I imagine there can be very few people who don’t know where they were and what they were doing when they first saw the film footage of 9/11. In the 1960s, similarly, it was said that everyone could recall their movements at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination. The death of Princess Diana was another legendary happening, but without a doubt 9/11 was the most gruesome of such events – the kind which have mythic proportions even before the print dries on the newspaper headlines.

To see 9/11 as a media event, and to view it (at least partly) from the point of view of its audience (or audiences) is to make a powerful cultural statement. It implies that the media played a primary role, that there would have been far less social and political impact without the media, and that the whole catastrophic event was, in fact, deliberately played to the cameras so to speak. This, to my mind, always raises the question of how cameras happened to be right there and rolling pointing in the direction of the twin towers just as the first hijacked plane was about to crash. Either someone knew in advance, or our cities have become so utterly laden with media and people walking about with gadgets that we might as well be in Orwell’s 1984 – or rather, a kind of liberal free market version of Orwell with the only Big Brother being that stupid programme on TV.

It is often said that 9/11 heralded in a new era – in communications, in worldview and culture, in international affairs, and in terrorism itself. In 1996, five years before the attacks of 9/11 2001, authors Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass commented, in a book on terrorism, that “…it is often argued that the news media, the terrorism specialists, and the terrorists themselves require one another in order to thrive”. (1) They quote an ABC news producer – one could hardly wish for a more reliable source – Ted Koppel, who maintained:

“Without television terrorism becomes rather like the philosopher’s hypothetical tree falling in the forest: no one hears its fall and therefore it has no reason for being. And television, without terrorism, while not deprived of all interesting things in the world, is nonetheless deprived of one of the most interesting.” (2)

Television’s need for terrorism can, in my view, be exaggerated. However, terrorism’s need for television certainly cannot. This entire relationship, which has been discussed much more since 9/11, takes us into the whole complex of current issues concerning the media and audiences.

The falling tree
It is surely self evident that the impact of present day terrorists without the media would be very greatly reduced because they would have very little audience. As an audience is a crucial factor in the acts of propaganda and threat that they carry out, the lack of one would cause them to reassess their tactics. The people who are to be terrorised are not only those unfortunate ones who literally get caught in the line of fire – or the kidnapping, the torture, or whatever else. The point of such acts, of course, is also to create a climate of fear, and that means threatening, or terrorising, those who watch – the audience, us, the rest of us who do not wish to live in a climate in which such things happen. In other words there would be little point in terrorism if no-one heard of it.

The media, therefore, and especially the TV news media, are complicit in the culture of terrorism. They do not plot and commit terrorist acts, of course, but they create a culture of spectacle in which any terrorist act is certain of reaching a huge public – the bigger the better.

If the governments and media were really serious about reducing terrorism acts of terror would simply not be reported at all. Whether or not such a policy would actually work is beside the point. It will never be tried, so we’ll never know whether it would work or not. The news media’s appetite for spectacle is non-negotiable. The French Situationist philosopher Guy Debord called our society the “society of the spectacle”, claiming that it is spectacle itself that constitutes one of the most powerful controlling forces. The relationship between the media and terrorism is a good example.

Craving an audience
Terrorist acts, gruesome though it may be to consider them in this way, are performances, and performances need audiences and the media can be guaranteed to supply such audiences. The more spectacular the performance the greater the media interest – Band Aid, the mourning over Princess Diana, the trials of O.J.Simpson and Michael Jackson, and, “best” of all, 9/11.

Perhaps the word performance, in this context, needs some definition, because although it may seem somewhat alarming to view 9/11, or any other public act of terrorism as a performance, there are plenty of grounds for doing so.

Marvin Carlson, in his book Performance, begins by maintaining that performance in the arts requires “the physical presence of trained or skilled human beings whose demonstration of their skills is the performance”. (3) This broad approach, due to its very inclusiveness, could readily be applied to the trained and skilled team who planned and carried out 9/11. There is no doubt that the whole incident was a public display of technical competence and, through that, of power.

