Terror, Representation, and Postmodern Lessons in Hitler Studies

 
Hapless Jack Gladney seems to have wandered into the postmodern world of Don DeLillo’s White Noise directly out a David Lodge novel. The chair of a Department of Hitler Studies in a small Midwestern college, Gladney feels an obligation to remain neutral about Hitler (a position in part facilitated by Gladney’s inability to read German). What makes Gladney a man ahead of his time is DeLillo’s reliance on the fact that “Hitler Studies” is painfully anachronistic, a point illustrated by the way the term “Nazi” seems to have lost its intellectual content. “Nazism: Hitler Studies:: Poststructuralism: Postmodernism” might be the answer to a hypothetical SAT question, but in what year? In 1934, before SAT questions or postmodernism existed? In a non-existent future, after the moment when Hitler Studies will have had emerged as an institutionalized option of the liberal education? Is Nazism the nexus of a potentially renewable intellectual engine, we are forced to ask, or simply a leveling pejorative, the relic of a bygone moment (except in the Vatican) when the word signified—as does today the word Republican (or Democrat, Tory, Liberal, or Socialist)—a viable political movement with issues and agendas? The problem of Hitler Studies, both for Gladney and for DeLillo’s readers, is to construct an imaginary space wherein Hitler Studies attributes to an academic field a vitality and a legitimacy that it denies to Hitler himself. Constructing this space fissures the seam where imagining is cemented to conceiving, for we can certainly imagine Hitler Studies by applying paradigms from other “interdisciplinary” academic programs: conferences and journals clustered around loci of mystery and controversy, requirements of the major, curricula that partition and redistribute privileged topics along temporal, geographic or disciplinary axes (e.g., “Hitler’s Art and Nazi Aesthetics,” “Hitler’s Rhetoric,” “Hitler and Globalization,” “The Semiotics of the Hitlerian,” “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” etc.).
 
What is so discomforting—in both the best and worst sense of that word—about the plethora of writing on “9/11” is that it evokes the same contradictions as does the (fictive) world containing a place for Hitler Studies. Can we study the event of 9/11 with Jack Gladney’s intellectual and ethical distance, and if not, can we be said to be “studying” it—as opposed to invoking, or denouncing, or mourning, or memorializing it—at all? All four of the books at hand evoke this question, and even more so in conjunction. Jeffrey Melnick (9/11 Culture), treating the destruction of the twin towers and the panoply of its cultural fallout as a series of questions, comes closest to Jack Gladney’s objectivity. Philip E. Wegner (Life between Two Deaths, 1989-2001) resembles Gladney as cultural historian, and Marc Redfield (The Rhetoric of Terror) manifests Gladney’s philosophical doubt. Karen Engle (Seeing Ghosts) resembles Gladney’s haunted aspect in his uncertainty about how to interpret signs and meanings, how to distinguish in his own perceptions between the visionary and the hallucinatory, and in his own conclusions between insight and paranoia. Melnick raises better questions, to be sure, than Gladney, and Wegner is a much better cultural historian. Redfield and Engle, similarly, are more genuinely philosophical than Gladney, and both are a hell of a lot smarter. All four authors, moreover—like those who try to ward off misfortunes by imagining that they are about to occur—express awareness of their awkward positionality in relation to their topic. But it is still hard to shake off the disquieting concern that all these books exist in, or at least are haunted by, the hypothetical space of Hitler Studies, since the very act of imagining Hitler Studies makes its actuality inconceivable.
 
Herein, we enter an ontological loop where the inconceivability of Hitler Studies is as absolute as is the reality of Hitler’s actions. How is this possible? Or to put it another way, if imagining a Department of Hitler Studies in some way makes the question of Hitler academic and so distances Hitler from reality somehow, is there an ethical dilemma in reducing Hitler to pure simulacrum, or an epistemological dilemma in knowing him only as a representation? At the same time, given that the past does not exist, all we ever know of it are representations: records, photographs, memories, written accounts, relics. In that regard, the emergence of Hitler Studies claims a futurity from the perspective of which our current absurdities merge with our past horrors, and we become the captives of the events we are trying to capture.
 
