Architecture, Media, and Memory: Facing Complexity in Post–9/11 New York 9781350037663, 9781350037656, 9781350037632

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Architecture, Media, and Memory

Architecture, Media, and Memory Facing Complexity in Post–9/11 New York

JOEL McKIM

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Joel McKim, 2019 Joel McKim has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Alamy All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McKim, Joel, 1975- author. Title: Architecture, media, and memory: facing complexity in post-9/11 New York / Joel McKim. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018030760 | ISBN 9781350037663 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781350037632 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Memorials–New York (State)–New York. | September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001–Social aspects–New York (State)–New York. | Collective memory and city planning–New York (State)–New York. | New York (N.Y.)–Buildings, structures, etc. Classification: LCC NA9350.N5 M39 2018 | DDC 720.9747/1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030760 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3766-3 PB: 978-1-3501-7051-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3763-2 ePub: 978-1-3500-3764-9 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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Contents Acknowledgments vi List of figures vii

Introduction 1 1 Mourning and protest: Spontaneous memorials at Union Square 17 2 Absence and exposure: The National September 11 Memorial & Museum 39 3 Algorithmic memory: The interaction designs of Jake Barton and Local Projects 61 4 Secrets, false targets, and social media: Confronting conspiracy theories 77 5 Creative recall: Digital design, architecture, and the challenge of memory 97 6 Landfills and lifescapes: The transformation of New York’s Fresh Kills 115 Conclusion 137 Bibliography Index 155

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Acknowledgments L

ike many academic works, this book’s research and writing was completed over many years and across multiple locations. It was made possible by funding support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Overseas Research Scholarship, and the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences’ Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh. There have been many friends, mentors, and colleagues who have generously offered their insights and comments along the way. In Montreal at Concordia and McGill, Peter C. van Wyck, Will Straw, Brian Massumi, and Erin Manning provided both support and intellectual stimulation. In London, at Goldsmiths, a vibrant community of friendship and ideas served as the foundation for much of this work. I would like to thank in particular Jennifer Gabrys, Howard Caygill, Angela McRobbie, James Burton, Sean McKeown, Laura Cull, Theresa Mikuriya, Craig Smith, Daisy Tam, Susan Schuppli, Lucia Vodanovic, Shinji Oyama, John Hutnyk, and Scott Lash. And at the University of Pittsburgh my postdoctoral colleagues and mentors provided yet another rich environment for discussion and debate. I would like to especially acknowledge Alice Mattoni, David Kim, Frans Weiser, Benjamin Kahan, Jocelyn Buckner, Kristen Tobey, Logan Dancey, Raymund Ryan, Fred Evans, Drew Armstrong, Josh Ellenbogen, Barbara McCloskey, Terry Smith, and Kirk Savage. A thank you as well to my wonderful present-day colleagues at Birkbeck, University of London. This book also greatly benefited from many interviews and conversations with members of the New York art, design, and architecture community, including Jesse Reiser, Bill Talen (Reverend Billy), Michael Shulan, Rem Koolhaas, Katerina Lucas (Park51), and Doug Elliott (Freshkills Park). I’m very appreciative of Donald Lokuta, SOMA Architects, and Jake Barton and Local Projects for generously providing images for inclusion in the book. And thank you to the editorial and production team at Bloomsbury for seeing the project through to final print. Thank you most of all my loving and supportive family, particularly my parents Myrna and Jerry. A special thanks to my sister-in-law Sarahmay Wilkinson who hosted me on many research trips to New York. And finally, to Judith for being there with me through it all.

List of figures Figure 1.1

Union Square Memorial. Donald Lokuta 18

Figure 1.2

Thomas Hirschhorn Mondrian Altar (1997)—installed in Queens, NY, in 2011. Joel McKim 27

Figure 2.1

President Obama at National September 11 Memorial (10th Anniversary of 9/11). Local Projects 40

Figure 2.2

Public Patriotism on Display at 10th Anniversary of 9/11. Joel McKim 41

Figure 2.3

Public Protests at 10th Anniversary of 9/11. Joel McKim 42

Figure 2.4

National September 11 Memorial. Local Projects 50

Figure 2.5

Flower Left at National September 11 Memorial. Local Projects 51

Figure 2.6

National September 11 Museum Foundation Hall. Joel McKim 54

Figure 2.7

National September 11 Museum Memorial Exhibition. Local Projects 55

Figure 2.8

National September 11 Museum Historical Exhibition. Local Projects 56

Figure 3.1

National September 11 Museum Timescape Exhibition. Local Projects 68

Figure 3.2

National September 11 Museum Last Column Exhibition. Local Projects 72

Figure 3.3

MCNY Future City Lab Map Table. Local Projects 74

Figure 4.1

9/11 Truth Movement at 10th Anniversary of 9/11. Joel McKim 81

Figure 4.2

Park51 Rendering. SOMA Architects 93

Figure 6.1

Fresh Kills Landfill, Staten Island, NY, in 2011. Joel McKim 124

Figure 6.2

Fresh Kills Landfill, Staten Island, NY, in 2011. Joel McKim 124

Introduction N

o more than 200 meters from the site of the National September 11 Memorial, along the bank of the Hudson, lies another monument to a devastating historical event. The episode this memorial seeks to narrate is historically and geographically very far removed from what occurred here in 2001. This space, constructed with relatively little public attention or discussion, is the Irish Hunger Memorial commemorating the Great Famine1 that devastated the population of Ireland and led to mass emigration between 1845 and 1852. The memorial, designed by the New York– born artist Brian Tolle, is a quarter acre of simulated Irish landscape touching down to meet the pavement on its east side and gently ramping up twenty-five feet above the ground on its opposite edge. The imported tract of rural Ireland, complete with indigenous vegetation and the remains of a ruined stone cottage brought from County Mayo, appears to have been wrenched from its proper context and dropped down from above into the New York cityscape. Tolle’s intention is to create a “living” monument, both in the sense of the memorial’s verdancy and its ability to link past events to current global conditions (Johnson 2003: 55). The dulcet and measured voice of Bob Geldof emanates from the memorial’s base, drawing connections between this specific historical disaster and the present state of famine worldwide. I first visited the site during a typically scorching July day in New York, and a battalion of sprinklers attempted, in vain, to keep the landscape from passing from its intended green hue to various shades of burned yellow. It seemed that this grafted transplant from another continent and another time was not settling in easily to its new environment. When the memorial was dedicated in the summer of 2002, it became the latest addition to an expanding archipelago of monuments and statuary spread over the surface of Lower Manhattan. From the Irish Hunger Memorial you can venture due east to the corner of Duane and Elk Street, the location of the even more recent African Burial Ground National Monument—a site earmarked for the construction of a US Federal office building, but found in 1991 to contain the remains of more than 400 free and enslaved Africans buried during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A memorial designed by the Haitian-American architect Rodney Leon was opened to the public in 2007; it features a sunken circular “Ancestral Libation Court,” the floor of which is inscribed with a map tracing the routes of the African diaspora. If you instead walk south past the North Cove Marina you’ll find the New York City Police Memorial, a fountain and reflecting pool dedicated in 1997 to officers fallen in the line of duty. Continuing south along the Battery Park City brings you to the Museum of Jewish Heritage (itself described as a living memorial to the Holocaust) and its Garden of Stones. The garden, designed by the British artist Andy Goldsworthy and opened in 2003, features eighteen boulders each with a single oak sapling growing out from its craggy surface. Here you also find the entrance to Battery Park, which is home to more than twenty memorials alone, including the American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial completed by the Pop Art sculptor Marisol Escobar in 1991; the New York Korean War Veterans Memorial dedicated the same year; the 1963 East Coast Memorial for World War II serviceman who died in the coastal

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waters of the Atlantic; and the 1955 Coast Guard Memorial. Commanding more attention than any of the other memorials in the park is the battered, but otherwise intact Koenig Sphere, the imposing metallic form sculpted by the German artist Fritz Koenig that once stood in the middle of Austin Tobin Plaza, occupying a prominent position between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Originally intended as a symbol of world peace, the sculpture is far more appreciated now than it ever was in its first incarnation. The sphere was recovered from the Ground Zero rubble and moved to Battery Park six months later to serve as a temporary memorial to the 9/11 victims and a monument to its own survival. And still other locations could be added to this memorial list (the Battery Labyrinth which also commemorates those who died on September 11, New York’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial dedicated in 2001, the Stone Wall National Monument to LGBT rights and history established in Greenwich Village in 2016, Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf’s Gardens of Remembrance opened in 2003, to name a few more), clearly establishing Lower Manhattan as the city’s preferred repository for monuments and sites of remembrance. Not all New Yorkers welcome the tendency; the opening of the Irish Hunger Memorial led Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin to remark that while uptown has its Museum Mile, downtown now has a Misery Mile and many residents of the area feel that the neighborhood is beginning to cater more to the dead (and the tourists who come to pay their respects to them) than to its living inhabitants (Iovine 2003).2 Certainly, this area of New York appears to have succumbed to the contemporary cultural phenomenon Erika Doss has termed “memorial mania,” which she defines as “an obsession with issues of memory and history and an urgent desire to express and claim those issues in visibly public contexts” (2010: 2). Yet Doss also reminds us that America has had previous iterations of this memory obsession and she points to the “statue mania” of the 1870s to the 1920s that emerged in response to the divisiveness of the Civil War (2010: 20). One material consequence of this “statue mania,” the vast number of confederate monuments erected across the Southern United States during this period, was the subject of one of this year’s most significant and disturbing political confrontations. The struggle over whether these monuments should be preserved or dismantled came to a head in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August when a statue to Robert E. Lee slated for removal became the focal point for a white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally and a clash with counterprotesters that produced over thirty injuries and the death of thirty-two-year-old Heather D. Heyer (Astor, Caron, and Victor 2017 and McKim 2017). These events have motivated New York’s own process of memorial questioning with monuments to Theodore Roosevelt (on horseback flanked by a standing Native American and an African), Christopher Columbus, and Nazi-collaborator Philippe Pétain, all accused of representing the ideas and history of white supremacism (Cotter 2018). Writing in the 1930s, Robert Musil famously noted that despite their attempts at conspicuousness, there is nothing as invisible as a monument: “they are impregnated with something that repels attention, causing the glance to roll right off, like water droplets off an oilcloth, without even pausing for a moment” (1995: 61). The recent enthusiasm for memorial construction and the passionate calls for the removal of historical monuments would seem to contradict Musil’s claims. In light of current events, Michael Taussig’s suggested adjustment to Musil’s theory, that it is not until a monument is destroyed that it succeeds in drawing our attention, appears to be a necessary alteration. Taussig reminds us that the monument is often the first symbolic object of attack in

INTRODUCTION

3

times of struggle and it is through negation that its hidden power is revealed. “With defacement,” he writes, “the statue moves from an excess of invisibility to an excess of visibility” (1999: 52).3 It is in this mnemonically crowded and emotionally charged landscape that the rebuilding projects at Ground Zero have taken their place. By most conceivable measures—sheer size, public attention, symbolic importance—the new World Trade Center and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum eclipse the Lower Manhattan memory locations that surround them. In an area of New York becoming increasingly defined by its connections to the past, the ongoing reconstruction of Ground Zero, perhaps the most colossal and complicated architectural project ever to contend with considerations of remembrance, remains the undisputed locus of memory culture. The dense accumulation of memorials in Lower Manhattan and recent confederate monument debates are only some of the tangible manifestations of the widespread memory boom that has taken place over the past several decades in America and elsewhere. In addition to their position within a congested urban setting, New York’s post–9/11 architectural projects occupy an important place within an equally crowded field of memory scholarship, literature, philosophy, and artwork. This book seeks to better comprehend the interaction of memory and architecture that has occurred on this highly charged sixteen acres of Manhattan land and emanating beyond it. The planned reconstruction of Ground Zero and other post–9/11 architectural projects are significantly altering the New York cityscape, but they are also having a profound impact on our wider understanding of cultural memory, its conjunction with the built environment, and how it may or may not help foster new forms of political communication and ethical engagement. What does it mean to construct a site of remembrance in the Financial District of one of the world’s most culturally and economically dynamic cities? What happens when discourses of memory overlap with the rhetoric of urban development and revitalization? How do our prevailing notions of mourning and loss apply in the context of global events that are still in the process of unfolding? What role does memory play in relation to a war on terror now in its seventeenth year and with no end in sight? The first central premise of this book is that the challenge of rebuilding in post–9/11 New York introduces a level of complexity to memory-oriented architecture that requires a considerable expansion of our current thinking and design practice. The second major premise of this book is that the decades following September 11, 2001, have seen an increasingly intertwined relationship between architecture and media. As Terry Smith notes, the attacks themselves were of course “designed as a media event . . . [creating] the most spectacular effect within a spectacle-saturated world” (2006: 140). But the events of 9/11 can also be viewed as occurring in the historical interval between two different digital media eras or moments, the dot-com bubble that fuelled the growth of internet technology in the 1990s had just burst and the “social media revolution” of Web 2.0 was on the brink of occurring. The rebuilding and memorial projects in New York take place against the backdrop of these broader media changes and the gradually expanding role of digital technologies within architectural design practice more specifically. A number of significant media and architecture intersections thus characterize this period: a growing popular awareness of architectural projects via online circulation; new digitally enabled forms of public participation in architectural discussions and debates; the embedding of media screens and interfaces into the physical environments of museums, memorials, and other city spaces; the emergence of distinctly digital design movement within architecture. This

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“mediatization” of architecture in the years following 9/11 contributes to the overall complexity of memory aesthetics and politics involved. It also, I believe, requires that we incorporate into our thinking currents of media theory, digital culture, and political communication that currently sit outside the existing cannon of memory studies. Before outlining the specific topics addressed in the chapters of this book, I would first like to introduce a brief account of some of the central debates within the field of memory studies and memorial design. I do this in order to both provide a conceptual and material context for the post–9/11 projects in contemporary New York and to indicate some of the ways in which the complexity of architecture in the city requires a rethinking of much of this terrain.

A short history of contemporary memory The challenge of how to rebuild New York appears in some way to be a point of culmination for the culture of commemoration developing through the 1980s and 1990s, yet the specific configuration of memory and politics in New York does not always sit comfortably within these pre-established theories and models. Few subjects have garnered more intellectual and popular attention in recent years than the subject of memory. This contemporary memory obsession has expressed itself in a plurality of forms from a burgeoning mass media nostalgia industry (Jameson 2006, Boym 2002), to questions concerning the science of memory storage and retrieval (Hacking 1996), to the popularization of museums and proliferation of monuments and memorials (Young 2000; Weil 1990). In his seminal 1995 text Twilight Memories, Andreas Huyssen tries to take stock of this developing social fixation. He astutely points out the paradoxical nature of a culture simultaneously experiencing a waning of historical consciousness (epitomized by the circulation of post–Cold War claims for the “end of history”) and an unprecedented explosion of interest in concepts and practices of memory. According to Huyssen, the current shift in prioritization from authoritative history to cultural memory is not strictly analogous with earlier attacks on archival history and its oppressive teleology carried out by Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and other modern thinkers. Far from being overwhelmed by the burden of official historicism, he suggests the present cultural moment is afflicted with an acute anxiety over the possibility of finding itself historically adrift. Huyssen explains that “the difficulty of the current conjuncture is to think memory and amnesia together rather than simply to oppose them” (1995: 6). The recent memory turn must then be considered in relation to worries over the dwindling of generational memory and the rapid pace and information overload brought on by technological change. From the vantage point of the mid1990s, Huyssen saw in the memory boom “a potentially healthy sign of contestation” (1995: 9)—it presented a burgeoning interdisciplinary academic field, a form of resistance to the unfettered growth of “informational hyperspace” and a way of re-establishing more human-oriented structures of temporality. Perhaps the most intense discussion provoked by the threat of fin de siècle cultural amnesia identified by Huyssen has been a wide-ranging debate over how best to remember the atrocities of the twentieth century, so as to not slip into a disastrous cycle of repetition. The fear of forgetting these human disasters is heightened by the fact that the survivors of these events are in the process of passing away. Holocaust remembrance is a primary imperative in this respect, but

INTRODUCTION

5

other occurrences of genocidal ethnic cleansing this century, in Armenia, the Balkans, and Rwanda, as well as mass-scale state terror campaigns in the Soviet Union, Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere, have also underlined the importance of keeping memory alive and active. There has by no means been any easy consensus concerning how best to accomplish this goal, and memory studies have been in part defined by fervent debates within the field. The French historian Pierre Nora’s distinction between lieux de mémoire (historical sites of memory) and milieux de mémoire (collective environments of memory) has been one important touchstone in considerations of what may or may not constitute an effective process of memory in the present. Nora argues that milieux de mémoire, anchored in ritual and the living practices of communities, are being replaced in contemporary society by a compulsive archiving of history that transforms the past into a static representation, a document to be filed away or a location to be visited on a tourist route4. Our accelerated culture, he claims, is being confronted with “the brutal realization of the difference between real memory—social and unviolated, exemplified in but also retained as the secret of so-called primitive or archaic societies—and history; which is how our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize the past” (1989: 8). Nora’s writing has been interpreted as an appeal to respond to the contemporary “crisis of memory,” but it has also engendered its share of criticism. Some scholars accuse Nora of presenting a largely mythologized and dematerialized image of memory, a move that diminishes the technological aspects and institutional, social, and political organization of remembrance. John Frow, for example, claims that Nora’s theory “cannot account for the materiality of the signs and the representational forms by which memory is structured” (1997: 224). Rather than nostalgically lamenting the loss of traditional, unmediated memory, Frow suggests we must envision new and innovative ways of establishing vital connections with the past. Debates over the limits of historical representation and the critical need for remembering past atrocities extend into another important discussion within memory studies, one that revolves around the psychoanalytically informed concepts of trauma, testimony, and witnessing. The work of American comparative literature scholars Cathy Caruth (1995, 1996) and Shoshana Felman (1992, 2002) has had a strong influence in bringing notions of traumatic memory into the domain of the humanities. Drawing on their readings of Freud, Caruth and Felman share the view that an event of trauma is one that is not capable of being fully experienced or assimilated into consciousness. Instead, the event returns belatedly and involuntarily to the victim in the fullness, urgency, and literalness of its original form. Caruth writes, “To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (1995: 4). Traumatic memories thus operate outside the bounds of representation, testifying to an event that is historically unknowable and beyond the narrative scope of language. Felman sees in Claude Lanzmaan’s Holocaust testimony film Shoah a demonstration of the traumatic event’s resistance to comprehension and incorporation at both a personal and collective level. She suggests the film enacts “the Holocaust as the event-withouta-witness, as the traumatic impact of a historically ungraspable primal scene which erases both witness and its witnessing” (1992: 224, italics in original).5 Caruth and Felman’s scholarship focuses on the fundamental aporia that exists around historical traumas, making them incapable of being understood through the methods of official historiography. Other notable thinkers, including Ruth Leys (2000) and Dominick LaCapra (1994, 2001), take issue with this depiction of traumatic memory as an unmediated return of the past. Leys insists that traumatic memory appears in Freud’s writings as something that is “inherently unstable or mutable” (2000: 20)

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rather than veridical, while LaCapra criticizes this literary strand of trauma studies for severing the connection between historical events and the socio/political/ethical responses they demand. LaCapra suggests that this line of thought unwittingly fosters a melancholic cycle of repetition and he promotes instead forms of mourning that might break this cycle by encouraging a critical “working-though” of past traumas (2001: 186).6 The architecture of contemporary memorial and museum design has developed alongside these theoretical debates, often attempting to answer in material form the challenges and dilemmas expressed in scholarly discussions. A turn away from archival history and toward forms of cultural memory has thrown the role of monuments and museums, the physical storehouses of official history, into question. Suspicions regarding the role of monuments as transmitters of history extend back considerably further, however, than the most recent wave of memory studies. Since at least the 1960s, contemporary art has taken on the project of defacing the traditional monumental form, often through lampooning or deriding its pretensions to grandeur. We may think, for example, of Robert Smithson’s photo series titled Monuments of Passaic which depicts the modest remnants of his New Jersey birthplace’s industrial heritage or Claes Oldenburg’s irreverent pop-monuments of household items—clothespins and garden trowels enlarged to monstrous proportions.7 In post–World War II Germany, addressing the problem of public memory has necessarily taken a different path; simply doing away with or mocking conventional monuments seems an inappropriate strategy for a nation struggling to confront its troubling past. A tradition has developed within Germany of building memorials that seek to efface their own problematic monumentality while still affirming the need to inscribe the events of history on the landscape. The national practice of constructing what James E. Young (1992) has termed “counter-monuments” has closely mirrored academic discussions of traumatic memory. Works such as Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s Monument Against Fascism (1986) in the Hamburg suburb of Harburg and Horst Hoheisel’s “negative form monument” (1987) in Kassel shift the burden of memory away from the memorials themselves and toward the communities in which they reside, attempting to foster a contemporary milieu de mémoire where only silence previously existed. The Harburg Monument Against Fascism was a twelve-meter high column designed to gradually descend into the ground as it accumulated signatures on its surface (each one a sign of commitment against fascism). The monument eventually erased its own presence by disappearing entirely into the earth. Hoheisel answered a call to restore Kassel’s Aschrott Brunnen monument (a neo-Gothic fountain built as a gift to the city by a local Jewish entrepreneur and then destroyed by Nazis in 1939) by constructing a replica of the original fountain in negative form and inserting it, top-down, twelve-meters into the ground. These artists, and others following in the same tradition, have established a sophisticated and a subtle aesthetic for representing the nation’s many traumatic absences. The memorials attempt to acknowledge the impossibility of bearing witness to the atrocities they reference (the distance of time and Germany’s position as the perpetrator of these acts foreclose this possibility), while at the same time refusing to disavow the responsibility of remembering. It is a difficult philosophical and ethical balancing act that few examples from German culture have accomplished as well as these early counter-monuments. The scene for an emerging German architecture of memory shifted to Berlin in the late 1990s as two projects of a much larger scale promised to significantly alter the face of the newly reunified city. The much-heralded Jewish Museum designed by Daniel Libeskind, a striking jagged form extending out from the eighteenth-century Prussian courthouse that houses the Berlin Museum

INTRODUCTION

7

of history, was completed in 1999 in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin. A far cry from Musil’s invisible monument, the museum’s architecture, with its gleaming metallic surfaces interrupted by erratic cuts and slashes of glass, became an instant public attraction (even though it would not be filled with exhibitions for another two years). The same year that Libeskind completed his Jewish Museum, Peter Eisenman’s design for a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was granted final construction approval. After a drawn out and highly contested selection process that lasted over ten years (the winning design of the first competition was vetoed by then chancellor Helmut Kohl), Eisenman’s proposal to transform the vacant 4.7 acre plot of land near the Brandenburg Gate into an undulating field of 2,700 stone pillars was set in motion and eventually completed in 2005.8 Both of these projects draw from the aesthetic precedent of the counter-monument and the psychoanalytic vocabulary of trauma studies, while also overtly referencing Jacques Derrida’s selfreflexive philosophy of deconstruction. The two architects endeavor to convey the ungraspable and inexpressible nature of the Holocaust and the absences it has left behind, attempting to represent through material means the fundamental unrepresentability of this traumatic event. Libeskind named his design for the Jewish Museum “Between the Lines” and envisaged the project as an architectural dialogue between “two lines of thinking, organization, and relationship. One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments; the other is a tortuous line, but continuing indefinitely” (in Young 2000: 164). The irregular lines of the museum form a relationship with a constellation of sites throughout the city, the architect having mapped out the former residences of great Jewish composers, philosophers, and poets. The structure itself is cut through with an empty space signifying the expulsion and absence of the Jewish culture formerly an integral part of Berlin. Referred to as “the Void,” this spatial interruption creates a series of gaps within the museum that reflect the broken narrative of Jewish history in the city; these spaces may be seen by visitors, but are otherwise inaccessible. The museum also contains a twenty-five-meter high “Holocaust Tower,” a vacant and unheated concrete silo, lit only by the sunlight passing through a small slit near the ceiling. The tower acts as a spatial metaphor for the horrific enclosures produced by the Third Reich, the deportation cars and gas chambers that effectively severed the connection between Jewish and German history. Visitors to Eisenman’s Jewish Memorial are intended to walk between its rows of blank pillars in silent contemplation. The memorial, employing a similar visual discourse of vacuity and loss to Libeskind’s museum, produces an unheimlich or uncanny experience for those that enter its sacred space (Young 2000: 206).9 Eisenman explains his design in the following way: “It is a field of pillars that attempts to decontextualize the Holocaust, in the sense of trying to see it as a cut in the history of Germany. . . . Not to try to locate it, not to try to make it a thing of nostalgia, not to try and make it able to be rationalized, but to be able to be unrationalized” (2001: R1). With the realization of these two projects, the aesthetics of absence first developed within the tradition of German counter-monuments had now assumed national and monumental proportions in Berlin. These large-scale German memory sites are certainly not impervious to their own share of criticism. The Berlin Jewish Museum and Jewish Memorial are now destination points on an expanding circuit of trauma tourism (Lennon and Mitchell 2007) and their techniques for partially or metaphorically replicating the experience of the Holocaust are viewed by some as sensationalistic or kitsch. Other commentators contend that processes of memorializing that favor aesthetic abstraction over historical detail may risk blurring the distinction between the trauma of the

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victims and the trauma of the perpetrators (Friedlander 1992). And coming as they do shortly after German reunification and at the brink of a new century, the memorial and museum also have the potential to function as receptacles of German guilt, problematically absolving the nation of its past transgressions and allowing it to move forward unhindered by its difficult history (McKim 2003). Yet despite these cautionary readings, there can be little doubt that the visibility of these memorial projects has helped generate an important national discussion regarding Germany’s relationship to its own troubling past. The fact that the country’s memory struggles have so often been carried out in public through architectural form has made Germany an important reference for other national efforts to give material presence to past traumas. Just days after Libeskind’s Jewish Museum was officially opened to the public on September 9, 2001, two planes were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the scene of architecture’s convergence with memory shifted once again. It was not long after the attacks that the question of how to rebuild first surfaced in the public sphere. The process of determining an appropriate architectural response to this devastating event would occur while the trauma it had produced was still raw. The New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp offered the following explanation for the popular interest in the rebuilding process: “After the catastrophe of 9/11, who wanted to think about the aesthetics of architecture? Many people, it turned out. Buildings were the targets of the terrorist attacks. Fantasies of new buildings became a form of recovery: signs of the city's resilience in the face of unprecedented enemy assault” (2002). The collapsing of the Twin Towers was broadcast live on countless television screens and the reconstruction of the World Trade Center would in turn become the world’s most visible urban redevelopment project (Sagalyn 2005: 23). The scale of the initiative and the fact that it would take place on American soil, in the center of one of the world’s most recognized cities contributed to the sense of epic importance surrounding the reconstruction. There is of course a certain obscenity in comparing an event that resulted in the violent death of 3,000 people to past atrocities that resulted in the systematic extermination of millions and yet, in the months after September 11, there was a common impression that the memory scholarship and memorial efforts of the previous decades had somehow led up to this specific historical moment and architectural challenge. This feeling of continuity was reinforced by the participation of both Libeskind and Eisenman in the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s official competition for the Ground Zero master plan.10 It would be Libeskind that would eventually capture the spotlight, winning the LMDC competition and becoming an international celebrity in the process. The architect opens his autobiography Breaking Ground, published in 2004, by suggesting that “a great building . . . can tell the story of the human soul” (2004: 4), and during the run up to the LMDC’s decision Libeskind cast himself in the role of master storyteller, recounting his own experiences as an immigrant arriving in New York Harbor in 1959 to look in awe at the Statue of Liberty. Rather than simply including a memorial at the site, his winning “Memory Foundations” design proposed to fashion the entire area into a place of remembrance, while simultaneously accommodating the need for office space, public places, and retail stores. The penchant for architectural metaphor Libeskind demonstrated in his design for the Berlin Jewish Museum was also in evidence in his plan for Ground Zero. The design featured a glass spire extending 1,776 feet into the air, evoking both the upraised torch of Lady Liberty and the date of the signing of the US Declaration of Independence. Libeskind named this reassertion of the New York skyline, “Life Victorious.” Other key components of the plan included the preservation of the exposed concrete retaining wall of the original foundations that still kept

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the Hudson River at bay and descended seventy feet down to bedrock. At the public unveiling of the plan (which took place at the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden across the street from Ground Zero) Libeskind described it as: “the great slurry wall, the most dramatic element which survived the attack. . . . The foundations withstood the unimaginable trauma of the destruction and stand as eloquent as the Constitution itself asserting the durability of democracy and the value of individual life” (Goldberger 2004: 8). The public spaces included in the master plan possessed such descriptive titles as the “Park of Heroes” and the “Wedge of Light.” The former was designed so that each September 11, sunlight would enter the memorial space between 8:46 a.m. and 10:28 a.m., marking the time between the first plane collision and the falling of the second tower. Libeskind’s proposal was heavily endorsed by then New York state governor George Pataki, who is considered to have greatly influenced the LMDC’s selection process (Goldberger 2004: 168). Just as the rural landscape of the Irish Hunger Memorial is an uneasy fit within its new surroundings, the aesthetics of trauma that Libeskind sought to migrate from Berlin to New York was not an entirely welcome transplant. Despite its success in the LMDC competition, the project raised serious doubts as to whether an architecture of remembrance that had to this point been confined to memorial sites and museum projects could or should be magnified to the level of urban planning. Would the crystalline structures and exposed foundations of Libeskind’s design preserve a city committed to change within a perpetual moment of disaster, a melancholic repetition of 9/11 in architectural form? Can a site design founded on traumatic memory also function as a place to work, to relax, to shop? Some commentators found the metaphoric design elements of Libeskind’s previous work to be amplified to an unbearable level of kitsch in his Ground Zero proposal. Techniques and language that felt authentically invested and thoughtfully considered in his Berlin-based work were now read by many as opportunistic and saccharine. Responding to the selection of the design in the London Review of Books, Hal Foster remarked, “The real pessimists glimpse a Trauma Theme Park in the making, with Libeskind a contemporary cross between Claude Lanzmann and Walt Disney, the perfect maestro for an age when historical tragedy can become urban spectacle” (2003: 17). The Pataki-inspired decision to rename the 1,776-foot spire, the “Freedom Tower,” did nothing to alleviate the heavy-handedness of the site’s symbolism and foreshadowed the project’s susceptibility to being articulated to the jingoism of a nation at war. Muschamp, who had originally praised the design, now described it as “an aggressive tour de force, a war memorial to a looming conflict that had scarcely begun” (2003). As the United States commenced its “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan and its military occupation of Iraq, patriotic calls to remember 9/11 lost any political innocence they might have once possessed. Libeskind’s design, which had won over New Yorkers by integrating a discourse of mourning with a celebration of American life, could no longer disavow its connection to global events in the process of unfolding. UC Davis professor David Simpson saw in the architect’s trademark “soporific doublets” a certain consistency with the language used to justify these acts of war; Libeskind’s “Park of Heroes” and “Wedge of Light” occupied a position within the same semantic chain as such political aphorisms as the “axis of evil” and the “coalition of the willing” (2006: 64). Libeskind’s Ground Zero proposal was not the only project to raise doubts about the conjunction of memory and architecture being staged in New York post-9/11. The competition for the National September 11 Memorial produced hundreds of designs that drew directly from the particular aesthetics of absence that had developed within the German counter-monument tradition. The winning proposal by the young architect Michael Arad titled “Reflecting Absence,” a plan to turn the

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footprints of the Twin Towers into two voids bordered by walls of cascading water, made this link quite explicit. There are, however, many important differences between these two contexts, and grafting elements of a memorial practice addressing the memory of the Holocaust onto Ground Zero has numerous implications. While the counter-monuments devised by Hoheisel and the Gerzs attempt to provoke a sense of accountability for the atrocities committed in Germany, the voids and absences in New York may in fact facilitate a denial of political responsibility. Discourses of trauma, in other words, have the capacity to instigate either processes of reconciliation or acts of retribution. Even Huyssen, who had seen such promise in the scholarly and artistic explorations of the topic, was motivated to write that memory culture in post–9/11 America had reached an impasse. He states: “The 9/11 memorial debate may be the best example to date of how memorialization and forgetting can enter into an unholy alliance that betrays both past and present” (2009: 152). How then are we to respond to the memory impasse that revealed itself in New York after September 11? One possible reaction is to turn away from what has become a fraught conceptual and aesthetic terrain and forego considerations of memory altogether. Numerous proposals for post–9/11 architectural projects sought to do just this, embracing the future rather than fixating on the past. The destruction at Ground Zero was viewed by many architects as an opportunity for innovation, a chance to infuse creativity into a city that had become overly conservative in its vision of urban planning and design. Yet simply sidestepping the question of memory risks inhibiting architecture’s ability to critically engage with its own historical and political conditions. As Felicity D. Scott remarks, the architectural response to rebuilding at Ground Zero “missed an occasion to problematize the discipline’s imbrication within complex and shifting historical, social, institutional, and geopolitical contexts” (2003: 76). The avoidance of memory does not change architecture’s potential complicity with the economic and military forces shaping the post–9/11 world.

Responding to complexity This book will propose a different response to the complexities of rebuilding in New York. Rather than dismissing considerations of the past, it will explore the possibility of establishing an alternative configuration of architecture, memory, and media. Such a project will necessarily entail rethinking many of the existing theories of trauma and remembrance, but the need to establish a productive and politically engaged connection to history remains nonetheless. In her essay collection titled Precarious Life Judith Butler offers one of the most cogent and eloquent acknowledgments of the double imperative of memory and political action that exists after 9/11. She argues against the notion that grieving is a private and thus depoliticizing activity, insisting instead that mourning may involve a recognition of the vulnerability of oneself and others that brings to the fore “the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility” (2006: 22). Mourning and memory have the capacity, according to Butler, to foster new forms of political community and “effect a transformation in our sense of international ties that would crucially rearticulate the possibility of democratic political culture here and elsewhere” (2006: 40). By examining a number of architectural projects and media examples, sites and case studies, this

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book will attempt to highlight the moments and places in New York after September 11 when the possibility of such forms of political community emerged. It must be said that significant changes have occurred within memory studies itself over the past several years and the discipline is attempting to account for the increasing global complexities of contemporary cultures of remembrance. Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, for example, express the need for a conception of “transnational memory” that accounts for the “‘frictions’ caused by the interlocking social fields of the local, the national and the global” (2014: 3). Michael Rothberg has put forward an influential theory of “productive, intercultural [and] dynamic . . . multidirectional memory” with “the potential to create new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice” (2009: 5). Aleida Assman and Ines Detmers have turned from a consideration of memory to one of empathy, “an overlooked and . . . highly important social resource in a world faced with the challenges of globalization and the limitations of an endangered eco system” (2016: 21). Amir Esthel has even attempted to shift scholarly focus from the topic of memory to a concept of “futurity,” one that is “tied to questions of liability and responsibility, to attentiveness to one’s own lingering pains and to the sorrows and agonies of others” (2013: 5). While occasionally referencing these encouraging developments in memory studies, this book will draw primarily from a range of thinkers that appear less often in existing memory discussions. Many of these philosophers and theorists are more commonly associated with media theory, political communication, and digital culture, yet memory often also plays a significant role within their writing. The primary sources for this examination of architecture, media, and memory include figures such as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the political and media theorist Bernard Stiegler, the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, and the digital theorist Wendy Chun. The assertion of this book is that the complex intersection of architecture, memory, and media involved in the rebuilding of New York necessitates an engagement with this more expansive philosophical terrain. It should also be noted that this book is not a systematic account of the rebuilding of Ground Zero. Others have done this historical work much thoroughly and effectively than I ever could, from the early journalistic accounts offered by Paul Goldberger (2004) and Philip Noble (2005) to the more recent scholarly works of Elizabeth Greenspan (2014) and Lynn B. Sagalyn, whose 800-plus page Power at Ground Zero (2016) is impressively exhaustive in its detail. This book is instead an attempt to highlight a number of specific sites or situations that provoke particular philosophical, ethical, or political dilemmas that require consideration. The pages ahead also do not presume to offer a solution to the complex global political difficulties we currently face, from the still present threat of terror to an ongoing war against it waged on multiple international fronts. Rather than put forward an inevitably simplistic political position it more modestly seeks instead to introduce a (hopefully) productive hesitation in thought and a reorientation of the current grounds of discussion. The book begins by examining the small spontaneous memorials that appeared throughout New York immediately after the attacks and gradually moves up in scale to a consideration of one of the largest development projects to ever take place in the city, the transformation of the Fresh Kills landfill (containing the debris from the World Trade Center) into a public park. Chapter 1 of the book thus addresses the sites of remembrance that materialized in New York long before the formation of official committees and the commencement of authoritative decision-making processes. Within hours of the Twin Towers collapsing, small memory shrines began appearing

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in public spaces throughout the city. These spontaneous memorials—chaotic assemblages of photographs, flowers, cardboard placards, and small objects—have become familiar sights at places of tragedy. In New York they were some of the first expressions of grief from a population still reeling from the shock of the attacks. There has been an ambivalent scholarly reaction to this popular memory phenomenon. Some critics claim that, in New York and elsewhere, the memorials present an example of mass mobilization with considerable political importance. Other scholars are more skeptical about these forms of public outpouring, claiming they are products of a consumer society in which emotions are channeled through material objects and drained of their political content. This chapter considers the merits of these opposing positions by focusing on one spontaneous memorial site in particular, the brief, but significant gathering that took place in Union Square in the days following September 11. The Union Square memorial was simultaneously a space for mourning and one of the first locations where New Yorkers could gather to discuss the likely political repercussions of the events that had just occurred. As such, it was a remarkable example of a political community in formation within a site of memory. In order to better understand the social and material dynamics involved at Union Square, the chapter turns to a number of philosophical and aesthetic reference points that fall outside of the current scholarship addressing the spontaneous memorial phenomenon: the artwork of Thomas Hirschhorn (sprawling installations attempt to harness the social potential of popular memory practices) and the philosophical writing of Paolo Virno and Bernard Stiegler, both of which attempt to consider how emotions, memory, and media and communications intermix within our contemporary economic and political climate. Considered together, the thought of Hirschhorn, Virno, and Stiegler helps us acknowledge the fragile yet potent political force residing within spontaneous memorials in general and the Union Square gathering in particular. Chapter 2 shifts focus from these unsolicited and dispersed sites of remembrance to the official site of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. The chapter opens with the unveiling of Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s Reflecting Absence memorial on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and begins by questioning current assumptions of what precisely a contemporary memorial such as this one is intended to be and do. What is its perceived social function? What kinds of activities are expected to occur there? Can an official memorial be a space for discussion or interaction rather than simply silent contemplation? The chapter seeks to re-open this critical discussion by turning to the philosophy of aesthetics, poetics, and language developed by Giorgio Agamben. Agamben reminds us of the classical Greek association of art to poiesis, a passive act of bringing into being, rather than praxis, the active expression of the artist’s creative will. Taking this distinction as his starting point, Agamben suggests the possibility of an art concerned not with transmission of any particular content, but with the task of transmission or communication itself, the ground, in other words, for our common belonging in the world. The chapter next discusses the eventual opening of the National September 11 Museum which introduces a problematic and tightly confined historical narrative to the more open memorial above ground. It concludes by introducing the ethics of exposure endorsed by the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers and offers the example of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s City of Refuge proposal as an alternative vision of an institution that seeks to bring the presence of the other connected global conflicts and victims into the space of mourning and remembrance. Chapter 3 looks more specifically at the interactive design work of Jake Barton and Local Projects, who were entrusted with media design at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

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The intersection of architecture, digital media, and memory is a consistent refrain throughout Barton’s career, and the chapter looks closely at Local Projects’s pioneering work in interaction design via three thematic topics and by highlighting a number of different 9/11-related projects produced by the studio. The first section of the chapter examines the idea of “intimacy and involvement through mediation,” the notion that digital media technologies may produce a sense of closeness and togetherness, despite the communities they produce often operating across distance. Next, the chapter examines the potential of “algorithmic memory”—the specific ways in which forms of computational logic and information processing are impacting memorial and museum design. And finally, it discusses Local Projects as a leading example of “digital engagement,” the ways in which digital media are significantly transforming the surfaces and interfaces of the memory museum experience. The chapter suggests that the media interventions into the museum space produced by Local Projects present the possibility of a more promising confrontation with the complexities of memory, but it also acknowledges that Barton’s overall vision for a collaborative and even contested engagement with the past is only partially realized at Ground Zero. Chapter 4 attempts to contend with some of the more troubling intersections of media and architecture that have emerged in the aftermath of September 11. One of the most vocal organizations to appear in the aftermath of the attacks in New York is the 9/11 conspiracy or “Truth Movement,” a loose network of activists united by the belief that information regarding what really occurred on that day is being withheld from the public. Architecture features prominently within the movement’s claims. The manner in which the buildings in New York and Washington were damaged or destroyed is scrutinized, frequently leading to suggestions that 9/11 was an “inside job.” Cultural studies and critical theorists have exhibited an uneasy position in relation to this populist movement, often finding grounds for solidarity in its spirit of resistance (despite its paranoiac tendencies). The chapter questions the shared politics of suspicion that creates a strange alliance between the 9/11 conspiracy movement and cultural theory. It next introduces Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of equality in the hopes that it might help shift the grounds of evaluation from a politics of suspicion to one of democratic appearance and visibility. While finding the productive grounds of a reformulated democratic politics in Rancière’s thought, the chapter will conclude by introducing two New York examples that indicate both the promise and possible limitations of this philosophical perspective: the public intervention into the early architectural proposals for the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan and the far more troubling protest movement against the building of a so-called Ground Zero Mosque. Chapter 5 looks more closely at how the architecture community responded to the call to rebuild Lower Manhattan, paying particular attention to a faction of designers who stressed structural innovation and creativity over concerns with the past. A number of proposals in official and unofficial competitions envisioned the empty sixteen acres in Lower Manhattan as an opportunity to bring New York to the forefront of digital design and material experimentation. One point of connection for this diverse group of architects is a shared interest in the writing of Gilles Deleuze, whose philosophy of movement, vitalism, and the new is often positioned as an antidote for the contemporary obsession with traumatic memory. This Deleuze-inspired architecture has, however, been accused of being both ahistorical and apolitical, moving relentlessly toward the future rather than confronting the problems of the present. This chapter will resist the temptation to draw a neat dividing line between an architecture of memory and future-oriented Deleuzian design practices. Despite Deleuze’s clear aversion to the

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stultifying and conservative forces of the past, concepts of history and memory actually play an important role in the philosopher’s thought. A close examination of Deleuze’s idea of repetition and his engagement with the thinking of such figures as Henri Bergson and Søren Kierkegaard, reveals a conception of memory within the philosopher’s writing that is at once creative and politically committed. The chapter concludes by considering how Deleuze’s notion of creative recall might help in the task of envisioning a rebuilding project at Ground Zero that is both innovative and historically engaged. The sixth and final chapter of this book examines an architectural project that is even more monumental than the reconstruction project in Lower Manhattan. A process is underway to transform New York’s Fresh Kills landfill, formerly the largest garbage dump in the world, into a public park and wetlands conservation area. Once receiving over 29,000 tons of New York’s garbage daily, the landfill’s mounds of waste have been covered over in preparation for the conversion of the site into a 2,200-acre public park. The ambitious “Lifescape” design by James Corner’s Field Operations landscape architecture firm is the most prominent example of a recent design movement that seeks to renew architecture’s engagement with infrastructural concerns and the life processes of the city. Also drawing inspiration from the philosophy of Deleuze, landscape urbanism views the change, mutability, and emergent properties of natural and biological systems as a potential paradigm for architectural practice as a whole. Referencing large-scale, city-altering projects like the Fresh Kills transformation, proponents of landscape urbanism also suggest the movement marks architecture’s return from the aesthetic to the political. Yet the political consequences of the Fresh Kills Lifescape are far from straight forward. The site’s post–9/11 role as the containment and processing site for the World Trade Center debris and the implications of the landfill closing for New York’s expanding program of waste exportation complicate the project’s celebratory narrative of renewal and revitalization. This chapter will seek to question the political assumptions of both the Lifescape design and the landscape urbanism movement more broadly. In order to do so, it will draw upon the discussions of protection and vulnerability that appear in the later texts of Jacques Derrida. The concepts of immunity and autoimmunity play an increasingly important role in Derrida’s post–9/11 writing and bring the philosopher into a distinctly biopolitical terrain. Here they serve as guiding terms for thinking through the complexity of the Fresh Kills conversion and whether or not the project offers the promise of a landscape immune to its own history of abuse.

Notes 1 The Irish prefer the more accurate term the Great Hunger, acknowledging the role of British policy, rather than natural causes, in the mass starvation that occurred. 2 Helen Zucker Seeman, a founder of the Battery Park City United residents group, has noted the dearth of recreational and family-oriented spaces in the neighborhood, commenting, “They’re taking up every last bit of open land. . . . While everyone’s crying out for open space, we’re building memorials” (Iovine 2003). 3 The art historian Thomas Stubblefield adds that it is actually the act of photographing the monument’s destruction, giving it “the kind of spectacular death that only the media can grant,” that finally provides it visibility (2015: 149).

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4 In so doing, Nora enters into discussions of collective memory and public ritual that lead back to the sociological thought of Maurice Halbwachs and Émile Durkheim. 5 Lanzmann himself echoes this sense that the trauma of the Holocaust defies attempts at interpretation in his one-page manifesto titled “Hier ist kein Waum” (Here There Is No Why), in which he describes the “absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding” (1995: 204). 6 This is of course only a small sample of the vast number of academic texts dealing with the subject of memory in recent years. Other important areas of discussion include, but are not limited to: the importance of intergenerational post-memory (Hirsch 1997), the performative aspects of memory (Bal et al. 1999), and the continued interest in historical mnemonic systems inspired by Frances A. Yates’ canonical study The Art of Memory (1966). 7 See Mark Godfrey’s October essay “The Artist as Historian” (2007) for an excellent account of the role of historical representation in contemporary art. 8 Young’s At Memory’s Edge (2000) provides a thorough account of the lengthy memorial process initiated by television personality Lea Rosh. Horst Hoheisel’s submission to the same competition was a very literal interpretation of Taussig’s theory of critical defacement; rather than building another monument, he proposed the detonation of the Brandenburg Gates. 9 The commonality between the architects has produced some frictions in the past. When Eisenman first unveiled the design for his memorial, Libeskind complained that it too closely resembled the memorial garden adjacent to his Jewish Museum (Bernstein 2005). 10 Libeskind was the sole principal involved in his design while Eisenman entered the competition as a member of the New York “dream team” along with Richard Meier, Steven Holl, and Charles Gwathmey.

