culture foundations.

JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 8 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2004)

Ground Zero: Reflections on Trauma, In/distinction and Response

Jenny Edkins Taylor and Francis LtdRCUV8302.sgm10.1080/1479758042000264939Journal for Cultural Research1479-7585 (print)/1740-1666 (online)Original Article2004Taylor & Francis Ltd83000000July [email protected]

This essay traces practices of tourism and memory at Ground Zero in New York in 2001 in an attempt to understand the perceived significance of what had happened and what it was that had been seen as traumatic. It describes the endless circling of the site, and the need for people to see for themselves. It argues that what happened included not just the impact of the planes but the collapse of the twin towers and the wound to the cityscape that followed. This exploration leads the paper to propose a more all-embracing view of trauma, not as an injury to the flesh, to the psyche, to the community, or to the built envi- ronment, but as the name for an event where the very distinctions between body, psyche, community and environment are called into question. Practices that took place after 9.11 reveal how visitors and rescue workers sought, for example by taking photographs and in their insistent search for remains, to rein- state distinctions that had been obliterated, and how they struggled not only against the use of victims as a means that took place that day, but the ongoing instrumentalisation of life that takes place anyway under contemporary systems of sovereign power.

I have nothing to say—no words stronger than the steel that pressed you into itself; no scripture older or more elegant than the ancient atoms you have become. (Morrison 2003)

On the first anniversary of September 11, President George W. Bush shuttled between three ceremonies of commemoration (Sanger & Preston 2002). The first was at the Pentagon in Washington. There the only tangible sign of the events of the year before was a single blackened stone bearing the date “September 11th, 2001”. At Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed, he met relatives gathered in the replanted field after a formal ceremony and wreath laying. The names of those aboard (apart from four presumed hijackers) are inscribed on a monument to heroes under the now famous motto “Let’s roll”. The final ceremony the President attended was in New York City. The scene there was very different. In New York there was no formal service, no presidential speech, and no seated ranks of relatives—of “loved ones”, to use the current

ISSN 1479–7585 print/1740–1666 online/04/010247–24 © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1479758042000264939

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terminology. Instead, there was a continuation of the ceremony that had been going on all day as the masses of family members of those killed slowly made their way in turn down into the base of the site where the twin towers of the World Trade Center had once stood while the names of those lost were read aloud by a rota of dignitaries and others. The rest of New York—and indeed the many relatives or survivors who did not visit the site—went quietly about its busi- ness. The disaster site was still an open wound, impressive in its scale. It was too huge to have been covered over, despite a year’s worth of work 24 hours a day. Even the list of names was illusory in its claim to completeness, although there had been a last minute scramble to check and double-check each one. At least one woman was surprised to hear her name read out that day—and no doubt others who were indeed killed will remain unknown or at least unlisted (Lipton 2002).1

Despite the official rush to memorialisation evident in the moments, hours and days following the impact of the first plane into Tower One (Edkins 2003b; Sturken 2002), recovery at the site and in New York in general was a slow process, and one far from complete by the first anniversary. Though George W. Bush may have wanted to move on to a different agenda on 12 September 2002, when he made his speech to the United Nations to announce his intentions with regard to Iraq,2 for many of those affected more closely by the events of the preceding 11 September the anniversary marked something more like the begin- ning than the end of a process. Events in downtown Manhattan called forth a response more complex and more controversial than could be encompassed in nationalist rhetoric.

In this paper I want to examine this response, looking specifically at these cultural and political practices centring around what has come to be called “Ground Zero”. This site represents a stumbling block that to some extent resists the incorporation of what happened that day into narratives of heroism and revenge. The events of September 11 are widely seen as traumatic (Robbins 2003; Greenberg 2003). I begin by asking more specifically how we might inter- pret the collapse of the twin towers as a particular type of traumatic event, one where buildings were revealed as instrumental rather than protective, and where all that was left afterwards was a debris in which human remains were indistinguishable from dust. I propose that we need to re-think the notion of “traumatic” to include not just a variety of wounds—to the body, to the psyche, to the social fabric or to the environment. I argue that it is helpful to see what we call “trauma” as arising in situations where distinctions that are otherwise taken for granted, and which provide the basis for routine social existence, disappear. In the light of this I first note the reaction of New Yorkers who took to the streets and encircled Ground Zero, engaging in impromptu public debates

1. Some 50 cases of people reported missing were still under investigation; it was decided to read their names out anyway 2. Although he waited until 12 September for his UN speech, the news of the content of that speech was a point of discussion on the 11th; it “hung over a somber but restorative day of national mourn- ing and commemoration” (Sanger & Preston 2002)

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and demonstrations and erecting shrines and memorials. Second, I examine the way in which attempts were made to restore the distinctions thrown into ques- tion by the events of that September morning. I briefly compare these reactions to those of the Bush administration, and consider whether the former practices challenge the obliteration of distinctions, and to what extent this constitutes an ethico-political practice.

