| The televised invasion of the home by the footage of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center were an exceptional event in that they unified viewers across boarders in the experiencing of trauma; regardless of channel, viewers were exposed to identical footage and similar responses on the part of those who are normally meant to mediate incomprehensible information. The experience of the nation was an experience shared by any individual audience member who “tuned in.” By approaching the events of 11 September 2001 via interdisciplinary means which include but do not privilege psychoanalytic strategies, Marusya Bociurkiw attempts to understand this experiencing of a national trauma and how it bound Canadian and American citizens together only to be dissolved in the events of the 2001 Olympics. With a discussion of “roots,” Bociurkiw helps to provide further evidence of the beginning of a Deleuzian century. | |
Homeland (In)Security: Roots and Displacement, from New York, to Toronto, to Salt Lake City
Marusya Bociurkiw
impossible citizens,/repositories of the city's panic
Dionne Brand, thirsty (40)
<1> On September 11, 2001, broadcast and print media around the world narrated the destruction of New York City's World Trade Center and the deaths of thousands of its occupants. This paper will examine the ways in which television and its appendages (the telephone, the internet, the newspaper) operated to organize the discursive meanings of this traumatic event. I will propose that between September 11 and February 2002's Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, ideas about home, roots and rootedness (and their Others: foreignness, homelessness, nomadicism) operated as a discursive mapping of that which could otherwise not be mapped, or fully grasped. From the demonization of those nomads, migrants and others moving across borders, to the triumphant "Roots" logos on the uniforms of British, American and Canadian Olympic athletes, roots, in a sense, became the unrepresentable "real." How did television, then, in its liminal position on the borders of the home, narratively organize the spatial boundaries of inside and outside, local and global? More specifically, I want to examine how Canadian television worked to mediate the trauma of boundary dissolution in both a literal and a representational sense. Following along recent trauma theory, I want to ask: how does a nation itself experiences common symptoms of trauma? And can these fears become unrepresentable in and of themselves, so that the metaphor of home and roots stand in their place?
<2> The use of the words "homeland" and "homeland security" erupted in the U.S. almost immediately after September 11th, and the meanings of the word "home" became delimited by unspoken racialized binaries [1]. The terminology of heimat served to reiterate earlier, nostalgic utterances, as well as to produce new ideas about self and other. The U.S., as an imperial power, has long projected its borders across space. But as Hannah Neveh writes, colonizing notions of distance and proximity acquired new meanings after 9/11:
September 11 has violated and shattered the confidence of the United States in the total security of its territorial body. The sense of being violated has permeated U.S. domestic space by and large -- every "place" as well as every "in-between" has become suspect of infection: the work space, the leisure space, the home space....Yet the ultimate and illuminating transformation, which conceptualizes America's new sensitivity, is the creation of a federal agency for "Homeland Security." (2002: 451)<3> In Canada, 9/11 produced a new proximity to the U.S. Canada, its identity historically defined as being unlike the U.S., now had to redefine otherness. Moreover, as Eva Mackey has written, Canada's belief in itself as tolerant "was one key feature of an emerging national identity believed to differentiate Canada from the USA" (2001: 23). Thus, Canada's new intolerance for refugees and foreigners, post-9/11, created even more ideological synergy with the U.S. In Canadian media, an increased emphasis on notions of home occurred via news stories about (Canadians) staying home more on the one hand, and those (foreigners, immigrants) being told to go home on the other. Immediately after the bombings, the following headline ran in the Vancouver Sun: "Tighten immigration laws and plug our porous borders." The article called for the deportation of "people who have committed crimes in this country....so that they don't disappear into the fabric of Canadian life" (13 Sept 2002). This monolithic "fabric" demanded stability. News and advertising during Thanksgiving and Christmas 2001 took advantage of people's fear of flying and the travel industry's downturn to champion the merits of "at home" celebrations. "Holiday Heritage" in the December 2001 issue of Canadian Living Magazine, for example, described "Christmas with all the trimmings" at the home of Canadian Heritage minister Sheila Copps: "Ask the average Canadian to share what makes the holidays special and chances are you'll hear some version of 'spending time with my family.' Sheila Copps, the minister of Canadian heritage, is no exception" (195).
<4> Since 9/11, several news reports of Canadian and American born people being "sent back" to homelands they'd never been to have circulated in the media. Morley writes, "the nation is idealized as a kind of hometown writ large, a sociogeographical environment into whose comforting security we may sink....The over-valuation of home and roots has as its necessary correlative the suspicion of mobility" (2000: 33). This fantasy of hometown roots rewrites the actual narratives of peoples displaced by globalization not once, but many times in their lives.