1 Mourning and protest: Spontaneous memorials at Union Square

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ith their modest scale, the temporary memorials that materialized throughout New York in the weeks that followed September 11 offered a visual counterpoint to the massive destruction at Ground Zero. Appearing almost immediately after the attacks, these fragile memorials were the first additions to New York’s changed topography1 and, as media playback of the collapsing towers waned, the next iconic images to circulate on television screens and in the pages of newspapers. In Washington Square and Tompkins Square, at the Brooklyn Heights Promenade overlooking Lower Manhattan, at the multiple fire stations around the city, gatherings of votive candles, poems, banners, flowers, and keepsakes formed in similarly chaotic arrangements. Battered placards reading “We Will Never Forget,” baseball hats, family snapshots of the missing, and wilting bouquets clinging to metal railings and wired fences became a frequent, yet powerful, sight around the city. Perhaps the most prominent of the temporary memorial sites was also one of the shortest lived. Located just north of the Fourteenth Street police cordon and the closest accessible public space to the World Trade Center (WTC) site, Union Square became a natural gathering point for those attempting to locate lost family members, for people in search of information regarding the still developing state of emergency, and for many who simply wished to be in the presence of others in the days following the attacks (Kimmelman 2001). Documentation of this brief, but important occurrence is now distributed across hundreds of amateur photography websites and Flickr photostreams. In this dispersed digital archive we can still see crowds of people gathered day and night around the aggregation of candles, flowers, and American flags that spread out to surround the park’s statuary and lamp poles. Specific objects stand out from the colorful background of melted wax: a child’s painting of two towers embracing, a rescue worker’s knee pad, a cardboard sign that reads “Killing More Will Not Honor,” and a pair of shoes still in their box. These and thousands of other individual contributions combined to transform Union Square into something unplanned and unrehearsed—a place for grieving, but also a place for discussion and deliberation over what had just happened and what was likely to occur in response (see Figure 1.1). The distinctive aesthetics of the memorials that appeared throughout New York in the days following September 11 make them participants in the larger cultural phenomenon of the

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FIGURE 1.1 Union Square Memorial. Donald Lokuta.

spontaneous memorial. Often emerging in the direct aftermath of a tragedy, long before official memory responses are established, spontaneous memorials mark a need to remember that is immediate, improvised, and perhaps instinctual. Although increasingly common occurrences at sites of tragedy, whether small-scale traffic accidents or large-scale disasters, the social and political significance of these impromptu memorials is a source of some debate among memory scholars, folklorists, and social historians. From one vantage point, the rituals of mourning are interpreted as forms of popular political expression and seen as exemplary cases of mass mobilization, a developing vernacular aesthetic and the unsolicited occupation of public space. From another perspective they represent a suspicious fusion of media-intensified emotions channeled through the kitsch materialism of consumer product goods. What then are we to make of these popular sites of memory and the complex intersection of affect, political communication, and materiality they embody? In this chapter I wish to explore the wider ambivalent or mixed reaction to spontaneous memorials by considering the specific events that unfolded in Union Square after 9/11. The Union Square memorial was remarkable both in terms of its size—the sight of the square overflowing with memory objects was a visually arresting one—and in terms of the unusual diversity of messages and sentiments communicated at the site. It is my contention that the existing interpretations of temporary memorials, both celebratory and skeptical, fall short of fully explaining the type of

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community that took form in the park in the short ten-day period of the memorial’s existence—one that attended to the immediate and personal need to grieve and gather, but also to the desire to connect to and acknowledge a wider political context for the events that had just occurred. As this book will frequently demonstrate, in post–9/11 New York, the imperatives of personal memory and collective politics are often kept apart or even placed in deliberate conflict. The spontaneous memorial at Union Square was, I argue, one early example of resistance to this false opposition between memory and responsible politics. Before turning to this specific example in New York, the chapter will provide a brief cultural history of the emerging spontaneous memorial phenomenon in America and Europe and an outline of the contrasting academic perspectives concerning its social and political implications. With this context established, the particular history of the Union Square gathering and the manner in which it complicates some of the critical assumptions about improvised memorials will be considered. I wish to suggest that voices remaining outside current academic discussions of memorial culture might offer a different interpretation of this terrain and it is with this hope that the chapter will bring forward a number of alternative philosophical, political, and aesthetic perspectives. The first is the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, a contemporary Swiss artist who frequently draws from the popular aesthetics of public altars and other mass rituals in his sprawling sculptural practice. Hirschhorn’s art explores the political possibilities that exist at the intersection of material excess and popular forms of communication. Next I’ll look to two philosophers, Paolo Virno and Bernard Stiegler, who attempt to contend with the inherently ambivalent emotional and communicative situation of the contemporary mass populace. Both thinkers highlight the current economic conditions that pattern and restrict the political forms available to the contemporary multitude, while placing emphasis on the role of collective memory as a possible site of resistance. Together these examples help establish another framework for evaluating the underlying affective and political potential of spontaneous memorials in general and the Union Square memorial in particular.

Cultural history of spontaneous memorials Like most cultural phenomena, unauthorized public memorials and their particular aesthetics of impermanence do not spring from a single point of origin. In order to roughly trace the emergence of the practice, we’re faced with the task of assembling a number of possible sources of influence. In the United States, the grieving rituals that have developed around Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., are one commonly cited visual precedent. Lin’s memorial features two black granite walls, gradually sinking into the ground and engraved with the names of the American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War. Immediately following the completion of the memorial in 1982, visitors began depositing objects beneath the names of specific individuals: flowers, messages, cards, flags, and possessions belonging to the deceased (Kristin Ann Hass’ Carried to the Wall provides a detailed account of the custom). The minimalist surface of Lin’s memorial seems to invite the addition of these eclectic and personal contributions. The items left behind, objects ranging from “bubble gum wrappers [to] wedding rings” (Hass 1998: 22), are collected by the National Parks Service staff and added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection (VVMC). These memory objects, common items now made sacred, are preserved in the

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Museum and Archaeological Storage facility (MARS) in Lanham, Maryland, where over 250,000 objects (excluding flowers and flags) had been collected by 1993 (Hass 1998: 23). Similar unplanned collections of mementos and flowers emerged at numerous sites of trauma in the United States in the 1990s. The security fence surrounding the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, site of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, became an impromptu memorial wall, adorned with bouquets of flowers, teddy bears, flags, and posters. Large spontaneous memorials also emerged at the sites of such violent incidents as the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado, in April of 1999 and the bonfire collapse at a Texas A&M University student rally in November of the same year (Girder 2006: 254). In the UK, comparable rituals of public grieving have followed the tragedies of the Hillsborough soccer stadium disaster in Sheffield in 1989 (Walter 1991) and the Dunblane school massacre (Jorgensen-Earp and Lanzilotti 1998). The death of Princess Diana in the summer of 1997 brought the phenomenon of the spontaneous memorial to a heightened scale and level of media exposure (Kear and Steinberg 1999). Within hours of the first reports of the accident, the gates of Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace were blanketed in floral tributes, photographs, and trinkets. By the end of the public outpouring, 10,000–15,000 tons of flowers had been removed from the various royal sites (Greenhalgh 42). The Liberty Torch monument at the Place de l’Alma, nearby the accident site in Paris, was also refashioned into a surrogate Diana memorial and yet another place for the depositing of flowers and keepsakes. An additional chain of influence connects American spontaneous memorial practices to Roman Catholic, particularly Latin American, traditions and rituals for the public commemoration of death. Holly Everett, for example, traces the custom of placing roadside crosses or altars at the site of traffic deaths in the Southwest to the long-standing Mexican cultural traditions in these states. She points to the Catholic Descansos (resting places for the souls of travelers who died en route) that peppered the region as far back as the 1700s (2002: 27). Regina Marchi considers the contemporary rituals of El Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) in America as a form of recurring spontaneous memorial. And Celeste Olalquiaga, comments on the process of “Latinization” of the United States in the 1980s and charts the influx of Catholic religious trinkets in New York’s Fourteenth Street markets, the interest in Latin American altares (home altars) within the New York City art scene and the prevalence of Latino Catholic iconography in the club culture of the period (1992). Spontaneous memorials, particularly in Latino-influenced cities, such as New York, are perhaps a translation of these aesthetic sensibilities and cultural practices into the modes of expression employed by the general public. Many of the scholars who have sought to understand this developing phenomenon detect a clear form of social engagement and even political expression within these rituals of public mourning. Jack Santino, whose principle objects of study are the “spontaneous shrines” of Northern Ireland, suggests that the memorials have both a commemorative and a “performative” quality, adapting J. L. Austin’s linguistic theory of “performative utterances” to the materiality of these popular memory practices. While Austin used the designation to refer to statements that cause the effect they declare (the marriage pronouncement “I do” being a prime example), Santino extends the meaning of the term “to events that attempt to cause social change” (2006: 9). He suggests that every memorial, however modest, possesses a degree of this performative quality in that it brings a specific issue into the public realm through the insistence of its very presence. This is certainly true of the shrines marking the sites of sectarian killings in Northern

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Ireland, but it is also true, Santino claims, of less overtly political memorials. Spontaneous shrines left at the roadside after a car has struck a cyclist or pedestrian, for example, commemorate the death of an individual, while also making a statement on the public issue of road safety. Even the display of mourning following Princess Diana’s death can be viewed through this lens as signaling the people’s changing relationship to the monarchy and presenting the public demand for a state funeral and permanent memorial.2 Santino interprets the phenomenon of spontaneous memorials as a method of marking the concerns of a community within public space and therefore as a practice with intrinsic political relevance. Adopting a similar critical stance, Harriet F. Senie suggests “spontaneous memorials are inherently also expressions of protest” (2007: 27). She points, for example, to a mural and shrine that appeared in Detroit to mark the site where Malice Green, a black unemployed steel worker, was beaten to death by two white police officers. Senie comments on the role the memorial played in bringing public awareness to an occurrence that may otherwise have gone unnoticed (2006: 41). “Frequently commemorating victims of random bullets, police brutality, or hate crimes,” Senie claims that immediate memorials, “serve both as expressions of protest and outlets for communal grief and rage” (2016: 50). Likewise, Marchi, in her aforementioned study of El Dia de Los Meurtos, points to the history of political negotiation incorporated within these popular rituals. She highlights the anti-colonial roots of the custom within Latin America, characterizing it as an indigenous resistance to Roman Catholic power through the continuation of traditional observances of ancestor worship hidden in the guise of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day celebrations. According to Marchi, this element of cultural resistance continues to be manifested in contemporary American versions of El Dia de Los Meurtos where the identification of social problems facing Latino communities, such as farm workers’ safety, is incorporated into the rituals. She comments, “U.S. Day of the Dead rituals create sacred spaces that serve both as sites for cultural affirmation via the enactment of ancestral customs, and sites for political expression, in which the dead become allies of the living in the condemnation of injustice” (2006: 272). Not all who study these emerging forms of popular memory share this faith in their political potential, however. An opposing position is vehemently argued in the writing of Patrick West, a researcher for the liberal British think tank Civitas, who criticizes the public outpourings of grief after Dunblane and the death of Diana as displays of inauthentic “conspicuous compassion.” West views spontaneous memorials as manifestations of a fundamental social anomie, a symptom of an atomized consumerist culture devoid of the traditional institutions (family, church, neighborhood) that would direct these energies toward genuine forms of civic involvement (2004: 65). In his dismissal of popular mourning West draws on sociologist Stjepan Mestrovic’s theory that we are witness to a modern “postemotional society,” one in which “mechanization has extended its imperialistic realm from technology and industry to colonize . . . the emotions” (Mestrovic 1997: 146). West maintains that it is this form of simulated and pre-packaged emotional experience that spontaneous memorials provide the public, distracting them from the real work of sustained political commitment (2004: 2). Recent considerations of memory rituals in post–9/11 New York have tended to adopt a similarly skeptical view of the underlying political intentions of these practices. Marita Sturken’s work Tourists of History charts the interconnection of memory, security, and patriotism in America from the Oklahoma City bombing to current architectural developments in Manhattan. Her study sets the current obsession with the memorialization of sites of trauma against the background of a

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general atmosphere of fear that dominated the 1980s and 1990s America (a period which saw the proliferation of prisons and a preoccupation with personal security, despite being a time of relatively low threat) (2007: 42). Sturken argues that the diffused sense of fear that was endemic to the 1980s and early 1990s gave way to the full-blown terror generated by the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks, and an already developing culture of comfort and security was pushed to a new level of intensity. The result, Sturken claims, is a “frenzied consumer response to the fear of terrorism” (2007: 5). Among the manifestations of this reaction highlighted by Sturken are the rising sales of sports utility vehicles in post–9/11 America; the civilian adoption of the Hummer military vehicle is seen as the ultimate example of a purchasable sense of security. Sturken extends her analysis to the spontaneous memorial phenomenon and the increasing number of official memorial sites in America, claiming that they too are reflections of this fear-driven form of consumerism. Both participate in a realm of kitsch, she argues, where the experience of history is mediated through commodities. The flowers and keepsakes left behind at sites of trauma and the souvenir trinkets taken away from the gift shops at official monuments are equally symptomatic of this merging of mourning and consumerism. Even the spontaneous memorials appearing as an initial reaction to the WTC attacks were, according to Sturken, “quickly incorporated into the media spectacle of 9/11 as the media operated to shape the public aspects of mourning” (2007: 174). The kitsch aesthetic of these practices, she argues, made them readily available for repackaging by the media. The photographs of the missing included in the makeshift memorials, for example, return as the “Portraits of Grief” featured daily in The New York Times. These rituals of mourning with their dependence on consumer objects (from the erection of street corner memorial shrines to the circuit of trauma tourism) are, according to Sturken, oriented toward the production of comfort and the reconstitution of a sense of American innocence that delimits any potential political response to these events. The ubiquity of the memorial teddy bear is for Sturken the quintessential symbol of this depoliticized form of reassurance. She ultimately claims that the “culture of comfort” fostered by popular memory practices “functions . . . as a means to confront loss, grief and fear through processes that disavow politics” (2007: 6). What Sturken describes is not the “postemotional” public suggested by West, but rather one that diffuses intense feelings of anxiety through the readily available conduits of commodity objects. The possibility of an engagement with the forces conditioning this experience of anxiety is, she argues, sacrificed in this process of transference. Considering the proliferation of 9/11 memorabilia available near the Ground Zero site, Karen J. Engle makes an even stronger claim for the disastrous political consequences of a kitsch response to world events. In her view, “Kitsch says: we can all be One, and be united in our common purpose. But this One is totalitarian, and it desires no less than the extermination of its foes” (2007: 77). In Engle’s reading the inauthenticity of cheap, mass-produced items becomes a channel for equally counterfeit sentiments and a method of fulfilling a melancholic desire to incorporate lost objects—not only the towers or the victims, but also the sense of American innocence identified by Sturken. For Engle, mass-produced memorabilia and government policies are part of an interrelated response, one that produces a kitsch communitarianism with an orientation toward military retribution. This readily available and easily manufactured form of community stands in opposition, in Engle’s estimation, to Judith Butler’s theorizing of a potential politics of mourning grounded in vulnerability and exposure, rather than comfort and retaliation. According to Engle, the commodified objects of memory kitsch interrupt the empathetic experience of mourning

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called for by Butler. Although Engle remains focused on the 9/11 souvenirs available to tourists, epitomized by a Twin Tower key ring purchased for two dollars at Ground Zero, the undeniably kitsch elements of spontaneous memorials would seem to put them within the same problematic political continuum. Engle and Sturken document persuasively the commodification of grief and disaster tourism that developed in New York post-9/11. Following this line of critique, it is possible to view the public’s participation in spontaneous memorials as an extension of what Lauren Berlant labels an increasing “privatization of U.S. citizenship” (1997: 3). Writing in the late 1990s and reflecting on developments initiated in the years of the Reagan administration, Berlant outlines a process through which the American public sphere of collective politics came to be dominated by private and individualized concerns. This movement toward an “intimate public sphere,” where questions of sexuality, abortion, morality, and family values take precedent, is one in which even the most privileged citizens begin to view themselves as victims of the cultural and economic changes taking place within the nation. We are left, Berlant argues, with a political field that is saturated with a widespread “public rhetoric of citizen trauma” (1997: 2) that obfuscates the specific oppositional discourses of historically disenfranchised social groups. She suggests these changes ultimately serve a conservative agenda, muting direct criticism of state policy and encouraging a strongly patriotic defense of a mythic traditional American way of life. Samantha J. King has recently adapted Berlant’s concepts of privatized citizenship to her analysis of such mass displays of volunteerism as the breast cancer “Race for the Cure.” She argues that these public events encourage “a remolded view of the United States as a nation whose survival depends on publicly celebrated, personal acts of generosity mediated through—and within— consumer culture” (2003: 297). While not questioning the good intentions of the participants, King suggests that a very specific form of political subjectivity is generated through these public exhibitions of caring. Corporately sponsored events like the “Race for the Cure” position individual philanthropy (fueled by the affective charge of participating in a mass event) as the model of responsible citizenship, while more critical forms of collective activism, protest, and dissent are dismissed as naive and unproductive. Given the image of mass emotionality, kitsch consumerism, unquestioned patriotism, and deferred political engagement presented by West, Sturken, and Engle, it is certainly tempting to interpret the public outpourings at spontaneous memorial sites as another expression of this conservative form of privatized citizenship. Yet, as I hope to describe, what transpired in Union Square immediately after 9/11 does not correspond entirely to this reading. But nor does it quite match Santino’s model of performative protest. I believe the specific memorial gathering at Union Square calls for a different explanatory framework.

Union Square, from 9/11 to 9/20 The Union Square memorial began taking shape soon after the WTC towers collapsed and while clouds of debris still engulfed much of Lower Manhattan. Its genesis can arguably be traced to the actions of a nineteen-year-old NYU student, Jordan Schuster, who on the afternoon of September 11 taped a fifteen-foot-long roll of butcher’s paper to the pavement of the square providing a surface for gatherers to write their initial reactions to the events. Messages ranging from outrage to grief soon began accumulating on the affixed paper, reflecting the diverse sentiments of New

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Yorkers following the attacks. More than 150 such rolls were filled during the ten-day existence of the memorial (Collins 2002). The accumulated materials (flags, patriotic signs, bouquets, candles, and other small objects) that were common features of other such memorial sites were present in Union Square as well, but here they were accompanied by other elements that were unique to this space. Local musicians occupied the square throughout the period playing impromptu concerts and creating an atmosphere where solemnity was mixed with what could almost be called festivity. Local performance activist Reverend Billy (a.k.a Bill Talen) led gatherers in chants of “Our grief is not a cry for war” and encouraged the formation of a speaker’s corner in the square.3 He describes the excitement produced by the unauthorized occupation of the park in the following way: “I got the feeling that people felt the tragedy, but were not objectifying it, therefore making possible an on-purpose continuation of this wonderful rehumanizing, renarrating of public space” (Talen 2002: 21). The anticipation of military retribution for the attacks was a repeatedly expressed concern in the square; the equestrian statue of George Washington (designed by Henry Kirke Brown in 1856) that dominates the south side of the park was quickly refashioned into an anti-war monument. The base of the statue was covered in anti-war graffiti and a large peace flag was placed in the general’s outstretched hand. Marshall Berman captures the atmosphere of the site when he writes, “Overnight, Union Square became the city’s most exciting public space: a small-town Fourth of July party combined with a 1970s be-in” (2002: 11). The park has long been an important location for protests and labor activities (it was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1997 in particular for being the starting point of the first Labor Day Parade in 1882). According to Reverend Billy, the square’s history, “the May Day celebrations, the general strikes of the sweatshop workers almost a century ago,” helped foster the politicized atmosphere during the memorial period (Talen 2002: 20). And yet this political activity did not prevent the square from functioning as an important site for grieving and reflecting on the destruction that had so recently occurred. The Union Square subway kiosk was covered in a “Wall of Hope,” a sobering display of photocopied missing person notices. Museum curators James B. Gardner and Sarah M. Henry described the square as a “civic church—a place of pilgrimage, prayer and protest” (2002: 40). Mourning and political critique were attended to simultaneously in the space; two activities that have been placed in opposition in much post–9/11 commentary and Union Square seemed remarkably capable of accommodating and brokering a potentially conflicting range of emotions and viewpoints. Commencing prior to the media circulation of official rhetoric and rehearsed sentiments, and before 9/11 could be positioned within stock patriotic narratives,4 the Union Square gathering preceded the establishment of sanctioned or habitual reactions to the attacks. The spontaneous memorial was a site where opinions and emotions were still very much in the process of formation. Under these conditions the multiple elements of the site, material and participatory, appeared to intensify rather than extinguish each other. The assemblage of candles and memory objects drew people toward the square and helped preserve it as sacred, occupied space. The speeches and peace vigils provided an atmosphere of activity and togetherness to a grieving population still making sense of the events. This particular spontaneous memorial was not granted a long existence by city authorities. Just nine days after September 11, with the first threat of rain, New York City Parks Department workers dismantled the collection of poems, banners, and missing person flyers that had accumulated in the square and erected a fence around the area. The reason provided was a concern over the

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park being occupied by the homeless (Jacobs 2001). The rapid dispersal of the Union Square memorial by city officials foreshortened this political community and public space in formation. Other memorial sites around the city were granted longer lives. The spontaneous memorial at the end of Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights, for example, was cleared on May 30, 2002, the official end of the recovery effort at Ground Zero (Senie 2003). While public mourning was officially sanctioned in New York, the mixture of grief and political discussion that emerged in Union Square in the days following the attacks seemingly was not. The memorial quickly moved from public space to archival space as remnants of the gathering were preserved and displayed by The Museum of the City of New York. The museum also created a “Virtual Union Square” on its website inviting participants to submit photographs and accounts of the occurrence (Gardner and Henry 2002: 49). Within ten days of its formation, the Union Square memorial had itself been safely relegated to the realm of memory. Perhaps as a result of its short duration, the Union Square memorial is mentioned only in passing in the majority of academic considerations of public responses to the 9/11 attacks in New York.5 Its limited presence in discussions concerning the political significance of spontaneous memorials is consequential, for the public sphere and space of contestation considered by many scholars to be largely absent in post–9/11 America seemed very much present in Union Square in the week following the attacks. The specific occurrences at the site were certainly not a kitsch patriotic response, nor were they an example of a depoliticized collective grieving. This by no means diminishes the relevance or importance of the critiques provided by scholars such as Sturken and Engle. They offer insightful descriptions of the manner in which the very immediate experiences of those directly impacted by the 9/11 attacks became, over time, extended and diffused into a form of mass mourning that was often directly articulated to a conservative and reactionary form of nationalism. But we should hesitate to collapse all sites of memorialization into an expression of consumerism, media spectacle, and protectionism averse to political engagement. What transpired in Union Square challenges the depiction of a population uniformly pursuing comfort in the face of fear and participating in a disavowal of global responsibility. In the process of cataloguing the political shortcomings of the American population I wonder if we risk passing over the moments when a more promising scene of collective action appears. The Union Square events invite a reconsideration of the potential relation between spontaneous memorial practices and the formation of responsive political communities. The gathering at Union Square also complicates some of the assumptions held by those scholars mentioned above who attempt to inscribe spontaneous memorials within a long history of protest politics. These accounts tend to present the memorials as a medium through which specific communities express their distinct concerns within the public realm—a mode of communication involving statements of protest in response to clearly defined injustices or social conditions. The involvement of spontaneous memorials in circuits of popular media imagery and their frequent dependence on kitsch materials is often downplayed in these readings. The phenomenon tends instead to be viewed in relation to traditional cultural or religious symbols and customs.6 I would argue that this notion of a “performative” rhetoric of protest does not fully explain the dynamics of political communication that took place at the Union Square memorial either. The gatherers in the square were neither linked by their belonging to a specific community nor by their participation in a preexisting struggle. The anti-war sentiments expressed were, significantly, in anticipation of events yet to come, rather than condemnations of specific government actions and these

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views were not uniformly accepted by those in attendance. The politics initiated by the memorial gathering was less oriented toward the issuing of statements or utterances than it was directed toward the establishment of a space of discussion, a demonstration that within a moment of grief and uncertainty a community of concern could be formed. How then might we begin to consider the Union Square gathering in all of its complexity as a space of communication and what might it tell us about the political potential of other spontaneous memorials? It is at this point that I wish to bring forward a number of sources that generally fall outside of the current scholarship on the topic and may help provide a different position from which to consider the intersection of emotion, politics, and materiality present at the Union Square memorial. I’ll begin with a contemporary art example, the work of Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn before turning to two philosophical voices, those of Paolo Virno and Bernard Stiegler.7 My claim is that all three of these figures attempt to locate the political potential of everyday memory practices within the difficult context of our contemporary economic situation. The artwork of Hirschhorn seeks to harness the latent power of ad hoc monuments, viewing colloquial memory aesthetics as an important source of resistance. The philosophers Virno and Stiegler both, in their own way, recognize the difficulties of community formation within post-Fordist or advanced industrial societies, with memory again occupying a crucial position within their thought. While offering a sharp critique of our contemporary political situation, Virno, Stiegler, and Hirschhorn attempt to identify the places from which more promising forms of organization and communication may yet emerge. The memorial at Union Square may be an example of such a place.

Thomas Hirschhorn’s aesthetics of excess Unlike the other seventy artworks featured in MoMA PS1’s 2011 exhibition titled September 11, Hirschhorn’s contribution was not located in the gallery itself (a converted public school building in Queens), but rather a block away on the corner of 21st Street and 45th Road. The work was originally created in 1997, significantly prior to 2001, and its direct subject could hardly be further from the topic of contemporary global terror. The installation, clustered around the exterior of a shuttered storefront, is titled Mondrian Altar, Hirschhorn’s tribute to the Dutch painter and member of the De Stijl movement. Yet the work’s connection to post–9/11 visual culture is unmistakable—the installation’s street side collection of candles, devotional banners, stuffed animals, and cardboard placards instantly invoking the proliferation of spontaneous memorials emerging in the wake of the attacks (see Figure 1.2.). Mondrian Altar is an example of Hirschhorn’s series of altars dedicated to his artistic and literary heroes, people who Hirschhorn claims to love “for their work and for their lives” (2000a). Conceived prior to 9/11, the roadside or sidewalk shrines that mark the sites of violent deaths (celebrities and the unknown equally) are the explicit reference points for Hirschhorn’s own fragile tributes. He faithfully replicates the appearance of these memorial sites, reproducing their familiar accumulations of everyday objects and consumer items. Hirschhorn has made four such altars: the American short story writer Raymond Carver; the German cubist painter and sculptor Otto Freundlich; and the Austrian poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann, join Mondrian as subjects of commemoration. Just like their “real-life” counterparts, Hirschhorn’s altars are placed

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FIGURE 1.2 Thomas Hirschhorn Mondrian Altar (1997)—installed in Queens, NY, in 2011. Joel McKim. unceremoniously into the space of the city—deposited under bridges, next to shops, along the fences of empty lots. The artist’s incorporation of the aesthetics of the spontaneous memorial is not, he makes clear, an exercise in harnessing an appealingly naive or ready-made style. Hirschhorn explains his interest in the popular practice in terms he calls “economic” (in Fogle 2000); it is the vitality of their production and the demonstration of enthusiasm inherent in their visual intensity that draws Hirschhorn to these sites. He explains, “Because of their precariousness, these profane altars have a great formal strength and emit a great deal of visual energy. They are generic, but apply weakness implacably as a strategy” (1998). In Hirschhorn’s analysis, the aesthetic power of the memorial is derived directly from its vulnerability; the uncertainty and frailty of its form communicate the sheer act of commitment involved in its creation. Not unlike the folklorist Jack Santino, Hirschhorn recognizes that the very presence of these shrines is an insistence of their right to exist that bypasses typical restrictions to public space. Through the form of the memorial, something is pushed into common sight. In the case of a typical sidewalk shrine, it is a loss of life. In the case of Hirschhorn’s altars, it is the fact that an inspiring creative figure or an important idea has faded from popular awareness. I have written elsewhere of Hirschhorn’s efforts at “repotentialising images that have been made inert through the passage of time” (McKim 2010: 70). While scholars who defend the politics of spontaneous shrines have tended to downplay their connection to consumer culture, for Hirschhorn it is precisely because of their dependence on the modest materials of mass-produced commodities and disposable items that the altars generate an engagement with a passing public. He argues that the crudeness of the memorials’

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construction serves as testimony that “everyone can be concerned” (2000a) and that there are no material restrictions preventing a form of response. The aesthetics devoid of hierarchy that is characteristic of the spontaneous memorial is also a call for involvement, according to the artist. In Thomas Hirschhorn’s artistic practice we find the conviction that an innovative politics must emerge from out of the economic conditions in which we currently find ourselves. Hirschhorn directs his exploration toward both material and mediated forms of communication, attempting to mobilize within an art context the passion of popular culture and the visual potency of makeshift memorials. The precarious and amateur nature of the altar projects is an extension of Hirschhorn’s sustained interest in the power of fandom. In a number of works he has mimicked the memorabilia associated with enthusiasts of various ilk, creating for example in the installation Artists’ Scarves (1996) a display of football scarves dedicated to his favorite artists. The fan who professes love for a celebrity or sports team need not justify this devotion through detailed explanation or through the demonstration of exhaustive knowledge, and Hirschhorn sees a political potential in this particular affective relation. He explains, “The fan can seem kopflos [headless or silly], but at the same time he can resist because he’s committed to something without arguments; it’s a personal commitment. It’s a commitment that doesn’t require justification” (2004: 35). In the logic of fandom, a self-justifying commitment that needs no external means of validation, Hirschhorn sees refuge from a prevailing contemporary cynicism that perpetually delays political action, or worse, paralyzes it completely. And importantly, fandom is contagious, making it a model example of Hirschhorn’s distributive “economy” of human energy. In taking up the position of the fan while constructing his altars, Hirschhorn attempts to translate the commitment of the enthusiast into the nonhierarchical and unplanned aesthetics of popular memorials. It is this mode of creation (one without authorization, total command, or expertise) more than the content of any specific message that Hirschhorn considers to be political in nature. The following claim is one the artist makes repeatedly: “When you work quickly, like me, you cannot control everything. I’m not here to show that I am able to control things well. This is what I call working politically” (2000b: 8). The perspective advanced by Hirschhorn is a significant departure from most academic justifications of spontaneous shrines in that it prioritizes the specific materiality of the memorials and the manner in which they are produced, rather than simply interrogating their political content. This recognition of aesthetic potential allows Hirschhorn to transfer distinguishing characteristics of the spontaneous memorial into new contexts. His series of monuments to inspirational philosophers (Bataille, Deleuze, Spinoza, and Gramsci to date) constructed from the ordinary materials of aluminum foil, cardboard, spray paint, packing tape, and magazine cut outs, bare more resemblance to ad hoc memorials than official public statuary. In his large-scale installations such as Flugplatz Welt/World Airport (1999) and Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake (2000), these same makeshift elements are supplemented with more overtly political, yet no less disposable, materials. In the former work Hirschhorn creates a scaled-down airstrip from cardboard and packing tape. The tourism posters and last-minute commodity kiosks typical of airport terminals have been replaced in Hirschhorn’s maquette by a series of partitions plastered with photocopied newspaper articles and magazine images documenting the global conflicts of the recent past (Kosovo, Tiananmen Square, the Middle East) and detailing the rise of global mega-corporations. The latter piece features a cake magnified to gigantic proportions, its surface covered by another overwhelming collection of images and literature corresponding to the disturbing realities of our present age— images, statistics, and texts describing global famine, poverty, and racism. The chaotic aesthetic of

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the spontaneous memorial is deployed in these projects in an apparent simulation of our mediated experience of global politics. Hirschhorn’s strategy, however, is not to reproduce the sense of powerlessness typically induced by this bombardment of disposable facts and images. He attempts instead to mine the past for a possible response. In Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake a series of giant-sized commemorative spoons, each one representing what Hirschhorn describes as “the failures of utopias” (2000b: 35), form a circle around the cake. Among their ranks are Rosa Luxembourg, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mies Van Der Rohe, and, more enigmatically, the city of Venice, the Fashion Industry, and the Chicago Bulls sports team. A network of aluminum foil conduits connect these figures from the past to the depictions of present-day global injustice, as if Hirschhorn means to spark an exhausted utopianism into life in order to confront the gravity of our contemporary political situation. Whether constructing troubling depictions of global conflict or optimistic shrines to personal heroes, the materials employed by Hirschhorn are, without exception, examples of the excessive production of an industrialized commodity culture. Douglas Fogle calls this creative method “a distinctively contemporary take on the term arte povera, or poor art” (2000). The organic materials favored by the Italian art movement of the 1960s (flour, stone, animal skin, etc.) as a reaction against industrialization, have been substituted in Hirschhorn’s work with “poor materials that are part and parcel of the industrialist consumer milieu” (2000). Among the interpreters of Hirschhorn’s work, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh formulates the most compelling reading of the artist’s material strategy, situating it within an art historical context. Buchloh emphasizes Hirschhorn’s unabashed optimism in the face of the pervading cynicism of the 1980s art scene from which he emerged and his desire to recuperate both the utopianism of the 1920s avant-garde movements, Aleksandr Rodchenko’s design-focused Soviet Productivism for example, and the radicalism of art in the 1960s, embodied by the social interventions of Josef Beuys. Yet while insisting on the continued relevance of these movements, Hirschhorn resists a naive or nostalgic approach that would simply reproduce them in the present (too many failed attempts had already been made to directly translate the utopianism of the past into a contemporary context). Buchloh maintains that two additional Hirschhorn references, Kurt Schwitters and Andy Warhol, serve as historical counterpoints to an overtly optimistic stance. Rodchenko’s faith in the ability of design to establish a new proletarian public sphere and Beuys’ shamanic “acts of expressive immediacy and . . . demands for socially transparent communication” (2004: 43) are considerably disrupted by Schwitters and Warhol’s insights into the nature of Western industrial production. The claustrophobic architectural interiors of Schwitters’ Merzbau (1923) already conveyed the “violence of an ever-expanding overproduction” (2004: 44) that threatens to subsume all available spaces for thought and action. While Warhol’s work expresses the conviction that if an outlet for subjectivity (political, artistic, or otherwise) remains in our image-oriented form of capitalism, it is one that is necessarily enmeshed in the logic of brand identity and corporate design. The problem facing Hirschhorn, Buchloh argues, is the challenge of finding a mode of artistic expression suitable for an age in which the material accumulation of advanced industrial production has all but suffocated the modern subject. Is it possible, in other words, to remain committed to the utopian social vision of Rodchenko and Beuys while doubting the existence of a space of self-constitution entirely independent from the commodity form? Buchloh suggest that Hirschhorn finds in the 1960s work of Robert Filliou and the Fluxus artists the inspiration for a way forward from this apparently contradictory position. For these artists, he argues, the “mass-cultural annihilation”

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of industrial production presents an opportunity for the emergence of a new subjectivity, but one that would develop through minute advances from within “these parameters of destruction” (2004: 88). Neither retreating to a mythic or spiritual realm outside of economic exchange, nor envisioning the emergence of a wholly new social organization, the artists of the Fluxus group see in the detritus of mass culture an abundance of available materials and modes of communication to be experimented with and assigned new, unintended uses. It is through this work, Buchloh claims, Hirschhorn discovers a potential in the center of “the dialectic of anomie and agency” and the possibility of a process that “enacts a multiplicity of micrological steps toward self-constitution and subjectivity” (2004: 88) from within a mass-cultural public sphere that is otherwise oriented toward consumption and control. For Filliou, a trained economist turned artist, the simple act of being human implies the possession of adequate skills and “genius” to commence the task of intervening in our surroundings and an excessive production of industrial goods provides ample resources to do so. The artist consistently vaunted his own lack of natural talent and sought to develop an artistic “Principle of Equivalence” which discerns no appreciable difference between a work that is: bien fait, mal fait, or pas fait (well made, badly made, or not made at all) (in Dezeuze 2004: 2). By insisting on the capacity of creative action despite an apparent lack of ability and limited materials, he rebuffs the state of paralysis supposedly induced by contemporary culture. String, cardboard, ballpoint pens, and other shabby mass-produced objects were most often Filliou’s materials of choice. Filliou’s commitment to creation without means is revived in Hirschhorn’s mantra, “Energy, yes! Quality, no!” (2000b: 32), which motivates the entirety of the Swiss artist’s work. Replicating Filliou’s choice of modest materials, Hirschhorn consistently employs items that have little or no value—objects that are virtually worthless but are also continuously used and familiar to all.8 Hirschhorn liberates these materials from their normally rapid passage from cheap commodity to valueless waste. In doing so he insists, like Filliou, that these highly disposable objects possess an unrealized capacity to be inscribed with a use value entirely unintended by their producers. In works such as Flugplatz Welt/World Airport and Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake, mass-produced media images of world politics call for the same creative reworking. Like the other materials he utilizes, these images of global conflict, in the overabundance of their production, appear to be virtually meaningless to their media-saturated audience. In making them a constitutive element of his constructions (however incompetent or inadequate a response they may be), Hirschhorn refuses to allow these images and materials to remain either worthless or artistically paralyzing. In an interview with Buchloh, Hirschhorn comments specifically on the politically debilitating power of the incessantly repeated image of the WTC collapse, claiming: “I want to combat this power by producing a huge number of other images” (2005: 93). The spontaneous memorial is embraced by Hirschhorn as a demotic manifestation of many of these artistic realizations. Through an act of collective assemblage the most disposable of consumer product goods—cheap teddy bears that accumulate unwanted on closet shelves, plastic wrapped floral bouquets bought from corner stores, crudely drawn placards fashioned from dismantled cardboard boxes—are invested with an otherwise unthinkable social energy. For Hirschhorn this is a process of considerable political importance, not for any particular message that might be expressed, but because it confirms the communicative potential that resides in these mass-produced forms and the continued capacity for enthusiasm that exists in these popular rituals. He finds in these memory practices a resistance to the total subsumption of the social and political spheres threatened by advanced capitalism.

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Memory, language, and politics: Stiegler and Virno In the writing of Bernard Stiegler and Paolo Virno, I believe, we find a philosophical accompaniment to Hirschhorn’s artistic explorations, one that provides further conceptual resources for working through the complex mix of affective outpouring, political memory, and economic materiality present within spontaneous memorials. Virno, a key figure within the Italian autonomist or operaismo movement, attempts to delineate the political possibilities actually available to the contemporary masses—what he, following Spinoza, calls the multitude. The shared productive powers of language, communication, and memory sit at the center of his conceptual framework. Stiegler, the French philosopher of media and politics, also places memory at the core of his considerations of collective organization, social interaction, and community formation. Both thinkers address the potentials and limitations of political action under the specific conditions of contemporary postindustrial or post-Fordist society. Western economies formerly reliant on industrial mass-production have given way to the expansion of de-centralized service and knowledge economies that require a considerably more flexible infrastructure and labor force. Within such a climate of production, Virno argues, the boundaries between spheres of activity that were thought to be essentially separate, those of work, sociality, and politics, grow increasingly porous. In an economy where change and uncertainty are foundational, informal communications and political maneuvering become essential qualities of the workforce. Virno’s philosophy recognizes that the modes of political expression and action available to the general population are directly tied to these changes in material and economic conditions. No possibility exists, therefore, for a return to a political sphere untainted by the effects of commodity culture and the postindustrial workplace. Collective politics and productive communication must emerge out of these very conditions, according to Virno. This is not to suggest that the philosopher minimizes the challenges of generating productive forms of politics in the present moment. Virno describes the precarious position of the multitude within this social arrangement—the very capacities on which resistance depends (language, creativity, sociality) would seem already to have been harnessed and put to work by capital. It is for this reason that Virno describes the contemporary multitude as an ambivalent mode of being, “it contains within itself both loss and salvation, acquiescence and conflict, servility and freedom” (2004: 26). In a sense, Virno describes the processes that have produced the depoliticized American population identified by Sturken, but he also conceives of a different political potential available to the multitude. The post-Fordist sphere of production depicted in Virno’s writing is one in which the bureaucratic logic of industrial capital has been replaced by an unstable economy increasingly dependent on human creativity, informality, and spontaneity. The mechanized worker of the Fordist assembly line has been supplanted by a contemporary wage laborer who must possess qualities of: habitual mobility, the ability to keep pace with extremely rapid conversions, adaptability in every enterprise, flexibility in moving from one group of rules to another, aptitude for both banal and omnilateral linguistic interaction, command of the flow of information, and the ability to navigate among limited possible alternatives. (1996:14) It is a set of qualifications that Virno suggests is not a “product of industrial discipline,” but is instead developed through “a socialization outside of the workplace” (1996:14). In this sense, labor arrives

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at the office ready to work, already possessing the attitudes and aptitudes necessary for production within a highly variable information and knowledge economy. The required nondeterministic mentality and comfort with contingency are not learned on the job, but are instead developed in an increasingly lengthy pre-work period where media exposure and the shock experiences of the city provide a diffused form of conditioning.9 As we’ll soon discuss, Stiegler devotes considerable attention to this process of media conditioning of the mass population. In the current economy, the worker’s “potential to produce” (Virno 2004: 81) is increasingly drawn from generic linguistic and intellectual capacities, Virno claims, “the primary productive resource of contemporary capitalism lies in the linguistic-relational abilities of humankind, in the complex of communicative and cognitive faculties (dynameis, powers) which distinguish humans” (2004: 98). The primary innovation of post-Fordism, he argues, is the bringing of language into the workplace—the general linguistic competencies required for normal social interaction, improvisation, are mobilized in the sphere of production. Every workplace in the post-Fordist economy (the Fiat factory as much as the offices of a media conglomerate) can therefore be viewed as a communicative space, and labor is no longer expected to silently and obediently follow specific commands; it is instead required to be a creative and verbal presence, managing contingency and actively participating in the improvement of work processes. In this new paradigm of communicative work, the boundaries between domains of life formerly thought to be separate and distinct are in the process of dissolving. Post-Fordist conditions disrupt the stable classical partitioning of human experiences into the spheres of Labor (or poiesis), political Action (or praxis), and Intellect (or the life of the mind). Most troubling for Virno is the possibility that the realm of production has effectively absorbed the qualifications and activities thought to pertain to the sphere of politics. He looks to the philosophy of Hannah Arendt and finds that the essential characteristics she assigns to political action—being in the presence of others, the act of setting something unpredictable and irreversible into motion, the establishment of relationships10—have all become inherent features of the workplace. Virno suggests that this tendency has reached the point that “political action now seems, in a disastrous way, like some superfluous duplication of the experience of labor” (2004: 51). Samantha J. King’s description of corporately sponsored citizenship, fostered by such events as the “Race for the Cure,” is one offshoot of the world Virno depicts, a world in which the economic sphere and the social or political sphere have become virtually indistinguishable. Virno also shares with scholars like Sturken, Berlant, and King an interest in examining the contemporary conjunction of economics, politics, and affect. But while Sturken, for example, positions consumerism as a comfortable refuge for the fearful masses, for Virno it is precisely the conditions of the market that generate the pervasive feelings of anxiety circulating within the populace. Given our constant state of economic uncertainty, Virno argues that anguish (a form of dread with no discernible cause) has become the default affective mode of our time, with traditional communities and cultures no longer providing security in the face of fear. In his words, “there is nothing more shared and more common, and in a sense more public, than the feeling of ‘not feeling at home’” (2004: 34, italics in original). According to Virno, we take refuge from this pervasive sense of anxiety by adapting ourselves to the workplace and incorporating the “emotional tonalities” of opportunism, cynicism, and cheerful resignation it requires. He writes, “Insecurity about one’s place during periodic innovation, fear of losing recently gained privileges, and anxiety over being ‘left behind’ translate into flexibility,

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adaptability, and a readiness to reconfigure oneself” (1996: 17). Yet despite this rather bleak picture, Virno also suggests the current economic and social conditions present the potential for new forms of political response and new grounds for the constitution of viable communities. Post-Fordism is a paradoxical situation, he argues, in which the multitude is, in many ways, more equipped for a transformative collective politics than ever before. The common faculties and capacities that capital now seeks to harness always exceed this attempt at containment and Virno retains faith in a possible redirection of the communicative action, general intellect, and cooperative abilities that are developed within the space of the market, but do not belong to it. The emotional tonalities of opportunism and cynicism have the potential to be converted into their affective counterparts: political enthusiasm and communicative openness. For Virno the somewhat unexpected consequence of the shared feeling of anguish and insecurity that is generated by post-Fordism is a heightened awareness of “belonging as such, no longer qualified by a determinate belonging ‘to something’” (1996: 32, italics in original). While we may have lost the traditional communities and identities of the industrial era, Virno suggests we have perhaps been presented with an opportunity to form new connections based on a more generic and fundamental commonality. Both language and memory lie at the core of this common bond, according to the philosopher. Language is the faculty, according to Virno, that provides us with “openness to the world” (2008a: 17) and an access to a sense of the not yet determined. He defines it as being “the phonetic, lexical and grammatical system, which exists in the sense of an inexhaustible potential, a potential that is perennial because it is never exhausted or attenuated by the ensemble of its realisations” (2015a: 23). Although exploited by capital, the greater potential of language remains present as a more essential capacity for human connection. Politics according to Virno, is therefore “inherent to the very fact of having language. The biological configuration that allows us to speak and to act politically is one and the same” (2015b: 41). The goal is not a return to an earlier and purer sphere of communication for Virno, but rather to go beyond the current configuration of economy and sociality. He states, “The point is not to withdraw language from being put to work, but to translate the economic and productive powers of language into political and aesthetic powers” (2008b: 45). Memory for Virno is the capacity of recollecting actual past events, but it is also the capacity of remembering our common belonging within language and our ability to act and think as political beings—the memory of the unrealized potential of language and politics is a shared human characteristic. In his essay on history and memory, titled “Déjà Vu and the End of History,” he writes, “Memory . . . branches in two, and applies to both a former actuality—to definite events which are now far back in time—and the persistent not-now of potential” (2015a: 122). And later, “The object of memory is not . . . a more or less immense mass of mental acts, but rather the mind as a trinity potential: the capacity-to-remember, the capacity-to-think, the capacity-towill” (2015a: 131). Importantly for Virno, this memory of our access to the potential of language and politics is less a concern with any particular linguistic utterance or political statement, it is instead a more fundamental matter of remembering the process through which the conditions of communication are formed. He therefore stresses that language exists “in the relation between the members of a community” (2008a: 46, italics in original). Stiegler shares with Virno a worry over the ability to form political communities within post-Fordist or postindustrial societies, and the conjunction of memory and media play an even larger role within the philosopher’s thought. One of Stiegler’s persistent preoccupations is the impact of exteriorized

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and technologically based memory systems on the development of individual and collective lives. His attention is focused most acutely on “the industrialization of memory” (2009a: 97) that occurs when the symbols, images, and sounds available to us are increasingly provided by commercialized culture industries. When he began writing in the 1990s, broadcast television was his central example of industrialized memory, but with the expansion of digital media, and data-driven social media in particular, Stiegler’s specific brand of media critique has assumed an even greater resonance. He labels these exteriorized or prosthetic forms of memory “tertiary retentions,” which he defines as “memory support objects and mnemotechniques that make the recordings of traces possible— notably those photograms, phonograms, cinematograms, videograms, and digital technologies that form the technological infrastructure of control in the hyper-industrial epoch” (2011: 57). The influence of these industrialized tertiary retentions is crucial for Stiegler because it conditions both our internalized perception of the world (what he calls primary retention) and capacities of memory (secondary retention). Increasingly, Stiegler claims, the reservoir of collective memory and potential that we rely on to form both individual and collective identity (what he, following Gilbert Simondon, calls the process of “individuation”) has become standardized and commercialized (2014: 46). The synchronized viewing patterns of broadcast television and now the homogenized image and news circulation of social media feeds results in the formation of a common and shared fund of memory, but it is one that, due to its centralized ownership and data mining practices, is subject to becoming “a technics of hyper-control . . . dissociation . . . dis-integration and of the proletarianization of the social itself” (2016: 39). It is for this reason that Stiegler and other philosophical collaborators such as Yuk Hui call for the development of alternative social networks to Facebook or other corporate platforms, ones that actually produce forms of meaningful communication and collaboration, what both Hui and Stiegler call new “associated milieus” (2016: 251). While both Virno and Stiegler are clearly aware of the challenges to communication and politics presented by postindustrial economic conditions, they are also attuned to the possibilities the current situation still presents. I’d like to suggest that the spontaneous memorial at Union Square provided a glimpse of the kinds of productive processes of collective memory and individuation that Virno and Stiegler advocate. Could the attacks of 9/11 and the specific fear they produced have necessitated, for example, the formation of the type of community Virno depicts, breaking through the dispersed feeling of anguish that otherwise prohibits this occurrence? It is perhaps no coincidence that the Union Square gathering occurred in a rare interval when work and other activities in New York were brought to a standstill. In this brief suspension of economic roles and positions, the general capacities that are otherwise subsumed in this sphere could be redirected to both the need for mourning and the need for political debate and discussion. The gathering also significantly formed directly after the events and prior to (or at least simultaneous with) the bombardment of televised and internet-circulated images and discourses that would come to form the “tertiary retentions” through which a collective, mediatized memory of 9/11 would be shaped. In the short period in which the gathering in the square was permitted to exist, a different and more immediate forum for communication and memory was temporarily established. I think it can be argued that overriding the importance of any specific statement or message uttered at the site was an awareness of a “belonging as such” that, amazingly in this time of threat, extended beyond the space of Union Square to recognize those that might soon become victims of military retribution. There is however a notion of ambivalence or uncertainty in both Virno and Stiegler’s thought, one that actually helps us to acknowledge the political potential that exists within the spontaneous

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memorial (and on occasion does take form), while also recognizing that it too is susceptible to being drawn into the cynical, opportunistic, and divisive relations that unfortunately dominate our current social situation. It is a viewpoint that helps clarify the process by which the 9/11 spontaneous memorials became complicit in circuits of kitsch patriotism and disaster tourism. Virno and Stiegler encourage us to consider the general exposure to uncertainty and economic instability that predated the terrorist attacks and thus allow us to better understand the appeal of the various promises of comfort and security that followed them. Considered together, Virno, Stiegler, and Hirschhorn significantly shift the grounds of the current debate surrounding the spontaneous memorial phenomenon. Existing academic accounts tend to either dismiss temporary memorials on the grounds of their reliance on a commodified mode of expression or diminish this connection to consumer culture by placing the practice within a long lineage of traditional protest rhetoric. In contrast to both of these positions, Virno, Stiegler, and Hirschhorn suggest that new forms of political communication and action must arise from within these challenging post-Fordist conditions. Hirschhorn attempts to release a dormant energy residing in everyday mass-produced materials and popular social rituals, while Virno and Stiegler insist on the possibility of community formation, despite the encroachment of work or industrialization into the space of politics, language, and memory. The Union Square memorial presents in many ways a point of intersection for these two lines of thought. The gathering demonstrated that a temporary community can be initiated with the most meager of resources. In this case, popular memory rituals, including the depositing of objects and flower, appear to have facilitated rather than impeded the establishment of the park as a space for both mourning and discussion. The type of communication generated by the memorial was not simply the confirmation of an already existing community nor was it an expression of protest by a clearly defined social group. Here communication took the form of a process, the commencement of a community without predetermination. Perhaps most importantly, what occurred at Union Square is a reminder that the political capacity that stems from our common belonging in language and memory has not been entirely subsumed by a consumer culture that would seek to put it to work. The possibility does exist to effectuate a reorientation, directing our shared affective modes and communicative skills away from the cynical and opportunistic pursuits dictated by the market place. In many ways this brief gathering in Union Square prefigured the more explicitly economically motivated protest community that formed in Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement and indeed some of the same organizers and activists (including the Reverend Billy) were present at both sites. Yet, as mentioned, New York’s spontaneous memorials also substantiate Virno’s conviction that our contemporary political situation is a highly ambivalent one. As scholars like Sturken and Engle rightly remind us, memory practices that helped bring about a temporary public sphere fostering empathy and concern in Union Square later become articulated to reactionary expressions of patriotism and the desire for absolute security. But whether a spontaneous memorial facilitates a space of meaningful exchange or a disavowal of politics is neither arbitrary nor inevitable. In the case of Union Square, the memorial’s ability to serve the latter function was contingent on the park being available to the public in a relatively unrestricted manner. When Union Square was made off limits—its temporary community brought to an immediate and deliberate halt by a municipal decision—the paucity of such spaces within the city was brought into relief.11 With access and restrictions on behavior in New York’s parks tightening (in part because the city has handed control

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over to the private interests of Business Improvement Districts12) the unique political status of Union Square has become more apparent. Apart from the temporary closure that brought the spontaneous 9/11 memorial to an abrupt end, Union Square faces a more permanent threat to its ability to maintain its public role. The Union Square Partnership, the area’s own Business Improvement District and Local Development Corporation, has recently initiated a large-scale renovation of the park, which includes plans to enhance its economic feasibility. Among the proposed changes to the square is the installation of an upscale restaurant in the park’s nearly eighty-year-old north side pavilion. The plans to convert the former bandstand have been opposed, however, by community groups who view the initiative as a further privatization of New York’s diminishing public spaces. The rallying of local activists around a “Union Square Not For Sale” campaign suggests that the political community that was brought into being in the days of the 9/11 memorial may not have dissipated entirely. The Reverend Billy (having also just run for city mayor) has been a particularly vocal member of the citizen’s group, defending the public right to assemble at the pavilion. Under the name the Union Square Community Coalition, the group filed a lawsuit against the New York City Parks Department and the Union Square Partnership in April 2008 and successfully attained a preliminary injunction against the restaurant installation. According to the coalition, the court supported their central claim that without state legislative approval, the restaurant would be an unlawful alienation of public parkland.13 Yet in February 2014 the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that the Parks department could go ahead with their plans (Fabricant 2014) and The Pavilion restaurant was opened by May of that year. While ultimately unsuccessful in preserving the pavilion as a place of assembly, organizers of the “Union Square Not For Sale” campaign recognized that genuinely public space is the prerequisite condition of political communication and one that often needs defending. The redirection of communicative energies away from the sphere of work and the politics of enthusiasm advocated by Virno, Stiegler, and Hirschhorn require a space of enactment. Union Square became such a space in the days following the 9/11 attacks, as it has so many times in the past. At stake now is the question of whether or not it will be permitted to occupy this role in the future. This book moves now from the unsanctioned memorial at Union Square to a consideration on the official site of commemoration at Ground Zero, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. If, for a brief period of time, Union Square seemed capable of allowing both expressions of grief and political debate to occur within the same space, could a similarly complex form of memory also be accommodated at a more visible and permanent memorial site? The next chapter begins ten years later at the tenth year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a moment that at last saw the opening of the Reflecting Absence memorial, but that was also marked by a considerable degree of political uncertainty and unrest.