Thus history is always captivating, regardless of the terms of that captivity. This insight implicitly connects Redfield, Melnick, Engle, and Wegner, all captives in one way or another of the phenomena clustered around the term “9/11,” for, as Redfield explains, “very quickly the name-date became a slogan, a blank little scar around which nationalist energies could be marshaled” (1). The authors, linked by the illusiveness of that ambiguous name-date, often invoke Derrida to help explain its slippery logistics. “Derrida tells us that mourning and memory are inextricably tied to the proper name” (39), Engle explains in an attempt to analyze the photo image named Falling Man, a figure that in its namelessness she sees as a metonym for the whole 9/11 event: “The work of mourning—for this man, for this day—is permanently disrupted by the impossibility of recognition, the failed identification of the victim. This failure cannot be overemphasized, for it is through this failure that the profundity of Falling Man‘s iconicity begins to emerge” (39).
 
The failure of the visual, furthermore, complements a failure of the verbal, as Melnick shows in his chapter on the rumors that simultaneously infuse and bracket the event. These rumors interweave, creating a vast non-fabric of threads tugged in every direction: Arabs in a Detroit (or was it Bakersfield?) restaurant cheered when the towers went down, BUT the Jews working at those towers were mysteriously warned not to show up for work that day, BUT a Middle-eastern-looking man in New Jersey purchased inordinately large amounts of candy just before Halloween in order to poison trick-or-treating children, BUT the towers were actually taken down by explosives planted in their base by the Bush administration, AND the Pentagon was actually hit by a missile, BUT the real point of the attack was to control African-American minorities. Significantly, the circulation of what Melnick calls these “wedge-driving” rumors employs the same avenues of public discourse as do the channels of news and music and expressions of community action, memorialization, and patriotism. Therefore, if 9/11 culture is “constituted by the labors of historians, fictions writers, journalists, musical artists, and so on trying to make the tragedy available to the widest possible public as their own story” (35), Melnick notes that it also allows “the illusion of care and community-building to satisfy much more self-absorbed goals” (35).
 
The snapshot also figures cogently in the tension between official representation and cultural counter-statement. Melnick champions photography, especially the impromptu sort, as “the most valuable form of democratic cultural expression in the months after the attacks” (65). Thus, he implicitly marks the snapshot as a kind of counter-terrorism, one undertaken by an array of agents. Even though he feels that the New York Times‘s “Portraits of Grief” feature efficiently “cornered the market on remembrance” (76), Melnick praises the Times as the “first cultural actor to take note of the ‘snapshot culture’ . . . [and] to reproduce it in a representational economy of scale” (77). He qualifies his praise, however, by reminding us that the Times’s “standardization of the snapshots . . . made it clear that a corporate 9/11 culture was born almost simultaneously with the collapse of the towers” (77). Melnick’s book is full of these ups and downs, with a whole chapter devoted explicitly to the imagery of rising and falling that proliferates in fiction, film, and visual art after 9/11. Notably, Melnick uses the chapter’s title, “Rising,” to foreground the culture’s impetus toward uplift, most powerfully represented by Bruce Springsteen’s blockbuster record, The Rising, a conscious 9/11 memorial, especially to the kind of working people that Springsteen’s earliest music celebrated. As with the Times “Portraits,” it is impossible to separate commercial and corporate interests from the production of public commemoration.
 
Nonetheless, Melnick highlights the value of rising as a counter-imagery to what he calls “the central visual reality of 9/11: falling” (78). Claiming simultaneously that it is the central image and also the taboo image in the wake of 9/11, Melnick makes falling both center and margin in 9/11 culture. From 2001 to 2005, the taboo against falling is generally observed; Clear Channel’s list of banned songs included “a number of ‘falling’ songs” (80). In its place, Melnick contends, “rising” imagery prevailed. (The film Chicken Little and the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, he feels, typify this trend.) By 2006 we find images of paper falling and in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center the sound of bodies hitting the ground, which created cultural permission for the representation of falling bodies. Except that, Melnick points out, the 2004 novel Windows on the World ends with “a man jumping out of the titular restaurant with his two kids” (89); except that a significant Esquire article discussed falling imagery as early as 2003 and addressed Richard Drew’s earlier well-circulated photo of the anonymous falling man; except that Eric Fischl’s Tumbling Woman sculpture was mounted in Rockefeller Center in 2002, on the first anniversary of 9/11. Even though the sculpture was renounced as tasteless and quickly covered up, its subsequent removal as much disproves the falling taboo as demonstrates it, as does Melnick’s decision to hold these earliest details to the end of his chapter, such that we read backwards, from the absence of an image to its appearance, to its presence and disappearance during the period of its absence.
 
