Death and security: Memory and mortality at the bombsite 9781526108128

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: death and security – the only two certainties
The problem of dying while resilient
Containing the spectacle: disaster management
Reflecting absence? Disaster recovery and the World Trade Center
Reclaiming place and self-harming architecture: Norwegian experiences of death and security
Mutating disaster space: itinerant death at the Ground Zero Mosque and Bali bombsite
Bombs without bombsites: memory and security without visibility
Conclusion: pathologising security through Lacanian desire
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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DEATH AND SECURI T Y

New Approaches to Conflict Analysis Series editors: Peter Lawler and Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester

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Until recently, the study of conflict and conflict resolution remained comparatively immune to broad developments in social and political theory. When the changing nature and locus of large-​scale conflict in the post-​Cold War era is also taken into account, the case for a reconsideration of the fundamentals of conflict analysis and conflict resolution becomes all the more stark. New Approaches to Conflict Analysis promotes the development of new theoretical insights and their application to concrete cases of large-​scale conflict, broadly defined. The series intends not to ignore established approaches to conflict analysis and conflict resolution, but to contribute to the reconstruction of the field through a dialogue between orthodoxy and its contemporary critics. Equally, the series reflects the contemporary porosity of intellectual borderlines rather than simply perpetuating rigid boundaries around the study of conflict and peace. New Approaches to Conflict Analysis seeks to uphold the normative commitment of the field’s founders yet also recognises that the moral impulse to research is properly part of its subject matter. To these ends, the series is comprised of the highest quality work of scholars drawn from throughout the international academic community, and from a wide range of disciplines within the social sciences.

PUBLISHED

Christine Agius Neutrality, sovereignty and identity: the social construction of Swedish neutrality

Richard Jackson Writing the war on terrorism: language, politics and counter-​terrorism

Tim Aistrope Conspiracy theory and American foreign policy: American foreign policy and the politics of legitimacy

Tami Amanda Jacoby and Brent Sasley (eds) Redefining security in the Middle East

Eşref Aksu The United Nations, intra-​state peacekeeping and normative change M. Anne Brown Human rights and the borders of suffering: the promotion of human rights in international politics Anthony Burke and Matt McDonald (eds) Critical security in the Asia-​Pacific Ilan Danjoux Political cartoons and the Israeli–​Palestinian conflict

Matt Killingsworth, Matthew Sussex and Jan Pakulski (eds) Violence and the state Jan Koehler and Christoph Zürcher (eds) Potentials of disorder David Bruce MacDonald Balkan holocausts? Serbian and Croatian victim-​centred propaganda and the war in Yugoslavia Adrian Millar Socio-​ideological fantasy and the Northern Ireland conflict: the other side Jennifer Milliken The social construction of the Korean War

Lorraine Elliott and Graeme Cheeseman (eds) Forces for good: cosmopolitan militaries in the twenty-​first century

Ami Pedahzur The Israeli response to Jewish extremism and violence: defending democracy

Greg Fry and Tarcisius Kabutaulaka (eds) Intervention and state-​building in the Pacific: the legitimacy of ‘cooperative intervention’

Maria Stern Naming insecurity –​constructing identity: ‘Mayan-​women’ in Guatemala on the eve of ‘peace’

Naomi Head Justifying violence: communicative ethics and the use of force in Kosovo

Virginia Tilley The one state solution: a breakthrough for peace in the Israeli–​Palestinian deadlock

Death and security Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Memory and mortality at the bombsite

CHARLOTTE HEATH-​K ELLY

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Charlotte Heath-​Kelly 2017 The right of Charlotte Heath-​Kelly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 1 7849 9313 9 hardback First published 2017

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

CONTENTS

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List of figures—vi Acknowledgements—viii Introduction: death and security –​the only two certainties—1 1

The problem of dying while resilient

22

2

Containing the spectacle: disaster management

36

3

Reflecting absence? Disaster recovery and the World Trade Center

57

4

Reclaiming place and self-​harming architecture: Norwegian experiences of death and security

93

5 6

Mutating disaster space: itinerant death at the Ground Zero Mosque and Bali bombsite

