Abstract
Certain events which have a near horizon can attain the classic significance of events with a distant horizon that have over time become regarded as historic or as being foundational in the inauguration of change. This is certainly the case with 11 September 2001: what happened on that momentous day travelled rapidly around the world as a set of iconic images in the making; they created globally distributed memories; they punctured the illusion of US invulnerability; they redefined geopolitics, particularly around the West’s relationship with Islam; and they generated a critical watershed of ‘before’ and ‘after’, a radical turn of temporal rupture. As Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, puts it, ‘We can recite other time-breaks when the before was inexorably severed from the after … But never before had the whole world tuned in to see such a tragedy in real time’ (Guardian, 29/12/2001, p. 24). More than that, of course, for subsequently the day had multiple ramifications outside of the United States and the West, as, for example, in the deaths of innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Islamophobia became the most virulent current form of Orientalism, and the sense of some ineradicable form of enmity became prevalent, the Arab Spring notwithstanding. Victor Seidler has been writing this book since 9/11, not least because, like everyone else, the process of coming to terms with it and trying to comprehend its significance has been difficult and slow. He delivers a detailed account of 9/11 and its aftermath, developing a narrative approach that samples many different voices which become interwoven as well as being played off against other. It is then in relation to this medley of voices that Seidler remarks, But while we can appreciate that memories can be fluid and unbound as they move across different digital media, we also need to question a cultural relativism that can make it hard to appreciate that some memories are more truthful that others and that some voices were more concerned with truth-telling and were ready to talk truth to power, while others were ready to submit to the political agendas of neo-conservatism that had long planned an attack on Iraq. (p. 14)
This seems very much the right track to take, yet unfortunately Seidler combines his opposition to facile forms of relativism with the fashionable conflation of psychosomatic trauma and damage to a nation’s sense of collective identity, in what Jeffrey Alexander and others wrongheadedly refer to as cultural trauma. Whatever harm may have been done to America’s sense of itself as a result of 9/11, such harm cannot be effectively analysed or gauged by applying to it the diagnostic term ‘trauma’. That said, Seidler is worth reading for the many voices reflecting on 9/11 which he has assembled, and for his own thoughtful reflections on this most terrible of events. The book is a sustained and heartfelt effort after understanding.