Ground Zero

Ground Zero was not a zero, there was not a nothing there. (Rothenbuhler 2002)

The name “Ground Zero”, which appears to have been given by the media within 24 hours of the collapse of the towers, has stuck, despite the fact that for those working there the site was called by other names. Initially known simply as “the pile” (Langewiesche 2003, p. 11), as work progressed it became (for obvious reasons) “the hole” or “the pit”. The term “ground zero” is technically a term that relates to a nuclear explosion. It designates the position on the earth’s surface immediately above or below the point of detonation of a nuclear bomb. In the case of a nuclear attack, chances of survival are measured in terms of the distance from “ground zero”, usually conceived as a series of concentric circles (Chant & Hogg 1983, p. 39, reproduced in Schwenger 1991, p. 253). In the first circle, which is several miles or kilometres in diameter, nothing at all survives: all trace of living flesh and bone is vapourised; buildings are flattened. For those outside this circle, survival is temporary. In Hiroshima as one doctor describes it “those who were irradiated with the same dose of radiation at the same distance from the epicentre fell ill simultaneously and died together” (Hida 1998, p. 428). In connection with the use of the term in New York it is interesting to note the destruction that would be caused by various patterns of nuclear explosions over Washington. A one-megaton weapon (1,000 kilotons) detonated between the White House and the Capitol would completely destroy both structures and everything in between, including underground bunkers at the White House. The blast would extend as far as the Pentagon, though at that distance (2 miles) it would be insufficient to completely destroy the reinforced structure. The radia- tion from a much smaller weapon of 100 kilotons centred on the Pentagon would spread lethal radiation over an area extending well beyond the Beltway (Postol 1987: Figures 11-4 and 11-10). In relation to this level of destruction produced by relatively modest nuclear explosions, the use of the term in connection with Manhattan seems exaggerated.

However, in some ways the term “Ground Zero” could be seen as apt for the site in New York, although the extent of its suitability was not apparent when it was coined. Like a nuclear weapon set to detonate above ground to cause maxi- mum casualties, the explosion of the two aircraft on impact with the towers was hundreds of feet above street level. As in a nuclear attack no human remains were to be found at the epicentre: victims were eliminated without trace. There

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were similar though much muted concerns about toxicity. Like the two nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the target was the very centre of a city. In both cases, the aim seems to have been a demonstration of power and the production of maximum terror, with little regard for who was to be killed: numbers mattered, individual lives did not.3 However, in terms of scale, it is difficult to see Manhattan as even “a miniature Hiroshima” (Ketcham 2002, p. 10). In Hiroshima (a 10 kiloton blast) immediate deaths totalled tens of thou- sands, with the final official total of 186,940.4 The whole city was flattened, not just a few blocks. From this perspective, the use of “ground zero” to describe New York is a grotesque exaggeration of tragedy, and a worrying hyper-valuation of lives lost on American soil. Twin towers reflecting two entire cities, with around 1,000 lost in each tower, as opposed to over 100,000.

However, let us return to the specifics of what happened at Ground Zero Manhattan on 11 September 2001. What happened that morning? We could say that there were in an important sense two “traumatic events” that took place. First, planes were hijacked and flown directly into skyscraper office blocks, caus- ing huge fires and devastating loss of life in the explosions. It is already hard to remember how unimaginable that was before it happened. The scale and inac- cessibility of the fire, and the way people were trapped by it was one shocking aspect. The other was the incomprehensibility of the way it had been brought about: how could huge airliners have been flown directly into buildings? The second “event”, shortly afterwards, was when the twin towers collapsed, killing all those still inside. Buildings that people had thought safe and solid “melted into air”. Concrete, flesh and furniture vanished leaving only a snowstorm of paper and a covering of white dust. A huge gash appeared in the cityscape, trans- port arteries were severed and an enormous cloud of dark acrid smoke poured outwards from the area. Understanding this wound to the fabric of the city, both in itself and as an allegory for other wounds, provides a necessary part of any account of the practices that developed around—and drew upon and exploited— Ground Zero.

The traumatic impact of the collapse of the twin towers arises in part because in general, as Mark Wigley puts it, “buildings are seen as a form of protection, an insulation from danger. They have to be solid because their occupants are fragile. Keeping the elements and enemies out, they allow bodies to have a life” (Wigley 2002, p. 71). In the same way as clothing, they are fashioned with care to provide protection for the human body; as Elaine Scarry points out, “a made object is a projection of the human body” (Scarry 1985, p. 281). To construct a building would be to sense the vulnerability of the human frame to cold, wind and rain and to provide protection from the elements by walls and ceilings. This “making” is a response to sentience. Violence and brutality in torture and war

3. For a review of the literature concerning the decision to use the bomb see Walker (1996) and for an argument that by that point in the war it was more or less automatic that the new weapon could be used on a civilian target see Bernstein (1996). Gar Alperovitz’ work is also interesting here; see, for example Alperovitz (1998) 4. A figure that hides the difficulty of attributing individual deaths to the bomb (Sayle 1998, p. 24)

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are the precise opposite of this. They are an “unmaking” of the world and reflect a lack of sentience: those responsible must cultivate a non-awareness of the feel- ings of those they brutalise. In this sense, perhaps, “the terrorist is the exact counter-figure to the architect” (Wigley 2002, p. 72). However, buildings, unlike clothing, can allow or even encourage us to forget our vulnerability. And build- ings, like clothes, are made for reasons other than those Scarry describes: commercial reasons that can lead the architect and the fashion designer to ignore or even exploit the vulnerability and sentient awareness of their clients. In a corporate building, for example, “the occupants … are irrelevant” (Wigley 2002, p. 75): the design acts as a screen to conceal those working within. As an exemplar of such construction, the World Trade Center towers were not there to protect their occupants from the weather. The point is not just that the archi- tects of corporatism construct buildings that have everything it finds attractive— high profile, smooth modernist appearance, open plan spaces at a low cost—at the expense of a structure that is quick to evacuate or able to withstand fire. It is that their work also conceals the people that inhabit their buildings, rendering them an anonymous mass of faceless workers behind a screen or façade. In a sense it has been argued that terrorists and architects can be equated: both “distance themselves from the flesh and blood experience of mundane exist- ence” and for both “reality distils itself to the instrumental use of physical forces in the service of an abstract goal” (Darton 2002, p. 89). Both “bombers and master-builders … view living processes in general, and social life in particular, with a high degree of abstraction” (Darton 2002, pp. 88–89).