122

Bombs without bombsites: memory and security without visibility

153

Conclusion: pathologising security through Lacanian desire—170 Bibliography—183 Index—198

v

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FIGURES 3.1 Coventry War Memorial. Photo by Amanda Slater, reproduced under CC-​BY-​SA 2.0. page 75 3.2 Reflecting Absence 02. Photo by Bosc d’Anjou, reproduced under CC-​BY 2.0. 76 3.3 Reflecting Absence, World Trade Center Memorial Plaza, 29 July 2014. Photo by Charlotte Heath-​Kelly. 85 3.4 The Survivor Tree, World Trade Center Memorial Plaza, 29 July 2014. Photo by Charlotte Heath-​Kelly. 86 3.5 The Slurry Wall, 29 July 2014. Photo by Charlotte Heath-​Kelly. 90 4.1 Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered under the National Socialist Regime, Berlin, 20 August 2013. Photo by Charlotte Heath-​Kelly. 98 4.2 Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered under the National Socialist Regime, Berlin, 20 August 2013. Photo by Charlotte Heath-​Kelly. 99 4.3 The Oslo Government Quarter adorned in protective covering, post-​bombing, 13 August 2013. Photo by Charlotte Heath-​Kelly. 105 4.4 The Oslo Government Quarter adorned in protective covering, post-​bombing, 13 August 2013. Photo by Charlotte Heath-​Kelly. 105 4.5 Early promotional image of the New Utøya project, used with the permission of Erlend Blakstad Haffner of Fantastic Norway. 108 4.6 Early promotional image of the New Utøya project, used with the permission of Erlend Blakstad Haffner of Fantastic Norway. 109 4.7 The Love Trail Fence at Utøya Island, 13 August 2013. Photo by Charlotte Heath-​Kelly. 110 4.8 Høyblokka towering above Y-​Block, 13 August 2013. Photo by Charlotte Heath-​Kelly. 113 4.9 Picasso’s The Fisherman in concrete, Y-​Block, 13 August 2013. Photo by Charlotte Heath-​Kelly. 114 5.1 Park 51, 21 August 2010. Photo by Paul Stein, reproduced under CC-​BY-​SA 2.0. 130 5.2 Interment of unidentified remains at the 9/​11 Museum, 24 May 2014. Photo by John Hill, reproduced with written permission of the photographer. 138

vi

Figures

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5.3 The remains of a crushed fire engine at the 9/​11 Museum, 29 July 2014. Photo by Charlotte Heath-​Kelly. 6.1 7 July Memorial, Hyde Park. Photo by G Travels, reproduced under CC-​BY-​NC 2.0. 6.2 ‘America’s Response: De Oppresso Liber’, 1 August 2014. Photo by Charlotte Heath-​Kelly.

vii

138 155 162

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ACKNOWLEDGEM E N T S Some parts of the Introduction and Chapter 1 have previously appeared in early draft form as ‘The Foundational Masquerade: Security as Sociology of Death’, in Masquerades of War, edited by Christine Sylvester (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), pp. 58–​76. An alternative version of Chapter  4 has appeared as ‘Building a New Utøya:  Re-​ Placing the Oslo Bombsite  –​Counterfactual Resilience at Post-​ Terrorist Sites’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 39/​4 (2016), pp. 308–​25. Finally, the discussion of the Bali Peace Park Association’s activism in part of Chapter  5 has previously appeared as ‘Securing through the Failure to Secure: The Ambiguous Resilience of the Bombsite’, Security Dialogue 46/​1 (2015), pp. 69–​85. The author is grateful for permission to reproduce sections of text in this monograph. The author is also very grateful to the British Academy who provided the funds for the project fieldwork: award number SG121055. The research would not have been possible without this financial support. Also, I acknowledge the invaluable support of the University of Warwick who provided a fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study, 2013–​15, to enable the development of this project. Finally, the Leverhulme Trust contributed to my ability to finish this book, by awarding me an Early Career Fellowship that minimised my non-​research duties: ECF-​2015-​283. Thank you to all. Finally, I would also like to acknowledge the steadfast dedication shown by Bea Szabo and, of course, my two cats (Benny and Lily), during the completion of this book. They have shown incredible patience and kindness. Thank you for letting me moan about insurmountable chapters, massive lapses in coherence and the general tedium of authorship that drags on, and on, and on. Thank you for making me happy again. Unfortunately, I  have promised to write another book, so we will go through this all again soon!