Carlson also introduces the idea of consciousness. He recognises that in everyday life we drift in and out of roles, and that everyone is aware, in particular circumstances, of playing a role of some kind. What, then, is the difference between merely doing something and performing? Carlson replies that when we do actions consciously “this gives them the quality of performance”. (4) One can see that in the context of much contemporary so-called “performance art” consciousness is crucial. I may walk down a street as I do every day. Or I may decide that my walk on a certain day is a performance. Again, consciousness of what was being done, how it was being done, and what its probable consequences would be apply perfectly to 9/11.

Richard Schechner, the eminent theorist of performance, also sees the distinction between performance and everyday life as a thin one. He acknowledges that as well as applying to theatre and the arts the word performance covers such things as “greetings, displays of emotion, family scenes, professional roles, and so on – through to play, sports, theatre, dance, ceremonies, rites, and performances of great magnitude”. (5) The performance types on this list amount to a collections of genres. All performances, by definition, are contained within genres even when, as in the case of much contemporary art, those boundaries are redrawn – a lot or a little. In the case of 9/11 the genre of terrorist act was, indeed, redrawn dramatically. In point of fact, this particular genre subdivides into kidnapping, hostage-taking, taking over transport such as aeroplanes, bombing, suicide bombing, car bombing, letter bombing, and so on. Until 9/11 flying aeroplanes into tall buildings hadn’t been tried.

Training and skill, consciousness, and genre - we begin to get some impression of the rough territory occupied by performance. However, a vital ingredient which completes the picture is that of an audience. A performance is always for someone. There are observers, onlookers, spectators, crowds, large or small. For those who would split hairs, there are those specialised cases in which the audience is oneself. Typically this occurs, for example, in music practice when a musician pretends to be playing to an audience. Those who actually learn a musical instrument often imagine an audience’s presence. It gives practice an extra edge. Even so the act of performing in front of a real, rather than an imagined, audience is utterly different.

An audience of some kind, then, is central to the idea of performance. To quote Carlson again: “Performance is always performance for someone, some audience that recognizes and validates it as performance even when, as is occasionally the case, that audience is the self.” (6)

We have established that acts of terrorism are generally directed to their audiences, and that just as smaller acts of terrorism may come to the attention of smaller audiences, the bigger, more dramatic acts of terrorism – and 9/11 stands as the biggest to date – tend to be seen, or known about, by larger audiences. If training, skill, consciousness, genre and audience are basic to the concept of performance, as I believe they are, it would be very hard to find a way of excluding terrorism and 9/11 from the field.

9/11 was one of those rare events, even more than those mentioned earlier such as Band Aid or the funeral of Princess Diana, whose audience was the whole world, although it could be argued that the terrorists, Al-Qaeda, specifically saw America as its audience. Audience studies teach us that audience reactions even to a simple soap opera are not as uniform or as simple as might be thought. The response to 9/11 can therefore fairly be imagined to be very complex indeed. We will begin by examining the specific response of what was a very specialised audience – that of artists, and of the German modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in particular.

The greatest work of art
Is the fact that something qualifies as a performance enough to also qualify it as art? In relation specifically to 9/11 Stockhausen was widely reported as saying it was “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos”. (7) The British artist Damien Hirst referred to the film footage of 9/11 as “visually stunning”, but it was Stockhausen’s statements that provoked the most widespread anger. He is reported to have continued by referring to:

"Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for 10 years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn't do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing. Artists, too, sometimes try to go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world." 

Stockhausen angrily claimed that he had been selectively reported. He had been asked a question at a press conference in Hamburg: were Michael, Eve and Lucifer historical figures of the past? He answered that they exist now, for example, in New York, and then continued by saying:

“In my work, I have defined Lucifer as the cosmic spirit of rebellion, or anarchy. He uses his high degree of intelligence to destroy creation. He does not know love.” (8)

It was in this context that Stockhausen, defending himself, claimed that 9/11 was “Lucifer’s greatest work of art”. He was speaking metaphorically about the forces of evil. Or so he maintained.

