Visualizing Homeland

Abstract

The following analysis approaches the 9/11 Memorial through the lens of a moving methodology, which is grounded in the intersections of critical rhetorical theory and visual ethnography. An intersectional methodological approach takes seriously movement, affect, and aesthetics as primary modes of understanding in situ communication and reveals that the National 9/11 Memorial works affectively and viscerally to constitute the surveilling flâneur, a security-conscious consumer subjectivity who is mobilized through the temporal, horizontal, and vertical vectors of the site. Ultimately, I suggest that the Memorial’s affective dimensions position the habitus of the surveilling flâneur as reflective of larger discourses about freedom in a post-9/11 culture.

Keywords

rhetoric visual ethnography place memorials 9/11

On the backdrop of a cloudless September sky in New York City, the red and orange of fire and heat exploded the Twin Towers and the consciousness of a nation. Under the control of 19 terrorists from the Islamic extremist group Al-Qaeda, four planes were hijacked and used as weapons to destroy symbols of American power. In just 102 minutes, 2,977 people from 93 nations perished and New York City was permanently marked by terrorism. Pollard (2011) writes, “The American public’s experience of September 11 can be called trauma. These are: psychic injury involving threat to life and bodily integrity, terror, helplessness, fear, threat of annihilation, or state of existential crisis” (p. 85). The trauma of 9/11 marked a significant and abrupt change in both the U.S. culture and the global relations, shifting the nature of civil liberties, causing divisive political climates, and birthing the War on Terror (Mitchell, 2011). The events of 9/11 mark not just a traumatic loss of life but also a traumatic loss of a sense of safety, security, and civic identity. This public trauma became, as Casey (2004) simply puts, a “wound to the body politic” (p. 36).

Processing this trauma began almost immediately after the twin towers collapsed, with thousands memorializing these victims by posting missing posters around the city (Haskins & DeRose, 2003). Official acts of remembrance, however, were met with intense and prolonged conflict (Donofrio, 2010; Low, 2004; Sturken, 2004; Young, 2006). Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Governor George E. Pataki, family members of victims, the general public, and real estate developer Larry Silverstein, who held the lease on the World Trade Center, all demanded what Donofrio (2010) describes as “place-making authority” (p. 156). Out of this turbulent process, a master plan designed by Daniel Libeskind was decided in 2003 and a memorial designed by Israeli American architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker was chosen in 2004.

The National 9/11 Memorial, titled “Reflecting Absence” opened to the public on September 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the attacks. The Memorial consists of two rectangular waterfalls that sit in the footprints of the now absent Twin Towers (see Figure 1). Existing as the largest human-made waterfalls in North America, each pool is nearly an acre in size and is lined with dark granite. Still water pools begin at ground level and fall nearly 30 feet into a larger pool before draining into a secondary hole in each of the pools. Surrounding these “reflecting pools” are 400 Swamp White Oak trees, ivy beds, benches, and interactive Memorial screens that guide visitors in locating victim names.

Figure 1.

National 9/11 Memorial.

Victim names are stencil cut through bronze panels that rim each of the pools and are organized by “meaningful adjacency” (e.g., romantic couples were placed next to one another), rather than chronologically or alphabetically (Hess & Herbig, 2013). The 9/11 Museum building sits between the two pools and One World Trade Center, or the Freedom Tower, rises to the North. As of 2014, 23 million people had visited the Memorial, experiencing the rhetorical force of what Aden et al. (2009) term the emplacement of public memory of 9/11.¹ Although public memory occurs out in the open through speeches, public policies, parades, and holidays, Casey (2004) argues it thrives on “tenacious media such as stone or brick” (p. 17). A number of studies in communication demonstrate how memorials, shrines, monuments, and museums work in constructing and negotiating the past in ways that function ideologically in the present (Aden et al., 2009; Blair & Michel, 1999, 2000, 2007; Bond, 2012; Dickinson, 1997; Dickinson, Blair, & Ott, 2010; Dickinson, Ott, & Aoki, 2006; Dunn, 2011; Ewalt, 2011; Gallagher, 1999; Hess & Herbig, 2013; Hoskins, 2003; Jorgensen-Earp & Lanzilotti, 1998; Sturken, 2007). Emplaced traumatic memories, such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the AIDS Quilt, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, and the Holocaust Museum function cathartically, where material and symbolic resources are provided for visitors as a means for processing, grieving, and mourning trauma (Blair & Michel, 2007; Gallagher, 1999; Haskins & DeRose, 2007; Hoskins, 2003; Jorgensen-Earp & Lanzilotti, 1998).

To date, research surrounding the 9/11 Memorial focuses on the ways that memory and mourning is negotiated around the design as well as the physical and digital presence of Ground Zero (Aden et al., 2009; Donofrio, 2010; Hartelius, 2010; Hess & Herbig, 2013; Low, 2004; Paliewicz & Hasian, 2016; Sturken, 2004, 2007; Young, 2006). Sturken (2007) demonstrates how the physical place of the Memorial provides a tourist and consumer opportunity that re-centers the United States as innocent and victimized. She argues that the reenactment of the traumatic event, particularly within kitsch products (i.e., burning Twin Towers woven rugs) becomes a central way in which tourists to the Memorial are able to process the tragedy. Hess and Herbig’s (2013) study takes a different approach to suggest that the digital layers of information provided through the smart phone apps override the themes of ambiguity and meaningful adjacency presented by the place of the Memorial, ultimately arguing that “the primary symbolism of the memorial reads as trapped in trauma rather than working toward renewal” (p. 2207).

