At the 9/11 Museum
The contributors to Memory Remains worry about an aestheticisation of the remains. There are other troublesome issues to mull over. Early on, the skin of the [cross-like] Last Column, scorched and rusted, began to flake, and conservators rushed to re-attach the chips. Is that the right response to a thing whose value is in part its index of time? ‘Everything down to the smallest residue was of the utmost importance,’ Torres writes. One understands what he means, and appreciates the special care of his shoot and of the objects in general. But can this be true? Many things in the photographs seem both significant and meaningless, both relic and detritus. Here the project of the book and the mission of the museum get especially tricky. ‘They’re not sculptures. You don’t want them to be beautiful,’ Chris Ward, the executive director of the Port Authority, says of the objects. Adler agrees: ‘They are something more than beautiful. They are sacred.’ This touches on the most difficult ambiguities of all – not ‘art versus document’ so much as ‘beautiful versus sublime’ and ‘artefact versus relic’ (the last term pervades the book).
‘These events are unspeakable,’ I wrote in the LRB of 4 October 2001, ‘but they shouldn’t be left in the oppressive space of the sublime.’ Yet that is where they were immediately put and have since remained. For Americans the WTC became the world trauma center, and we were as likely to fix on the tragedy as traumatists as we were to work through it as mourners. Very quickly that trauma was turned into support for the ‘War on Terror’ – don’t victims, the lex talionis of trauma runs, have the right to be perpetrators? – and so the violence was returned with interest. Wounded, this empire aimed not only to ‘build the towers higher than before’ but also to ‘hunt the terrorists down and smoke them out’, and, in keeping with a rhetoric that bin Laden used to his advantage, it marched into battle as the Crusades come again.
In this light the talk of relics and icons, and the appearance of crosses and stars, is not so benign, for here the experience of the sublime and the traumatic is all but captured by the category of the sacred. Early on, Ground Zero was described as ‘hallowed ground’, and to this day 9/11 is often treated as an event that cannot be assimilated, which passes all human understanding.
