In light of what I've watched for the previous two days (i.e., the
bombings of the Twin Towers), the previous discussion seems justifiably
removed from the fantasy/illusion of cinema--and yet, I think this impulse
to talk of reality, whether bolstered by our home-movie sensibility or the
brute loss of life, is utterly problematic. Virutally every person I've
seen interviewed in the last couple days has, when pressed to define the
event, said something to the effect of: "it's another Pearl Harbor" or,
alternatley, "it's worse than Pearl Harbor." The "witnesses" are not
veterans, however, but twenty and thirty-somethings, sometimes middle aged
men and women, who (like me) have no first-hand grasp on what Pearl Harbor
really meant. Honestly, I think the comparison does not lie in any
historical analogy but in a visual one, which is to say that the
images of the bombings are measured by their tacit juxtaposition with an
image of Pearl Harbor that is certainly the residue of a summer film. The
tendency is thus to say that these images are more real, more credible,
more indexical perhaps, but this strikes me--on a personal level, at
least--as altogether wrong. I am tranfixed, nauseated, by those images of
commuter planes hurdling into the Twin Towers precisely because they defy
my capacity to believe: they are truly sublime, impossible to imagine yet,
uncannily, there, ex-isting before our eyes.
Without offending anyone, I think that the proliferation of
cliches around the event are the incantatations of a culture that will do
anything to make sense of that which--in the most profound sense of
aesthetics--is beyond sense. The invocation of evil is the instrument of a
good old metaphysical-moral narrative that has always been used to
make sense (of women as "witches" or of Jews as "goats," etc.) by virtue
of demonizing. Don't get me wrong: the bombing is sick, obscene, but the
whispers of evil are the first strains of a nasty little symphony that
gets played out when boys in New Jersey start to vandalize Indian-owned
bussinesses, or when Muslims in the United States begin to feel uneasy.
There is a really fine line here: on the one hand, I am so heartened by
the sense of cooperation that I've seen reported, but on the other hand,
what coheres a community better that some "evil"? As Freud said in
_Civilization and Its Discontents_, nothing brings a community better than
a victim-scapegoat. Without running aground on shoals of moral relatavism,
isn't it possible to detest the bombings without invoking moral simplcity,
without invoking a notion of "evil"? Robert Kohler says above than this
isn't a time for moral relativism, which I take to mean, this isn';t a
time to pull out the tropes of academia. I think the opposite: if they are
not to be merely tropes but tenets, this is precisely the time to weigh
events, to moderate our anger, to reflect on our motives, and to resist
absolutes.
Gregg Flaxman
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