When the towers collapsed, then, two things happened. First buildings that should protect killed—structures that should have held and outlived their occu- pants fell, crushing those that relied on them for survival. Second, the collapse suddenly revealed the faces of those workers who had been previous concealed5—and the way that corporate culture instrumentalises those it exploits became plain. As Wigley puts it very graphically:

When the façades came down the faces of the invisible occupants who were lost came up, filling the vertical surfaces of the city in pasted photocopies and cover- ing the surfaces of televisions, computers, and newspapers all around the world. They formed a new kind of façade, a dispersed image of diversity in place of the singular monolithic screen—each face, each personality, each story, suddenly in focus. (Wigley 2002, pp. 82–83)

What is horrifying in the end is what is already there but unacknowledged: “the devastating spectacle of September 11 was a simultaneous destruction of body and building and the distinction between them” (Wigley 2002, p. 72). It was not just that everything was revealed as vulnerable (Butler 2004). What was revealed was the impossibility of a sustained distinction between body and building, flesh and object, protected and protector, vulnerable and invulnerable, animate and inanimate:

5. For a paper that includes many of these images see Eng (2002)

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The everyday idea that architecture keeps the danger out was exposed as a fantasy. Violence is never a distant thing. Security is never more than a fragile illusion. Buildings are much stranger than we are willing to admit. They are tied to an economy of violence rather than simply a protection from it. (Wigley 2002, p. 84)

Mark Wigley’s account focuses on the built environment. For people who make a clear distinction between the fabricated and the “natural” world, the failure of the former is perhaps a particularly traumatic form of betrayal. However, buildings are not the only part of our lived surroundings that can be damaged. What we call the natural world can sustain injury through human action, or can be altered beyond recognition by earthquakes, storms and volcanic eruptions. The alteration in significant elements of the landscape can be a traumatic event. For many—city dwellers for example—the most significant or even the only signif- icant elements are the buildings, but this is not the case for everyone. In Kai Erik- son’s (1994) account of a “new species of trouble” it may not be the elements he identifies (human involvement, toxicity and a blurring of the acute/chronic distinction) that are central but rather the injury to people’s lived surroundings or habitat.

The wound to Manhattan in all its severity is shown clearly in Laura Kurgan’s installation “New York, September 11, 2001. Four days later…” (Kurgan 2001a). This piece is a contemplation on a high-resolution image of New York taken as the Ikonos satellite passed overhead four days after the collapse of the World Trade Center. The smoldering ruins are clearly visible, as is increased activity around the site, and the trucks removing debris on otherwise deserted highways. The script that accompanies the piece reflects on the yearning for some sort of answer to the questions that a traumatic event reveals. The god’s-eye view of the surveillance camera does not offer any enlightenment however. With all its one-meter resolution accuracy, it does not tell us any more about what happened or what to do. Even “sublime incomprehension” is not there: the image can tell any number of different stories. Why does the image with its data and its accu- racy not help us? It “offers only a certain kind of evidence,” a certain form of memory (Kurgan 2001a, p. 5). Significantly still “what is missing from this image is the missing. … Beneath or beyond the limits of visibility, of data, are the dead. And yet they remain in the image, in the ruin of the image, and ask something of us” (Kurgan 2001a, p. 6). The image shows more than just the ruins and the rescue activity below: “Between the satellite and the bodies … a cloud of smoke slowly drifts away from the disaster” (Kurgan 2001a, p. 1). It is here that Kurgan, writing in October 2001, locates the trace of the missing in the image of the smoke. For her, it is “the cloud of smoke that bears witness to the crime” (Kurgan 2001a, p. 6).

Kurgan’s installation draws attention to the way the dead are beyond the limits of data. Not only had the buildings disappeared, their occupants had “disap- peared” too: “In the cacophony of 9.11, the bodies that allow us to mourn have vanished, or merged with polluted air, or simply turned into construction debris” (Yaeger 2003, p. 189).

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Trauma

What does it mean to call what happened on September 11 “traumatic”? The notion of trauma these days means for most people an injury to the psyche. The term indicates the response to a shock encounter with brutality or death, or, as Cathy Caruth (1991) puts it, “an overwhelming experience of sudden or cata- strophic events, in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrolled repetitive occurrence of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena”. It is “the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness and horror, cannot be placed within the schemes of prior knowledge” (Caruth, 1995, p. 153). I have argued that it is more than this: in an important sense, trauma is the betrayal of a promise or an expectation. Trauma can be seen as an encounter that betrays our faith in previously established personal and social worlds and calls into question the resolutions of impossible questions that people have arrived at in order to continue with day-to-day life: “what we call trauma takes place when the very powers that we are convinced will protect us and give us security become our tormentors: when the community of which we considered ourselves members turns against us or when our family is no longer a source of refuge but a site of danger” (Edkins 2003a, p. 4).

