{"id":206,"date":"2005-12-04T12:49:01","date_gmt":"2005-12-04T17:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/2005\/12\/04\/where-were-you-when\/"},"modified":"2005-12-04T13:12:36","modified_gmt":"2005-12-04T18:12:36","slug":"where-were-you-when","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/2005\/12\/04\/where-were-you-when\/","title":{"rendered":"Where were you when…?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m interested in the question of ownership in relation to 9\/11.  My first response to In the Shadow of No Towers<\/u> was a negative reaction to the extreme self-centeredness of the narrative.  There’s something immediately off-putting about not just “I live on the outskirts of Ground Zero and first saw it all live – unmediated” (1), but the dramatized third-person delivery of “He remembers that morning yet again” (4).  It’s as if, through his narcissistic dramatization, Spiegelman seeks to own 9\/11 for himself.  He pokes fun at his own narcissism (2), but there it is nonetheless; whether or not Art Spiegelman has a beard is suddenly a crucial fact when considering 9\/11.  In a sense, this is just a better “where were you when…?” type of story – better because he was a closer observer than us.  But the “where were you when…?” phenomena itself is perhaps more interesting than Spiegelman’s recounting of his day and his later political disgust.  The readings from South Atlantic Quarterly<\/em> were especially useful in examining this phenomena.  Slavoj \u017di\u017eek hits on selfishness when he talks about Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint<\/u>; the world as you know it is a sham put on for your benefit.  We each live in an individual bubble of illusion.  But \u017di\u017eek points out that the nation is a collection of bubbles and is only protected by the continued suffering of the third world.  Fredric Jameson makes an elegant move to the collective when he discusses as a “collective delirium” the public’s ability to be “devastated by catastrophe in which they have lost no one they know” (298).  Jameson suggests that Americans are held together not just by collective mourning, but that this mourning is circulated and enforced by the media and ultimately forged into a therapy called war (299).  Susan Willis then tracks this therapy back to the individual in the form of an attachment to the American flag as a signifier of protection: “Americans show with our car-mounted flags that we know the ‘war on terrorism’ is the code phrase for the preservation of our interstates, cars, suburbs, and the petrochemical octopus that feeds and clothes us” (380).  In terms of \u017di\u017eek’s essay, the flag acts to keep us plugged into the matrix rather than exposed to the ‘desert of the real.’  So, in one sense, Spiegelman’s book works as a plaintive cry that his emotion cannot be his own.  His own fear and pity are caught up in the ongoing significations of ideology that mark them with the inevitable falsity of political spectacle.  But I’m not entirely convinced.  The “where were you when…?” phenomena exemplifies the selfishness of American culture by privileging our own experiences and anxieties above those who happened to be in the towers.  (I suppose I can’t have it both ways, but I’ll leave the post as is).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m interested in the question of ownership in relation to 9\/11.  My first response to In the Shadow of No Towers was a negative reaction to the extreme self-centeredness of the narrative.  There’s something immediately off-putting about not just “I live on the outskirts of Ground Zero and first saw it all live – unmediated” … Continue reading Where were you when…?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2005\/660\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}