The most recent research on the Memorial by Paliewicz and Hasian (2016) includes the Museum space and affirms this emphasis on trauma through the notion of melancholia as a central feature of the Memorial design. Like Hess and Herbig (2013), these authors argue that the fixation on the traumatic losses of 9/11 prevent individuals from working through a national grief and instead may work to remind visitors “that American homeland is always under the threat of terror” (p. 18). Their emphasis on trauma and melancholia reflects Biesecker’s (2007) study of the larger rhetorical context of a post-9/11 era. Identifying melancholia as a key constitutive function of the presidential rhetoric post-9/11, she argues, “to an aesthetics of dematerialization and hermeneutics of suspicion has been articulated a melancholic citizen-subject who not only cedes all authority to the remilitarized state but also is induced to function on its behalf” (p. 163). Broadly, this research demonstrates important ways that the public memory of the 9/11 Memorial is situated within larger practices of consumption and new technology, and points to how the Memorial frames memory around a preoccupation with melancholia and the trauma characteristic of a post-9/11 era.

However, the Memorial does more than memory work. As a place, it functions fluidly (Massey, 1994; Rose, 1993) as nexus for the co-constitution of subjectivity and place. As Dickinson et al. (2006) argue, memory places can function constitutively to “invite visitors to assume (to occupy) particular subject positions” (p. 30). The constitutive process occurs through the material and aesthetic organization of the site, which engenders particular ways of looking. Ways of looking are not simply a characteristic of a particular subjectivity. Rather, ways of looking are the articulation of subjectivity where the self becomes the eye/I (Dickinson et al., 2006).

Like language itself, all places are rendered coherent only through the reiterative performances, glances, and movements of the bodies within these places (Butler, 1997). Memory places are thus maintained through what Bourdieu (1987) calls the habitus, the dispositions and actions of the body, which are both structured by and are a force in structuring the larger spatial practices of contemporary culture. Moreover, as a particularly important national place, it also works like other national memorials to “rearticulate the relation of the citizen to the nation” (Biesecker, 2004, p. 216). Like the rhetoric of post-9/11 political address that constituted citizens as melancholic citizen-subjects (Biesecker, 2007), memory places such as the 9/11 Memorial work constitutively to hail certain citizen-subjects. Thus, the following study focuses on how the affective dimensions of the memorial work to constitute new subjectivities, ways of seeing, and citizen-subjects in the context of a post-9/11 world.

This focus calls for particular methodological orientations, ones that can assess the dark and affective dimensions of the rhetorical work of the Memorial as a place, as well as focus on the ways that the Memorial works at a visceral, rather than only symbolic, level. In response to these theoretical concerns, I utilize what I term a moving methodology, an orientation toward the analysis of in situ rhetoric that takes seriously movement as a fundamental mode of perception in the rhetorical force of particular places while placing critical rhetorical perspectives in conversation with the qualitative perspectives of visual ethnography. This intersectional approach can be understood within the larger “participatory turn” in critical rhetorical studies that takes seriously the creative role of the critic as “bricoleur,” utilizing fragments of various methods to address phenomena in the field (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). In the following, I first delineate the central nodes of this orientation before turning to my analysis.

In my analysis section, I discuss how the National 9/11 Memorial juxtaposes images of terror with practices of tourism, consumerism, and rituals of mourning that work viscerally on the bodies of visitors to produce emotional states of unease and anxiety. Simultaneously, the Memorial works in to alleviate this anxiety through the agency produced through practices of consumption and surveillance. The push and pull of these affective responses is mobilized through particular vectors, or lines of sight, cemented into the Memorial design. These vectors invite visitors to assume particular citizen-subject positions. Specifically, I argue that the National 9/11 Memorial works affectively to constitute the surveilling flâneur, a security-conscious consumer subjectivity who is mobilized through the temporal, horizontal, and vertical vectors of the site. The rhetoric of the Memorial is also reflective of larger discourses of the nature of freedom in a post-9/11 culture, positioning the surveilling flâneur as a new habitus for enacting citizen-subjectivity outside the boundaries of Memorial.

I conclude by suggesting that the eye/I of the surveilling flâneur provides a theoretical provocation for approaching the nature of seeing and not seeing in a post-9/11 world. Broadly, this argument has the potential to contribute to conversations concerning transgression and control, ways of seeing, and the politics of aesthetics, particularly as they relate to issues of memory, citizenship, and place. Methodologically, this study highlights the possibilities of crossing methodological and disciplinary boundaries. For qualitative researchers, this study reflects the utility of movement as a central heuristic for understanding in situ phenomena. Moreover, the visual ethnographic components have the potential to add significant emphasis on visual production within the field of rhetoric and demonstrate the importance of self-reflexivity in regard to the visual narratives created in rhetorical fieldwork.

Moving Methodology

When attending to the dynamic, embodied, and in situ nature of fleeting social practices such as memory places, Büscher, Urry, and Witchger (2011) argue, “The temptation is to hold down and dissect these phenomena to study them—but this would destroy them” (p. 1). To resist flattening these phenomena, participatory critical rhetoric utilizes cross-disciplinary and multimodal methodologies that engage ethnography, performance, and qualitative methods with rhetorical inquiry (Middleton, Hess, Endres, & Senda-Cook, 2015). This perspective follows from the work of Conquergood (1991), who argues for a rethinking of ethnography that highlights the role of the body, the importance of performance, and rhetorical reflexivity. Rather than immobilize the fluid, which flattens place into the symbolic realm, I want to illustrate how the lens of movement is a particularly productive orientation toward the study of place that takes into account the overarching themes of participatory critical rhetoric. Foregrounding movement places emphasis on the body of the critic and the role of the visual in the constitutive force of in situ rhetorics. In addition, a moving methodology is better able to articulate, access, and engage the affective, rhetorical, and emplaced aesthetics by documenting and analyzing visual images and articulating self-reflexive narratives of the body as it is moved by and mobilizes the rhetoricity of place.

Using movement as a central orientation toward analysis is grounded in the assumptions of critical rhetoric because it configures rhetorical texts as fragmented and dynamic and the role of the critic as performative and creative (McKerrow, 1989). In gathering cultural fragments surrounding the text under analysis, collecting particular examples within the artifact itself to support particular claims, and moving to larger theoretical perspectives, the critic works to produce both the text under analysis and their own argument about that artifact. Whereas numerous scholars highlight the creative modality of the critic in this orientation (Charland, 1991; Dow, 2001; Gaonkar, 1993; Ivie, 1995), fewer have highlighted movement.