Coup de Theatre
Part of the problem, part of the furore that Stockhausen caused, revolves around his use of the word art, and what is generally meant by art. There is a strong tendency to equate art with positive qualities. Art is, thus, a “good thing”, a good idea, and in the last analysis a positive, beneficial force in society. For some it even has a redemptive force. It is the very thing that will save society from whatever ills it is supposed to have.

It has been said that there is a danger in treating 9/11 as art. Michael Shurkin, in a website article, argues that:

“9/11 was no coup de théatre. The danger in treating 9/11 as art, beyond anesthetizing oneself from the horror, is that it makes the attacks a primarily aesthetic act, like the Taliban's destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamian. But the attack was not vandalism: it was mass murder. Not the sign of mass murder or 'mass murder' in postmodern quotation marks, but real mass murder.” (9)

I agree that if viewing 9/11 as art had the effects Michael Shurkin fears, it would be somewhat dangerous. However, my view is that the perceptions of art are helpful in attempting to gain some handle on what happened.

The view that art is, by definition, a “good thing”, seems to be essentially an old fashioned view, although even today’s discourse about art seems to perpetuate the idea that art, at some basic level, is a positive force. This view of art as inherently positive can hardly be supported by the facts of art history and usage. For example, certain types of music used in ancient and medieval battles were intended to stir the troops into the mood for fighting and killing.

Medieval epics such as The Song of Roland abound in descriptions of battles in which the spilling of guts and entrails are described in gory detail worthy of any present day video-nasty. An enormous number of paintings in many countries over many centuries were commissioned in order to represent power and powerful people, thus reinforcing a virulent class system. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is routinely accused of anti-Semitism. Leni Riefenstahl’s famous movies of the 1936 Hitler Olympics are a bench mark of innovative filming techniques, but controversy remains as to whether or not they amounted to Nazi propaganda. It would be easy to compile an enormous catalogue of art which has ideological content which, from a fairly standard viewpoint today, could be regarded as offensive or negative in some way. If “art” can be reduced to a neutral term, a descriptive term with no implied value judgement, then 9/11 might qualify.

Furthermore, (and in support of 9/11’s claim to be art) there is, of course, plenty of disagreement these days about what, exactly, constitutes art. The twentieth century saw a gradual and very radical, reframing of art and its objects to the extent that the intention of an artist is sufficient to make an everyday object or occurrence into art. “Its art if I say it is” – that kind of thing. One thinks of Marcel Duchamp’s “ready mades”, and John Cage’s idea that “music is all around us. If only we had ears there would be no need for concert halls.” Or one thinks of Orlan’s so-called “carnal art” in which her operations for plastic surgery were filmed as her artwork. Furthermore, a great deal of contemporary art relies on the element of sensation. There was an entire exhibition of new British art – the title of the exhibition being “Sensation”. Sensational art leaves the viewer, the audience to complete the work. The work itself is not necessarily the most important thing. Rather, it is what the work provokes in the onlooker, the audience that matters most. If anything, no matter how exceptional or unexceptional can be regarded as art, and if sensation can be the main ingredient, would 9/11 qualify?

The missing ingredient here is the artist’s intention. The perpetrators of 9/11 were not consciously making an artistic statement. Their action was politically or religiously motivated – or a combination of the two. So while there would seem to be nothing in the way of objective qualifications that would exclude 9/11 from the realms of art, subjectively there may be a problem. The terrorists did not intend it as art, and that, for many people, should settle the matter. (Perhaps not for me, however…)

As if...
It is at this point that Stockhausen’s view comes into play. Remember he was asked a metaphorical question about Michael, Eve and Lucifer, and he answered metaphorically by claiming that Lucifer, the “cosmic spirit of rebellion, or anarchy”, was alive in New York City using “his high degree of intelligence to destroy creation”. (This, incidentally, does not sound as though Stockhausen approved of 9/11 as his critics implied.) What Stockhausen appears to have been doing is to evaluate 9/11 as if it were a work of art. Taken on this metaphorical level there is, perhaps, much to learn.

