Contents introduction

Narrative Exploits begins with a discussion of the traumatic moment of 9/11 precisely because the attacks on the World Trade Center—in their symbolic dimensions, their media coverage, their ability to exploit the image, and the public reaction they provoked—revealed the dimensions of an institutional presence deeply involved in the everyday lives of Americans.⁶ The traumatic moment of the attacks on the towers was followed by an immediate frenzy of nationalist discourse that positioned America as an innocent victim of terrorism. Rhetorically defined in this way, the state was not only justified, but obligated to take military action against those responsible for the attacks. Caught within this milieu, the traumatic experience of 9/11 was codified along political channels that aligned individuals with state power. The terrorists did not attack America; they attacked Americans. The processes by which the state co-opted these channels for processing trauma perfectly capture the tension between the initial traumatic destabilization of the individual and the system and the rapid reconstitution of the biopolitical nation-state. Shortly after the attacks, individuals found themselves in the midst of intersecting vectors of trauma: the personal, private experience of “witnessing” the attacks on television and the ensuing articulation of a collective, public, national trauma. Paradoxically, it was precisely this traumatic moment— the moment when the mediated spectacle resisted personal and collective psychological processing—that our problematic relationship to the state was temporarily laid bare. The individual’s lack of political agency within biopolitical systems of control became evident through the horrific destruction and death as well as through the more unsettling realization that the attacks were connected to political operations of a higher order.
The events of 9/11 (chapter one) and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (chapter three) suspended us in what Edkins calls “trauma time,” or time outside of the linear and historical time of institutional power. Although the national conversation about these two events differs in critical ways, what the events revealed about our relationship to state power can be pieced together with the same set of tools. For Edkins, trauma time offers us ways of confronting a political presence that is invisible under normal circumstances. She writes, “what trauma or a traumatic encounter does, then, is reveal the way in which the social order is radically incomplete and fragile. It demonstrates in the most shocking way that what we call social reality is nothing more than a fantasy—it is our invention and it is one that does not ‘hold up’ under stress” (“Remembering Relationality” 109). Later, Edkins elaborates, “A traumatic event is one that entails the blurring of the very distinctions upon which everyday existence depends, upon which people rely to continue their lives” (110). Jay Winter calls trauma time the defining mode of temporality in contemporary existence, particularly considering the potential for trauma to be broadcast via television media (72). For Jennifer Loureide Biddle, instead of blurring the distinctions of the everyday, trauma reinforces boundaries that separate subjects and thereby prevents victims from identifying with society. She writes, “Trauma causes a closing-off of the boundaries of one’s inhabited, intersubjective generosity…[it] causes a failure of and in identification; the violence of a loss that cannot be assimilated” (56). The two approaches in fact complement one another; during trauma time, the victim experiences a radical destabilization of identity during which her belief in the wholeness of a social reality—a totality integral to the stability of her identity—begins to collapse. Suspended in trauma time, she is both psychologically-vulnerable and politically-aware in ways that she had not been prior to the event. In the following minutes, hours, days, etc., she shores up her identity as a kind of healing mechanism to protect herself from future psychological harm occurring as a result of the encounter with the real.
The national response to the attacks on the WTC, the subsequent initiation of the Homeland Security state, and the traumatic aftermath of Katrina provide fertile ground for unpacking these complex political and psychological processes. In these national events, the “social reality” that was believed to be stable and whole was shown to be incomplete and flawed, and the media images that documented them contained deeper symbolic resonances that spoke to this reversal of perception. What was so disturbing about witnessing these events on television was not that the terrorists had undermined our social and economic power, or that the hurricane had wrought such devastation on New Orleans, but rather that these external forces had temporarily illuminated the machinery of a complex institutional system of social and political control in which we were (and are) all invested.

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