Media Hysteria: Fredric Jameson's Critical Response to 9/11

The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have spawned a diverse network of literary responses from Dinesh D'Souza's extremely positive What's So Great About America to the caustically critical 9-11 by Noam Chomsky. However, there is an important subcategory of these reactions in which the goal is to deconstruct America's patterns of grief and mourning post-September 11 and to analyze the role the U.S. media has played in influencing our view of the attacks (FOOTNOTE 1). Accounts such as Slavoj Zizek's Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, Jean Baudrillard's The Spirit of Terrorism, Paul Virilio's Ground Zero and Fredric Jameson's "The Dialectics of Disaster" argue that after September 11 the media created an inescapable climate of grief and mourning . Each author agrees that interpolation into the media's hysterical schema of mourning was unavoidable after the attacks occurred. For months, newspapers, television news shows, and the radio devoted a significant percentage of their programming to the physical and emotional aftermath of the attacks. This pervasive coverage led to what the aforementioned critics see as a lack of clarity of our own personal feelings. Consequently, these critiques ask the following question: if we are being bombarded constantly with images of grief and horror, is it possible to for us to feel anything but those same emotions?

This preceding question is one that has troubled postmodern critics like Zizek and Jameson in various forms since the foundation of postmodern cultural criticism in the early 1980s. In postmodern critical theory, the media tends to be seen as a barometer of political, economic and social conditions and/or a numbing means through which we are locked into a system of oppressive consumer culture which limits our understanding of history and forces us to understand events as it sees fit. This latter image of the media is epitomized in Jameson's essay "The Dialectics of Disaster" and this paper seeks to analyze the problems that stem from this postmodern method of responding to September 11 through a discussion of Jameson's essay and his complex view of the interdependency of the media and our collective and personal senses of history.

Jameson has long argued that one of the most significant markers of postmodernity is the causal relationship between the condition of historical amnesia and the loss of history ("Postmodernism and Consumer Society" 125). The media's hysterical and seemingly omni-present response to September 11 gives Jameson ample space to prove his point again-with mixed success. I read "The Dialectics of Disaster" as Jameson's mournful coda to a set of works we might describe as a requiem for the death of any sort of subjectivity immune to historical amnesia. However, Jameson's critique falls short of comprehensively explaining why the media functions as such a destructive apparatus. Failing to acknowledge any sort of reciprocity between the media and its audience, Jameson instead sees it only as a repressive interlocutor between the political and economic interests of late capitalism and America's citizens. In "The Dialectics of Disaster," it seems that the only means of escape from historical amnesia and the interpolation of the media's affected and numbing grief would be through revolutionary and, implicitly, violent reconstitution, or, alternately, the destruction of humanity as we know it (305). Jameson fails to take into account the multiplicity of anti-hegemonic media reactions to September 11 that resist sentimentalizing what was, undoubtedly, a stupefying catastrophe. "The Dialectics of Disaster" thus condemns us to a life sentence within an oppressive postmodern prison with virtually no non-violent means of escape, a problem endemic in virtually all post-modern critiques of September 11 published to-date.

Jameson's conception of historical amnesia was first defined in his essay "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" which was given as an address at the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Arts in 1982 and later published to great acclaim in the New Left Review in 1984 (FOOTNOTE 2). "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" describes what Jameson identifies as the primary characteristics of postmodernism: pastiche, "the imitation of the peculiar or unique" and schizophrenia, the "breakdown of the relationship between [Lacanian] signifiers" (114, 119). Yet, it is the ending of his essay in which he links postmodernity with the concept of historical amnesia that is the key to understanding the argument proposed in "The Dialectics of Disaster." Jameson explains that the interdependency of postmodernism upon late capitalism, the post-industrial system of capitalism in place after World War II, is manifest is what he terms "the disappearance of a sense of history" in our lives (125). Thus, somewhere within the miasma of popular culture, consumerism, neo-colonialism, and Reaganomics, which marked the early 1980s, history vanishes. He goes on to explain: "our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions" of our collective history (125). To exemplify his point, Jameson describes the media's "exhaustion of news" which he argues is something that forces us to process events quickly to serve the purposes of the machine of late capitalism. Jameson invokes the media's representation of familiar cultural icons to prove his point:
Nixon and, even more so, Kennedy are figures from a now distant past. One is tempted to say that the very function of the news media is to relegate such recent historical experiences as rapidly as possible into the past. The informational function of the media would thus be to help us forget, to serve as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia (125).
As such, the media lulls us into a virtually inescapable condition of historical amnesia.