Notes 1 Laura Kurgan’s Around Ground Zero project, a temporal map of the Ground Zero area, attempted to chart the appearance and disappearance of spontaneous memorials in Lower Manhattan. Kurgan marked memorial sites with a teddy bear icon on her fold-out maps, one of which was published in the Spring 2002 issue of Grey Room.

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2 Several authors in the essay collection Mourning Diana (Kear and Steinberg 1999) also make such a claim. 3 I am grateful to Reverend Billy for providing a detailed account of the Union Square gathering during a conversation we had in New York in June 2005. Video footage of Reverend Billy’s anti-war and anti-consumerism speeches in the square, shot by media activist DeeDee Halleck, is available at: www.archive.org/details/RevBillyUnionSquare. 4 See, for example, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites’ comparison of the flag raisings at Iwo Jima and at Ground Zero in their coauthored study No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture and Liberal Democracy (2007). 5 The writing of Harriet F. Senie is a notable exception and the Union Square memorial is also referred to in several essays contained in the collection After the World Trade Center edited by Sharon Zukin and Michael Sorkin and published in 2002. 6 Santino, for example, emphasizes the use of sacred Catholic imagery and objects in the spontaneous shrines of Northern Ireland, firmly embedding them within regional folk culture (2001: 78). 7 Senie includes her own thoughtful reading of Hirschhorn’s significance in her treatment of “immediate memorials” in her recent Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 (2016). 8 As Buchloh suggests, Hirschhorn’s work both affirms “the need for industrial production as a model for artistic production” and “the need for communicative structures that appeal to as many participants as possible” (Hirschhorn 2005: 78). 9 Here Virno’s thought shares affinities with Gilles Deleuze’s notions of a “control society” which pervasively and continuously patterns behavior (see Deleuze’s much cited “Postscript on the Societies of Control” [1992]) and Antonio Negri’s concepts of affective labor in which the organization of power moves to a biopolitical register, encompassing “population and culture, traditions and innovations” (1999: 83). 10 See chapter 5 of Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) titled “Action.” 11 The implications of Zuccotti Park’s status as a private-owned public space (POPS) was made clear when protesters were eventually forcibly removed. 12 See, for example, Sharon Zukin’s account of the impact of these public-private partnerships on the city’s public spaces, particularly Bryant Park’s administration by the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, in her book The Culture of Cities (1995). 13 The blog site http://unionsquarenotforsale.wordpress.com/ details the coalition’s campaign at the time.

2 Absence and exposure: The National September 11 Memorial & Museum

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emorial ceremonies have been taking place at Ground Zero every year since 9/11, but the tenth commemoration of that day was particularly notable for reasons beyond the obvious significance of the anniversary. To begin with, 2011 was one of the first 9/11 anniversaries after what seemed like the ushering in of a new political era. President Barrack Obama had assumed office in 2009 and the Iraq War that had at that point lasted nearly nine years was in the process of drawing to an official close (the last US troops would be withdrawn on December 18, 2011). After so many years in which the construction site of Ground Zero had seemed to be in permanent stasis, the tenth anniversary also saw, at long last, the unveiling of Reflecting Absence, the National September 11 Memorial. On the anniversary day itself, a Sunday, access to the memorial site was reserved for survivors, service men and women, the family members of victims and public officials including President Obama, his predecessor George Bush, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and his predecessor Rudy Giuliani. The ceremony—involving speeches, the traditional reading of victim’s names, and a musical performance by Paul Simon—was fed to a large screen visible to the gathered crowds beyond the site’s construction barriers. Although it would not open until May 2014, the aboveground glass and steel pavilion of the National September 11 Museum, designed by the Oslo-based architecture firm Snøhetta, was in place. The David Child’s designed One World Trade Center (formerly known as the Freedom Tower), which would not “top-out” until May 2013, was also already a substantial presence at the site. First access to the memorial site would be granted to the general public the following day on September 12 (see Figure 2.1). The opening of the memorial and the tenth anniversary ceremony projected a certain sense of historical closure and even optimism, yet the ambient mood in Lower Manhattan on that day suggested a far more tense and conflicted public feeling. Amid demonstrations of mourning and patriotism (American flags, banners to the “fallen heroes,” and tributes to rescue workers), various expressions of political protest were visible in the streets surrounding the memorial site. Included among these voices were a very prominent contingent of “9/11 Truthers” wielding signs reading “The Bush Regime Engineered 9/11” and “Revolt! Against U.S. Gov. Traitors” (we will discuss the “9/11 Truth Movement” in greater detail in Chapter 4). In an allocated protest

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FIGURE 2.1 President Obama at National September 11 Memorial (10th Anniversary of 9/11). Local Projects.

area on Broadway adjacent to City Hall Park, a temporary memorial to “the unknown Iraqi, Afghanistan and Pakistani civilians” killed in the “US Global War on Terror” had been fashioned using the familiar memorial trope of empty pairs of shoes representing the nameless dead. A performer dressed in a by-now iconic black hood and orange jumpsuit knelt, hands bound behind his or her back, next to photographs of Abu Ghraib torture scenes that included the notorious “thumbs up selfies” of American military prison guards. An impromptu stage covered with posters condemning anti-Muslim bigotry occupied another corner of the area and featured a rotating array of anti-war and anti-racism speakers. The atmosphere of protest and public gathering that enveloped Union Square a decade earlier was present here to a degree, but the noticeable tension in the air was also an indication of just how polarized and confrontational the public discussion around these issues had become in the intervening years. The strong dividing lines between patriotism and critique visible in Lower Manhattan on this anniversary day appeared to indicate irreconcilable political differences rather than a developing community of debate and deliberation. Placards reading “Stop the Drone Attacks—Stop Terrorism!” and the presence of the aforementioned “inside job” conspiracy movements were clear indications that, despite the Obama presidency, the impending withdrawal from Iraq and the tenth anniversary commemorations, a process of post–9/11 national healing, was far from complete (see Figures 2.2 and 2.3). Yet given the domestic and global context of the time, it is perhaps unsurprising that a general mood of unrest permeated the city on this September day in 2011. As The Guardian foreign correspondent Jason Burke reminds us, the year leading up to this anniversary had been an eventful one in terms of the ongoing war on terror, what he terms the “9/11 Wars.” While the combat mission in Iraq was declared over on August 31, 2010, the gradual withdrawal of US troops

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FIGURE 2.2 Public Patriotism on Display at 10th Anniversary of 9/11. Joel McKim. contributed to an increase in non-state sectarian violence in the country—an average of over seventeen daily deaths from suicide bombs or gunfire and executions were recorded throughout 2010 (Burke 2011: 479). Meanwhile, the war in Afghanistan continued on (as it still does to this day) and its extension into Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) intensified during this period. Drone strikes in FATA had increased significantly during Obama’s presidency with some 118 such strikes taking place in 2010 alone (Burke 2011: 470). The upheavals of the “Arab Spring,” emerging first in Tunisia in December of 2010 when street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight in Sidi Bouzid in protest of government corruption, spread throughout North Africa and the Middle East in the winter months of 2011. By September it was clear that characterizing the uprisings as a straightforward transition to democratic rule was naive and the Syrian Civil War was already under way. As Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger note, it is out of this volatile context that Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s leadership of ISIS (then the Islamic State in Iraq) solidified and the group’s

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FIGURE 2.3 Public Protests at 10th Anniversary of 9/11. Joel McKim. violence in Iraq escalated throughout 2010 and 2011, including the tactic of coordinating multiple suicide attacks on the same day (2015: 38). The domestic context was also not free of violence and unrest in the lead up to the tenth anniversary. In May of 2010 a large car bomb was placed in Times Square by Faisal Shahzad, a thirtyone-year-old Pakistani man who had become an American citizen the year before. Significant damage and loss of life were narrowly avoided when the explosives inside the smoking Nissan Pathfinder failed to detonate (Grynbaum, Rashbaum, and Baker 2010). Burke situates the attempted bombing within a rising wave of terrorist attacks throughout 2010 and 2011 that revealed the emergence of a more fractured array of Islamic militant groups with only tenuous links to Al-Qaeda—Shahzad, for example, was affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban. If the recurrence of a large-scale and highly planned event such as 9/11 seemed less likely at this moment in time, the threat of smaller-scale, yet more frequent and difficult to predict, attacks was growing. He argues, “With every year that had passed since the 9/11 Wars had begun, the situation had become more complex, even as the threat of catastrophic violence itself had stabilized” (2011: 470). In September of 2011, the United States was still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis and shouldering the burden of a war in Iraq that had by this time cost nearly $825 billion (Rogers 2011). In reaction to the continuing economic after effects of the financial crisis and a perceived lack of appropriate official response, the Occupy Wall Street movement would take over Zuccotti Park, meters from the 9/11 memorial site, on September 17, just six days after the tenth anniversary commemorations. It is against this turbulent national and international backdrop that the National September 11 Memorial would be unveiled in 2011. What role the memorial (and the eventual museum) would

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seek to take within this context was yet to be fully established. What precisely would the memorial site be calling on us to remember? Would the memory at Ground Zero be confined to the events of a single terrible day in 2001, or would a more expansive and perhaps more contentious politics of remembering be encouraged or permitted to take shape at the site? Would the memorial and museum recognize or allude to the still unfolding global repercussions of that day, or rather seek to delimit the temporal and geographic references of the site? And would the memorial space somehow acknowledge the conflicted and complex range of sentiments being expressed outside its gates on the day of its inauguration, or would it instead demarcate the memorial as sacred ground untouched by such controversy? This chapter will discuss the memory politics and aesthetics of Ground Zero and seek to question the role of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, while recognizing its admittedly challenging mandate. It will do so by first recognizing the difficult position that memorials in general hold within art history and public politics, occupying as they do a territory between the aesthetic and the rhetorical. Here I will outline an ongoing debate over precisely what kind of experience a memorial should provide: Educational? Therapeutic? Something else entirely? I’ll also revisit an argument I made prior to the completion of the memorial at Ground Zero—that the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben might provide a productively different conception of what forms of engagement a memorial might be possible of invoking. Agamben’s theory of poiesis and “art without content” still provides, I suggest, a useful reminder that apart from any particular representational content, memorials also have the potential of engendering a space of open communication that is neither purely didactic or therapeutic. I then discuss how, despite at first being skeptical of the Reflecting Absence proposal’s ability to produce such a space of exchange, my initial experience of the completed site left a more positive impression. The opening of the museum space, with its tightly controlled historical account, further problematizes the site however and I conclude the chapter by both critiquing the museum’s official narrative and pointing toward a radically different vision for a memorial and institutional response to the challenges of 9/11—Krzysztof Wodiczko’s proposed City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial.

Memorial challenges The memorial that was unveiled in 2011 is of course titled Reflecting Absence. The design proposal of Michael Arad, a thirty-four-year-old architect for the New York City Housing Authority, had emerged the unexpected winner of a 2003 memorial competition that generated 5,201 entries. Apart from his unusually young age, Arad established himself as a somewhat unlikely candidate by being the only one of the eight competition finalists to enter without a partner or team (Blais and Rasic 2011: 136). The original proposal for his Reflecting Absence design contained the following description: This design seeks to emphasize the void left by the destruction of the twin towers, a void that is both physical and emotional. The footprints of the two towers are marked by creating two square depressions thirty feet deep, in a flat field. At the bottom of each depression is a reflecting pool that is fed by a constant sheet of water that cascades down the four sides of each square pit. Each reflecting pool’s surface is punctured by a square opening into which the water cascades further down, seemingly into a depthless void. (LMDC 2003)

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By the time it was actually realized this original design had undergone many changes, but this core concept of transforming the tower footprints into two massive reflecting pools remained intact (although the voids would eventually be scaled back by 30 percent and would therefore not occupy the full dimensions of the footprints [Dunlap 2005]). The selection jury had admired the elegant simplicity and symbolic strength of Arad’s design, but the austere plaza surrounding his proposed voids was deemed too barren and too brutal (Blais and Rasic 2011: 136). When his entry became a competition finalist, Arad was asked to partner with landscape architect Peter Walker in order to inject more life into the memorial’s public space. Walker would introduce the grove of 416 swamp white oak trees that would eventually surround Arad’s two voids. The other major change to Arad’s plan was the addition of an interpretive center (that would become the National September 11 Museum) located at bedrock beneath the memorial plaza and exhibiting the artifacts taken from the World Trade Center site. Arad’s design was ultimately deemed too minimalist and too abstract to be granted the sole responsibility of memory at the site and the interpretive center was considered to be a necessary addition to anchor the memorial more explicitly to the events of 9/11. This anxiety over abstraction versus representation, aesthetics versus education, is typical of memorial design processes. We might recall that Frederick Hart’s figurative The Three Soldiers statue was added as a “traditional complement” to Maya Lin’s minimal Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial and an information center was added to the abstract field of stone pillars that constitute Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The consternation involved in all these designs is indicative of more fundamental concerns that often circle discussions of memorial aesthetics. Indeed, memorials have always held an uncertain place within art history and theory. They occupy a position somewhere between politics and art, and whether or not they perform either role adequately has frequently been subject to question. Noël Carroll notes that memorials are specifically designed to perform a social function and not simply to provide a disinterested aesthetic experience, and it is this fact, he suggests, that produces art histories reluctance to acknowledge them as art. Carroll claims that aesthetic theory holds precious the idea, “that something is an artwork if and only if it is designed with the primary intention of affording or having the capacity to afford experiences valuable for their own sakes” (2005: 1). Social, political, or rhetorical demands are viewed as unwelcome intrusions into the realm of aesthetic experience. Yet, as Carroll recognizes, works possessing a social and specifically memorial function (from religious art to political portraiture) are arguably more the norm than the exception in the history of art. But even if we accept the monument’s fusion of aesthetic and political modes, the precise function of a memorial—what we would like it to be and do—remains tricky and contested territory. Contemporary memorials must navigate such narrow spaces as the gaps available between the pitfalls of sensationalism, over abstraction, kitsch, and heavy-handedness. Although not referring directly to memorial design, I suggest that the philosopher Alain Badiou’s meditation on the relationship between art and philosophy, his Handbook of Inaesthetics, provides a useful starting point for a consideration of the place of contemporary memorials within aesthetic theory. Badiou presents three distinct schemas that reflect art’s changing relationship to truth within the history of Western thought: the didactic schema, the romantic schema, and the classical schema. He suggests that the didactic schema, beginning with Plato, holds a deep distrust of the persuasive character of art. This perspective maintains that art deceptively promises an immediate access to a bare or naked truth, while in fact being entirely incapable of truth. The didactic tradition

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therefore positions art as a dangerous and seductive simulacrum or copy of truth, capable of diverting us from its actual pursuit in slow and disciplined thought. Badiou suggests, “The heart of the Platonic polemic about mimesis designates art not so much as imitation of things, but as the imitation of the effect of the truth” (2005: 2). Art is thus always an art of deception, according to the didactic schema and it must be controlled by censorship (take Plato’s infamous call to banish the poet from the polis) or strict surveillance. The goal of art thus becomes education, but education that is strictly policed by truths “prescribed from outside” (2005: 2. italics in original) by some greater and more reliable authority. Badiou presents Marxist aesthetics as the key twentiethcentury version of the didactic schema in which art’s purpose becomes to educate the masses on the truth of class struggle. For Maxist aesthetics, Badiou argues, art left unmonitored by this philosophical truth is at risk of descending into bourgeois hedonism. Badiou places in polar opposition to this didactic formation what he names the romantic schema. “Its thesis is that art alone is capable of truth” (2005: 3, italics in original). In the romantic schema art provides a privileged point of access to a truth that philosophy grasps for, but ultimately fails to attain. From this romantic perspective, Badiou argues, “it is art itself that educates, because it teaches of the power of the infinity held within the tormented cohesion of the form” (2005: 3), and German hermeneutics, with Martin Heidegger being its chief proponent, is the twentieth century’s representative of the romantic tradition. In his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” for example, Heidegger depicts the privileged relationship between art and the unveiling of truth. Art, according to Heidegger, opens and preserves a “world” in which the unconcealment of truth may occur. He writes, “The truth that discloses itself in the work can never be proved or derived from what went before. . . . What art founds can therefore never be compensated and made up for by what is already at hand and available. Founding is an overflow, a bestowal” (1977: 200). Finally, Badiou adds to the polarity of the didactic and the romantic a third schema that suggests a relative peace between art and philosophy. The classical schema, which he associates with Aristotle, overcomes Plato’s suspicion of art’s dangers by claiming that the purpose of art is not truth at all. Aristotle, according to Badiou, consigns art not to the realm of knowledge, but to that of “catharsis” (2005: 4). Its purpose becomes neither cognitive nor revelatory, but therapeutic. For Badiou, the twentieth century’s upholder of the classical tradition is clearly psychoanalysis, but he also suggests that the price for the classical schema’s removal of truth from the domain of art is the reduction of art to the level of public service measured by its effective utility in treating the human soul or psyche. Badiou is actually critical of all three of these schemas because he maintains that they all limit art’s potential to seek truths that are immanent and unique to art. They do so by relegating art to a subsidiary role in the promotion of a truth imposed from outside (didactic); making art a privileged path to a return of the absolute (romantic); or by reducing art to a conservative mechanism of psychic or emotional relieve (classical). He claims that our current aesthetic field is polluted with saturated versions of all three of these schemas. I think we can certainly see the frequent recurrence of both the didactic and classical perspectives within contemporary memorial design and debate. The distinction between the two schemas may in fact help us differentiate between the sometimes interchangeable terms: monument and memorial. For example, when commenting on Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the art historian Arthur Danto makes the claim that memorials initiate a process of healing and reconciliation, whereas monuments present a triumphalist reference to past events (in Rowlands 1999: 130). Carroll makes a similar differentiation, suggesting that

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monuments have historically been celebrations of heroic nationalism, serving as a mode of transmitting cultural assumptions and preserving social order. We have witnessed, in other words, a recent shift away from didactic monuments (seeking to promote an officially sanctioned version of historical events) and toward therapeutic memorials. As Danto notes, the subtle form of Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with its minimalist black stone walls, maintains an ambiguous view of the events it references, certainly refusing a purely heroic narrative. The language used to describe contemporary memorials is increasingly psychoanalytic rather than nationalistic, and contemporary sites of remembrance are commonly envisioned as locations for “working through” the traumatic events of the past. As places entrusted with alleviating the psychic wounds produce by war and conflict, these memorials can be said to participate in the aesthetic schema of classical catharsis. The connection of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to this therapeutic role is made explicit in the name given to the half-scale replica of the memorial that travels throughout the United States, “The Wall That Heals.” Carroll suggests that this cathartic mode has become the norm for contemporary memorials and he writes that these sites, “give articulate focus to the unease the loss has caused and allow for the reassessment of the event in retrospect; This enables mourners to manage their emotions, to move from shock to healing” (2005: 9). Kirk Savage makes this contemporary monument to memorial shift quite explicit in his observation that in the past century the hero monument has withered, and the victim monument has flourished. The old-fashioned celebration of triumph has increasingly given way to the therapeutic process of recovery. If the traditional monument trumpeted our ever-expanding collective being, or, more modestly our triumph over outside threat, the therapeutic memorial assembles traumatized remnants of our being and tries to make them whole again. (2009: 57) It may on first appraisal appear that this movement from didactic monuments to cathartic memorials is an unquestionably positive one. Jenny Edkins, for example, argues that successful therapeutic memorials, like Lin’s, replace historical time with a “trauma time,” in which “the ethical moment, the moment of decision, the moment of the political” become possible (2003: 84). Yet Badiou cautions us to be suspicious of art’s movement into the register of catharsis where it is no longer concerned with the production of shared truths and is limited to the role of assuaging personal pain or despair. The contemporary memorial’s potential emphasis on an internalized and individual response to past events, in other words, might dampen the political potential of these sites, moving collective history into the domain of private catharsis. Even the much-praised Vietnam Veterans Memorial arguably initiates an isolated process of healing rather than a collective political response. May Lin writes in her artist’s statement, “death is in the end a personal and private matter, and the area contained within this memorial is a quiet place, meant for personal reflection and private reckoning” (in Edkins 2003: 7).

A memorial of open communication? Writing before the completion of the Reflecting Absence memorial, my initial thought was that recourse to a different aesthetic schema might be necessary in order to determine what role a

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memorial at Ground Zero can and should perform (McKim 2008). I suggested that the thought of philosopher Giorgio Agamben (which draws from Heidegger, but also Walter Benjamin) presents the potential grounds for a more productive conception of contemporary memorial aesthetics. Agamben’s interpretation of classical aesthetics complicates Badiou’s image of therapeutic catharsis and delineates a Greek mode of thought that, far from excluding art form the realm of truth, defines poiesis as precisely “a mode of truth understood as unveiling” (1999b: 69), or a bringing into presence. The notion of poiesis put forward by Agamben, which he distinguishes from both the determined action of praxis and the romantic creative will of the artist, is an interesting one to consider in relation to memorial design. For what Agamben argues is unveiled by poiesis is actually not any particular or eternal truth, but rather a kind of spatial and temporal opening that allows a form of shared communication to take place. Poiesis, according to Agamben, creates a pause or suspension in the endless flow of instants that make up contemporary life (he associates it with the concept of rhythm that emerges in Greek thought). It thus suspends the linear time of praxis and work—a temporality of casual action and reaction—and throws us into what Agamben characterizes as a more original time. He explains, “By opening to man his authentic temporal dimension, the work of art also opens for him the space of his belonging to the world, only within which he can take the original measure of his dwelling on earth and find again his present truth in the unstoppable flow of linear time” (1999b: 101). Men and women attain in the poetic act a suspension of the endless movement of time that allows them to be active historical beings (and not simply living animals) for whom the past and the future are at stake. Rhythm opens up the space of the present for men and women to act and is thus not unlike the “now time” put forward by Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” which overcomes empty, homogenous time and succeeds in blasting the past “out of the continuum of history” (Benjamin 1999: 253). There is a passivity inherent to the truth process of rhythm and poiesis according to Agamben. It is precisely not the expression of will, but instead opens a space that allows for willed and free activity to occur. In his provocative book on aesthetics, The Man Without Content, Agamben (following Franz Kafka) argues that the modern condition is one in which the seamless transmission of traditions and beliefs from past to present has been disrupted. Yet instead of lamenting this loss of cultural heritage, Agamben suggests that this situation has produced the possibility of an art that takes as its content the act of transmissibility itself. Kafka’s writing, according to Agamben, intensifies rather than redeems negatively the contentless transmissibility of art. It therefore points to an art that “[renounces] the guarantees of truth for love of transmissibility” and “succeeds once again in transforming man’s inability to exit his historical status, perennially suspended in the inter-world between old and new, past and future, into the very space in which he can take the original measure of his dwelling in the present and recover each time the meaning of his action” (Agamben 1999b: 114). What Agamben points to is the possibility of a modern poiesis that recognizes the potential of transmissibility and the pure communicability of language, apart from any specific contents of communication.1 He, in other words, highlights the ability of art to help establish the very conditions of productive communication, language, and (I think we can add) memory. In this regard, his thought clearly coincides with the philosophy of communication developed by Paolo Virno (addressed in Chapter 1 of this book), one which privileges the common or generic capacity of language and memory as the foundation of any community and politics. For example, in his text,

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The Coming Community, Agamben argues, similar to Virno, for the possibility of community to be formed based “not on any condition of belonging (being red, being Italian, being Communist) . . . but by belonging itself” (1993: 85).2 Agamben is therefore encouraging us to conceive of art or poiesis as that which creates a space or an interval for something to take place, for communication to occur, or for a community to form. My effort to import Agamben’s aesthetic philosophy into a discussion of developments at Ground Zero was motivated by the conviction that something was missing from the most prevalent current conceptions of memorial aesthetics, including the didactic and therapeutic models. Largely absent from the discussion of memorial practice is a recognition of the capacity of memory sites to function as spaces of communication, rather than simply representations of the past or catalysts for personal healing. While referencing specific events of history or encouraging particular acts of remembering, the forms of communication engendered by memorials are also not (or should not be) fully prescribed or predetermined. Although somewhat risky in nature and therefore less common, memorial examples do exist (both realized and unrealized) that specifically emphasize the invitation for communication that is present, however latently, within all memorial sites. In my previous writing I’ve highlighted, for instance, the unrealized design for Berlin’s now-completed Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe submitted by Jochen Gerz and the architect Nasrine Seraji (McKim 2008). Their proposal titled “Warum?” (German for “Why?”) had as its focus a discussion center titled “the Ear,” in which visitors would be asked to engage in conversation and debate on the topic of why the Shoah could have occurred. Thomas Hirschhorn’s monuments to philosophers such as George Bataille and Antonio Gramsci, discussed in the previous chapter, incorporated reading rooms, cafés, and snack bars to facilitate and encourage active discussion among visitors. And of course the spontaneous memorial in Union Square was very much a communication and discussion-oriented space of memory. Agamben’s thought encourages us to see the openness and indeterminate nature of such memorials not as an aesthetic weakness, but as a requirement for them to instantiate a poietic moment, one that has the potential to bring new forms of public and political life into being.

Initial encounters When Arad and Walker’s Reflecting Absence design was first selected, I was initially worried that the memorial might be called upon to enact both a didactic and therapeutic role simultaneously (conveying a patriotic narrative while offering personal healing), leaving little room for a more open form of communication or discussion to take place. The mission statement accompanying the original submission guidelines seemed to embody this dual objective of both education and catharsis: “Respect this place made sacred through tragic loss. . . . May the lives be remembered, the deeds recognized, and the spirit reawakened be eternal beacons, which reaffirm respect for life, strengthen our resolve to preserve freedom, and inspire an end to hatred, ignorance and intolerance” (LMDC 2003). Arad’s design, like many of the other competition finalists, draws from recent memorial traditions in Germany and America in which the representation of absence and voids, and the psychoanalytic language of trauma and wounds features prominently. Elements of the Reflecting Absence design, such as the inscription of victim names, the cascading water, and

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the central voids descending into the earth, pay homage to some of the most iconic memorials from both these geographic contexts, from Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery to Horst Hoheisel’s negative form Aschrott Fountain memorial in Kassel, which descends into the ground where the original fountain once stood. James E. Young, the American scholar chiefly responsible for documenting the emergence of the important “countermonument” tradition emerging in Germany during the 1980s, served on the 9/11 memorial selection committee, as did Lin herself. The originally selected Reflecting Absence design planned for visitors to descend ramps lining the edges of the voids into underground galleries displaying the nearly 3,000 names—the roar of the cascading water drowning out the street noise from above. Arad and Walker’s design statement evokes an almost sublime or incalculable sense of loss and a solitary experience of contemplation: “The enormity of this space and the multitude of names that form this endless ribbon underscore the vast scope of the destruction. Standing there at the water’s edge, looking at a pool of water that is flowing away into an abyss, a visitor to the site can sense that what is beyond this curtain of water and ribbon of names is inaccessible” (2004). I feared that by enacting the magnitude of the event it memorializes, the Arad and Walker design could actually suggest the impossibility of language in response to such a disaster. The memorial might invoke personal and therapeutic meditation on a tremendous loss, while perhaps also prohibiting or discouraging discussion, a consideration of a wider context and a more communal experience of memory. The language of trauma and healing is frequently invoked in the statements and commentary surrounding the memorial. As Young notes, the selection committee valued the design’s “succinct capturing of the twin motifs of loss and renewal already articulated so powerfully in Daniel Libeskind’s ‘Memorial Foundations’” (2016: 67). While the two memorial voids represent a devastating absence, the memorial park surrounding them is often described as repairing the fabric of the city and signifying a process of revitalization. The official memorial website reads: the surrounding plaza's design has evolved to include beautiful groves of trees, traditional affirmations of life and rebirth. These trees, like memory itself, demand the care and nurturing of those who visit and tend them. They remember life with living forms, and serve as living representations of the destruction and renewal of life in their own annual cycles. The result is a memorial that expresses both the incalculable loss of life and its consoling regeneration. (National September 11 Memorial & Museum 2017) While providing a representation of loss and a promise of renewal, it seemed far from certain that Arad and Walker’s memorial would also be capable of somehow incorporating or acknowledging the complex and divergent range of sentiments and perspectives that were clearly still circulating around an event whose global impact continued to reverberate. The original Reflecting Absence plan would eventually be scaled back due to budgetary constraints and security concerns (cost estimates for the design had ballooned to $1 billion and fundraising had proven difficult). To Arad’s initial frustration, the memorial’s underground galleries were eventually eliminated and the engraved names were moved to bronze parapets surrounding the pools at surface level, leaving space beneath the memorial for the museum to come (Hagan). That Arad’s original vision would be realized at all seemed very much in doubt at various points in the long process of construction and financing—we had, after all, already seen one architectural

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vision for Ground Zero, Libeskind’s master plan, pushed aside by the twin forces of logistics and politics. Lynne Sagalyn opens her chapter on Reflecting Absence, titled “Memory Politics,” with an account of the unanticipatedly positive reception of the memorial among architecture critics when it was finally unveiled to the public in 2011. Martin Filler, writing in The New York Review of Books, notes for example, the “sobering, disturbing, heartbreaking, and overwhelming masterpiece . . . comes as a surprise to those of us who doubted that the chaotic and desultory reconstruction of Ground Zero could yield anything of lasting value” (in Sagalyn 2016: 335). There were, of course, also many critical assessments of the memorial, and Hariet Senie does a good job of collecting these in her book Memorials to Shattered Myths (2016: 159–60). I actually count myself among these initially skeptical commentators who found their first encounter with the realized memorial unexpectedly moving. Given the long delay and perpetual political jostling, it seemed slightly miraculous that anything had materialized at the site by the time of the tenth anniversary. In those first days of its opening, the memorial appeared like a liminal, floating space cut off from the rest of the city by an enveloping zone of still-intense construction. Entrance to the site required passage through an airport-style security area (complete with x-ray baggage scanners) that served as a reminder of the changed world brought about by the events of 9/11. The many years of anticipation combined with these rituals of access, contributed to the sense of this being an emotionally charged and solemn space (see Figure 2.4). Encountering the memorial pools in physical form for the first time after having seen them in countless renderings and sketches was an undeniably powerful experience. Despite being reduced from their originally planned size, they are still immense—on a windy day the empty spaces at the center of the pools appear almost to generate their own weather effects. There can be little doubt

FIGURE 2.4 National September 11 Memorial. Local Projects.

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that the memorial evokes in a forceful way the sheer size of the former towers themselves and the loss of life suffered on the day. Blair Kamin, architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, argued that the proposed design had promise because it “communicates not rhetorically, but physically, giving the visitor a visceral sense of absence” (in Sagalyn 2016: 342) and this is certainly true of the completed memorial. Yet the commanding physicality of the work is also married with some quite elegant and subtle design details that help restore a human connection to what might otherwise be an overwhelming presence. The etching of the names into the surrounding parapet, for example, allows flowers or other mementos to be inserted into the memorial’s surface. The display of names also provides a tactile point of connection to what is otherwise an inaccessible and monumental form (see Figure 2.5). Witnessing people on the first day of the public opening seemingly spontaneously adopting the rituals of leaving flowers or using paper and a crayon to create a rubbing of a name was a touching experience. Since 2013, following the suggestion of a volunteer, white roses are placed in the names of each victim who has a birthday on that day (Site Blog). While Arad lamented the decision to move the names and the visitor encounter with the memorial pools to surface level, I think this was a positive design change, reducing the memorial’s tendency to overwhelm the viewer and produce an experience of solitary reflection alone. In the current configuration the memorial park surrounding the pools is activated and the visitor is more aware of the existence of others at the site. The diverse responses and sentiments at the memorial become shared, from expressions of grief to more ambivalent reactions. Like Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the powerful presence, yet minimal design of Reflecting Absence does allow it to provoke and absorb multiple view

FIGURE 2.5 Flower Left at National September 11 Memorial. Local Projects.

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points and interpretations of the 9/11 events and their aftermath. Engagement with the memorial does not feel overly prescribed or regulated, partly due to the sheer size of the pools and the surrounding plaza. And while appropriately honoring the lives lost on that day (and the earlier WTC attacks), overt expressions of nationalism and patriotism are relatively muted within the Reflecting Absence design itself. The memorial could perhaps even be successful, at least to some degree, in generating the forms of open communication Agamben advocates. As Young suggests, “it may almost be the inhumanly proportioned scale of the waterfalls that creates unexpectedly intimate spaces among small groups and families as they cluster together in the plaza at the edges of the voids” (2016: 75). The site has now been reconnected and reintegrated into its urban surroundings. The elaborate security gates have been removed and there is a more natural flow of tourists and local business workers in and out of the site. Yet the memorial’s appearance within the otherwise dense streets of Lower Manhattan is still a significantly uncanny one. It does present a kind of suspension of the normal spatial dynamics, flows, and activities of a fast moving city and, beyond commemorating the absence of the towers, it does, I believe, encourage a broader consideration of 9/11 as a world changing and still ongoing political event.

The arrival of the museum On May 21, 2014, approximately two and half years after the opening of the memorial, the National September 11 Museum opened its doors to the public. My first visit to the museum took place in September of that year and I was once again quite apprehensive regarding how this new addition to the former WTC site would impact the tone and impact of the existing memorial. The involvement of cultural or museum institutions at the site had already produced a great deal of conflict and none of the organizations originally earmarked for inclusion had survived the political process. The Drawing Centre, an art gallery currently located in SoHo, but was to move to the site, had been vetoed due to protest by families of 9/11 victims over formerly exhibited “unpatriotric” artwork (Feiden 2005). The proposed International Freedom Center (IFC), an educational and cultural center with the somewhat nebulous directive to “nurture a global conversation on freedom in our world today,” was also removed from construction plans after victims’ families argued the center’s global historical outlook would take focus away from the “sacred ground” of the site (Fisher 2005). Debra Burlingame—whose brother was the pilot of Flight 77, the plane that hit the Pentagon—was a particularly vocal critic of the proposed IFC. She formed the Take Back the Memorial protest group (which included the website takebackthememorial.net) and wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal denouncing the focus of the center and the political leanings of its organizers, “the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. is handing over millions of federal dollars and the keys to that building to some of the very same people who consider the post-9/11 provisions of the Patriot Act more dangerous than the terrorists that they were enacted to apprehend.” After these complaints, then governor George Pataki assured the families that nothing of an unpatriotic nature would ever be programmed or exhibited at Ground Zero, insisting, “We will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America, denigrates New York or freedom, or denigrates the sacrifice or courage that the heroes showed on September 11” (Dunlap 2006).

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Although satisfying the demands of these vocal family groups, the inclusion of a museum at Ground Zero housing artifacts excavated from the site and telling the story of the events of that day was cause for concern among a number of critics. In 2006 when the underground information center was first proposed (it was not part of the original competition guidelines), The New York Times ran an editorial worrying that the restrained underground galleries depicted in the initial drawings could easily expand over time into something far less appropriate: Right now, the very general renderings of the remaining underground gallery show a stark and powerful space with one or two pieces representing the disaster and heroism of Sept. 11, 2001. But some will have the urge to add every memento or to use the spaces as more personal memorials to the individual victims rather than as a broader public expression of the event and its meaning. The museum and entrance are important, but if they remain underground, they should be somber and spare, restrained enough not to squeeze out the central mission of the Arad design. (The New York Times 2006) And the newspaper’s architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff had noted earlier, as the memorial adaptation process began, that “the constant revisions continue to gobble up space for the living, threatening to transform the site into a theme park haunted by death” (2005). My initial impression of the museum upon entry was again a more favorable one than might be expected given the anticipated fears of these critics. The Snøhetta museum pavilion, that had by this time already been in place for several years, is an elegant structure. Passage through its glass facade leads to a set of escalators that bring visitors down below the surface of the plaza, passing between the memorial reflecting pools, into a museum space at bedrock designed by David Brody Bond. First glimpse of the museum exhibition galleries comes from a mezzanine that looks out over the “Foundation Hall” where the original WTC slurry wall, the retaining wall for the site’s seventy-foot-deep foundation that continues to hold back the Hudson River, is visible. The Foundation Hall is impressive in its dimensions (it measures sixty-feet high at its highest point), yet it is relatively sparsely populated with artifacts and exhibitions. The focus of the hall is the slurry wall itself and the “Last Column,” the final steel beam to be removed from the recovery site, which stands vertical in the center of the space. In many ways the hall is the realization of the stark, powerful, and selective museum space that The New York Times had hoped to see (see Figure 2.6). But the Foundation Hall is, of course, just part of a larger museum space that spreads out over 100,000 square feet and consists of multiple exhibition spaces and thousands of artifacts. Alice M. Greenwald was appointed as the director of the museum in 2006, after having worked as the associate director of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington. Thinc Design studio was entrusted with the majority of the museum’s exhibition design, which they would undertake with the help of media and technology partner Local Projects (whose contribution we will discuss at length in the next chapter). The major, and significant, exception to this arrangement being the creation of the museum’s “Historical Exhibition,” which was led by Layman Design. In his explanation of why he decided to take on the challenging project, Tom Hennes, Thinc’s principal and founder, expresses a promising outlook, “I went after this project because I thought it was an opportunity to bring [a] spirit of reconciliation to this horrific event. . . . I’m talking about reconciling the split society in the United States and around the world about how to deal with difference” (2016).

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FIGURE 2.6 National September 11 Museum Foundation Hall. Joel McKim. Apart from the effective and reasonably minimal Foundation Hall there are other elements of the museum that are admirably successful. Several of the media-based exhibits, designed by Local Projects, offer innovative ways of engendering a participatory form of memory and will be discussed at length in the next chapter. The central “Memorial Exhibition” is a tactful and moving tribute to the lives lost in the attacks—Hennes describes it as the element for which he is most proud (Kuang 2014). A wall displaying the faces and names of the victims surrounds the quite intimate exhibition space of approximately 3,000 square feet. Touch-screen interfaces allow visitors to select particular individuals in order to have their profiles, photos, and audio remembrances played in a smaller inner chamber where, beneath a glass floor, the bedrock that supported the original towers is visible. Hennes comments, “We wanted the exhibition to be as minimal as possible. To simply perform the function it needs to perform . . . to have this story told as much as possible from the first person” (2016), and in this section of the museum he appears to have achieved this aim (see Figure 2.7). It is the museum’s Historical Exhibition that has rightfully generated the most criticism and here the restraint and thoughtful design of much of the rest of the memorial and museum is, unfortunately, severely compromised. Although also occupying only a fraction of the museum’s total floor plan within the North Tower footprint, it is here that the vast majority of the museum’s thousands of collected artifacts and audio and video recordings are confined. If the Foundation Hall represents the realization of The New York Times’ hope for the museum, the Historical Exhibition is in many ways a manifestation of their fear of memory object overload and the transmission of a localized version of history, without larger context. The exhibition is intended to provide “the

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FIGURE 2.7 National September 11 Museum Memorial Exhibition. Local Projects.

story of 9/11” through three sections: “the events of the day,” “before 9/11,” and “after 9/11.” The overall experience of the exhibition is claustrophobic with every inch of space seemingly occupied by a damaged artifact, an image, or a video projection. This anxious feeling is not aided by the fact that this section of the museum seems to attract the most footfall with the majority of museum visitors crammed within its confines (see Figure 2.8). In the first section of the exhibition, the repetitive playback of exploding planes, collapsing towers, and distressed phone calls, coupled with the surfeit of displayed objects (from crumpled steel to airplane slippers), is an overwhelming one—as if the exhibition was intended not just to document the events of the day in minute-by-minute detail, but to re-invoke them. Hennes appears cognizant of these hazards when he states, “In some ways, that intensity is what we have to shield people from—unless they really want to go there—because it can trigger trauma” (in Davis 2015), and it bears repeating that this is the one museum exhibition whose design was not led by his studio. Greenwald expresses a similar sense of awareness when she comments, “When do you cross the line between documentation and exploitation? We debated that question endlessly and we worked very hard not to cross that line” (Davis 2015). Yet while much of the memorial and museum succeeds in navigating that difficult line, this particular section of the museum feels misjudged and even gratuitous in its obsessive revisiting of the traumatic events of that day. As Philip Kennicott observed in the Washington Post, “Repetition is the essential thing: We suffer the trauma again and again in a way that inflates our sense of participation in it. This isn’t history, it’s spectacle, and it engulfs us, makes us a part of it, animating our emotions as if we were there, again, watching it all unfold” (2014). The issues with the Historical Exhibition continue in the subsequent sections. A comparatively small section of the exhibition traces the rise of Al-Qaeda, but the historical context presented

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FIGURE 2.8 National September 11 Museum Historical Exhibition. Local Projects. (provided mostly in the form of a Brian Williams narrated video) is so brief it is at best simplified and at worse misleading. And indeed, an interfaith leaders panel organized by the museum criticized the film (which refers to Al-Qaeda as “Islamists”) for not sufficiently distinguishing between Al-Qaeda and the Muslim community in general; the only Imam on the panel resigned over the refusal to change the film (Otterman 2014). Yet it is the final “after 9/11” section of the exhibition that is arguably the most problematic, not for what is included, but for what is conspicuously absent. This section is primarily devoted to a narrative of heroic recovery and triumphant renewal, the city of New York’s revival marking the end of the 9/11 story. Remarkably, virtually no mention is made of the global impact of the attacks, the US military response, or the ongoing threat of terror. A brief reference is made to the war in Afghanistan and the signing of the USA PATRIOT Act, but no other political ramifications are discussed (including perhaps most egregiously the war in Iraq). These glaring omissions are compounded elsewhere in the museum. The film that screens in the museum’s above ground theatre titled Facing Crisis: America Under Attack features interviews with then US and UK leaders George W. Bush and Tony Blair detailing their immediate response to the attacks and their conviction that military action in Afghanistan was necessary. Again, no mention of the more contested and less justifiable war in Iraq is made within the film, an unforgiveable omission. Writing in Artforum, Rosalyn Deutsche refers to the museum’s “prodigious amnesia” in relation to this global political context and argues: For although it claims that it wants “to inspire an end to hatred, ignorance, and intolerance,” the museum constructs a narcissistic memory that impedes its own goal. Hiding 9/11’s traumatic disturbance of the nation’s self-image, the museum concerns itself only with the violence we have suffered and supposedly triumphed over and, turning away from the rest of the world, resists trying to understand (which is not the same as forgiving or justifying) the psychic, political, economic, and cultural conditions of religious terrorism that contributed to the barbaric attack. (2014)

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In contrast to the museum’s selective historical account, Deutsche calls instead for a “critical memory” that would meaningfully engage with the question of “how to make the world less violent for everyone” (2014). The problems highlighted by the Historical Exhibition unfortunately overshadow the more carefully considered elements of both the memorial and the museum. Following the development of the site for more than a decade and having spoken to several of those involved, I know that many talented and well-meaning designers were invested in its creation. I’ve become sympathetic to the enormous political and public pressures placed on them. New Yorker writer Adam Gobnik’s reflections on his experience of the site certainly ring true, “Throughout the museum, the designers seem engaged in curatorial white-water rafting, struggling to keep the displays afloat while in constant peril from the enormous American readiness to be mortally offended by some small misstep of words or tone” (2014). By delimiting the scope of what is permitted to be displayed and discussed, the museum ultimately misses an opportunity to deliver the kind of poetic suspension that Agamben calls for, one that would allow a new and unforeseen response to these tragic events to emerge. It instead suspends the site within the confines of a single day and through its unrelenting repetition fails even to provide the therapeutic personal healing promised by the memorial above. Hennes writes of his design ambitions, “The museum should help visitors put their experiences into a more fully realised context; help them be more engaged in the complex post-9/11 world” (in Davis 2015). It’s a shame that the historical simplification of the Historical Exhibition significantly derails these efforts.

