Imagining the past, remembering the future: Past events as future possibilities
“On September 11th more people clicked on documentary news photographs than on pornography for the first (and only) time in the history of the internet”[1] [David Levi Strauss demonstrating the importance of imagery in the remembering of 9/11’]
It seems impossible to remember the future, if only because it hasn’t happened yet. It seems equally implausible that we have to ‘imagine’ a past, not least because we instead remember what has happened or have indeed experienced it. Yet, the process of imagining, as the word suggests, relies on the image, the visual. And whilst image, or the visual in any other form is increasingly becoming the means through which we remember our past, there is always room for conjecture; always room for alternative pasts in our mind that simultaneously help influence and shape our future. Thus, the process of imagining and remembering; whilst seemingly cognitively and temporally distinct (one being the process of calling to mind something from the past and the other to picture a future) are somehow intertwined, particular during rupturing political events such as 9/11. Redfield refers to such events as ‘virtual trauma’ or ‘trauma that is not entirely real’[2], and despite being first viewed as a catastrophic one-off, there are an increasing number of such events taking place each year. I want to consider the nexus between image, memory, technology and security and explore how the increasing use of imagery and technology as a way to record events have enabled a paradoxical but possible inversion of remembering and imagining- one that (re)configures our images of the past and; perhaps more importantly, shapes our memories of the future.
The events of 9/11 quickly became dubbed in both academia and popular culture as ‘unbelievable’[3]– an event so horrific and exceptional that it could not be cognitively processed as in normal circumstances. It was, as Zevin states ‘a most unusual and terrifying event that must be explained’[4]. But 9/11 could not be easily explained- or just explained for that matter, leaving academics to comment on its surreal or perhaps more accurately, hyperreal nature. As Redfield states ‘there is something particularly virtual and hyperreal about the central 9/11 event’[5] as it was simultaneously both ‘horrifically present and strangely unreal’[6]. Its ‘real’ presence became acknowledged not through the memories that people had of the event- as these ‘slip away rather easily into oblivion’[7] , but instead through the images that constituted its reality- images that, according to Baudrillard, became more real than the event itself. As Zizek states on September 11th ‘its [America’s] citizens were introduced to the ‘Desert of the Real’- to us corrupted by Hollywood, the landscape and the shots we saw of the collapsing towers could not but remind us of the most breath-taking scenes in the catastrophic big productions’[8]– making 9/11 a familiar event that we had paradoxically never experienced. That isn’t to say that 9/11 didn’t really happen, but that the memories held of the events found themselves somewhere between the real, the unreal and the hyperreal leaving us unable to decipher real event from the hyperreal image. Baudrillard asks ‘what then is a real event if everywhere the image, the fiction, virtuality perfuse this very reality?’[9] – and in the context of 9/11 image becomes reality, real becomes hyperreal and we are left with no ‘memories’ for we haven’t experienced reality. Instead we can only rely on our imaginations to make sense of the past.
The (un)believability of the events embedded themselves within the way 9/11 became remembered as exactly that- as 9/11- a single date representing a catastrophic day and subsequent and continuing decade of war. But how else were we supposed to remember it? Did we have an alternative? Or did we have to make do with our imaginations? Redfield states that ‘the formal emptiness of the phrase ‘September 11 imposes knowledge and amnesia, knowledge as amnesia…’[10] so we ‘know’ (or can imagine) what happened through the role that imagery played in the constitution of a 9/11 reality. But, taking Baudrillard’s view, the images can be considered more real than the event itself, and therefore we are left with gap in our past reality. In times of virtual trauma, as in the case of 9/11, we often find that the trigger events for amnesia are ‘wounds beyond words’[11], yet they are the events which most need to be explained. In the absence of ‘memories’, it is imagination that seeks to explain the unexplainable.
It’s not just 9/11. Over the past two decades, an increasing number of terrorist attacks have occurred. 7/7, The Paris attacks, The Manchester bombings, and The London Bridge attacks are all events characterized by a horrific sequence of events and graphic aftermaths. Footage of the three most recent were also widely shared on social media. Yet, despite the graphic detail in which individuals recall the attacks and the intense synaesthesia which often characterize witness accounts of such attacks, the events themselves have become remembered in society through a simple reference to a date or a place. The widespread naming of these rupturing events in solely temporal and spatial terms inscribes a sense of emptiness or a gap in memory which is filled with our imagination despite the fact that the events themselves were played out in real time, shared, retweeted and circulated via social media.
By Redfield’s argument then, we are not only imagining wht has happened to fill the gap caused by ‘amnesia’ but also remembering what is to come. As he states of 9/11 ‘this futural inflection of trauma may also be read in the date name- the month-day minus the year.[12]’ This futural inflection of the date ‘insists on its recurrence’[13] and therefore the only way that September 11th can truly be remembered rather than imagined is through the possibility of it happening again in the future. In doing so, it (re)configures our understanding of history as a linear progression and as a product of Western chronological time to one which is constantly haunted by the past, or one where past, present and future collide through the visual. It also has implications for security. How can the way that we imagine the past help to shape a secure future and prevent subsequent terror attacks?
