passionate babble of conversation.”20 Let us not forget the
many audience members on the day of 9/11 who called friends and relatives with very little or
nothing to say. This was impassioned yet desultory speech. The “oh my god” phrases and “what
is happening?” express little fully developed content. Biesecker notes of this paradox that the
speech event “…works not through the successful aggregation of the richest or most meaningful
signs in order to make good sense; everything must be made to move in the opposite direction,
toward non-sense.”21
Witnesses’ discourses defining the exigence of 9/11 turn out to be a paradigmatic case –
but not of a rhetorical situation that they have often been placed in. The problems of meaning in
these texts add up to something more than an imposed model of context can account for. Their
lack of a determinate sense, a kind of “non-sense” if you will, registers in a “meaningful” way
that is paradoxical and confusing. While I have spoken about this meaningfulness with respect
to a vocabulary of events offered in Chapter Four, I can do so with respect to terms in Chapter
Three too. As I discussed in Chapter Three, linguistic events, fragmentary phrases in the search
for expression, demonstrate a rhetorical process of unhinging the subject from the category of
understanding in a sublime moment. Just as discourse about events “marks” a rupture in context
and disorientation in audiences, this discourse can actively interrupt understanding and move
20
Alessandra Stanley, “Cheers, Tears and a Sense of the Historic Moment,” New York
Times, Nov. 6, 2008.
21
Biesecker, “Prospects of Rhetoric,” 27.
286
subjects literally toward non-sense. In this moment, one utters a word that reflects but also
participates in a shifting context. This can be an event for the writer or speaker as well as the
listener. At either end, this movement is excited, impassioned, and demands a vocabulary that
escapes the context of rhetorical critics’ impetus to read this discourse as just part of a situation
congruent with other events.
The call for a turn to a new kind of vocabulary to describe a moment of an evental
encounter has been made before. To define the power of discourse and its impact on us in terms
of an experience of it was Michael McGee’s charge. He made a plea for this notion of
language’s power several decades ago when he labored to develop a materialist conception of
rhetoric. He argued:
The first requirement of a material theory of rhetoric which purports to account for
practice would seem to be actual description of “exigence,” not the supposition of it.
Without resort to paradox, traditional vocabularies simply do not give us the resources to
describe the experience of rhetoric as it impinges on us, as it exists “naturally.”22
The phenomenon of the exigence, especially when it is discourse or enacted speech, must be
accounted for since it has an impact, and an undeniable one for McGee. This impact is crucial to
our sense of the rhetorical:
Though it is the only residue of rhetoric one can hold like a rock, it is wrong to think that
this sheaf of papers, this recording of “speech,” is rhetoric in and of itself. It is surely
“object,” and the paper and ink scratches are “material.” But the whole of rhetoric is
“material” by measure of human experiencing of it, not by virtue of our ability to
continue touching it after it is gone. Rhetoric is “object” because of its pragmatic
presence, our inability safely to ignore it at the moment of its impact.23
22
Michael C. McGee, “A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric.” Ray E. McKerrow, ed.,
Explorations in Rhetoric: Studies in Honor of Douglas Ehninger, (Glenview, IL: Scott,
Foresman, 1982), 38.
23
Ibid., 29. 287
Though not physically material like a rock, speech has a material impact. It too is, and should be
analyzed as, a kind of “phenomenon.” While McGee calls it a “phenomenon,” I call it an
“event.” I call it this because discourse is not just perceived and registered (understood). It
impacts the way in which it registers at all. When it impacts, it is not just stagnant discourse. It
is rhetoric. Rhetoric is material, then, when it is evental, which is to say “material” in the larger
sense hinted at by McGee. In fact, he prefigures my argument here. His extended analogy of the
material force of rhetorical discourse is telling:
We can reconstruct the nature, scope and consequence of a nuclear explosion by
analyzing its residue when the raw matter and even the energy inherent in its occurrence
have dissipated. Thus it is possible to reconstruct the nature, scope, and consequence of
rhetoric by analyzing “speech” even when “speaker,” “audience,” “occasion,” and
“change” dissipate into half-remembered history. Reconstruction of the whole
phenomenon, it seems to me, is a prius to an accounting of the rhetorical, for it is the
whole of “speaker/speech/audience/ occasion/change” which impinges on us: to confuse
rhetoric with a discourse is the same error as confounding fallout with nuclear
explosion.24
McGee’s goal is to explain the impact of the speech as a bomb, not as ash. Words for
him, as for Edmund Burke, do not have meaning per se; they have effects. I fear that McGee is
right and that he explains in advance what some rhetorical scholars explored with respect to
Bush’s remarks on 9/11. Sifting through the rubble of President Bush’s discourse in which the
event of 9/11 was constructed, critics found that Bush’s addresses in the immediate aftermath of
9/11 contained an unusual gravitas – an explosion at a distance, to continue the analogy. His
speech came at an important moment. It became a moment. Some of us, as witnesses – of the
attacks, of news coverage, and of each other’s reactions – held our breath slightly to hear what he
had to say. But we also, throughout this timeframe and even further into the future, talked back
– a fact not noted enough since his speeches were considered events to the exclusion of other
vernacular voices just as evental. We spoke back to and about the attacks, Bush’s speeches, and
24
Ibid., 39.