A cosmopolitical memorial? How then might we begin to conceive of a memorial or museum that truly attends to the global complexities of these still unfolding events? Could such a site possibly reconcile both the legitimate need for personal grieving and the responsibility to confront the challenges of our changed political world? What form would such a “critical memory” actually take? Recent scholarship in both memory studies and political communication helps point us in several productive directions. In highlighting the need for a conception of “transnational memory,” Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney note for example, “the national has . . . ceased to be the inevitable or preeminent scale of the study of collective remembrance” (2014: 2). And Judith Butler compellingly urges us to question the arbitrary line that determines which lives are worthy of grief and empathy: “We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all” (2010: 38). I would like to add to these excellent viewpoints a critical voice from outside direct discussions of memory or military conflict, but one that, I believe, is nevertheless helpful for considering how to expand the limits of who or what is granted admittance to our processes of remembrance and politics. Isabelle Stengers is primarily known as a philosopher of science3, but her theory of “cosmopolitics” allows us to question the ethics of global action and decision making more broadly. She begins a description of her “cosmopolitical proposal” by insisting that it is primarily a provocation for thought and a “slowing down” of reasoning rather than a proposition of what ought to be done (2005: 994). Stengers also distinguishes her cosmopolitics from Kant’s

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conception of cosmopolitan rights with its promise of perpetual peace and an earth finally united. Her thought relies on no such notion of universal truth and is directed instead toward the dynamics and particularities of concrete situations. Her cosmopolitics is a reminder that the “political arena is peopled with shadows of that which does not have a political voice” and that science or any other sphere of knowledge production or decision making should be called on to “construct its legitimate reasons ‘in the presence of’ that which remains deaf to this legitimacy” (2005: 996). Stengers’ ethical proposal does not prohibit decisions or arguments from being made, but it does insist that decision makers not be artificially shielded from the potential consequences of their decisions and actions. What would it mean, in other words, to genuinely make decisions “in the presence of” those that cannot participate in those discussions, yet will be impacted by their outcome? Stengers elucidates her thought through the example of scientific laboratory practice and experimentation in which researchers are actively shielded from the immediate ethical consequences of their decisions within sanitized, distanced, and clinical environments. She writes, for example: “We know that in laboratories in which experiments are performed on animals, all sorts of rites and ways of talking and referring to those animals exist, attesting to the researchers’ need to protect themselves” (2005: 997). Rather than condemn these practices outright (perhaps a too easy simplification of a complex ethical situation) Stengers insists instead that these protections be removed, so that decisions be made directly “in the presence of” the potential victims of these decisions and such that “the experimenters find themselves forced to experience the discomfort or anxiety to which their practice exposes them” (2011: 398). Stengers’ proposal is therefore an ethics of exposure, rather than one of prohibition or censor. It is also an effort to bring more of the world into the space of what may at first appear to be local decisions or situations. She explains, “I have a very different kind of delocalization in mind: to bring into existence the experience of here and there, the experience of here that, by its very topology, affirms the existence of a there, and affirms in a way that excludes any nostalgia for the possibility of erasing differences, of creating an all-purpose experience” (2010: 62). Here Stengers clarifies that bringing the presence of “the other” into the space of decision making is not an act of erasing difference or proclaiming the existence of a mythical all-inclusive public sphere—it is precisely a matter of being fully exposed to the existence and consequence of these differences of power and representation. Finally, there is also a memory component to Stengers’ thought that seems particularly relevant in relation to our present political moment. She suggests that a functioning cosmopolitics would entail “the building up of an active memory of the way solutions that we might have considered promising turn out to be failures, deformations or perversions” (2005: 998). The cosmopolitical ethics Stengers proposes introduces an important and productive complication to Agamben’s call for a radically open form of communication. What would it mean to hold these discussions without predetermination in the presence of those that may be affected, yet are unable to directly participate? In the context of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum this would certainly mean removing the protections of omission currently in place and necessitating an exposure to the full global consequences of the 9/11 attacks. Stengers’ philosophy of ethics does not preclude the need to mourn and remember those lost that day, but it also insists that this process takes place in the presence of the too-often nameless others who have also unwittingly and tragically become implicated in these events.

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I would like to conclude this chapter by briefly acknowledging the fact that examples of such an ethics of exposure do actually exist within the history of memorial aesthetics and in relation to the 9/11 discussion more specifically. We might look, for example, to Chris Burden’s The Other Vietnam Memorial, a series of thirteen-foot-high copper plates etched with 3 million Vietnamese names, first exhibited in New York in 1991.4 The questions provoked by Burden’s supplement to Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial are clear: why are the names of some worthy of commemoration, yet not others? What does our empathy for the victims of war seem to stop so suddenly at the limits of national borders? Yet Burden’s work also highlights the problems of difference and presence also implicit in Stengers’ cosmopolitical philosophy. The reality is that we do not know the names of the Vietnamese (and Cambodian and Laos) victims of the war—the United States did not document them. Burden’s solution to this problem prefigures in a strange way the algorithmic naming practices at the Reflecting Absence memorial that will be discussed in the next chapter. He used a computer to generate the 3 million names based on 4,000 name variations derived from a Vietnamese phonebook—the artificial and calculated nature of this activity contributing to the alienating impact of the work. Through his projection-based work the Polish-born, US-based artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has been inserting the presence of the invisible other into the space, and onto the surface of official monuments for many years. His 2012 Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection brought this technique to New York’s Union Square, where he superimposed footage of interviews conducted with fourteen war veterans onto the statue of Lincoln erected in the square in 1870. More Art, the commissioning organization, offers the following description of the project’s intention: “Speaking through the mouth of Lincoln, the participants made their experiences starkly public thereby asking the audience to face the wider implications of war, particularly the fate of traumatized war veterans” (More Art 2012). But yet another Wodiczko project brings a form of cosmopolitical approach even closer to the Ground Zero site. The artist’s 2009 City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial is, like Burden’s work, proposed as a supplement to the memorial at the WTC site that was then under construction. Wodiczko’s ambitious proposal involves the creation of a spherical, floating structure located in the center of the New York Harbor. Four smaller spherical satellites would receive transportation ferries from a number of key sites around the city and in turn deliver these ferries to the central sphere. This central structure would contain a forum for debates and presentations, a “situation room” monitoring unfolding and potential conflict and post-conflict zones, a “Conflict Transformation Centre,” and a “Peace Building Institute” “equipped with facilities for research and project development in a local, regional and global scale,” as well as a “Cultural and Clinical Trauma Healing” and a “Justice and Reconciliation Network,” among other resources and facilities (2009: 87). The project’s title derives from the Talmudic and Biblical “Cities of Refuge,” referenced in the lectures of Emmanuel Levinas, where perpetrators of unintentional acts of homicide could claim asylum. Apart from offering sanctuary to these “half-guilty” and “half-innocent” individuals, the cities were places of study where those that sought refuge were expected to devote themselves to learning in exchange. By adopting the title, Wodiczko is obviously implying that we are all in a position of half-guilt and half-innocence in a post–9/11 world and he describes his “aim to create a place for a more active, critical and discursive memory of the September 11 attack, examined in its historical and political context, in the light of military action taken in its wake, and its domestic and international fallout” (2009: 12). He specifically states that the memorial must go beyond personal

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reflection and a psychoanalytical process of “working through” the trauma of September 11, in order to instantiate a more active form of both memory and engagement. He explains, “The memorial will be a place of operative memory, memory in action. It will be an interrogative and ‘agonistic,’ not antagonistic, institute of memory, a public forum and base from which to initiate new transformative projects” (2009: 12). The project Wodiczko proposes is knowingly utopic in its scale and objectives, but it does encourage us to recognize that meaningfully confronting the complexities of a post–9/11 world would require not just memorials, but also new institutions and forums for exchange, ones that encourage rather than shy away from including a wider global context within the discussion and are thus prepared to accept the confrontations and disagreements that would inevitably result. As impossible as Wodiczko’s City of Refuge might appear, a similarly ambitious institution would be necessary to commence the process of reconciliation and debate necessary to overcome the polarization of views this chapter began by describing. The next chapter of this book will remain with the National September 11 Memorial & Museum and look more closely at the contributions of a studio responsible for some of the more promising elements of the existing site. As mentioned briefly, Local Projects (self-described as an experience design studio and led by designer Jake Barton) was entrusted with the media design for the memorial and museum. They define their design approach as exploring the integration of architecture and digital media, making them a particularly relevant case study for this book. The chapter will attempt to situate this 9/11 project within the larger trajectory of the studio, a body of work that suggests how digital and interactive media might offer the potential to develop more complex and innovative responses to the issues of memory, politics, and public discussion explored thus far.

Notes 1 In essays such as “The Idea of Language” (1999a), Agamben makes explicit his conception of the pure potentiality of language as something that is always in excess of the particular speech and knowledge that it brings to light. 2 In reference to the brutal repression of the occupation in Tiananmen Square, he actually claims that the manifestation of a community of belonging without precondition is among the biggest fears of any established power: “What the state cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging (even in the form of a simple presupposition)” (1993: 86). 3 Stengers first came to prominence through her collaborations with the Nobel laureate physical chemist Ilya Prigogine, known for his investigations of the properties of complex systems. 4 And according to Jon Weiner, poorly received and poorly understood by critics at the time (2015).

3 Algorithmic memory: The interaction designs of Jake Barton and Local Projects

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lthough a distinctly modern memorial phenomenon, it is now hard to imagine a memory site that does not include the prominent inscription of individual names. As The New York Times’ architecture critic Michael Kimmelman notes, “By aesthetic and social consensus, names are today a kind of reflexive memorial impulse, lists of names having come almost automatically to connote ‘memorial’” (2003). This incorporation of names is often a powerful and moving design element, but it can also be a deceptively complicated one.1 As we’ve seen already, the 58,000 names of fallen and lost servicemen are the central (and virtually only) visual component of Maya Lin’s minimalist Vietnam Veterans Memorial, their presence helping to engender complex memory rituals of pilgrimage and offerings. Yet what would eventually become a much loved and admired memorial design was first met with considerable public outrage and deemed “too abstract, too intellectual, too reflective” (Hass 1998: 15). The plan to include victims’ names in the originally selected design for Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe proved to be an even more contested and controversial memorial feature. The winner of the first design competition in 1995, Christine Jackob-Marks, proposed the construction of a one-hundred-square-meter-sloped concrete panel; its surface to be inscribed with the 4.5 million recoverable names of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The planned memorial was criticized on several fronts for its heavyhanded symbolism and coarse quantification of loss, its insensitivity to Jewish naming traditions, and its technical and economic infeasibility (the cost of engraving millions of names would be immense) (Young 2000: 190; Carrier 2005: 129). The proposal was eventually abandoned triggering the second design competition that would eventually produce Peter Eisenman’s now-completed memorial. As these two examples show, names can be a primary source of affective power for memorials, but they can also be the cause of their unmaking. The decision to include the names of the 2,977 victims of the 9/11 attacks (as well as the six victims of the 1995 WTC bombing) in the September 11 Memorial was already made for Michael Arad—the requirement to “recognize each individual who was a victim” was written into the memorial competition guidelines (LMDC 2003). The order of placement of these names was, however, cause for much deliberation. Lin had chosen to list the names of fallen soldiers chronologically according to their date of death, but this was obviously not possible in the case

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of the 9/11 memorial. Other available options such as alphabetical or random arrangement also seemed unsatisfactory and Arad eventually developed a notion of “meaningful adjacencies” that would attempt to take into account relevant relationships between victims and place their names accordingly, etched into bronze parapets surrounding the recessed pools of the Reflecting Absence memorial (Greenspan 2014: 183). The 9/11 Memorial Foundation undertook the process of collecting adjacency requests from victims’ families and assembled a database of over 1,200 connections. These personal requests would be combined with formal affiliations (companies, public service units, etc.) and subaffiliations (departments within companies, precincts, etc.) to form a complicated network of relations. The completion of Arad’s novel naming vision was begun by hand using slips of paper (Sagalyn 2016: 352), but the complexity of the task soon became apparent and the challenge was handed to Local Projects, a design studio led by Jake Barton placed in charge of media design for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Barton recognized that this attempt “to make a latticework of meaning underneath all of those names” would require significant software development and that further expertise was required (Sreenivasan 2011). Local Projects in turn enlisted the help of digital artist and data visualization designer Jer Thorp,2 who set about creating an algorithm capable of addressing the “weight of data” the network of names represented, both in terms of its complexity and its emotional significance (Thorp 2011). Further problematizing the task were the spatial issues presented by both the variety of name lengths and the need to organize all of these names within the confines of the seventy-six bronze panels of the memorial stretching over 1,500 feet (twelve of which, at the corners of the pools, were irregularly shaped). The software tool that Thorp developed involved both an arrangement optimization algorithm and a customized interactive interface that would allow the architects to make aesthetic adjustments by hand. Thorp describes the two-part system as one that allows computers and humans to do what they do best, explaining, “the underlying framework of the arrangements was solved by the algorithm, and humans used that framework to design the final result” (Thorp 2011). In the end, Thorp and Local Projects were able to accommodate more than 98 percent of the requested and formal adjacencies, ranging from the largest, the grouping of 704 Cantor Fitzgerald employees, to the most intimate, including the linking of the Vigiano brothers—firefighter John Vigiano placed at the end of his unit, Ladder 132, and next to his brother Joseph, placed at the beginning of his police department Emergency Services Squad 2 (Matson 2011). I begin this chapter with a description of this process of arranging names at the Reflecting Absence memorial because it is both a significant example of the productive coming together of computational media and architectural design and an introduction to the wider involvement of Jake Barton and Local Projects at Ground Zero. While the last chapter outlined several ways I claim the memorial and museum have fallen short in their attempts to respond to formidable design challenges, instances of more successful memory engagements exist at the site and perhaps suggest a more promising museum that might have been. Many of these examples, I would argue, involve the integration of various forms of digital media within the traditional space of the museum or the urban environment. Barton’s Local Projects has been concerned with the intersection of media and architecture and the potential of digitally enhanced memory projects since the studio’s inception, mere months before the 2001 attacks. Barton’s career in museum and interaction design has developed in close parallel with the many memory imperatives arising in his native New York in the aftermath of 9/11 and it is therefore fitting that Local Projects was

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entrusted with the role of media design for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. This chapter will look closely at Local Projects and their pioneering work in memory-oriented interaction design via three thematic topics and by highlighting a number of different 9/11-related projects produced by the studio. The first section of the chapter will examine the notion of “intimacy and involvement through mediation,” a concept that might at first appear somewhat paradoxical, but is nonetheless present in a number of Local Projects design schemes. Next, the chapter will look more closely at the potential of “algorithmic memory”—the specific ways in which forms of computational logic and information processing are impacting memorial and museum design, the meaningful adjacencies naming challenge already offering one case in point. And finally, the chapter will explore Local Projects as a pioneering example of “digital engagement,” the ways in which digital media are significantly transforming the surfaces and interfaces of the memory museum experience. While suggesting that the media interventions into the museum space produced by Local Projects offer a direction toward a more promising confrontation with the complexities of memory, the chapter also questions whether these projects could go further than they do in their initiation of dialogue, debate, and contestation. Barton’s overall design philosophy of collective storytelling, the democratizing of memory, and the initiation of conversation around contested histories is reassuringly progressive, but given the political pressures present at Ground Zero it is perhaps only partly realized in Lower Manhattan.

Intimacy and involvement through mediation Barton, a native of Brooklyn, New York, completed his first degree in performance studies at Northwestern University and an interest in the drama of storytelling has accompanied him throughout his career. He began working as an exhibition designer for Ralph Appelbaum Associates in New York (a firm with which he would later compete for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum commission). His work there on the American Museum of National History’s Hall of Biodiversity would win him a number of design awards (Krygier 2006: 42). Barton formed Local Projects in the spring of 2001 and the studio’s first project titled Memory Maps, a collaboration with the graphic designer Nancy Nowacek, was staged on the Mall in Washington D.C. as part of the Smithsonian’s annual Folklife Festival. Memory Maps was, as the Geographer John Krygier notes, the first realization of Barton’s ongoing interest in connecting stories or narrative to physical space, “bringing life and humanity to the inert physicality of the roads, buildings, and other urban infrastructure that dominate ‘normal’ maps” (Krygier 2006: 49). Memory Maps was, at this stage, a fairly low-tech initiative and involved a series of Styrofoam borough maps of New York City that allowed visitors to pin their personal stories of the city to specific locations using vellum sheets. Memory Maps would later assume a digital manifestation as City of Memory (cityofmemory. org), a project undertaken in conjunction with the City Lore cultural history group. This online version of the cartography project allowed native New Yorkers and visitors to tag the virtual map with their individual stories, allowing the city to be seen, Barton claims, “not just through an official lens, but . . . through the lens of what other people have experienced” (Mooney). Barton’s move away from institutional museum design work toward these more unconventional memory projects was, according to Krygier, an attempt to engage with more controversial content and accommodate the

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young designer’s “comparatively radical, populist instincts” (2006: 42). Krygier describes Barton’s fascination with the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscious and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and District Six Museum in Cape Town in particular. He saw in these museums an attempt to address contentious elements of the past (from poor housing conditions to forced migration) and an effort to disrupt the hierarchical flow of history, producing a culture of collective memory sharing, rather than authoritative transmission of historical authority. The embrace of tech-oriented projects was motivated by Barton’s desire to further democratize memory and narrative. These early Local Projects examples employ technological mediation, particularly newly emerging web platforms, as tools for enabling deeper connections between individuals, city space, and the past. Mediation, in other words, was recognized as being capable of generating a greater degree of intimacy with the events of history, rather than producing a sense of removal or distance. This notion of mediated intimacy certainly informed Local Projects’ development in 2003 of the recording booths used in the StoryCorps oral history initiative (founded by radio producer Dave Isay), until recently the studio’s best-known project. The booths, the first of which was located in Grand Central Terminal in New York City, allowed two members of the public to interview each other for forty-five minutes, a recording of the conversation was made available to them and also sent to The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress for archiving (https://localprojects.net/work/storycorps). Selected audio stories produced within the booth were transmitted on the booth’s exterior screens. In the summer of 2005, a StoryCorps booth was opened at the site of the World Trade Center, becoming one of the principal means by which oral histories of September 11 were recorded. This was Local Projects’ first direct engagement with the memory of 9/11, although the events and aftermath of the day had of course been seeping their way into the studio’s other initiatives. The effectiveness of the StoryCorps booths was precisely their ability to bridge a number of paradoxes. The booths themselves were sheltered spaces, despite being located in some of the most heavily trafficked locations in the world; the stories told were highly personal and often private, yet they were being shared publicly and preserved for posterity; and the process appeared highly intimate and human despite being formed around the use of media technologies. Barton describes the project as having the simple, yet “subversive goal of getting people to talk to each other” (Wright 2010: 21). The role of mediation within the practice of commemoration has been the source of much debate within the field of memory studies. This discussion has revolved in part around the influential, but controversial, concept of “prosthetic memory” advanced by art historian Alison Landsberg. The term is used by Landsberg to denote forms of non-lived or indirectly experienced memory that are, in modern society, increasingly produced and transmitted by the commodified media representations of mass culture, from Hollywood cinema to new experiential museums. While often met with deep skepticism by scholars and critics, Landsberg argues that these forms of media-produced prosthetic memories actually “have a unique ability to generate empathy” (2004: 24) as they allow connections to be formed across differences of experience. Landsberg’s theory has attracted its share of critiques with a number of voices in the field of memory studies questioning what forms of empathy and political action are actually likely to be produced by such “kitsch” or “ideologically determined” forms of mass media (Berger 2007, Sturken 2008). Yet as the media theorist Wolfgang Ernst suggests, the general pervasiveness of media representations within social life can’t help but also influence exhibition design, as “the modes of perception of the visitors are dominated by media perception and museums have to react to it” (Ernst and

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Henning 2015: 12). And a much longer history of mediated memory of course exists; historian Lisa Gitelman, for example, offers a reminder that media have always been “functionally integral to a sense of pastness” (2006: 5) with everything from books to photographs to films providing our primary access to history, while also shaping the past through their specific mediatic qualities. Silke Arnold-de Simine notes the particular and increasing reliance on media representations within museums dealing with the traumatic past. She comments, “The assumption that the moving image has the power to affect people and shape their ethical outlook and their politics like no other medium is one of the main reasons why this technology has become ubiquitous in museums which deal with violent and difficult histories” (2013: 92). While acknowledging the affective power of moving image media, Arnold-de Simine ultimately finds that many of these new media-infused museum exhibitions fall short of generating truly social forms of engagement, “they are based on the spectacle which elicits an individuated response and negates the relational quality of the encounter” (2013: 203). It is important to note however that these existing discussions of media and memory tend to be oriented toward film and video examples—a focus that lends itself to discussions of spectacle, mass media, and passive reception. The forms of online and interactive digital media produced by design studios such as Local Projects are less often discussed. Projects like City of Memory and StoryCorps explore the notion that media used as a tool of memory collection and archiving, rather than simply as a method of representational playback, may be capable of generating enhanced forms of intimacy and involvement. The distributed and networked nature of these digital projects arguably makes them relational and community-oriented almost by definition. In 2007, a partnership between Local Projects and the exhibit design firm Thinc (headed by Tom Hennes) was awarded the commission to design the exhibitions for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Local Projects would handle the media design elements of the museum and the studio was in some senses charged with bridging the time gap until the museum would actually open in 2014. Their first project was the development of the Make History website in 2009, which allowed visitors to contribute stories, photos, and videos related to 9/11. This online archive would form a kind of reservoir of public memory that would eventually be drawn from in the creation of other projects and exhibitions, some situated within the eventual physical museum and some predating it. The Make History initiative, in many ways an extension of the collaborative storytelling methods embodied in the City of Memory and StoryCorps projects, would represent for Barton and Local Projects a kind of ethical starting point for the studio’s overall engagement with the museum. As stated on the studio’s website, “We made a radical decision to avoid a singular, ‘official’ narrative. Instead, we collected thousands of stories from those at ground zero and around the world, creating a museum with a plurality of views” (Local Projects 2017a). It would, in other words, set the foundation for the vision of democratized memory and public conversation that Barton had been attempting to engender throughout his career. Justifying his return to a more formal museum-institution context, Barton argues: “Museums are starting to evolve into agents of social change [and] are functioning as spaces for community dialogue. We [are] trying to make diverse people visible to each other through a storytelling space” (in Fisher 2007). Barton and Local Projects were of course not alone in suggesting that the democratization of memory was the most appropriate response to the challenge of commemorating 9/11. Michael Shulan’s here is new york: a democracy of photographs project embodied a similar

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ethos of promoting a nonhierarchical ownership of the historical record. Shulan, who would later serve as creative director of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum during its formation, began the project (along with Charles Traub, Gilles Peress, and Alice Rose George) as an exhibition of 9/11 photographs displayed in a store front at 116 Prince Street in SoHo. The philosophy of the exhibition was that anyone could contribute their photographs and that all additions, whether from the general public or a professional photographer, would be anonymous and assigned equal status. As Shulan comments on the project website: “The work of worldfamous photographers hangs alongside pictures by police officers, firemen, businessmen, housewives, schoolteachers, construction workers, and children. The events of September 11 affected everyone equally, leaving no one immune to confusion, shock, and grief” (Shulan 2002). This sense of democratic and pluralistic memory also informed Shulan’s attitude toward the overall thrust of the National September 11 Museum. “The visitors really need to feel that it is their story,” Shulan comments, “Everyone has a stake, and therefore it needs to be an open museum” (in Greenspan 2014: 208). The development of the Make History initiative was clearly a linking point between Shulan and Barton’s shared vision of collective storytelling and memory production. The archive of memory generated by the online Make History project was first deployed by Local Projects in an Explore 9/11 app launched in 2010 (still four years before the opening of the museum). The Explore 9/11 app, described as “a guide for deconstructing and understanding 9/11 through the eyes of witnesses” (Frazier 2010), involved a seven-stop walking tour of key points of interest around the World Trade Center site (still very much under construction at the time of the app’s release); a GPS-enabled explore feature linking 9/11-related images to the specific location of the user; and an interactive timeline of the day’s events. The audio and image content of the app was derived directly from the publicly generated Making History archive. The nowopened museum continues to draw from the Make History material; the Local Projects–produced introductory exhibition, for example, features an “audio tapestry” constructed from 417 recorded testimonies of people located across the globe describing where they were when they first heard about the 9/11 attacks (Local Projects 2017a). Although the Local Projects designed “Reflecting on 9/11” exhibition space within the museum does not draw from the Making History archive, it can nevertheless be viewed as a continuation of the studio’s oral history and storytelling mission. This section of the museum is comprised of a recording studio prompting visitors to respond to questions regarding the impact of the attacks on their own lives and the continuing repercussions of the events. Within individual recording booths, visitors are asked to offer answers to such questions as: “What have you learned from 9/11?,” “Do you think the national security measures put in place after 9/11 have been effective?,” and “How did 9/11 change your view of America?” An adjacent screening room allows visitors to view an archive of video interviews with government officials, historians, journalists, family members of victims, and so on, including Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, and US Army colonel and 9/11 survivor Matthew Klimow. Barton describes Reflecting on 9/11 as “An exhibition space that’s really dealing with what 9/11 means today,” going on to explain: “We always knew that the museum could just be about the history, say the first year after 9/11, but that the conversations and the controversies, the ways in which people talk and think about 9/11 is so important that we wanted to capture and play a productive role in conversations about what the topic means today” (Barton 2014).

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As these projects attest, the Local Projects studio certainly appears sincere in its desire to employ digital media to significantly expand the sphere of involvement surrounding the official production of 9/11 memory. Throughout his career Barton has proven adept at designing mediaenabled spaces and platforms that generate a wide and relatively diverse network of engagement, while also retaining a sense of human scale and connectivity. The StoryCorps booths and City of Memory project were quite successful in achieving this balance between reach and intimacy, and Local Projects has made an effort to translate this experience to the difficult context of the National September 11 Museum. I would argue that the studio has realized this vision of pluralistic memory involvement to a mixed degree. While it is clear that the museum has drawn inspiration and material from the reservoir of memory produced by the Make History archive and that this is a significantly different and more democratic starting point for museum curation, the studio appears less successful at encouraging the forms of contentious conversation Barton values. The important example of the Reflecting on 9/11 section of the museum helps to illustrate this point. It is perhaps first worth noting that, like the quite powerful Memorial Exhibition discussed in the previous chapter, the Reflecting on 9/11 studio, at least on my visits to the museum, is sparsely occupied in comparison to the more sensationalistic and less participatory historical exhibition.3 It is a more darkly lit and solemn environment than other parts of the museum, which may discourage visitors from entering the area. And while premised on the equal value of all accounts, from heads of state to the visiting public, it is not difficult to imagine that the thought of entering the studio booth to add your answers to those of Rudy Giuliani or 9/11 survivors may be a daunting one. Unlike the StoryCorps booths, which encouraged partner-based interviews, the studio is designed as an individual recording process and is a more solitary experience as a result. The space, in other words, is oriented toward documentation rather than conversation. There is some room, it must be said, within the questions asked to register at least some of the deeply conflicted and opposing national sentiments that are undeniably now part of the 9/11 narrative, but there is relatively little evidence of this potential debate within the selected screening room playback footage. In response to the question “How did 9/11 change your view of America?” Robina Niaz, executive director of the Turning Point for Women and Families organization and identified as a Muslim women’s rights advocate, is shown calling for a more diplomatic exercise of American power abroad, but this a clear exception to a series of responses by public officials that are very much in synch with the museum’s dominant narrative of patriotism, personal loss, and national resilience in the face of adversity. It is difficult to envision a visitor coming away from the experience reflecting on a more diverse or controversial range of issues than these prevailing themes.

Algorithmic memory Another example of Local Projects’ stamp on the museum comes in the form of Timescape, a thirty-four-foot-long data visualization projected on to the concrete wall of the museum’s cavernous Foundation Hall. Timescape was made (once again) in association with Jer Thorp, but this time with further involvement from digital artist Ben Rubin and professor of statistics Mark Hansen. Rubin and Hansen collaborated previously on the now canonical digital art project Listening Post

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(2001–02) (winner of the Golden Nica prize at the 2004 Ars Electronica festival)—a work that displays real-time conversations harvested from chat rooms and other online discussion forums. Involving a different form of “data scraping,” Timescape uses algorithms to sort through a nightly updated database of several million articles gleaned from sources such as the Associated Press, Google News, and LexisNexis. An algorithm, put simply, is a sequence of computational operations required to complete a specific task. Timescape’s software algorithm pulls forward various 9/11-related new stories, organizing them according to various timelines illustrating the correlation between key terms and their development as they unfold from 2001 to the present day. Keywords are initially displayed as a kind of radiant starburst of information across the overall timeline, before specific “event clusters” are isolated and magnified—groupings such as “Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Osama Bin Laden” or “Lease, World Trade Center Site, and Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.” In an interview with the technology website Gizmodo, Barton described the project as an attempt at “narrative future-proofing” the museum in a way that allows the story it tells to continue to adapt to changing information and for patterns of understanding to emerge beyond what a curator might have predicted (Manaugh 2014). Barton often speaks of 9/11 as an event that is incomplete and continuing to unfold, and Timescape is part of his effort to engender a sense of open-endedness and transformation within what might otherwise be a fixed and static museum (see Figure 3.1). The project connects the museum to a much wider contemporary discussion surrounding database art, digital archives, and new forms of algorithmic memory. There is growing critical and creative recognition that digital archives do not merely involve new storage methods for audio and visual collections, they also present a much more fundamental shift in our societal forms of memory organization, retrieval, and generation. With the ongoing digitization of existing

FIGURE 3.1 National September 11 Museum Timescape Exhibition. Local Projects.

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cultural records and the expanding quantity of “born digital” material, our memory archives are increasingly numerical and computational in nature and thus available to significantly different forms of processing and analysis. As Jussi Parikka has suggested, “The issue of digital memory is then less a matter of representation than of how to think through the algorithmic calculation-based ontology of a memory” (2013: 9). According to Wolfgang Ernst, we are experiencing no less than a change of memory regimes that will necessarily entail new practices in memory aesthetics. He claims that “the twenty-first century . . . allows for a genuinely computer-generated information aesthetics that is closer to that of processual diagrams than to figurative phenomena within the audiovisual (or textual) regime” (2013: 27). The shift to the digital archive involves, according to Ernst, a reconfiguration of the traditional knowledge hierarchy between telling (historical narration) and counting (historical data). He explains, “Historical imagination asks for iconic coherence, to be separated from the organization of knowledge about the past in the form of naked data banks” (2013: 150). With the increasing reliance on digital archives, accessibility via the internet being one major contributing factor, this division between telling and counting—narration and data— becomes considerably blurred. The digital archiving of cultural material has not only expanded access to these collections (take for example the initiative to create an online “Fifth Tate” in order to help overcome problems of limited regional accessibility), it has substantially altered the means by which meaning and understanding are extracted from these collections. As Ernst describes, “The digital archives . . . are compiled alphanumerically . . . this means that through algorithms they are accessible to mathematical operations, something unprecedentedly new compared to the silence of the classical archive” (2013: 86). In response to these new research possibilities, the media theorist Lev Manovich has called for the formation of a field he names “Cultural Analytics,” that would facilitate new forms of cultural pattern recognition and algorithmically enabled “deep cultural [searches]” of emergent institutional and popular digital archives (2017: 275). The “database” according to Manovich must be recognized as the key form of cultural expression of the contemporary computer age, replacing the previous age of the novel and the cinema. What we are experiencing, Manovich claims, is the “projection of the ontology of the computer onto culture itself,” with data structures (information organized to enable efficient search and retrieval) and algorithms (sequences of operations to complete tasks) representing the two essential components of this superimposition (2010: 239). Manovich expresses the opposition between narration and the database even more starkly than Ernst, declaring, “Modern media are the new battlefield for the competition between database and narrative” (2010: 245). And with the database being the default structure of the computer, it is not difficult to determine which side Manovich sees as currently winning the battle. It is telling that Barton describes the design motivation behind Timescape as precisely an attempt to reconcile these two oppositional modes or methods by bringing together narration and data. “The challenge,” he claims, “is to make things graspable and to tell an engaging, meaningful story. We wanted to focus the design on something that wouldn’t render it overly simply, but would tell the story of both the data and how we were deriving the individual timelines” (Rosenthal: 2014). Similar to Manovich, Andrew Hoskins and Amy Holdsworth observe that “Databases organize, classify, and make accessible the past in new configurations that transcend and translate time and space” (2015: 23). Hoskins and Holdsworth emphasize, however, the particular imperatives of coming to terms with digital memory within the specific political context of a post–9/11 world. They identify a “new immediacy of memorialization” engendered by the real-time digital recording

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and immediate global distribution of events via personal devices and social media networks, writing: “These memorializations include the potential consciousness afforded by digital memorial networks, archives, and databases, which set out the potential trajectories of future memory of present and recent warfare and other catastrophes” (2015: 27). The scholars point to artist Joseph DeLappe’s iraqimemorial.org project launched in 2007 which invites artists and designers to submit proposals for a memorial for the thousands of Iraqi civilians killed in the Iraq War (the site now serves as an archive of over 190 submitted proposals). Hoskins comments elsewhere on our current “post-scarcity era” of online memory and data, a situation characterized by tension between “the scale of the volume of material that can be made available online and the decreasing capacity of anyone to consume it, or to make sense of it” (2011: 269). In the context of global political events, digital media may therefore actually reinforce the notion of memory as something that “ultimately slips through the cognitive and material processes of capture, storage, and retrieval” (2011: 271). There is, in other words, a problem of overabundance in relation to post–9/11 digital memory in which the problem of sense-making overtakes the traditional issue of preservation. Yet, this common memory diagram of storage and retrieval, so readily translated into the language of computer technology, may be an inherently limited one. The unquestioned adoption of the metaphor belies the necessary activity and creativity of memory, according to digital scholar Wendy Chun, who writes, “Crucially, memory is not static but rather an active process. . . . Again, memory does not equal storage.” She argues that this “conflation of memory and storage gloss[es] over the impermanence and volatility of computer memory. Without this volatility, however, there would be no memory. . . . Memory is an act of commemoration—a process of recollecting or remembering” (2013: 167). Chun reminds us that computer information, like cultural memory, is dynamic and its movement, regeneration, and degeneration are intrinsic to its functioning. The historian of ideas Howard Caygill traces this common conception of storage and retrieval—the reduction of the work of memory “to a technique of recall from a given stock of information”— back to Plato’s account of memory in the dialogue Meno (1999: 1). Caygill sees in the original promise of the World Wide Web (WWW) a very different conception of memory, one that is inventive, rather than simply reproducing what already exists. The WWW was premised on a view of memory, Caygill suggests, involving “the peculiar effect of discovering new, productive linkages between existing configurations” (1999: 7). Two very different understandings of memory have thus emerged and continue to circulate, “one as a stock to be retrieved by the art of memory, the other as the effect of a linkage between existing configurations of knowledge that potentially transform their entire field” (1999: 7). One conception is inherently conservative, the other is inventive and creative. Caygill questions which of these models of memory currently underpin the version of the internet we have now. For some, algorithmic computation holds the promise of overcoming a conservative storagebased conception of memory and unlocking the potential of a more inventive memory of unforeseen and productive linkages. As Ernst writes, “The ‘archive’ is no longer simply a passive storage space but becomes generative itself in algorithmically ruled processuality” (2013: 29). Yet, in the post–9/11 and the post–Snowden era of computational surveillance and government watch lists, the politics of algorithmic memory are far from straight forward. In this current age of “algorithmic life” and “big data,” Louise Amoore and Volha Piotukh note that “calculative devices . . . are engaged in the filtering of what can be seen, so that they create novel ways of perceiving the world and

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new visibilities and invisibilities” (2016: 5). Similarly, David Beer highlights the heightened, yet often hidden or unperceived impact of algorithms on everyday life—from Google PageRank to government decision making. He questions, “how algorithms shape what is encountered, or how algorithms prioritise and make visible” (2016: 6). Questions of data ownership, computational transparency, and “algorithmic governmentality” thus rise to the surface of political life (Rouvroy and Berns 2013). With Timescape, Local Projects attempts to harness the generative qualities of algorithmic memory, while perhaps eliding some of these larger political concerns. As one of the only exhibitions that recognizes a wider post–9/11 context and opens out to an unfolding global situation, it is certainly among the museum’s most compelling moments. In its aesthetic presentation of changing timelines and constellations of links, Timescape provides an acknowledgment of the geographic and temporal complexities of our current political moment, even if it does so rather carefully. The clusters and keywords selected for Timescape are relevant and interesting, yet consciously curated it seems to avoid too much controversy. Barton, for example, highlights in several interviews the unexpected emergence of a cluster linking the attacks, the American airline industry and the stock market, revealing the industries’ multibillion dollar losses in the decade following 9/11 (Ferro 2014). Yet this is hardly the biggest financial cost of the post–9/11 period and a cluster revealing the economic impact of the ongoing military campaigns in the Middle East is unlikely to emerge as a timeline within the display. It is perhaps telling that despite its algorithmic capabilities, Timescape is not an interactive exhibition. Allowing visitors to develop their own timelines and generate their own forms of political memory was obviously a risk the museum was unwilling to take. This feels like a missed opportunity as Barton and Local Projects have in some ways incorporated a more radically algorithmic method in other, less politically charged, museum environments. One of their digital media interventions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, for example, ingeniously uses a facial recognition algorithm to match items from the museum collection with individual visitor’s expressions. Another interface, the ArtLens Wall, allows visitors to re-organize the museum holdings according to their specific interests, mapping out idiosyncratic routes through the collection. In these examples of interaction design, the potential of algorithmic memory is realized to an even greater degree, allowing the archive of the museum to be fully reconfigured and generating new patterns of experience. It would be interesting to consider how such forms of algorithmic interaction might have been successfully integrated into the more contentious space of the National September 11 Museum.

Digital engagement This is certainly not to say that Local Projects made no attempt to inject elements of interaction and engagement into the museum. Digital interfaces, touch screens, and mobile applications have become increasingly common features of museum and gallery experience and Local Projects excel in the innovative use of these technologies. Andrew Barry charts the growing enthusiasm, since at least the 1980s, for the concept of “interactivity” within European science museums and the articulated notions of public “participation,” “empowerment,” and “accountability” (1998: 98).

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The growing ubiquity of digital media technologies has led to the emergence of interaction design as a unique discipline with its own philosophies and traditions of critique (Saffer 2010; Löwgren 2009). The environment of the museum remains one of the prime spaces of innovation for the design discipline offering ample opportunities to develop new participatory, haptic, and multisensory experiences (van den Akker and Legêne 2016). While screen technologies and computer-generated imagery are still seen by some as distraction or spectacle within institutions of knowledge production, media theorists like Seth Giddings argue that there is a great deal of meaningful crossover between science, learning, and popular entertainment (including video games), pointing for example to the common terrain of simulation across these fields. Giddings claims, “Simulation media require their own new ‘literacies’ and, while they are not necessarily a superior way to grasp the real world’s complexity compared to the more familiar linear narratives of scientific papers and television documentaries, an implicit understanding of them as media and technologies is inseparable from engaging with their rhetorical possibilities” (2015: 161). In the National September 11 Museum, Local Projects incorporates a number of interactive technologies into the visitor experience. The touch-screen tables of the previously mentioned Memorial Exhibition allow museum goers to search through the faces and biographies of the 2,983 victims, selecting, if they so choose, individual profiles to later play on the screens of the inner chamber. Engaging with the touch screens is a moving experience, managing to transmit both the overall enormity of the loss of life and the singularity of each victim. The “Last Column” display in the Foundation Hall lends an element of “augmented” or “mixed reality” to one of the material remnants of the towers (see Figure 3.2). The vertical touch screen, situated in front of the final steel beam to be removed from the Ground Zero clearing operation, allows visitors to scroll up and down the column discovering information about the numerous markings and tributes that accumulated

FIGURE 3.2 National September 11 Museum Last Column Exhibition. Local Projects.

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on its surface during the recovery and clearing efforts. Another series of four screens in the Foundation Hall are arranged horizontally, adjacent to a curved piece of steel extracted from the WTC wreckage. On these screens visitors are invited to “write a note of hope and remembrance” (Local Projects 2017a) using a stylus. The contributions are temporarily projected onto the base of the slurry wall of the museum before being permanently collected in the museum’s digital archive. Kasey Ball views these interactive tables as an extension of the “improvisational mark-up of the Last Column” that successfully “simulates the conditions that made an encounter with [it] so moving, securing the affective power of individual sentiments” (2017: 5). These interactive tables are perceived to be the final component of the philosophy of “collaborative storytelling” Barton and Local Projects have attempted to instill within the overall museum (Wright 2010: 21). The impact of these interactive elements varies between powerfully affective and more fleeting experiences. The young design studio would no doubt have felt the weight of the numerous political pressures outlined in the previous chapter and given those circumstances their contributions to an extremely demanding museum space are thoughtful and creative. It is perhaps only due to the highly innovative nature of Local Projects’ work in other institutions that one cannot help but wonder whether an opportunity might yet exist to push the studio’s commitment to collaboration, discussion, and contestation even further. We can look, for example, to the studio’s development of a Future City Lab at the Museum of the City of New York (the center point of the institution’s first permanent exhibition “New York at Its Core”), which calls on visitors to confront the city’s persistent urban problems and dilemmas. The exhibition includes a large interactive “map table,” curving up from the floor to the wall, that presents an array of crucial city data and demographic information: “Statistics on flooding over the last couple of years may appear on one panel . . . while flood maps, images of flooding and flood mitigation efforts show up, then dissolve, on others” (Miller 2016). Faced with this information, the visitors are then challenged by the Lab to work through the complicated issues affecting New York, from housing shortages to ecological crises, via an interactive digital urban simulation (see Figure 3.3). The studio is particularly adept at combining a relatively light technological touch with more social and human forms of engagement. The Urbanology game produced by Local Projects at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York once again asked participants to, in the words of the studio, “confront a variety of realistic urban dilemmas.” The game allowed “players to argue and vote for different scenarios along the major themes of urban life: innovation, transportation, health, affordability, wealth, lifestyle, sustainability and livability” (Local Projects 2017b). Players of the game must agree on responses to various urban scenarios, such as: “A production company will pay the city $20 million to film in the subway—but half the subway lines will be closed for a month. Will you agree to this?” or “A new nuclear power station 10 miles from your city will create many jobs and bring millions in tax revenue. Waste will be stored on-site. Will you allow it?” The results of their decisions are processed by an algorithm that calculates the closest real-world city that approximates the stated priorities of the players. The game is designed to provoke heated debate around genuinely difficult issues among a group of strangers. In these examples of media-enabled engagements, Local Projects does not appear to shy away from contentious confrontational public interactions. This is not to suggest that identical games, scenarios, or simulations would be entirely appropriate in the context of the National September 11 Museum, but would a similar faith in the public’s ability to discuss the issues of a post–9/11 world necessarily be misplaced? Should we consider why complex issues of urban economics and

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FIGURE 3.3 MCNY Future City Lab Map Table. Local Projects. climate change are deemed open to debate within the context of a museum institution, yet equally essential questions of national security, commemoration, and international relations seemingly are not? Swiss museum director Beat Hächler suggests that museums, even historical or memorial museums, must view themselves as “spaces of the present” and take on precisely this role of initiating difficult engagements. He explains: The question of the museum as a space of the present goes far beyond matters of participative methods and interactive tools. In essence, it is a question of the ability of the museum as institution to create new social spaces in the present: spaces (i.e. not simply places) which make recognizable, negotiable, and accessible to reflection; far from ruling out historical material, this definitely includes it. As I see it, a museum as a space of the present acts as a resonating chamber for one’s own behavior. For in such a setting, what museum visitors are confronted with above all is themselves. (354) The potential exists for the National September 11 Museum to generate such a “space of the present” in relation to the post–9/11 world. In suggesting this I by no means wish to diminish the difficulty of the design challenge involved in envisioning the forms of engagement and interaction that would allow this discussion to occur in a meaningful and safe, if not entirely harmonious, way. Barton and Local Projects have demonstrated their ability to meet this challenge in a number of different contexts and even if not entirely realized in the difficult circumstances of the National September 11 Museum, their design practice points to the productive engagements made possible by the thoughtful integration of digital media, architecture, and memory. While the work of Local Projects indicates the positive impact of digital media on our relationship to the built environment, the aftermath of 9/11 has also highlighted some of the more troubling

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ways that new media technologies have recently shaped discussions of architecture and urban space. The next chapter will look at two architecture-related protest movements that, enabled by the affordances of social media, formed in the years following the attacks. The first is the significant 9/11 conspiracy or “truth” movement, the presence of which at the tenth anniversary commemoration was already noted in the second chapter of this book. The second was an organized resistance to the proposed building of an Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan, inaccurately labeled the “Ground Zero Mosque.” These two examples serve as reminders that not all protest movements are necessarily progressive ones, while also prefiguring some of our current anxieties regarding the destabilizing political impact of digital technology, and social media in particular.

Notes 1 Erika Doss writes, “Naming is a focal point in contemporary commemoration if also a subject of considerable controversy” (2010: 151). 2 Unbeknownst to Thorp at the time he accepted the job, two computer scientists had already turned down the challenge outright (Matson 2011). 3 I encountered only one other person in this part of the museum during my three visits to the museum over a period of several years.

4 Secrets, false targets, and social media: Confronting conspiracy theories

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n May 6, 2016, Paul Salo, an American expatriate living in Thailand, posted a video on YouTube with the rather provocative title: “911Redux.com—We will fly a fully loaded 747 into a building at 500 MPH.” The video itself is considerably less dramatic; it consists of Salo himself, speaking to the camera (or more likely camera phone) at the edge of a Bangkok canal, serene apart from the passing of an occasional water taxi or tour barge. Salo, with late day sun on his face, speaks quite gleefully about his proposed initiative and crowdfunding campaign. The plan is as follows: raise $1.5 million for the purchase of a decommissioned plane1 with a working black box, in order to fly it, fully loaded with fuel, into an abandoned building via autopilot. The purpose? “To prove once and for all,” according to Salo, “was 9/11 a hoax, or was it real?” As if in anticipation of challenges to the experiment’s credibility, Salo goes on to claim in his appeal, “Everything that was in 9/11, we’re putting in this one” (Salo 2016). It would be easy to dismiss Salo’s campaign as irrelevant, naive, and distasteful were it not for the attention it has generated (the Washington Post, GQ, and The Daily Dot have all covered the story) and the fact that it seems representative of the undeniable longevity of a culture of “9/11 truth” claims with a close attachment to online forms of connectivity, circulation, and funding (from YouTube to Indiegogo). The 9/11 Redux joins a growing array of media objects and internet campaigns claiming that the official account of what unfolded on September 11 is not to be believed and that untold secrets regarding these events should be revealed. The “9/11 Truth Movement” is one prominent example of how architecture, the questioning of official narratives, and new types of grassroots organization converge in the aftermath of September 11. Not all of these examples are as polarizing as the proliferating number of 9/11 conspiracy theories. The destruction of the World Trade Center has brought architecture (long a domain reserved for expert knowledge, capital investment, and government decision making) into public view in an unprecedented manner and this has led to both encouraging and disturbing forms of political engagement concerning the built environment. Indeed, the line between positive democratization and reactionary populism is sometimes hazy and it is often difficult to decide precisely how this determination should be made. In some ways the activities of the 9/11 truth claimants follow closely the models of political activism advocated by progressive theorists and critics: circumvention of the gatekeepers of

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public opinion, mistrust of official narratives, disruption of existing hegemonies of knowledge, a sense of DIY media production. And it is precisely for this reason that cultural studies has sometimes struggled to contend with or critically evaluate conspiracy theories and other forms of questionable populism. When precisely does productive skepticism and popular activism cross over into the domain of conspiracy theory or political scapegoating? This chapter will seek to question this difficult political determination through three examples involving the intersection of architecture, popular organization, and digital technologies. It will begin by acknowledging the atmosphere of political mistrust that lends some context to the proliferation of conspiracy theories post-9/11. The chapter will then take a closer look at the growth of the 9/11 Truth Movement, its central claims, and its prominent texts and figures—including the emergence of independently produced internet documentaries, such as Loose Change. Architecture takes a central position in the majority of these oppositional accounts; their refutations are based on the belief that the official version of events presents multiple physical and structural impossibilities. One primary interest explored here is the ambivalent reaction of culture studies toward conspiracy theories and the understandable, yet problematic, reluctance of scholars on the left to dismiss or critique such movements. In order explore the potential of shifting the grounds of evaluation from a politics of suspicion to one of democratic visibility, the chapter will next introduce Jacques Rancière’s philosophy of appearance. While finding the productive grounds of a reformulated democratic politics in Rancière’s thought, the chapter will conclude by introducing two New York examples that indicate both the promise and possible limitations of this philosophical perspective: the public intervention into the early architectural proposals for the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan and a far more troubling protest movement against the building of a so-called Ground Zero Mosque.

