9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster

Thomas Stubblefield

Description

Winner, NEPCA Rollins Book Award

Listen to an IU Press podcast with the author.

The day the towers fell, indelible images of plummeting rubble, fire, and falling bodies were imprinted in the memories of people around the world. Images that were caught in the media loop after the disaster and coverage of the attack, its aftermath, and the wars that followed reflected a pervasive tendency to treat these tragic events as spectacle. Though the collapse of the World Trade Center was "the most photographed disaster in history," it failed to yield a single noteworthy image of carnage. Thomas Stubblefield argues that the absence within these spectacular images is the paradox of 9/11 visual culture, which foregrounds the visual experience as it obscures the event in absence, erasure, and invisibility. From the spectral presence of the Tribute in Light to Art Spiegelman's nearly blank New Yorker cover, and from the elimination of the Twin Towers from television shows and films to the monumental cavities of Michael Arad's 9/11 memorial, the void became the visual shorthand for the incident. By examining configurations of invisibility and erasure across the media of photography, film, monuments, graphic novels, and digital representation, Stubblefield interprets the post-9/11 presence of absence as the reaffirmation of national identity that implicitly laid the groundwork for the impending invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Spectacle and Its Other
1. From Latent to Live: Disaster Photography after the Digital Turn
2. Origins of Affect: The Falling Body and Other Symptoms of Cinema
3. Remembering-Images: Empty Cities, Machinic Vision, and the Post-9/11 Imaginary
4. Lights, Camera, Iconoclasm: How Do Monuments Die and Live to Tell about It?
5. The Failure of the Failure of Images: The Crisis of the Unrepresentable from the Graphic Novel to the 9/11 Memorial
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Media Studies
• Social Science
• Popular Culture
• Sociologie, société et politique
• 9
• 11

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 17 décembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253015631
• Langue: English

Extrait

9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
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2015 by Thomas Stubblefield
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stubblefield, Thomas.
9/11 and the visual culture of disaster / Thomas Stubblefield.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01549-5 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01556-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01563-1 (ebook) 1. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001 - Influence. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001, in mass media. 3. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001, in art. 4. Emptiness (Philosophy) I. Title.
HV 6432.7. S 78 2014
973.931 - dc23
2014029044
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
FOR C. D. S .
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction: Spectacle and Its Other
1 From Latent to Live: Disaster Photography after the Digital Turn
2 Origins of Affect: The Falling Body and Other Symptoms of Cinema
3 Remembering-Images: Empty Cities, Machinic Vision, and the Post-9/11 Imaginary
4 Lights, Camera, Iconoclasm: How Do Monuments Die and Live to Tell about It?
5 The Failure of the Failure of Images: The Crisis of the Unrepresentable from the Graphic Novel to the 9/11 Memorial
Conclusion: Disaster(s) without Content
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Acknowledgments
As pieces of this book have passed through so many skilled and caring hands over the past decade, it is impossible to faithfully represent the full catalog of those who have helped bring it into being. What I offer here represents only a small sampling of the many individuals who have participated in the ongoing conversation.
I initially began to wrestle with issues surrounding the visual culture of 9/11 in 2004 while pursuing my master s degree in art history at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Throughout these early investigations, I was encouraged and inspired by Bob Bruegmann, Peter Hales, Hannah Higgins, and Woodman Taylor. Together, they not only pushed me to clarify and develop my ideas further, but introduced the possibility of my one day turning this project into a book. For that, I am eternally grateful. Several years later, the project was given new life at the Visual Studies Program at the University of California, Irvine. Anyone familiar with the unique interdisciplinary spirit of the program will immediately see its influence on my methodology and overall approach to visual culture. It is hard to imagine having the same opportunity to pursue these questions across such a disparate field of media at any other program at the time.
I would like to thank Peter Krapp, who was (and remains) extraordinarily giving of his time. Peter can always be counted on for a relevant source or thought-provoking question. Additionally, C cile Whiting offered tireless and timely feedback throughout. I am also grateful to Martin Schwab, who had the uncanny ability to force me to revisit the assumptions of my argument with a single well-placed question. Mark Poster too proved an invaluable resource, particularly with regard to helping me to build the theoretical toolbox that this project necessitated. I will never read Foucault without thinking of him. In addition, my interaction with colleagues in the program was critical in helping me to sculpt my ideas into the form that they would eventually take. For this, I thank Chris Balaschak, Kim Beil, Mark Cunningham, Douglas Hodapp, Ari Laskin, Tim Seiber, Sami Siegelbaum, Nicole Woods-Beckton, and Ken Yoshida. It is also important to acknowledge the generosity of the University of California, Irvine, in this endeavor. The Chancellor s Fellowship, numerous traveling grants from the International Center for Writing and Translation and the School of the Humanities, and a Summer Dissertation Research Fellowship allowed me to dedicate myself more fully to this project and are in no small part responsible for its success.
This project has come to full fruition while I have been working as professor in the Art History Department at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Throughout the endless revisions, I have benefited tremendously from the guidance and support of Anna Dempsey, Memory Holloway, Pamela Karimi, Hallie Meredith, Erin Sassin, and Michael Taylor. Allison Cywin and Charlene Ryder helped enormously in the endless hunt to procure images and essays. In addition, I am indebted to the students of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at UMD , especially those in two classes, The Visual Culture of Disaster and Theory of Photography, who kept me on my toes and forced me to keep my ideas fresh and relevant.
I also want to thank Indiana University Press for its diligence and commitment to this project. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude to my editor, Raina Polivka, who believed in the book from the beginning and worked tirelessly to bring it into being. Jenna Whittaker deserves ample credit for somehow ensuring that everything moved forward while at the same time always looking over my materials with a conscientious and critical eye. Eric Levy provided the fine-tooth comb and meticulous scrutiny that was needed to my whip my prose into shape. I am also very appreciative of the insightful suggestions and comments of the outside readers. Additionally, I want to acknowledge Tom Gunning, who fielded my questions about the representation of falling bodies in early film with characteristic expertise and generosity.
Finally, I want to thank Barbara, Dave, David, and Trisha Stubblefield for their unwavering support, Hayden, Zoey, and Damien for interjecting some much-needed perspective throughout, and Karen, whose gentle nature and wild optimism make all things appear obtainable.
I don t know what we ll see when the smoke
clears . . . but I fear it may be nothing.
LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ ,
The Writing on the Wall