The as if dimension is not in the least far-fetched. The point has been made many times that 9/11 itself imitates disaster movies, apocalyptic movies, good versus evil action movies in which the world is saved from aliens or from enemies who have more to do with the shadow side of the mind than any real enemies from the Cold War onwards. 9/11 could probably not have been conceived without Hollywood. So we have a case here not of art imitating life, but of life imitating art.

Stockhausen refers to “an act we couldn’t even dream of in music”, drawing particular attention to ten years’ of rehearsal (which, in the case of 9/11 may not be an exaggeration), and the utter commitment of “preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying”. He continues: “You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn't do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing. Artists, too, sometimes try to go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world”.

There seems to be a degree of envy here. Stockhausen, whose artistic dreams have always been on a grandiose scale, is clearly impressed not only by the dedication, skill and commitment required for the event, but more importantly by the way 9/11 went beyond what he calls the “feasible and conceivable”. 9/11 did, indeed, as he claims, “open ourselves to another world”. Post 9/11 the world is a different place in some important ways.

Viewed, then, as what might be called “unintentional art”, 9/11 displays the grandiosity, the scope, the breadth and influence that artists like Stockhausen can only dream of – one hopes, of course, that their dreams are of an altogether less destructive nature. However, the threat of destruction is not entirely outside the realms of artistic experience, and I should like to now examine this in terms of that ineffable realm of experience generally known as the sublime.

Realms of feeling
The great philosopher of the sublime was the Anglo-Irishman Edmund Burke whose Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful was written in 1757 when he was nineteen years old. Joseph Addison had earlier written of the sense of astonishment it is possible to experience when witnessing something (anything) that extends the boundaries we have lived with up to that point. (Maybe we could think of the recent eclipse of the sun.) Both Nature and Art, for Addison, were capable of inducing this astonishment – which was characterised by a sense of words failing, of coming to the end of what language was capable of describing. We are thus forced into a realm of feeling rather than logical thought of any kind.

Burke’s account of the sublime was darker than Addison’s. It referred to fear and even pain. Nature was not only a matter of obvious beauty. It was also thunder, storms at sea, gales and hurricanes, unimaginable distances in the skies, the heat of the sun, destruction and devastation. Burke’s idea of the sublime focussed on the sense of awe it is possible to feel in the face of the tremendous, impersonal power of Nature, an awe that is born out of the awareness that we are not in control other than perhaps in an everyday, mundane sense.

Ultimately a fear of death lurks behind danger, although this death can be real or symbolic. Symbolic death might well include a loss of control, the sudden irrelevance of the ego, or the necessity to surrender to circumstances because there is no other meaningful path available. Any event or happening that induces such feelings is, in Burke’s sense, “sublime” – a rather different take on the word to the average dictionary definition, although it can include all the more conventionally upbeat emotions of joy and oneness. An utterly beautiful sunset and a terrifying storm at sea are opposites, but they have the sublime in common. The root difference between the two is the presence or otherwise of danger of threat. We can be astonished, delighted, enraptured by the sunset because the sun is so far away that we are out of danger.

As well as Nature, the sublime could include the joys and suffering of humans. Burke went as far as to maintain that we derive some kind of “delight” from the suffering of others. One can see what he meant. He lived in an age in which public executions were a common crowd puller, and all kinds of human suffering were a visible and daily occurrence. In my own fieldwork focussing on working class culture in the Northeast of England I was told, by an elderly woman, that stillborn babies, or tiny babies that died within their first day or two of life, were not uncommon, and that such dead infants would be laid out in the living room and the children of the neighbourhood would “ask to see the baby”. Perhaps this suggests the sublime in the sense that derives from Burke.