Traumatic events produce a moment of openness, often brief and transitory, where things that were considered decided and secure become once more subject to question. The response to such trauma is more often than not its medicalisation as a mental health problem and the introduction of forms of therapy designed to produce healing, which, if successful, will enable the sufferers to resume their daily life in a satisfactory way. There are extensive examples of this in the aftermath of September 11 of course. This medicalisa- tion of trauma can be seen as a form of governance: a disciplinary practice, as in Vanessa Pupavac’s work for example (Pupavac 2001). The psychological or psychoanalytic uses of the term “trauma” derive from earlier uses in connec- tion with physical injury to the body, where the body is cut or shattered violently. The integrity of the physical body and its survival as an organism is threatened by an open wound or severe crushing injury. The trauma ward of a hospital is where such physical violence is tackled, the physiological system stabilised and wounds attended to.

More recently writers have suggested that it makes sense to talk of collective, community or cultural trauma. Kai Erikson (1994) has studied communities in the aftermath of disasters including floods, contamination, large-scale fraud and nuclear accident. He identifies a “new species of trouble”. These troubles are “seen as having been produced by human hands, they involve some form of toxic contaminant, and they blur the line … between the acute and the chronic” (Erik- son 1994). He argues that traumatised communities are distinct from assem- blages of traumatised persons in that “the tissues of community can be damaged in much the same way as the tissues of mind and body” (Erikson 1994, p. 230). Although trauma can produce community, or what Erikson calls “a gathering of the wounded”, where those who carry the same pain are drawn together, a more

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common result he claims is damage to the texture of community (Erikson 1994, p. 232). This means that what the community previously offered is no longer there:

It is the community that offers a cushion for pain, the community that offers a context for intimacy, the community that offers the repository for binding tradi- tions. And when the community is profoundly affected, one can speak of a damaged social organism in almost the same way that one would speak of a damaged body. (Erikson 1994, p. 232, emphasis in original)

This loss of community is demonstrated by the way in which such disasters affect members of the community who were absent at the time of the disaster and did not experience it directly. They still suffer from the traumatic injury to their community.

The notion of cultural trauma is similar but distinct. As discussed by Ron Eyer- man in relation to African American identity, national or cultural trauma refers to “a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion” (Eyerman 2001, p. 2). What Eyerman calls “mass mediated representations” and collective memory play a central role, and cultural and national trauma can be more or less equated. What is suggested here then is a traumatic event on a slightly different stage from that analysed by Erikson, one that impacts on the broader community, which is seen as a community connected by the long-distance, mediated commu- nication of memory and culture rather than necessarily by geographic proximity or micro-cultural practices. National or cultural trauma entails according to Eyerman a struggle over meaning that involves identifying “the nature of the pain, the nature of the victim and the attribution of responsibility” (Alexander, quoted in Eyerman 2001, p. 3). In response, collective or cultural identity is reconfigured “through collective representation, as a way of repairing the tear in the social fabric” (Eyerman 2001, p. 3).6

The notion of some form of collective or national trauma became widespread after 9.11. However, there are a number of difficulties associated with talking of trauma in these ways. First, it is by no means clear that trauma can ever be a purely individual event, given that it always already involves the community or the cultural setting in which people are placed. Second, as many critics have argued, the ascription of “trauma” can be a prelude to the imposition of post- traumatic therapeutic interventions (Young 1997). These are designed to domes- ticate or cover over the trauma. They encourage people to return to their previ- ous assumptions about safety and security and about the importance of aspects of their lives thrown into question by the traumatic disruption. They reinstate the forms of power and governance that trauma questions and disrupts (Edkins 2003a). In a way, the discussion of trauma in terms of physical or psychic trauma,

6. The idea of national trauma and recovery has been discussed by Hannah Starman (2000) in rela- tion to foreign policy in Israel, though she draws mainly on Erikson

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or of individual, collective or cultural trauma, enables this medicalisation and technologisation.

However, the discussion in the previous section of the essay of what happened at Ground Zero in New York suggests a move that might replace these ideas with a different view of trauma. What presents itself at first as a supple- ment becomes the trigger for a rethinking of how “trauma” should be regarded in the first place. Events in New York imply at first that what we have is an additional form of injury that can be seen as a traumatic event: a wound to the setting or surroundings in which we live, our habitat, if you like. This is prefig- ured somewhat in Erikson’s discussion of various forms of environmental contamination. In the case of New York contamination was an issue, but it is not central to the question I am trying to pose here. It could then be argued that the destruction of the surroundings in which we live is a distinct form of traumatic happening. In the case of September 11, what was destroyed was a significant part of the built environment.