The sub-text of Jameson's conceptualization of historical amnesia seems to be that the process of relegating experience to the past as quickly as possible forces us to be continuously filled with whatever images and emotions the media would have us feel. In this description of the media, human agency is usurped by a powerful cultural mechanism and, as Jameson's mournful tone implies, it seems there is little possibility for escape from this numbing effect of postmodernity and the culture of late capitalism. Jameson's essay ends by asking a provocative question: if modernism somehow functioned against its society, can the same be said for postmodernism? "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" frames the possibility for this question to be answered through examples from various cultural apparatuses such as art, literature or film, yet Jameson also makes it clear that the media should be seen as a repressive foil of playful and subversive counters to the hegemonic constraints of postmodernism and late capitalism.

Jameson's continued to focus on the interrelation of postmodernism and historical amnesia in his more contemporary works of cultural criticism. Heavily influenced by Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century, Jameson complicated his definition of historical amnesia to account for the rise in information technology and the economic, social and political consequences of globalization that occurred in the 1990s. In a discussion of a commercial celebrating transportation giant Norfolk Southern, Jameson asks the following question: "What kind of a perpetual present is this [we see in the ad], and how to disentwine an attention to the persistencies of the Same from that shock of visual difference alone entitled to certify temporal novelty?" The commercial depicts a "Metamorphosis-as a violent and convulsive means of holding on to the thread of narrative time while allowing us to disregard it and consume a visual plentitude in the present instant; yet it also stands as the abstract monetary container, the empty universal tirelessly refilled with new and shifting content" (157). I read this analysis as key step in the evolution of Jameson's conception of historical amnesia. More refined than "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," Jameson's critical assessment of Norfolk Southern's advertising campaign employs many of the critical and rhetorical tools he later utilizes in "The Dialectics of Disaster" to discuss what he sees as the tragic emptiness of a postmodern universe in which the media distorts and refills the content of our memories ("Culture and Finance Capital" 143-157).

Significantly, Jameson only discusses the relationship between historical amnesia and the popular media in "Culture and Finance Capital." As in "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" Jameson avoids discussing counter-hegemonic media publications that might conceivably challenge his definition of historical amnesia. Instead, the media and artistic production are set up as a contesting binary. In "The Dialectics of Disaster" Jameson argues that the news media, whether it be liberal publications such as The Nation or more mainstream magazines such as Time, has further forced us into the "perpetual present" (298). Yet this sweeping condemnation of the media seems problematic-we might even call it hysterical. Why does Jameson fail to explore any of myriad counter-hegemonic responses to September 11? Keeping in mind that "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" ended with the implicit hope that postmodernism would somehow find the means to resist the logic of consumer capitalism, might we not argue that the multiplicity of media apparatuses available in our contemporary society through which the news is disseminated allows for the possibility for reactions against the constraints of our postmodern world (FOOTNOTE 3)? Instead, Jameson seems to lose sight of any sort of human agency that might exist within the intricate matrix of the media. Jameson seems to redefine postmodernism in "The Dialectics of Disaster" as a condition lacking the playful subversiveness that was so important to his earlier understanding of this epochal term.

Although in "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" Jameson mourned our loss of history, he always seemed hopeful that there would be a way to playfully work against the cultural, political, and economic conditions of late capitalism, "The Dialectics of Disaster" seem to prove the opposite to be true. Jameson speaks of September 11 as disclosing a "dissociation of sensibility " (297)(FOOTNOTE 4). "To get at the real historical event itself, you feel, one would have to strip away all the emotional reaction to it. But even to get at all that emotional reaction, one would have to make one's way through its media orchestration and amplification" (297). Thus, America is more or less forced into a "collective unanimity…of a vast tidal wave of identical reactions" (298). Jameson also points out that some Leftist critics have posited that newer methods of dispersing media information such as the Internet will lead to the formation of "universally intersubjectivity" in which the media works to unify a multiplicity of global citizens. Jameson rejects this hypothesis as utopian (300). "The Dialectics of Disaster" represents all media-whether it is associated with the Left, the Right, or the Center as occluding our ability to process September 11. Moreover, Jameson implies that the long-term effects of this sort of media dispersal will lead both to an increase in historical amnesia and world historical conflict. Recalling Marx, Jameson concludes his essay in the following passage. "[W]orld-historical conflicts [such as that generated by the aftermath of September 11] end 'either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.' It is the prospect of that common ruin that must now fill us with foreboding" (303). Here Jameson seems already to mourn what he anticipates will be our common ruin achieved via violent struggle. I find his fatalistic conclusion to be repeated, in a variety of ominous ways by Baudrillard, Virilio, and Zizek in their respective texts. In these postmodern responses, the media becomes an omnipresent scapegoat for all that is wrong with society. Rather than painting Osama bin Laden or the Taliban as the villain of September 11, the U.S. media's deployment of historical amnesia becomes both the cause of violence, and the effect of violence against America (FOOTNOTE 5).