A tendency to gawp
Particularly in relation to 9/11 it is crucial to underline a further observation of Burke’s, one which is worth quoting at length here:

“. . . there is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity; so that whether the misfortune is before our eyes or whether they are turned back to it in history, it always touches with delight. This is not an unmixed delight, but blended with no small uneasiness. The delight we have in such things hinders us from shunning scenes of misery; and the pain we feel, prompts us to relieve ourselves in relieving those who suffer; and all this antecedent to any reasoning by an instinct that works us to its own purposes, without our concurrence.” (10)

In a way this is reassuring. The tendency to gawp at accidents, at terrible scenes of devastation on the news (or even live for that matter), or the magazines such as Bizarre which matches gore and sexuality, is not one which apparently reflects well on us humans. Burke, here, argues that there is indeed a form of what he calls delight at work, but he acknowledges that it is an uneasy feeling, consisting of what, in later psychoanalytic language, would be called projection. Without this projection there would be no empathy with those who suffer, and so Burke argues we “relieve ourselves by relieving those who suffer”. The inescapable conclusion here is that there is really never an entirely altruistic act, never an action purely done for the good of others.

As far as the gaze of the entire world - as the audience for 9/11 - was concerned, this explains much. That footage of the plans crashing into the twin towers is, in the sense we have been discussing, sublime. Damien Hirst was right. It was “visually stunning”. And Stockhausen was right. Whether or not we wish to regard it as a work of art, literally or metaphorically, it has “opened ourselves to another world”, and it has done so because of the awesome, tremendous and awful nature of the event.

Ways of seeing
Or is this really so? Was it really the event itself, the event and only the event, which changed the world, or was it primarily the meanings it was possible to derive from it? One might imagine that a terrorist event of such shocking magnitude would provoke fairly standard responses throughout the Western world and beyond. It was terrible. Many people died horrible deaths. It was utterly shocking.

My own experience on the very day it happened showed something different. In the evening, in my local pub, various points of view were voiced. This should be no surprise to anyone who has been involved in audience studies. A single event, TV programme, piece of music, advertisement or whatever may be assumed to have a particular meaning, but in point of fact many meanings are constructed, many views of voiced. Any simple piece of fieldwork generally confirms this. These views heard in a pub are pieced together from my recollection.

One view was the basic humanitarian one that the attack was awful on every level. Empathizing with the victims involved a serious degree of anguish and incomprehension. It was almost too horrible to contemplate.

A second view interpreted the event as a symbolic attack on capitalism, the World Trade Centre being an obvious symbolic target. This view, although accepting that the attack was awful, reserved the right to maintain that capitalism had it coming, especially from the viewpoint of the Third World.

A third view was openly anti-American, and argued that America had it coming, and that for over fifty years they had pursued a foreign policy of interfering, even terrorizing, various parts of the world, and this was their come-uppance. According to this view the supposed smugness of American ideological and political culture partly derived from the fact that America itself was hardly ever attacked or in any way implicated in aggression on home soil. The famous exception was the bombing of Pearl Harbour during the 2nd World War – and look how they reacted then! It is widely believed that the bombing of Hiroshima was America’s revenge. This anti-American view failed to recognize that by no means all the casualties were American. It did correctly point out that the fatalities which resulted from the attacks of earlier that day (around 3,000 – although I don’t recall whether this figure was actually known at the time) although serious, were still small in comparison to those which had resulted from American foreign policy over the years. The sheer drama of 3000 casualties happening all at once as a result of the most audacious piece of terrorism even known was all that made things different. I recall feeling that this was a serious argument which needed to be given some weight if we were ever to understand the day’s events but that it still didn’t justify what had happened.

A fourth view heard that evening assumed that Osama Bin Laden, or sources very close to him, had been behind the attacks. It was known that he had had been implicated in a previous attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993, that he was a sworn enemy of America, and that Al-Qaeda was a Sunni Islamist organization. This led to the viewpoint, also heard that evening, that all religions were stupid and potentially aggressive because they required ultimate devotion of a kind that could tip over into fanaticism.