Secrecy and post-truth politics In his consideration of the role of secrecy in the realm of the social, published at the turn of the last century, Georg Simmel characterizes the modern age as one in which the affairs of individuals become increasingly private and the general affairs of the state become increasingly public. He describes this transition to political transparency in the following way: In earlier times, functionaries of the public interests were customarily clothed with mystical authority, while, under larger and more mature conditions, they attain, through the extension of their sphere of domination, through the objectivity of their technique, and through their distance from every individual, a certainty and dignity by means of which they can permit their activities to be public. (1964: 336) Simmel’s depiction of a modern state in which the greater anonymity of the metropolis coincides with the absence of secrecy in matters of politics, administration, and jurisdiction hardly seems recognizable at the beginning of the current century. A general atmosphere of secrecy and mendacity now seems an inevitable accompaniment to the modern political process. The assumption that there is an absence of truth and transparency in contemporary political life appears, in fact, to be one of the few ideas that both ends of the mainstream political spectrum

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unreservedly agree upon. This was certainly the case in the immediate political aftermath of 9/11. Take as one example of the bipartisan mistrust of post–September 11 political figures, the publication in fairly quick succession in 2004–05 of Eric Alterman’s When President’s Lie (2004) and Peter Oborne’s The Rise of Political Lying (2005). Alterman (a journalist for the Left-leaning periodical The Nation) traces a history of post–World War II American presidential lying from FDR to George W. Bush. His chapter on the Bush administration is titled “The Post-Truth Presidency,” and Alterman suggests he may well have coined the term (Alterman 2012). At virtually the same moment, Oborne (a political editor for the conservative magazine The Spectator) claims that British parliamentary dishonesty escalated dramatically during the Blair years of New Labour rule. The assumption that we are experiencing an era of “post-truth” politics has of course only escalated in the Brexit and Trump moment of “fake news” and “alternative facts” (Davies 2016). Such accounts of political duplicity reinforce the common feeling that our representatives are likely deceiving us, but they also advance an even more disturbing notion, the suggestion that there are no perceivable repercussions when the lies of public figures are actually exposed. Nostalgia is now expressed for a lost time of bona fide scandal and real political fallout over confirmed acts of deception by public figures. In his comprehensive study of the ethics of lying, Jean-Michel Rabaté elucidates the forms of exemption that are at play in post–9/11 American politics. His text documents, for example, the shifting logic of the Bush administration’s justification for war in Iraq, where claims for the existence of WMDs metamorphosed into the president’s declaration: “One thing is certain: no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the Iraqi regime is no more” (in Rabaté 2008: 79). With the war officially declared over before it had begun, Bush’s adapted argumentation served to obscure the initial act of deception that had actually precipitated the invasion. Rabaté notes how military intervention in Iraq effectively produced many of the conditions that were originally stated as the pretext for war: reinforcing Islamic fundamentalism, bolstering guerrilla forces, and creating insufferable living conditions for the population. Lies that reduce the complexities of international politics to a battle of good versus evil have, in other words, the perverse capacity to bring into being the state of affairs they purport to already exist. As Rabaté writes, “When simplism is erected into state ideology, it is the state lie that dictates politics. The lie is simplifying, and brings in its wake a circular process. The lie creates its own world” (2008: 81). Like Simmel, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have considerable interest in the modern power of the secret and seek to sketch its particular character and dynamics. Deleuze and Guattari insist that it is a mistake to think the secret in terms of a binary machine having only two terms—the secret and its disclosure. This simplified conception, they claim, views the secret only in terms of a content, one that either remains concealed or is betrayed and brought into view. The authors of A Thousand Plateaus suggest instead that the power of the secret resides as much in its mode of action as its content—its real effect is a result of the way in which it imposes itself and spreads. Deleuze and Guattari thus recognize the essential status of “the secret as secretion,” something that “must sneak, insert, or introduce itself into the arena of public forms,” pressuring and prodding “known subjects into action” (1998: 287). It is in this way, they claim, that the secret “is elevated from a finite content to the infinite form of secrecy,” no longer the concealment of a definite content, but instead “an eminently virile paranoid form” (1998: 288). The fear that secrets are being concealed, in other words, quickly generates a general political ambience of suspicion. This depiction of a paranoiac

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atmosphere of secrecy, no longer conditioned by a definite or finite concealed object or content, seems quite an apt description of the post–9/11 political situation. After all, as Scott Michaelsen and Scott Cutler Shershow remind us, this time of unspecified terror threats and government wiretapping is one in which, “the state claims the right to uncover its citizens’ secrets, and to do so in secret” (2005: 126, italics in original). Edwards Snowden’s revelation of the sheer immensity of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program and the reach of the military’s covert drone strike initiatives (see, for example, Laura Poitras’ remarkable 2014 documentary Citizenfour) would seem to justify even the most extreme suspicions of rampant political abuse of power.

Politics of suspicion The current climate of indistinct secrecy, occasionally fueled by a confirmed case of political deception, is a generating machine for conspiracy theories. Yet there is of course a rather long tradition of conspiracy claims within American politics. We may look, for example, at the subject of historian Richard Hofstadter’s influential Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford in 1963 and later printed in Harper’s Magazine titled, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” In the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination, Hofstadter outlines a history of US conspiracy movements with alternating targets: anti-Masonic, anti-Catholic, anti-Mormonist, anti-banker. Similar to the state lie, whose simplification is more seductive than reality, “the paranoid mentality,” Hofstadter argues, “is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities” (1996: 36). While September 11 is clearly not the point of origin for conspiracy theories in America, it has elevated them to an unprecedented level of public attention and participation. The person who turns to the internet in a moment of doubt regarding the official version of what transpired on September 11 will be greeted by a surfeit of organizations and sites committed to uncovering an as-yet unavailable truth. The 9/11 conspiracy or “Truth Movement” (depending on your viewpoint) is a loose organization consisting of an astonishingly diverse group of voices, ranging from victim’s family members to esoteric millenarians, and an equally diverse set of claims and demands, from calls for greater access of information to more radical assertions of the “inside job” variety (see Figure 4.1). Members of the movement are connected by their deep suspicion of officially sanctioned explanations, such as the 9/11 Commission and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reports, and their demands for greater government accountability. They are also united by a very specific interest in architecture, an intense preoccupation with the structural characteristics of the buildings involved in the attacks: the Twin Towers, 7 World Trade Center, and the Pentagon building in Washington. The movement often engages in a form of amateur forensics that rests on the belief that a sinister truth behind the unanswered questions of 9/11 may be unlocked through a greater understanding of load-bearing columns, building demolition techniques and the melting points of construction materials. Those with engineering and design expertise therefore hold a special status within the movement and the organization Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (www.ae911truth.org) boasts 2,900 professional members. Although there is by no means a general consensus, the recurring architecturally oriented allegations made by “9/11 Truthers” include the assertions that fire caused by the airplane crashes

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FIGURE 4.1 9/11 Truth Movement at 10th Anniversary of 9/11. Joel McKim. was not hot enough to soften or melt the steel structures of the WTC; the Twin Towers and the 7 World Trade Center building could only have been brought down by controlled demolition of already planted explosives; and the entry hole in the Pentagon was too small to be produced by a Boeing 757 jet airliner (a cruise missile is frequently suggested as a more plausible cause). Seldom, if ever, have building design and architectural engineering been the topics of such fervent public research and debate. To offer but one example of the sustained and continuing level of engagement in the movement, Dr. J Leroy Hulsey, chair of the University of Alaska Fairbank’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, and two PhD researchers are currently completing a two-year computer modeling study of the WTC 7 collapse, crowdfunded by the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth organization (WTC 7 Evaluation). Hulsey already claims to have emphatically proven that fire did not cause the collapse of the building, allegedly disproving the findings of NIST’s own simulations and report. The extended 9/11 Truth network has certainly taken full advantage of the internet as an ideal medium for the publication and distribution of oppositional positions. A rather bewildering number of sites have emerged expressing doubts regarding the official account of September 11 or advocating alternative explanations, including, but not restricted to: the 9/11 Truth Movement (www.911truth. org), the 9/11 Visibility Project (www.septembereleventh.org), Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth (mp911truth.org), and Scientists for 9/11 Truth (www.scientistsfor911truth.org). The movement also has its share of internal rifts and splinter groups. The organization Scholars for 9/11 Truth (911scholars.org), led by retired Philosophy of Science professor James H. Fetzer2, now has competition from the Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice (stj911.org), formed by the physicist Steven

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Jones. Jones apparently established the breakaway group in order to distance himself from those who question the controlled demolition thesis and advance another explanation, such as directedenergy weapons fired from space, for the collapse of the buildings (Fenster 2008: 252). The democratization of video production and editing technology has also been an important element in the movement’s ability to achieve a visibility and legitimacy previously unknown for conspiracy claims. Video documentaries such as 911 In Plane Site, 9/11 Mysteries, and particularly Loose Change are remarkably successful examples of viral dissemination via the internet. By 2007 as many as 100 million people had viewed Loose Change, a film first released in the spring of 2005 and initially made on a laptop computer by twenty-one-year-old director Dylan Avery with a budget of $2,000 (Sales 2006). The original version of the film is a collage of news footage overlaid with narration by Avery himself and a musical soundtrack composed by the director’s friends. The eighty-two-minute Loose Change is a kind of visual compendium of already circulating 9/11 conspiracy theories, including the proposition that the South Tower was in fact struck by a remotecontrolled drone rather than a commercial airplane and that Flight 93 never crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and was instead diverted to Cleveland Hopkins Airport. There have now been six different versions of the film released, each one with an escalating budget and a paring back of some of the most outlandish claims. The 2007 third edition of the film Loose Change Final Cut saw the involvement of two of the biggest 9/11 conspiracy celebrities, libertarian radio host Alex Jones as executive producer and retired professor of theology David Ray Griffin3 as script consultant (Stahl 2011). Whatever we may think of the content of Avery’s films, it is hard not to view them as a quintessential example of the participatory “convergence culture” identified by Henry Jenkins (2006), in which corporate media content and grass roots, DIY production energies intersect. The success of Loose Change and its influential audio and visual style has spawned an entire genre of conspiracy films that extends well beyond the topic of 9/11. In 2009 the Jones directed and narrated The Obama Deception began circulating on the internet. The film argues that “the Obama phenomenon is a hoax . . . crafted by the captains of the New World Order . . . to con the American people into accepting global slavery” (Jones 2009). More recently, Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016 film Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party grossed over $13 million at the domestic box office (spoiler: the secret is the Democratic Party was historically the party of the Confederate South and therefore according to D’Souza secretly racist). In The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), Frederic Jameson remarked on the centrality of conspiracy themes in the fictional thrillers of a 1970s America struggling to come to grips with globalization and postmodernity (think for example of Three Days of the Condor or The Parallax View); in the post–9/11 world, conspiracy obsessions appear to have migrated to the documentary form. In the more traditional medium of print, journalist Thierry Meyssan’s 2002 book 11 septembre 2001: L’Effroyable imposture (published in English as 9/11: The Big Lie), which argues that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were orchestrated by an extreme rightwing group operating within the US government, became a best-seller in France selling more than 200,000 copies (Riding). And lending a further air of legitimacy to the movement, in the spring of 2004 two major international 9/11 Truth conferences were held two months apart, the “International Inquiry into 9/11” in San Francisco and the “International Citizens Inquiry into 9/11” in Toronto (Fenster 2008: 246). One Truth group has founded the “peer-reviewed” open-access Journal of 9/11 Studies that publishes material by Griffin and other 9/11 skeptics (Byford 2011: 89). On the milder end of these various Truth interventions is the assertion that the US government

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has concealed facts to cover up its incompetency in preventing the attacks. The more extreme, but also more frequently made claim of these movements is that the attacks constitute a deceptive “false flag” operation by the government itself (or a shadow organization operating within it), designed to justify military intervention in the Middle East. As radical as these views may seem, that conspiracy claimants have occupied more than a fringe position in post–9/11 political discourse can hardly be disputed. The organizations themselves repeatedly insist that theirs is not a marginal voice, often quoting a 2006 poll conducted by Zogby International (and commissioned by 911truth.org) which indicated that 42 percent of Americans believe that the US government and the 9/11 Commission “concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11th attacks” and that “there has been a cover up” (Zogby). But more impartial indications of the Truth Movement’s influence also exist. A Scripps Howard/Ohio University national survey in the same year found that more than a third of Americans suspect that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 attacks or intentionally did nothing to stop them (Hargrove 2006).4 Another sign of the movement’s power is the necessity for government inquiries, such as the NIST report, to directly acknowledge their most frequent assertions and explicitly deny their validity (NIST 2006). The prominence of the conspiracy movement also prompted the magazine Popular Mechanics to run a March 2005 cover story, dispelling claims from a scientific stand point, that later appeared in book form as Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts (Reagan and Dunbar 2006), complete with a foreword by Senator John McCain.5 The number of internet sites and sources disproving these theories nearly rivals the conspiracy sites themselves (these include the “Screw Loose Change” blog and the “Answering the questions of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth” site). The back and forth exchange between the 9/11 Truth Movement and its detractors took an almost comical level of circularity with the publication in 2007 of David Ray Griffin’s book titled, Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (2007).

The cultural studies response to 9/11 conspiracy theories What to do with or how to respond to the 9/11 Truth Movement has proven to be decidedly tricky for academics operating within cultural studies or critical theory traditions that have long been committed to celebrating grassroots initiatives, skepticism toward governmental authority, and the democratization of political communication. Although by no means the majority, some academic commentators have more or less adopted Hofstadter’s “paranoid style” thesis in relation to 9/11 conspiracy theories. Political scientist Michael Barkun’s A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (2003) dismisses the movement as simply a new variation on the millennialism of previous conspiracy claims. All conspiracy advocates, according to Barkun, are ultimately motivated by an apocalyptic vision of a world engaged in a struggle of good versus evil (which, one could argue, hardly differentiates them from the dominate political discourse of the Bush era). Not unlike Hofstadter, he characterizes their simplified view of events as one in which “nothing happens by accident,” “nothing is as it seems,” and “everything is connected” (2003: 3–4). Barkun discounts the legitimacy of these groups on the grounds that their quest to

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find the true loci of power behind the appearance of democracy is ultimately a refusal to engage in the actual complexities of the political process. Outlining this larger history of conspiracy theories is a useful exercise, but there are limitations to Barkun’s tendency to subsume the particularities of the 9/11 Truth claims within his general critique of evangelical, esoteric, and millenarian politics. The exceptional diversity and size of the movement, its impact on mainstream political discussions, and its unique methods of communication and dissemination are left largely unconsidered by Barkun’s all-encompassing theory. Although certainly skeptical or dismissive of their claims, law professor Mark Fenster is more sympathetic to the causes and motivations of 9/11 conspiracy movements. He notes that the ambiguities and lack of individual and institutional accountability in the 9/11 Commission’s official account has helped fuel the growth in conspiracy theories (2008: 239). Conspiracy theorists must be placed in a tradition of populism, Fenster argues, that forms part of an important democratic tradition of calling for transparency. Yet he ultimately condemns the movement on the grounds that it “leads antiwar activists to commit themselves to the politics of the illusory,” allowing the tragic loss of life in the Middle East to continue (2008: 288). Many scholars, however, have been much more reluctant to dismiss conspiracy movements on the grounds of their failure to participate in traditional political channels. For a substantial number of cultural studies scholars, conspiracy theories provide a model of sorts for political and epistemological resistance in all its forms. Claire Birchall, for example, in her essay titled “Just Because You’re Paranoid, Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Out to Get You,” asserts that “conspiracy theory as a discourse enables specific interpretations and supports a unique knowledge about how power works” (2004). She criticizes the tendency to pathologize conspiracy theories or theorists and contra-Hofstadter she suggests that the paranoiac mode of these movements may in fact be a reasonable response to many contemporary political situations. Conspiracy theories represent for Birchall a kind of paradigm for “cultural studies’ own unstable, ambiguous and sometimes ‘paranoid’ relationship with legitimacy” (2004). A somewhat awkward and perhaps questionable affiliation is thus established between conspiracy theories and cultural studies. Conspiracy movements serve to demonstrate that an aporia of legitimacy defines all knowledge and interpretation, and this revelation becomes itself a form of authorization for a discipline that is, above all, self-reflexive with regard to the uncertainty of meaning. Cultural studies emerges from its encounter with conspiracy theories as the only academic discipline capable of facing up to the secret of the radical contingency of legitimation. And it is, consequently, the only discipline willing to uncritically enfold conspiracy claims into its political project. Birchall suggests elsewhere that this might mean “not being able to say that a conspiracy theory (or any other strange, crazy, odd, paranoid or just plain stupid text) is outside the cultural studies’ ‘canon,’ because these judgements themselves are inhabited, made possible by the necessary possibility of overinterpretation, paranoia, and conspiracy theory. The decision itself would be unstable” (2006: 85).6 But in its emphatic embrace of contingent meaning, I wonder if cultural studies risks abandoning the responsibility to decide what constitutes a productive political ally. In the post–9/11 world of rampant conspiracy claims there may be significant dangers in declaring any person or group that demonstrates a counter-hegemonic desire to confront the existing institutions of power, a fellow traveller. I believe some of the potential problems of such an alliance manifest themselves in Jack Z. Bratich’s attempt to defend the “subjugated knowledges7” (2008: 7) of conspiracy research against

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the agents of political rationality. In his analysis of the post–9/11 situation, Bratich admonishes the “gatekeeper Left” (figures such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn) for contributing to a “conspiracy panic” (2008: 141) that denounces conspiracy theories as political distractions and effectively creates a hierarchy of dissent and activism. He writes: Conspiracy panics run the risk of infusing the Left with a divisive tendency, the splitting of active forces, forcing them to turn against each other. To characterize conspiracy theories as being opposed to Left concerns (even aligned with the dominant) is to already defuse active dissent (investigative powers, organizational efforts) that could potentially be linked to leftist politics. (2008: 163) The possibility that claims made by 9/11 conspiracy theorists might be poorly researched, contradictory, sensational, or opportunistic seems to be of little consequence in Bratich’s formulation. The even more problematic anti-Semitic and ultra-conservative currents within these movements also appear to escape criticism.8 Bratich acknowledges these tendencies only in suggesting that their existence is exploited by conspiracy panics as a means of delegitimizing populist forms of resistance. Through a somewhat strange twist of logic, in Bratich’s analysis, it is the promoters of “conspiracy panics” and not the conspiracy theorists that are guilty of “scapegoating,” “paranoid projections,” and “self-delusional claims” (2008: 166). In a similar vein to Birchall and Bratich, Jodi Dean’s early work on conspiracy theories asserts that these claims serve as the material proof of the very implausibility of an operative public sphere, exposing the limitations of political positions based on notions of complacency, consensus, and transparency. Dean suggests that conspiracy theorists should be characterized by their willingness to embrace an absence of closure and undertake a perpetual search for more information. Far from being politically irresponsible, Dean champions conspiracy theorists as exemplars of postmodern political subjectivity. She writes: “Insofar as its practitioners can link together varieties of disparate phenomena to find patterns of denial, occlusion, and manipulation, conspiracy theory, far from a label dismissively attached to the lunatic fringe, may well be an appropriate vehicle for political contestation” (1998: 8). In her book Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace, alien abduction victims are Dean’s central examples of social agents enacting the freedom of information gathering and unveiling the fictions of accepted political discourse. The persistence of conspiracy theories in the public realm stokes Dean’s enthusiastic critique of normative political processes and authoritative truth claims. She concludes her study by commenting: “Welcome to the twenty-first century. Stories of rational persons making decisions freely and equally as they talk together in a public sphere no longer command much mindshare” (1998: 179). Yet the political prominence and libertarian leanings of 9/11 Truthers are difficult for Dean to reconcile and she insists in her more recent writing that the movement “manifests a shift in conspiracy thinking, a shift from questioning to certainty,” which she ultimately labels a “psychotic discourse” (2009: 148–49). Dean’s dramatic shift from conspiracy praise to conspiracy condemnation is indicative, I think, of the difficulty the 9/11 Truth Movement poses for cultural studies and critical theory. Drawing the line between productive and problematic populism or between healthy and “psychotic” political skepticism can be challenging for disciplines committed to championing marginal and counterhegemonic voices. Clearly, not all cultural theorists align themselves unreservedly with present-

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day conspiracists, but there is a well-established tradition of distrust within contemporary critical thought. Michel Foucault wrote of philosophy’s inheritance of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” born in the nineteenth century and exemplified by the three masters of interpretation, Nietzche, Freud, and Marx (1998). From each we receive a different mode of skepticism, a call to look beneath or beyond the surface appearances of language, consciousness, and social relations. Frederic Jameson similarly characterizes the various “depth models” of modern thought, in which the search for truth requires an act of excavation: the dialectical separation of “essence and appearance”; the existential model of “authenticity and inauthenticity”; the semiotic opposition between “signifier and signified” (2006: 490).9 These techniques of investigation are particularly ingrained within the traditions of the political Left. Sven Lütticken has recently pointed out that even Guy Debord, the exponent of the surface powers of the spectacle, often turned to considerations of conspiracy in his late writings. Discussing the European political situation of the 1970s and 1980s, Debord argued that the state itself had become conspiratorial, plotting to maintain the existing social order. Noting how the threat of terrorism had taken on a new significance as an instrument of state preservation, he explained: “This perfect democracy itself produces its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism. It wants to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results” (in Lütticken 2005). Drawing Debord’s comments into the context of the present, Lütticken attempts to navigate a tricky conceptual and political ground: how to confront the “structural conspiracies” that limit political change, without conceding to the sometimes “racist, facist, or occult” tendencies of existing conspiracy movements (Lütticken 2005). Lütticken finds himself in a difficult position that is shared by many Left-oriented critics. Distinguishing necessary forms of suspicion from paranoia and choosing productive political partnerships are not easy decisions in the present moment. In their recent book Cartographies of the Absolute, Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle insightfully outline the current conspiracy dilemma. While they do not hesitate to label conspiracy theory an “immensely oversimplified narrativisation of amorphous or anonymous global power dynamics,” they also recognize the danger of a potential conspiracy backlash in which the fear of being labeled delusional or paranoid may cause people to turn away from investigations of the “dark geography and relations” of contemporary politics and economics (2005). They point to the artist Trevor Paglen’s mapping project of US government secret sites, Blank Spots on the Map, and his observation that one of the reasons that research into this covert world of military “black sites” is so scarce is its “susceptibility to the charge of conspiracy theory” (2005). The proliferation of unfounded and delusional conspiracy claims paradoxically act, in other words, as a concealing device for actual networks and practices of political subterfuge. Scholarship and activism do of course exist that criticizes conspiracy movements for focusing on false targets and diverting attention away from pressing political problems, while simultaneously questioning the validity of traditional political institutions and processes. An example of this approach is the San Francisco–based activist collective Retort, a self-identified gathering of “antagonists of the present order of things” (2005: xi) that includes Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts. Their book titled Afflicted Powers calls the return of an actionable resistance politics that avoids producing conspiracy theories (attributing complex geopolitical formations to the “magical shaping power” of capitalism) or declarations of the obvious (claiming to have “uncovered” the Bush and Cheney administration’s ties to the military industrial complex). They state: “We tire of detectives solving crimes the criminals have never bothered to conceal” (2005: 10). The group criticizes, for example, the sloganeering tendencies of many of the political

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movements of the Left, calling for a more nuanced interpretation of the post–9/11 global context. In a chapter titled “Blood for Oil?” Retort insists that the common assertion that the Iraq War is essentially an oil grab fails to recognize the position of oil within a larger history of capitalist market expansion. The group emphasizes the need to view the war in Iraq as “a radical, punitive, ‘extraeconomic’ restructuring of the conditions necessary for expanded profitability” (2005: 72). While the collective may distance itself from the conspiracy claims of the 9/11 Truth Movement, Retort sets about disclosing processes of global capital that are in many ways just as terrifying. They provide convincing evidence that we are wise to be suspicious of both the assurances of state power and the oversimplified reactions to them. Yet the group fully admits that revealing the workings of global capital is an easier task than suggesting a political response appropriate to countering them. Retort remains hopeful that an alternative to the current order will eventually surface, but the group is ultimately left in a state of waiting: “We shall pose the questions, in other words, not answer them” (2005: 174). Having no difficulty identifying the deceptions of the state and the perniciousness of global capital expansion, Retort struggles nonetheless to envision a political movement capable of confronting these powers.

Rancière and the politics of appearance The theoretical views on conspiracy outlined above highlight several genuine ambiguities and dilemmas present in the current political landscape. Whether forging alliances with conspiracy movements or seeking distance from them, contemporary critical theorists tend to participate in a mode of thought founded on some form of suspicion regarding the democratic process. If there is a point of consensus among these views, it can perhaps be found in the common conviction that an operative and transparent public sphere, if it ever did exist, is certainly defunct in our current era of political secrecy. A shared sense exists across the political spectrum that the secrets and lies propagated by the State must first be exposed, before genuine politics can commence. But there are perhaps some repercussions to this widespread position of political skepticism and distrust. The action of looking behind the surface appearance of democracy may indeed reveal a complex and even clandestine structure of decision making that escapes public view, but it does not necessarily produce a more satisfying model of political communication and action. I wonder if our suspicions that the sphere of politics has been corrupted may have the unintended consequence of blinding us to the rare occasions when a more promising form of collective organization has occurred. With these thoughts in mind, I would like to turn now to a brief examination of the philosophy of Jacques Rancière, which begins from a significantly different starting point than most works of cultural studies or critical theory and therefore has the potential at least to shift our political perspective. Rancière is actually quite explicit in his intention to replace a hermeneutics of suspicion with a politics of affirmation. In contrast to methodologies of disclosure aimed at bringing about the necessary conditions for politics to take place, Rancière formulates a theory of the political that begins with the axiomatic claim that equality is not a goal of politics, but rather its precondition. “Politics,” simply put by Rancière, “is that activity which turns on equality as its principle” (1999: ix). From this fundamentally different point of departure, Rancière sets out not to

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expose the inequality that exists beneath the facade of neoliberal democracies, but to consider the ways in which the existence of equality may be confirmed and made visible. It is a viewpoint that attributes far greater significance to the public’s appearance in domains where they have traditionally been excluded and I would therefore like to consider it as a possible foundation for considering the ways in which architecture, beyond the singular example of the Truth Movement, became the subject of widespread debate in a post–9/11 New York City. After outlining some of the core elements of Rancière’s thought, I’ll conclude by “testing out” his political perspective via the introduction of two architectural examples linked to the Ground Zero site. The shifted ground of Rancière’s approach is quite clearly stated in his short text On the Shores of Politics, where he employs his customary method of revisiting classical writings on democracy. Here Rancière turns to Book II of Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War in which Pericles delivers an oration characterizing two indispensable features of the democratic political subject: “the absence of constraints and the absence of suspicions” (2007: 41). Democracy, for Thucydides, is thus distinguished from other political regimes, by its rejection of “looking underneath” (2007: 41). Rancière juxtaposes this depiction of democracy with the practices of contemporary social theorists that have styled their work as a science of suspicion, seeking through a process of demystification to shatter what is claimed to be the illusion of democracy. According to Rancière, democracy under the lens of philosophy and the social sciences is perpetually called upon to confess to not being what it claims to be; those committed to its practice are labeled duped participants in a political system veiling the truth of inequality. Throughout its history, Rancière contends, philosophy has actually seldom been receptive to the idea of democracy.10 He suggests that from Plato to Marx, political philosophy has been focused on “the achievement of the true essence of politics, of which democracy merely produces the appearance” (1999: 63). The republic envisioned by Plato is one that substitutes the disordered individualism of democracy with a social arrangement that replicates the well-structured life of an organism, each part destined to occupy its natural role and function. Plato proposes to partition the unruly demos into mutually distinct categories of citizenship: rulers and philosophers; soldiers and auxiliaries; artisans and farmers. And each role is assigned its corresponding and exclusive activity: thought, war, or labor. Rancière gives the name “archipolitics” to this political philosophy, of which he is critical, that posits the existence of an arkhe—an underlying principal of justice and the good that dictates that those that govern and those that are governed do so according to their dispositions.11 Rancière argues that Plato’s political philosophy effectively reduces politics to policing—he uses the term “the police” to designate the system charged with monitoring and enforcing the distribution and legitimization of places and roles. This profound mistrust of democracy resurfaces again, according to Rancière, in the modern political scientist’s reproach of the self-obsessed members of contemporary consumer society, whom they view as infantile social actors, allegedly incapable of assuming their political responsibilities. The supposed incompetence of the citizenry becomes justification for putting democracy to one side in favor of a republic governed by those that are most fit to rule.12 Politics actually occurs only sporadically, according to Rancière, when the configuration established by the police is interrupted. The authorized parceling out of places, occupations, and powers is thrown into dispute by the emergence into the social field of those in the community who have been assigned no role in this arrangement; Rancière describes this disruption as the “institution of a part of those who have no part” (1999: 11). For Rancière then,

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politics is a divisive or disintegrative force before it is a unifying one; it breaks down the solidified hierarchies of the established order and “exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account, setting up a community by the fact of placing in common a wrong” (1999: 27). The wrong alluded to here is not a specific grievance or dispute that could be settled once and for all by judicial or political means (Rancière does not put forward an issues-based politics); it is instead the infinite wrong produced by a fundamental schism— the incommensurability that exists between the equality of all speaking beings and the unequal allotment of places and roles. He therefore insists that democracy, the political appearance of the excluded demos, is an intermittent or sporadic occurrence that must be repeatedly invoked rather than a type of constitution or a form of society. “The political wrong,” Rancière declares, “does not get righted” (2007: 103). Rancière’s appraisal of the contemporary political situation is certainly a critical one. “Societies, today as yesterday,” he comments, “are organized by the play of oligarchies. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as democratic government” (2006: 52). Rancière describes our current state of “post-democratic” politics as one that has produced a dangerous form of social policing dependent on an “extension of the political powers of authorities who are not accountable (experts, judges, committees)” (1999: 97). We are living in the time of consensus politics, according to Rancière, in which the state resorts to the constant deployment of opinion polling and the ceaseless formation of political partnerships in order to prevent the disputes that constitute democracy from emerging in the public arena. In contemporary consensus politics, governments on the Left and the Right present all political decisions as inevitable outcomes, necessary directions conditioned by either the will of the general public or the uncontrollable forces of the global marketplace. The project of democracy in this age of consensus, Rancière maintains, is to resist the government’s shrinking of the public sphere and the oligarchic relegation of non-State actors to a domain outside of politics. The struggle to enlarge the public sphere has historically involved two aspects, he suggests: “the recognition, as equals and as political subjects, of those that have been relegated by State law to the private life of inferior beings; and the recognition of the public character of types of spaces and relations that were left to the discretion of the power of wealth” (2006: 55). As governments attempt to move more elements of public life into the sphere of private negotiations and expert knowledge, politics must intervene to ensure that these issues regain their status as collective disputes. Democracy, in other words, occurs when politics is no longer given over to representatives and when the forces of consensus and privatization are challenged by the emergence of public “dissensus.” Rancière writes: “the demonstration proper to politics is always both argument and opening up the world where argument can be received and have an impact—argument about the very existence of such a world” (1999: 56, italics in original).

Architecture made visible Given Rancière’s theorization of politics as a resistance against the hierarchical assignment of roles and places and the reestablishment of public spaces and relations, it is somewhat surprising that he has written so infrequently on the topic of architecture and urbanism. Yet the role of architecture as both an instrument of policing and as a potential site for the emergence of politics seems

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implicitly present within these texts. The spatial orientation of Rancière’s thought is evident, for example, in his statement: “Political action always acts upon the social as the litigious distribution of places and roles; it is always a matter of knowing who is qualified to say what a particular place is and what is done in it” (in Hallward 2005: 34). And Rancière has quite recently turned his attention specifically to issues of urban space, architecture, and occupation in interviews, public talks, and short written contributions. In a conversation with Mark Foster Gage at the Yale School of Architecture, Rancière characterizes architecture as an “instrument for the reform of perception” (Rancière 2016). The question of aesthetics is always formulated by Rancière not in terms of art or the beautiful, but in correspondence with its original Greek definition pertaining to sense perception more generally, which for him is inevitably bound up in the ability to establish a common world. He quite famously refers to this notion of aesthetics as a “distribution of the sensible,” a partitioning and allocation that “revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time” (2004: 13). In relation to this particular and inherently political concept of aesthetics, Rancière views architecture as a mechanism for the organization of the sensible and a practice concerned not just with “constructing units for inhabiting, but also constructing new senses of seeing, walking, acting, feeling, etc.” (Rancière 2016). Rancière has recently commented directly on contemporary occupation-based political movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Taksim Square in Istanbul. He highlights the twofold sense of the word occupation, a reference to the activity of taking up space and the notion of an employment. These specific forms of political protest are significant, according to Rancière, because they function as both a “transformation of this space into a public space” and “the symbolic configuration of a community” which interrupt “the normal order of social occupations” (2012). Here I would like to consider Rancière’s philosophical claims in relation to the emergence of another urban community in Lower Manhattan, one that was united by an effort to make the rebuilding of Ground Zero a matter of public concern rather than private decree. In the months following the attacks a significant dissensus arose over the existing hierarchy of decision making regarding the site and interventions by architects, planners, and civic groups attempting to influence the rebuilding process. This unsolicited response by the city’s design professionals and community organizers was an effort to complicate the consensus opinion arrived at by official government agencies and private ownership and to make public a discussion that was at risk of being conducted in closed boardrooms. In Rancière’s terminology, those that had been granted no right to be counted as speaking beings refused to be excluded from these deliberations. Let me name just a few of the public voices that came forward to influence the architectural debate at the time. In February of 2002 New York New Visions, a coalition of twenty-one architecture, planning, and design organizations, released their “Principles for the Rebuilding of Lower Manhattan,” the result of the pro-bono work of some 400 individuals. The New Visions recommendations included the establishment of an open and transparent memorial process, a flexible mixed-use plan for Lower Manhattan and the prioritization of design excellence and sustainability (New York New Visions 2002). Rebuild Downtown Our Town (or R.Dot) was a citizen planning organization founded by the architect Beverly Wills and Susan S. Szenasy, the editor in chief of the architecture and design magazine Metropolis. The group, which eventually numbered over 500 people, saw itself as a conduit for bringing the unfiltered views of the Downtown

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residents to the attention of city and state officials. R.Dot emphasized a planning vision that would take into account the entire area of Lower Manhattan, not just the WTC site, and proceeded according to the assumption that “only when the city was seen through the eyes of the citizens who lived and worked in it everyday could any attempt be made to determine how that city might best be reconstructed” (R.Dot 2002). In contradistinction to these community recommendations, in April of 2002 the Lower Manhattan Development Committee (LMDC)13 and the Port Authority jointly issued a request for proposals for the redevelopment of the area based on a program dominated by the insistence that ten and a half million square feet of office space be replaced, along with hotel facilities, retail space, and transportation infrastructure. From the fifteen submitted proposals (which were undisclosed to the public), a committee made up of representatives from both agencies selected the architects of Beyer Blinder Belle, a very conservative choice of a firm best known for its restoration work on landmarks such as Grand Central Terminal and Ellis Island (Goldberger 2004: 91). Beyer Blinder Belle was called upon to produce six different master plan alternatives to be released to the public that summer. Politics, in the sense that Rancière uses the term, was reintroduced into official proceedings through the initiative of another organization seeking to broaden public participation in the reconstruction process. Forming soon after the attacks, the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York, a coalition of civic groups and community and professional associations, chaired by Robert Yaro, the president of the Regional Plan Association, spearheaded a series of town hall– style public hearings they named “Listening to the City.” Presented with Beyer Blinder Belle’s six uninspiring alternatives, the 4,300 people assembled in the Javits Convention Center on July 20, 2002, emphatically dismissed the designs as “too dense, too dull and too commercial” (Civic Alliance 2002: 2). The diverse group of New Yorkers called instead for a project that was more aesthetically ambitious and provided a better mix of commerce, culture, and housing with an emphasis on “the needs of low- and moderate-income people and new immigrants” and the provision of “adequate public facilities” (Civic Alliance 2002: 28). The reaction against the Beyer Blinder Belle concept plans was so vehement that the Port Authority and the LMDC had little choice but to abandon them and initiate a new design competition that would this time be waged in view of the public. The Listening to the City meeting saw the temporary appearance within the sphere of architecture of a previously uncounted part of New York’s population. Rancière critiques the incessant opinion polling of consensus politics for its attempts to present the demos with a choice that is, in reality, no choice at all. The public gathered at the convention center on Eleventh Avenue resisted the non-choice presented to them by the LMDC and the Port Authority and refused to select among six mediocre designs that represented only insignificant variations on an unchanged and commercially dominated program. They demonstrated instead an ability to articulate intelligent arguments on subjects for which they have been assigned no role or function, topics ranging from architectural aesthetics to urban planning. The people who participated proved themselves to be political actors capable of recognizing the complexities involved in a rebuilding process of this magnitude. As Paul Goldberger notes, the various popular interventions into architectural discussions in New York testify that public involvement in planning need not be “synonymous with the idea of protest” (2004: 109). The public came into appearance post-9/11, not simply to say no to proposed projects, but also to state their desire to be involved, as speaking subjects, in the process of planning and creation.14

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Not all examples of architecture activism and protest that emerged post-9/11 are as heartening as this one, however. I would like to conclude this chapter by presenting a second example of an oppositional community forming around a Lower Manhattan development plan that provides a number of potential challenges to Rancière’s philosophy of radical democracy and productive dissensus. On December 9, 2009, The New York Times ran a front-page article revealing that a fivestory building in Lower Manhattan, located some two blocks north of the Ground Zero site, had been earmarked for the construction of an Islamic cultural center. The building, at 45 Park Place, was formerly home to the Burlington Coat Factory, but had stood vacant for nearly eight years after sustaining considerable damage to its upper floors from falling airplane debris during the 9/11 attacks. At the time the newspaper feature was published the building had already been in use for several months as a Muslim prayer space, accommodating an overflow of worshippers from a crowded mosque located a little further north in the Tribeca neighborhood. Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam leading the $150 million project, envisioned the cultural center as a means to challenge religious extremism and promote interfaith dialogue between the moderate Muslim community of Manhattan and other New Yorkers. The structure would house cultural and recreational facilities open to all (including a fitness center, a swimming pool, childcare facilities and a culinary school) in the mold of the 92nd Street Y or the Jewish Community Center (see Figure 4.2). The story of the development (officially named Park51) was remarkable, not because Muslim worshippers had been practicing their faith so close to the most scrutinized and emotionally charged building site in America or that this far more ambitious Islamic center was being proposed at the location, but because there seemed to be relatively little opposition to either occurrence. The New York Times article listed Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Joy Levitt, the executive director of the Jewish Community Center, among those already voicing their support for the project. Levitt is quoted as saying, “For the J.C.C. to have partners in the Muslim community that share our vision of pluralism and tolerance would be great” (Blumenthal and Mowjood 2009).15 Manhattan Community Board One eventually voted twenty-nine to one in favor of the Islamic center’s construction, arguing that it would bring much needed social and cultural services to the downtown area. Perhaps the ease with which the city of New York embraced the idea of an Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan should not be surprising given that neighborhood has been home to two mosques for decades—the congregation of Masjid Manhattan has been worshipping peacefully on Warren Street, only four blocks from Ground Zero, since 1970. Yet by the summer of 2010 this initial acceptance would be eclipsed by an unrelenting storm of protest over its proposed construction. Spearheaded by the conservative blogger Pamela Geller, co-founder of the “Stop Islamization of America” organization, a vocal movement emerged to prevent the center, now misleadingly dubbed the “Ground Zero Mosque,” from being built. Geller’s virulently anti-Muslim blogsite “Atlas Shrugs” featured stories with headlines such as, “Islamic Supremacist Mega Mosque at Ground Zero,” and she would later produce her own highly inflammatory conspiracy documentary in 2011 titled Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 911 Attacks.16 Geller would become a mainstay on mainstream media for the duration of the summer (Fox News in particular, but also CNN and MSNBC), organizing several protests at the Ground Zero site, the largest of which attracted some 500 protesters (CNN 2010). Following months of sustained negative coverage within the conservative press, the developers would eventually shelf plans for the community center in 2011, later announcing an alternative plan for a luxury condominium project on the site (Kaysen 2017).

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FIGURE 4.2 Park51 Rendering. SOMA Architects.

Does Rancière’s thought provide us with a way of distinguishing between these two very different instances of architectural protest—both in some ways cases of new political voices making themselves heard? Can his philosophy help us delineate between the paranoid suspicion of conspiracy theories and the productive critique of authoritative power? And can we support Rancière’s notion of radical democracy, without also countenancing the xenophobic and reactionary

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forms of populism that have emerged so frequently in a post–9/11 world? Rancière himself has felt the need to address variations on these questions in the wake of the populist nationalism that has surfaced recently in his native France. Contributing to the French newspaper Libération in 2011, the philosopher penned an article with a title that translates to “The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass,” a version of which was later published in English in the essay collection What Is a People? under the title “The Populism that Is Not to Be Found.” In it Rancière begins by questioning the conjunction of traits that are generally assumed to characterize “populism”: “a style of speaking that addresses itself directly to the people, going beyond its representatives and notables; the assertion that governments and ruling elites are more concerned with their own interests than the state; an identitary rhetoric that expresses fear and rejection of foreigners” (2017: 101). Yet these traits need not necessarily be linked, according to Rancière. He insists that the entity called “the people . . . is tied to no form of racist sentiment or xenophobia” (2017: 102). In fact, Rancière insists a single entity named “the people” does not exist: “What exist are diverse or even antagonistic figures of the people” (2017: 102). The particular figure of a dangerous populism—“ignorant masses . . . led to extreme violence by the circulation of uncontrolled rumors and contagious fear” (2017: 103)—thus becomes a way for existing state powers to justify their rule. Better the political status quo then the chaos of the unruly and incompetent masses. This is not to say that racist and xenophobic movements do not exist and are not a threat, but Rancière suggests they often feed off of the divisive and fear-mongering strategies and policies of the state, rather than being generated directly from the body popular. In a powerful indictment of the state’s role in propagating that fear, Rancière declares: Our states base their legitimacy today on their ability to ensure security. But this legitimization has as its correlate the obligation to show at every moment the monster that threatens us to maintain the continual feeling of an insecurity that mixes the risk of economic crisis and unemployment with those of black ice and formamide so that it can all culminate in the supreme threat of the Islamist terrorist. The extreme right only has to fill in the colors of skin and blood on the standard portrait drawn by governmental measures and ideological prose. (2017: 104) Where does this then leave us in relation to the question of post–9/11 conspiracy theories, populism, and democratic communities explored in this chapter? Although by no means offering a comprehensive political solution, Rancière’s thought does provide an important reminder that not every emergence of “the people” into the public realm need be championed and that all must be evaluated according to their commitment to genuine equality and establishing a shared world, rather than a selective or self-serving act of repartitioning. There is therefore no simple formula by which to distinguish critical and reactionary political upswells. The Left or cultural studies must not, therefore, abdicate their responsibility for identifying and rejecting movements founded on xenophobia or paranoia, however grass roots or resistant to established structures of authority they may be. Yet Rancière also warns against the tendency to equate all forms of populism to nationalism and the instrumental way in which state power promotes the parallel images of an omnipresent foreign threat and the dangerous and ignorant mass that opposes it. If hope remains for a genuine, if sporadically appearing politics, Rancière suggests it must not be founded on the suspicion of democracy, but rather on the continued assertion of its actual existence. In the struggle to determine how Lower Manhattan should be redeveloped we have on occasion seen

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that assertion of equality and the making public of decisions that would otherwise be decided in the private sphere of expert knowledge. The next chapter of this book turns to yet another intersection of media and architecture that emerged in the wake of 9/11. One prominent response to the immediate challenge of rebuilding Lower Manhattan came from an emerging field of architects committed to experimenting with new forms of digital design practice. While these digitally generated structures and renderings are now more commonplace, the official and unofficial design competitions and exhibitions that followed the September 11 attacks served as a kind of international showcase for digital design innovations that had been developing throughout the 1990s. A whole series of amorphous shapes and contorted towers circulated in New York periodicals and on gallery walls. This future-oriented strand of architecture draws heavily on the writing of Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher often positioned as the preeminent thinker of the new. There is, however, a prominent place for memory within Deleuze’s system of thought and the next chapter will question whether the philosopher’s concept of creative recall might encourage an architectural response to the challenges of Ground Zero that is simultaneously attuned to the demands of past, present, and future.

Notes 1 Salo would later revise his plan to include a 767, a plane matching the ones used on September 11, rather than the originally stated 747. 2 In 2015 Fetzer self-published an edited collection with the self-explanatory, yet disturbing, title Nobody Died at Sandy Hook. 3 Griffin is the author of multiple 9/11 conspiracy books, among them The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9-11 (2004b) and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2004a). 4 Conspiratorial beliefs within the Muslim global community are similarly high, if not higher. McGill researchers Jamil and Rousseau note that a 2007 Pew Research Center survey found numbers believing that Arabs were not involved in the attacks ranging from 28 percent in the United States to 59 percent in Egypt and Turkey (2011: 248). Their own surveys of Pakistani communities in Montreal and Karachi found rates of conspiracy believe as high as 81 percent (2011: 252). 5 On the fifth anniversary of the attacks, the syndicated news program Democracy Now! aired a quite heated debate between the creators of Loose Change and the editors of Popular Mechanics. 6 Birchall has more recently been critiquing the advocation of political transparency, arguing for the renewed political potential of secrecy as an anti-neoliberal “non-positive [form] of knowledge” (2011: 77). 7 Bratich employs Michel Foucault’s term describing popular forms of thought disqualified as inadequate by the dominance of official systems of knowledge. 8 Although not the dominant discourse, there is a noticeable presence of racist or xenophobic commentary within the 9/11 Truth Movement. Perhaps the most frequently circulated claim of the “9/11 was a Zionist plot” variety was the story that 4,000 Jews working in the WTC towers were warned not to go to work on September 11 (Gorowitz Institute 2003). 9 Although Jameson is himself critical of the turn to conspiracy theories, calling them a “degraded” and “desperate” version of the cognitive mapping required to make sense of globalized logic of late capitalism (1990: 356).