Jameson's presence in the milieu of postmodern scholarly work is described by Perry Anderson as an explosion "like so many magnesium flares in a night sky" which illuminates the "eerie refulgent tableau" of our postmodern world (The Cultural Turn xi). To trouble this analogy I suggest we recall that a tableau is a picturesque and manipulated presentation. Jameson's interests in the cultural, political, and economic implications of postmodernism and late capitalism motivate his scholarly work. It is wise to think of Jameson's rendering of the aftermath of September 11 as a vivid and mournful montage of images and concepts reflecting his own personal biases as much as the reality of the situation. It is only the continuation of the pastiche of responses to September 11-literary, artistic, political, and economic-disseminated by a variety of sources that will ultimately either counter or approbate "The Dialectics of Disaster." The reliance of Jameson and other postmodern critics on violence to end historical amnesia in all its various guises is questionable for a variety of significant reasons. Most obviously, the huge body of personal testimonies and varied articles that emerged after September 11 seem to prove how intent America is on retaining September 11 as an epochal event that illustrates its vulnerability and, in some cases, its shortcomings as a nation.

Footnotes

1. Excerpts from Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, The Spirit of Terrorism and the full text of "The Dialectics of Disaster" are published in a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly entitled Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11. Ground Zero, The Spirit of Terrorism, and Welcome to the Desert of the Real! were all published by Verso press one year after September 11 as a series which seeks "to comprehend the philosophical meaning of September 11 and will leave untouched none of the prevailing views currently propagated" (Book Jacket, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!I).

2. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" has been published many times and in many forms over the last 19 years. The article I have used in writing this paper comes from The Anti-Aesthetic, a collection of essays edited by Hal Foster. However, it should be noted that, for example, The Cultural Turn includes an edition of "Postmodernism and the Consumer Society" which was first published in Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices edited by E. Ann Kaplan (London: Verso, 1988). Kaplan's edition of "Postmodernism and the Consumer Society" is actually an amalgamation of the version of "Postmodernism and the Consumer Society" published in The Anti-Aesthetic and "Postmodernism: the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" published in the New Left Review (July-August 1984).

3. There is not space in a paper of this length to provide a selection of examples of media publications that seem to refute Jameson's point. Please visit my web site www.english.ucsb.edu/grad/student-pages/smclemore/ for counter examples and a more-in depth analysis of counter-hegemonic media responses to September 11.

4. By employing T.S. Eliot's use of the phrase "dissociation of sensibility" in the first sentence of his essay, Jameson seems clearly to align himself with Eliot who first used the term in "The Metaphysical Poets" written for the Times Literary Supplement in 1921. Eliot's doctrine argues that "One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts" in order to escape from the sort of sentimentality which marks, for Eliot, literature written after the seventeenth century (Modern British Literature 519). Eliot wrote "The Metaphysical Poets" during what we can term the period of "high modernism." That Jameson turns to Eliot during a moment, which he sees as a grim marker of our postmodern condition, is significant and worthy of more investigation than I can provide in an essay of this length.

5. See especially Welcome to the Desert of the Real! 33-82.

Works Cited

Anderson, Perry. Forward. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern,
1983-1998. By Fredric Jameson. London: Verso, 1998.

Jameson, Fredric. "Culture and Finance Capital." The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings
on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. London: Verso, 1998.

--------"The Dialectics of Disaster." South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 (2002): 297-304.

-------- "Postmodernism and Consumer Society." The Anti-Aesthetic. Ed. Hal Foster.
Bay Press: Port Townsend WA, 1983.

Kermode, Frank and John Hollander. Modern British Literature. Oxford University
Press: London, 1973.