Home and Heimat
<5> An overt national focus on notions of home and homeland carries with it the disturbing echo of the German concept of heimat (Morley 2000). Celia Applegate defines heimat, which originated in the 19th Century as an expression of the "feeling of belonging together" (1990: x), in which sentiment stemming from shared roots become part of an essential identity. By the 1930s, this idea had been appropriated by Nazism. Writes Applegate:
The integrity of local culture and identity that lay at the heart of the Heimat movement was an early and in some sense willing victim of the National Socialist revolution; its forms persisted, but now infused with the rhetoric of racial superiority and the rituals of German power. (198)
<6> As Applegate has pointed out, German fascism capitalized on the idea of roots by integrating "heimat associations" -- traditional expressions of German communalism such as youth groups, hiking fellowships and singing clubs -- into Nazi culture. She writes, "In the specific context of club activities, the apparent lack of change could and did legitimate the Nazi regime by giving it an appearance of rootedness in the structure of everyday life" (203, italics mine). At the same time, however, the Nazis were centralizing all operations, negating the heimat idea of local organization and fellowship (205). Heimat became nothing more than a symbolic notion, which , via the Nazi practice of encouraging folk customs, was a means of imagining cultural roots that were racially pure (217).
<7> But power operates across all surfaces, and is always productive. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue further that fascism (or, for the purposes of this paper, global capitalism), does collapse in on itself, managing to produce ruptures, or trauma, to the root system. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari ponder postmodernity's vexed relationship with roots, which they dub the "fascicular system." They imply that the root system has its origins (roots?) in the classical era -- "noble, signifying" (1987: 5), and perhaps even despotic:
It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, all of philosophy...: the root foundation, Grund, racine, fondement. The West has a special relation to the forest, and deforestation. (18)<8> Deleuze and Guattari map a symbolic connection to fascism via the notion of the fascicle -- "a bundle-like cluster" according to the American Heritage Dictionary, but also the etymological root of the word fascism -- which, in a sense, "bundles together" state, corporate, and nationalist interests. This coming together of local and global forms of capitalism is vividly evident in the ways in which television operated within domestic space, during and after 9/11.
Festive Viewing
<9> "Home is where the heart is," goes the expression; home is at the heart of post-9/11's excessive nationalisms, on TV and outside of it. Television schedules are one of the things that help create a sense of home -- thus, home is not only space but also time (Morley 2000). Thomas Dumm, taking this idea further, argues that the prime time viewing schedule is an instrument of discipline: "I have known for some time how much hinges on regularity, how the creation of the modern soul, to borrow from Michel Foucault, now depends as much upon television as it does on a prison schedule" (315). Indeed, several feminist television theorists (Modleski, Probyn) have discussed the ways in which television regulates, and in some sense oversees, women's housework schedules. In this sense, the home is a space of discipline, and the television a kind of panopticon. In describing a panoptical gaze informed by looking relations and technologies of light, Foucault almost seems to be describing the televisual apparatus:
The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly. A central point would be both the source of light illuminating everything and a locus of convergence for everything that must be known: a perfect eye that nothing would escape and a center toward which all gazes would be turned. (1978: 173)<10> According to Foucault, disciplinary apparati like the panopticon -- or in this case, the apparatus of television -- work upon the body as a locus of power, producing the repetition of bodily movements and gestures. Kaja Silverman refers to this as a "performative model, whereby meaningful practices and rituals are understood to produce the assent of the individual who engages in them" (1992: 17). The body's movements from telephone to television and back again; the entry onto to the street and then back into home can all be seen as instances of performativity producing a kind of docility to ideology. As Silverman contends, even if the subject knows that much of what she is seeing on the screen is fabricated, belief is produced as a result of what she calls "orchestrated corporeality" (17).
<11> The call to turn on the television, even in final phonecalls between hijacking victims and their wives, even by those who were watching the event first hand, is one of the things that marks 9/11 as a particularly televisual moment, located in the home. I heard about a young man who watched the towers start to go down from his Manhattan rooftop. As they were in mid-collapse, he left the roof to go inside to turn on his TV, hoping it would make him "understand." Television's ability to suture together one's own fragmented observations, and then to repeat them over and over again, can undercut local and personal experience. (Morley 2000). While this has been true of many national and international events, 9/11 is generally considered to be unique in that the entire event was covered live and in real time by TV [2]. As such, television took on a totemic importance, organizing people's emotions via ritualized utterances and generic forms.
<12> When prime time broadcast scheduling collapsed during and just after 9/11, I felt a sense of disorientation, and a kind of relief -- the relief one gets, perhaps, while being temporarily away from home. Perhaps it was the same feeling one gets on a holiday: Monday no longer means work, a weekend may no longer mean certain social pressures. But it was also that there was now a seamless, seemingly undisciplined flow of television, which one could watch endlessly, without the irritating interruption of commercials or TV shows I didn't like. This was, of course, only a different sort of disciplinary apparatus. Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, writing about televised historic events (state funerals, inaugurations and the like), use the term "festive viewing" to mark a broadcasting genre that is, in their minds, by definition,
...not routine. In fact, they are interruptions of routine; they intervene in the normal flow of broadcasting and our lives. Like the holidays that halt everyday routines, television events propose exceptional things to think about, to witness, and to do. Regular broadcasting is suspended and preempted as we are guided by a series of special announcements and preludes that transform daily life back into something special, and, upon conclusion of the event, are guided back again. (1994: 334-335)<13> Dayan and Katz's typology, which lists such things as "reverence and ceremony," "the almost priestly role played by journalists," and "a norm of viewing in which people tell each other that it is mandatory to view, that they must put all else aside" (336-337), recall televisions playing in every store and workplace I entered that day, or New York firefighters (the secular saints of the occasion) standing at attention as stretchers were carried out of the rubble. Religious invocation permeated the earliest breaking news of the event, as in This Morning broadcast by CBC Newsworld, as the second of the Twin Towers collapsed:
MARK KELLEY: Oh my God...(silence) Oh my God (silence)... if you can imagine the situation getting any worse, it just got worse, that was the second tower of the World Trade Center collapsing before our eyes... Unspeakable horror in Manhattan. [3]<14> Processes of decoding (Hall 1980) also shifted. There was very little need to prefer one thing over another; no need to engage in a decoding process, to negotiate the text beyond its preferred readings; all of the wall-to-wall coverage was, in a sense preferred [4]. Since all stations were broadcasting the same images, there were few choices to be made. TV became less like home -- with all of its banal routines -- and more like a trip, a being-away-from-home, but one, ironically, that one had to stay home for (grounded flights notwithstanding).
