4 - 9/11 News Coverage

Summary

In his address to the nation on 11 September 2001, American President George W. Bush declared that no American will ever forget the terrorist attacks of 9/11, going on to announce that the country would ‘go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just’ in the world. This chapter will look to the social reality and function of remembering traumatic events such as 9/11 asking: at what point can we declare that we are remembering too much? Or more significantly, when does the trauma of a past event turn despotic? It will be argued that the mass media's appropriation and repetition of 9/11 images along with the public's will to consume these constitutes a repressive and authoritarian social organization, one that comes from converting the libidinal affects and energies of memory labor into a habitual, albeit paranoid Memory. In this way, the postmodern logic of memorial culture is understood not just as a periodizing concept exemplary of late capitalism, as Jameson proposes, it is also symptomatic of culture's complicity with a broader problem of social repression operating at the level of desire: seamlessly turning the creative and disruptive energies of a little forgetting into a repressing force of Memory signification.

Notwithstanding the fact that for the first five days after the 9/11 attacks the media covered the event around the clock in the absence of commercial breaks (even sports channels turned to disaster coverage), the majority of Americans persistently watched the pastiche of images repeat on their television screens despite the fact that viewing the material made them depressed.