A fifth viewpoint was the one I put: that “America” is, on one level, simply a place where many people live, and they cannot all be assumed to agree with everything that America stands for, especially with regard to foreign policy. On another level “America” is a cultural complex consisting of many strands. Some of these strands – certainly post 2nd World War foreign policy – may be distasteful to me, but other aspects of America are not only welcome, but have become part of the culture we live in Britain and elsewhere: rock music, abstract expressionism, various revolutions in taste and lifestyle from the 1920s onwards, experimental music, various kinds of American poetry, movies, recorded sound, the electric light bulb, philosophically challenging ideas such as those of C. Wright Mills or Noam Chomsky, American novels – Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Salinger, Updike, and on up to the present day. Probably I presented an even longer list which was designed to reinforce my point that anti-Americanism is a form of racism. It may be “hidden” racism, but it is racism none the less to assume that all Americans have views entirely consistent with those aspects of America we may be critical of. The attack on the World Trade Centre, therefore, was not only an attack on America, but on the Western world and its values in general. These values may be said to be derived from the materialism inherent in capitalism, but capitalism is international, not only American. 9/11 certainly went for the most symbolic target, the World Trade Centre, which might well be identified with the heartland of capitalism. But my point was to challenge the anti-American racism that entered at certain moments in the conversation. Britain is as complicit in international capitalism as America. It society, collectively and personally, operates according to some values given to us by capitalism – and many of these values are aspects of life we would not wish to be without, including the freedom to disagree in a pub.

There were other views not covered in our pub conversation. News footage of Middle Eastern Muslim communities celebrating 9/11 with evident glee made for uncomfortable viewing. For some Middle Eastern cultures the notion of “blood feud” is part of traditional culture. Some saw 9/11 as a grand form of avenging those who had been killed by years of American imperialism. The audience was indeed huge and varied in its response. One audience, however, responded in ways that turned out to be intensely political and that was the American government headed by George Bush. Bush’s “war or terror” begins after 9/11. Before that date all kinds of counter-terrorist strategies had been initiated and encouraged. 9/11, however, presented American politicians with the necessity to react. Despite the obvious advantage of refusing to report the incident – as argued earlier – there was a widespread desire for retribution.

The impact of the impact
As far as its impact on its audience is concerned 9/11 was almost as if Al-Qaeda, who plotted the attacks, had thought the whole thing through to the extent that they were always a number of steps ahead in terms of knowing how the American government and population as a whole would react. It has to be said that in one particular sense this is patently not true. Nobody knew that the impact of the aeroplanes on the two skyscrapers would cause the entire buildings to collapse. Architecturally the possibility of such an attack had been considered in the construction of the buildings. The fact that the buildings actually collapsed on impact revealed a fault in the architectural plans and was an enormous bonus for the terrorists. In terms of the mythic nature of 9/11, however, this detail of accuracy hardly matters. The basic mythic narrative remains the same: they flew aeroplanes into skyscrapers and the buildings instantly collapsed.

George Bush’s explicit “war on terror” began in response to 9/11 and was made clear in a statement to a joint session of Congress and the American people in these words:
"Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

From the terrorists’ viewpoint this was an excellent result. Bush’s speech explicitly divided the world into two camps – “with us or agin us” – effectively dividing the map of the world into those who like America and those who don’t. From the point of view of audience studies Bush, in effect, created two audiences for all future activities – for and against. This degree of polarization, in a volatile world, could be thought of as dangerous. The situation in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s through to recent times is instructive. Although very few Northern Irish Catholics were members of the IRA, and many disapproved of its use of terrorism, in the last analysis there was a perception that insurgents and Catholics were on the same side. This polarization made counterinsurgency highly problematic because local Catholic communities would not speak about the IRA, about who was a member, or assist the RUC and the British army in any way. Bush’s far more wide reaching polarization of the world into those “for or against America” could be said to have exacerbated an existing problem rather than deal with it.

Not ready to make nice
Bush, and many other politicians, interpreted the mood of the American people – who are, don’t forget, their audience - as being in need of revenge. In this sense, whether or not this was actually true of the audience, its mood was created for it. Osama bin Laden, of course, was impossible to catch. In an extraordinary sleight of political hand Bush managed to morph perceived public need for revenge or punishment away from Al-Qaeda and onto Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Bush explicitly linked 9/11 with Iraq in a March 2003 press conference. He did not directly claim that Saddam Hussein was implicated in the attacks, but played to the impression that he did have some undisclosed role. This is despite the fact that bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were known to despise one another – Hussein a secularist and bin Laden a fundamentalist Islamist.