Many of those who have engaged movement are concerned with the rhetoric of place. Dickinson (1997), for example, argues that methodological movement occurs between formal details of place to “the abstract, cultural and discursive structures in which these details are embedded” (p. 4). To fully understand the connection between the formal details of the built environment and the larger discourses that mobilize its rhetoric requires attention to the physical movement of the body to and within place. Blair and Michel’s (1999) reading of the Astronauts Memorial and Dickinson et al.’s (2006) study of the Plains Indian Museum, for example, both illustrate how the rhetoric of place is constituted through movement to and from the memory place, through its connection to other landscapes, places, and imaginations. Within particular places, attention to movement and the body can highlight an affective dimension. Blair’s (2001) set of parables, for example, highlights how movement through the Holocaust Museum is exhausting because of the “dehumanizing force of its interior space on the body” (p. 287). The force of this rheotic on the body varies. Gallagher (1999) illustrates how materiality of place has the potential to control sensory information whereas Woods, Ewalt, and Baker (2013) articulate the ways that materiality also offers bodies the opportunity to utilize place in ways that the space is not designed to facilitate. Dickinson and Ott (2013) offer the clearest articulation of embodied movement as a methodology by introducing two central concepts. Velocity, they argue, is the speed or pace of embodied movement through particular places and vector is directionality of this movement through space; they argue,

The rhetorical force of particular places, then, resides in the interconnected nature of materiality and symbolism, where interpretation of symbols is often mobilized by affect and where the affective dimensions of place are produced through the materiality of its symbols. (p. 530)

Engaging movement within rhetorical engagements with memory places is successful and offers qualitative scholars a useful tool for studying place. Thus, movement not only saves place from certain death, it excites the rhetoricity of place into revealing its affective dimensionality. Beyond simply an emotion, the affective dimensions of place work as viscerally mobilized sign systems on the bodies of visitors, moving them to occupy physical, conceptual, and ideological spaces and subject positions (Dickinson & Ott, 2013).

Rhetorical orientations that are grounded in movement offer important contributions for qualitative inquiry of place. However, documenting, articulating, and visualizing the critic’s affective and embodied experience of place in academic writing and contexts creates particular challenges. Writing about affect often reflects an entire vocabulary that privileges signification and symbolism over systems of affect (Massumi, 2002). To remedy this, I suggest using a visual ethnographic approach that integrates the self-reflexive practices of ethnographic research with the visual, which are already and inherently embedded in visual practices (Delgado, 2015; El Guindi, 2004; Jay, 1996; Pink, 2006, 2012, 2013). Although early uses of visual methods in anthropology were highly systematic, Pink (2013) encourages ethnographers to view photography or video production as a part of the production of knowledge itself and asks researchers to become self-reflexive about how their cultural, academic, and personal influences inevitably effect their choice in visual medium, framing devices, subject matter, and composition. The visual, then, is both embedded in the process of analysis as well as the ways that that research is communicated within an academic context. By utilizing visual ethnography, rhetoricians can take seriously the connection between affect and place and visualize this force through the use of photographs or video (Barthes, 1980; Mitchell, 2005).

Specific to this project, I utilized photography as a way of documenting and communicating the affective dimensions of the 9/11 Memorial in two separate research trips, the first lasting 3 days in September of 2012 and the second lasting 5 days in April of 2013. I chose to incorporate photography as a primary dimension of my visual experience, analysis, and argument because of my training in photo documentary practices. This training encourages the recording of empirical visual evidence, an attention to aesthetics, as well as an emotional connection to the image (Denton, 2005). In addition, photographs have powerful and visceral connections between memory, the past, and place (Zelizer, 2004). Although photography as a sign system is composed of still, rather than moving, images, research in cognitive science and visual perception indicates that still images initially bypass the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for rational thinking, and are processed in the more primal areas of the brain responsible for more emotional and instinctual responses (Williams, 2005). Photography, then, while certainly not comparable with experiencing a place in person, becomes a clearer, more suitable way of visualizing, rather than inscribing, the rhetoric of place.

The perspectives of participatory critical rhetoric allow for a synergy between rhetoric, movement, and qualitative inquiry that reveals new insights for qualitative inquiry. To demonstrate these insights, I approach the 9/11 Memorial through a moving methodology to show how embedding self-reflexive and personal accounts of place with visual production and movement animates the dynamism of place.

Memorializing 9/11: Constituting the Surveilling Flâneur

Visiting the 9/11 Memorial requires a voyage that begins in the underground subways where the oldest parts of the city are revealed to passengers through dim yellow lighting, roaring sounds, and the tremendous movement of people and machines. I spend my time here remembering; the smell of dust and paint when I first heard of the attacks (I was in a painting class in Colorado, working on a self-portrait); the narratives of family members who experienced the events firsthand (my Uncle Marty was working in the City); like a visual cacophony, images of the towers collapsing, people jumping, and the massive hole left by the absence of the Twin Towers explode in my mind. I reflect on the Patriot Act and the loss of my sense of security. I reflect on the Boston bombings, which occurred only days before my last trip to the Memorial.

My body is released and moved by the waves of other bodies who push up and out of the darkness and stench of the subway into the lights and sounds of the city. On the city surface, I avoid eye contact with other walkers and I move quickly. Massive architectural bodies dwarf my presence and I tighten my jacket against the cold shadows they create. Glancing sideways, I notice a mannequin frozen in a glossy window display. She hails me as a consumer, selling me future happiness, and I am constituted as the flâneur, a modern city-wanderer whose leisure time is spent window-shopping and experiencing the city primarily through looking. This subject, written about by Benjamin (1999), is known as using a distracted and detached gaze, which helps to fetishize the commodity, distance the city dweller from everyday life, and elevate consumption as a mode of engagement with the world. Wood (2005) argues,

Walking slowly, the flâneur enacts a series of movements and glances: simultaneously gazing upon the entire scene and becoming lost in the labyrinth. Turning this way and that, pausing to wipe the dust off a rusted sign, overhearing snatches of conversation, and weaving past temporal narratives into the current seen, the flâneur sees what might be otherwise obscured. (p. 317)

This gaze, Casey (2007) argues, is a mode of viewing privileged by modernity and defined by its gravity, by its ability to take things seriously. In its gravity and affirmation of the status quo,

the gaze does not contest the “rules of the game” but, on the contrary, takes pleasure in their continual reenactment. Its interest is not in how things should be or might be otherwise but in how they stand and do not change. (Casey, 2007, p. 143)

Both the flâneur and its gaze are distinctly modern, mobile, and comfortable in the streets of New York City.

