The Terror of Communication

By Alasdair Cannon

Foreword

Written by N. Purdy

At 9:05 am Sept. 11th, during the live news coverage, one ABC anchor broke an uncomfortable silence while witnessing the footage of the second plane striking the South Tower;

"To watch powerless.....is a horror."

We are all accustomed in some way, large and small, by the events of that fateful 2001, September day. Its truth seems to echo through the tumultuous years which succeeded - unyielding in its presence, the modern conscience seems a home for the dreadful reality encased within this day. The eyes of humanity, unblinking in the face of calamity, the awe and spectacle of a horror unrelenting, it appalled and mesmerized the world in the most uncanny way. This was like everything we thought we could control, and everything which we feared, breaking apart and colliding in and upon itself with a vicious abandon. The world which one thought to belong, consumed itself in a feast of Live TV and Eye Witness handy cam footage. We shared the events of that day, and its indelible legacy remains within us collectively. The spectacle of violence which the modern world consumed to entertain itself had been undone by the tragedy of a single momentous day. From the Chief of Staff's whisper into the presidents ear, the Reality of the world had demanded to be heard. Now 20 years separates the beginning of the 'War on Terror' from the withdrawal of U.S armed forces in Afghanistan. Two decades of senseless violence upon the conscience of humanity. Post 9/11, we find ourselves with fewer freedoms than ever before as state imposed surveillance seeks to infiltrate communities both foreign and domestic. Everyone is the enemy, we are no closer to peace either socially or ecologically. Should we continue to play pretend, living in a world of fantasy?

The Terror of Communication

I Nothingness

If I remember correctly, and I’m not sure that I do, my earliest memory of a Mass Media Event is from September 11, 2001 – the day the Twin Towers fell. As the towers collapsed I fell into world-history; I was dragged into time by terror communicated through TV and newspapers.[1] On that day I learned of the flux and fall of empires through images and media. Discovered the violent potential of time. The terror of communication.

My memory goes like this: I am seven years old, in class, second grade, pondering the trailer for the upcoming Spiderman film,[i] sitting next to my friend who may be doing the same. Townsville, Australia. September 12th, 2001. 15,480km from Ground Zero. After the fact but still unaware. Waiting to start our lesson. The teacher arrives. The teacher sits down. Her face tense like she’s suppressing distress. A quiet moment, then she holds up a newspaper.

I don’t remember the headline. But I can’t forget the front-page picture: blue sky and grey buildings disturbed by hell-red. Steel swallowing steel in a smoking bloodburst, a haemorrhage of energy. A Kantian act of violence, tearing open the world’s façade to reveal the in-itself inferno that roils beneath it all. The planes hit the buildings and ripped an arterial split in reality. The planes and the buildings and all the people trapped inside were gone. New York, NY—a place I only know from TV shows—weep for their loss.[2]

As a child this adult event is beyond my understanding. Had never even seen a skyscraper in the flesh, never felt the inverse vertigo inspired by the sublime, the human scale approximating nothing when standing beside the gigantic. Quietly disturbed, I lack the language for this collision of world and heart. I feel a deep uneasiness; an obstruction between my child-lungs and child-mouth. Something had gone wrong in those obsidian hollows behind language, the caverns upon which thought is built, from which words emerge. I look at the floor, out of joint with my own body. I say nothing. Speechless for the fact that unspeakable violence was possible.

My friend is not beset by such ambivalence. He probably thinks it is a still from a Hollywood film. He had seen it and loved it all before and he shouts his approval.

‘That’s so cool!’ he says, awed by the image.

My teacher recoils, moderately horrified.

‘This is real,’ she says.

That day my teacher was correct: the image was real. Like a movie, like a memory, the picture entered the room and our child-minds where it had a real effect. It warped the atmosphere; it cracked our consciousnesses, altering us in the way we are changed by all reality. 9/11 was as true to him, to her and me as any event or film we had seen.

I still don’t know what to feel about the image or the event. But now, in memory, I feel a sympathy for my teacher and my friend. She was right to be horrified and he was right to be amazed: the spectacle was both awesome and terrible, hideously surreal and violently true. And obviously my friend’s enthusiasm was not for the Al Qaeda cause: his passion was secured by his child-love for the Western technology that erases the boundary between the false and the true, the artifice and the real, turning our world into entertainment and making entertainment our world.

Unlike my teacher I don’t think we can fault my friend’s excitement. To me it seems that he understood media more than my teacher: her reality principle was outdated. He knew that the potential of print and television was the sublime, painted in shades of fear and awe. And in 9/11, those pictures and words that disfigured our fear, our memory, our language – that is what he got. With terror, the suicide pilots had created a sui generis media event. They violently kicked in the boundaries of news, entertainment and art, and they ushered in a new aesthetic: they taught us an entirely new pattern language.

With 9/11, the terrorists achieved what most entertainers can only hope for: they gave us true novelty. And this young boy, a lover of spectacle, responded as he had been conditioned. His passion was for the avant-garde; he sought the unseen. To be moved – that was his raison d’être. Naturally, the violence of 9/11 left my friend wild with desire. He enjoyed the arrival of death’s dream kingdom. Readied by television, he was prepared to speak whatever language terror demanded of him.

II

Power

‘I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people’s sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.’

—Don DeLillo, Underworld, p.76

‘…in a society that’s filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act… People who are powerless make an open theatre of violence.’

—Don DeLillo, interviewed in The New York Times, May 19, 1991

‘True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.’

—Don DeLillo, interviewed in The New York Times, May 19, 1991

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[1] This doesn’t make me unique: it’s a cultural phenomenon, the birth rite for children born in between maybe 1993 and 1995. [2] Another famous image I saw later that day. A man sailing headlong into negative transcendence: his bent knee disrupts the Cartesian plane behind him, the modernist grid perpendicular to the one on the ground; his billowing shirt hints at the abyss; he is a skydiver, a skywriter, that presages the building’s fate.

[i] See https://youtu.be/Ozz8uxW733Q