However, I would like to suggest that rather than considering this wound to the setting in which we live as an additional form of traumatic event, we instead look at it a different way. Rather than adding this to a set of injuries—to the body, to the psyche, to society, to culture—and thus accumulating a series of different types of traumatic injury, let us take this one step further. Let us think this differently. What does it mean for our understanding of “trauma” if we concen- trate not on what it is that is injured—the psyche, body, setting, and so on—but on the type of injury that we have in each case? Maybe what we are talking about is not a series of injuries to different objects but rather an injury to the distinc- tions between psyche and body, body and building, building and environment. It is perhaps this obliteration of distinctions that is horrific, and that prompts us to describe an event as “traumatic”. What is specific about something that we describe as traumatic then is not just that something is injured, but that the very possibility of the thing itself, its very distinctiveness as a thing, is threatened: the way in which the body, for example, is generally regarded as distinct from its surroundings is called into question. The radical relationality of bodies is revealed, and the way in which such events “tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that are not our own, irrevers- ibly, if not fatally” (Butler 2004). However it is not just, as Butler argues, that we are all vulnerable, it is rather that this vulnerability consists of and is comprised of our radical relationality. A traumatic event is one that entails the blurring of the very distinctions upon which everyday existence depends, upon which people rely to continue their lives. It may be clear that some or even all of these distinctions are questionable: we “know” for example that our bodies are made of the same chemical or atomic constituents as the rest of the world. Yet on the whole we prefer to forget these questions. We prefer to think of build- ings as solid, of home as a place of safety, of ourselves as separate from our neighbours. A traumatic event demonstrates how untenable, how insecure, these distinctions and these assumptions are. It calls for nothing more or less than the recognition of the radical relationality of existence.

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Response One

We all lost you all, and mourn together. We are not “sightseers”.

“Mariette”, World Trade Center Viewing Platform, 26 January 2002

In this section of the paper, I want to turn to examine reactions and responses to Ground Zero, as reflections of a “traumatic event” that entails the blurring of distinctions. I look first at the flows and circulation of people around and into the site—rescue workers, volunteers, tourists, relatives. What went on at Ground Zero in New York is in a sense not unique. It can be compared with practices of recovery after disaster at other locations of death and destruction that become in the course of time sites visited by tourists and incorporated into guide books. However, the way in which the contending issues are articulated and re-articu- lated is in another sense always unique, and practices surrounding the events of 9.11 at Ground Zero are no different. Examining the struggles over meaning and meaninglessness that took place (and are still taking place) is important in under- standing what sort of event 9.11 became and how it might relate to other events of that type, and what then became possible or impossible in political terms in its aftermath.

In the first few days, once the initial chaos and confusion had passed, it was impossible for ordinary New Yorkers to approach Ground Zero (Langewiesche 2003). All of Manhattan below 14th Street was cordoned off, inaccessible at first even to those who lived there. To get past the official barricades required a fire- fighter’s badge or some subterfuge. The formerly open city had been closed, fenced and guarded. This inaccessibility was one of the things that generated feelings of powerlessness in those affected but unable to help. What happened in response was that large groups of people gathered in the squares and parks closest to the scene. Initially, this was Union Square, located on the edge of 14th Street; later, as restrictions on access were gradually lifted, Washington Square became a focal point too. The gatherings in these public places were interesting and involved a number of different activities taking place alongside each other. Impromptu shrines of candles, artifacts and messages appeared. People debated heatedly but not in general acrimoniously the rights and wrongs of what had happened and what should happen next. There was great emotion alongside strong feelings of consideration for opposing views and people’s absolute right to express them in appropriately sensitive ways. Some people laid out rolls of paper on the paving where anyone and everyone could write their thoughts and messages; others chalked on the sidewalks or attached notes to fencing or lamp posts. The atmosphere was one of tension, almost in a way excitement in the face of the new, and a quiet, intense mourning of a loss that was not yet fully grasped, let alone accepted.7

7. There is video material of that event, for example in Rosenbaum (2002) and Jacobs (2002a). See also the video of Union Square exhibited at the New York Historical Society in March 2002.

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As restrictions were further lifted, Ground Zero itself became a focus of atten- tion. People came to volunteer their services (until the work was contracted out to commercial organisations), to bring gifts of food and medical supplies, and to try to help in whatever ways they were allowed to. Rescue workers were the “heroes” of the day. They had the hardest job and were exposed to extremes of horror, but they were also in some sense the most privileged: they at least were able to help. As the official emergency team got organised, other volunteers were progressively excluded. Not only were they barred from the site, they were accused of voyeurism—wanting to help was seen as a morbid fascination with death and destruction. Indeed some people made the decision not to visit the site, perhaps because they agreed with the view that it was a voyeuristic exercise.

Some of those who were unable to visit Ground Zero themselves, those outside New York or even outside the US, sent surrogate visitors in the form of objects mailed to rescue organisations (Rothenbuhler 2002; Rothenbuhler forthcoming). Surveillance web cameras were set up so that the world could watch the recovery

Figure 1 Impromptu memorial, St Paul’s Chapel railings, March 2002.

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effort and rescue workers could watch what was going on when they were on a break. Those who did visit left objects—for the dead or for each other—messages inscribed on T-shirts or flags, garlands of paper cranes, teddy bears, flowers and photographs tied to the railings or left at impromptu shrines around the site (Figure 1). Viewing platforms were set up, one for the public and one with restricted access for the Port Authority (Czarnecki 2002). By February 2002 it was necessary to purchase tickets to visit the platform. People queued for an hour or so for the free tickets allocating them a time, returning later at the allotted hour to queue once more before ascending the wooden viewing platform. Each group of visitors was allocated three minutes at the site (Figure 2). They wrote messages on the wooden sides of viewing platforms, took photographs of each other and of the pit, and descended again to street level. By March 2002 the boundaries of the site had in any case shrunk to the extent that the recovery operation could be seen from a number of points around the site, and visitors circled the area stopping to look at what was going on and to inspect the tempo- rary memorials set up on police barricades and construction fences. A map was produced that documented the moving boundaries and showed visitors where they could walk and where the impromptu shrines were (Kurgan 2001b; Lerner 2002). Stalls in the surrounding streets sold images of the towers before their collapse. Impromptu memorial, St Paul’s Chapel railings, March 2002.Visitors at the World Trade Center viewing platform, March 2002.As time went on the perimeter of the site shrank, but certain features and practices followed the shrinking borderline. New maps were produced,

Figure 2 Visitors at the World Trade Center viewing platform, March 2002.