There is a particular pull toward the Memorial, lit by blue signage and other bodies who move down Vesey Street to the Memorial Preview Site to retrieve their pre-reserved tickets.² Although tickets are free, their very existence primes the experience of the Memorial as a restricted place, as set aside from the city, and as a carefully monitored site of trauma. Inside, the Preview Site is brightly lit and organized around the area for ticket retrieval and a retail area. While waiting in line on the ticket side, visitors in the Preview Site encounter images of survivors recounting the horror of their experiences on massive screens that dominate the walls. Pieces of steel beams from the Twin Towers, a small retail space, and a large-scale timeline of the events of 9/11 are displayed as well (Figures 2 and 3). As I blankly stare at an adorable New York Fire Department (NYFD) rescue dog stuffed animal, set comfortably among a plethora of other kitschy objects for sale, I imagine what it would have been like to experience 9/11 like Florence Jones who was nearly burned to death in the South Tower. Here I become a citizen tourist.

Figure 2.

Retail at Preview Site.

Figure 3.

Survivor narratives at Preview Site.

Tickets in hand, visitors like myself move into the city again, this time toward the Memorial entrance and security screening area (see Figure 4). Signage posted on the temporary construction walls reads, “Please be reminded that the 9/11 memorial is a place of remembrance and quiet reflection.” Other signage shows visual icons of restricted objects within the site, which alarmingly includes an image of a grenade. The images and technologies of security begin to engender a sense of unease and anticipation produced by entering a secure (but potentially dangerous) place. A rush of adrenalin floods my body as I find myself taking a photograph of a sign that reads: “No photos here.” As I enter the actual screening room, I begin to actively self-monitor my behavior to appear unthreatening. As a flâneur, the gaze that was conditioned to view the commodities of the city now turns inward to view the self as object, demonstrating Foucault’s (1978) notion of bio-power. In unison, visitors remove coats and empty pockets, move slowly, haltingly, looking for cues from the security personal who periodically yell, “Keep your tickets out!” As a pregnant White woman traveling with her White male partner, my body was apparently deemed so unthreatening during my second visit that I was simply “waved” through security, but most visitors are subjected to multiple ticket checks, and a security screening of both person and belongings.

Figure 4.

Security screening at Memorial site.

Even before entering the Memorial, visitors have already been primed to experience it in particularly affective ways. The flâneur’s gaze is constituted first in the Financial District of the city and second through the display of kitsch and retail of the Preview Site. This gaze is turned toward 9/11 in tourist ways through the screen displays of tragedy and loss narratives while the technologies of security and discipline again turn this gaze inward, producing a visceral unease, a “sense” of being watched, and an anxiety of (in)security (Foucault, 1977).

These visceral reactions are further expressed and complicated by the materiality of the Memorial whose temporal, vertical, and horizontal vectors pull the attention, body, and vision of visitors like myself in particular and constitutive ways. These vectors work to hail the surveilling flâneur: a security-conscious consumer whose gaze is conditioned through practices of consumption and surveillance. The eye is now encouraged to look at more than merely the artifacts of mass production for the purposes of pleasure. Rather, the practices of vision of the post-9/11 flâneur is one of surveillance, which actively watches for behavior that is out of place and consumes images of security for the purposes of pleasure.

Temporal Vectors

Immediately on entering the actual space of the Memorial, the sound of falling water drowns out the sounds of the city, audibly separating this place of mourning from the everyday practices of the city. The vastness and newness of the Memorial is apparent and pulls the eye vertically upwards to the Freedom Tower, downward into two large pools of water, and horizontally across a wide plaza filled with young trees. My attention and direction is focused around the large crowds of people who form in the distance around the edge of a large void. Moving to stand within the crowd, I am confronted with the first reflecting pool. The view is overwhelming. The enormity of the square of cascading water nears the mechanical sublime. At the level of symbolism, the use of water suggests life and fluidity, but the movement of this water darkly reenacts the falling of the towers. Viscerally, the thirty-foot drop of the water produces a slight sense of vertigo in my own body and perceiving myself in relationship to the size of the reflecting pools is strangely disorienting.

These pools sit within the “footprints” of the Twin Towers and as I move toward the North pool, I attempt to reimagine them back into the air above the pools. In doing so, I am thrust into images of their immanent fall. Mitchell (2011) argues that “the ‘twin towers’ were (as their ‘twin’ designation indicates) already anthropomorphized” (p. 14). By making their footprints permanent, they transform Ground Zero into an indexical sign, a sign that has a direct or causal relationship between the sign and the object that it represents. These signs have particularly affective properties because in experiencing the representation (the footprint), one has a direct connection to the original object itself (the Towers). The Memorial functions much like a photograph does because it fills the visitor’s field of vision with an undeniable past, what Barthes (1980) describes as a culturally shared affect of “that-has-been” (p. 100).