288
news coverage of them all. When witnesses write, when they respond to the myriad of things
that comprise the eventfulness of 9/11, it is in this critical context of sifting through the
discursive rubble themselves and responding to it. I find their reconstructions part of a selfreflexive awareness of being in the “ruins of language,” to use a popular post 9/11 phrase.
However, the production of language in this environment makes present their voices to rebuild a
context. Further research on the basis of the theoretical points urged in this dissertation would
yield more work on the ways witnesses made calls for new ways of understanding themselves,
new understandings of being “American,” “citizens,” or “political,” for example. This work
would be to produce specific rhetorical criticism of different categories of audience. Here,
however, I am laboring to understand more theoretically the category of audience itself.
McGee was not alone. Other scholars note how rhetorical discourse, speech and writing
as an event entails important consequences for understanding the material impact of discourse on
context (in the weaker sense of “materiality” in which language is effective rather than
meaningful). Rhetorical theorists, too, make an honest attempt to solve McGee’s problem of
finding the critical rhetorical resources to describe the very present, material impact of what is
often not materially present. Martha Cooper, for example, has struggled with this task. She
argues explicitly for reading discourse as an event. As she put it, reading statements as evental
calls for a strategy of investigation separate from the traditions of theorizing rhetoric as art
(technê), action, or process.25 Unique occasions – and who can say which occasions aren’t –
demand unique modes of interpretation. She argued generally for “the idea that discourse should
be treated as an event” since it opens up the productive possibility that “discourse is meaningful
25
Martha Cooper, “Rhetorical Criticism and Foucault’s Philosophy of Discursive
Events,” Central States Speech Journal 39, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 1.
289
by the very fact of its occurrence.”26 There is here undoubtedly an echo of McGee’s
“materialism,” which she cites and credits; discourse is meaningful, if one can use that word at
all, in that it is experienced as impactful. Yet Cooper complements McGee’s materialism with
Foucault’s insights on discursive practices. According to Foucault, discourse issued forth as an
utterance or statement is an event, but an ethereal and incorporeal one. Whereas McGee spoke
of the materialism of speech, Foucault is more specific and names the effect of speech as an
event that is incorporeal and material at the same time. This is Foucault’s doctrine of
“incorporeal materialism.” He puts is this way:
“…events are not corporeal. And yet, an event is certainly not immaterial; it takes effect,
becomes effect always on the level of materiality.27
Cooper puts it this way:
If the speech arouses the audience to action, their actions take on a material form. Yet
the experience of the engagement between speaker and audience is not physical but
metaphysical.28
According to Foucault’s account, there is no neat and clean separation between a
statement and its impact, between an event and its meaning, if any one can even speak clearly
about meaning at all rather than about significance. The significance of a speech or statement
can be its incorporeal happening and its material effect simultaneously. There is for Foucault
then a notion of a “meaning-event.”29 The meaning of discourse is as much its happening as its
26
Ibid., 1.
27
Michel Foucault, “The Discourse of Language,” Trans. Rupert Sawyer in appendix to
Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language, trans. Ann Sheridan Smith (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 231.
28
29
Cooper, “Rhetorical Criticism,” 4.
Foucault, Michel. “Theatrum Philosophicum” in. Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans D.F. Bouchard, Sherry Simon, (Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1977), 171.
290
content: “Speaking is meaningful, as a happening, because to speak is meaningful.”30 Too often,
meaning has been made out of the situation in which a meaning-event takes place. However,
Foucault argues that “the event is not the state of things.”31 If it were solely the result of the
given situation, meaning would, in fact, always be reduced to mere repetition of the same and
would lose the uniqueness of its occurrence. For example, to hear the words “I love you” can be
meaningful in that I and others may have heard these words before and through convention we
find ourselves in a position of understanding these words depending on context. I know what it
means when someone says this. Hence, to understand the meaning of this statement at the
general level of convention is what Foucault referred to as a statement conforming to the “eternal
repetition of the infinitive.”32 When someone tells me “I ate,” “I jog,” “I will go,” these
utterances make sense in virtue of their relation to the infinitives “to eat,” “to jog,” “to go.”