Introduction
SPECTACLE AND ITS OTHER
The collision of the jet passenger planes with the Twin Towers, their subsequent collapse into nothingness, the ominous absence within the smoke-filled skyline, the busy streets of Manhattan turned disaster movie - these scenes were images as much or more than actual events. 1 The hard truth of this realization came less than a week after the attacks when Karlheinz Stockhausen described the disaster as the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos and once again on the eve of the one-year anniversary of 9/11 when Damien Hirst expressed his admiration for the terrorists ability to create such a visually stunning piece of art. 2 With the remains of the dead still being sifted out of the rubble at Ground Zero and the Tribute in Light beaming into the night sky as a daily reminder of the horrific events of the day, it was all but impossible to see through the callousness and publicity-driven nature of these remarks at the time. Eventually, however, as references to the Hollywood disaster movie and the rhetoric of the sublime reverberated throughout popular discourse, the realization set in that the eerily photogenic quality of the event was not a coincidence. Rather, as Stockhausen and Hirst suggest, the attack was aimed at and made for the image.
As a result, the disaster appeared tailor-made for a familiar postmodern discourse. In a discussion with J rgen Habermas held only days after the attack, Jacques Derrida catalyzed this response by noting that the shared interest of maximum media coverage between the perpetrators and victims of 9/11 reflected a pervasive desire to spectacularize the event. 3 Not long after, Samuel Weber diagnosed the theatricalization of the attack and subsequent retaliation as an escalation in war-as-spectacle, one which shifted the stakes of the conflict from a specific geographical space or national identity to the media itself. 4 Summarizing what has since become a refrain within the scholarship of 9/11, Katalin Orb n describes the disaster as a constitutively visual event that can (and did) become a real time global media spectacle, where maximum exposure, rather than concealment, ensures terror s success as an act of communication. 5

0.1. Paul Fusco, Tribute in Light , 2002. By permission of Magnum Photos.
While acknowledging the primacy of the image to the event, the enduring association of the disaster with spectacle served to obscure the fact that the experience of 9/11 and its aftermath was one in which absence, erasure, and invisibility dominated the frame in equal measure. Following the logic of implosion rather than explosion, the World Trade Center withheld its contents from view as it fell; its stories pancaked on top of one another rather than turning themselves inside out. With the vast majority of the dead dying behind the curtain wall of the towers facades, the most photographed disaster in his