Re-Membering the Terrorist Spectacle: Medial Discourses, the Shaping of History and Collective Cultural Memory in the Wake of 9/11 (near-final version)

When faced with the unimaginable tragedy of the 9/11 attack and its aftermath, many United States Americans felt vulnerable and unable to process " [t]he terror of this disaster, which literally came bursting out of the blue, the horrible convictions behind this treacherous assault, as well as the stifling depression that set over [New York City] " (Habermas 26). As a result, the United States – and New York City in particular – desperately needed to come to terms with the event and its seemingly inconceivable magnitude. Processes such as these have long been discussed by psychoanalytic theory and have been described in terms of a progression which has been well explained by theorist Gene Ray. He explains that, the act or event itself is often referred to as the 'hit', whereas " the movement after the hit is what psychoanalytic theory calls mourning. Trauma is a category of damage. It marks the limit of conventionalized, assimilable experience " (Ray 1). From the onset, 9/11 was designated as unique and beyond compare, as " the most deadly and destructive terrorist attack in history " (Terrorism 2000/2001, emphasis added). When the hit becomes too traumatic, or exceeds the individual's or (in the case of mass disasters) society's capacity of comprehension, only a break remains. It follows that " the missed encounter and its meanings can only be reconstructed in retrospect " (Ray 1). Although traditional theories of mourning maintain that " what is assimilated is the miss itself " or the break with reality occurring directly after a traumatic incident, this process becomes indelibly confounded in the intertextual context of media and social interconnectedness: a moving from individual grief to " cosmopoliticized mourning " (Ray 132). Ray discusses this transformation under the heading of " politicized mourning ". During this " collective processing of catastrophic history " , the reconstruction of events are shaped by ideology (political or otherwise) and exceed the original break, moving beyond the initial hit to reexamine and, in so doing, rework the underlying processes which make " such history possible " (cf. 132). Though several thousand New Yorkers experienced the events of 9/11 first hand, the majority of the United States and the world had no direct access to the attack. Instead, they 'witnessed' the event through diverse channels: newspaper and magazine articles, and televised images and news broadcasts, which " present[ed] their product as live, …