Varieties of Imagination and Nothingness in the Global Village

Abstract

One of the most remarkable things about the events of September 11th is the extent and degree of their aestheticization. Had the weather in New York on that day been overcast we would have seen the muted television images of a silver passenger plane blended into grey clouds. The plane would have penetrated a building rising out of a skyline absorbed in a neutral horizon. Smoke would have melted into a pallid background. The scene would have been horrible, but not horribly sublime. Had the objectives of the attack been only the Pentagon and, apparently, the White House, we would have been left with visions of the partial destruction of centres of military and political might, their buildings close to the earth and televised as enlarged versions of what we often see in the ordinary course of the daily news: burning buildings. But in New York on September 1 11th the morning sky was a clear expanse of blue. A contrasting band of smoke flowed from the first tower that was struck. And then we saw a plane slice into the other tower as a knife goes into a stick of butter. Against a background of innocent baby blue, black energy poured out of the tall, erect, light grey geometric modernity of the towers. Then after a time they fell into themselves and there was nothing left against the horizon where they had stood except the perfection of the sky itself. Photographs taken near the site caught the tottering facades of the towers that remained standing in the smoke and dust of ground zero. They were horribly beautiful, almost Frank Gehry-like in dishevelled modernity although some saw them as a Gothic cathedral standing amidst ruins. Creating September 11th David Wellbery (2002) of the University of Chicago has described the role of symbols in pragmatic thought and latterly in the work of the German sociological theorist, Niklas Luhmann (2000), as binders of time. Time is a domain of basal improbability, an empty ongoing flow where nothing (nothing) is certain (except death). Nevertheless something (some-thing) can be precipitated in time, something can happen. An improbable episode fills time, an unlikely this transpires rather than any of the other possible but improbable that's. Congealed in memory, the symbolic trace of what happened is raw material for reason, desire and action as future presents that flow into present futures The normal, probable chaos of the present yields to an improbable vector of action whose meaning is found with reference to the symbol. An ongoing something reduces the improbability of something happening in time. Time is contingently bound. The effort to bind time with the symbols of art in the wake of September 11th was almost as remarkable and singular as the events themselves. Horrible beauty found in the perfection of concerted action transmuted into the unforgettable visuals of TV seemed to demand and call forth the symbols of artistic imagination. There was a flood of them. Reporting from New York City for The Globe and Mail, Simon Haupt wrote: Immediately after Sept. 11, thousands of people in this city and around the world set out to capture the meaning of those events through artistic expression. In the intervening months, thousands more have joined the effort, resulting in what may turn out to be the largest creative response in history to a single day's event. Poetry, prose, dance, architecture, photography, soundscapes, TV, popular music, theatre, comic books, film, painting and sculpture: They have all grappled with the attacks and their aftermath, in the process provoking questions about the meaning of art, its practical usefulness, and the legitimacy of artistic aspirations by non-artists (Haupt 2002, R1). How likely is it that this outpouring will produce anything that will bind the time of the public in a definitive and long-lasting way? In other words will there be any great art produced by the immediate rush to aesthetic action? …