At the North Pool, a nearby sign invites me to touch the name panels. As I walk, I run my fingers along the panel and my fingertips recognize each name in a particularly embodied way. Through touch, I acknowledge the lives of those lost. The phrase “and her unborn child” following the name of Dianne T. Signer comes sharply into focus and I pause, a small knot forming in the pit of my stomach. Rybczynski (2011), architectural critic for Slate, describes his experience in similarly emotional ways, writing “there is nothing comforting about gazing into the vast pit—or, rather, two pits—of the 9/11 memorial, the water endlessly falling and disappearing into a bottomless black hole. The strongest sense I came away with was of hopelessness” (par. 3). As visitors like myself touch the name panels and attempt, however unsuccessfully, to orient themselves clearly in relation to their size and massive spatial dominance, they are asked to engage with the Memorial in particularly embodied ways. The sound, touch, and smell of the water helps to constitute visitors as embodied witnesses to events of 9/11. In physically experiencing the imprint of a mark made by the Twin Towers, visitors are constituted as remembering subjects primarily through the relationship to the materiality of their absence, evoking strong and dark affective responses.

As I move back to the South Pool, the Museum building projects itself oddly into my path and into the larger plaza. As I take a photograph of it, I notice that it is positioned on the ground at an unnatural angle and its exterior is constructed out of two different surfaces that collide with one another, as if by force (see Figure 5). Not only is the building somewhat imposing, it is also a particularly explicit reenactment of the events of 9/11 because it appears to be falling down. Peering through its reflective yet transparent walls reveals a spider web of steel support beams that cut through the space at odd angles, some of which seem to be bending under a tremendous weight. These architectural elements further reinforce a feeling of anxiety and potential bodily harm. Again, I am thrust into the past through my own imagination of what it would be like to be there then.

Figure 5.

Museum building.

The vertical vectors materialized in both the Museum building and the footprints reflect what Hess and Herbig (2013) have argued is an orientation toward memory that is fixated on the past trauma of 9/11, rather than toward a present or future renewal. The smart phone app that visitors are encouraged to download when they reserve their tickets perpetuates the “reliving” of the trauma, by providing interactive timelines, survivor narratives, and accounts from first responders. But, the Memorial itself traps the sentiments of this trauma in an overwhelming and massive indexical sign, cementing the “that-has-been” in ways that work viscerally on the bodies of visitors. These temporal vectors, embedded in the materiality of the Memorial, work through a lens of perpetual trauma and reinforce a sense of fear and anxiety. The flâneur searches for a commodity to appreciate, but can see nothing but the past.

Vertical Vectors

My eye is drawn upwards. Dramatically juxtaposed to the endless depths of the footprint’s reflecting pools, One World Trade Center, commonly referred to as the “Freedom Tower,”³ rises patriotically at 1,776 feet (the year the declaration of independence was signed; see Figure 6). Regardless of its banality as an architectural presence, it is massive and offers one of the few symbolic resources for moving away from the trauma and sense of unease produced through the temporal vectors to the site. I try to capture an image of the tower and the memorial in the same frame, but it is impossible from my position in the Memorial. My inability to visualize it in my lens makes it somehow more difficult to apprehend as a whole.

Figure 6.

Freedom Tower standing in the Memorial.

Osborn’s (1967) work on the archetypal metaphor is illuminative of the rhetorical force of the vastness of the vertical scale, arguing, “vertical scale images . . . project desirable objects above the listener and undesirable objects below” (p. 166). The “Freedom Tower,” then, in rising so high above the trauma of 9/11 configures freedom as an important American value and symbolically demonstrates the country’s triumphs over terrorism. Hundreds of trees planted in the plaza grow upwards toward this ideal. According to 911memorial.org, the 400 Swamp White Oaks were harvested from areas surrounding locations affected by 9/11, including Pennsylvania, D.C., and a 500-mile radius of the Ground Zero, and the “Survivor Tree,” a pear tree, was found in the rubble of the attacks and nursed back to health. The vertical growth of all the survivor trees out of the darkness of the events of 9/11 and upwards toward Freedom is in unison and illustrates a material symbolic resource for visualizing growing together as a nation and into the light.

The vertical scale offered between the destruction of 9/11 in the pools to the Freedom Tower provides the flâneur a material symbol of resilience and strength at an overtly nationalistic level. Yet, this symbolism is complicated by the horizontal vectors of the Memorial site, where the affective force of the place causes visitors to navigate the contradictory intersections between tourism and surveillance practices, both of which indicate a complex negotiation of freedom in a post-9/11 world. Moreover, they work to fix the flâneur’s gaze on the goals of security as a source of patriotism and agency.

Horizontal Vectors

At one point during my first visit to the Memorial, I took a photograph of my partner smiling in front of the Museum Building. His smile, he noted immediately after the photograph was taken, felt grotesque within the context of the Memorial. In fact, watching other tourists take “selfies” and smiling photos is routinely frowned upon in online reviews of the Memorial.⁴ Although visitors are primed to experience the Memorial, in part, as a tourist, 1,115 unfound bodies remain in the ground of the Memorial, making it sacred ground. Sturken (2007) argues that sacred ground calls for specific and ritualized behaviors. Numerous signs distinguish the sanctioned from the unsanctioned. “Please do not walk on the ivy beds,” for example, or “Please do not throw anything into the Memorial pools” are displayed throughout the site. Although regulatory practices are not unique to places of memory dedicated to controversial topics (Woods et al., 2013), the 9/11 Memorial includes visible security cameras, park rangers, bomb squads, armed New York Police Department (NYPD) officers, and bomb sniffing dogs who collectively watch for suspicious behavior. Visually, the NYPD colors also match those of the 9/11 memorial logo, connecting the Memorial to images of security in aesthetic ways.

Regulating behavior in this sacred space occurs by connecting memory to technologies of surveillance and security. In doing so, the Memorial is simultaneously read through the lens of (in)security, which promotes the sense that although one is “secure,” one’s body is also always also being watched for the deadly and invisible markings of terrorism. Like the security screening, bio-power works here, where visitors self-regulate their own bodies. However, the surveilling gaze is also turned outward as a mobile surveillance unit. Visitors are encouraged to become a part of the system of surveillance itself. Biesecker (2007) discusses the melancholic citizen-subject in a post-9/11 era in similar ways, arguing that this new subjectivity “not only cedes all authority to the remilitarized state but also is induced to function on its behalf” (p. 163). One sign, for example, reads, “If you see anyone scratch, sit on, or otherwise damaging the names panels, please alert memorial staff.”