viii

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Introduction: death and security – the only two certainties

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. (Benjamin Franklin quoted in Meister 1952: 163)

T

Life and death in security

reworks the proverb of Benjamin Franklin, quoted above, so that it reads, ‘in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and security’. Mortality is, of course, the epitome of inevitability. We are all aware of our individual impermanence. But what are the political consequences of this certainty? This book argues that death is ontologically coupled with state security practice. Security responds to, and functions to displace, the anxiety of mortality –​ which would otherwise disrupt the performance of sovereignty. Why is death a problem for political authority? Sovereignty only exists if it is recognised by the population made subject (Edkins and Pin-​Fat 1999) –​consider, as counterpoint, the sudden collapse of sovereignty when recognition is removed during revolutions. To maintain the recognition, and thus constitution, of sovereignty, the state performs itself as omnipotent within a given territory. It performs itself as a God. But death is beyond control and exposes an aporia within the performance of sovereign authority. We can see this disruption in the hysterical traumatic response to terrorist attacks. Death is a force beyond mastery. It is an excess, a problem, that disrupts the carefully managed illusion of sovereignty and power. Death disrupts the performance and recognition of sovereignty. To maintain the performance of sovereignty, then, states ritualistically efface mortality through security practices. Security protects sovereignty by creating objects of threat, called ‘risks’ or ‘enemies’, and then acting to overcome these totems to simulate collective permanence through the nation. These threat-​objects are stage props in a performance that functions to alleviate a much broader death anxiety: that of inevitable mortality. his book

1

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Death and security In the reading used in this book, mortality is a generalised condition to which the state responds. The book does not directly equate mortality or death with ‘killing’, but rather the knowledge of inevitable impermanence. When I argue that death and security are ontologically coupled, I mean that secular politics struggles to efface the challenge of foreknown death when compared to its religious predecessors. It lacks the means to promise a heaven and to alleviate our anxieties about dying. This makes secular sovereignty vulnerable to exposure and disruption. The salience of mortality can impinge upon the subject, separating them from their usual immersion in hegemonic discourse and causing the recognition of omnipotent sovereignty to cease. Security is one way of many by which the challenge of death anxiety is mediated, as I will explain. Why explore the connection between death and security? There is a critical purchase to analysing security in this way. If we begin with mortality as foundational anxiety, we can displace the state from its position as supposedly omnipotent actor. By looking at security practices as the desperate response to a place beyond the state’s control (mortality and its inevitability), we figure the state as a frightened child rather than a coherent powerful actor. If security is the flight from mortality and a responsive barricading of sovereignty, then this performance is responsive to something more powerful than the state, something that cannot be properly controlled but only encircled and effaced: death. By exploring how this works in theory and practice, we can disarm the state of its sovereign armoury as omnipotent actor. This is an important responsibility for critical thought, given that resistance and protest is becoming increasingly paralysed by the extension of bureaucratic control. Edward Snowden’s revelations have clarified the extension of intelligence gathering beyond anything previously seen in history and the effect of this panopticon is to induce a feeling of hopelessness in those who desire political change. How can one effect political change when all moves are anticipated in advance? Simply outlining the biopolitical manoeuvrings of the state is not enough. Knowing how repression works through assemblages is not enough. Instead, critical philosophy after Snowden requires, I will argue, a different approach. By exploring and explaining the apparatuses that protect hegemony in the present day, we can inadvertently induce further hopelessness with regard to the sheer size of the obstacle. Instead, we should take a step in the direction of exposing the masquerade of security. Security and sovereignty are not omniscient or omnipotent; they merely pretend to be. They actually fail hard, fail often and –​as this book will argue –​rest upon a foundation of failure. They can never achieve total control, only simulate it. So let us look at failure and the impossibility of sovereignty rather than contributing to the theorisation of omniscience and omnipotence. Secular sovereignty makes impossible claims to authority. It appropriates omnipotence from previous religious articulations of divine sovereignty, but cannot remedy the death anxiety implicit within human existence (Agamben 2