To the extent that Melnick is correct about his details, then, the rising imagery that celebrates the nation’s (and its corporate interests’) response to the collapse of the towers (and the falling bodies that preceded the collapse and the fallout that proceeded from it) continuously marks the falling that it excludes. Melnick’s analysis thus turns The Rising into a sign of falling. What, after all would be the point of Springsteen’s relentless insistence on rising—the words “rise” or “rising,” Melnick points out, appear in more than half the songs on the record—if nothing had fallen, if this music did not come after the fall? And how are we to interpret Melnick’s linking of the public’s revulsion at Tumbling Woman with his claim that the jumpers, like the snapshot phenomenon, were “a tragic expression of American democracy: a racially and economically diverse mix of bond traders, restaurant workers, and administrative assistants waited at those windows” (emphasis added, 92)? Melnick thus provides many examples of the way that 9/11’s up/down dichotomy is a version of the symbiosis, in Derridean fashion, of inside and outside. This loop of symbiotic inversion pervasively structures our representation of the event, which—like the site called Ground Zero—comprises an open space that is too full.
 
By contrast, consider how Engle, whose debt to Derrida is explicit, deals with some of the same details: “As Derrida writes, the desired demarcation of insides and outsides has never been fully realized” (14). Engle points this out in order to explain how the covering up of Tumbling Woman, prior to her removal, manifests the obscenity it tries to obscure: in exactly the way, I have suggested, the imagery of rising and Melnick’s celebration of it marks the taboo, and then the not-taboo, and actually the always-already of a taboo-being-violated.
 
Seeing Ghosts, Engle’s provocative examination of 9/11’s engagement by what she calls “the visual imagination,” starts with a series of contemplations on Tumbling Woman to illustrate how, as “Derrida so eloquently argues, that which is associated with the graphic is fundamentally associated with the improper—that condition or state of exteriority and distance from the truth, self-presence, and Being” (13). And yet in Tumbling Woman‘s incompletion—her removal from the narrative of her fall, her removal from the history of events that inform that fall, her removal from the completion of her fall, her removal from visual display, her removal from Rockefeller Center—the sculpture restages the displacement of 9/11 in the visual imagination. This may not point us to a narrative of democracy, as Melnick would have it (either directly or metonymically), but rather to the horror of our own historicity: “She has not yet finished dying and the future between her impact and her death remains open. This is the history,” Engle writes, “we cannot yet begin to imagine” (18).
 
Similarly, Engle implicitly interrogates Melnick’s praise of snapshots when she looks at the array of photographs surrounding 9/11 in juxtaposition with Richard Drew’s photograph, Falling Man, an eerily singular shot of a man in mid-drop, head pointed directly down, almost in an acrobatic pose. The man has never been definitively identified, and the photo was decried and subsequently pulled from circulation while at the same time circulating as an image of public discourse, the ultimate example of the falling taboo in violation. Some felt that the image was “pornographic,” presumably in that invited a prurient engagement with the intimacy of this man’s death. At the same time, Engle points out, the remains from Ground Zero were transported to Fresh Kills, Staten Island, where they were meticulously sorted and classified, then photographed and exhibited:
 

An exhibition, Recovery: The World Trade Center Recovery Exhibition at Fresh Kills, emerged out of the documentation of the Fresh Kills operation. Whereas Drew’s photograph was decried and condemned, images of a recovered tooth in a test tube, frozen tissue samples, and workers sifting through remains were framed and hung on museum walls.
 

(44)

 
Postcards and faces too haunt 9/11. Not just as ghosts but as composites with proscriptive messages, the postcards provide templates for imagining and historicizing the event. And yet, along with their imagery and iconography, they also circulate news of instability and uncertainty. “From technical reproductions of images on postcards,” Engle explains,
 

to the mass production of cards featuring the same images, to the millions of cards with their infinity of messages and images circulating around the globe, postcards operate simultaneously according to logics of reduction, replication, and multiplication. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to the movements of viral transmission, postcards expose a fundamental instability within the system of language and the tradition of linear history.
 