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charting the moving shrines that surrounded the site. The platforms built to accommodate tourists finally disappeared, and by the time of the first anni- versary in September 2002 visitors could walk around the edge of “the pit” itself (Figure 3). In commemoration of the anniversary, gatherings reappeared in Union Square and Washington Square Gardens. These reflected the same impetus to debate and reflect that had motivated the gatherings on 11 September 2001, though much muted and semi-formalised. Official spaces were provided where messages could be left (Figure 4). Overnight vigils were again held at these places. The anniversary was marked by silences there in parallel to and in protest at the official ceremonies at Ground Zero itself. Memorials were still in place around lower Manhattan, and missing posters still hung outside the hospitals (Figures 5 and 6). A remnant of the shrines that at one time surrounded Ground Zero was still evident on the fences around St Pauls, but elsewhere the authorities were trying to reclaim public space from the public. Notices signed by the City of New York Parks and Recreation

Figure 3 Visitors at Liberty Street, September 2002.

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appeared on fences asserting that “This is not intended to be a memorial site. Do Not Place Candles, Flyers or Posters. They will be removed”. Or, in Union Square, the rather improbable sign on railings and stone ornaments: “No Candles Please. Permanent Damage will Result. Thank You”. Visitors at Liberty Street, September 2002.Union Square Town Hall Wall, September 2002.Ceramic tile memorial, Seventh Ave/Greenwich Ave, September 2002.Missing posters, St Vincent’s Hospital, September 2002.What had happened, and why did people circle the site of this event? What were they trying to do or hoping to see? If the events of September 11 can be seen as forms of what we call a traumatic event, then reactions to it can be seen as responses to trauma. What was taking place at Ground Zero in the aftermath of 9.11 was both a dealing with trauma and a recognition and acknowledgement of it. People needed to see for themselves, to domesticate the imagination in a sense, but also to see the enormity that cannot be shown on television images or documented in eyewitness accounts. The reality on the ground was both incom- parably worse than and not as bad as people had imagined. The experience brings home what New York film maker Ken Jacobs described as follows:

Figure 4 Union Square Town Hall Wall, September 2002.

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What I don’t want is that the mass tightens into a thing. I prefer it porous, airy. To preserve the everyday and the ordinary that always accompanies the extraor- dinary, keeping it accessible. (Jacobs 2002b)

Like other New Yorkers, he visited Ground Zero. He remarks: “My need with many others here with camera in hand was to hold on to some of the strange- ness of our days” (Jacobs 2002b). The contradiction is plain: the need to preserve or hold on to the openness, the traumatic impact—what Jacobs calls “the strangeness”—alongside the need to respect the very impossibility of that openness being a “thing” that we can hold on to. In a sense, this could be described as the impossible attempt to distinguish, and recognise, the indis- tinguishable, or, in other words, to recognise indistinguishability in all its singularity. By circling the site of the trauma the traumatic event is in one sense located—it is specific, it took place here and nowhere else—and yet

Figure 5 Ceramic tile memorial, Seventh Ave/Greenwich Ave, September 2002.

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recognised as a hole, a gap, a lack or excess—it cannot be grasped, pinned down, specified in language.

In/distinction

The impact of what happened in New York that morning in September was not something that could be adequately encapsulated in the phrase “a terrorist attack on America”. It was a series of events that produced a severe and possibly traumatic shift in a number of registers. The official rhetoric focused on the lives lost, and their re-inscription as heroic lives sacrificed for freedom or in the case of firefighters in the performance of a courageous calling. However, the trau- matic element arises not just from the number of deaths, or even from the fact that they occurred on US soil, but from the manner of those deaths. The wound

Figure 6 Missing posters, St Vincent’s Hospital, September 2002.

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is deeper and more traumatic. Those killed died because they were treated instrumentally—not only by the hijackers, but by architects, planners, financiers and governments too. The sovereign power of the state relies in the contempo- rary world on an instrumentalisation of citizens as “bare life”, rather than life with a political voice (Agamben 1998): this becomes apparent in the aftermath of events such as 9.11 when governments call for remembrance of the victims as a means of legitimating particular policies and placing them beyond debate (Edkins 2002; Zehfuss 2003). Despite the rhetoric of heroism superimposed after- wards, the victims died as objects, indistinguishable from, and trapped in, the buildings in which (as objects) they had worked. Not only did they die, they were wiped out, “disappeared”, eradicated without trace. What was lost was not just lives and bodies but a landscape. The stress on the altered skyline might appear trivial to outsiders but was not misplaced. The destruction, it was repeatedly noted, happened on a morning when the world was at its most beautiful: a morn- ing of blue sky and sunshine.

