The Memory Exchange: Public Mourning at the National 9/11 Memorial Museum

Abstract

This article argues that the National 9/11 Museum blurs the lines between first hand experience and the experiences of visitors who come to participate in a shared encounter of public mourning and non-stop documentation. All visitors to the museum are invited to contribute to its testimonial archive in two prominent ways: by preserving their own “9/11 story” in a recording booth or by composing a message in a digital guestbook that is subsequently projected against the slurry wall as part of the permanent exhibit. By encouraging visitors to “Join the Conversation,” the museum frames 9/11 less as a specific event or date circumscribed by geographical spaces and more as an unending process of subjectification, in which the category of “witness” is constituted through acts of virtual exchange without much regard to an individual's proximity to the event. Bearing witness is unbounded in time and constituted though the circulation of affects, in which the feeling of what it is like to claim the status of witness emerges as a privileged figuration of historical trauma—yet one which remains mediated by state power in unexamined ways.