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10 Jacques Derrida makes a similar observation in his text Rogues when he notes, “there are in the end rather few philosophical discourses . . . in the long tradition that runs from Plato to Heidegger, that have without reservation taken the side of democracy” (2005: 41). 11 Jean-Michel Rabaté reminds us, even Plato’s perfect republic is not without its element of dishonesty. Despite the supposed naturalness of these divisions and the philosopher’s general disdain for falsities and simulacra, the propagation of a “noble lie” is deemed necessary by Plato: “a deception that will make possible the solidification of the social body of his ideal city” (2008: 167). The lie comes in the form of myth, a story that confirms that all members of the republic are brothers of the same earth, but forged from three different metals (gold, silver, and iron) according to their respective social position. The indispensable myth of the republic serves to naturalize the varied status of the citizens. 12 Rancière has in mind particularly the tradition of “political nobility” in France in which the vast majority of politicians are trained at the same institution, the exclusive Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris otherwise known as Sciences Po. The French presidents Jacques Chirac, François Mitterrand, Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande, and Emmanuel Macron all attended the institute (although Sarkozy failed to graduate). 13 The LMDC was formed as a division of the Empire State Development Corporation, an existing public authority of the state of New York under the control of then governor George Pataki. The LMDC’s level of political accountability was a matter of considerable concern. As Peter Marcuse noted of the makeup of the original eleven representatives of the board: “one African American, no architects, no cultural leaders, one downtown resident, no educators, no families of 9/11 victims, three former Giuliani administrative officials, one friend of George W. Bush, no planners, one union leader (construction), no urbanists, and four Wall Street executives” (2002: 153). 14 This was no insignificant feat given the scale of private and governmental interests involved, including pressure by lease holder and real-estate developer Larry Silverstein, who was anxious to recoup the $3.2 billion cost of his ninety-nine-year lease (Goldberger 2004: 38). The building of the original towers was also infamous for the non-democratic development process, including questionable collusion between financier David Rockefeller and his brother Nelson Rockefeller, then governor of the state of New York with direct influence over the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. 15 More astonishing still, the staunchly conservative Fox News Channel also seemed unfazed by the prospect of an Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan. When the Imam’s wife, Daisy Khan, appeared on the Bill O’Reilly show on December 21 to discuss the project, guest-host Laura Ingraham concluded the amicable interview proclaiming, “I like what you’re trying to do.” 16 Geller’s oft-stated position is essentially that all Muslims are or are sympathetic to radical jihadists. Even the conservative press (as well as Donald Trump) eventually distanced themselves from Geller’s extreme views and incendiary tactics when a “Draw the Prophet” contest she organized in Texas ended with two gunmen opening fire on the event, before being killed themselves by police (Selby 2015).

5 Creative recall: Digital design, architecture, and the challenge of memory

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n the early months of 2002, with the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation still in “listening mode,” the architectural community offered its first concerted response to the challenge of rebuilding at Ground Zero. In a small gallery in Chelsea, an exhibition titled “A New World Trade Center: Design Proposals from Leading Architects Worldwide” was unveiled on January 17. Paul Goldberger describes the frenzied atmosphere of the exhibition’s opening night, as New Yorkers formed a line around the block to gain entry (2004: 55). Gallery owner Max Protetch, who has specialized in exhibiting architectural drawings since the late 1970s, first conceived of the show in the days following the September 11 attacks. Wishing to make “a positive contribution” (2002: vii) in the wake of these events, he began inviting proposals from an international contingent of architects, artists, and designers.1 Seizing on the sudden visibility of architecture in the public eye, Protetch viewed the rebuilding project as an opportunity to redress what he considered to be a lack of great buildings in New York, a chance to establish an architectural heritage befitting the city’s economic and cultural status. In Protetch’s words: There is a need in New York for bold, recognizable forms that reflect contemporary design and technology. . . . It is crucial that such forward-looking architecture is created in lower Manhattan, so that New York can continue to grow as the world’s financial and cultural capital. Only by recognizing this incredible opportunity for renewal can the destruction of September 11 be properly memorialized. (2002: xi) The exhibition ran for one month, displaying sixty different proposals for the site, the majority of which seemed eager to take up Protetch’s call to envision a bolder and more inventive architecture for the city. This was a diverse assemblage of imaginative plans, ranging from the realizable to the speculative and provocative. While many proposals included a memorial element for the site, the dominant reference point for this collection was clearly not the memory-oriented architecture that had assumed such a prominent position at the end of the 1990s through the work of such figures as Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, and Zvi Hecker. The absences, voids, and fragmented forms

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that became emblematic of Berlin’s attempt to confront its historical responsibility would re-emerge in the 9/11 Memorial competition (as discussed in Chapter 2 of this book), but Protetch’s exhibition served to showcase a different architectural current, one pointed firmly toward the future.2 On the walls of his Chelsea gallery curvilinear forms generated by digital design software outnumbered the angular or disjointed surfaces characteristic of deconstructive memory architecture. References to complex systems and emergent material properties outweighed discourses of trauma or explicit references to the past. The prevailing mood of the collection was, as Protetch had hoped, visionary and forward-looking rather than melancholic. The digital tendencies on display at the “A New World Trade Center” exhibition have obviously continued to gather momentum since 2001, arguably becoming the dominant architectural design paradigm. The number of new terms in circulation describing digital practice reflects the shift within the discipline, including morphogenetic design, non-standard architecture, and parametricism.3 Apart from a commitment to innovatory computational design techniques one quite consistent link between this loose association of architects is their common reliance on the writings of Gilles Deleuze. The French philosopher’s influence can be felt in the very language of contemporary design. While psychoanalytic theories of trauma and loss and Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction informed the memory-imbued architecture of recent decades, Deleuze’s thinking of creativity, movement, and the vitality of life has undoubtedly been the central philosophical inspiration of the generation of architects emerging from the 1990s and 2000s. What better reference point for an architectural practice founded on experimentation than a thinker who once wrote, “There is no other truth than the creation of the New” (1989: 142)? We might be tempted then to draw a neat division between what appear to be two opposing architectural traditions. On one side of this dividing line would be a philosophy and architecture of memory and on the other a Deleuzian theory and practice of innovation and futurity. Yet I wish to hold back from dispensing a summary evaluation that would place these two movements in stark contrast to each other. Faced with the challenges presented by Ground Zero—the difficulties of rebuilding on a site where the demands of past, present, and future weigh equally—a convenient partitioning of memory and “the new” does not appear to be an acceptable or productive approach. Despite his privileging of emergence and invention, could Deleuze’s writing hold within it a different concept of memory, one that might help us envision ways to address the architectural complexities of a post–9/11 New York? It’s with this possibility in mind that I wish to consider more closely the place of history and memory in Deleuze’s thought. Upon first appraisal such a project might not seem very promising, as Deleuze makes abundantly clear his objection to any form of memory that is an attempt to conserve the past, stratify the present, or preserve tradition. Deleuze is, after all, a philosopher of becoming, as opposed to being. He and Félix Guattari could hardly state their position more emphatically when they stress in A Thousand Plateaus: “Becoming is an anti-memory” (1998: 294). In Anti-Oedipus, they elaborate in detail their intense dissatisfaction with the tenets of psychoanalysis, positing instead a “schizoanalysis” that emphasizes forward flows of desire, rather than a past congested with blocks of repressed memory. Yet despite this apparent disdain for notions of history and memory, these concepts hold an important, even crucial, position within Deleuze’s system of thought. The past also plays a pivotal role in Deleuze’s philosophical methodology—his penchant for reviving the work of prior philosophers and bringing forward traditions of thought that have been forgotten (or conveniently ignored) by contemporary scholars. In this chapter I will attempt to

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follow Deleuze’s conception of history and memory across a number of his original philosophical works and his interpretations of past thinkers. But before approaching Deleuze’s own writing I wish to first outline more thoroughly the ways in which his philosophy has been taken up by contemporary architects, many of which have participated in the various Ground Zero design competitions. There have recently been a number of charges of apoliticism and ahistoricism leveled at Deleuze and his enthusiasts in both the domains of architecture and philosophy and a close reading of the philosopher’s work will help us evaluate the merits of these critiques. My attempt to underscore the place of memory in Deleuze’s thought will begin with a discussion of repetition, a concept Deleuze adopts from Søren Kierkegaard and develops in his seminal text Difference and Repetition. I’ll then consider in turn Deleuze’s indebtedness to the writing of Henri Bergson and the philosopher’s particular conceptions of time and memory. What emerges from this reading of Deleuze, I believe, is a singular conception of memory that promotes an engagement with the past that is at once creative and politically committed. I’ll end the chapter by considering whether or not such a Deleuze-inspired sense of creative memory can help inform architects seeking to bridge this apparent divide between digital design technologies and an engagement with history.

Deleuzians and their discontents This is an interesting time to consider the emergence of digital design in architecture, as we’ve now reached a point where this moment of future-oriented innovation has begun to be historicized and contextualized. This periodization of the digital is being done through the work of architectural historians such as Mario Carpo (The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992–2012) and Antoine Picon (Digital Culture in Architecture) and through exhibitions and research programs, such as the Canadian Center for Architecture’s “Archaeology of the Digital” initiative led by Greg Lynn. As the timeline in Carpo’s book title suggests, the starting point of the “digital moment” in architecture stretches back considerably further than 2001. His genealogy identifies the simultaneous development of new design sensibilities and new technologies of production. Carpo writes, for example, “The emergence of a new digital tectonics in the early 1990s paralleled the technical development of spline modelers, a new generation of software that, thanks to the more general availability of cheap processing power, allowed the manipulation of curved lines directly on the screen, using graphic interfaces such as vectors and control points” (2013: 9). The centrality of the calculus-based adjustable parametric curves afforded by new design software packages like Revit and Vectorworks inspired Patrik Schumacher, in his 2008 manifesto, to give the name “parametricism” to the emergent field of advanced digital design: “Aesthetically, is it the elegance of ordered complexity and the sense of seamless fluidity, akin to natural systems that constitute the hallmark of parametricism” (2008). Malcolm McCullough takes the history of digital design back a little further than Carpo to the introduction of Autodesk’s Autocad computer-aided design program in 1986. But he too emphasizes the emerging importance of parametrics in architecture, which he characterizes as, “mainly a matter of expressing design problems or, more specifically, formal types, computationally in terms of a short set of independent design variables, especially dimensions” (2013: 185). The advantage of computational parametrics, according to McCullough, is the possibility of generating immense variation and complexity from relatively few inputs.

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Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, inaugurated in 1997, became an icon of this complex manipulation of geometry, although his first experiments in computational building design were produced for his earlier unrealized Lewis Residence in Ohio, on which he worked from 1989 to 1995 (Gehry and Lynn 2014). It’s on this project that Gehry first employed the CATIA (Computer-Aided Three-dimensional Interactive Application) modeling software used by the aerospace industry to design the Mirage fighter jet in the design of an architectural structure.4 Yet the promise of digital design for many of its early adopters was more than just the generation of innovative new forms. According to digital pioneers like Greg Lynn, the complex parameters capable of being processed computationally extended to social and political factors. He suggests, “The smooth spaces described by these continuous yet differentiated systems result from curvilinear sensibilities that are capable of complex deformations in response to programmatic, structural, economic, political and contextual influences” (2013: 32). Perhaps the second most iconic pre-2001 digital project was Foreign Office Architects’ (FOA) 1995 plan for the Yokohama International Port Terminal (although it would not be officially opened until 2002). The international competition attracted proposals by many of the rising figures within digital architecture, including Lynn and Reiser + Umemoto. The competition brief seemed the perfect showcase for exhibiting the kind of formal, programmatic, and social complexity digital architecture claimed it could deliver. FOA’s design in which the “surface of the ground folds onto itself” created a complicated, but functional interweaving of transportation infrastructure and public spaces (waiting areas, observation decks, and promenades). The studio described their design process as “the construction of a model which is capable of integrating differences into a coherent system” (Foreign Office Architects 2013: 58–59). As is already detectable in this language of folds, differentiation, and complexity, the common theoretical touchstone informing and supporting these technical and structural innovations was undoubtedly the philosophy of Deleuze. Allen describes the joint aesthetic and philosophical transition of the period in the following way, “I want to emphasize that there was a sense of moving into a new theoretical territory, a shift from Derrida to Deleuze, a shift away from disjunction, fragmentation and discontinuity to questions of connectivity, smoothness and the supple” (2017: 389–90). Both Carpo and Picon highlight the importance of Deleuze’s 1988 book on Gottfried Leibniz and the Baroque Le Pli (translated into English as The Fold in 1992) in bringing the philosopher’s thought into the sphere of architectural theory. The book was produced during a period of mutual collaboration between Deleuze and Bernard Cache, an architect and designer experimenting in the production of variable form through computer-aided methods. Deleuze cites Cache directly several times in “The Fold” and Cache would name his design studio Objectile, in reference to one of the key concepts developed by the philosopher in his essay. As Picon explains, “In The Fold, Gilles Deleuze had introduced the term ‘objectile’ to designate the capacity of calculus to generate an infinite number of objects as elements of a continuous series” (2010: 74). Deleuze’s exploration of Leibniz, the first great philosopher and mathematician of “the pleats of matter, and the folds in the soul” (Deleuze 1992a: 3), would inspire Greg Lynn to edit a 1993 special issue of Architectural Design on “Folding in Architecture.” These would be key moments in the establishment of the so-called Deleuze Connection in architecture (Carpo 2013: 10). In Deleuze’s philosophy, architects had found a set of concepts that seemed very much in synch with the discipline’s shift toward an incorporation of time-based digital design tools. Three-dimensional modeling and animation software and applications that make use of

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mathematical algorithms and evolutionary computation (such as Maya and GENR8) are now industry standards. Philosopher and architectural theorist Manuel DeLanda has written extensively about the parallels between these developments in design technique and a Deleuzian ontology in which “a species (or any other natural kind) is not defined by its essential traits but rather by the morphogenetic process that gave rise to it” (2002b: 10, italics in original). He suggests that software replicating the mutation and unfolding of biological evolution has moved architecture away from the design of individual structures and toward something akin to the creation or breeding of a population. The architect using evolution-based software lays down a set of virtual parameters or constraints that pattern the morphogenesis of an entire population of new forms, out of which a single structure may eventually be selected.5 DeLanda goes so far as to suggest that designers will soon be recognized for particular “topological diagrams bearing their signature” (2002a: 11), rather than any single masterwork. He highlights the importance in Deleuze’s thought of multiplicities that specifies “the structure of spaces of possibilities” (2002b: 10, italics in original) and it is these conditioning fields or manifolds, according to DeLanda, that are now prioritized in architectural design. The generative techniques facilitated by new software tools have developed in tandem with a renewed design interest in material effects. Deleuze is again a primary inspiration for a rethinking of the properties of matter that move away from notions of inert substances subservient to form and dominated from above. As John Rajchman explains, it is Deleuze’s exploration of the baroque period that helps the philosopher develop a theory of animate matter, in which “the metaphysics of formed matter is replaced by a metaphysics of materials ‘expressing’ forces” (1998: 14). Designers inspired by Deleuze seek to develop sensitivities to the specific qualities and inherent creative energies of the architectural materials with which they work. DeLanda, for example, finds in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “machinic phylum” a model for conceptualizing “how nonlinear flows of matter and energy spontaneously generate machinelike assemblages when internal or external pressures reach a critical level” (1992: 135). The machinic phylum refers, in other words, to a reservoir of immanent resources or solutions available to specific materials or physical systems under certain conditions—the ability of water to change from liquid to gaseous form or for metals to become malleable through changes of temperature, for instance. An interest in material effects is often positioned as an alternative to architectural methods concerned with historical signification; the architects Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto write, for example: “Effectiveness sidesteps the interpretative space of history, context, and representation in an effort to see and feel things for what they do rather than what they mean” (2006: 230). Dutch architect Lars Spuybroek and the studio NOX are key early experimenters in the possibilities of this form of expressive materialism. Spuybroek characterizes his methodology as an exploration of the potential of “seeing things as being mobile themselves,” taking advantage of properties of “self-organization, in which materials are active agents that seek nothing but agency, that seek an order that is not transcendentally established but emerges from the bottom up” (2008: 188). In his efforts to harness the emergent properties of particular materials, Spuybroek simultaneously emphasizes another common theme of Deleuze-inspired architecture, the introduction of movement into static form. A “topological vagueness” is promoted in his designs through which the structures “acquire a language of movement, i.e., ‘splitting,’ ‘merging,’ ‘bending,’ ‘twisting,’ which enables the architecture to move without the actual moving of the building” (2004 39). Completed NOX projects, including the 1994–97 Fresh H20 eXPO Water Pavilion and the 2000–04

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Son-O-House, were early examples of digitally generated architectural structures being combined with interactive sensor-based elements such as motion-triggered sound and lighting effects. A similar terrain has been explored in theoretical terms by Brian Massumi, who frequently uses Deleuze’s theories of sensation and expression as a platform for considering the relationship between the body and the built environment. Massumi points, for example, to the importance of proprioception—the sense proper to the body’s muscles and joints—as a kind of movement oriented sixth sense. What is sensed by proprioception is the “shape of space” and our movement through it, rather than the visual properties of a room or structure, according to Massumi. He argues that the topological geometry explored by contemporary design practice suggests the possibility of building in “hypersurfaces” that open up to a range of sensory experiences beyond the limitations of the visual: “Movement, not message, is the actual content of architecture” (2004: 322). But Massumi suggests that the possibility exists for an even more intimate relationship between the body and contemporary architecture, a direct interaction between our internal bodily affects and our external environment that he terms “biogrammatic.” He writes: It is often argued that architecture should allude to history. How pale that clear-eyed ambition seems faced with the twisted intensity of the biogram. If architecture were to make its mission to build in biogrammatic triggers or elicitation devices rather than contenting itself with alltoo-cognitive “citations,” it would have outgrown its moniker as a “spatial art.” It would have become not just metaphorically historical, but a literal technology of time. (2002: 194) The potential for real-time interactivity between the architectural environment and bodily sensation (prior even to conscious cognition) represents a desirable limit case for a number of contemporary designers and theorists—an architecture of affect and time, rather than one of history and memory. Deleuze-informed architecture—emphasizing morphogenetic design practices, experiments in materiality, and the prioritization of movement and affect over static form—was certainly on prominent display at the Max Protetch gallery in its “A New World Trade Center” exhibition. Many of the pioneers of digital architecture are present and a scan through the proposals quickly reveals a recurring set of tropes and a shared design sensibility. Archi-Tectonics, a firm founded by the Dutch architect Winka Dubbeldam, proposed an adaptive Flex-City plan for Lower Manhattan in reaction to “a market where consistency and stability have given way to uncertainty and volatility” (in Protetch 2022: 19). In an interview with Michael Speaks, Winka Dubbeldam describes a relationship to Deleuze’s thought that typifies the influence the philosopher has had on many of the architects featured in Protetch’s exhibition: “I was interested in Deleuze because his approach was generative rather than reflective. . . . When I read his work it seemed so spatial to me. I was especially interested in the behaviour of systems and morphogenesis and Deleuze informed my thinking about both” (2007: 183). Her Flex-City scheme envisages the site as an interactive and evolving infrastructure capable of adjusting to user demand and rapid economic and demographic shifts. Employing a comparable design vocabulary, Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture’s Asymptote practice put forward a sketch of two interlocking pairs of towers sheathed in “skins that express constant modulation and flux” (in Protetch 2002: 23). The description of their Twin Twins design (an homage to the original towers through an act of doubling) reflects the exhibition’s overall temporal priority: “Built on the traces of the elegant giants that preceded them, these are buildings that point the way to a vibrant and powerful future without resignation or apology” (Protetch 2002: 23).

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Farshid Moussavi and Alejandro Zaera-Polo of FOA and Spuybroek’s NOX design firm undertook similar experiments in the typology of the skyscraper. Both proposals rest on the assumption that the WTC towers should be replaced with a structure equal (if not greater) in height and presence, while also emphasizing new innovations in material and form. Of all the participants in the exhibition, FOA were the most brazen in their disregard for considerations of memory, stating: “Let’s not even consider remembering. . . . What for? We have a great site in a great city and the opportunity to have the world’s tallest building back in New York” (in Nobel 2005: 82). The Bundle-Tower they presented is an undulating complex of eight interconnected tubular towers that promise to “return to New York its legitimate possession” of 1.3 million square meters of workspace (in Protetch 2002: 41). The NOX plan for an Oblique World Trade Center—a series of conjoined towers forming a single irregular structure—is explained as an attempt to “deal with the huge” while finding ways of “working against the homogenous” and opening “to the changes and unpredictability of life” (in Protetch 2002: 107). The fluid shape was generated through an experiment in structural tension, borrowed from the German architect Frei Otto, in which wool threads were dipped into water and allowed, under the force of gravity, to “self-organize” into an interwoven structure. After this process of what Spuybroek calls “analogue, wet computing” (Spuybroek 2004: 355), the form produced is digitized, thickened, and further manipulated. The resultant structure has the appearance of a living organism, complete with pore-like apertures, pushing out from the ground below it. An amalgamation of the biological and the digital was also expressed through the folded exterior skin of the OCEAN north design and the shape-shifting animate form of the Oosterhuis.nl proposal. While the brief history of digital/Deleuzian architecture presented here clearly shows that the movement extends back to at least the early 1990s, if not further, the profusion of digital proposals that surfaced in response to the need to rebuild Lower Manhattan brought this emerging current into far greater public awareness. Following the Protetch exhibition, both The New York Times Magazine and New York magazine published collections of alternative Ground Zero design plans on the first year anniversary of 9/11. These creative visions of rebuilding served as a form of response to the official, yet lackluster, Beyer Blinder Belle proposals rejected by the public in July (as discussed in Chapter 4). Ambitious examples of digital architecture would feature prominently in the collections assembled by Herbert Muschamp and Joseph Giovannini, the architecture critics for The New York Times and New York magazine, respectively. The Hadid and Schumacher partnership, for example, was present in both print forums (as well as the Protetch exhibition). Their digitally produced New York magazine contribution, titled “Twin Towers Redux,” is an assemblage of two sets of twin towers, bending and melding together at multiple points. It’s described by the magazine as “a skyscraper that is higher, bigger, and more complex than the original World Trade Center towers . . . a mille-feuille landscape [of] folded and layered topography” (Giovannini 2002). The emergent digital design movement achieved even greater visibility in New York when a representative from its ranks was selected as a finalist in the LMDC’s official “Innovative Design Study” (from which Libeskind’s master plan emerged the eventual winner). The United Architects, a consortium of young practitioners, all of whom have drawn from Deleuze in championing innovation in architectural design, included Moussavi and Zaera-Polo of FOA; Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos of UNStudio; Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto of Reiser + Umemoto RUR Architecture; and Greg Lynn of Greg Lynn FORM. Together they proposed for the Ground Zero site the construction of a megastructure of five interconnected crystalline towers composed of glass

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and steel that would form a “cathedral-like enclosure” sheltering the footprints of the original towers (LMDC 2002). While promising “a bold vision of the future” (LMDC 2002) that echoes the rhetoric of so many of the proposals in the Protetch exhibition, the United Architects design differentiates itself from other future-oriented plans by claiming to also accommodate the need for memorialization. Referring to the sacrosanct nature of the site, the team describes the project as an attempt to draw from the sacred spaces of the past and replicate their protective and contemplative qualities. Included in the plan is a sky memorial from which visitors would be able to gaze down at the preserved recesses where the WTC towers once stood. Not all observers of the race to rebuild at Ground Zero were convinced by the United Architects’ claims that they had produced a successful synthesis of past and future, or by the various creative proposals exhibited at the Protetch Gallery and elsewhere. Reinhold Martin has penned what is likely the most excoriating critique of the future-oriented architecture that surfaced in New York after September 11. Commenting on the “A New World Trade Center” exhibition, he suggests that the “progressive” aesthetics promoted by the proposals was often married to a decidedly regressive politics. The triumphant refusal to look backward proclaimed by many of the projects was also, he suggests, a refusal to look critically. Martin chastises the designers involved for ignoring the historical conditions from which the events of 9/11 cannot be disassociated, remarking: “the responsibility of the professional in the new world order is merely to facilitate the arrival of the ‘new’ while washing their hands of the overdetermined historical narratives—and the dead bodies—through which this new is named” (2004: 219). Simply viewing Ground Zero as an opportunity for design innovation, in other words, represents an evasion of architecture’s global political responsibility. Martin’s evaluation of the United Architects proposal is no more sympathetic as he sees in the plan the realization of “a certain distorted Deleuzianism” that actually serves as an architectural accompaniment to American military imperialism (2004: 222). He argues that by “responding obediently for vision while remaining utterly blind to the violence of the ‘affective intensities’ they are being asked to serve up, these architects and others put themselves in a position of docile compliance with the imperatives of a nation at war” (2004: 222). The design team’s references to history and sacred space are dismissed by Martin as superficial symbols of nationalism and a distinctly Christian theological pathos that only underlines the project’s complicity with an unfolding war against militant Islam.6 Martin’s negative judgments on the forward-looking Ground Zero proposals can be seen as part of a larger critical backlash against Deleuzian currents in thought and design, one that questions the movement’s political commitments. Eyal Weizman’s insightful accounts of the inclusion of Deleuze and Guattari’s work in the reading list of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) certainly give pause to the assumption that any mobilization of the philosophers’ ideas is inherently progressive. He describes how the IDF’s policing strategies in the Occupied Territories have been informed— via military think tanks such as the Operational Theory Research Institute (OTRI)—by the rethinking of space and movement initiated by the French theorists of the May 1968 generation. Weizman quotes a 2004 lecture delivered by Shimon Naveh in which the retired brigadier general and director of the OTRI reveals: Several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaus became instrumental for us [in the IDF] . . . allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise explained. It problematized our own paradigm. . . . Most important was the distinction [Deleuze

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and Guattari] have pointed out between the concepts of “smooth” and “striated” space . . . [which accordingly reflected] the organizational concepts of the “war machine” and the “state apparatus.” In the IDF we now often use the term “to smooth out space” when we want to refer to operation in a space in such a manner that borders do not affect us. ( Weizman 2007: 200–01) Douglas Spencer has also recently cast doubt on the progressive claims of what he calls “architectural Deleuzism,” viewing instead a design approach that is very much in step with the demands of the neoliberal market, happily contributing to the production of the flexible and opportunistic subjects it requires (2011: 20). For many critics, this apparent embrace of capitalist market principles is exemplified in Schumacher’s model of parametricism, which he himself claims is eager to engage with the challenge of “the socioeconomic trends of post-Fordist restructuring, globalization, and market liberalization” (Schumacher 2015: 20). More socially engaged architects accuse Schumacher’s particular brand of parametricism of being an apolitical and homogenous project of formalist beautification; what Teddy Cruz characterizes as “the official architectural facelift of neoliberalism” (Cruz 2015: 191). Some recent critiques of Deleuze’s philosophy go so far as to suggest that apolitical or even militaristic applications of his concepts may not be merely distortions or opportunistic misreadings. Slavoj Žižek detects problematic ambiguities in Deleuzian attitudes toward capitalist economics and politics. He views Deleuze’s Spinozist theory of “impersonal affects bypassing persons” (2003: 184) as perfectly in line with modern marketing strategies and suggests there may even be fascist tendencies in an “irrationalist vitalism” (2003: 184) that celebrates a libidinal micropolitics circumventing ideological critique. Peter Hallward levels several additional charges against Deleuze, including claims that the philosopher’s thought is fundamentally ahistorical and lacking in worldly concern. Opposing common interpretations, he suggests: “Rather than a philosopher of nature, history or the world, rather than any sort of ‘fleshy materialist,’ Deleuze is most appropriately read as a spiritual, redemptive or subtractive thinker, a thinker preoccupied with the mechanics of dis-embodiment and de-materialization” (2006: 3, italics in original). He describes this philosophical move as a flight out of this world and into a virtual dimension of pure creativity, ultimately concluding that “the truth is that Deleuze’s work is essentially indifferent to the politics of this world” (2006: 162). Together, these mounting criticisms generate a reasonable degree of doubt as to whether any productive relationship could exist between Deleuze’s thought, the concept of memory, and architectural design. At best, the Deleuze-inspired architecture movement appears largely disinterested in a project of historically informed critical politics. At worst, it appears entirely complicit in the capitalist warmongering that such a project seeks to confront. But should Deleuze’s philosophical position be characterized so quickly as categorically ahistorical and extraworldly? And is an application of his thought in the sphere of architecture really best suited to the propagation of a willfully forgetful futurism or a form of digital-militarism? While keeping these cautionary readings in mind, I’d like to refrain from accepting their conclusions unquestioningly and turn instead to a direct and relatively sustained engagement with Deleuze’s own writing. By considering more closely the place memory holds within Deleuze’s thought, I hope to demonstrate that a significantly different point of intersection may be possible between his philosophy and architectural design.

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Deleuze and memory: Kierkegaard’s repetition My starting point for this exploration of Deleuze’s perspective on memory is the notion of repetition, a concept the philosopher assigns so much importance that he gives it equal billing to that of difference in the title of his masterwork. But what precisely is the relationship of repetition to the past and memory? I think the term is best explained by a temporary diversion through the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. Deleuze’s association with Kierkegaard is rarely commented on, perhaps being eclipsed by the philosopher’s more explicit affinities to Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Bergson, and others. Yet the ideas elaborated in Kierkegaard’s Repetition, published in 1843 under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius, occupy a significant position in Deleuze’s overall system of thought. As Kierkegaard’s text unfolds, the fictional Constantius tries desperately to regain sensations and impressions from his past by retracing his steps and replicating his previous actions as precisely as possible. He travels to Berlin in order to repeat a theatre-going experience he once had there, only to find that no such repetition is possible—the essence of the original escapes the grasp of the repeated experience. Our narrator gradually comes to the realization that he has grossly misunderstood the true nature of repetition. By attempting to arrest the world in a representation of the past, he has failed to open himself to an ever-changing world in movement. At the heart of Kierkegaard’s philosophical parable is the distinction between repetition and the Greek (Platonic) conception of recollection. He writes, “Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward” (1983: 131). While Plato conceived of the existence of eternal, perfect forms accessible to man through the faculty of recollection, Kierkegaard denies this iterability of sameness by insisting that there can be no repetition without change. He explains, “The dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated has been— otherwise it could not be repeated—but the very fact that is has been makes the repetition into something new” (1983: 149). This acknowledgment of the necessity of newness in repetition opens Kierkegaard’s philosophy to an embrace of the unpredictability of the future. For Plato, everything is knowable through the power of recollection, whereas for Kierkegaard, everything is possible through the power of repetition. These observations on relations to the past find their place within a schema that resurfaces throughout Kierkegaard’s many works (including the two volumes of Either/Or published the same year as Repetition). The Danish philosopher expounds two fundamentally different modes of experiencing the world—the aesthetic and the ethical—and employs the example of love to illustrate the distinction between the two. The first, the aesthetic, is the mode of the poet and the young lover who constantly attempts, but fails to recapture the past feeling of the moment of falling in love for the first time. The aesthetic poet is caught in a cycle of novelty and failed recollection. The ethical mode is the more mature mode of marriage and of repetition. The ethical lover recognizes that, like the world in general, his or her partner is constantly in a process of change and that there is never sameness in the repetition of daily life. The recognition of the inevitability of difference in repetition frees us from the desire for superficial novelty and leads to a more profound understanding of change. Experiencing the world through the ethical mode allows us to acknowledge the movement of the world and to embrace the uncertainty of the future.

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The concept of repetition delineated by Kierkegaard (not a sameness repeated, but a repetition with change) is essential for Deleuze’s overall project of developing a philosophy based on difference rather than identity. In the opening paragraphs of his treatise Difference and Repetition, Deleuze places repetition in direct opposition to generality and the regulatory tendency of knowledge expressed as law or science. His emphasis, in other words, is not on actual identifiable things that may then be categorized according to resemblances and equivalences—a process of establishing generalizable laws. Repetition, for Deleuze, is instead the movement of actualization and change that precedes and runs continuously beneath the appearance of any such stable identities. He writes, “If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to the ordinary, an instantaneity opposed to variation and an eternity opposed to permanence. In every respect, repetition is a transgression” (2001: 2–3). Repetition then, for Deleuze, is a singular force that privileges (and perhaps necessitates) experimentation over tradition, motion over solidity, and action over contemplation. So must we then view repetition as a force in opposition to memory? Deleuze would seem to invite this interpretation when he states that “it is in repetition and by repetition that Forgetting becomes a positive power” (2001: 7). Yet, I would argue, repetition’s relationship to memory and the past is not simply an oppositional one. Repetition involves a return of the past (were it otherwise, Kierkegaard argues, life would be reduced to a meaningless noise [1983: 149]), but it is a return based on difference, rather than the reproducibility of identical forms. The past repeats, but never without changing. Repetition involves remembering the inevitability of change and thus, it can be argued, is a form of memory with a crucial openness to the future.

Bergsonian duration and memory Deleuze’s notion of repetition and its relation to memory and time are further elucidated through his sustained engagement with the work of Henri Bergson. The French philosopher helps fuel Deleuze’s conviction that life is essentially a process of continual change and creative evolution and that difference may be conceived as internal difference, a creative force of differentiation, rather than simply a difference between two or more existing things. As Keith Ansell Pearson notes, it is Bergson’s writing that provides Deleuze with the insight that “the unity of nature consists of a complicated unfolding of an originary impulsion in which the creative energies of life are canalized in specific bodies (organisms and species)” (1999: 12). For Bergson, this energetic flow of life exists between two distinct creative dimensions (the actual and the virtual) and it is this conviction that supports his conception of memory, one that is in turn adopted by Deleuze. As a preliminary step toward Bergson’s notion of memory, let’s first consider his particular understanding of time. Bergson believes that we fundamentally misconstrue the nature of time when we conceive of it in terms of divisible and homogeneous instants, as in the hours, minutes, and seconds of Newtonian clock time. This spatialization of time, breaking it into quantifiable and uniform segments, is a misrecognition of its qualitative nature. Time conceived of as divisible instants, robs time of the movement that is its essential property. Bergson substitutes for this static spatialized time a notion of time as duration, a continuous multiplicity that cannot be divided without it undergoing a qualitative change. Bergson states in Time and Free Will, “Pure duration

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might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number: it would be pure heterogeneity” (1971: 104). Thus, two happy durations of time do not add together to make one ecstatic duration and an overall satisfying experience, say a trip to the theatre, cannot be divided into equal segments of satisfying time spent. Duration is a multiplicity, a flow of intertwined qualities that cannot be extricated from each other quantifiably. Having come to a definition of time as duration, a succession of qualitative changes, Bergson is left pondering the relationship between the present and the past in duration. Clearly for Bergson each moment has a qualitative impact on succeeding moments, as the changes making up duration permeate and melt into each other. Constantin Boundas writes, “Duration is a kind of succession which implicates, in a latent form, past, present and future. Segments of duration implicate each other, each one of them is present in all others and all of them in each one” (1996: 93). Thus duration is succession, but it is succession that endures. Or we could say that in duration there is both succession and coexistence. When we listen to a piece of music, for example, each new note is infused, or affected, with the notes that precede it. It is the succession of notes, all permeating each other, that make up the duration of the composition. It is this overlapping of duration, one moment permeating the next, that distinguishes duration from a discontinuous series of instants repeated without variation. But what is it that ensures the succession of duration? Why is it that the present passes? As Deleuze states, “This is the paradox of the present: to constitute time while passing in the time constituted” (2001: 79). In other words, the present is never only present, it is always also in the process of passing. The present is never a static snapshot of time, but is always in motion. At the same time as the past permeates the present, the present is moving into the past. Bergson’s resolution to the problem of succession, according to Deleuze, is to conceive of two distinct forms of the past. There is the past that was once present, a former present if you will, but there must also be a pure, a priori past that ensures the passing of the present and into which the present passes. Deleuze writes, “The [pure] past does not cause one present to pass without calling forth another, but itself neither passes nor comes forth. For this reason the past, far from being a dimension of time, is the synthesis of all time of which the present and the future are only dimensions” (2001: 82). And later, “each past is contemporaneous with the present it was, the whole past coexists with the present in relation to which it is past, but the pure element of the past in general pre-exists the passing present” (2001: 82). Bergson, and subsequently Deleuze, is making a radical claim for the pure past exuding a force of creation. It is this pure past that wills the movement that is repetition. Not only that, but this pure past, this past in general, acts as a repository in which all the former presents exist in a virtual state of coexistence. Deleuze writes in Bergsonism, “it is the whole, integral past; it is all our past, which coexists with each present” (1991: 59, italics in original). This total preservation of the past ensures the irreversibility of duration, the production of difference and the impossibility of an identical repetition of an event. Because the present coexists with an ever-expanding past, one can never go through the same state or relive the same experience twice. But how does memory figure into what is already an elaborate structure of time? It is against this background of a pure past that Bergson and Deleuze distinguish the process of memory, which is ultimately a process of bringing recollections from this virtual (ideal) past into the actual (concrete) present. According to Bergson, when we will a recollection, we first put ourselves

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back into this past in general. This entails leaving psychology altogether (Bergson does not believe that memory is stored in the brain7) in order to make a leap into the ontological, into the being in itself of the past. This leap, or “act of dilation” as Bergson calls it, brings us into the realm of the pure past, or virtual past, in which the totality of the past coexists. From this initial act of dilation we then move into a mode of contraction, orienting the whole of the past according to the present situation. We find ourselves not so much in the past in general, as in a region of the past that serves our particular needs. Deleuze describes Bergson’s virtual past as consisting of these regions that should be thought of as “distinct levels, each one of which contains the whole of our past, but in a more or less contracted state” (1991: 61). In each of these levels the whole of the past is repeated, but oriented around remarkable points or essential characteristics. It is only once we place ourselves in a level of the virtual past, that recollections may be brought forward into the present, or actualized. Deleuze writes, “The appeal of the present is such that [recollections] no longer have the ineffectiveness, the impassivity that characterized them as pure recollections: they become recollection-images, capable of being ‘recalled’” (1991: 63), and ultimately brought into the service of the present. The conception of memory that Deleuze arrives at through his reading of Bergson is a fundamental shift away from the common psychological and physiological models of memory. First, it rejects the claim that memory is simply located in the brain and subsequently denies the possibility of a particular memory being stored and retrieved in an identical form. As Deleuze conceives of memory as being contained only within duration (in a pure past), it is inevitably implicated within a process of difference and change. A memory, in other words, is by no means a direct representation of a past present. In passing, the present merges with the totality of a virtual past and as such undergoes a qualitative change, a difference in kind. In the process of contraction and actualization, the recollection again undergoes a qualitative alteration, so that memory must be viewed as being caught up in a continual process of change. A crucial characteristic of the transition from the virtual to the actual is that the actual never exhausts the full potential of the virtual. In Deleuze’s conception, every object, image, or memory possess two halves, one actual/ concrete and one virtual/ideal, but that these halves do not resemble each other. Deleuze explains, “For a potential or virtual object, to be actualised is to create divergent lines which correspond to—without resembling—a virtual multiplicity” (2001: 212). The actual half of an object, image, or memory is always less than the virtual half from which it sprung. In other words, every actualization refers back to a virtual excess and carries with it a reminder that it could be otherwise. In terms of memory, this means that the full potential of the past is never exhausted and no two acts of recollection will ever be identical. Memory is given a necessarily creative dimension. Bergson and Deleuze make a clear break from mechanistic or deterministic accounts of historical evolution in favor of an idea of creative and unpredictable historical development. Not all historical actualizations will be positive ones, but the virtual past always contains the possibility for alternative presents.

A Deleuzian architecture of memory? An intricate and uncommon notion of memory arises from this reading of Deleuze, one that, admittedly, is far from providing an easy blueprint for architectural practice.8 There are nonetheless

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many important avenues of thought opened up by Deleuze’s novel conception of the past and our relationship to history. In beginning to consider how a Deleuzian perspective on memory might inform architectural design at Ground Zero, two initial questions or concerns seem important to confront. First, the charge made by Hallward and others that Deleuze’s philosophy retreats from the material world in perpetual pursuit of a virtual origin of creation still needs to be addressed. What comes forward from a direct engagement with Deleuze’s texts, I would argue, is not the image of an ahistorical or apolitical philosopher, unconcerned with the actual people and events of this world, but rather that of a thinker attempting to resist the conservative, stifling, and retrogressive tendencies of tradition and the past. True to his reputation, the form of memory that Deleuze advances is a dynamic and creative one; in it the past presents itself as a resource for creativity, invention, and the emergence of new configurations. But while a concern with the dimension of the virtual and its absolute productive force is undoubtedly a key facet of Deleuze’s philosophy, it need not preclude a commitment to the specific political problems of the present. In fact, the separation of difference from the movement of repetition, transcendence from empiricism, the virtual from processes of actualization, or the future from the past, are all unthinkable divisions in Deleuze’s philosophy. It is the possibility of combating the blockages that limit the interaction between these various pairings that motivates Deleuze’s thought. The second question springs from the close association in architectural thought between history and memory and postmodernism. Can Deleuze’s conception of the past as a resource for creativity be distinguished from the postmodern techniques of historical pastiche that have exhausted themselves in recent architectural practice? I believe it can in several important ways. What Deleuze advocates is not simply the recombination of historical styles; the philosopher is clear that he does not envision the past as a repository of images or representations available to the present. Deleuze seeks instead to draw forth from history latent organizational formations and systems of relation, viewing the past as a reservoir of ideas, events, and desires that may be reinvigorated or reinhabited. When Deleuze looks into the past, he finds not static images, but models or diagrams for creative activity. This historical excavation also entails an evaluation; the systems and relations of force chosen by Deleuze are selected for their ability to offer a form of resistance to dominant organizations of power and habitual behaviors. There is a political imperative to Deleuze’s concept of memory that is missing in postmodernism’s irreverent juxtaposition of the ornamental styles of the past. Some perhaps unexpected affinities exist between Deleuze’s position and Adorno and Horkheimer’s much referenced assertion: “The task to be accomplished is not the conservation of the past, but the redemption of the hopes of the past” (2002: xv). We can certainly see a Deleuzian form of creative recall manifested in contemporary art’s current fascinating with reenactment and historical reconstruction. Jeremy Deller’s much discussed work The Battle of Orgreave, in which he restaged the confrontation between striking miners and the police that took place in 1984 near the Orgreave coking plant in South Yorkshire, is one such example. Deller’s recreation of the event entailed the enlistment of former miners and police involved in the original confrontation (many of whom switched roles for this second staging), English Heritage reenactment director Howard Giles, and several hundred members of the country’s various military dramatization societies, more accustomed to staging epic medieval or Napoleonic battles. In organizing the project Deller takes on Deleuze’s call to inhabit a past event in order to produce a counter-actualization of this historical moment through repetition. The 2001 Battle of Orgreave does not recreate the original in all of its recorded detail, it attempts to

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retrieve the event from its place in the official archive of history and realize it along a different line of unfolding. The intention of Deller’s reenactment is to be faithful to the event, not by reproducing it, but by responding to the demand it presents us with, an imperative to remember a historical instant when people took a stand against the violence of the State and to make this occurrence of some consequence to the present. There are a number of artworks that employ similar strategies of creative memory and historical layering to contend with the aftermath of 9/11. Jitish Kallat’s Public Notice 3, installed in the Grand Staircase of the Art Institute of Chicago and opened on September 11, 2010, converges in one place global events that occurred on the same date, but over a century apart. Kallat’s artwork recalls the first Parliament of the World’s Religions, an attempt to create a global interfaith dialogue, which convened in the very same building in 1893. The installation inscribed onto the staircase risers the words of the speech made by Swami Vivekananda at the Parliament on September 11 of that year, a call for religious tolerance and universal acceptance. In Kallat’s work, the words of the speech are illuminated in the colors of the threat coding system used by the Department of Homeland Security, which Brian Massumi has powerfully critiqued as a system of “anxiety calibration” and “fear modulation” (2005). The juxtaposition of the two historical moments acutely highlights just how far we seem to have strayed from Vivekananda’s vision of a more peaceful future. Monika Sosnowska’s colossal architectural sculpture Tower was installed in New York’s Hauser & Wirth gallery in September and October of 2014. Rather than standing upright, the steel frame of Sosnowska’s tower is collapsed and twisted, sprawling across the gallery floor. The structure, the name given to it, and the location of its installation cannot help but evoke the mangled steel girders remaining after the destruction of the WTC, some of which are on display in the National September 11 Museum, just a few miles south of the Chelsea gallery. Yet the Polish artist’s sculpture resembles even more closely other Eastern and Western architectural symbols of utopian modernism, such as the Eiffel Tower, Vladimir Tatlin’s unrealized Monument to the Third International (commonly referred to as Tatlin’s Tower), and Vladimir Shuchov’s Moscow Transmission Tower. Sosnowska allows all of these associations and memories to coalesce in her toppled structure, creating an ambiguous, yet potent commentary on modernity’s ambitions, failures, and catastrophes. Given architecture’s requirements of program and function it is perhaps more challenging to imagine the materialization of Deleuze’s notions of creative memory in this sphere of design, but I believe it is still possible and important to do so. If an architectural precedent for such a project exists, it is almost certainly the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck, a co-founder of the rebellious “Team 10” in 1954 (along with Alison and Peter Smithson, Giancarlo De Carlo and others). While Van Eyck’s most active design period predates the writings of Deleuze, he was directly inspired by Bergson’s conceptions of memory and duration, a connection convincingly and thoroughly established by the architectural historian Francis Strauven. A critic of the overly rational and ahistorical tendencies of modernist functionalism, Van Eyck sought inspiration from the overlooked colloquial building methods of various global indigenous populations. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Van Eyck made research trips to the Saharan regions of North and West Africa (from Mali to Sudan) (McCarter 2005: 36, 120) and to the Pueblo Indian territory of New Mexico in order to study the vernacular domestic architecture of the areas. He viewed these forms of architecture without architects as ingeniously minimal fusions of the biomorphic and the geometric. There accessible and elementary forms provided coherent, yet open, patterns of organization in close relation to

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the existence of the community—they were structures brought to life by their inhabitants. The knowledge of building and living contained within them represented, according to Strauven, a resource of “collective memory” and “a gathering body of experience” (1998: 420) that Van Eyck sought to draw from in his own designs. This veneration of the elementary forms of so-called primitive or archaic societies might have smacked of orientalism, architectural scholar Zeynep Çelik suggests, were it not for the profound and genuine respect Van Eyck held for these indigenous design practices (2005: 279). Yet for Van Eyck there was nothing static or timeless in the act of bringing forth this shared knowledge into the architecture of modernity. According to the architect, the forms and organizational elements accumulated in collective memory, “represent constants in space and time, constants that constantly change” (Van Eyck 2006: 99). In other words, the goal of the architect was to draw from the reservoir of memory produced by the long history of architecture, while introducing creativity and innovation through this act of retrieval. Van Eyck expresses this notion himself in a very Deleuzian manner in his book The Child, the City and the Artist when he writes, “All things are continually recreated in the mind through the power of imagination—they would not exist otherwise, for only what passes through imagination really ‘exists’—consciously or unconsciously—and is born anew” (2006: 95). Van Eyck materialized his particular sense of imaginative memory in the realization of a number of architectural projects, including most famously, a series of children’s playgrounds in postwar Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Orphanage (1960), and the Roman Catholic Church in The Hague (1969). We can actually see traces of this perspective contained in the work of a few of the architects participating in the multiple Ground Zero design competitions. Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, members of the United Architects partnership, have often explored within their practice the intersection of invention and historical precedent. Memory becomes a creative power for the architects, permitting them to access the past as a valuable resource for design concepts and techniques. Here they search out productive material “traits” that are open to variation and adaptation and may thus be carried forward into the present in useful ways. Reiser and Umemoto describe their memory process in the following manner: “Considering lineages as traits leaves them open to expansion; it keeps models active rather than solidifying them as historical forms that are resistant to change. Traits allow one to talk about and connect to precedents without being tyrannized by them” (2006: 182). The architects transform, for example, a pattern derived from representations of Solomon’s Temple in the book of Ezekiel into a canopy for a contemporary synagogue, the latticework design taking on both a structural and a decorative role in its new configuration. The design feature of the concrete brise-soleil, used perhaps most famously by Le Corbusier, is magnified to become the entire surface facade of their twenty-two-story 0–14 Tower in Dubai; the exterior wall provides solar shading and acts as a cooling chimney, making the building one of the most ecologically efficient structures in the area. Reiser and Umemoto integrate elements of a Deleuze-inspired creative recall into their methodology, using the approach to generate novel experiments in form and structure. The United Architects proposal for Ground Zero can be viewed as another example of this approach—the form and matter of the Gothic cathedral are retrieved from the past and translated into the sheltered space of the contemporary structure. Yet Deleuze’s conception of memory encourages us to go beyond formal innovation and material effects in order to produce more substantive changes to prevailing social forces and political organization. Traces of this politicized memory are detectable

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in a few of the submissions to Protetch’s “A New World Trade Center” exhibition. SITE studio, for example, proposed to restore the eclectic vitality that once distinguished Lower Manhattan by resurrecting the former street connections and reintroducing the scale and density that were eradicated by the original World Trade Center. The plan attempts to reinstate the city’s distinctive grid that Rem Koolhaas famously claims defines the city as “a mosaic of episodes” and assures that “Manhattan is forever immunized against any (further) totalitarian intervention” (1994: 20–21). SITE describes their project as an effort to “reestablish Lower Manhattan’s natural characteristics of organic neighborhood development, commercial variety, and cultural diversity” (in Protetch 2002: 125). Such a proposal would be in keeping with the reminders offered by sociologist Andrew Ross of the long history of ethnic and cultural diversity in pre-World Trade Center Lower Manhattan, including a bustling Syrian Quarter, populated mostly by Arabic-speaking Christians from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine, who thrived in the area for over sixty years. Ross suggests that the most appropriate rebuilding plan would be “a new, genuinely mixed-income neighbourhood that would capture, in the hustle and bustle of the living, the full sociological variety of those who died on 9/11” (2002: 130). Marjetica Potrč’s unusual proposal suggests that we remember the physical forces that coursed through the site long before any buildings stood here. Implementing an ecological design strategy in synch with the topic of our next chapter, she envisions a Lower Manhattan replete with windmills, micro water turbines, and photovoltaic solar cells capable of extracting the dormant energy potential of the area. Although not self-identified as Deleuzian projects, these proposals embody to some degree the philosopher’s commitment to a politically active form of remembering, one that employs the past as a disruptive creative resource rather than as a force for conservation or stratification. Only two of the proposals that were displayed in Protetch’s gallery will likely ever be completed. The first is the now iconic “Tribute in Light” originally proposed by a collaboration of architects and artists including John Bennett, Gustavo Bonevardi, Julian LaVerdiere, and Paul Myoda. The twin white beacons of light shine upward from the Ground Zero site each anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The second is a proposal for a 9/11 memorial at the Fresh Kills landfill site presented by the landscape architecture firm Field Operations. The memorial, a horizontal earthwork representing the towers of the World Trade Center, is part of a much larger plan to convert the former landfill into a public park and wetlands conservation area titled “Lifescape.” The project is an important example of landscape urbanism, a design movement that promises to return architecture to the sphere of politics through an engagement with the infrastructure and life processes of the city. The next chapter will discuss the transformation of Fresh Kills and its continued connection to the events of 9/11, while examining the political claims of the landscape urbanism movement.