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Introduction 1991; Bauman 1992; Becker 1973; Heidegger 1962: 279–​311, 1971; Oberst 2009). The emergence of ‘security’ during the slow secularisation of rule in Europe can be understood as the replacement of one technology of immortality (the promise of divine salvation) with another (collective perpetuity through the nation).1 Security protects the recognition of the sovereign as authoritative by banishing mortality from the polity and ensuring the immortality of the nation. Security, I will argue, is the attempt to pretend that secular, popular sovereignty is coherent and complete, in the face of a mortality that can no longer be pacified through appeals to God. Interestingly, International Relations (IR) and security studies are largely silent with regard to mortality and death anxiety. This silence is striking, given the violent and morbid topics studied within the discipline of IR: war, terrorism and genocide, to name a few. Of course, it is true that contemporary IR literatures of biopolitics and thanatopolitics focus on death in their own way, as ‘killing’. Here death is deployed to distinguish qualified life from unqualified life. But interpreting death as ‘killing’ puts mortality in the control of the state. It doesn’t get to the heart of the issue of death and sovereignty. The state ‘kills’; the state is the actor that deploys life and death. The state is thus always in control in these literatures. This book reverses the direction of analysis to analyse security as a response to the condition of mortality. It is important to do this to contextualise the relationship between state and security, to challenge the claim to omnipotence and omniscience and to problematise the assumption that security is a naturalised function of the state. The exclusion of mortality, as inevitable impermanence, from IR is also surprising because much has been written in philosophy concerning the political and social significance of death. Mortality, as confirmed by thinkers including Agamben, Heidegger, Schopenhauer, Sloterdijk, Bauman, Derrida and Hegel, is central to, and extremely problematic for, the rationalist paradigm. It sits beyond the limits of thought. It is disruptive to the imagination of meaning and politics as permanent, consistent and objective. As such, these philosophers argue that mortality drives the development of cultural and political techniques that efface the inevitability of death by performing stability and permanent meaning. I develop this philosophical trajectory here by reading security practice as sociology of death. Security, and the state that deploys it, are responsive to the aporia of mortality. The state does not just deploy death, as IR and security studies suggest; rather it is desperately trying to outpace the significance of mortality. Death undermines the rationalist foundation of secular politics. This is not simply a metaphysical question for philosophers to reflect upon. In practical terms we see the disruption caused to politics during, for example, the spectacle of terrorist attacks. The fraud of sovereignty is exposed when horror comes into our supposedly safe cities and towns. Traumatic events show the secular sovereign to be a discount, limited God who cannot control that which really matters. 3

