Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 123–129, 2003 Teaching in dark times SUNIL AGNANI Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin (eds) After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City New York and London: Routledge, 2002 236 ⫹ xi pp. ISBN 0 415 93479 6 (hb) US$25.00 Movie stars who have led adventure-packed lives are often too egocentric to discover patterns, too inarticulate to express intentions, too restless to record or remember events. Ghostwriters do it for them. In the same way I was Manhattan’s ghostwriter. Rem Koolhaas (1978) This is a welcome addition to the flurry of books that have appeared on the events of 11 September 2001, particularly since the first anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. From histories of individual architects such as the towers’ designer, Minoru Yamasaki, to strange picture books available in airports commemorating the disaster in full colour, one useful effect of this set of reflections is to bring architecture back into the most significant discussions of contemporary culture by placing it in dialogue with the work of city planners and economic and cultural historians. This has prompted a general discussion about the meaning and implication of modernism in architecture—and modernism in architecture of course bears more strongly upon the shaping of the social world than in other expressive media (painting, literature, and music, for example) because it informs the built environment in a much more obvious way, affecting how the populace of a city interacts with their immediate environment. Reviewing my teaching notes from 2001, when I was preparing for a course (Contemporary Civilisation) on Western political thought at Columbia University in New York City, I saw in the upper right-hand corner of a yellow notebook page filled with comments on Plato’s Republic the date ‘September 10, 2001’. On the strange morning the following day, I was immured in my office preparing to teach an 11am class, and learned of the attacks from a small clock radio announcing the unbelievable in the department office in Hamilton Hall. The worst was in progress: the first tower had collapsed, and there were rumours of a plane hitting the Pentagon. Upper Manhattan’s proximity to the events, combined with its immediate distance, made it unclear what to do. I walked to my class, not certain of who would and would not be there on what was only the second week of a new semester. In my head was a phrase from Hannah Arendt, ‘men in dark times’. To me the darkness was going to be the difficulty of understanding and explaining the event. But I did not yet realise that mourning could be turned so quickly into calls for vengeance. Darkness would ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/03/010123–07  2003 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies DOI: 10.1080/1368879032000080366 REVIEWS then take on other meanings. One meeting held shortly after September 11 by a legal group in Manhattan (the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund) brought out the sense that one had to prepare for a kind of low-level civil war in the body politic. If the rest of the country suddenly identified with New York, their appropriation apparently did not reflect the incredible diversity to which most of those who live in it cling. Later, in a crowded small cinema hall at Film Forum in Greenwich Village, I sat transfixed before a restored print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But now the scenes of the small aircraft weaving around the buildings have new connotations. Everyone has looked at these sets with their angular images of skyscrapers and intertwining bridges between buildings, and thought of New York as their closest approximation. But these days the scenes in the film where the designers conceive of the building, and call it Babel, also echo differently. The conception of, and subsequent attacks upon, the World Trade Center had more than a touch of Babel to them, but this would be to use moral and mythical categories to understand a human event. Nonetheless, in reading recently the account of the actual construction of the WTC,1 with Yamasaki’s original design for two already gargantuan towers of 80 storeys being stretched at the insistence of the Port Authority’s director of the project, Guy Tozzoli, to 105 storeys, it is clear that a very human hubris drove the towers to their height. Perhaps it is only retrospectively that such a critical eye could have been cast on the secret life of monuments. Although it is now harder to make use of the language of surrealism that inspired the very stimulating writings of an architect like Rem Koolhaas in relation to events that seem overshadowed by the tragic rather than the absurd, there is still much truth in the peculiar formulations he proposed in his 1978 work, Delirious Manhattan. In the declamatory opening pages, he wrote: This book is an interpretation of that Manhattan which gives its seemingly discontinuous—even irreconcilable—episodes a degree of consistency and coherence, an interpretation that intends to establish Manhattan as the product of an unformulated theory, Manhattanism, whose program—to exist in world totally fabricated by man, i.e., to live inside fantasy—was so ambitious