<15> Flow is one of the foundational ideas of television scholarship: the idea that television programming, rather than being comprised of bounded narratives, flows within itself (e.g. the flow between news segments), from program to program, and from program to commercial. Further, television programs are structured narratively so as to hold the viewer's attention (and maintain flow) between commercial breaks (Williams 1974) [5]. In more recent television writing, this idea has expanded to include the routines of everyday life, so that one may theorize, for example, a flow between the soap opera, the home, the freeway and the shopping mall, in the sense of these being narrative and physical spaces dominated -- in the daytime at least -- by women and by forms of female address.
<16> Flow operated in an almost hyperreal sense on 9/11 and the weeks that followed. There was an overflow of information and imagery; there was an endless, constantly churning flow between and across the spaces of the home, television narratives, the internet, the telephone, and the street. One couldn't, sometimes, distinguish what was on television from what one saw on the street, as in John Updike's description in the New Yorker "From the viewpoint of a tenth-floor apartment in Brooklyn heights...the destruction of the World Trade Center Twin Towers had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception" (2001: 28). Tears flowed, on TV and off, in the privacy of the home and in public. Slavoj Zizek described the spectacle as reality TV: "even if the show is 'for real', people still act in them -- they simply play themselves" (Zizek 2001).
<17> There was also considerable flow between television and cinema. Television's form of address is generally seen to differ from that of cinema's as being more fragmented and generically mixed. Where movie-goers are fixed in a single gaze towards a narrative, television-watchers, watching from home, are constantly distracted, getting up during commercials, talking on the phone, dealing with a flow of advertising, news, drama, etc. Cinema is said to produce the "gaze," and television, "the glance." But on September 11 and 12, 2001, television became something else, and its set of cultural competencies, theorized amid a control group of half hour programs, schoolchildren on a normal day with normal amounts of homework and housewives with feeding and laundry schedules (Modleski 1983), was nowhere to be seen. It seemed as though everyone was channeling CNN, as monolithically positioned as Laura Mulvey's visually transfixed cinema-goers. For a time, resistant readings had little or no currency: everyone was locked into the American gaze.
<18> Indeed, cinematic metaphors were constantly evoked by television hosts at a loss for words -- the phrase, "it's like a movie," was repeated many times. CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge groped for words: "It just... it's just... almost too hard to comprehend. If you'd watched a movie like this in a theatre you'd say this could never happen." New Yorker writer Anthony Lane pointed out that the duration of events -- the bombings and the towers' collapse -- lasted about two hours, the approximate length of a Hollywood action movie (2001: 79). But this was a made-for-TV movie, a movie seen in the home. Its cinematic qualities -- which included the lack of commercial breaks on September 11th and 12th -- were what helped to produce a gaze that sutured spectators more precisely into a national narrative. That unheimlich gaze, so unlike home TV-viewing and the theories that attend to it, produced a series of cinematic looks. The look of the camera, searching through rubble for surviving friends, fellow cameramen and reporters; the voyeuristic gaze of the audience that scanned the screen for falling bodies, that fetishized body parts; that hungered for images of suffering to substitute for a lost national self.
<19> Global media operates via the resignification of products and images: the transforming of the Hollywood action film Independence Day into an actual event; the recycling of the actual event into an episode of the TV drama series West Wing [6]. Guattari calls this "semiotic pillage," a system in which capitalism "manages to articulate, within one and the same general system of inscription and equivalence, entities which at first sight would seem radically heterogenous: of material and economic goods, of individual and collective human activities, and of technical, industrial and scientific processes" (1996: 235). The media then, becomes the desiring-machine of capitalism, "deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of productions" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 28). The Twin Towers reproduced themselves in movie metaphors, in war preparations, in the pledging of Canada's loyalty to the U.S., in TV images that repeated the bombing sequences over and over again. The insatiable need and hunger for news and images about the bombings was produced in large part by the media, a neediness that became, literally and metaphorically contagious, as anthrax spores appeared at major news sites.
Watching 9/11, One Year Later: The Traumatic Dream
<20> One year after 9/11, I reviewed CBC's coverage of the first eight hours of September 11th, 2001. I experienced some guilty pleasures. There was raw beauty in those images, in the novelty of erratic camerawork, of dirty lenses and unedited footage on TV. Cameras became as expressive as bodies, tilting quizzically, jerking in painful surprise, dilating or tearing up like human eyes. I enjoyed seeing what should have been edited out: the ellipses, the space between the frames. I was moved by the chiaroscuro of billowing clouds as the towers collapsed, by cameramen thinking they'd died and then coming back to life, frail pinpoints of light convincing us (and them) of a second chance to live, to set things right with their wives, their kids, their lives.
