Loss and Absence at Ground Zero

The primary question I want to examine today is this:

In the representation of loss resulting from violent conflict, when and how are the following strategies employed:

1. Representation of the lost in its pre-traumatic state
2. Representation of the lost in the midst of trauma
3. Representation of the absence of the lost

In the case of the World Trade Center attacks, decisions about these strategies have been key to the debates around the site's planned memorial and rebuilding plans. Popular calls for reconstruction of the original towers suggest a return to a pre-traumatic state - strategy no.1. The second strategy appears less often, but is still there. Shockingly to me, one of the original nine plans for the new building featured an element I could only understand as a reference to the planes' path through the original towers. The third strategy, that of representing (and even privileging) absence, seems to have won out, present in part in every finalist for the memorial or the building plan, and perhaps precedented by The Oklahoma City Memorial and even Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial in D.C.

"Reflecting Absence" was the winner
"Votives in Suspension"
"Suspended Memory"
"Garden of Lights"

I will spend some time today examining the prevalance of this choice, the dominance of "representing absence" as a strategy in the representation of loss. But first, I want to look at what's at stake in the choice.

In his 1999 essay, "Trauma, Absence, Loss," Dominck La Capra warned of the dangers of conflating absence and loss, discussing some of the necessary components of recovery from each. I first heard this paper delivered as part of a symposium at MIT on the subject of monuments and trauma, with a special emphasis on the work of artist Krzystof Wodiczko.

LaCapra defines absence as transhistorical - if something is Absent, it was never ever present, even if felt to be missing. Dreams of perfect community, mythological losses of innnocence. Loss, on the other hand, is historical, specific to particular events, even if felt to be present long after.

In La Capra's universe, absence and loss are often indistinguishable at the moment of trauma, but the process of recovery absolutely requires a movement toward distinguishing between the two. Absence must be acknowledged as impossible to fulfill or resolve, while loss can be "worked through" and recovered from.

He warns:

"When absence is converted into loss, one increases the likelihood of misplaced nostalgia or utopian politics in quest of a new totality or fully unified community. When loss is converted into (or encrypted in) an indiscriminately generalized rhetoric of absence, one faces the impasse of endless melancholy, impossible mourning, and interminable aporia in which any process of working through the past and its historical losses is foreclosed or prematurely aborted."

In the case of the attacks of September 11th, then, we would have to define as lost a finite number of lives, and perhaps a finite amount of economic goods and urban infrastructure. I think we would have to define as absent more abstract notions like security, peace, or the isolation of Americans from everyday political threats. The "War on Terror" would add to this list concepts like civilization and liberty as in danger of becoming absent.

Within this analysis, we might examine different attempts to represent or memorialize the events of that day, or even of those lost on that day, as more or less helpful toward the process of recovery, the process of "working through" loss and separating out what was always absent.

To my eyes, our public officials moved shockingly fast through a process of identifying the absent as lost and needing recovery. Peace and justice and were seen as lost to terrorist actions, instead of absent in the first place. The country moved to restore this loss hastily, to the detriment of the truly lost and their families, and in the interest of advancing a newly envigorated mythology of origins.

LaCapra warns again:

"The conversion of absence into loss gives anxiety an identifiable object - the lost object - and generates the hope that anxiety may be eliminated or overcome. By contrast, the anxiety attendant upon absence may never be entirely eliminated or overcome but must be lived with in various ways.....In converting absence into loss, one assumes that there was (or at least could be) some original unity, wholeness, security, or identity which others have ruined, polluted or contaminated and this made 'us' lose. Therefore, to regain it one must somehow get rid of or eliminate those others-or perhaps that sinful other in oneself."

Conversely, certain modes of representing the real losses of September 11 seem to convert loss to absence - those who we lost are now represented as absent or "gone," as if they were never here, as if they weren't tragically taken in a specific moment. In LaCapra's analysis, this approach damns the mourners to endless melancholy and repetition, a rut for which we're already too well prepared by consumerism.

I'm thinking here of the "eternally absent" approach of the Oklahoma City memorial, in which empty chairs, constructed of permanent material, render the loss of the dead as an everpresent absence. A historical loss is made a transhistorical absence. Many of the World Trade Memorials echo this form.

The 'lost" flyers of 9/11 seem closer to the appropriate task. Each flyer shows someone not simply "gone" but lost, taken. Their reproducible nature as xeroxes allows for the kind of repetition LaCapra sees as necessary to the "working through" process of mourning, but their perishable nature as objects leaves the mourning in time, a narrative process.

I'm stretching here though. What seems to be needed is a vocabulary of loss, an articulated and shared language that facilitates the process of mourning in conflict, in which loss and absence are differentiated through repetition and acknowledgement of passing.

Again, at stake in this differentiation is the possibility of recovery, as well as the prevention of further violence.

LaCapra expands on this need:

"A related problem is how to provide a means of symbolizing and expressing difference and conflict, thereby making possible the limiting or lessening of violence that may increasingly become an option to the extent that other options are not available. In other words, violence in unmediated form may be more likely when there are no accepted or legitimated modes of symbolizing difference and conflict in an effective manner that enables them to be addressed and to some extent dealt with. One could even argue that the provision of modes of symbolizing difference and conflict - not full consensus or community - is basic to democracy and that the dialogic itself in a democratic context must have an agonistic component."

I'm very interested in this expansion of the topic, the inclusion of representing difference and representing loss under the same umbrella. (I'll explain more of how he does this later if you wish, but for now I want to jump off of this to return to my initial question, that of representing absence.)

Now of the original three options I outlined:

1. return to pre-traumatic state
2. return to the moment of trauma
3. emphasizing the absence of the lost

The third is certainly the most desirable in LaCapra's world. The first doesn't acknowledge loss enough, the second doesn't allow for healing. But the third has its dangers, of confusing absence and loss.

If we're looking for this new vocabulary or language of expressing loss, conflict, and difference, then how can we acknowledge loss without converting it to absence? How can we privilege absence without forgetting the historical specificity of loss?

Well, with some caution I think we can approach the sometimes too-reflexive world of contemporary art for some help. Artists have been representing absence for a long time now. (Erased de kooning, john cage's 4'33"). Though sometimes their motivations are too structuralist for our purposes, I think we can still begin to get an idea of what a repsonsible representation of absence might look like.

I'll talk about some examples here in three categories:

1. representation of absence through still imagery
2. representation of absence through time-based media (video and sound)
3. representation of absence through live media

I'm purposely avoiding further discussion of explicit memorial architecture and sculpture, in part because this work has already been done, but also because I think that these other media are actually more common and in need of attention. I won't reach any conclusions here today, but I want to show that memorials are by far not the only places we should be thinking about these questions.

(informal slide talk through various images)