that to be realized, it could never be openly stated.2 The legitimacy of holding onto the importance of fantasy is everywhere apparent in the many studies of the Twin Towers in Sorkin and Zukin’s edited collection of essays, After the World Trade Center. These pieces speak to fantasy in two senses. In the first sense, as many of the contributors assert, the attention paid to the towers, which was in part the very reason they were targeted, was very much a part of the idea behind their original design. Mark Wigley, in his essay ‘Insecurity by Design’, makes the interesting point that architecture covers over fear: ‘Buildings are seen as a form of protection, an insulation from danger’ (p 71). Since it was precisely this conception that was proven to be a fantasy, he therefore calls for architects to express doubt, or vulnerability, in their work: ‘The only architecture that might resist the threat of the terrorist is one that already captures the fragility and strangeness of our bodies and identities, an architecture of vulnerability, sensitivity, and perversity’ (p 85). On its own, this 124 REVIEWS statement might have struck me as an untenable proposition, even if prompted by sound ideas. However, it seems to have been precisely this notion that prompted the talented architect Peter Eisenman to design his striking set of three buildings which appear to be partially imploded, a suggestion conveyed by the curvature of the glass surface of the medium-rise office towers he submitted to the most visionary (although unofficial) proposal for the redevelopment of the Ground Zero site organised by Herbert Muschamp, architecture critic for the New York Times.3 An architecture of vulnerability, however, is certainly harder to rally support for, except as memorial. As the original effort to construct the towers demonstrates—something which many of the other articles in this collection explore—the more alluring fantasy of launching such titans into the sky mobilised a much more zealous group of supporters. Few would argue that this group of planners and individuals at the Port Authority had much popular support. The towers were built, as John Kuo Wei Tchen points out in his essay ‘Whose Downtown?!?’, with complete indifference to the rare mixture of Jewish, Cantonese, and Syrian merchants who had over the years inhabited what came to be known as Radio Row, an area named after a cluster of small electronic shops demolished to clear the grounds for the WTC site. The centrality of New York as an old port city—and in particular Lower Manhattan—leads Wei Tchen to call for the preservation of ‘the port-culture communities of New York’ rather than allowing a financial logic to dictate all aspects of social life in the city. ‘Form follows capitalism’ is another clever dictum that Koolhaas elsewhere proposes, emending the statement attributed originally to Louis Sullivan (although perhaps more descriptive of Mies van der Rohe), that form follows function. It is a phrase not cited by any of the contributors to this volume, but one which many might well have employed, since accounts of the towers’ original construction persistently demonstrate how the imperative for speedy completion led to the neglect of many existing building codes and regulations. (The Port Authority, as a sovereign legal entity, could exempt itself from the city’s building codes.) But it would be applying this remark too narrowly if one were to remain solely with the construction of the WTC. The bulk of the articles in this volume do the work of suturing those other-worldly entities back onto the social body of New York City. Edwin Burrows—one of the authors of Gotham, the best-selling history of New York4—provides a fascinating account in his article on ‘Manhattan at War’ of previous moments of paranoia in the island borough starting in the mid-seventeenth century with the Anglo-Dutch War. He also reminds us of the very early links between New York and the West Indies, the large number of slaves who lived in the city (20% of the population in 1750), and the consequent settler colonial anxiety that beset Manhattan after every report of a slave uprising in the Caribbean. His larger thesis is to debunk the idea that New York experienced untroubled isolation until September 11, 2001. He is most persuasive, however, in conveying the turbulence of eighteenth-century New York rather than in showing a continuity between those events and the current day, since his most recent example after this period concerns a plot by Confederate arsonists in the mid-nineteenth century against theatres, shops, and factories. 