Posited in a realm external to the subject, these statements, like the acts themselves, may be
repeated. It is not “I” that has to do them in order to understand them. The mode of
understanding the statement is one in which the experience is considered as though it were in a
suspended, generic, indeed substantial state – to be in the state of eating, swimming, going.
Meaning here is considered in a discursive realm prior to and apart from any one invocation; it is
thought to exist both “outside and beforehand.”33
Though we can say for the most part that this sense holds for uneventful phrases, this way
of understanding meaning does not always hold. For example, when hearing “I love you,” the
30
Cooper, “Rhetorical Criticism,” 6.
31
Foucault, “Theatrum,” 173.
32
Ibid., 174.
33
Ibid., 176.
291
constitutive elements of this situation might undergo radical change. After an evental encounter
where one hears these words, the “I” of the listener and the scenic “world” in which this subject
exists might transform entirely… the subject and the world may seem more possible, hopeful,
joyful, etc. The value of the utterance is sometimes significantly more than its conventional
force and content, though one may not control when exactly this happens.
Focusing instead on the present and unique instance of discourse as a happening allows
one to see a doubled relation of language and context in which they are mutually influential: “…
a statement, discourse treated as an event, is both contextualized and contextualizing.”34
Statements seen in this light are not determined by context. But neither are they confined to
constituting that which they speak about or limited to material impacts upon others. They may
impact the entirety of the material situation in and around the statement:
In addition, the borders of a statement are comprised of the unique alteration of the
context that any particular statement can make. In other words, not only does a statement
gain its meaning and its relevance from the context in which it enters, but it, in turn,
defines the possibilities for future statements and assists in determining its own fate in the
realm of statements.35
Utterances and statements can, accordingly, change the elements of a situation and the
nature of the given situation or context itself. Analogically, one could take the case of playing a
game to make further sense of how an act of rhetorical discourse reconstitutes elements or
situations. As Saussure explains of the game of chess – and language too – a chess piece has
value when in relation to other pieces. The piece itself has potential force but no separate value.
Only in the context of enacting a force upon the totality of other pieces does it acquire a
relational value. That value cannot always be calculated in advance because some moves alter
34
Cooper, “Rhetorical Criticism,” 8.
35
Ibid., 7.
292
the kind of game being played. Whether by invention or chance element, some moves do not
necessarily conform to the logic of the game but are instead “game-changers.” Such a move is
not necessarily possible in the game of chess since to change the rules of the game might entail
not playing chess anymore. However, this “move” is possible with language. Foucault claimed
that language itself is “a game that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves
them behind.”36 This general point on language can be applied to evental statements specifically.
For rhetorical discourse about events, which is an event itself, disrupts the rules of exchange and
changes the meanings and values of the elements involved. Foucault, as I have explained, calls
this a “meaning-event.”
The force of a meaning-event has repercussions beyond the context that paradoxically
seeks to give it meaning. A meaning-event must therefore be said to, in the mode of a
possibility, disrupt and alter that which would seek to name it and to make it known. Its
possibilities cannot be pinned down or confined in advance. What is this power beyond the
possible and how to name it then? To name it would be contradictory since it would seek to
circumscribe its “possibilities” in advance. I recognize that I cannot do it. To do so would be
committing a certain injustice. My statement, my intuition, and not my limited propositional
argument, if you will, is that such a problem forces one to think through the possibility that the
forcefulness of a statement lies forever in advance of the meaning. In other words, what is
moving, effective, or as I would like to wager here, significant about the sign as deployed, is that
its significance itself be analyzed as separate from yet coterminous with meaning. Significance
and meaning may happen together but they are not the same thing. The reason Foucault calls a
36
Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, Ed.
Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977),
116.
293
statement a “meaning-event” in the first place is because there is more than meaning there. We
simply cannot locate this more in advance of the event of discourse taking place. This is, I
submit, exactly how witnesses’ discourses on the attacks of 9/11 are meaning-events. They are
utterly significant without fully determinate meaning. As evental encounters, they name
something important. Arguably, they change what it means to have encountered something of
that sort, even while the discourse about it cannot be understood fully in and of itself.
In this way, the fragmentary texts of 9/11 discourses we have been analyzing in this
dissertation becomes a paradigmatic occasion for analyzing rhetoricity in so far as they call for a
revision of how that idea is professionally, as it were, taught and understood. The possibilities
advanced in this final section overtly exalt a theme of destabilization in our field. I have
analyzed the concepts of “context” and “situation” as terms of stability and as rhetorical
resources that typically offer guidance to critics who wish to stabilize the meanings of texts for
procedures of interpretation within the confines of the “rhetorical situation.” I have shown how
rhetorical critics challenging traditional frameworks for meaningful discourse, such as Cooper
and Biesecker, draw from the reading practices of Foucault and Derrida to advance a new set of
possibilities for rhetoric as a discourse event. I have provided a salient case study that supports
their critiques. These perspectives are significant in that they do not constrain discourse to the
physical confines of words on a page, but instead allow them to live in the effects on audiences,
and as possible effectual changes that audience members can enact.