In addition, and true to its name, within “Reflecting Absence,” the buildings, water pools, and name panels are made of reflective surfaces (see Figure 7). This creates the sense that one is always being watched, while also allowing for the surveillance of others moving through the space.

Figure 7.

Reflection in Museum Building.

Moving about the site reveals that tourists consume images of nearly all aspects of the site. One of the most interesting practices at the 9/11 Memorial, however, is photography of and/or with security personnel. During my first trip, a woman handed her baby to one of the uniformed park rangers standing by the Museum building and asked whether she could take a photograph of him and two other Rangers. They obliged without hesitation (see Figure 8). During my second trip, several families approached a large bomb detection unit near the entrance of the memorial grounds and asked to take a photo of them with their dogs. All nine of the officers and two dogs also obliged and answered numerous questions about the dogs and their job. Although clearly NYPD (and their dogs) were heroic figures in the events of 9/11, tourist pictures taken with these elements of security transform them into mascots and insert oneself (or one’s firstborn) quite literally in the comforting arms of national security.

Figure 8.

Tourist baby with park rangers.

These engagements with security encapsulate the birth of a particular type of flâneur, one that combats the sense of unease and fear by projecting a surveilling eye outward to regulate the behavior of Others through surveillance. Whereas the vertical vectors direct the vision of visitors upwards to the Freedom Tower as one of the few symbols of hope and renewal within the Memorial, the horizontal vectors constitute a habitus that restricts personal freedoms in ways that reflect the more general loss of personal freedoms that occurred after 9/11. This might strike visitors as contradictory to the values embodied by the Freedom Tower. But instead, by calling forth a surveilling flâneur, the Memorial configures the technologies of surveillance and mascots of security that restrict and remove personal freedoms as the saviors and protectors of that same freedom. The habitus of the surveilling flâneur actually expresses the value of freedom by becoming a part of the surveillance apparatus itself. The eye swivels and searches for suspicious behavior, momentarily fixating on (other) images of security as a form of identification.

As I move to exit the Memorial, I am funneled toward the 9/11 Museum Gift Shop, which was opened to the public years before the Museum itself opened its doors. Here, one is presented with yet another site to re-live the events of the day through wall projections, books, and pamphlets. The familiar blue of the 9/11 logo/NYPD is projected onto another sea of kitsch and consumption, where visitors can purchase magnets, stuffed animals, and 9/11 themed coffee mugs. Personally, I weighed the pros and cons of purchasing a Survivor Tree iPhone case, before leaving empty-handed. But for many, by ending the experience of the 9/11 Memorial by purchasing something at the Gift Shop, visitors are able to return to their homes with a souvenir of their patriotism and the knowledge they have contributed to maintaining the memory of 9/11.

The Surveilling Eye/I

In a dance between imagination and memory, the contours of the 9/11 Memorial remain illuminated in my (mind’s) eye long after I leave. Whereas the mannequins frozen behind storefronts continue to hail me as a consumer, the vertical vectors of the Memorial haunt me. I cannot help but imagine the City as it was shown at the Preview Site, as covered in dust, stunned, and silent except for the sound of sirens. And, while I continue to avoid eye contact with other walkers, I find myself smiling self-consciously at a pair of police officers standing on a corner near Zuccotti Park. As a diffuse text, or what Dickinson et al. (2006) term an “experiential landscape,” the rhetoric of the Memorial is mixed up in other signs. Although rhetorical scholars have identified the ways that the immediate locale of a museum or memorial affects the reading of the place (Blair & Michel, 1999; Chevrette & Hess, 2015; Dickinson et al., 2006), I argue that as a national memorial, its rhetoric is mixed up in larger cultural signs, those of the Nation as a material and imaginary landscape.

The eye of the surveilling flâneur becomes a site where self meets social and where the ideology of Nation intersects with the habitus of the body. This eye/I is the metaphorical and physical point where the rhetorical force of the 9/11 Memorial begins its journey, where it stakes its claim. But, this is only its beginning. Visitors take this eye out into the city, carrying with it both a fear and an agency produced by becoming a part of the system of security. The rhetoric of the 9/11 Memorial not only helps to enunciate a sense of political, national, or individual subjectivity through materiality, aesthetics, and image but also provides the architectures for seeing the world and what is possible within it.

Conclusion

Approaching the 9/11 Memorial through the lens of participatory critical rhetoric offers the ability to blend useful methodologies that offer provocations for both qualitative and rhetorical scholars. In particular, the synergy between rhetoric and visual ethnography in a moving methodology is useful for scholars interested in understanding the dynamic complexities of place from a critical perspective. For qualitative scholars, attention to movement helps to bridge the difficult terrain between personal accounts of in situ phenomenon and the larger abstracted theoretical perspectives. The creative assumptions of critical rhetoric offer a useful grounding for moving from the formal details of the body in place to the larger discourses that are sustained and mobilized through this rhetoric. Movement also offers qualitative researchers a way of understanding and addressing place as more than contextual, and instead as in situ phenomena.

For rhetoricians, embedding visual production and participatory ethnographic engagement into the process of analysis offers a means of accounting for and more effectively communicating affective force. Affect, as a mode of knowing, has traditionally been excluded from dominant epistemologies and Conquergood (2002) argues, “the hegemony of textualism needs to be exposed and undermined” (p. 146). As I have illustrated throughout this analysis, a moving method participates in the effort of dismantling the textual bias by grounding visual production in embodied and affective frameworks. The visual, in this sense, does not replace the text as the dominant mode of knowing, but simply acts as a conduit for communicating the performative, visceral, and vernacular rhetoric of place. Decoding place through visual and moving modalities demonstrates how symbolic dimensions of rhetoric do not work in opposition to the visceral. Rather, embracing the intersections between critical rhetoric and visual ethnography is also to embrace the intersections of the emotional, embodied, cognitive, visceral, and rational layers of rhetorical force.