<21> But more than anything else, I was struck by the repetitiveness of the footage and the stunning lack of empirical information both the pictures and the announcers' and interviewees' commentary provided [7]. I was, of course, watching this footage in a controlled setting (CBC archives), without the overlapping texts of phonecalls, emails, channel-flipping, newspaper and radio. This was a radically different viewing situation from the one most of us experienced on the day itself. I wasn't at home; I couldn't walk away (I had brief and limited access to this footage); I couldn't look away. I was in a good position to notice what one couldn't possibly have picked up on the day it happened: the stutters, utterances and speech acts, the return of a repressed abject national self. Indeed, the representations and utterances I watched seemed to me to resemble the early stages of trauma as delineated by Judith Herman's classic medical accounting of the characteristics of post-traumatic stress disorder, Trauma and Recovery. Following Van der Kolk, she argues that trauma can place humans into a pre-linguistic stage. She writes: "in states of highly sympathetic nervous system arousal, the linguistic coding of memory is inactivated and the central nervous system reverts to the sensory and iconic forms of memory that predominate in early life" (39). Furthermore, the subsequent replaying of the Twin Towers' collapse (every few minutes on the first day; every few hours for months afterwards, and then every six months) seemed to enact the compulsion to repeat that characterizes post-traumatic stress. The compulsive return speaks to an unconscious desire to return to the state of trauma. By repeating or returning to unpleasurable experiences, the traumatized subject unconsciously hopes to achieve mastery, and thus to return to pleasure. In the case of Canadian media (and perhaps, most notably, television), mastery of a national self is almost always unrealizable; national and global crises bring this problem to the fore.
<22> The repetitious, compulsive televisual representation of 9/11 on Canadian television provides some interesting insights into the relationship of Canadian and American national identity, the porousness of Canada's representational borders, its abjection in moments of crisis, and its concomitant desire for (national) boundary maintenance. Flow functioned as both a connection to a national home, and a departure from it. At the outset of CBC's 9/11 coverage, American and Canadian images and voices were almost indistinguishable, an almost seamless weaving together of national narratives. CBC received a news "feed" from an American affiliate, WABC, and the voice of Mark Kelley, a CBC journalist who happened to be on air that morning, flowed in and out of the voices of journalists in New York City. This provided an opportunity to compare American and Canadian reactions to the event. By 9 a.m., WABC's announcers had named the event as a terrorist attack; it would be hours before Canadian broadcasters even attempted to draw such a conclusion:
UNNAMED AMERICAN ANNOUNCER: Now it's obvious I think that there's a second plane just crashed into the WTC. I think we have a terrorist act of proportions that we cannot begin to imagine at this juncture... My goodness. A second plane now has crashed into the other tower of the World Trade Center. (sigh) Obviously a suicide terrorist attack on the World Trade Center -- what we have been fearing for the longest time here apparently has come to pass. (WABC)MARK KELLEY: This is live coverage coming out of Manhattan, the scene of horrific, horrific -- well, some people are calling it an act of terror, we're not sure. (CBC)
<23> Attempts at national boundary maintenance functioned at the level of delay, an echo, or a trace. Later that morning, President George W. Bush delivered his speech to the nation, in which he declared, in ultra-colloquial terms, "we will hunt down and find the folks that did this." In a kind of unconscious, traumatized repetition, the Bugs Bunny-ish word "folks" began recurring in Kelley's speech: "This tragedy just continues to get worse, folks... I may add, folks, that thousands of people work in these two buildings... Clearly, folks, things are not under control." Thus, a Canadian TV announcer's repetitious utterance of the word "folks" on 9/11, post-Bush's speech, performatively sutures him back into American normalcy and recalls earlier utterances of the phrase: the nostalgia of the Warner Brothers ("That's all, folks!"); the unified subjectivity of the German volk; the down-home comforts of folk music and folklore [8].
<24> By 11 a.m., Kelley had caught up with America, and described the bombings as "a terrorist attack beyond belief." By 11:30, John Thompson, director of the right wing Canadian think tank The McKenzie Insititute, was on air, saying, "This is not terrorism anymore, it's war." And, "It's too soon to point fingers... but I think you might follow the strings all the way to Afghanistan." At about noon, the CBC graphic changed to "Attack on the USA" with a star-spangled blue background. Peter Mansbridge, the CBC's chief news anchor, had taken the reins with gusto, and his unscripted comments fell in with those of the American President:
As we heard from someone else today, it's almost wrong to be discussing this as terrorism, this is war. (cut to shot of collapsing tower). We have a country under siege, a city in devastation just south of us in the United States. These are not pictures from some far-off and distant land. This is our neighbour, and this is New York City, today, Sept 11, 2001. (CBC News)<25> Mansbride's responses are correlative with dissocciation, what Judith Herman has described as an inability to integrate memory. In this dissociative state, the replaying of the Twin Towers' collapse takes on the form of the "traumatic dream":
They often include fragments of the traumatic event in exact form, with little or no imaginative elaboration. Identical dreams often occur repeatedly. They are often experienced with terrifying immediacy, as if occurring in the present. (Herman, 39)<26> The phrase, "We are all Americans now" erupted days afterwards in the media. Canada's border with the U.S. -- long touted as the longest undefended border in the world -- became porous and blurry, almost overnight. "In Canada, pain has no borders," read a Globe and Mail headline on September 15, 2001. U.S. Ambassador to Canada, Paul Celucci was quoted in it as saying to Canadians: "You truly are our best friends" (A14). The sense of U.S. as other, so integral to Canadian identity, was significantly diminished, as Canada and the U.S. became embodied as friends with shared affective capacities. Shame, frequently harnessed at times of national crisis, was an integral part of this equation, producing what Nathanson has termed "the emotion of politics and conformity" (1992: 16).