With this, I have argued for a specific capacity and a general kind of possibility for
rhetorical discourse to do things. This possibility, however, is not “situated” somewhere. The
question of the evental “nature” of rhetoric does not depend, as it seems to in its less careful
practitioners, on the world actually being evental at all, in some, or only in a few moments.
294
There is no situation of events in the world waiting to unfold. Others, even in exalting the event,
make this mistake. Baudrillard, for example, exaggerates the evental quality of the world (the
image-event of 9/11 was the “mother of all events” in how it affected viewers). To look at the
matter in this contextual way – as a singularity but nevertheless as a possibility inherent in the
world – is to miss the point. It is to make events substance-like occasions that impinge on preconstituted audiences. By their very nature, though, events exist in the space of possibility.
Standard conceptions of the rhetorical situation underestimate the potential of this possibility not
only to intervene into a context but to transform that context. The possibility of this
transformation, I have argued, is rhetorical. It is not a crudely material impingement, an external
event, and followed by a rhetorical reply. Reciprocally, discourse encounters and names the
event, even if that which it names seems so eventful and so “real” that it is possibly outside the
boundaries of discourse. The point, however, is not to dwell on any conceptualization of this
“real” event outside discourse. My point has been to show that our received notions of rhetorical
situation and exigence do not account for this kind of dynamic encounter and offer far too broad
a theory of rhetorical discourse contextualizing in a reductionist way unique and paradigmatic
cases that ought to read as a challenge to situational accounts of rhetorical “events.”
To explicate this perspective more is a much needed task in the field of rhetorical studies,
especially given how audience analysis continues to flourish in the wake of the “constitutive
turn” in rhetorical scholarship. Biesecker clarifies the task as such:
One theoretical challenge remains: namely, to specify an evental rhetoric’s value, effect
or force. What real things can speakers do with words or particularly salient signs that,
by virtue of their having been emptied out and made into signifiers, are by definition
situated within a relation of excess to the symbolic system, which is to say uncodifiable
in its terms and logics?37
37
Biesecker, “Prospects of Rhetoric,” 27.
295
Audience members, it seems, sometimes do more than rhetoricians can handle. This,
however, is not a threat to the task of rhetorical scholarship. Rather, it presents an opportunity to
embrace a potentiality of audiences to reciprocally constitute their positionality and context in
relation to an exigence. This is the task of listening to and explicating the “criticality of
audience.”38 Reading speech and statements as events keeps alive the promise of the
transformational power of communication rhetorical studies gravitates toward.
From a broader disciplinary perspective, it remains to be seen whether such stress on
events and practices of “destabilization” will continue to attract good scholarship. It also
remains to be seen whether discourse events will become a disciplinary perspective through
which one can filter any, some, or even all occasions – the tendencies of scholarship being
contingent and potentially evental as any other discourse formation. Can any shared exigence be
read as an event? If the form of a traditional speaking situation is interrupted, say with a “gaffe”
like Howard Dean’s “scream” during the Iowa caucuses, does its “disruption” qualify
automatically as an event? There is, in other words, a risk that seeing rhetoric as evental may
become methodologically fixed and recognizable in the process, thereby denigrating the very
idea of eventful destabilization it seeks to find.
Will instabilities in interpretation be configured as temporary ruptures to be sutured back
together into a context by the critic, or will such instabilities mark a rich new set of possibilities
to interpret ruptures experientially, dynamically, and for new contexts? I do not think it is
simply a question of choosing between the two. The question of a change in approaches within
the context of the discipline is the same as the question posed in this dissertation – what kind of
discourse will be responsible for transformation? Rhetoricians must have a conversation about
38
Ibid., 27.
296
whether the text/context relation is significant a problem in light of the new mass mediated
powers of the audience to make and circulate “receptional fragments” such that it demands a
disciplinary set of approaches (a method of contextual reading) or must be read contingently in
each instance. This is an issue left necessarily to another generation of critics and theorists on
the other side of a possible transformative turn. In the meantime, one can speculate on the
question of what kind of discourse event will have to take place in order for theorists to
reimagine their own context of criticism. For me, that question has been answered by witnesses’
testimony about the significance of 9/11. It is this testimony that has compelled this dissertation.
297
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