An Elegy for 25th Anniversary of September 11

 

Pix credit here

It has been my practice to post on the Anniversary of the 11 September Attacks (eg, here, here, here, here, and here).  

On the morning of September 11, 2001 I boarded what was later to be understood as one of the last planes out of Heathrow Airport that was not diverted back to the U.K., and on my way to Pittsburgh. I had attended what in retrospect might now be understood as a last moment of innocence gathering of scholars who, each in their own way, embraced and pushed forward a fundamental belief in the dynamic and endless possibilities of an equally dynamic and endless but also deepening convergence that must inevitably bring us all (humans anyway) closer to the realization of a sort of global solidarity within the warm embrace of which the only real challenge was to decide (or at least enjoy debates among) the variations of the description and forms of perfection then on order.

At the margins of these common visions among these sets of self-referencing communities of believes in the glorious world that was about to come, communities which lamentably and in retrospect embraced self-absorption layered above their self referencing and arrogance (whether of the left or right as those terms might then have been manifested in the minds of their holders) crowned by and through the common discourse of the leading forces of these belief communities--at the margins of all of this bubbled a potent cocktail of equally self-absorbed, self-referencing and arrogant communities of believers. These communities sometimes successfully cultivated, among certain fashionable intellectual circles,  a sort of intellectual sympathy the logic of the discourse of which pointed to contradiction and threat, but which were seen nevertheless as pitiable and sad marginalia that required not just sympathy but also suggested the obligation to support, lead and guide them into the bosom of the global intellectual and discursive commonwealth of believers (أمة المؤمنين ) and thus absorbed into the abode of peace (دار الإسلام). Sure, some of these communities of the marginal (again marginal to the grand enterprise of convergence) tended at times toward violence, blowing things and people (in every sense of the term) up with unfortunate consequences, but that could always be explained away (it still is) and the debris of those blow ups could then be used to build the pathways to global convergence (again in every sense) onto which they could be nudged for the inevitable journey toward the goals to which the world ummah strove. Even the traditional and ancient hold outs--religion, culture, etc.)--communities that one might have been forgiven for thinking that they would wither away (like the state in the face of the global worker revolutions of the early 20th century) appeared amenable to made subject to the cognitive premises of the convergence order--tamed and subsumed within the emerging global guardrails and treated as systemic variations (like political factions) no longer free to be entirely themselves (or better put, no longer free to insist that they themselves were the embodiment of a mandatory global ordering within which everything else  could be organized, managed, tolerated, or suppressed, etc.). 

Except at the margins.  

Glorious.

Inevitable.

September 11, in retrospect, was the day, something not well understood at the time given the cognitive tenor of the times, and certainly contested to this day, when the margins began their long march (actually quite a short march as measured against prior such inversions) to the center, and the center began a long (actually quite precipitous) process of disembodiment, becoming over a short time little more than spectral vapors of a lebenswelt (lifeworld) passing away into history (except of course in the minds of those who stood to lose much by the process. The seeds planted in that passing, the centering of marginalia sprouting from out of the vaporous body of this cognitive world creation reality, have sprouted in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of places within an operational ecology in which all flora are aggressive and potentially dangerous. And most interestingly, they have sprouted from out of the corpses of the bodies that had been meant to be the guardians and gatekeepers of this once robust vision of and for the world.   

I had, at the time of my shortened and diverted flight from London,  and for the time I spent in what had been a summer camp in Newfoundland, only the cloths on my back and a copy of an early 20th century translation of Aristotle's Politics--oddly enough. My clothes were replaced thanks to the kindness of my Canadian hosts whose generosity I remember with great fondness. The book was not.  It was instead read and reread over the course of my time in stasis and before being transported back to the U.S. I did not know it then, of course, but there was something there that would, eventually provide some reassurance, though no joy, as I watched the self immolation of a grand order roasted by an ignition that it could seem to avoid.