<27> As the U.S. became less and less Canada's other, foreigners and migrants became more othered. As home became more important, homelessness became evidence of questionable morality. Canadian television worked hard to bring grainy, criminalized images of Muslims and Arabs into the familiar surroundings of the home, drawing and building upon a nation's xenophobia. As Morley writes,
The common location of the television set, in the very center of the home, profoundly integrates televisual experience into the time of everyday life. As a result of this, via television's transmission into the home, the coevalness of alterity is more strongly established than ever before, as that which is far away is made to feel both very much "here" -- right in our sitting rooms -- and precisely "now." (2000: 182)<28> The longing for a Canadian connection to terrorism was, following Ann Kaplan's formulation of viewing positions for trauma, a vicarious traumatization. As in a horror film, the impulse to imagine a Canadian connection was the trauma of unheimlich; the temporary loss of the maternal realm of belonging and incorporation, of home becoming not-home. On October 10th, Peter Mansbridge announced the first of several supposedly Canadian terrorists, in a trial by media that was to damage lives and livelihooods: "Another possible Canadian connection to tell you about tonight. This man's name is Ahmad Sa'id Khadr. He's a Canadian, a former aid worker, and the FBI is hunting for someone with the very same name, listing him as a suspect in the attacks of September eleventh" (CBC News, 10 Oct 2001).
<29> When Canadian media wanted to present the "other" side of the story, i.e. stories of racist attacks on Muslims, they would go to the U.S. to do so. On 16 Dec 2001, CTV news anchor Sandie Rinaldo announced this story:
RINALDO: This week, Americans watched in horror and anger as Osama Bin Laden boasted about the attacks on the World Trade Center. But for Muslim-Americans, there is fear the videotape will spark another round of hate crimes. Since September 11th, many Muslims have been harassed and victimized. CTV's Allison Vuchnich met with one family trying to cope with the hostility.
ALLISON VUCHNICH (Reporter): Watching the Heshmat's prepare dinner, you would never know that this American family is living a nightmare.
YASSER HESHMAT: No one should accept this situation.
VUCHNICH: The Heshmat's are Muslim and since the September 11th attacks, they have been harassed and victimized in their own home...
ALIAA HESHMAT: I don't think it's fair because we are American. We are American citizens and as I told you, we don't know where else to go. This is our home.
<30> "This is our home": Only an immigrant would have to say such a thing. As Ghassan Hage writes: "In the daily life of the nation, there are nationals who, on the basis of their class or gender or ethnicity, for example, practically feel and are made to feel to be more or less national than others...people strive to accumulate nationality" (52). If one has to strive for a sense of home, one can be fairly certain that home will always be denied in its entirety. Ahmed concurs: "the narrative of leaving home produces too many homes and hence no home." These Muslims are "bodies out of place" (Ahmed, 78); they are not really expected to have a safe home. For Canadian viewers, Muslims' experience of "hostility" is at several removes: safely placed away from home, and framed in the idea that these Muslims will have to keep moving. "In such a narrative journey, then, the space that is most like home, which is most comfortable and familiar, is not the space of inhabitance -- I am here -- but the very space in which one is almost, but not quite at home" (Ahmed, 78).
<31> Anthrax and anti-terrorism were discursively linked in the media, the anthrax standing in for foreign elements, which in turn stood in for terrorism. As Henrik Herzberg wrote in the New Yorker: "They [the terrorists] rode the flow of the world's aerial circulatory system like lethal viruses" (27). Canadian television, in its desire to be part of this larger world of contagion, was quick to provide a national anthrax story which conveniently appeared the same day that new anti-terrorist legislation was announced:
A contamination scare spread fear on Parliament Hill today. Bio-hazard crews rushed to the scene after opened mail was found to contain a suspicious powder. The scare came as the Chretien government launched its sweeping legislative assault in the war on terrorism. The controversial security bill would rewrite the law to give authorities new powers to hunt down suspected terrorists. It would allow for arrests without warrants in certain cases, expands police access to wiretaps, and imposes stiff new sentences, up to life in prison, for those convicted of terrorist activities. (Lloyd Robertson, CTV News, 15 Oct 2001).<32> Canadian and American news became a kind of phantom limb of the Twin Towers, endlessly acting out its melancholia. News of the arbitrary imprisonment and deportation of over a thousand Muslims and other "foreigners" began to leak out, via television's appendages: the internet, the alternative press, and occasional op-ed pieces in newspapers. A 9 March 2002 American Press article ran with the headline, "Hundreds of September 11 Detainees Still in N.J. Jails," reporting on the mass detentions which had left many Middle Eastern men behind bars on immigration charges, with no evidence linking them to terrorist actions. Many hundreds more had already been deported. The fantasy of roots, of a home that is fixed in time and place, became also a fantasy of first, second, and third generation immigrants who are made to go home, to a mythical place that is not here: "the condition of being a stranger is determined by the event of leaving home" (Ahmed, 78). The border had opened up only for those who felt at home, and were intent on staying there.