What were people doing, then, when they visited the site of the catastrophe? It was estimated that a million people had visited Ground Zero by the end of 2001 (New York Times) and that by the end of 2002 this would be 3.6 million (News- week). Kevin Bubriski was fascinated by the combination of “a remarkable sense of community” and “the deepest kind of personal reflection on loss and mortal- ity”. He visited Ground Zero several times, photographing not the site itself and the recovery effort but the faces of visitors as they “came to a full stop, planting their feet firmly as if to keep themselves from wavering or falling” (Bubrinski 2002, p. 11). In his images we see reflected in visitors’ faces their response to what they saw. They stood silently trying to make sense of what had taken place at Ground Zero—to re-make their inner world—and trying to heal the wound by their presence. The response was a response to a traumatic event that comprised several elements—the collapse of buildings, bodily trauma of the most extreme kind, and an injury to the tissue of community—that together meant a collapse of distinctions.

Like the visitors to Ground Zero, “rescue, relief and memorial efforts were also symbolic repair work [in an effort] to unscramble, reconstruct and reorder the damage done in our symbol system along with the damage done on the ground” (Rothenbuhler 2002). Eric Rothenbuhler analyses visits to Ground Zero in terms of boundary practices linked to the “contagious magic and dangerous powers of the sacred” (Rothenbuhler 2002, p. 2). Social prac- tices to do with the creation and crossing of boundaries around the site of destruction included

the definition of the impact zone with Ground Zero at its centre, the sending of volunteers, goods, funds, and gifts from around the country, and the celebration of the fire fighters and rescue and recovery workers who crossed the boundary and represented us at Ground Zero. (Rothenbuhler 2002, p. 3)

What is produced is a series of concentric circles

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At the centre is the place of death, those who have been touched by it and those who touch it. At the barricades are those who came to pay tribute and bear witness—to be within proximity, as if to touch, those who crossed the barrier. In the larger community is the place of the smell and the ash, the missing posters, candles, flowers, and public shrines. This territory extends out communicatively across the country. (Rothenbuhler 2002, p. 4)

and to the wider international community, some would say. Ground Zero, in this account is “the anchoring centre of a meaningful organization of experience: in other words, a sacred place” (Rothenbuhler 2002, p. 5).

Many New Yorkers were mourning the buildings themselves, as well as the people whose lives were lost in the collapse. Visitors to Ground Zero were like “loving family members of the buildings who needed to see the actual body of the buildings to accept their loss” (Wigley 2002, p. 73). The image of the build- ings appeared alongside the posters for missing people at shrines and impromptu memorials around the city. There were those who complained that the “Towers of Light” that shone upwards from Ground Zero to commemorate the six month anniversary of the collapse were inappropriate and insensitive in their focus on the loss of the towers rather than the loss of those killed. As a result the tempo- rary memorial was renamed “Tribute in light”. However the two events are inter- twined, as we have discussed. One of the strongest family groups in the aftermath of 11 September was an organisation for the safety of skyscrapers (The Skyscraper Safety Campaign 2003).

Response Two

When the buildings collapsed, flesh and structure became indistinguishable. The towers and their contents were uniformly destroyed. The aim of the rescue teams once it was clear there were to be no survivors was to reverse the indis- tinction between bodies and steel by the painstaking sorting through of the remains at Ground Zero. Initially at least this was undertaken by rescue squads who knew where certain people would have been and had a personal stake in the recovery of their remains. Within less than two months it became apparent that the city authorities in charge of the operation had different priorities. Their concern appeared to be to clear the remains of the buildings as quickly as possi- ble so that reconstruction could begin (Langewiesche 2003, p. 146). It was clearly necessary to produce lists of the lost, but it seemed that this could be based on the recovery of DNA once the mixed remains of buildings and people reached the Fresh Kills garbage dump on Staten Island.

The anxiety of firefighters to recover with as much honour as possible their own comrades and other victims of the collapse was making the whole process too slow. On 2 November 2001, Day 52 of the rescue effort, the city announced that the number of firefighters allowed on site was to be reduced to 25. The concerns for safety were cited as the reason for the proposed reduction in firefighter

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numbers, but for firefighters it was because the search for bodies was slowing the reconstruction process. The city planned to continue scooping and dumping at all times, with remains being separated out when the mix was examined at the Staten Island Landfill site (Smith 2002, p. 340). On Day 56, 5 November, Dennis Smith wrote “Ground Zero not only looks like a construction site, it is a construc- tion site” (Smith 2002, p. 349; emphasis in original). The announcement by the city led to a protest demonstration by firefighters and “scuffles” with police, following which—incredibly—firefighters were arrested for trespassing on Ground Zero. On 12 November, representatives of families of firefighters expressed their views in an emotional confrontation at the Major’s office. One widow remarked: “Last week my husband is memorialized as a hero, this week he’s thought of as landfill?” (Smith 2002, p. 352). As a result a compromise was reached: the force of firefighters was increased from 25 to 75 and the huge crane known as “Big Red”—regarded as too indiscriminate—was removed from the site.