For both rhetorical and qualitative scholars, a moving methodology provides the tools for understanding the constitutive nexus of the vernacular rhetorics of place and ways of seeing embedded in the body. First, by focusing on seeing, scholars can become attuned to the dynamic and moving interplay between embodied gestures, material signs, and power to address the ways that signs are mobilized within particular power structures to influence the habitus of the body as it moves beyond the context of the site of analysis. Second, it allows scholars to embrace ways of looking to understand the affective construction of place itself, in this case, the 9/11 Memorial. Third, attention to issues of power can be addressed through this methodology. In the case of the 9/11 Memorial, the surveilling flâneur can be understood as a privileged and problematic way of performing citizenship both inside the Memorial and beyond because it is grounded in the ability to decipher behavior that is threatening to dominant power structures, or is “out of place,” a category grounded in classed, raced, and religious Othering.

Although it is clear that memory and place are highly fluid (Massey, 1994; Rose, 1993; Vivian, 2004), the moving analysis of the National 9/11 Memorial indicates that the ways that memory is made material in sites such as this may cement meaning and regulate behavior in ways that not only privilege certain rituals of remembering and mourning but also privilege particular subjectivities, ideologies, and communities. The global effects of such rhetoric are profound and are reflected not only in the rhetoric of presidents and acts of war but also in the everyday practices of the ordinary citizen. As a global rhetorical text, the Memorial teaches millions of people from hundreds of countries how to live in a post-9/11 world, producing a solidly tourist experience that not only consumes kitsch and memorabilia as a means of demonstrating patriotism but also actively consumes images of security itself as a means of alleviating the unease produced through its affective dimensions. As the 9/11 Memorial configures the trauma of 9/11 through surveilling flâneur, millions of visitors from around the world are transformed into simply a surveilling I/eye.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks her committee and dissertation chair, Kevin DeLuca, for their guidance on the dissertation project in which an earlier version of this project appeared as a chapter. In addition, the author sincerely thanks Danielle Endres and Aaron Hess, along with the other reviewers of this article whose input and contributions have been integral to the success of the project.

Author’s Note

An earlier version of this project appeared as a chapter in a dissertation project at the University of Utah.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Elinor Light, PhD, is a Special Assistant Professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. Her research focuses on the intersection between images, place, and rhetorics of transgression and control.

References

Aden

R. C.

Han

M. W.

Norander

Pfahl

M. E.

Pollock

T. P.

Young

S. L.

(2009). Re-collection: A proposal for refining the study of collective memory and its places. Communication Theory, 19, 311-336. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2009.01345.x

Barthes

(1980). Camera Lucida: Reflections on photography ( Howard

, Trans.). New York, NY: Hill & Wang.

Benjamin

(1999). The arcades project ( Eiland

, Ed. & McLaughlin

, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Biesecker

B. A.

(2004). Renovating the national imaginary: A prolegomenon on contemporary paralegoric rhetoric. In Phillips

(Ed.), Framing publicm memory (pp. 212-247). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Biesecker

B. A.

(2007). No time for mourning: The rhetorical production of the melancholic citizen-subject in the war on terror. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 40, 147-169. doi:10.1353/par.2007.0009

Blair

(2001). Reflections on criticism and bodies: Parables from public places. Western Journal of Communication, 65, 271-294.

Blair

Michel

(1999). Commemorating in the theme park zone: Reading the astronauts memorial. In Rosteck

(Ed.), At the intersection: Cultural studies and rhetorical studies (pp. 29-83). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Blair

Michel

(2000). Reproducing civil rights tactics: The rhetorical performances of the Civil Rights Memorial. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 30, 31-55.

Blair

Michel

(2007). The AIDS memorial quilt and the contemporary culture of public commemoration. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 10, 595-626.

10.

Bond

(2012). Intersections or misdirections? Problematising crossroads of memory in the commemoration of 9/11. Culture, Theory and Critique, 53, 111-128. doi:10.1080/14735784.2012.680261

11.

Bourdieu

(1987). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

12.

Büscher

Urry

Witchger

(Eds.). (2011). Mobile methods. London, England: Routledge.

13.

Butler

(1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York, NY: Routledge.

14.

Casey

E. S.

(2004). Public memory in place and time. In Phillips

K. R.

(Ed.), Framing public memory (pp. 17-44). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press

15.

Casey

E. S.

(2007). The world at a glance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

16.

Charland

(1991). Finding a horizon and telos: The challenge to critical rhetoric. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 77, 71-74.

17.

Chevrette

Hess

(2015). Unearthing the native past: Citizen archaeology and modern (non)belonging at the Pueblo Grande Museum. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 12, 139-158. doi:10.1080/14791420.2015.1012214

18.

Conquergood

(1991). Rethinking ethnography: Towards a critical cultural politics. Communication Monographs, 58, 179-194.

19.

Conquergood

(2002). Performance studies: Interventions and radical research. TDR/The Drama Review, 46, 145-156. doi:10.1162/105420402320980550

20.

Delgado

(2015). Urban youth and photovoice: Visual ethnography in action. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

21.

Denton

(2005). Examining documentary photography using the creative method. In Smith

Moriarty

Barbatsis

(Eds.), Handbook of visual communication: Theory, methods, and media (pp. 405-428). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

22.

Denzin

N. K.

Lincoln

Y. S.

(2005). Introduction: The discipline and practice of qualitative research. In Denzin

N. K.

Lincoln

Y. S.

(Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 1-42). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

23.

Dickinson

(1997). Memories for sale: Nostalgia and the construction of identity in Old Pasadena. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 83, 1-27.

24.

Dickinson

Blair

Ott

B. L.

(Eds.). (2010). Places of public memory: The rhetoric of museums and memorials. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

25.

Dickinson

Ott

B. L.

(2013). Neoliberal capitalism, globalization, and lines of flight: Vectors and velocities at the 16th Street Mall. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13, 529-535. doi:10.1177/1532708613503780

26.