<33> These were not new, nor entirely American positions: Canada has a long history of racial profiling and anti-terrorist legislation, through its repeated uses of its War Measures Act (now the Emergencies Measures Act) which has been used to forcibly imprison and deport immigrants, dissenters and others, for most of the twentieth century. In fact, as Roy Miki and others have pointed out, the constant invocation of 9/11 as a repressive moment risks reinforcing the idea that anti-terrorist initiatives are entirely new (unpublished conference discussion, February 2002). In a similar vein, Zizek points out that such oppressive moments recur as the unrepresentable real, a "return" of "the same traumatic kernel in all social systems" (1989: 50).
The Olympics: Triumph of the "Will to Totality"
<34> The Salt Lake City Olympics, in February of 2002, provided false closure for the national traumas of 9/11. According to Kaja Silverman, "social formations depend upon their dominant fictions for their sense of unity and identity" (1992: 55). She argues that groups of people, perhaps even entire nations, can protect themselves from traumatic memory by, in a sense, repressing the memory of the traumatic event and participating in collective identifications that attempt to create closure and fixity of meaning. These fantasmatic projections, which she calls "dominant fictions," often entail the repeating of forms and gestures of a particular genre. A person's or a nation's normalcy can be constituted through this repetition, producing national narratives that are simultaneously known to be false and believed to be "real." The genre of the sports spectacle is particularly effective in producing such narratives. Hage writes: "The national 'we' magically enables the 'I' of the national to do things it can never hope of being able to do as an individual 'I'....Through this magical quality, all collective national identities work as a mechanism for the distribution of hope" (2002).
<35> This reassertion of hope via national boundaries was also an admission of a limit to hybridity. As the flags of nations were triumphantly carried into the stadium by athletes, the discrete borders of the nation-state were reasserted, if only for seventeen days. "Another Ice Age Begins" ran a headline in the February 9th issue of the Globe and Mail, over a photograph of white Canadian athletes in their Roots uniforms, a Canadian flag filling almost half of the frame. As Richard Dyer and others have pointed out, ice plays an iconic role in a Canadian national imaginary that foregrounds white settler values of agency and survival, which become rationales for colonization. In such constructs as that provided by the Globe and Mail article it is as though, as George Eliot Clarke has written, "the primeval frontier and the white body become one" (1998: 107). In a kind of televisual postscript to this trope, Wayne Gretzky, coach of the Canadian Olympic men's hockey team, appeared in an ad for General Motors that ran in December 2002. Against shots of neighborhood kids playing hockey, cars, Christmas trees and finally, an off-the-TV shot of Team Canada's winning game, Gretsky says: "What's there to celebrate about life in Canada? Celebrate ice. Trees. Determination. Celebrate hard work that pays off."
<36> The signifiers of a traumatized American nation took center stage at the Olympics. Canadian sports commentator Terri Libel said, "We arrived in Salt Lake City and discovered a nation still in mourning." (Incessantly patriotic throughout the 17-day broadcast, she mused upon who would carry the "red and white" at the opening ceremony, another unconscious echo of an American speech act). The tattered flag from the World Trade Center was displayed by New York City firefighters. A young American gold medallist skater performed a memorial dance for the victims of 9/11, complete with voice-over: "My name is Sarah Hughes. I am sixteen years old. This dance is in memory of those innocent people who lost their lives on September 11th." The much-touted childlike innocence of those "victims" stood in for U.S. victimhood and innocence, as when American folksinger Willie Nelson sang the words to "Bridge Over Troubled Waters": "I'm on your side/when times get rough/and friends just can't be found." Nelson's ordinarness, his disheveled hair and informal clothing, became a poignant signifier of Middle America and its peculiar notion of victimhood. As Sara Ahmed writes, these kinds of representations are far from benign. They signify
...the ordinary as in crisis and the ordinary person as the real victim. The ordinary becomes that which is already under threat by the imagined others whose proximity becomes a crime against person as well as place. Hate is distributed in such narratives across various figures...all of which come to embody the danger of impurity, or the mixing and taking of blood. (2002)<37> The huge costly spectacles of the opening and closing ceremonies reinscribed this fantasy of pure family and pure nation again and again: Donny and Marie Osmond sang "We are Family"; giant dinosaurs emoted: "We all share the same planet, and after five billion years we're still one family." Silverman (following Ernesto Laclau) has called this kind of statement a "will to totality": a societal mechanism which serves to forget and obscure cultural difference (1992: 54). The figure of the family is central here, combining, as Silverman argues, both sexual and economic normalizing regimes: family as node of symbolic order and mode of production (33).