Firefighters were not at Ground Zero, Rothenbuhler (2002, p. 12) argues, as “already given away life” or depoliticized “bare life” (Agamben 1998). Although they were treated in public discourse, and particularly in the rhetoric of the Bush war, as citizen-soldiers, as far as the general public and the firefighters them- selves were concerned, they were there on a personal basis, as indeed many had been on the day of the disaster itself. They were there looking for their sons and brothers, rhetorically and literally. Their role was that of “inside outsiders, defending to the very last day the irrational, the symbolic, the sentimental, and the memorial against the bureaucracy” (Rothenbuhler 2002, p. 16). Their involve- ment demonstrated “the contrast of instrumental rationality and universalism, on the one hand, and the logic of the sacred and personalism on the other” (Rothenbuhler 2002, p. 17). The importance of this contrast should be seen in the context of the instrumentalisation of life on September 11, an instrumentalisation that could only be contested by courtesy, reverence and personalization.

Ironworkers remained at the site, alongside the reduced contingent of fire- fighters, and bodies were still being recovered in March, six months after the collapse. The final piece of steel was removed with ceremony on 30 May 2002.

In the weeks after the celebration of the first anniversary in September 2002, attempts to reclaim Ground Zero as ordinary space increased. Surrounding streets were cleared of shrines and memorials—and the tarmac and sidewalks repaired—even before the anniversary. Once the ceremonies had taken place, a fence was constructed around the site—the construction site, as it now was. Rebuilding of transport arteries had already been underway for a considerable period, although plans for the final structures on the site were still being debated, as was the future of Manhattan or indeed New York as a whole (Wallace 2002). The fence was planned as an opaque structure, but there was resistance to this (Kurgan 2002). What was eventually erected was a steel fence that allowed visitors to observe the site, although the leaving of objects was discour- aged by a notice that asked us to “Please understand that all articles left behind must be removed”. The names of those reported killed were listed, and the fence also carried panels giving the history of the Trade Center and previous attacks.

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It was no longer the place of spontaneous or disorganized activity it once was. Gradually it had been reclaimed, and order re-imposed (Figure 7). Steel fence and flag, Churchill Street, November 2002.

Conclusion

Reflecting on what we think happened at Ground Zero prompts us to change our notion of trauma—not just to broaden its scope. The term generally indicates the response to a shock encounter with brutality or death, an encounter that betrays our faith in previously established personal and social worlds. Not only do we need to extend this notion to encompass not just personal and social worlds, but lived surroundings, we also need to rethink the implications of this move for our understanding of what the term “trauma” invokes. I have suggested that trauma is to do with our interconnectedness in the broadest

Figure 7 Steel fence and flag, Churchill Street, November 2002.

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possible sense—our implication in “the real”—to use the psychoanalytic phrase (Ž[Zcaron]iž[zcaron]ek 1989). Events that reveal the impossibility of entirely excluding the real from what we call social reality are what we call traumatic. Such events blur the distinctions between flesh and object, individual and community, animate and inanimate and demonstrate their inseparability.

This inseparability was recognized by those who encircled ground zero, and those who argued that it should be kept as a sacred space, a place apart from the everyday. It is a site where the boundary between life and death was broken—and other sorts of boundaries thrown into question as well. It was not just that the buildings and the injustice of their existence as denials of human- ness was brought into focus, nor that the intimate relation between our lives and our politics and the settings in which they take place was revealed. Nor was it only that we as a community were challenged, but that our place in the world and our way of living was thrown into question.

The analysis of practices at Ground Zero reveals a set of responses to the events of September 11 that differs quite markedly from responses in official rhetorics, whether at city or national levels. It casts light on the specificity of the traumatic events that occurred on September 11 and the way in which their impact derives not only from the number of deaths but from other aspects of what happened. It gives us access to forms of “subjugated knowledges” (Foucault 1980, pp. 81–83)—local, small-scale, but intensely political, these knowledges provide a site of resistance to the rhetorics of an instrumental rationality that dominate policy. They are by no means expressed by or contained within the public rituals of mourning and commemoration, particularly those that harness grieving to revenge and war, rather they provide the means to contest such appropriations of mourning. They are knowledges that admit the need for non- closure, or what David Eng calls “an articulate silence” (Eng 2002, p. 94). Ground Zero marks exactly that—a nothing that is not a nothing, an absence, an aporia, a stumbling block. To leave it empty would be a permanent reminder of the tear at the heart of the city. This would be unacceptable. Life must, apparently, go on. Or the instrumentalisation and depoliticisation of life must. Activities at Ground Zero must be tamed, discussions of memorialisation separated from questions of rebuilding office space.

Political leaders draw on the rhetoric of Ground Zero in a different way. The term helps them associate the current predicament with crises of the nuclear age: the way in which in 2003 we were looking for an “Adlai Stevenson moment”, where the evidence to justify an attack on Iraq would be dramatically revealed, is an example of this. The comparison blurs the distinction between the two situations. In one, proof was shown of the placing of nuclear missiles within 90 miles of the US, and the aim of revealing the evidence was contain- ment. In the other, the evidence was “murky” and the aim not containment but war (Borger 2003).

The events of September 11 do not arrive in a “ready made”, take it or leave it package. They can be used, as they have been, to justify actions that seem to many people to mirror exactly the instrumentalisation of life that took place on

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9.11 itself. The exaggeration of threats, emotional parables of recovery and heroism, and claims to victim-hood are enabled by the disaster and in particular by its form. The name “ground zero” is central to the articulation of 9.11 in those terms. However, I have argued here that it can also be central to practices of resistance to such articulations.

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