Articulation Of Time Research Articles

Fight Club and the World Trade Center: On Metaphor, Scale, and the Spatio-temporal (Dis)location of Violence

In this essay we examine the metaphorical rendition of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, which took place on 11 September 2001, as attacks on “civilization.” Our principal aim is to understand how it has proven to be as affective as it seems to have been thus far. We do so by turning to film, a medium that is quintessentially metaphorical and whose own affective power rests on the reconfiguration of time and space. More specifically, we do so by turning to David Fincher's Fight Club (1999). In contrast to the textual approach offered by Slavoj [Zbreve]i[zbreve]ek (2002), we explore how the formal play of different temporal and spatial scales, which would articulate a trenchant critique of alienation, in fact reproduces an understanding of the subject that is deeply complicit with capital. The play of time and space, on which the affective power of the film rests, articulates a rejection of the fundamentally schizophrenic nature of the subject of capital. Our claim is that this exploration of time, space, and political critique illuminates how the elisions of the historical and geo-political that characterize the metaphorical rendition of the attacks on New York and Washington might easily be overlooked. This essay also advances our more general understanding of both the articulation of time and space within the dominant form of metaphorical representation and how this enacts and consolidates a particular politics.

Notes on the Articulation of Time

REFLECTION on the work of my fellow-contributors to this journal suggests that the barbarous name of periodization may be given to at least six quite different things. First, the mere separation of historical data into discrete blocks for purposes of convenient presentation. Second, the attempt to find temporal divisions into which one's material naturally falls. Third, the imposition of a formal structure on such an articulation by assigning to each division an initial, medial and terminal phase, and perhaps other phases too, supposed to stand in some such constant dynamic relation to each other as growth, maturity and decay. Fourth, the imposition of such a structure, not in such formal terms, but by purporting to find in each segment a describable character, so that (for example) each stylistic division would fall into archaic, classical and mannerist periods. Fifth, the rise among historians of a consensus as to the appropriate scheme of articulation for history in general or for some such specialized field as literary history. And sixth, the claim that some such agreed scheme of articulation somehow invalidates all alternative schemes in its own field, or even in any field.' I do not say that periodization denotes only these actions and processes, but that it denotes at least these, and that all six can be discerned in the writings contained in this number. But most contributors assume that the term contained in this number. But most contributors assume that