At the time, of course, we all "knew" (and we certainly told by our "betters") that "things" would never be the same. However, at the same time  what was understood to comprise the body of "never be the same" did not touch on the structures and robustness of the convergence and ordering project, but rather that while the core was sound, the "issues" t be identified and resolved touched on more effective ways of reaching out to the marginals and bringing them more robustly from out of the abode of war (دار الحرب) into the light of our abodes of peace.  To, in the terminology of the 18th century--to enlighten them and free them of the falseness of their consciousness. For some, however, that process of enlightenment might also require action to satisfy a perceived need to more forcefully contain the margins in a conventional and in more traditionally violent ways. 

And so it was, for a little while longer. All of us still wrapped up in the warmth of our cognitive cages and more enthusiastically putting in place the final pieces of the collective architectures through which convergence could be realized and the world transformed. And so it was for a little while longer that the world ordering collectives and the masses they guided could appear to continue, in increasingly ostentatious ways, to be itself, projected into a glorious future--convergence, human rights norms and architectures, international law and its apparatus, sustainability, regulatory supervision and more generally bio-political efforts to "move"converging societies "forward" along an expert-scientifically constructed path toward the realization of an ideal society with ideal people engaging in idealized interactions embracing an ideal cultural ecology (and its benign variations) tightly controlled to ensure conformity with the ruling set of fundamental premises of the preferred cognitive ordering of the idealized global community--or perhaps more precisely of the global community that mattered, herding the marginals into the nicely appointed pens in which they could with patience be brought into the light.  It was, indeed, a glorious vision, a vision for a future hardly to be interrupted by the violent eruption of a community at the margins waiting to be received into the fold. What we got right, though we did not know it at the time, was that, given the imperatives of that cognitive cage and the behaviors of its stewards, was the transformation part, but little else.

	抵巇:	物有自然，事有合離。有近而不可見，有遠而可知。近而不可見，不察其辭也；遠而可知者，反往以驗來也。
		Things have their own nature; events have union and separation. There are things nearby that cannot be seen, and there are things far away that can be known. Those nearby yet unseen result from not examining their words carefully; Those far away yet knowable are so because one looks back to the past in order to verify what is coming.
	抵巇:	巇者，罅也。罅者，𡼏也。𡼏者，成大隙也。巇始有朕，可抵而塞，可抵而卻，可抵而息，可抵而匿，可抵而得，此謂抵巇之理也。
		Xī refers to a crack or fissure. A xia is a small opening or crevice. A small opening, if left unchecked, becomes a major rift. When the first signs of a fissure appear, it can be resisted and blocked, resisted and repelled, resisted and calmed, resisted and concealed, or resisted and turned to one's advantage. This is called the principle of dealing with fissures (xī).  (Guiguzi Rhetorics  (475 BC - 221 BC)《抵巇 - Exploiting Fissures》)

Nonetheless, the fissure that was 11 September, could not be ignored; and it was not sealed shut.  Those at the margins discovered it, preserved it, and signified it as the moment when, for an instant, it was possible to see, to envision (in the old sense of a sacred revelation), a world in which the post 1945 architectures and cognitive cages could be swept away. Those who looked for it, who embraced this signification, who could use it to build  tools to widen the fissure to the point where the fissure becomes the object and that around withers away,  those might see a triumph of the marginal and the overturning of the core(s); and not just those at the margins, but also those within the margins of the core. All marginals looked on 11 September then with something other than horror, an envisioning which would be repeated with greater frequency and equal animation in the years that followed, but which we could not quite fathom at the time.  Those within the convergence core, the world attacked on 11 September could signify the event and its aftermath  strategically--as an invitation to shift the locus and forms of convergence within the ruling group. For them, perhaps, the fissure could be curated and turned into an instrument which, if well controlled and deployed, could be used to advantage--and then to suppress those margins which gave it life, that is to put the tool back in its locked case.