Notes 1 Protetch also enlisted the aid of Architectural Record editors Sarah Amelar and Robert Ivy, Architecture magazine editor Reed Kroloff, and the director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) Aaron Betsky in drafting a list of invitees (Stephens 2004: 132). 2 A proposal by Libeskind for a shard like high-rise structure, complete with hanging memorial, was included in this collection, but the architect’s assertion that “the real question is about memory,

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and the future of that memory is what remains paramount” (in Protetch 2002: 85) appeared distinctly out of step with the overriding tone of the exhibition. 3 Morphogenetic design is a name used frequently by Architecture Association instructors Michael Hensel, Achim Menges, and Michael Weinstock, while “Non-Standard Architecture” was the title of an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 2003 and parametricism is a term coined by Zaha Hadid Architects director Patrik Schumacher. 4 The software was also used by Gehry to design the El Peix fish sculpture he produced for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. 5 In her book Contagious Architecture, Luciana Parisi similarly emphasizes “the new centrality of generative algorithms” in design (2013: xi). 6 Picon raises some substantial concerns regarding digital architecture’s relationship to history and memory more generally, asking, “Why do we have so many spaceship forms in architecture? Perhaps the reason is that spaceships do not have history. This is an architecture of the everlasting present that has difficulty connecting to a clear past and to a very different future” (2010: 92). 7 He writes in Creative Evolution: “Memory . . . is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no drawer” (2002: 173). 8 Deleuze’s conception of memory and history plays out over a number of other key texts that could also be explored here, including his unusual reading of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in his book Proust and Signs; his sustained engagement with Foucault’s diagrams of history; and his exploration with Guattari of the schizophrenic’s treatment of the past as creative resource in Anti-Oedipus.

6 Landfills and lifescapes: The transformation of New York’s Fresh Kills

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omewhere buried within the four mounds of refuse that make up the Fresh Kills landfill site on New York’s Staten Island lies Gordon Matta-Clark’s battered pick-up truck. Herman Meydag, the moniker bestowed on the truck by its owner, failed to survive the confrontation arranged by the young artist in his 1972 film, appropriately titled Fresh Kills. The film’s premise is a relatively simple one. Arriving at the landfill site, Meydag is set upon by two bulldozers that are temporarily distracted from their task of shaping the mountains of trash. The bulldozers make quick work of Matta-Clark’s vehicle; the teeth of their steel buckets ripping easily into the truck’s comparatively flimsy red paneling. The short film concludes with the truck’s remains being placed ignominiously among the rubbish that forms the stage setting of the mechanical gladiator match. Matta-Clark’s Fresh Kills documents a violent but playful act of demolition—a child’s compulsion to destroy his matchbox car enacted at an adult scale. Apart from its aggressive, boyish humor, the film is an exploration of a geography that MattaClark could hardly have resisted, a resting place for objects one stage further along the cycle of creation and destruction than the abandoned buildings that would become the artist’s typical targets for intervention. In his most famous works such as Splitting (1974) and Conical Intersect (1975), Matta-Clark sliced and burrowed through domestic architecture, revealing the inner structures of the built environment that are normally kept concealed from sight. His film, Fresh Kills, operates according to a similar logic of exposure, bringing into view an urban site never meant to be witnessed by a public that is very much complicit in its creation. The staged destruction of his cherished truck puts on display a geography to which virtually every inhabitant of New York has contributed and yet few have seen. A change is currently underway at the Fresh Kills site that Matta-Clark could hardly have anticipated, one that has brought the location into public vision in an unprecedented manner. Before its closure in March 2001, Fresh Kills was the world’s largest landfill, infamous for being one of the only human-made constructions visible from space. Between the authorization of its opening by New York’s “master builder” Robert Moses in 1948 (originally intended as a temporary measure) and its recent closing, it functioned as the city’s busiest garbage dump, receiving at

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its peak 29,000 tons of the city’s waste daily. The four mounds of landfill that occupy half of the site’s 2,200 acres range in size from 90 to 225 feet and are identified only by their property parcel numbers: 1/9, 2/8, 3/4, and 6/7. Despite its menacing name, Fresh Kills in no way indicates the kind of industrial blood sport organized by Matta-Clark, but instead recalls the days of New Amsterdam, a reference to the Middle Dutch world kille meaning riverbed (think Catskill Mountains). The Fresh Kills estuary runs through the center of the landfill, bringing water from the Arthur Kill that forms the area’s western border to the site’s many creeks and wetlands, their survival a testament to nature’s powers of resistance (NYC Parks 2001). In the spring and summer of 2001 the New York City Department of City Planning initiated the ambitious process of transforming the landfill into a public park and wetland conservation area. Sealed over and carefully managed, the mounds of garbage would form the foundations of a diverse living ecology. Six landscape architecture firms were invited to visit Staten Island and contribute their visions for a Fresh Kills site revived from its five-decade-long employ. Yet it was not this noteworthy design competition that first made the Fresh Kills site a topic of public attention in 2001. Only a few months after its closure, the landfill was temporarily re-opened after September 11 as a containment and processing site for Word Trade Center debris. A total of 1.8 million tons of wreckage were brought to mound 1/9 of the landfill and sifted for traces of human remains and forensic evidence, a process that lasted ten months and ended in July of 2002 (Feuer 2008). It soon became clear that for many family members of the 9/11 victims, the resting place of this debris must be preserved, along with the WTC footprints, as a second sacred ground (Depalma 2004). Despite this unanticipated final use of the landfill, the competition proceeded and in early 2003, the committee selected a plan titled “Lifescape” put forward by the Field Operations landscape design practice. The proposal seeks to transform the site through a gradual process of ecological “seeding,” infrastructure construction, cultural and leisure programming, and continual adaptation. The firm, led by landscape architect James Corner, describes the Lifescape plan as “an expansive network of greenways, recreational open spaces, and restored habitat reserves—a new naturelifestyle island” (Field Operations 2002: 20). The first phases of the Field Operations development began in spring, initiating what will be a thirty-year process of converting a landscape of waste into a heterogeneous mix of overlapping ecological, recreational, and cultural components. Lifescape’s conjunction of the built and the biological, the cultural and the natural, makes it a remarkable example of what has come to be called “landscape urbanism.” The term describes recent architectural discourses and practices in which landscape has usurped the building to become the primary element of urban design (Waldheim 2002: 15). In a period where architecture is attempting to become flexible, malleable, and responsive, the time-based methods, living materials, and ecological design principles of landscape urbanism have a particular contemporary appeal. Although partially propelled by a series of much discussed design competitions for innovative urban parks, the movement promises to expand its influence well beyond the confines of city parkland or the space of nature alone. The proponents of the emerging discipline suggest that its ability to organize the interaction of multiple systems (biological, social, industrial), with results that are desirable yet not entirely predetermined, may present a paradigm for architecture’s engagement with contemporary urbanism in general. Within this discourse, landscape design, previously relegated to traditions of the pastoral and the picturesque, is significantly elevated in status. Long considered as merely a decorative accompaniment to the more serious task of

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building, it is now positioned as a discipline capable of renewing architecture’s commitment to infrastructural concerns and the life processes of the city. In short, landscape urbanism promises to facilitate architecture’s return to the sphere of politics. This chapter considers the Fresh Kills redevelopment and the Lifescape design in relation to the broader movement of landscape urbanism. It seeks, in particular, to examine the political claims made by the emerging discipline—organized as they are around a specific politics of life—in light of Fresh Kills’ specific history and urban context. This investigation will begin by attempting to trace the historical circumstances and theoretical developments that have led to landscape urbanism’s ascension within architectural discussions, a genealogy that seems to culminate in the Lifescape project. The particular circumstances of the Fresh Kills redevelopment will be considered next and the chapter will outline the potential disruptions that threaten to complicate the political vision of the systems theory represented in the Field Operations plan. How does landscape urbanism and Field Operations contend with the landfill’s permanent material connection to the September 11 attacks and its relationship to New York’s changing infrastructure of waste disposal? Are there limits to what can be incorporated into the ecological framework of Lifescape? In pondering these questions the chapter will turn to the discussions of autoimmunity that arise in the later writings of Jacques Derrida, a thinker omitted from the canon of landscape urbanism. The concept invokes the dilemmas of protection and vulnerability, inclusion and exclusion, openness and closedness that remain unavoidably present beneath the surface of Fresh Kills.

An architecture of the living While many New York building projects were stalled or abandoned during the post–2008 economic downturn, construction of Lifescape had already begun by 2006 and some of the playgrounds, bike paths, and playing fields around the perimeter of the park are now open to the public. The overall plan set forward by Field Operation is an impressive attempt to respond to the acute challenges presented by Fresh Kills. Through a complex series of diagrams and site plans, the firm accounts for a somewhat dizzying multiplicity of environmental, economic, and cultural factors. Field Operations emphasizes rather than minimizes the contradictory character of the location, calling their design, “a synthetic, integrative nature, simultaneously wild and cultivated, bewildering and cultivating” (2002: 20). In terms of surface area, Lifescape is an architectural undertaking that actually dwarves the rebuilding project at Ground Zero. When completed, the park in Staten Island will cover a territory almost three times the size of the city’s beloved Central Park. The significance of this project, coupled with Field Operations’ design (in partnership with Diller Scofidio + Renfro architects) of the much-celebrated Chelsea High Line—the adaptation of a derelict 1.45-mile long above ground railway in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood into an elevated garden promenade— has vaulted the firm to the forefront of landscape urbanism discussions1. James Corner, the firm’s principal architect, is also one of the most articulate and widely published proponents of landscape design’s expanded role in urban development and has been hailed in the popular press as New York’s next Frederick Law Olmsted (the renowned designer of Central Park).2 The prominence of the Field Operations firm within New York’s current urban development plans is testament to the increasing stature of landscape design in relation to contemporary urban

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planning initiatives and has helped to establish the credibility of the landscape urbanism movement. An understanding of how these developments within the field of architecture came to pass can be gleaned, in part, by recognizing the importance of recent changes to contemporary urban conditions. The transition form an industrial to a postindustrial or post-Fordist economy, which Paolo Virno describes as fundamentally altering our social relations (see Chapter 1 of this book), has also significantly altered the organization of cities and their surrounding areas. The challenges to urban planning created by this shift seem to call for the particular design capabilities of landscape architecture. In their study of Detroit, arguably the quintessential example of this changing city structure, Patrik Schumacher and Christian Rogner attempt to take stock of the urban effects of globalized capital markets, shrinking state-regulation of the economy, eroding labor relations, and the resultant “liquified” architecture of business organization. In their assessment, the “strictly coded stereotypes and neat allocation of zones” characteristic of the modernist city become incapable of sustaining post-Fordist production paradigms that are “increasingly organized around principles of decentralization, horizontality, transparency, fluidity, and rapid mutability” (2001: 54). Cities that are incapable of adapting to these “vital processes of networking and self-organization” may be doomed to suffer Detroit’s fate, “an image of a post-industrial ex-urban center annexed to its own suburbs” (2001: 56). Compare this picture of Detroit, a semi-abandoned historical city of industry, with Rem Koolhaas’ description of the post-Fordist agglomeration of Atlanta: “it is a sparse, thin carpet of habitation, a kind of suprematist composition of little fields. Its strongest contextual givens are vegetal and infrastructural: forest and roads. Atlanta is not a city, it is a landscape” (1998: 835, italics in original).3 The research work of landscape architect Alan Berger assumes the task of systematically documenting these forms of urban change. Berger seeks to both visualize and analyze the “in-between” spaces and transitional landscapes of a contemporary America where the population density of urban centers has declined by more than 50 percent in the last fifty years and the majority of development is occurring at the peripheries of metropolitan areas (2006:18). The frequently advanced notion of suburban sprawl is questioned by Berger, who suggests that it no longer accurately describes the processes of horizontal development that characterize the American situation. These newly urbanized areas (neither central cities nor small towns) are now home to the majority of the country’s population and, as such, can no longer be classified as suburban; they must instead be recognized as the dominant form of urbanization taking place in the nation. Berger argues that they must also be understood in connection with the massive process of “de-industrialization” occurring in America. Berger offers the designation “drosscape” to encompass the combination of “waste landscapes” (areas containing solid waste, sewage, etc.), “wasted spaces” (abandoned or contaminated sites), and “wasteful places” (large parking lots and retail malls) that are the problematic leftovers of these joint tendencies in development (2006: 45). He notes that in 2005, over 600,000 abandoned and contaminated waste sites were identified within US cities (2006: 199). Berger’s impressive aerial photographs make apparent the pervasiveness of this dispersed form of urbanization and the design quandaries facing the discipline of landscape architecture. Kenneth Frampton reinforces many of Berger’s claims when he reminds us that 85 percent of American public infrastructure and commercial development projects are conducted “without the intervention of the architecture profession” (2007b: 115). In Frampton’s estimation, landscape design is becoming the “remedial art par excellence” (2007a: 110), charged with the task of rehabilitating

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the neglected and damaged regions produced by this lack of long-term sustainable planning. Yet these patterns of urbanization are by no means confined to the American geography. The German architect and urban planner Thomas Sieverts has gone so far as to suggest that the concept of “city” may be an antiquated one as an increasing expanse of Europe is taken up by what he terms the Zwischendstadt, a kind of “urbanized landscape” in which the distinction between landscape and city, rural and urban has effectively dissolved (2003). Sieverts presents Germany’s Ruhr area as an example of the Zwischendstadt, an 800-square kilometer urban cluster of several postindustrial cities (including Dortmund, Duisburg, and Essen) that is, in effect, entirely developed.4 Presented with the challenges of a postindustrial geography, landscape architecture is thus assigned a double charge—to provide coherence to the fragmentary, dispersed, and continuous urban field that now exists between major cities, and to recover and recondition the contaminated brownfield sites and obsolete industrial infrastructure that persist within the older city centers. Although not the only role that landscape architecture has assumed in reconditioning historical city centers, the conversion of former industrial sites into urban parks has been the most visible element of this adaptation process. As manufacturing economies wane and contemporary metropolitan areas are reorganized to accommodate growing information-based, cultural, creative, and tourist industries, leisure and green spaces assume an important role in enhancing the appeal of these cities for a new demographic.5 The amount of disciplinary discussion generated by a series of recent design competitions for public parks is indicative of the central position that urban parkland has come to occupy within both city planning and architectural thought. A certain trajectory can be traced from the Parc de la Villette in Paris (built between 1982 and 1998 on the location of the city’s central slaughter houses), to the Downsview Park in Toronto (a 2001 competition for the conversion of a former Canadian Air Force base that remains stalled in the planning stages), to the Fresh Kills site in New York, “the crown jewel of brownfields” (Pollack 2002: 59).6 While the first two commissions were assigned to architecture practices (Bernard Tschumi designed the Parc de la Villette and the proposal put forward by the partnership of Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture and designer Bruce Mau was selected from the Downsview competition), only landscape architecture firms were invited to compete for the Fresh Kills project—another sign of the discipline’s rising profile and an indication that its specific design methods are gaining broader recognition.7 The theory of landscape urbanism emerges in reaction to the already expanded role ascribed to landscape in the post-Fordist built environment, while advocating for a still larger shift in architectural perspective away from the prevailing emphasis on singular constructions and toward a systems and process-oriented design approach. The proponents of landscape urbanism argue that the conceptual scope of landscape design, the discipline’s “natural” inclination to think in terms of networks, relations, temporal change, and complex interactions, makes it an ideal basis for the re-formulation of urban planning. Two related themes stand out as essential refrains within the discourse on landscape urbanism: the importance of an ecological approach to urban design and an attention to infrastructural concerns within the city. Charles Waldheim, the landscape architect who coined the term, suggests that landscape urbanism’s advantage lies in its ability to unite these two elements by promoting “the conflation, integration, and fluid exchange between (natural) environmental and (engineered) infrastructural systems” (2002: 43). The foundations of landscape urbanism’s ecological and systems-oriented methodology can, to a significant degree, be traced to the figure of Ian McHarg, the charismatic Scottish-born planner

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who founded the department of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954. McHarg’s deep conviction that urban planning must be conducted according to the example set by the natural world had a profound and quite direct influence on the movement (Berger, Corner, and Waldheim all studied at the University of Pennsylvania, and Corner was until recently the chair of the department).8 His writing stresses the interdependence of relationships within any ecology and conceives of landscape design as a method of achieving an adaptive fit between a new programmatic requirement (be it socially or economically motivated) and the already existing environment. We can see in McHarg’s ecological position the influence of the American communication theory and cybernetic thought that emerged in the post–World War II period via figures such as Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener. Implementing the language of systems theory, McHarg views the primary goal of design to be the achievement of higher levels of organization and the consequent reduction of entropy (or disorder). There are, however, several important distinctions between McHarg’s perspective and that of early cybernetic theory. Wiener, for example, places a priority on homeostasis and the mechanisms of feedback and communication that allow humans to “exercise control over our environment” (1967: 26). Wiener is relatively ambivalent toward notions of life founded on biological or vitalist principles, emphasizing instead the affinities between any systems that resist the forces of entropy. In his formulation, the human and the machine stand together as the few “enclaves of organization” countering nature’s tendency toward disorder (1967: 46). McHarg, on the other hand, advances a notion of “dynamic equilibrium” (2007: 22) that is far more sympathetic to the productive processes of ecological change. For McHarg, there is an anti-entropic tendency, what he calls a “thermodynamic creativity,” inherent in matter and energy itself. In what seems like a direct refutation of Wiener’s position, he maintains: “This conception, that matter and energy are creative, have been creative, and are now creative is a very different view from the one which assumes that nature is a sort of backdrop to a human play in which man plays his uniquely creative role” (1998:180). Natural ecological systems, McHarg insists, have the capacity to evolve from “simplicity to complexity, from uniformity to diversity” (1998:180), and it is human intervention that, more often than not, introduces systemic disorder and destruction.9 Landscape architecture’s task then is to develop a “creative fitting” (2007: 25) between social systems and environment that might overcome human entropic tendencies. Yet even this clearly defined cybernetic distinction between system and environment is a tenuous one for McHarg who, in a rather Spinozan moment of monism, insists that “this whole system is in fact one system, only divided by men’s minds and by the myopia which is called education” (1998: 181–82). Reinhold Martin argues convincingly that the most consequential union of cybernetic principles and architectural design in the postwar period was considerably distant from McHarg’s progressive ecological vision. The realization of systems theory through design could instead be seen in the “modulated flexibility” and “organicist notions of open-ended yet controlled growth” (2003: 159) developed by corporations like IBM and General Motors and instantiated by architects and architectural firms such as Eero Saarinen and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Contemporary theories of landscape urbanism attempt to instigate a return to McHarg’s ecological principles, bringing them to bear on the postindustrial urban conditions of the present, while perhaps infusing them with greater faith in the creative potential of human technological interventions in the landscape. The insights drawn from natural life by McHarg—the dynamic interplay between multiple interactive layers (geological, biological, climatic), the impact of process on spatial phenomena, the

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importance of the movement toward organizational diversity—are applied to an even wider array of social and natural systems within discussions of landscape urbanism. Corner suggests, “we might speak of ecology as describing not a remote ‘nature’ but more integrative ‘soft systems’— fluid, pliant, adaptive fields that are responsive and evolving” (2003: 63). In following and extending the ecological path set forth by McHarg, landscape urbanism finds itself in dialogue with a current of architectural thought that takes the creation of difference and mutation as an ontological starting place for considerations of the built environment. As discussed in the previous chapter of this book, the biologically informed concepts of creative evolution, morphogenesis, and non-linearity advocated by philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze have been brought into the sphere of architecture by both theorists (Sanford Kwinter, Brian Massumi, and Manuel DeLanda among them) and practicing architects (including Reiser + Umemoto, Lars Spuybroek, and Greg Lynn). An interest in the tenets of complexity theory (the scientific work of Ilya Prigogine being one key point of reference10) provides an important point of intersection for landscape urbanism and this particular strand of contemporary architecture. Knowledge of the self-organizing tendencies of biological and chemical systems pushed far-fromequilibrium, the possible emergence of higher levels of order from what appears to be a state of entropic chaos, helps motivate a shared emphasis on the potential for spontaneous and unplanned effects in both these design movements.11 These ideas, with their focus on flexibility, change, and a lack of predetermination, are often too easily characterized as a reaction against the monolithic and brutalist structures that are the legacy of modern architecture. Yet the target identified by this emergent architectural discourse is perhaps more often the postmodern and deconstructive architectural theories of the more recent past and their emphasis on architecture’s relationship to language and meaning. These current biologically inspired theories often call for a revival of modernism’s large-scale engagement with the city on an infrastructural and organizational level. In his book Architectures of Time, Kwinter reminds us that a lineage of thought exists within modernity that orients architecture away from structure and form and toward conceptions of movement and the emergence of events (2001).12 In the design for La Città nuova put forward by the Italian futurist Antonio Sant’Elia, Kwinter sees an architecture concerned with lines of communication and transportation and based on the intensive qualities of vectors and speeds, rather than the extensivity of stable Cartesian grids. In a provocative series of written interventions R. E. Somol and Sarah Whiting call for a projective architecture that emphasizes the discipline’s instrumentality, its ability to produce effects and interactions among multiple economic, social, and ecological systems, rather than its ability to represent or signify (2002: 77). The architect Stan Allen (who, at the time of the Lifescape proposal, was a co-director of Field Operations13) has provided one of the most sustained appeals for architecture’s return to the questions of function and implementation that had been sidelined by postmodernism’s semiotic turn. Allen claims that in its attempt to restore history and meaning to an architecture purged of these qualities by modernism’s master-planning and relentless decontextualization, postmodernism had inadvertently retreated from its role in shaping large-scale urban design. If postmodern architects championed complexity over simplification and reduction (as in Robert Venturi’s seminal Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture), it was a complexity viewed in terms of the richness and ambiguity of meaning and symbol alone. According to Allen, an architecture obsessed with self-critique and decorative localism had lost its ability to influence the

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economic and social infrastructure of the city. He calls for an architecture that one again seeks to intervene in these processes; an approach that “understands architecture as material practice— as an activity that works in and among the world of things, and not exclusively with meaning and image” (1999: 52, italics in original). Like Somol and Whiting, Allen claims that architecture must own up to its powers of instrumentality that set it apart from other representational media (architecture is importantly not the same as film or literature). Architecture, according to Allen, must once again engage with the question of infrastructure, becoming less concerned with the form and style of individual buildings and more concerned with the fields that dictate what it is possible to construct. If, as Frederic Jameson has famously argued, postmodern architecture was an “internal and superstructural expression” of the economic system of “late capitalism” (2006: 485), then Allen calls for a far more direct and purposeful encounter with these same forces of production and circulation. In landscape architecture Allen sees a methodological model for the instrumental urbanism he proposes due to its customary management of horizontal surfaces and the “performative material effects” they engender (2001:124). Practitioners of landscape architecture have been equally enthusiastic about the potential to productively apply the discipline’s approaches to questions of infrastructure. Landscape from this perspective would refer not simply to the design of idyllic greenery and recreation areas, but would also imply a consideration of the organizational framework required to facilitate the movement of people, resources, and energy through urban space. As stated by Waldheim, “contemporary landscape urbanism recommends the use of infrastructural systems and the public landscape they engender as the very ordering mechanisms of the urban field itself, capable of shaping and shifting the organization of urban settlements rather than offering predictable images of pastoral perfection” (2002: 13). McHarg’s systems design approach, having been rejected as a form of “eco-fundamentalism” in the 1980s (Treib 2005: 112) and supplanted by more conceptual, cultural, and meaning oriented forms of landscape design (Laurie Olin’s collaborations with Peter Eisenman being a prominent example), is given new resonance in this context. For both Allen and landscape urbanism, this shift toward infrastructural concerns necessarily involves architecture’s return to the sphere of politics. A reengagement with the planning of urban systems would entail a move away from the publicity- and vanity-driven “signature buildings” that are seen to be the outcome of architecture’s recent postmodern and deconstructive turns. Belief in the political potential of landscape urbanism, its ability to account for the multiplicity of voices and imperatives that constitute the urban environment, is evident in Corner’s description of what he considers to be the movement’s promise: “the development of a space-time ecology that treats all forces and agents working in the urban field and considers them as continuous networks of inter-relationships” (2006: 30). The latest permutation of landscape architecture takes the form of a response to climate change and the resultant “resilient design” strategies. In the New York area, these initiatives have been particularly motivated by the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. In 2013 Mayor Bloomberg and the City of New York released its action plan “A Stronger, More Resilient New York” in response to the hurricane’s $19 billion damage to the city and a number of design competitions, exhibitions, and collaborative research projects have emerged within the architecture community in the wake of that disaster. These include the Structures of Coastal Resilience research project and Rebuild by Design: Hurricane Sandy Design Competition, both supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Although predating Hurricane Sandy, MoMA’s 2010 exhibition “Rising Currents:

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Projects for New York’s Waterfront” is another important moment in the city’s landscape and coastline resilience timeline of events.

Political landscapes Many of the trajectories that make up landscape urbanism’s genealogy seem to coalesce at the Fresh Kills landfill site: the movement’s emergence in response to postindustrial conditions; the application of its ecological systems approach and infrastructural objectives; the promise of a politically engaged alternative to recent postmodern and deconstructive architecture. Field Operations’ design would certainly appear to fulfill many of landscape urbanism’s aspirations to productively intervene in the social and economic life processes of the city. The New York City Department of City Planning describes it as “one of the most ambitious public works projects in the world” (NYC Parks 2001). The project presents Corner with the added incentive of addressing one of his mentor’s long-standing disappointments. McHarg lamented the mismanagement of New York’s natural resources and specifically the failure to preserve Staten Island’s unique geological and biological environments for the enjoyment of the city’s residents. He writes in his book Design with Nature, “Staten Island retained its quality as a bucolic haven rather longer than any other area as near to Manhattan, but in the postwar period the speculative builders made it the testimony to their shortsightedness and greed” (1992: 104).14 Lifescape holds the promise of correcting the decades of environmental abuse anticipated by McHarg in the 1960s. It is difficult not to be awestruck by the engineering feat required to make the Fresh Kills landfill site not only inhabitable but also teeming with life (see Figure 6.1 and Figure 6.2). This is truly an evolving topography, as the height of the mounds populating the site may lower as much as 100 feet as the garbage that constitutes them decomposes. There are two by-products of this process that require management. One is leachate, a toxic liquid by-product of the decomposition, which must be collected and treated. The other is methane gas, which is collected for reuse or is burned in a process called “flaring off” (NYC Parks 2001)—the flames occasionally produced by methane flares located across the site acting as a kind of spectacular finale in what seems like a magic act of vanishing waste. The ability to make the remnants of the site’s former function effectively disappear clears the way for an array of other activities and initiatives offered to New Yorkers. Field Operations details them in the following way: Ecological reflection, passive recreation, active sports and exercise, creativity, performance and cultural events, community development, economic enhancement and neighborhood revitalization all take their place alongside the micro-macroscopic processes of lifescape. It is fully integrative. Lifescape is not a loose metaphor or representation—it is a functioning reality, an autopoietic agent. (2002: 24) Yet it is precisely the seamless and total integration emphasized by the Field Operations plan that has generated a certain degree of public apprehension and may provide an occasion to query some of landscape urbanism’s more general political claims. Are there any limits to what is included in the ecology initiated and managed by Field Operations? Are there processes connected to the site

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FIGURES 6.1 and 6.2 Fresh Kills Landfill, Staten Island, NY, in 2011. Joel McKim.

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(social, political, material) that are unable to be integrated into such a lifescape? The description of the park as “an autopoietic agent” naturally gives rise to some of these questions. The reference connotes the properties of self-creation and self-organization that are the defining characteristics of living systems, according to the theory of autopoiesis developed by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.15 But autopoietic systems, according to Maturana and Varela, are also crucially autonomous, organizationally closed, and homeostatic properties of conservation and limitation that perhaps do not sit easily within the discourse of creativity, complexity, and emergence favored by landscape urbanism.16 It is specifically this self-referential character that Niklas Luhmann emphasizes when he, not without controversy, suggests that all social systems are autopoietic in nature. For Luhmann, the functionality of a social system is dependent on its ability to maintain an internal coherence and closed communication that necessarily establishes boundaries between a system and its surroundings. Autopoietic systems, he writes, “have the ability to establish relations with themselves and to differentiate these relations from relations with their environment” (1995: 13). It is, according to Luhmann, an operational closure that is necessary for the self-preservation of the system, but it is also one that “limits the domain of possible changes, of possible learning” (1995: 36). From an autopoietic perspective, a system’s possible contact with its environment, how it perceives the reality of its environment, and its potential to respond is therefore conditioned by the structure of its internal self-organization. There is, in other words, neither direct input nor immediate output between system and environment, but always separation, mediation, and, potentially, exclusion. In Luhmann’s autopoietic reasoning, a system’s failure to preserve the boundaries that maintain its distinction from its environment place this system at risk of disintegration and destruction. Challenges to the Lifescape proposal have been raised on two fronts, both of which question the systemic boundaries being set at Fresh Kills: the procedures of operational closure at work, and the specific forms of environmental integration and exclusion under way. The first grievance comes from those who evoke the site’s undeniable connection to the events of September 11 and are uneasy with an area that may still contain unidentified remains being too easily incorporated into a leisure-oriented lifescape. The second political challenge to the project is raised on the grounds that it is perhaps too successful in making the city’s largest accumulation of garbage effectively disappear. As Linda Pollock suggests, “To the extent that the Fresh Kills landscape is a consequence of our own material desires and consumption, it also reflects a desire to ignore our waste and abject products, to look in a different direction rather than risk being identified with them, to have them go away” (2002: 59). The first contestation became public in August of 2005 when a group of family members of 9/11 victims filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in an attempt to force the city to honor what, they claim, was its promise to separate thousands of tons of World Trade Center debris from the other landfill waste.17 The family members wished for these materials to be moved to a formal burial site and memorial park away from the Fresh Kills site (O’Donnell 2005). The case gained increased attention in March of 2007 when New York City’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Charles S. Hirsch and former workers at the landfill gave affidavits testifying that human remains were, in all likelihood, still to be found in the debris (Hartocollis 2007).18 Allegations by a recycling supervisor that fine debris potentially containing human remains was removed from the site and used to pave roads and fill potholes was particularly enraging to family members. The distress produced by thoughts of contamination and profanation is evident in the comments of Diane Horning, whose son was

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killed: “They lied to us and treated our loved ones as road fill and garbage” (Hartocollis 2007). The case was ultimately dismissed, however, in July of 2008 by Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who affirmed the city’s claims that sifting the debris had been conducted thoroughly and respectfully. He wrote in his verdict, “All human remains that could be identified, were identified. . . . Only dust remains” (Feuer 2008). Despite this judicial resolution, the manner in which the Fresh Kills park acknowledges its implication in the memory of 9/11 remains under scrutiny. Importantly and remarkably, with the closing of Fresh Kills New York no longer has any active landfills within city limits. Yet even if the trash itself is now interred, the site’s connection to the city’s politics of waste disposal continues. The history of garbage in New York is, unsurprisingly, not a pretty one. In the words of Elizabeth Royte, “For more than two hundred years, New York’s garbage has changed hands through cronyism and favors, and landed on the backs of the disenfranchised” (2007: 24). That is of course when it wasn’t simply being dumped at sea, a practice that continued until 1933 when communities on the New Jersey shore obtained a court order preventing the practice (Ascher 2005: 185).19 When Robert Moses opened the Fresh Kills landfill in 1947 he showed little regret for the resultant elimination of marshland, describing the project as “unsightly and unsanitary waste lands made useful and profitable” (Moses 1951: 1). Intended as a temporary measure until the city constructed more incinerators (or “burn units”) to handle its waste, Moses originally envisioned the Fresh Kills garbage to be used as the foundation under the approach system for his proposed Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (eventually completed in 1964) connecting Staten Island and Brooklyn. While Staten Island residents were assured the landfill’s lifespan would be no more than five years, the successive closure of landfills and incinerators in the city’s other boroughs extended Fresh Kills’ active service to fifty-three years (Johnson 2001). By the 1980s, the city was virtually entirely reliant on the Fresh Kills landfill for its waste disposal. The borough’s inordinate and involuntary trash responsibility has been a point of contention for Staten Islanders since the landfill’s inception. The level of opposition among the population was so pronounced that in 1992 a referendum passed calling for the borough to secede from New York City (Gandy 1994: 84). The eventual closing of the landfill is generally viewed as an example of political payback rather than sound environmental policy. Rudolph Giulinai, a close friend of then borough president Guy V. Molinari, was elected mayor in 1993 in part due to the support of Staten Island, the only “solidly Republican, overwhelmingly white borough” (Sze 2007: 112). Giuliani forged the agreement to close the landfill in 1996 despite there being as much as twenty years of remaining capacity, and according to the former director of policy planning for the New York City Department of Sanitation, Benjamin Miller, without: “a shred of analysis . . . or any planning, or any consultation with knowledgeable advisers inside or outside the administration, without any consideration of public health impacts, if any, or of environmental effects, or of financial consequences” (Miller 2000: 284). With no landfills or incinerators in operation in any of its boroughs, a complex and diffused transportation infrastructure has arisen to facilitate the exportation of New York’s garbage to poorer states willing to assume the ecological burden. A fleet of 18-wheeled semi-trailer trucks bear the brunt of this duty, departing from sixty-six transfer stations, spread primarily around the outer boroughs. Two-thirds of the city’s municipal waste ends up in one of two dozen landfills in Pennsylvania, but these sites are now reaching capacity and costs are rising, encouraging the city to transport waste to more remote locations in states such as Virginia and South Carolina (Ascher 2005: 190–91). In addition to truck haulage, the city has mobilized a rail network of waste disposal.20

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The Staten Island Railroad, an abandoned eight-mile railway connecting the island to the national rail network, was recently reactivated in order to transport 900 tons of solid waste daily to a landfill in South Carolina. A train consisting of thirty-five cars of containerized waste makes the 400-mile trip between a warehouse at the Harlem River Yards and a landfill in Waverly, Virginia each day (Ascher 2005: 191). This is a consignment process that has now been mostly given over to private waste companies, Waste Management, IESI, Solid Waste, and American Ref-Fuel the largest among them. The financial cost to the city is significant, with transport and landfill prices surpassing $90 per ton (not including collection), more than twice as much as Fresh Kills costs. These expenses make up a substantial portion of an overall sanitation budget that had already topped $1 billion annually by 2002 (Porter 2002: 55). There are also pronounced social and political effects brought about by these new methods of disposal. If, as City Councilman Michael E. McMahon claims, Staten Islanders were “for 50 years . . . the victims of trash injustice” (Vandam 2006), then we must wonder whether that injustice has simply been displaced to less politically visible locations. Resistance to New York’s waste exportation plans was initially quite vocal with New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman famously telling Giuliani to “drop dead” when in December 1998 he revealed a plan to transfer city garbage to the neighboring state without first consulting her (Martin and Barry 1998). Giuliani further enflamed the anti-trash sentiment by making his notorious “trash-for-culture” comment in response to Virginia governor James Gilmore’s threat to pursue a ban on the state’s intake of non-local waste, the then mayor suggested that the people of Virginia “like to utilize New York because it is a culture center and business center” and should therefore be prepared to help the city resolve its garbage problem as a “reciprocal relationship” (Sze 2007: 119). Virginia’s attempts to legislate an out-of-state garbage ban failed to hold up in court however and protests at this level of politics have largely abated as these states have only grown more financially dependent on the income generated from waste disposal. While the exportation of garbage clearly distributes its negative effects across a wider geographical area, trash-related health concerns within New York itself are far from eliminated by this new infrastructure. Communities unfortunate enough to be located near one of the city’s busy transfer stations, where garbage is carted and then sorted for export, are plagued by dust, noise, diesel-fuel emissions, noxious odors, cockroaches, and rats (Sze 2007: 110). Their necessity emerging quickly after the announced closure of Fresh Kills, the transfer stations surfaced where land was cheap and, as economist Richard C. Porter points out, “that happens to be where New York City’s poor live” (2002: 55). More than half of the city’s fifty-four privately owned waste transfer stations are located in just two lower-income neighborhoods: thirteen in the South Bronx and seventeen in Williamsburg/Greenpoint (Sze 2007: 113–14). Adding further complexity to an understanding of the current situation, the growth of environmental justice activism in these and other poorer New York neighborhoods in the 1990s was actually partly responsible for the city’s shift toward export as a post–Fresh Kills waste management solution. Multiethnic community coalitions, growing increasingly aware of the unequal distribution of toxic sites within the city,21 vehemently protested several proposed large-scale and highly polluting waste management projects such as the construction of a fifty-five-story tall mega-incinerator at the site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the opening of an extensive recycling operation in the South Bronx.22 With multiple transfer centers peppered across these neighborhoods, landfills dispersed across several states and a mobile network of highways and rail lines connecting them, the local activism

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that arose in the past to confront centralized and highly visible projects is unlikely to manifest itself in the same way. The communities impacted by the current system are even more marginal and fragmented; the environmental effects are even more diffused. In short, the closure of the city’s last remaining landfill has produced a quintessentially post-Fordist political situation. The geographer Mathew Gandy anticipates these problems when he describes the waste economy of a New York without Fresh Kills: “The elimination of all vestiges of production from the urban landscape is leading to widening environmental disparities at a regional level, as increasingly competitive forms of local antipollution activism simply redistribute unwanted land uses along an existing axis of property values and neighborhood militancy” (2002: 207–08). It is these systemic and ecological realities that landscape urbanism must address if it is sincere in its desire to intervene instrumentally and politically in a waste infrastructure that extends far beyond the borders of New York, let alone the confines of the Fresh Kills site.

Systems of protection Field Operations thus faces at least two challenges that test the integrative limits of Lifescape and underscore the possible exclusions from this nonetheless complex ecology. Precisely where the contours of this ecological system are set and whether these borders are porous or impervious become important conceptual and political considerations for the project. Another way to frame these dilemmas is through a discussion of protection and vulnerability. We might ask if in revitalizing the natural ecosystem at Fresh Kills and protecting it against the waste that is ultimately its foundations is Lifescape also sheltering itself and New York from the larger ecological and infrastructural problems facing the city? And if so, does this also constitute a disavowal that stands counter to the general political claims of the landscape urbanism movement? In Chapter 2 of this book we discussed the importance of Isabelle Stengers’ ethics of exposure in relation to 9/11 memorial culture. Could a similar philosophy of ecological exposure be necessary in considering the Fresh Kills site? In an attempt to traverse some of this fraught terrain, this chapter will conclude by exploring a concept that emerges in the writing of a figure, who has himself been excluded from the overall discussions of landscape urbanism. The name of Jacques Derrida would seem to be anathema to a movement that has ardently sought to distinguish itself from the legacy of architecture’s semiotic and deconstructive turns. And it is rather fitting that it is a park project that stands as the representative proof, for some, that the encounter between deconstruction and architecture was in the end a failed one. After all, the collaboration between Derrida and Peter Eisenman on a section of Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette infamously stalled over irreconcilable conceptual differences (as is documented in the publication Chora L Works).23 Yet the concept of autoimmunity that assumes an increasingly important role in Derrida’s late writing (surfacing long after architecture’s substantive forays into deconstruction) seems, nevertheless, very germane to these debates over the workings of an ecological and infrastructural politics. The notion of autoimmunity is particularly befitting in this context for several reasons. It is a concept that performs a central function in Derrida’s post–9/11 considerations of a potential democracy to come, and if there is such thing as a biopolitical moment in Derrida, it can also be found here in these discussions.24 The earliest sustained reference to the term autoimmunity

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occurs, however, within a text that predates 9/11, the essay “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.25” In introducing the concept Derrida immediately acknowledges its biological affiliation, defining it as the process by which “a living organism . . . [protects] itself against its self-protection by destroying its own immune system” (2002: 80 note 27). Here the idea assumes a prominent role within the philosopher’s discussion of the contemporary resurgence of religion as a global and political power. In this essay Derrida ponders the manner in which religion, founded as it is on “the experience of the unscathed, of sacredness or of holiness” (2002: 70, italics in original), has adopted the technological extensions of media transmission in order to spread itself globally. In its current configuration, the domain of the sacred and the divine must, however uncomfortably, reconcile itself with the scientific forces of the profane, the iterable, the machinic. Derrida writes: We are here in a space where all self-protection of the unscathed, of the safe and sound, of the sacred (heilig, holy) must protect itself against its own protection, its own police, its own power of rejection, in short against its own, which is to say, against its own immunity. It is this terrifying but fatal logic of auto-immunity of the unscathed that will always associate Science and Religion. (2002: 79–80) This is the autoimmune logic of an age of televised papal addresses and the Dalai Lama gone digital. In order to assure its survival and maintain the continued possibility of a sacred experience, religion must open itself, make itself vulnerable, to the very “tele-technoscientific machine” which threatens to “[dislodge] it from all its proper places” (2002: 82). For religion, always with a desire to extend its community of belief, there can be no final assurance or total indemnity from the risk of autoimmunity. Derrida later transfers the reverberating concepts of immunity and autoimmunity from a religious context to a political one in which religion figures prominently, resurrecting the terms in his assessment of the US reaction to 9/11 and the unfolding “war on terror.” This re-application is perhaps not surprising since, as W. J. T. Mitchell reminds us, the term immunity can be traced to a “sociopolitical discourse” as much as to a biological one, the origins of the Latin words immunitas and immunis signifying the legal concept of an exemption, as in the notion of “diplomatic immunity” (2007: 282). As noted by Mitchell, both the biological and juridical-political connotations of immunity are invoked in Derrida’s analysis of how the “body politic” attempts to preserve itself against the threat of terrorism. The nation’s efforts to ensure a seamlessly secure national defense are accompanied once again by a quasi-suicidal tendency to destroy its own protection. In a dialogue with Giovanna Borradori, Derrida suggests that the attacks on 9/11 (and he of course questions the meaning of naming this incident in such a way and the significance of labeling it an event) must be situated as one moment within an autoimmunitary process that extends further back to US and Soviet Cold War intrusions into Arab Muslim countries. The suicidal return of hijackers “welcomed, armed, and trained” (in Borradori 2003: 95) within US military programs is the first of three phases in what is a larger, interconnected autoimmune crisis. The second moment in this tripartite cycle is occasioned by the traumatizing nature of what occurred on September 11. But the common assumption that trauma is produced by a force from the past exercising its power over the present is placed in question here. “For,” Derrida writes, “the wound remains open by our terror before the future and not only the past” (in Borradori

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2003: 96, italics in original). The source of trauma, he argues, is less a past event that is unable to be fully appropriated, than the fear that something worse is still to come. This of course is the particular temporal logic of terrorism, not to inflict damage in the present, but to place in doubt the security of the future. Derrida argues that the obsessive acts of naming and commemorating 9/11—of establishing clear counters to “the event”—are symptoms of an attempt to repress the trauma produced by the threat of what has yet to occur. As Borradori notes, “By monumentalizing the terrorist attacks, the date 9/11 also declares that they are over” (2003: 151). The trauma of terrorism, however, refuses to cooperate by remaining in the historical place assigned to it; no form of mourning is capable of working through it. Derrida writes that “all these efforts to attenuate or neutralize the effect of the traumatism (to deny, repress, or forget it, to get over it) are but so many desperate attempts. And so many autoimmunitary movements. Which produce, invent, and feed the very monstrosity they claim to overcome” (in Borradori 2003: 99). Derrida follows this autoimmunitary tendency of repression, to ultimately reproduce what it seeks to eliminate, from a psychoanalytic to a political application. The third movement in this overall process is identified as the unintended consequence of the “war on terrorism,” its inevitable propensity to engender hatred toward the United States, and reproduce “the causes of the evil [it claims] to eradicate” (in Borradori 2003: 100). As even the most hawkish politicians now reluctantly acknowledge, military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have succeeded in furnishing the poverty, resentment, and instability that are the ideal incubators for the next wave of reprisals. It is a thread that is further developed in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason where Derrida discusses the consequences of the war on terror for the internal political life of America. Democracy itself exhibits an autoimmune tendency when US Homeland Security measures are implemented that “restrict . . . certain so-called democratic freedoms and the exercise of certain rights by . . . increasing the powers of police investigations and interrogations, without anyone, any democrat, being really able to oppose such measures” (2005: 40). In its attempts to expunge the enemy from within, the United States risks corrupting the ideals it claims to be defending and thus increasingly comes to resemble its enemies. Derrida describes the willingness of democratic states to send off (renvoi) democracy in order to protect it—to expel what it deems internally undesirable, but also to delay or defer (perhaps perpetually) democracy until a more conducive time comes to pass. And yet Derrida insists that autoimmunity is not “an absolute ill or evil” (2005: 152), it is in fact an indispensable attribute of democracy. While the American political response to 9/11 has proven to be very flawed indeed, Derrida retains his faith in the promise of a “democracy to come”26 that refuses to succumb to the urge for total immunity, for absolute self-protection. Democracy remains, he argues, “the only system that welcomes in itself, in its very concept, that expression of autoimmunity called the right to self-critique and perfectibility” (2005: 86–87). Only democracy, at least any democracy worthy of the name, fosters within itself the forms of critique and dissent that will inevitably lead to its being partially dismantled, disintegrated, and reconfigured. In this respect, Derrida argues that democracy’s virtue is its property of never properly being itself, of never remaining assured of its proper identity or ipseity—in short, its indeterminacy. Derrida maintains that this self-challenging and self-contesting is demonstrative of a faith in the promise of the future. For democracy’s propensity to attack itself, its self-destructive tendency, is also what constitutes its openness to the possibility of change, evolution, and betterment. Trust in what has yet to arrive manifests itself as well in democracy’s willingness, above all other political forms, to

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remain hospitable to outside forces (even those that are undemocratic). A systemic openness is exhibited that is also necessarily a fragility (Derrida notes that America’s receptivity to immigrants exposed it to the threat of terrorism from within its borders). Yet without this vulnerability, he argues, there can be no democracy and no futurity. It is autoimmunity that “enables an exposure to the other, to what and to who comes—which means that it must remain incalculable. Without autoimmunity, nothing would ever happen or arrive; we would no longer wait, await, or expect, no longer expect one another, or expect any event” (2005: 152). The concept of autoimmunity bears more than a metaphoric relation to questions of life and the living in Derrida’s thought. He writes, “My questions concerning ‘political’ autoimmunity thus [concern] precisely the relationship between the politikon, physis, and bios or zoe, life-death” (2005: 109). In this notion of a self-destructive force that is a precondition for survival Derrida finds a logic that resists the separation of life from so many oppositional terms. It is these forces, typically positioned contra-life—spirit, culture, technology, death—that connect life to the incalculable, the unknowable, and thus introduce within life the potential for change. As Elizabeth Rottenberg suggests: “The implacable law of autoimmunity must be reaffirmed, therefore, if a discourse is not to be mortiferous (mortifère), if it is to bear death in life, if it is to remain on the side of the ‘yes,’ of the affirmation of life, of the future” (2006: 10). If there is a biopolitical message in Derrida, it comes in the form of warning against any attempts at the management, organization, or immunization of life that seek to shelter it from these forces of indeterminacy and deny the presence of death, of futurity, of the other, in life. This conception of “life-death beyond the opposition between life and death” (Rottenberg 2006: 3) must, according to Derrida, be preserved within the political framework of a democracy to come. Returning to the unusual configuration of life and death being produced by the creation of a “lifescape” at Fresh Kills, Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity introduces many necessary complications to the ecological and infrastructural systems taking form on Staten Island and generates a series of critical questions. With its emphasis on revitalization and total integration, is the Lifescape project an effort to immunize the Fresh Kills site against the presence of its troubled past? Or does the possibility exist for the creation of an ecological system that is open to acknowledging its connection to ongoing traumas, both political and environmental? Does, in other words, the Lifescape plan have the potential to be a living system that is more autoimmune than autopoietic? “Contradiction” is the name Luhmann assigns to external conflicts that disrupt the otherwise coherent logic of a closed system. His thought comes closest to coinciding with Derrida’s recognition of the autoimmune when he writes: “One can see clearly how contradictions fulfill their function of warning and alarming. For an instant they destroy the system’s total pretension to being ordered, reduced complexity. For an instant, then, indeterminate complexity is restored, and everything is possible” (1995: 373, italics in original). Yet for Luhmann even these moments of contradiction ultimately serve an immunitary function, allowing the system to select what serves its interests and reject what endangers its self-organization and thereby “protect through negation against annihilation” (1995: 372). Derrida’s conception of the autoimmune calls on us to think the inclusion of contradictions within the system itself and reconsider the notion that there exists an impenetrable division between stable systems and the environments that terrorize them.27 In so doing it presents a significantly more difficult challenge to the designers of Lifescape, to find a role within the space of the site for the contradictory elements that continue to haunt the landfill.