Dickinson

Ott

B. L.

Aoki

(2006). Spaces of remembering and forgetting: The reverent eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 3, 27-47. doi:10.1080/14791420500505619

27.

Donofrio

T. A.

(2010). Ground zero and place-making authority: The conservative metaphors in 9/11 families’ “take back the memorial” rhetoric. Western Journal of Communication, 74, 150-169. doi:10.1080/10570311003614492

28.

Dow

(2001). Criticism and authority in the artistic mode. Western Journal of Communication, 65, 336-348.

29.

Dunn

T. R.

(2011). Remembering “a great fag”: Visualizing public memory and the construction of queer space. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 97, 435-460. doi:10.1080/00335630.2011.585168

30.

El Guindi

. (2004). Visual anthropology: Essential method and theory. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

31.

Ewalt

(2011). A colonialist celebration of national <heritage>: Verbal, visual, and landscape ideographs at homestead national monument of America. Western Journal of Communication, 75, 367-385. doi:10.1080/10570314.2011.586970

32.

Foucault

(1977). Discipline and punish ( Sheridan

, Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

33.

Foucault

(1978). The history of sexuality, volume 1: An Introduction. ( Hurley

, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books.

34.

Gallagher

(1999). Memory and reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2, 303-320.

35.

Gaonkar

D. P.

(1993). Performing with fragments: Reflections on critical rhetoric. In McKerrow

R. E.

(Ed.), Argument and the postmodern challenge: Proceedings of the Eighth SCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation (pp. 149-155). Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association.

36.

Hartelius

E. J.

(2010). “Leave a message of hope or tribute”: Digital memorializing as public deliberation. Argumentation and Advocacy, 47(2), 67-85.

37.

Haskins

E. V.

DeRose

J. P.

(2003). Memory, visibility, and public space: Reflections on commemoration(s) of 9/11. Space and Culture, 6, 377-393. doi:10.1177/1206331203258373

38.

Haskins

E. V.

DeRose

J. P.

(2007). Between archive and participation: Public memory in a digital age. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37, 401-422. doi:10.1080/02773940601086794

39.

Hess

Herbig

(2013). Recalling the ghosts of 9/11: Convergent memorializing at the opening of the National 9/11 Memorial. International Journal of Communication, 7, 2207-2230.

40.

Hoskins

(2003). Signs of the Holocaust: Exhibiting memory in a mediated age. Media, Culture & Society, 25, 7-22. doi:10.1177/0163443703025001631

41.

Ivie

R. L.

(1995). Productive criticism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81, 2.

42.

Jay

(1996). Visual anthropology. In Levinson

Ember

(Eds.), Encyclopedia of cultural anthropology (Vol. 4, pp. 1345-1351). New York, NY: Henry Holt.

43.

Jorgensen-Earp

C. R.

Lanzilotti

L. A.

(1998). Public memory and private grief: The construction of shrines at the sites of public tragedy. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 84, 150-170. doi:10.1080/00335639809384211

44.

Low

S. M.

(2004). The memorialization of September 11: Dominant and local discourses on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site. American Ethnologist, 31, 326-339. doi:10.1525/ae.2004.31.3.326

45.

Massey

D. B.

(1994). Space, place, and gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

46.

Massumi

(2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

47.

McKerrow

R. E.

(1989). Critical rhetoric: Theory and praxis. Communication Monographs, 56, 91-111.

48.

Middleton

Hess

Endres

Senda-Cook

(2015). Participatory critical rhetoric: Theoretical and methodological foundations for studying rhetoric in situ. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

49.

Mitchell

W. J. T.

(2005). What do pictures want? The lives and loves of images. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

50.

Mitchell

W. J. T.

(2011). Cloning terror: The war of images, 9/11 to the present. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

51.

Osborn

(1967). Archetypal metaphor in rhetoric: The light-dark family. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 53, 115-126.

52.

Paliewicz

N. S.

Hasian

(2016). Mourning absences, melancholic commemoration, and the contested public memories of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. Western Journal of Communication, 80, 140-162. doi:10.1080/10570314.2015.1128559

53.

Pink

(2006). The future of visual anthropology: Engaging the senses. London, England: Routledge.

54.

Pink

(2012). Situating everyday life: Practices and places. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.

55.

Pink

(2013). Doing visual ethnography (3rd ed.). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.

56.

Pollard

(2011). Seen, seared and sealed: Trauma and the visual presentation of September 11. Health, Risk & Society, 13, 81-101. doi:10.1080/13698575.2010.540647

57.

Rose

(1993). Feminism and geography: The limits of geographical knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

58.

Rybczynski

(2011, September). Black holes: There is nothing comforting about the 9/11 memorial. Slate, Architecture. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/architecture/2011/09/black_holes.html.

59.

Sturken

(2004). The aesthetics of absence: Rebuilding ground zero. American Ethnologist, 31, 311-325.

60.

Sturken

(2007). Tourists of history: Memory, kitsch, and consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

61.

Vivian

(2004). A timeless now: Memory and repetition. In Phillips

K. R.

(Ed.), Framing public memory (pp. 187-211). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

62.

Williams

(2005). Cognitive theory. In Handbook of visual communication: Theory, method, and media (pp. 193-210). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

63.

Wood

A. F.

(2005). “What happens [in Vegas]”: Performing the post-tourist flâneur in “New York” and “Paris.” Text and Performance Quarterly 25, 315-333. doi:10.1080/10462930500362403

64.

Woods

C. S.

Ewalt

J. P.

Baker

S. J.

(2013). A matter of regionalism: Remembering Brandon Teena and Willa Cather at the Nebraska History Museum. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 99, 341-363. doi:10.1080/00335630.2013.806818

65.

Young

J. E.

(2006). The stages of memory at Ground Zero. In Stier

O. B.

Landres

J. S.

(Eds.), Religion, violence, memory, and place (pp. 214-234). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

66.

Zelizer

(2004). The voice of the visual in memory. In Phillips

K. R.

(Ed.), Framing public memory (pp. 157-186). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.