<38> With the mythology of nation-as-family stronger than ever in the U.S., the Roots logo, visible on the chests and foreheads of the U.S., British and Canadian athletes, became subtextually resonant. This was a corporate branding not only of athletics, but also of normalcy, with its demonization of rootlessness. The Roots-designed red Canada jackets (available to athletes and consumers alike) had a vintage feel, reminiscent of my brother's Pee Wee hockey jacket from the 1960s. There was a big maple leaf on the chest, with "Canada" scawled underneath in retro script, harkening back to a time before Quebec separatism, before Bill C-36, Canada's brand-new anti-terrrorist legislation. In Canadian media, much was made of the fact that it was the Canadian-based, albeit American owned, company Roots that designed the uniforms for athletes for Canadian, American, and British athletes. During the Olympics, Rebecca Eckler of the National Post entered a Roots store and purchased full Team Canada regalia. She wrote: "I looked like I belonged on a podium. Or in a mental institute. Who, in their right mind, would advertise their country to this extent?" Ecker interviewed Micheal Budman, co-founder of Roots, quoting him as saying, "This is the greatest moment in Roots history....We're just ecstatic how well Americans are receiving our products, all of which are made out of Toronto." According to Eckler, Budman credited Roots with making Canada "the star of the games." This was an interesting reversal of the actual situation. In fact, it was Canada that had made Roots the star of the games: corporate branding had been reterritorialized as patriotism.
<39> The enactment of nationalism, be it specifically Canadian, or a brand of western, uber-Americanism, is comprised of a host of details. Hage, following Pierre Bourdieu, stresses the importance of cultural capital in the production of a "practical nationality [which] can be understood analytically as the sum of accumulated nationally sanctioned and valued social and physical cultural styles and dispositions (national culture)" (2000: 53). The accruing of these styles and positions produces, argues Hage, a sense of national belonging. On a weekend trip to Seattle in January 2002, my friends and I delight in noticing the peculiarities of American behaviour and ritual. The almost aggressive friendliness of the waiter (he sits down with us, to chat, before taking our orders) reminds us of our own mythical Canadian politesse; the hundreds of flags we notice everywhere become proof of an overdetermined patriotism that is not our own. But it is the similarities, the common symptoms of this nationalist hysteria, that are more difficult to notice and pin down. While much of 9/11's collective affect echoes earlier episodes like (in the U.S.) presidential assasinations or (in Canada) the Quebec referendum, there is a different quality to the signifiers of Canadian national belonging post-9/11.
<40> On a Sunday afternoon in February 2002, as I emerge from the cocoon of a three-day conference (ironically, a conference on hybridity), I am taken aback by the sight and sound of cars honking, huge Canadian flags being displayed from car windows, worn as capes, or painted on faces. The streets of Vancouver, usually so staid and quiet, so readable, are filled by revelers of many races and all ages. A group of young women stand on the sidewalk, holding up flags and homemade signs as cars go by, echoing the posture of New York citizens as they hailed firefighters immediately after September 11th. A man walks by, holding an empty Molson's Canadian beer carton aloft like a flag. Canada has won the gold in Olympic hockey against the U.S. Suddenly, we are no longer Americans: Canada has regained its autonomy and perhaps its virility through sports. As Mansbridge announces on that day's evening news, over shots of people shouting "Ca-na-da!", we were "a country united and feeling good all over."
<41> This feel-good Canada was a more folksy nation than we had seen in some time. This was a Canada that expressed its heimat, its "feeling of belonging together" (Applegate 1990: x) via a valorization of the local (as in TV commercials that took us to the athletes' hometowns) amid an unprecedented centralization of state and global power in the form of anti-terrorist legislation and new controls on immigration. Such a retro, smalltown Canada could only reclaim its origins in what Roy Miki has called "an earlier 'nation' formation" (2002), one with a single set of roots and a burgeoning fascicular system. Indeed, as Silverman has also argued, the signifiers of "town" and "nation" exist in ideological relation to other binary oppositions like male and female, and are integral to the formation of the dominant fiction (1992: 35).
Postscript: Impossible Citizens
<42> Anniversaries recur, with a deep compulsive need to repeat the trauma of loss. In the wake of the various tragedies of 9/11, the telling and re-telling of the story becomes a way to return to an emotional ground zero, to the homeplace of grief.
<43> As I attempt to watch a week's worth of anniversary footage of 9/11, I finally reach a necessary limit. It is not just that the documentaries, the interviews, the reflections, have been harnessed to the service of Bush's call to war against Iraq. It is also that it is only two months since a death in my own family. The faces of New Yorkers mourning the loss of their husbands, wives, daughters and brothers are suddenly familiar to me: they look like my face. The television has become a mirror-machine, and I have reached a limit, of skin stretched taut to connect their experience and mine, to connect theory and affect, my brother, my father, my grandmother, my own dead, flesh and blood, skin and kin. The unrepresentable "real" has folded into the reality of personal grief. Theory for here, affect for there, layers of skin on skin, multiple points of connection: to justice, to power, to sentiment, to a false collectivity, to community, to the repetitive, compulsive homeplace of grief.