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Death and security The modern sovereign’s authority is conjured through the protection of the popular body (rather than the royal body) (Santner 2011). Explosions and public massacres suddenly remind us that death is beyond control. Sovereignty, and the subjectivity constituted in relation to it, are shaken. The excess temporarily takes hold –​and requires retrospective security practices (such as post-​terrorist reconstruction and memorialisation) to re-​narrate and secure the trauma, reasserting the fiction of perpetuity, continuity and authoritative control. This is not meant to be an ahistorical claim; rather I argue that the relationship between security and mortality is one of modernity and postmodernity. Their coupling speaks to the gradual removal of divine foundations for political ordering associated with the ‘Death of God’. By replacing God with science and nation, and reconstituting political authority around democratic participation rather than divinely ordained kingship, politics created the need for a new method with which to appease death. Sovereignty was no longer anchored in God through its appropriation of Christian mythology (Agamben 2011; Debrix 2015; Kantorowicz 1957; Santner 2011); rather the population became the ‘flesh’ from which sovereign authority is derived. In democracy, the demos are framed as the source of political authority. But what effect did the Death of God have upon the salience of mortality? What of the promise of heavenly immortality that had, until then, assuaged the fears of the populace? As I will argue in this chapter, the Death of God unleashed mortality as a force capable of disrupting sovereignty. In response, the state attempted to assuage this newly salient death anxiety through the articulation of eternal national community –​embedding individual lives in the perpetual national ‘body’. But this is a vulnerable equation of the individual with the social body, given the concurrent processes of individuation at work during mortality. The individual is not subsumed within the frame of the national community, so the individual is still vulnerable to the distress of mortality –​a distress that could compromise their recognition of the sovereign as omniscient. And, as this book will argue, practices of retrospective security are required to mitigate the spectre of death, in order to reconstitute the subject’s recognition of the sovereign as sovereign. Neither do I wish to make a universal geographical claim of this ontological coupling. It is peculiar to the development of Judaeo-​Christian societies and the emergence of the modern secular capitalist state. My field research in Bali after the 2002 bombing suggests that this particular Buddhist community understands the role of commemoration, and its entanglement within discourses of mortality and security, very differently. I am unable to comment on other societies outside the bounds of my fieldwork, which took place in the United States, Europe and Indonesia, so this book should be understood accordingly. Within these necessary restrictions, I will argue that security is a responsive performance. It functions to elide the knowledge of human mortality –​that place and time beyond the limits of rational comprehension –​by compartmentalising 4

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Introduction and objectifying it into threat-​ objects, and then vanquishing it through security action (military action, scenario planning, risk governance). The secular state is the inheritor of the Judaeo-​Christian architecture and mythology (Agamben 2011; Foucault 1983; Kantorowicz 1957; Santner 2011), but one that makes do with limited tools. It can’t promise individual immortality so it performs national perpetuity. Security functions to simulate an earthly heaven, articulating the permanence of collective life and concealing the inevitability of our impermanence. Whereas religion and religiously derived sovereignty conquered mortality through the allusions to heavenly salvation, modernity and postmodernity rework this technique as the promise of the population’s security. But this always inevitably fails to completely silence death. And we should pay attention to these moments of failure because they are moments where we can dispel the illusion that states are omnipotent. Instead, their performance of sovereignty is a simulation riddled with holes. Chapter structure Given that this book explores a new conception of security, as ontological counterpart to mortality, this introductory chapter focuses only on setting up the book’s theoretical model. It begins by highlighting the reduction of mortality to ‘killing’ in IR literatures. If death is understood solely as killing disqualified life within the biopolitical management of population, then we are left with an impression of the state as a totalising and omnipotent actor. We face a God. However, if we utilise the philosophical insights of scholars who analyse death as the anxiety-​provoking condition of mortality, we can obtain a very different starting point for thinking about sovereignty. If mortality is taken seriously as the inevitable barrier to reason and sovereign control, we no longer face a God when we resist the state. Instead, we are facing a force that is desperately trying to conceal its own impotence through the performance of security. By focusing on the difference between death as ‘killing’ and death as the ‘condition of mortality’, we can highlight how biopolitical research in IR sometimes accidentally reifies the performance of sovereignty. This introductory chapter turns to the philosophical literatures on mortality to construct a new theory of security, situating them in a socio-​historical analysis of death practices. These sociological treatments highlight how death only took on its contemporary problematic form in the era of secularism and rationalism. Death was not a problem when sovereignty rested upon divine foundations prior to modernity:  it was tame, accepted as a natural feature of life (Aries 1974, 1983). But the advent of modernity created the problem of mortality through its secularisation of churchly authority and constitution of individualised subjectivity. Without God, there was no promise of eternal salvation to mitigate the knowledge of mortality. Death became terrifying. 5