(62)

One constructed postcard image features Uncle Sam standing Paul Bunyan-like above the New York skyline, his fist clenched, his forearm bulging, his arm reared back as though he were about to land a powerhouse punch on the nose of the next incoming plane. Many postcards present a collage of shots of the towers aflame superimposed on the broader skyline of lower Manhattan full of vast black smoke. In one example, the words “Attack on Manhattan” appear across the upper right quadrant of the picture, just above smaller words, in a more uneven typeface: “The Unthinkable.” Another shows a waving American flag superimposed on a close-up of the rubble at Ground Zero, and some cards inscribe bits of texts such as the Pledge of Allegiance or the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” against an array of 9/11 backdrops. While intending to create a sense of national unity, a message from an “I” to a “you” comprising an “Us,” these cards communicate ambiguous messages, perhaps the most troubling being that they gesture “toward a myth of national community that obscures the everyday violations of individual rights enacted against the apparently self-evident and protected group: the American people” (Engle, 76).

 
Extensively detailing the sense of national unity that crossed racial divides to create a post-9/11 “Us,” particularly in popular music, Melnick too shows how fragile that unity was, evoking as much critique as assertion, which only accelerated with the assault on Iraq. Both Engle and Melnick explain convincingly how the culture reflects the contradictions in the claims that 9/11 united the nation against a common enemy, and Engle is particularly astute in her analysis of the imagery representing that “enemy,” especially the use of homoerotic images to demean bin Laden. If Engle is insightful about the way this imagery questions American masculinity in the process of asserting it, both she and Melnick make clear that the gender politics of 9/11 re-masculinize the national imaginary by assigning women to a subordinate role, a trait that the film World Trade Center shares with the stories spun around rescued soldier Jessica Lynch and Abu Ghraib prison guard Lynndie England. Engle and Melnick also explain that what Melnick calls “shout outs” merge and muddle the acts of mourning and the attempts at memorializing.
 
“Virtual trauma,” the first of two concepts produced by the events of 9/11 that Marc Redfield insightfully contemplates, bears directly on the points made by Melnick, and even more so by Engle. If one might describe Melnick’s book as surveying the spectrum of media that represent 9/11 and the array of mediations they produce, Redfield examines how those mediations structurally connect to the commemorative and the traumatic, to our ability to name and to mourn. In every aspect of its meaning, the name-date 9/11 depends on a time mediated by the futurity that makes commemoration possible as well as by a present that makes repetition immanent. This tension between temporalities in effect drains the name-date and empties it out, as Redfield shows: “Imperatively and imperialistically, the empty date suggests itself as a zero point, the ground of a quasi-theological turn or conversion: everything changed that day, as the U.S. mainstream media so often tells itself” (17). As it mediates time, 9/11 produces mediated space: “Just as there is now only one ‘September 11,’ there is now only one ‘Ground Zero,’ capitalized. But the latter term has been torn not out of the calendar but out of the lexicon of atomic warfare” (23). As such, the term “both calls up and wards off the ghost of Hiroshima” (23) at the same time that it effaces the future by suggesting a site of survival rather than of nuclear annihilation, connoted by the non-capitalized uses of “ground zero.” Steeped in the rhetoric of targeting, the name “stokes a fantasy of omnipotence that is inseparable from vulnerability and exposure” (25).
 
Drawing on the recent work of Donald Pease, Redfield elaborates the relationship between this fantastic space and many confused claims of innocence: “The zero is a ground, American ground, the virgin space of a new beginning (‘everything changed’), the guarantee of a wounded innocence and a good conscience” (24). The site Ground Zero both evokes and deploys competing narratives of innocence. To the extent that “zero” becomes the baseline for culpability, the litmus test of innocence, its appropriation as a national site produces the troubling question that nearly got Professor Ward Churchill expelled from the University of Colorado, in effect: how innocent were the people whose occupations centered on world trade and who worked in the lap of Wall Street? Similarly, some African Americans expressed discomfort over being identified as part of the power system which bin Laden held accountable for what he saw as U.S. imperialism, while others saw the event as transcending racial divides (at the same time, of course, that it was erecting new ones).
 