Some manipulation of the American people, the politicians’ “audience”, clearly took place between 9/11 and January 2003. Polls showed that just after 9/11 only 3% of Americans thought that Saddam or Iraq were in any way involved in the attacks. In January 2003, however, 44% believed that either “most” or “some” of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. The truth, incidentally, is that none of them were. In terms of audience studies it seems that this kind of political manipulation suggests that the effects model is still alive and kicking.

Indeed, it seems that 9/11 has been used in America to create a climate of fear, a kind of siege mentality in which dissention is marginalized. The case of the Dixie Chicks perhaps proves the point. Ten days before the US invaded Iraq lead singer Natalie Maines told a London audience:

“Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”
Incidentally, in 2006 they issued a single titled “Not Ready to Make Nice” with the following words.

I’m not ready to make nice
I’m not ready to back down
I’m still mad as hell and I don’t have time to go 'round and 'round and 'round
It’s too late to make it right
I probably wouldn’t if I could
‘Cause I’m mad as hell
Can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should

The most revealing aspect of 9/11 and terrorism in general as a media hype and political campaign aimed at the politicians’ audience, the electorate, however, is seen in the true social dimensions of the attacks. This can be seen in some simple statistics and comparisons. It has been pointed out, for example, that far more people in America die from influenza than from acts of terrorism. During Ronald Reagan’s time as President of the US, as with Bush, terrorism was officially given out as the major international problem, and apparently 80% of Americans agreed. Yet in the period 1980-1985 seventeen people were killed by acts of terrorism in the United States. In 1985 twenty-three Americans were killed, or, as was pointed out at the time, a quarter of the number who die each year as a result of being killed by lightning. In a twenty year period from 1974 to 1994 more Americans died of bee stings than acts of terrorism. In the years between 1989 and 1992 there was not a single death from terrorism in America. There were, however, 100,00 homicides.

It is true that all these statistics come from the era before 9/11, but the fact remains that even given the 3000 deaths at the World Trade Centre on 9/11, numerically speaking terrorism is still insignificant. Neither Reagan, Clinton nor Bush ever mounted a “war on influenza”, a “war on lighting or bees”, or – more seriously – a “war on murder”. If these had happened the language used would have been different: a “campaign to contain influenza” might gain some ground; or “a widespread safety policy” to warn people of the dangers of lightning or bees; or perhaps a “crusade for life” might deal with the homicide issue. The use of the word “war” is addressed to two audiences: the American people as a whole, and what might be called the “terrorist world” – all those who are “agin us”. Not since the Cold War has there been such a convenient dumping ground for the collective shadow regions of America’s collective psyche. Ultimately, this amounts to a means of control.

The blurring of the vision
Finally I should like to speculate on one powerful effect of 9/11 in the cultural sense. Clearly it set a new benchmark for terrorist activities in terms of its sheer physical violence, but this alone did not constitute its most far reaching impact.

We were all the audience. We watched what happened and, like the individuals who make up any audience, we had our different views on what had happened, made our minds up in a variety of ways. What we witnessed was shocking, and it was shocking because it was real. Later, after the dust had literally settled, some commentators pointed out how “Hollywood” the event had been. It was a disaster movie. It was about aliens. It was like a high powered action movie. And it was pointed out that the terrorists had been as exposed to these western influences and were, in a sense, feeding them back to us, turning them into objects of real terror. And this line of thought quickly took us into that familiar postmodern discourse about reality and hyper-reality, the real and the fantasy, the real and the simulacra – in other words the real world and the invented, fictional world.

Baudrillard’s idea, put simply, argues that there is a process of blurring which takes place. We are surrounded by the simulacra (the representations of life, the fictional, simulated, simultaneous versions) to the extent that the one feeds the other. We expect real life, in important senses, to be like the representation. Its like pornography. No porn movie ever shows less than utterly and searingly orgasmic sex that lasts for ages. Men have huge erections and women come every time, screaming, moaning and shouting as they go. This representation of sex, so the theory goes, then becomes expected from sex every time we have it. The boundaries blur. This may be a trivial example, but it makes the point.

