Balm for a saccharine day:
...the mnemonic easily tips into the memorializing, that is to say, into a demand that the historical be monumentalized, and often today what is monumentalized is the traumatic....we seem to live in a culture fixed on horrific pasts, not in a culture desirous of transfigured futures. From my perspective its political effects are disastrous: we live under the repressive dread of antidemocratic blackmails ("9/11," "the war on terrorism," etc). - Hal Foster
2 comments:
Good quote. The culture's looking backwards in fear rather than forwards in optimism. . . fixating on 9-11 with the expectation that it will recur. . . when in fact it can't really recur, since a terrorist act on that scale has to be a unique event enabled by a unique inspiration. And now the U.S. has this commentary industry focused on imagining new possibilities for 9-11, and describing them to terrify the public. . . which is a bit pathological, devoting newstime to describing imaginary terrorist attack possibilities, but it's great for security fetishists.
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