Like racial and national identities, like the significations attached to “ground zero,” the notion of innocence does not so much describe a fact as initiate its contestation. If all of these books demonstrate anything, it is that nothing about 9/11 is innocent. At the heart of the conflicts over innocence, these books suggest to me, is the unacknowledged fact that the term can refer to radically different realms of reference. Innocence can entail issues of law, evidence, procedure, and (potential) punishment. The word can also refer to the disposition of the soul. Yet a third type of innocence denotes lack of experience, often but not necessarily sexual. Slippage among these meanings, however, seems almost inevitable, as they circulate in a slippery chain of cultural substitution. The loss of sexual innocence can entail an illegal act and/or can affect the disposition of the soul, depending on the legal, social, or spiritual referents one invokes. Innocence thus activates some entrenched confusion connected to, if not partially caused by, the infusion of secular life with theological myths, meanings, attributes, or wants. In what ways was 9/11 an attack on the innocent? In a purely criminal context, the victims were innocent and the perpetrators guilty, but as these books show, 9/11 is transcendent in issues of law because it put U.S. retaliation above the rule of law. The U.S., holding itself innocent in the eyes of God as well as the eyes of the law, set out to seek God’s revenge–a point President George Bush II made in his famous post-9/11 speech, and which he and numerous of his supporters have reiterated frequently. God is on the side of the United States because it was innocent, as innocent as the innocent people in the World Trade Center whom God chose not to protect. This argument uses evidence—9/11, Ground Zero—to transcend the need for evidence: doing God’s work makes evidence irrelevant, because it is hubris to try to prove anything to God, something that would of course be clear to someone such as George Bush II, who believes God had chosen him to run for President.
 
But when innocence is debated on spiritual grounds rather than forensic, it is glossed—or outed—by the actions of the terrorists whose claims to spiritual innocence warranted their actions; that innocence was epitomized by the virgins promised them in heaven. The terrorists’ innocence gave them access to innocent young women, who, under heavenly auspices, would lose their innocence by surrendering it to the oxymoronically innocent terrorists. The forensic guilt for their attack on the secular nation and on secular institutions was thus the reciprocal purchase of innocent victims. Evaluated in such a spiritual economy, they could neither feel guilt for what they were about to do, nor be guilty for what they had done. In the end, it was all very innocent: innocent victims, innocent victors. In this context, post-9/11 stages a struggle for the rhetorical position from which to ascribe the guilt.
 
Although Redfield does not address the concept of innocence in these terms, its specific dualities are consistent with those he ascribes to “September 11” and to “Ground Zero”:
 

Both terms move beyond themselves, as it were, and in a double sense: on the one hand, by emphasizing survival and encouraging all the phantasms of power—of picturing, targeting, annihilating, and consuming—that drive the “war on terror”; on the other hand, by surreptitiously exploiting an iterability and finitude conditioning of all life, technology, and mourning . . . . The more the world superpower dials the 9-1-1 emergency number, gives a name and a face to evil and goes to war, the more haunting September 11 becomes. Overwritten by atrocity after atrocity committed in its name, its afterimage persists.
 

(47)

 
The geographical and temporal dislocations involved with name-date and site-name also help explain why the event of 9/11 was often compared to a movie, illustrating once again the way visual paradigms, in their failure, continue to haunt representation. If most people who saw 9/11 or saw news of it did so via television, what they saw was already a movie, an event viewed through the contrivance of cinematic conventions that inform traumatic spectatorship. In this way, the event was a form of reverse engineering in that the movie conventions that mediated its reception also informed its production:
 

On the one hand, the phrase “it was like a movie” conjures up not just an excess of event over believability but a sense that this event is to be mediated, would have no sense, perhaps would not even have occurred if it were not being recorded and transmitted. . . . On the other hand, the cameras and transmitters repeat the terroristic violation of human dignity itself, reducing someone’s pain and death to an image, stripping away the soul in capturing a representation of the body.
 

(30-31)

Here Redfield usefully evokes the Burkean idea that the sublime enables the spectator to imagine surviving his or her own death, to suggest that “in being ‘like a movie’, in soliciting the spectator to identify with the inhuman camera, the spectacle-transmission renders the spectator part of a process of mediation in which time and space suffer dislocation” (35). Thus, the rhetorical import of the name-date and the site-name, the language of targeting and of televisualizing simultaneously demand and obstruct mourning, a conclusion that Redfield shares with Melnick and Engle, although he demonstrates it with arguments of a different register (except when he discusses the films World Trade Center and United 93).