Through the technology behind the recording of images that allow us to imagine the past, we can also remember the future- and by doing this, we can predict patterns of behaviour that might undermine our security. Sylviane Agacinski suggests that we are in the midst of a technological paradox where there is an urge to record but perhaps not to remember once those records are stored.[14]’ It’s this recording rather than remembering of data that allows us to form future projections based on past events. In contrast to the hypervisibility of the past, the future is invisible- but it is there to be decoded by technology. This is particularly apparent in the post 9/11 context at the border where American companies such as Raytheon, BAE and IBM provide border security technology that seeks to ‘join the dots that should have been connected before 9/11’[15] . Through the use of eBorder programmes such as the one developed by Raytheon and IBM’s ‘Project Semaphore’ individuals become ‘data derivatives’[16]– their right to cross borders based on the potentialities that arise from their past behaviour and calculated by complex algorithms ‘remembered’ by computers. For example, if an individual presents themselves with a ‘past travel to Pakistan and duration of stay over three months, in association with flight paid by third party, then risk flag.[17]’, or detain if paid ticket in cash’[18]. This type of security intervention is ‘based precisely on an absence, on what is not known’[19], on the invisible not the visible. This leaves us to not to speculate what these individuals might do but to ‘join the dots’ to remember what they are capable of. As Amoore explains ‘the data derivative is not centered on who we are, nor even on what our data says about us, but on what can be…inferred about who we might be- on our very proclivities and potentialities’[20]. More recently, data mining of social media platforms have identified patterns of language used by personnel belonging to terrorist groups and used these to determine the likelihood of them presenting a threat to our security [21]. Thermal imaging equipment at airports has tried to make visible the data that is coded by our past behaviours, rendering the ‘data derivative’ visible and turning memory into image.
We remember then not to try to make sense of past events- for in times of catastrophic trauma we can only imagine these. Instead, we record in order to remember our futures. This was epitomized by the speech made by the Commission charged with deciphering the events of 9/11 in which it was stated that ‘a redirection to preparedness is perhaps the best way to honor the memories of those we lost that day.[22]’ Through this use of technology which allows ‘real time’ decisions based on algorithms, memories are reco(r)ded- that is to say that the recording of them as a past event equals a simultaneous recoding as future possibility.
The virtual trauma of 9/11 and subsequent terror events and our eagerness to not let it be repeated, has enabled an inversion of remembering and imagining. As an event that was both horrifically present and strangely unreal, it became remembered through our imagination- through its hyperreality made possible via the (re)presentations of the iconic falling towers by means of the internet, television and media. In contrast, the future, and how secure this is, is taking shape based on memory- or at least based on the reco(r)ded events that technology enables. As our world becomes increasingly virtualized, we all become data derivatives, our futures shaped not by what we’ve done nor who we are but on what we could be.
[1] Levi Strauss, D. 2003. Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics. New York: Aperture. p184.
[2] Redfield, M. 2008. Virtual Trauma: The Idiom of 9/11. Diacritics. Vol. 37 (1). p68.
[3] Der Derian, J. 2011. 9/11 +10 Remembering and Forgetting. Available from http://essays.ssrc.org/10yearsafter911/91110-remembering-and-forgetting/ [accessed 20th Jan 2015]
[4] Zevin, J. 2011. Memories Slipping Away: The Tenth Anniversary of 9/11. The Social Studies. Vol. 102 (4) Special Issue: The Challenges of Teaching 9/11: Now and in the Future. P143.
[5].Redfield, M. op. cit. p56.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Foucault, M. cited Zevin, J. op. cit. p141.
[8] Zizek, S. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. The South Atlantic Quarterly. Vol. 101 (2). p386.
[9] Baudrillard, J. and Valentin, M. 2002. L’Esprit du Terrorisme. The South Atlantic Quarterly. Vol. 101(2). p413.
[10] Redfield, M. op. cit. p59.
[11] Redfield cited Miller, K. A. 2014. Transatlantic Literature and Culture after 9/11. Palgrave Macmillan. p4.
[12] Redfield, M. op. cit. p60.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Cited Zevin, J. 2011. Memories Slipping Away: The Tenth Anniversary of 9/11. The Social Studies. Vol. 102 (4) Special Issue: The Challenges of Teaching 9/11: Now and in the Future. Pp. 141-146.
[15] Department of Homeland Security, 2006.
[16] Amoore, L. 2011. Data Derivatives: On the Emergence of a Security Risk Calculus for Our Times. Theory, Culture, Society. Vol. 28(24). Pp. 24-43.
[17] Amoore, op. cit. p27.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Amoore, L. op. cit. p28.
[21] Singer and Golan. 2019. Identification of Subgroups of Terror Attacks with Shared Characteristics for the Purpose of Preventing Mass-Casualty Attacks: A Data-Mining Approach. Crime Sci. Vol. 8(4). Available from: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-019-0109-9
[22] Der Derian, J. 2011. 9/11 +10 Remembering and Forgetting. Available from http://essays.ssrc.org/10yearsafter911/91110-remembering-and-forgetting/
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