Pre-Class Zizek

After reading Baudrillard and Zizek’s theoretical take on 9/11, I could not help but evaluate my own initial experience with this event nearly ten years ago and how what I was feeling was an actual real-life application of these authors’ suggestions concerning fantasy versus reality. The notion of a “mediated spectacle” most effectively sums up what occurred during the WTC attack and the ensuing hysteria that took place among a public that had never- before-hand been witness to such a grand, Hollywood-like catastrophe that was only fantasized about through film and television. Zizek states, “It was before the WTC collapse that we lived in our reality, perceived Third World horrors as something which was not actually part of our social reality as something which existed as a spectral apparition on the TV screen and what happened on September 11 was this fantasmic screen apparition entered our reality” (234). The images we have always been an audience to, yet at a distance and not as active participants, had finally taken form and shattered our own reality, a reality that we had previously only been a part of through the “virtual life”. It was as if our fantasies were translating into realities, and an event that what we had only before imagined in our minds and in our fiction materialized into an authentic actuality.

We, as Americans at least, experience life through sort of a staged performance, sheltered from truths that are taking place outside of our borders and living in this notion of a “sphere” where we are held in isolation. I think the notion of the “Other” also plays a large part in explaining our position as mere spectators to a show that we can distance ourselves and separate from as “us” versus “them”. It seems as if the WTC event destroyed this distance, serving as the connecting force that brought our digitally-refined and special-effect generated images from television and film out of the big screen and into our “real” lives, morphing our virtual reality into a “real” reality. I can attest to the fact that what I was witnessing on screen that day as the towers collapsed, to be cliché, was something “out of the movies” that was so out of my own realm of thought that it did not seem to be “real”. It was a “spectacle” that elicited massive panic across the nation that had much larger consequences beyond the material damage (not to downplay the many lives lost) and it is this notion of the “spectacle” that the terrorists were looking to accomplish. We were placed in the position of “spectators” yet again, seeing the videos and images from this event replay time after time, all the while feeling all too familiar with this scene, for it was a scene reminiscent of the horror and thrill we have been an audience to in Hollywood blockbusters.

And yet, still, the way in which I perceived 9/11, from my living room through news broadcasts and media-generated images, did not tell the whole story or report the carnage in its totality. It was only those individuals who experienced the events as first-hand witnesses and first-hand participants who knew the actual “reality” of what took place; they were the only ones who could define what was “real” for they had broken free (although by means of unfortunate circumstances) from that bubble we all live (are imprisoned?) in.