125 REVIEWS If Burrows tries to show that the events of 9/11 themselves were reminiscent of earlier New York crises, then it is Beverly Gage’s aim, in her piece ‘The First Wall Street Bomb’, to show that subsequent responses to the event also had their precursors. I mentioned earlier my own experience of being startled at the manner in which the diverse forms of public mourning for the loss of thousands of lives were quickly transmuted into a single-minded call for revenge. At the individual level this was manifested in the sudden suspicion of all people of ‘Middle Eastern appearance’. It is an irony that such an apparently specific term should have had such an indiscriminate application, so that people of many ethnicities suddenly needed to be expelled from the social body. After 9/11, hate crimes in the United States against South Asians (Muslim and non-Muslim) and Arab Americans, for example, numbered 645 in the first week alone, according to one group gathering data based on reports in community newspapers.5 The subjective experience of identifying collectively with a city that had been hit—indeed I know many people who find it far easier to identify with this civic entity than any state or national identity—was suddenly undercut by the perverse and cruel realisation that suspicious and accusing stares were now directed at oneself. At times, as we know, more than a stare was directed at the racially marked citizen and migrant: there is the violence of civil society and that of state security apparatuses, and Beverly Gage points to some fascinating parallels between the present rounding up of Muslims and migrants and a similar process which took place after a bomb attack in New York after 1920. In that earlier explosion, due process and attention to legal detail were also flagrantly ignored as self-proclaimed and purported anarchists and communists were indiscriminately arrested and detained. Gage argues that then, as now, this action came with a simultaneous rejection of any analysis of root causes; to examine these would be both to legitimise the bombing and to appear unpatriotic. As with the Reds, the tendency was to assign collective rather than individual blame. In the 1920s, the non-citizen immigrants who were targeted were Italians, Russians, and Jews of many nationalities; today it is Muslims and those of Middle Eastern appearance. It is against a collective amnesia of this sort that many of the other contributors wish to argue. In the most unusual essay in this volume—unusual because imaginative and narrative in the midst of empirical prose and argument—Moustafa Bayoumi’s ‘Letter to a G-Man’ narrates in an epistolary form a short history of the migration of Arabs and Muslims of many nationalities to New York City. The imaginative centre of this diaspora was Washington Street in Little Syria, the quarter of the Lower West Side erased by the laying of the site for the WTC to which I alluded earlier. This fascinating history contains some surprises even for those who may know something of the story of migrations to the city, such as the founding of the first mosque in Brooklyn in 1907 (not, as one might expect, near Atlantic Avenue—another old residential quarter for many Lebanese—but in Williamsburg) and that by Polish, Lithuanian, and Russian Muslims. If Little Syria is one archaeological layer of lower Manhattan, Andrew Ross begins his piece, ‘The Odor of Publicity’, with reference to another, a 1991 ‘rediscovery’ of a massive African American cemetery dating to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The 20,000 people buried at the site were predominantly slaves in the service of a 126 REVIEWS trading economy set in place by the Dutch West India Company, and they are evoked by Ross as an example of the sometimes intentional forgetting of victims when they are excluded from the writing of the annals of history. It is for this reason that Sharon Zukin writes in her essay, ‘Our World Trade Center’, of memory as a contest, and argues for a vigilance concerning the ‘regime of memory’ that will eventually be set upon the events of 9/11 and the recollection of the disaster. Part of that regime is already being set in place, although immersed as we are in the present it is impossible to easily discern the meaning of this event within the longue durée of the history of New York. David Harvey, M. Christine Boyer, and Andrew Ross all in passing make some effort at a historical periodising of the moment of construction of the towers within a larger economic history of the city and the nation. Harvey regards the occlusion of a political analysis of events in the US as enabled and encouraged by a focus in the media upon personal stories of grief. Yet the towers and their construction were never innocent. The technical bankruptcy of New York in 1975 seemed to pose the argument that the city’s recovery depended upon further de-industrialisation. Boyer sketches a similar periodisation by tracing the gradual decline of New York from being the largest manufacturing city in the US on the eve of the Second World War to the rise of the white-collar service industries which predominate at present. Supplementing the periodisation within a local and national frame is Neil Smith’s argument, in ‘Scales of Terror: The Manufacturing of Nationalism and the War for US Globalism’, that the contradictions within the present forms of global society must also be examined. The causes of anger and hatred directed against the US derive from the existence of an interlocking system of global commerce and migration without a global state to address its failings—and the claim of the United States to be this global state is a result more of imposition than consensus. It is the desire to disconnect from the turbulence of the global economy that precludes one from viewing the WTC towers as innocent, Harvey argues, for the many financial services which were located there were insulated from ‘the global consequences of their actions’ (p 59)—none of