One moved, then, from deepening convergence, to the defense of the core, and from there to its reformation. None of this was clear in 2001. The financial collapse of about 2007 made it clearer; the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014 (during which the leading forces began to develop their discursive tropes of failing in their duty and of protecting their core), the date of the commencement of which was again pathetically and tragically ironic, made what could now be seen seem more inevitable--but also more palatable, given the shifts in discursive modes. Not just defense, then, the stance after 2001/2007, but transformation after 2014, even if initially veiled in the frigid warmth of the discourse of the time. The forms of these movements and its pathways were, at least impossible to ignore after COVID.

All the while the margins moved toward the center, as the core collapsed in itself like some aged system intent on becoming the weighty absence of itself in space, a gravitational vortex that could be felt, historically but not seen. If one got too close one would also disappear.  Indeed, one might now wonder whether the margins have become the lodestar against which all systems now converged both within themselves (where the margins dominate) and among themselves in the ecologies of collective ordering. And there is where one might suppose one finds oneself now--among the margins and the marginals seeking to grasp the center, yet in a space without a center, but one which is well enough ordered by the accumulation significations of actors, once in and as the margins increasingly pulling things in their wake. Where the path from 11 September appears to lead is from a center to the margins. And if there is no center--only a space that is the ether of what had been there before--then even those who claim successorship of that core; those who divide it up and still presume to define a center as against the margins, fail tp see that they have indeed not risen from within the center to its core, but instead have descended from the core to its margins along with everything else.  And that presents a somewhat different set of lifeworlds from that which came before , whatever the shape of the ritual invocation of the past in the service of multiple futures. This is not to suggest either good or bad. I have no answer for that; I have only the realization of something quite different now from when I got on that plane in London. 

That brings me back, at last to Aristotle, who would have suggested both the inevitability of change and the nature of collapse when the core begins to doubt not its cognitive cage but perhaps its leading role within it.  Our fissure has become the core; and the core is known only by that which exists around it. This is not to suggest that one ought to mourn the normative structures and aspirations of what is passing as such. Many do not--but belief is not debatable--its only antidote comes from evangelization, from alternative beliefs--something that remains a significant and conscious force. Evangelization is perhaps the great untold story of the first quarter of the current century and the last decades of the 20th century.  As object and process--as flow and particle; as the irresistible temptation of those who found it useful or who no longer find their way when the system itself  transformed into a porous platform the structures of which could, in extremis be taken as an invitation, as permission, to un(re)make what had been made and what made the making possible in the first place. It offered retreat; and retreat into more structured ecologies was what evangelization proffered. In that sense September 11 as consequential rather than formative; it was a performance of the advancing state of decay that arrogance, self-absorption and inattention produced; it was a performance that served as the overture to an ongoing operatic tragedy; its essence was the "un" unmaking; unmasking; accepting; unabsorbing; unobedient--and the "un" had to go somewhere. One might escape the sanctuary of the temple of  convergence to embrace the flies, the harpies, as Sartre would have it fort Orestes (Les Mouches 1943); but it turned out that after a while another port in the storm of uncertainty became appealing; one might not want to undo but one might want move onto something different, exotic, comforting--marginal. What is central to the core becomes, in part, an irresistible instrument of its own dissipation.  

 It is the process of dissipation that ought to be lamented--not the particular vision that is lost to lamentation. This society has become so good at unmaking that every "un" becomes a fetish, and fetishes can be fashionable because underlying  the fascination with the "un" is perhaps the sort of hubris that characterized  the now abandoned lebenswelt--the unshakable belief that there was nothing that could derail the project, and that, cast as inevitable, one could envision the apotheosis of its progress as the withering away of the thing itself, that the corr disappears into everything as the global meta-signifier. That in turn enhanced the cultivation of the other and the process of not unmaking but dissolving the self into everything else--an aspiration that remains viable. Davos 2026 Part 1--A Bandung Conference for a "First Wives" Club of "Middle Powers"; Reflections on the Remarks of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. And in the end, the fissure becomes the thing itself.