 
In turning to his second scrutinized term, “war on terror,” Redfield draws heavily on Agamben to argue that “at the heart of modernity’s rudimentarily secularized idea of sovereignty lies terror: a terror proper to sovereignty itself” (54). Explaining how the “terrorist” is essential to the constitution of the modern state, Redfield demonstrates forcefully and effectively that “the declaration of war on terror is at once the most obvious, overdetermined, and obscure speech act of our era” (91). Just as Redfield ends the first half of the book with a sentimental gesture toward the possibility of “true mourning, if we achieve it” (47), the deconstructive energies of the second half evoke the utopian possibility of moving from the paradigm of perpetual war to that of perpetual peace: “as ‘peace’ becomes the site of a certain excess within language and thought, a nonapocalyptic openness to the future may be said to emerge” (94).
 
Redfield’s move connects the examinations of cultural representation produced by Melnick and by Engle to Phillip E. Wegner’s reading of cultural allegories between 1989 and 2001—what Wegner calls “the long nineties”—so as to periodize the cultural history that culminates with 9/11. Quoting the final lines of Don DeLillo’s Underworld, a meditation on the possibility of a word becoming a thing in the world, a word identified at the end of the novel as “peace,” Wegner shares with Redfield a desire to summon the possibility of peace as the utopian impetus of 9/11’s apocalyptic narratives. To this end, Wegner pursues a historical analysis based on identifying and tracing cultural allegories. In other words, telos rather than scope of content connects Wegner to the other 9/11 books in this group, in that they all are attempting to ask what comes after 9/11. The details of the haunted space that Engle sees there and the contradictions implicit in its cultural artifacts, delineated by Melnick, are consistent with the logic traced by Redfield. When that logic yields authority to utopian desire, Redfield is in effect willing an after-9/11-ness that fills the implicit void articulated by Melnick and Engle. Using a logic of historical dialectics—grounded in what led up to 9/11—Wegner attempts, similarly, to replace the haunted void with a utopian vision.
 
For him, 9/11 marks the end of a period initiated by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet Communism. In that period, as Wegner describes it, neoliberal energies consolidate around the triumphalism associated with Francis Fukuyama’s declaration that history had come to an end. In the context of this pseudo-utopian vision of a world order in which American power, influence, and values flourish uncontested, Wegner identifies the dystopian strains to which, at the end of this period, 9/11 gives visibility. To put it another way, if 9/11 marks the end of the end of history, the nightmare of history that was always there announces itself—as all nightmares do—at the moment of awakening. For Wegner, 9/11 is a wake-up call that makes visible the fact that historical possibility is open-ended.
 
Underworld thematized this historical possibility as a retrospective allegory of the long Cold War period that preceded Wegner’s “long nineties.” In those long nineties, Wegner demonstrates, the three films of The Terminator series “form a dialectical sequence . . . as each film reworks the ideological and political raw materials of its predecessor” (62), sequentially reflecting the world-views of the three previous Republican Presidents. About the two versions of the film Cape Fear and the novel on which it was based, Wegner fruitfully asks, “what are the fears, the ‘real life’ to which the figure of [the villain] Cady has given form?” (87). With finely nuanced readings, Wegner shows that each version of the Cape Fear narrative reflects the anxieties of its historical moment: the novel reflecting Cold War gender anxieties, the first version of the film reflecting late 1950s racial conflict, and the Scorsese 1991 remake manifesting “the explosive reemergence . . . of anxieties about new forms of class conflict” (88).
 
These chapters, which constitute the first half of the book, historicize the cultural possibilities that provide Wegner’s raison d’être. They illustrate, as well, how he develops his allegorical readings and the historical purposes to which he puts them. His larger goal, as he makes clear from the beginning, is not just to historicize but to construct the conditions of utopian possibility. Thus he examines the films Ghost Dog and Fight Club to demonstrate the relationship between the naturalist tradition and dystopian narrative, and to explore “the way they adapt the formal strategies of the dystopia, as well as its precursors in naturalist fiction, to the new situation of what has been variously described as an emergent global postindustrial, post-Fordist, or service economy” (124). The final third of the book looks at works that provide what Wegner identifies as a way out of the dystopian: the film Independence Day (read alongside Derrida’s Specters of Marx in order to tease out an allegorical conception of the messianic), the Forever novel trilogy, Octavia Butler’s Parable novels, and the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
 