which, he hastens to add, excuses the reckless violence of the acts committed. Many articles, therefore, such as Sharon Zukin’s, leave the reader with a pressing question: can there exist an ethics within (finance) capitalism, within an economic system which allows for a complete detachment from the social costs of decisions made on high? It may seem an abstraction to put it in such general terms, but it is also true that this sense of isolation and detachment was an explicit part of the ideological agenda behind the many forms of architectural modernism starting in the 1950s and 1960s. One can make this assertion knowing that the motive was at times ‘populist’: mass housing schemes, a desire to level forms of hierarchy embedded in some forms of traditional design. I myself find some examples of architectural modernism, such as Oscar Niemeyer’s designs for Brasilia, sculpturally very powerful and expressive (Niemeyer is also the main architect of the less impressive United Nations Headquarters in New York, in collaboration with Le Corbusier). But it is evident that the structure-in-use by people was not always at the forefront of their design. The overlaying of an old stratum with a new edifice, or even a whole new 127 REVIEWS city—as with Corbusier’s Chandigarh or Niemeyer’s Brasilia—was what enabled this tabula rasa form of architectural modernism to be employed equally in the Third World and in lower Manhattan. In ‘The Janus Face of Architectural Terrorism’, Eric Darton links this fantasy of the modernist skyscraper architect— to clear away a socially devalued decrepit space, as Yamasaki did, and to put in its place something that would stand aloof and apart—to the impulse motivating the skyscraper terrorist to take such a building down. In both cases, suggests Darton, one resorts to the use of abstraction to a very high degree. The analogy between those who build and those who destroy such structures, Darton argues, lies in the extent to which each must view the living processes and the social life contained in such a building in very abstract terms. In an argument remarkably reminiscent of some aspects of Edmund Burke’s descriptions of the Jacobin use of abstraction as enabling a degree of violence in revolutionary France, Darton suggested in an earlier work6 that ‘for the terrorist and the skyscraper builder alike, day-to-day existence shrinks to insignificance—reality distils itself to the instrumental use of physical forces in service of an abstract goal’ (quoted on p 89 in the volume under review). Darton wrote these words in 1999, after the first bombing of the WTC, but long before the events of 2001 would give them even greater resonance. The tabula rasa, too, was precisely one component of Manhattanism as Koolhaas tried to define it in his own chapter on ‘The Skyscraper Theorists’, where visionaries imagined Manhattan as a modern Venice, each block in its grid a floating island between which coursed the ebb and flow of traffic in place of water—a ‘culture of congestion’ that one could contemplate safely, at a distance, from a view high above it all. The blank slate upon which one would inscribe the forms of new society (Jacobin France), or the organised geometry of new buildings (architectural modernism), requires a conceptual abstraction employing the same logic that enables those who wish to level such monoliths to undertake their task. In resistance to the headiness of some of these thoughts, I began this review with a reference to Hannah Arendt’s phrase, originating with Bertolt Brecht, of ‘men in dark times’. Arendt’s thought holds to the elements of truth that an individual’s life might tell us even ‘when the public realm has been obscured and the world become so dubious that people have ceased to ask any more of politics than that it show due consideration for their vital interests and personal liberty’.7 Teaching in these times seems potentially as dark because the language one reads on both sides of this contest is such an obvious abuse of clear thought. ‘Enduring Freedom’ and the ‘war on terror’ bespeak false righteousness, while the language of Osama bin Laden’s statements also lays claim to a justice mingled liberally and promiscuously with hate. In this context who can easily prise apart the valid from the mask for violence? What if both contestants wear such masks? Dark times are brought upon us by these eyeless masks that blind the wearers. Notes 1 2 This account appeared in a special issue of the New York Times Magazine: J Glanz and E Lipton, ‘The Height of Ambition’, New York Times Magazine, 8 September 2002, pp 32–44. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious Manhattan, New York: Monacelli Press, 1994, p 10. 128 REVIEWS 3 4 5 6 7 Herbert Muschamp, ‘Don’t Rebuild. Reimagine’, New York Times Magazine, 8 September 2002, p 53. Edwin G Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, New York: Oxford UP, 1999. ‘American Backlash Report’, produced by the civic education and non-profit group South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow. Available at ⬍ http://www.saalt.org/abr.htm ⬎ E Darton, Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York’s World Trade Center, New York: Basic, 1999. H Arendt, Men in Dark Times, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968, p 11. 129