<44> My brother's body is returned to his birthplace for burial: to a sunbleached plot of prairie land. His real homeplace was in Vancouver's traumatized, drug-ridden, Downtown Eastside. The DTES provided for my brother, as for many others, a site of ethics and community built from the ground of trauma. This grid of eight scarred city blocks amid which he lived is a place of roots shallowly but firmly placed, of memories of origin that rise in dreams and drug-induced hallucinations like hands choking throats, or like something someone else dreamed for you. Like de Certeau's wandersmanner, my brother walked the city's streets and alleys daily, obsessively, one of those "whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban text" (de Certeau 1984: 93). But this was a text which, despite his daily presence in it, could not include him in its syntax, its organization. Impossible citizen: vichnaya pamiat, eternal memory, eternal unbelonging.
<45> As Jill Bennet has pointed out, psychoanalytically-based trauma theory assumes a world in which the context surrounding the trauma is a normal one to which one can eventually return. She cautions, however, that "for those who live in violent communities, there is no stable backdrop" (2002: 347). The Freudian possibilities of mourning, in which trauma is worked through and located in the narratives of present-time, found a limit in September 2003: in my own mourning process: in that of nations bent towards war.
<46> De Certeau's Twin Towers were rooted, immobile, looking down upon nomadic populations: "the dark space where crowds move back and forth" (1984: 92). Panoptic, all-seeing, the World Trade Center represented a will to knowledge rather than a will to truth, an illusion of empiricism and purity. That those differences could and would erupt, in the form of terrorists, aliens and foreigners, was inevitable; for de Certeau, the "clear text of the planned and readable city" was a palimpsest, overlaid with the text of the nomadic city, Heimlich becoming unheimlich.
<47> One of the things that television did on September 11, 2002, was to remind us that, in the face of trauma, the home always has the potential to become unlike itself, to become not home. This was the trauma of the unheimlich with its uncanny Twin Towers-ish doubling -- reality that could be mistaken for cinema, Canadian TV that could be mistaken for American. Ghosts and doubles everywhere: the memorialized dead of Washington, Pennsylvania and New York, the unmemorialized of poverty, neglect, genocide. As Miki writes, that ghostly invisibility is crucial in forging "the exclusive boundaries of the colonial nation-state" (2002).
<48> Trauma, writes Jill Bennet, "seeks home not just in language but also in the body...when one has the realization 'I am in this scene', it affects me, I am a witness" (348). It is at that moment that the possibility of a public, rather than private memory of trauma can unfold. Without that moment of inhabitation, traumatic memory remains privatized, and perhaps even unrealizable. And it us upon such a foundation of forgetting that national citizenship depends. Television, purveyor of ghost stories across the borders of inside and outside, made of each home a mirrored house of horrors whose only recourse seemed to be escape to the larger home of nation.
Notes
[1] The notion of homeland later became institutionalized in the U.S. in November 2002 with the formation of the Department of Homeland Security, the largest American federal reorganization in several decades. Immigration would now operate as a security operation, in the same department as the Secret Service and Customs, effectively criminalizing the movement of immigrants. The National Post reported that, "All male 'foreign visitors' from a list of 25 mostly Arab and Muslim countries are required to report to authorities for interviews, and be photographed and fingerprinted" (2003: B1). [^]
[2] Many people argue that the Kennedy assassinations were the first such events, but these were recorded on film and later broadcast on television. [^]
[3] News announcer Mark Kelley's emotive outpouring is, according to Dumm, not out of line, for, as he writes, "the anchor is able to present herself or himself as a fellow watcher, but one who is a surrogate for the watcher at home, able to ask questions and guide the agenda" (317). [^]
[4] The term "preferred reading" derives from Stuart Hall's seminal essay "Encoding/Decoding" in which he identified three possible ways of decoding media texts: oppositional, negotiated, and preferred (or dominant). Crucial to this formulation is Hall's insistence that, while polysemy creates the possibility of a variety of readings among audience members, the media text is still "structured in dominance." Hall wrote: "Polysemy must not be confused with pluralism....Any society/culture tends, with varying degrees, to impose its segmentations....There remains a dominant cultural order, though it is neither univocal nor contested" (1980: 134). I find this to be a useful caveat in my own attempts to understand the ways in which mainstream media achieved a kind of monolithic textuality during the events of 9/11. [^]
[5] Raymond Williams defines flow as "the replacement of a programme series of timed, sequential units by a flow series of differently related units in which the timing, though real, is undeclared" (1974: 93). While he used the term to refer specifically to the structure of television programming, I am using it in a much broader sense. [^]
[6] In a critical article rare for the neo-conservative national Canadian paper The Globe and Mail, columnist Russell Smith described the West Wing episode as "official art, American-style", writing that, "The writers of the program may not have to satisfy the demands of a central propaganda committee, but they do have to come up with something that a terrified corporation, the network, would air in a time of greatly heightened sensitivity" (2002: D1). [^]
[7] Stanley Cavell, however, cited in Dumm, argues that improvised talk is absolutely characteristic of television, and that "the fact that nothing of consequence is said matters little compared to the fact that something is spoken....Improvisation, no matter how slight, is the sign of life on the televison monitor" (311). [^]
[8] In a similar vein, Mary Pat Brody notes that the War on Terrorism's "narratives of emergency" recall earlier utterances of terminology used in the War on Drugs, suturing the notion of an attenuated, masculinist, and institutionalized war into normalcy. [^]
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