For Wegner, 9/11 thus creates the occasion for the shift into a new cultural stage, a way out of life caught between death’s rehearsal and its restaging. The first sentence of the book’s final paragraph tells us that we have arrived “at the most significant lessons that we can take away from these extended narratives” (216-17). In articulating the tension of the two deaths that impel his periodizing, Wegner thus constructs an argument caught between an informing moral teleology and specific cultural anxieties. These works teach Wegner more than something about the conditions of their production, the complexity of those conditions, and the layers of displacement that those complexities produce; they also teach him how we should envision the future, how we should live in historical time. In Wegner’s reach for the utopian, one is reminded of the end of The Political Unconscious, where Jameson argues that religion, as a utopian discourse, is a form of Marxism. This move may be glib or optimistic or admirable, and from my perspective, at least, only a curmudgeon—or worse, a libertarian—would be completely unsympathetic to Jameson’s (and hence Wegner’s) objective, which is progressive, reconciliatory, and social-minded. It is similarly hard to object to a methodology that is detailed and clever.¹
 
To what extent, however, does Wegner’s utopian tale wag the postmodern dog? If the idea that everything is narrative is a postmodern concept amenable to the allegorizing methodology used here to contextualize the postmodern condition within a progressive teleology, perhaps the allegorical method succeeds not because of the trajectory it reflects but simply because everything is narrative. From my perspective, the meaning of the term culture and the value of cultural criticism derive from the fact that at any historical moment, specific narratives acquire cogency. That value lies, however, not in subsuming narrativity to the interests of metanarrative, but in demonstrating that cogent narratives do not constitute a coherent whole, because at the moments of conflict and contradiction, at the sites where competing or self-contradictory narratives are sutured, ideology becomes most visible. The allegorical aspect of culture follows from the idea that culture is the product of narratives.
 
But what follows from all of this? Although Wegner appropriately uses the name-date to mark an end to historical opacity, if one is to build on his work, it is necessary to go beyond the position contra Fukuyama. If 9/11 creates the rupture through which the signs of history must be acknowledged, by what process do those signs enter the flow of historical representation, the flow upon which 9/11 has returned our focus? The dilemma of inside/outside, the power of enfoliation that torments the capacity to represent 9/11 (as Engle and Redfield so convincingly demonstrate), makes us ponder not only what 9/11 was and what it means, but what follows, in the light of which allegorical thinking—as the juxtaposition of these other books with Wegner’s makes a little more clear—is a form of wishful thinking. This troubling issue confronts the stasis implicit in 9/11 souvenirs, those mementoes that replace the flow of history with the reification (and, Melnick emphasizes, the commodification) of memorials.
 
The next step, these books taken together remind us, is as uncertain as it is necessary. Dare we not consider what comes after bin Laden? While American military forces and intelligence operatives are going after him, so long as he escapes their capture, we remain his unwilling captives. Whether we consume with alacrity the souvenirs of his greatest triumph or critique with a vengeance the way that triumph is represented, whether we grouse at the humiliation of full body scanners at airports or support whole-heartedly the PATRIOT Act, we remain bin Laden’s captives. Until he is captured, he is free from facing any consequences or acknowledging any restrictions. This makes him the veritable leader of the free world, with everyone else his follower, in lockstep or in pursuit, however deceptive his trail, however hard it is to follow. No one can deny that crashing a plane into a tower of the World Trade Center is a hard act to follow, except by some of bin Laden’s followers, who crashed a second plane into the World Trade Center twenty minutes later. What followed is history. If that was the same history to which Fukuyama proclaimed an end, the reason may be that Fukuyama’s argument is harder to follow than bin Laden’s, which is simple almost to the point of being innocent: bin Laden represents the victims of Western imperialism. The U.S., he believes, has designs on the Muslim world that entail following cultural infiltration and economic coercion with military invasion. Because U.S. coercive power is directly connected to its wealth, the only way to combat its designs is to destroy its economy by luring it into a multi-trillion-dollar revenge fest.
 
The validation of his argument was marked in the U.S. by a return to displaced historical narratives that followed a logic of associating 9/11 and Ground Zero with Iraq, hinging particularly on the idea that Saddam Hussein was the next Hitler. As each of these books demonstrates, in the wake of 9/11, the impossibility of representing 9/11 within historical time is a course-offering from the postmodern Department of Hitler Studies.