The implication here is that somehow we lose the ability to distinguish between ourselves as audience and as people in a non-audience, everyday role. Somewhere in this theory is the idea that we are losing the ability to make firm distinctions between reality, unreality, hyper-reality and fantasy. 9/11, in my view, knocks holes in this typically view. When it matters – and 9/11 certainly mattered – we knew very well that this was really and unambiguously happening, just as we all know that sex is rarely like it is in porn movies. We do have a grasp on everyday life. This has deep implications for audience studies. An audience witnesses a performance or communicative event of some kind. Normally we are aware of being in the audience role. The content of the everyday certainly shifts according to trends that may be signaled or even invented in fiction – novels, movies, advertisements, soap operas and other TV programmers, pop videos. This may account for the disaster movie tactics used in 9/11, but it still does not even remotely suggest that we don’t know the basic distinctions between the real and the not-real.

Related to this are two other postmodern sacred cows, the disappearance of the grand narrative and the whole idea of cultural relativism – meaning the notion that all cultures, all ideas, all worldviews are equally valid. The “grand narrative” is, in its simplest terms, a story that explains everything such as “Jesus came to this earth to teach the love of God, died for our sins, but was resurrected and is always available to those who seek him”. Or: “the working class will eventually take the means of production and distribution from the bourgeoisie and create a fairer way of living”. Of course, people who believe grand narratives such as these are highly motivated by the beliefs that result from them. The postmodern position has always been that grand narratives of this kind are no longer credible, even if the argument that all worldviews are equally valid seems to contradict this.

Our responses to 9/11 demonstrated that we do actually have a grand narrative, or at least a worldview, of sorts, and that we are not actually and unambiguously cultural relativists. If each and every worldview is OK because it is valid for someone, then it is OK to hijack planes and fly them into skyscrapers. We might wish to adopt a culturally relative position in order to try to understand the motivations of Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but, in the last analysis, we do not approve of what they did.

What could replace the postmodern view? My suggestion is that if 9/11 could teach us anything it might be to replace the ethically barren territory of the postmodern with a new era of responsibility. But perhaps that is another story.

For now let us conclude by summing up: 9/11 was the world’s number one audience event. To some extent, of course, we all continue to be its audience. If we are influenced by it, in some way it is still going on. It was a performance and, as such, there were ways in which it intersected with art. It has been possible for the Bush administration to turn 9/11 into a means of controlling the American people and justifying its aggressive attitude to the world as a whole – with us or agin us. To some extent we are all audience to this political reality, no matter how critical of it we may be. And finally, if a new era of responsibility can and does follow from 9/11 this involves every one of us attempting to understand our roles as audiences, actors and everyday people, distinguishing between the real and the various forms of not-real.

Sam Richards

References

(1) Zulaika, Joseba, and Douglass, William A; TERROR AND TABOO, THE FOLLIES, FABLES, AND FACES OF TERRORISM; Routledge, New York & London, 1996; p.4
(2) Quoted in Zulaika & Douglass, op. cit; p.7
(3) Carlson, Marvin; PERFORMANCE, A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION; Routledge, New York & London, 1996; p.3
(4) Carlson, op. cit; p.4
(5) Schechner, Richard; PERFORMANCE THEORY; Routledge, New York & London, 1988 (1st. pub. 1977); p. viii
(6) Carlson, op. cit; p.6
(7) Said by Stockhausen at a press conference for the Hamburg Music Festival, 2001. There was much second hand reportage and much publicity for these remarks.
(8) Stockhausen, Karlheinz: Message from Professor Karlheinz Stockhausen, September 19th, 2001. Letter circulated to the press.
(9) http://www.zeek.net/art_03013.htm
(10) Burke, Edmund, quoted in a website article by Vernon Hyde Minor:
http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~jast/Number14/Minor.htm