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Field Operations has already offered a form of response to the first of the two primary apprehensions about the Fresh Kills redevelopment project. With plans drawn in the months following the attacks, Field Operations included in the Lifescape design a monument to 9/11 that is remarkably successful in avoiding the heavy-handed symbolism of so many contemporary monuments. The proposed Fresh Kills memorial consists of a pair of earthworks, the length and width of the collapsed towers laying on their sides and pointing toward Ground Zero. The two horizontal forms will become topographical elements of the landscape, cresting mound 1/9 where the World Trade Center debris is located; visitors to the park will be permitted to climb their summits.28 The calls by some to entirely remove these buried materials from the landfill cannot be answered by the Field Operations plan, but in accordance with the logic of autoimmunity, consenting to these desires for absolute purity would seem unjustifiable. The memorial is instead a thoughtful presence that subtly, skillfully, and even beautifully references the site’s otherwise hidden significance. Realizing a design that allows these contrasting functions to cohabitate—a lifescape that is also a reminder of death—Field Operations has achieved an unusual accomplishment, the creation of a living memorial that significantly alters the complexion of the park. The second cause for concern regarding the Fresh Kills site, its complicity in the unjust dispersion of the city’s waste problem, is an even greater challenge to the Lifescape design and one that Field Operations seems less successful in addressing. While landscape urbanism insists on the infrastructural instrumentality of the discipline, at Lifescape references to the ongoing processes of American post-Fordism are remarkably absent. With an overall site design that verges on the pastoral, Lifescape’s prospective status as a nature reserve and wetland conservation area emphasizes the promise of a pristine future, potentially disowning the landfill’s distasteful industrial past. Julia Czerniak makes the following observations concerning the project diagrams: with polemics that so pointedly resist nature/city oppositions, [Lifescape’s] competition “image” is unapologetically natural-looking, not that different from the soft and undulating nature of which Corner was critical. Although circulation plans, habitat restoration, defragmentation strategies, and prominent external views render Lifescape seamless with the city, the project could be understood as a restoration effort with a management strategy, shored up through the choice to neither index the landfill nor reveal the landscape’s own artificiality. (2007: 224) In truth, the plan does not entirely disregard the site’s working past. Remnants of the landfill’s years of active use, trash barges, and waste disposal equipment, will be present as ornamental features in some areas of the park. The manner of their inclusion, however, suggests that they too will serve a type of memorial function, firmly allocating Fresh Kills’ role as landfill to a period of history that has now passed. The dominant visual and rhetorical tone of the plan remains a redemptive one—a landscape of waste regenerated to the status of nature. In 2012 the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI), a sustainable design competition founded by Robert Ferry & Elizabeth Monoian, chose the Fresh Kills site as the location for their second design brief.29 The published compendium of submissions was collected under the title “Regenerative Infrastructures” and the competition guidelines required applicants to design “a three-dimensional sculptural form that has the ability to stimulate and challenge . . . contemplation from viewers on such broad ideas as ecological systems, human habitation and development, energy and resource generation and consumption” (LAGI 2013: 28). The design submissions were also required

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to “capture energy from nature, convert it into electricity, and have the ability to store and/or transform and transmit the electrical power to a power grid” (LAGI 2013: 28). The winning entries to the competition materialize the LAGI’s mission of promoting both compelling design aesthetics and sustainable energy development: a wall of wind harnessing piezoelectric generators that in the evening activates a mesh of lights “displaying a memory of the generated energy” (LAGI 2013: 56); a hilltop undulating landscape of funnels, channeling wind toward a series of turbines; a field of “99 majestic red balloons” that double as photovoltaic solar generators (LAGI 2013: 74). The LAGI’s mission is an admirable one and the competition responses are testament to the existence of a rapidly developing sustainable design community. Beyond this particular event, the Freshkills Park, as it is now known, is also clearly genuinely committed to an ongoing program of renewable energy promotion and environmental awareness through the work of organizations such as the Freshkills Park Alliance. It is important to note, however, that none of the submissions to the LAGI competition acknowledge the expanding network of waste removal set in motion by the landfill’s closure. The risk of these initiatives is that they present the ecological impact of New York’s immense and continuing garbage production and energy consumption as an overcome past or a distant memory. Indeed, in their competition description, Monoian and Ferry go so far as to present the rehabilitated Fresh Kills site as a kind of memorial to a pre-sustainable past, “the reclamation of Fresh Kills Landfill will mark an era of healing and inspiration for Staten Islanders and New Yorkers, standing as a beautiful monument to restoration and ecological adaptation, a symbol of our collective ability to learn from our past and move beyond a status quo and towards a more sustainable ideal” (LAGI 2013: 24). Envisioning a design that would resist this immunitary impulse and acknowledge the continued implications of the Fresh Kills site for the city’s dispersed infrastructure of waste disposal is an admittedly difficult task. But if landscape urbanism wishes to fulfill its promise of instrumentality, it must actively intervene in the unevenly distributed economic processes shaping the organization of urban politics and geography. Simply recuperating the abandoned postindustrial sites left behind by these changes or establishing them as monuments to a new era of sustainability is not sufficient. Landscape urbanism must widen the ecological systems with which it concerns itself, extending their contours beyond the confines of a protective nature.

Notes 1 Among Field Operations’ other current projects is the design of a rooftop garden on London’s Battersea Power Station development and a waterfront park connected to Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory development. The firm also notably collaborated with Skidmore Owings Merrill in a plan for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center and partnered again with SOM on a proposed master plan for the redevelopment of the Hudson Yards where the High Line terminates. 2 See, for example, the New York Magazine feature article on Corner titled “Wall-E Park” (Sullivan 2008). 3 There are many other useful accounts of contemporary postindustrial urbanity in recent scholarship on the city. See, for example, Edward Soja’s description of LA as the place where late-twentieth-century urban restructuring processes “all come together” in his book Postmodern

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Geographies (1989) and Mike Davis’ critique of this position on the grounds that it, however unintentionally, glamorizes LA’s post-Fordist conditions and their often disastrous social effects (1992: 84–88). 4 The area includes the much-discussed Landschaftspark in Duisborg-Nord designed by Peter Latz and completed in 1991 and the Zeche Zollverein coal pit and cokery in Essen that was declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 2001. The Duisborg-Nord landscape park, which incorporates the extensive industrial infrastructure of the area’s former coal and steel production, and the Zeche Zollverein, which has been converted into a cultural arts center and Ruhr museum (designed by OMA), have become models for postindustrial brownfield regeneration. See the publication Talking Cities: The Micropolitics of Urban Space for a discussion of the Ruhr area’s changing urban condition. 5 An extensive body of recent scholarship attempts to interpret shifting urban demographics and analyze the strategies employed by cities to accommodate these changes, including efforts to attract and retain valuable creative labor and compete for the attention of tourist populations. See, for example, the work of Richard Florida, The Rise of Creative Class (2003); John Hannigan, “A Neo-Bohemian Rhapsody” (2007); and Allen J. Scott, The Cultural Economy of Cities (2000). 6 The Fresh Kills redevelopment can also be situated within the ongoing process of transforming New York’s Waterfront from a functioning port system to a valuable landscape feature for the city’s reconstituted postindustrial economy. Raymond W. Gastil documents the city’s numerous waterfront development projects in his Beyond the Edge: New York's New Waterfront (2002). 7 Field Operations was among the finalists for the Downsview Park competition, but R. E. Somol argues that the “extensive and informational” nature of their organizational diagrams was less compelling than the “intensive and performative” branding of Koolhaas and Mau’s “Tree City” proposal (in Czerniak 2001: 131). At the time, the “imageability” of the logo still had more resonance than Field Operations’ ecological processes. 8 Corner and Berger both contribute to the volume Ian McHarg: Conversations with Students (2007). 9 McHarg was fond of using a particularly provocative thought experiment to demonstrate the imperative of his ecological teachings. He envisioned confining all the “arch-destroyers” of the earth, the military generals, and atomic energy commissioners, to a space-borne capsule, a precarious closed environment where they would be forced to recognize the similar fragility of the earth’s ecosystem. McHarg used his typical candor to describe this assembled cast of ecological miscreants: “all these animated, planetary diseases who masquerade as men and whose best efforts are to inflict lesions on the world body. Bang! Bang! Bang! They are off in space” (1998: 177). 10 See, for example, his From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences and Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, co-authored with Isabelle Stengers. 11 Carey Wolfe notes the preponderance of references to “emergence” and “self-organization” in the proposals for the Downsview Park design competition, which he explains as the influence of a “second-wave systems theory” that accounts for time and temporalization (the first wave being the systems of stability and control emphasized by cybernetics) (in Czerniak 2002: 86). 12 Similarly, Colin Rowe underlines modernist architecture’s seemingly contradictory double impulse, one “relating to measurement and mechanism” and another “relating to change and organism” (1978: 28). Modernism’s biological and vitalist inspirations are apparent in statements such as Le Corbusier’s cellular and organic explanation of the Radiant City and Walter Gropius’ insistence that “Modern buildings are not monuments but receptacles of the flow of the life they have to serve” (in Rowe 1994: 26). 13 Allen has since ended his direct involvement with the firm, leaving James Corner as the sole principal. 14 McHarg’s fears, writing in the late 1960s, that the Staten Island ecology was already being severely impacted by development initiatives was well founded. With the growth of the Fresh Kills

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landfill and a population jump on the island from 160,000 inhabitants in 1931 to 400,000 in 1990, the area has, according to a 1994 Rutgers University study, lost nearly half of its 1,082 native plant species (McCully 2007: 107). 15 See, for example, their Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. 16 For example, Keith Ansell Pearson offers in his book Germinal Life a very thorough account of the important points of differentiation between notions of autopoiesis and the Bergson-inspired theory of creative evolution espoused by Deleuze and Guattari. He stresses the radically open nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the machinic phylum that emphasizes “transversal communication” and “novel alliances” over fixed boundaries and stable organization (Pearson 1999: 169). 17 Controversy over the treatment of materials at the Fresh Kills landfill was incited earlier by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa’s accusation in February of 2004 that FBI agents assigned to the forensic site had been “filching” mementos from the landfill. Grassley claimed that agents had participated in a “ghoulish practice” of “grave robbing” items that included fire truck doors, airplane pieces, and American flags (22Barry 2004). The claims, although never entirely substantiated, led to an official FBI ban on agents removing any item from a recovery site and the “grave robbing” rumor continued to circulate for some time afterward. 18 The discovery in the spring of 2006 of seventy-four bone fragments on the roof of the condemned Deutsche Bank building bordering the Ground Zero site provided additional credence to the families’ claims (Dwyer 2006). 19 There are a few anomalous examples of progressive figures and innovative ideas embedded in this history. Colonel George Waring, for example, instituted New York’s first comprehensive waste management system from 1895 to 1897, a time when the city was facing an acute garbage crisis and general deterioration of public health. Waring’s army of sanitation workers became known as the “White Wings” in reference to their immaculate white uniforms (Ascher 2005: 185). Waring established a mandatory recycling program, calling on residents to separate their waste into three categories: putrescible food waste (to be steamed and compressed to produce grease for soap products and fertilizer), dry rubbish (form which paper and other reusable materials were salvaged), and ash (which was sent to landfills). 20 Miller labels this form of garbage transport the “pew yew choo-choos” (2000: 289). 21 Greenpoint-Williamsburg, for example, has a level of pollution almost sixty times the national average of residential neighborhoods (Gandy 2002: 197). 22 Interestingly, the Bronx Community Paper Company was to be designed by Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. 23 Even within wider academic circles there seems to be a consensus that Derrida’s encounter with architecture has run its course. See, for example, the volume Critical Architecture emerging from a recent conference at The Bartlett School of Architecture that brought scholars together to defend philosophy’s contribution to architecture. Among many thoughtful calls for architecture to question the current “post-critical” turn and renew engagements with Adorno, Deleuze, Tafuri, and others, claims for Derrida’s continued relevance are conspicuously few. Andrew Benjamin’s essay “Passing Through Deconstruction” may be the exception, but even here the goal is largely to situate “deconstructivist architecture” within a historical period that has since passed. 24 Although Derrida’s interest in matters of life and death extends much further back in his writing. It could be argued that Derrida is already thinking biopolitically when he discusses the implications of the pharmakon, meaning both remedy and poison, on the living body in the long essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” first published in Tel Quel in 1968 and later contained in the essay collection Dissemination. 25 There are earlier appearances of the term in the texts Spectres of Marx and Politics of Friendship, but these are quite brief and only suggestive.

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26 In using the expression “democracy to come,” Derrida clarifies that he is not referring to the coming of a future democracy, a better political system that hopefully will arrive soon, but rather to “a democracy that must have the structure of a promise—and thus the memory of that which carries the future, the to-come, here and now” (2005: 85–86, italics in original). 27 See Gunter Teubner’s excellent account of the crucial difference in the role assigned to paradox in the thought of Derrida and Luhmann in his essay “Economics of Gift—Positivity of Justice” (2001). 28 The screened and sifted WTC remains will be located in a containment area adjacent to the memorial earthworks and not directly accessible. 29 The competition was organized in collaboration with the New York City Department of Sanitation, and the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation.

Conclusion D

espite its energy and dynamism, New York has never been known for being a city that quickly embraces new architectural movements or avant-garde building designs, particularly those deriving from outside of America. The masters of European modernism, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, were accepted by the city only grudgingly and to a limited degree.1 Even Rem Koolhaas, whose Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1994) is the quintessential architectural ode to the city, has famously never contributed to the creative urban grid he described so evocatively. From this perspective, the pushing aside of Daniel Libeskind’s Memory Foundations proposal, a European outsider’s masterplan for Lower Manhattan, in favor of the more conservative vision of architects such as David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (the giants of American corporate architecture) seems consistent with the city’s overall building history. And yet over the past few years New York, and Manhattan in particular, has seen some relatively uncharacteristic additions to its skyline. After the post–9/11 period, that included the 2008 financial crisis, when it seemed that very little was being built at Ground Zero or anywhere else in the city, New York is in the midst of a remarkable construction boom.2 It is real-estate and property speculation, of course, and not memory, that is driving this boom—apartment and condo complexes are finally providing a cadre of superstar global architects an opportunity to build in the city. The undulating form of Frank Gehry’s 8 Spruce Street apartment building became one of the most recognizable buildings in Lower Manhattan when it was completed in 2010 and it was the architect’s first skyscraper. Herzog and de Meuron’s residential 56 Leonard Street, with its unusual and slightly precarious looking “stacked houses” design, was completed in Tribeca in 2017. Rafael Viñoly, whose THINK Team finished second to Libeskind in the Ground Zero masterplan competition, now has his Manhattan monument in the form of the controversial, ultrathin 432 Park Avenue condominium complex that, at 1,396 feet, is second in height only to One World Trade Centre within the city. Viñoly’s building, completed in 2015 and towering over Central Park, is the most notorious example of a new trend of “supertall,” residential skyscrapers that stand more than 1,000 feet high. Nearby One57, designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Christian de Portzamparc, tops out at 1,005 feet and was completed in 2014. These “supertalls” will soon be joined by Jean Nouvel’s MoMA condominium tower (1,050 feet) and two towers designed by SHoP architects: 111 W 57th Street (1,428 feet) and 9 Dekalb Avenue (1,066 feet), Brooklyn’s first “supertall.” The city also awaits the arrival of Central Park Tower designed by Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill which, at last report, is planned to reach 1,795 feet at its pinnacle, nineteen feet higher than One World Trade Center. Although by no means a “supertall,” this real-estate boom has even given Rem Koolhaas and his OMA studio an opportunity to finally build in New York; their 121 East 22nd condo complex is already under construction. But despite all of this international design activity, the forty-three-year-old Danish architect Bjarke Ingels may, in the end, have the most indelible impact on the city’s contemporary urban

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fabric and in several ways that intersect with the examples discussed in this book. The first New York intervention made by Ingels’ studio, BIG architects, was a relatively modest one produced in collaboration with Jake Barton’s Local Projects (the experience design studio featured in Chapter 3 of this book). The 2012 light sculpture “BIG Loves New York” was a sensor-activated, ten-foot glowing heart installed in Times Square that pulsated in response to the touch of passing tourists. BIG’s next New York–based project sits squarely within the landscape urbanism and climate resilience tradition, a winning submission to the 2012 Rebuild by Design Hurricane Sandy Competition discussed in the last chapter. The studio’s “BIG U” proposal, which is now in the process of being implemented, is a ten-mile flood protection zone around the perimeter of Lower Manhattan that doubles as new leisure and recreation space. True to the studio’s name, BIG’s New York projects have only expanded in size and scope. In addition to the “BIG U” design, Ingels has no fewer than four significant Manhattan-based architectural projects recently completed or underway. A counterpoint to the “super tall” movement, his thirty-five-story tall, pyramid-shaped VIA 57 West residential building was completed in 2016 in Hell’s Kitchen. But Ingels is hardly eschewing the Manhattan trend to go high and his contribution to the massive Hudson Yards development project will be the 1,005-foot office tower named The Spiral. BIG’s The Eleventh project will be located further down the High Line, a pair of twisting towers housing a hotel and a residential complex. And finally, the architect has recently ousted Norman Foster for design rights to 2 World Trade Center, the fifth and final tower to be built at the World Trade Centre site. The 1,340-foot structure’s stepped design consists of seven separate building volumes, stacked like children’s blocks. Ingels claims the building appears “straight-laced” from the side of the memorial and more unconventional from the other side where a series of graduated, set-back roof terraces lead down to St. Paul’s Chapel at ground level. It will eventually be home to Rupert Murdoch’s media companies, 21st Century Fox and News Corp and a digital news ticker will run across the downward-facing overhanging edge of each of the stacked building blocks. All of these developments—from the real-estate—fuelled building boom to the decision to supplant the more stoic Norman Foster design for 2 World Trade Centre with BIG’s modern, playful media building—could be interpreted as signs that New York is moving on from its concern with commemorating 9/11 or its interest in memory more generally. As it finally reaches completion, the new World Trade Centre site already feels, in some ways, like a marker of a different architectural moment in the city. While attracting visitors from across the country, the site’s expressions of unreserved patriotism or nationalism feel out of synch with the general mood of the city. Yet as much as there is a danger in a city obsessively revisiting past traumas, there are also substantial risks involved in it too willingly moving past them, particularly when the repercussions of these events are still unfolding. New York’s confrontation with the memory of September 11 still remains far from complete. This book has presented a number of different intersections of architecture, media, and memory occurring in New York in the aftermath of 9/11. The philosophical ideas and political theories that have been introduced are clearly diverse and sometimes even divergent, but they do collectively contribute to some common insights. One consistent theme of this book is the conviction that in the context of rebuilding New York, an approach to architecture is needed that acknowledges the past, while also allowing or even compelling the city to innovate and move forward. The issues of public concern that face New Yorkers are indeed complex and they do require inventive solutions and new approaches. Distinct from the novelty produced by real-estate booms and housing

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speculation, this form of creative memory (which we can see manifested within the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, but also in the media innovations of designers like Jake Barton and Local Projects) would view the past as a reservoir of potential techniques, organizations, and ideas rather than an archive of static images. It would employ memory as a catalyst for the generation of new forms of communication and new ways of living together responsibly. The book has attempted to serve as a reminder that architecture and media can be interpreted from the point of view of their specific form or content, but they can also be understood as platforms that allow things to occur or processes to take shape. I believe memory can also be viewed from such a platform perspective, conceived, in other words, as the foundation and impetus for something different and necessary to develop, rather than simply as the conservation or recollection of a past event. Many of the thinkers, artists, designers, and texts explored in these pages reflect this platform-oriented perspective, as they attempt to consider the very conditions necessary for ethical remembrance, productive communication, and political discussion to take place. The question of platforms is a crucial one at this particular moment because so many of the social and political platforms we depend on, to debate our common world and confront the political challenges we face, seem to be under threat. The gathering at Union Square, for example, signaled the importance of preserving New York’s last remaining public spaces. Architecture that serves its potential role as a platform for discussion without predetermination is increasingly rare. Given that official memorials are occupying more and more of these dwindling public spaces we must begin to question our assumptions about what social and political roles they are intended to play. Can we imagine a memorial that facilitates communication rather than silent contemplation or didactic instruction? Can a memorial help bring a new political community into being rather than commemorate the victories and tragedies of one that already exists? The importance of these architectural questions is compounded by the fact that the efficacy of our media, another primary platform for contemporary political communication, is also in doubt and a source of anxiety. While in the decades after 9/11 new digital media forms have arisen that have radically and productively altered everything from design practice to public participation and interaction, they have also played a troubling role in further polarization of the political sphere. The same digital platforms that generated new and democratic engagements with the reconstruction of Lower Manhattan also helped produce the rampant conspiracy theories and xenophobia that have marred these more positive architectural developments. Many of the more disturbing digital tendencies that characterize our current “post-truth” moment were already being incubated in the aftermath of September 11. An inability to confront post–9/11 political dilemmas has, in other words, come back to haunt us. There is therefore no way to simply move beyond the question of post–9/11 memory, despite whatever 9/11 fatigue we may understandably be feeling. We and other international communities continue to experience the effects of a changed political world brought into being by these events and the responses to them. Another common refrain for the artists and thinkers explored in this book is the conviction that the form of memory and communication generated in post–9/11 New York must transcend local and national borders to acknowledge the global complications of a still unfolding and still volatile international situation. This would entail a riskier response, one that would involve greater exposure to the consequences and victims of a still ongoing war on terror and the destabilization it has produced. Such a memorial culture need not be viewed as a

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prohibition on mourning the loss of life close to home, it would call instead for an expansion of the limits of who deserves or requires mourning. It would mean envisioning an architecture of memory that does not attempt to protect or immunize the nation from threat, but encourages instead a confrontation, however painful and difficult, with the undeniable complexities of our post–9/11 world.

Notes 1 Le Corbusier was not pleased with the decision to adopt a design for the United Nations Headquarters that was an amalgamation of his proposal and that of the younger Oscar Niemeyer (Schulz 2014), and the appointment of Mies as the architect for the now much-celebrated Seagram’s Building was thanks to the tireless efforts of a young Phillis Lambert (Lambert 2013). 2 The city hit a record six-month high in construction in 2017 (Trangle and Colangelo 2017).

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Index 9/11 attack. See National September 11 Memorial; World Trade Center conspiracy theories 77, 80, 82 cultural studies response 83–7 memorial debate 10 9/11 Memorial Foundation 62 “9/11 Truth Movement” 77–8, 81, 87 “9/11 Truthers” 39, 80 11 septembre 2001: L’Effroyable imposture (Meyssan) 82 “A New World Trade Center” exhibition 97–8, 102, 104, 113 “A Stronger, More Resilient New York” 122 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) 79, 98, 104 Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection (Wodiczko) 59 Adorno, T. W. 110 Afflicted Powers (Boal, Clark, Matthews and Michael) 86 African Burial Ground National Monument (designed by Leon, Rodney) 1 Agamben, G. 12, 43, 47–8, 52, 57–8 Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building 20 algorithmic memory 13, 60–75 Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Dean) 85 Allen, S. 121 Alterman, E. 79 American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial (Escobar, Marisol) 1 Amoore, L. 70 Ancestral Libation Court 1 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari) 98 anti-war sentiments 25 Arad, M. 9, 12, 61 archipolitics 88 architectural Deleuzism 105 architecture of contemporary memorial and museum design 6

Architectures of Time (Kwinter) 121 Arendt, H. 32 Arnold-de Simine, S. 65 Around Ground Zero project 36 Artists’ Scarves 28 ArtLens Wall 71 Aschrott Brunnen monument 6 Assman, A. 11 Austin, J. L. 20 Austin Tobin Plaza 2 autoimmunity and immunity 129–31 Avery, D. 82 Bachmann, I. 26 Badiou, A. 44 Ball, K. 73 Barkun, M. 83 Barry, A. 71 Barry. D. 127 Barton, J. 12, 60–75, 138 Bataille, B. 48 Battery Park City 1 The Battle of Orgreave (Deller) 110–11 Beer, D. 71 Benjamin, H. D. 29 Benjamin, W. 4, 47 Bennett, J. 113 Berger, A. 118, 120 Berger, J. M. 41 Bergson, H. 14, 99, 121 Bergsonian duration and memory 107–9 Berlant, L. 23 Berlin Jewish Museum (designed by Libeskind) 6, 8 Berman, M. 24 Beuys, J. 29 Beyer Blinder Belle 91, 103 “BIG Loves New York” 138 “BIG U” proposal 138 Billy, R. 24 Birchall, C. 84 Blair, T. 56

156

INDEX

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (Venturi) 121 Conflict Transformation Centre 59 Conical Intersect (Matta-Clark) 115 conspiracy panic 85 contemporary designers and theorists 102 contemporary memory 4–10 Corner, J. 14, 116–17, 120 cosmopolitical memorial 57–60 counter-monuments 6, 10, 49 crisis of memory 5 critical memory 57 Cruz, T. 105 Cultural and Clinical Trauma Healing 59 A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Barkun) 83 Czerniak, J. 132

Blank Spots on the Map (Paglen) 86 Bloomberg, M. 39, 92, 122 Blumenthal, R. 92 BMW Guggenheim Lab 73 Boal, I. 86 Bond, D. B. 53 Bonevardi, G. 113 Borradori, G. 129 Bouazizi, M. 41 Boym, S. 4 Bratich, J. Z. 84–5 Breaking Ground (Libeskind) 8 Breslin, J. 2 Burden, C. 59 Burke, J. 40 Burlingame, D. 52 Bush, G. 39, 56, 79 “The Bush Regime Engineered 9/11” 39 Butler, J. 10, 22–3, 57 Cache, B. 100 Carpo, M. 99–100 Carried to the Wall (Hass) 19 Carrier, P. 61 Carroll, N. 44 Cartographies of the Absolute (Toscano and Kinkle) 86 Caruth, C. 5 Carver, R. 26 CATIA (Computer-Aided Three-dimensional Interactive Application) modeling software 100 Caygill, H. 70 Child, D. 39 The Child, the City and the Artist (Van Eyck) 111–12 Chomsky, N. 85 Chun, W. 11, 70 City of Memory 63, 65, 67 City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial (Wodiczko) 43, 59–60 Clark, T. J. 86 classical schema 44–5 Coast Guard Memorial 2 collaborative storytelling 73 collective memory 112 Collins, G. 24 Columbine High School shooting 20 Columbus, C. 2 The Coming Community (Agamben) 48 communication by memorial 35

12,

Danto, A. 45–6 Davies, W. 79 Davis, A. 55 “Day of the Dead” 21 De Cesari, C. 11, 57 Dean, J. 85 Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (Griffin) 83 Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts (Reagan and Dunbar) 83 de-industrialization 118 Déjà Vu and the End of History (Virno) 12, 19, 26, 31–6 DeLanda, M. 101, 121 DeLappe, J. 70 Deleuze, G. 11, 13–14, 30, 79, 95, 98–105 association with Kierkegaard 106–7 concept of “machinic phylum” 101 Deleuzians and their discontents 99–106 inspired architecture 13, 98, 101, 105 memory 98–9, 106–7, 109–10, 112 “Deleuze Connection” in architecture 100 Delirious New York: A Retroactive (Koolhaas) 137 Deller, J. 110–11 Derrida, J. 7, 14, 117, 128–9 design competitions for Ground Zero 99, 112, 137 Hurricane Sandy 122, 138 in Lower Manhattan 8, 13 Design with Nature (McHarg) 123

INDEX

Detmers, I. 11 Deutsche, R. 56–7 Diana, death of Princess 20–1 Diana memorial 20–1 didactic schema 44–5 Digital Culture in Architecture (Picon) 99 digital design in architecture 99 digital engagement and Local Projects 13, 63, 71–5 digital memorial networks 70 The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992–2012 (Carpo) 99 digitally enhanced memory projects 62 diplomatic immunity 129 disaster tourism 23, 35 Disney, W. 9 Doss, E. 2 D’Souza, D. 82 Dubbeldam, W. 102 Dunlap, D. W. 44, 52 dynamic equilibrium 120 East Coast Memorial for World War II serviceman 1–2 Edkins, J. 46 Eisenman, P. 7, 61, 122, 128 El Dia de Los Meurtos 20–1 emotional tonalities of opportunism and cynicism 32–3 Engle, K. J. 22–3, 25 Ernst, W. 64, 69 Escobar, M. 1 Esthel, A. 11 Explore 9/11 app 66 facial recognition algorithm 71 Facing Crisis: America Under Attack 56 Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) 41 Feiden, D. 52 Felman, S. 5 Fenster, M. 82, 84 Ferry, R. 132 Filliou, R. 29 flaring off, Fresh Kills landfill 123 Flex-City plan for Lower Manhattan 102 Flugplatz Welt/World Airport 28, 30 Fogle, D. 27, 29 The Fold (Deleuze) 100 Foreign Office Architects (FOA) 100, 103 Foster, H. 9 Foucault, M. 86

157

Foundation Hall 53–4, 68, 72 fragile memorials 17 Frampton, K. 118 Frazier, M. 66 Freedom Tower (designed by Child) 9, 39 Fresh Kills (short film) 115 Fresh Kills landfill 14, 124 closing of 126 Field Operations plan 117, 123, 132 flaring off 123 garbage dump 115–6 Lifescape design 117 Matta-Clark’s vehicle 115 political landscapes 123–8 systems of protection 128–33 transformation of 115–7 Freundlich, O. 26 Friedlander, S. 8 Frow, J. 5 Gandy, M. 128 Garden of Stones (designed by Goldsworthy) 1 Gardner, J. B. 24–5 Gehry, F. 100 Geldof, B. 1 Geller, P. 92 The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Jameson) 82 Gerz, J. 6, 48 Giddings, S. 72 Gill, G. 137 Gilmore, J. 127 Gitelman, L. 65 Giuliani, R. 39, 67, 126–7 Gobnik, A. 57 Goldberger, P. 9, 11, 91, 97 Goldsworthy, A. 1 Gramsci, A. 48 Great Famine (Irish Hunger Memorial) 1 Green, M. 21 Greenspan, E. 11 Greenwald, A. M. 53 Griffin, D. R. 82–3 Ground Zero 2–3 alternative design plans 103 Around Ground Zero project 36 challenge of rebuilding 97–8 clearing operation 72 design competitions 99, 112, 137 destruction and opportunity for innovation 10, 17, 104 envisioning rebuilding project at 14

158

Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 911 Attacks 92 Libeskind’s proposal 9, 50 Mosque 75, 78, 92 political pressures at 63 Power at Ground Zero (Sagalyn) 11 protests at 92 reconstruction/rebuilding 3, 10–11, 14, 90, 104, 117 Ground Zero Mosque: Second Wave of the 911 Attacks (Geller) 92 Guattari, F. 79 Hächler, B. 74 Hacking, I. 4 Hallward, P. 90, 105, 110 Handbook of Inaesthetics (Badiou) 44 Harper’s Magazine 80 Hart, F. 44 Hartocollis, A. 125–6 Hass, K. A. 19 Heidegger, M. 45 Hennes, T. 53 Henning, M. 65 Henry, S. M. 24–5 Heyer, H. D. 2 Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (D’Souza) 82 Hirsch, Charles S. 125 Hirschhorn, T. 12, 19, 26 aesthetics of excess 26–30 Artists’ Scarves 28 Flugplatz Welt/World Airport 28, 30 Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake 28–30 Mondrian Altar 26–7 work with disposable materials 27–8 Historical Exhibition, National September 11 Museum 53, 55–7 The History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides) 88 Hofstadter, R. 80 Hoheisel, H. 6, 10 Holdsworth, A. 69 Holocaust remembrance 4 Holocaust Tower 7 Horkheimer, M. 110 Horning, D. 125 Hoskins, A. 69 Hurricane Sandy Design Competition 122, 138 Hurricane Sandy (2012) 122 Huyssen, A. 4, 10

INDEX

immunity and autoimmunity 129–31 Ingels, B. 137 interactive technologies, Local Projects 72–3 International Freedom Center (IFC) 52 Irish Hunger Memorial (designed by Tolle, Brian) 1–2, 9 Isay, D. 64 Israeli Defense Force (IDF) 104 Jameson, F. 4, 82, 86, 122 Jenkins, H. 82 Jewish Memorial (designed by Eisenman) 7 Johnson, K. 126 Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake 28–30 Justice and Reconciliation Network 59 Kallat, J. 111 Kamin, B. 51 Kennicott, P. 55 Kierkegaard, S. 14 Kierkegaard’s repetition 106–7 Kimmelman, M. 17, 61 King, S. J. 23, 32 Kinkle, J. 86 Klimow, M. 66 Koenig Sphere (designed by Koenig, Fritz) 2 Kohl, H. 7 Koolhaas, R. 113, 137 Krygier, J. 63 Kwinter, S. 121 LaCapra, D. 5–6 Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) 132–3 landfill’s lifespan 126 Landsberg, A. 64 landscape architecture 122 urbanism 116–17, 119–23, 133, 138 Lanzmaan, C. 5, 9, 15 Last column Exhibition, National September 11 Museum 72 LaVerdiere, J. 113 Layman Design 53 Lee, Robert E. 2 Lennon, J. J. 7 Leon, R. 1 Levinas, E. 59 Leys, R. 5 Liberty Torch monument 20 Libeskind, D. 6, 8–9, 49–50, 97, 103, 137 lieux de mémoire (Nora) 5 Life Victorious 8

INDEX

Lin, M. 19, 44–6, 49, 61 “Listening to the City” 91 “living” monument 1 Local Projects City of Memory 63, 65, 67 digital engagement 13, 63, 71–5 and exhibit design firm Thinc 65 Historical Exhibition, National September 11 Museum 53, 55–7 innovative 73 interaction designs of barton and 61–75, 138–9 interactive technologies 72 Last column Exhibition, National September 11 Museum 72 MCNY Future City Lab map table 74 Memorial Exhibition, National September 11 Museum 54–5 positive impact of digital media 74–5 StoryCorps oral history initiative 64 Timescape Exhibition, National September 11 Museum 67–8, 71 urbanology game 73 Loose Change (Avery) 82 Lower Manhattan (Downtown Manhattan) 1–3, 17, 23, 39–40, 52, 63, 113, 137–9 accumulation of memorials 3 design competitions 8, 13 Flex-City plan for 102 Islamic community center 75, 92 Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) 91 Principles for the Rebuilding of Lower Manhattan 90 rebuilding/redevelopment 13–14, 78, 90, 92, 95, 103 Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) 8, 91, 97 Luhmann, N. 125 Lütticken, S. 86 Luxembourg, R. 29 Lynn, G. 99–100 machinic phylum concept 101 The Man Without Content (Agamben) Manovich, L. 69 Marchi, R. 20–1 Martin. D. 127 Martin. R. 104, 120 Massumi, B. 102, 111, 121 Matta-Clark, G. 115

47

Matthews, J. 86 Maturana, H. 125 Mau, B. 119 McCain, J. 83 McCullough, M. 99 McHarg, I. 119–20, 123 McKim, J. 2, 8, 27, 41–2, 47–8, 54, 81, 124 McMahon, Michael E. 127 MCNY Future City Lab map table 74 mediation, intimacy and involvement through 63–7 “mediatization” of architecture 4 mementos and flowers 19–20 memorial challenges 43–6 memorial communication 35 Memorial Exhibition, National September 11 Museum 54–5 memorial mania 2 memorial of open communication 46–8 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (designed by Eisenman) 7, 44, 48, 61 Memorials to Shattered Myths (Senie) 50 memory, language, and politics 31–6 memory and architecture 9–10 Memory Maps 63 memory politics 50 Merzbau (Schwitters) 29 Mestrovic, S. 21 Metropolis 90 Meydag, H. 115 Meyssan, T. 82 Michaelsen, S. 80 milieux de mémoire (Nora) 5–6 Miller, B. 126 Mitchell, M. 7 Mitchell, W. J. T. 129 MoMA PS1’s 2011 exhibition 26 Mondrian Altar (Hirschhorn) 26–7 Monika Sosnowska’s tower 111 Monoian, E. 132 Monument Against Fascism 6 monuments dismantled 2 Monuments of Passaic (Smithson’s photo series) 6 Moses, R. 115, 126 Moussavi, F. 103 Mowjood, S. 92 Murdoch, R. 138 Muschamp, M. 8–9, 103 Museum and Archaeological Storage facility (MARS) 20

159

160

INDEX

Museum of Jewish Heritage (a living memorial to the Holocaust) 1. See also Garden of Stones (designed by Goldsworthy, Andy) The Museum of the City of New York 25 Musil, R. 2, 7 theory 2 Myoda, P. 113 National September 11 Memorial & Museum 1, 3, 12, 50 9/11 Memorial Foundation 62 “9/11 Truth Movement” 77–8, 81 on anniversary ceremony 39 Arad, Michael 9 arrival of museum 52–7 design competitions 99, 112, 137 Explore 9/11 app 66 expressions of grief 51 faces and biographies of 2,983 victims 72 flower left at 51 Foundation Hall 53–4 Historical Exhibition 53, 55–7 Last column Exhibition 72 Memorial Exhibition 54–5 Obama at 40 public patriotism on display at 10th anniversary 41 public protests at 10th anniversary 42 Reflecting Absence 9 small memory shrines 11–2 Timescape Exhibition 68, 71 negative form monument 6 New York City Police Memorial 1 New York Korean War Veterans Memorial 1 The New York Times 53–4, 61, 92 The New York Times Magazine 103 New York’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial 2 Niaz, R. 67 Nietzsche, F. 4, 29, 106 Noble, P. 11 Nora, Pierre 5 Nowacek, N. 63 Obama, B. 39–40 Oblique World Trade Center 103 Oborne, P. 78 Occupy Wall Street movement 35, 42, 90 O’Donnell, M. 125 Oklahoma City bombing 20–2 Olalquiaga, C. 20 Oldenburg, C. 6

Olin, L. 122 On the Shores of Politics (Rancière) 88 Operation Enduring Freedom 9 Operational Theory Research Institute (OTRI) 104 The Origin of the Work of Art (Heidegger) 45 The Other Vietnam Memorial (Burden) 59 Otterman, S. 56 Otto, F. 103 Oudolf, P. 2 Ouroussoff, N. 53 Paglen, T. 86 parametricism 99 Parc de la Villette (desinged byTschumi) 119, 128 Parikka, J. 69 Park of Heroes 9 Park51 rendering, SOMA Architects 93 Pataki, G. 9, 52 Peace Building Institute 59 Pearson, K. A. 107 Pétain, P. 2 Picon, A. 99–100 Piotukh, V. 70 Plato 88 poiesis 47 Poitras, L. 80 Pollock, L. 125 populism 94 Porter, R. C. 127 postemotional society 21 post-Fordist 26, 31–3, 35, 105, 118–19, 128 “The Post-Truth Presidency” 79 Power at Ground Zero (Sagalyn) 11 Precarious Life (Butler) 10 Principles for the Rebuilding of Lower Manhattan 90 prosthetic memory concept 64 Protetch, M. 97 Public Notice 3 (Kallat) 111 Rabaté, J. 79 “Race for the Cure” 23, 32 Rajchman, J. 101 Rancière, J. 13, 78 archipolitics 88 characterizes architecture 90 and Plato 88 and politics of appearance 87–9 populism 94

INDEX

Reflecting Absence memorial (designed by Arad and Walker) 9, 12, 48, 59 original proposal 43–4, 49 winner of 2003 memorial competition 43 Reich, T. 7 Reiser, J. 101, 103, 112, 121 repetition concept 106–7 “Revolt! Against U.S. Gov. Traitors” 39 Rigney, A. 11, 57 The Rise of Political Lying (Oborne) 78 rituals of mourning 22 Rodchenko, A. 29 Rogner, C. 118 Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Derrida) 130 romantic schema 44–5 Roosevelt, T. 2 Rothberg, M. 11 Rottenberg, E. 131 Rowlands, M. 45 Royte, E. 126 Sagalyn, L. B. 8, 11, 50–1, 62 Salo, P. 77 Santino, J. 20 Schumacher, P. 99, 118 Schuster, J. 23 Schwitters, K. 29 Scott, D. 10 Senie, H. 21, 50 Shahzad, F. 42 Shalev-Gerz, E. 6 Shannon, C. 120 Shershow, S. C. 80 Shoah (movie by Lanzmaan) 5. See also Holocaust remembrance Shuchov’s Moscow Transmission Tower 111 Shulan, M. 65–6 Sieverts, T. 119 Simmel, G. 78 Simon, P. 39 Simondon, G. 34 Simpson, D. 9 Smith, A. 137 Smith, T. 3 Smithson, R. 6 Snøhetta museum pavilion 53 Snowden, E. 80 “social media revolution” of Web 2.0 3 Somol, R. E. 121 Sosnowska, M. 111 Spencer, D. 105

161

Splitting (Matta-Clark) 115 spontaneous memorials 18–9 Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building 20 cultural history of 19–23 Diana, death of Princess 20 Dunblane school massacre 20 as expressions of protest 21 Hillsborough soccer stadium disaster 20 Hirschhorn work with disposable materials 26–30 media spectacle and 22 at Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights 25 and political communities 25–6 and Roman Catholic 20 Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection (VVMC) 19–20 spontaneous shrines 20–1 Spuybroek, L. 101, 121 statue mania 2 statue of George Washington (designed by Brown) 24 Statue of Liberty 8 Stengers, I. 57–8 Stern, J. 41 Stiegler, B. 11–12, 19, 26, 31–6 Stone Wall National Monument 2 Stop Islamization of America organization 92 StoryCorps booths 64–5, 67 Strauven, F. 111 Sturken, M. 21–3, 25, 31 “supertalls” 137–8 Swami Vivekananda 111 Talen, B. 24 Tatlin’s Tower 111 Taussig, M. 2 temporary community 35 temporary memorials 17 theory of “performative utterances” 20 thermodynamic creativity 120 The Three Soldiers statue 44 Time and Free Will (Bergson) 107–8 Timescape 67–8, 71 Timescape Exhibition, National September 11 Museum 68, 71 Tolle, B. 1 Toscano, A. 86 Tourists of History (Sturken) 21 transnational memory 11 Trauma Theme Park 9 trauma tourism 7, 22

INDEX

162

Van Eyck, A. 111–2 Vandam, J. 127 Varela, F. 125 Venturi, R. 121 video documentaries on 9/11 attack 82 Vietnam Veterans Memorial (designed by Lin) 19, 44–6, 49 Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection (VVMC) 19–20 Vigiano, J. 62 Virno, P. 12, 19, 26, 31–6 Virtual Union Square 25

The Wall Street Journal 52 “The Wall That Heals” 46 Warhol, A. 29 Washington Post 55 Watts, M. 86 Wedge of Light 9 Weil, S. E. 4 West, P. 21, 23 When President’s Lie (Alterman) 79 white supremacism 2 Whiting, S. 121 Wiener, N. 120 Williams, B. 56 Wodiczko, K. 12, 43, 59–60 World Trade Center 9/11 Memorial Foundation 62 collapsing and reconstruction of 8 Explore 9/11 app 66 Historical Exhibition 53, 55–7 Koenig Sphere (designed by Koenig, Fritz) 2 Last column Exhibition 72 Loose Change 82 Memorial Exhibition 54–5 National September 11 Memorial 1, 3 public patriotism on display at 10th anniversary of 9/11 41 public protests at 10th anniversary of 9/11 42 small memory shrines 11–2 spontaneous memorials 18–9 StoryCorps booth 64 Timescape Exhibition 68, 71 Union Square after 9/11 17–8 video documentaries 82 Winter Garden 9 World Wide Web (WWW) 70

Waldheim, C. 116, 119–20, 122 Walker, P. 12, 44 “Wall of Hope,” Union Square 24

Zaera-Polo, A. 103 Zinn, H. 85 Zwischendstadt 119

traumatic memory 5–6, 9 “Tribute in Light” 113 Truth movement 13, 75, 80 Tschumi, B. 119 Twilight Memories (Huyssen) “Twin Towers Redux” 103

4

Umemoto, N. 101, 103, 112 Union Square Community Coalition 36 Union Square memorial 12, 17–18 from 9/11 to 9/20 23–6 impromptu concerts 24 and political communities 25–6 “Union Square Not For Sale” campaign 36 “Unite the Right” rally 2 United States Holocaust Museum 53 “unpatriotric” artwork 52 urban planning and memorial sites 9–10 urbanized landscape. See landscape urbanism US Declaration of Independence 8. See also Statue of Liberty USA PATRIOT Act 56