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Death and security In response, institutions promise collective security to assuage some of this anxiety –​but individuals, once constituted by politics, can never be totally subsumed within the identity of the collective. They are still vulnerable to mortality even if the nation is supposedly permanent. As such, the relationship of sovereign and subject is vulnerable to the incursion of death anxiety. Security is an imperfect reimagination of earlier political theology. To explain this, early modernity slowly appropriated the Church’s self-​ authorising discourse of Christ’s ‘two bodies’ (one body of Christ is consumed during Mass, and the other is present within Church apparatus) into one of kingly sovereignty. This founded a bureaucratic authority for the state based upon the transformed mythology of Christ’s duality as secular sovereign duality (the king has two bodies: one mortal, the other the body politic) (Kantorowicz 1957; Santner 2011). But the secularisation of sovereignty cast aside the promise of eternal salvation. Individual subjects were constituted as ‘recognisers of ’ political sovereignty, and thus the source of political authority for the modern state (its ‘flesh’, to borrow from Santner 2011), but individuals are also cognisant of their own deaths. Without the promise of heaven, mortality remained prone to disturb and terrify these subjects and thus disrupt their recognition (and thus constitution) of sovereignty as omniscient authority. The potential for disruption lurks in this performance of politics. As such, we see the responsive creation of ‘security’ as a totemic performance of collective immortality –​to defeat death anxiety. Security steps in to bridge the mortality gap left by the Death of God in the balancing of authority, recognition and the exclusion of mortality. After I explore this theoretical model, I introduce (in Chapter 1) the radical rethinking of security and mortality that has occurred during the era of resilience. Building upon the analysis already undertaken in the Introduction, I turn to address the contemporary shift in the ways in which mortality is effaced. Resilience in contemporary security policy undertakes a cynical move whereby death is supposedly admitted into the polity. The polity appears to make peace with death. Resilience directly addresses the inevitability of ‘death’ by refiguring security around unpreventable events and the resulting socio-​infrastructural recovery. It performs life. But this performance does not mean that we now witness ‘honest dealings’ with mortality. Not at all. Rather resilience continues the work of the previous era of security, effacing the salience of mortality to conceal the aporia within sovereignty. It does this, paradoxically, by highlighting the visibility of unpreventable events so that inevitable recovery can be performed. Security is reconceptualised in the resilience era to signify adaptive vitality in the face of danger, rather than protection from danger. In this recalibration, life is systemically operationalised to defeat death. Chapters 2 to 6 then address the practices of emergency response, memorialisation and reconstruction performed at bombsites as methods of death effacement. These, I will argue, are all practices of retrospective security. Terrorist 6

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Introduction attacks are so feared by security actors (despite their low-​frequency occurrence) because they expose the aporia at the heart of sovereignty: they prove that the sovereign’s claims to omnipotence and authority are merely simulated, and that death escapes the grasp of sovereign control. They show that the contemporary sovereign is a discount God. Retrospective security measures are deployed to conceal this incursion of mortality and its disruptive effects: for example, emergency management performs the end of the ‘emerging emergency’ through the application of pre-​determined steps that stop the emergence of uncontrolled force. Measures are deployed to contain the excess and force it back underneath the architecture of society. But the evidence of the encounter with mortality lives on at the bombsite. Destroyed space is extremely problematic for politics for this reason. The physical evidence of death, as it broke through the illusion of sovereign mastery, provokes extensive efforts to conceal mortality through architectural reconstruction. In Chapters 2 to 6, I explore emergency response, architecture and memorialisation upon post-​terrorist space as retrospective security practices –​they efface the remnants of the death that has already happened, closing the visibility of the aporia within sovereignty. This retrospective orientation proves that security is ontologically connected to mortality and its effacement, because a retrospective security practice cannot be assumed to prevent future threat. Security is thus oriented towards the mitigation of mortality. The case studies I utilise to argue that security is performed retrospectively are drawn from terrorist attacks against ‘Western’ sites between 2001 and 2011. I have specifically chosen major attacks on ‘Western’ sites because they sit within the Judaeo-​Christian heritage of secular politics, where death became a problem upon the transformation of religious authority into politics. These spaces were incorporated within the performance of secular sovereignty before they were attacked (indeed, this is probably why they were attacked), and thus the efforts to reconstruct them speak to the relationship between secular sovereignty and the effacement of mortality. To produce the material for this analysis, I have travelled to sites of reconstruction and memorialisation at the World Trade Center in Manhattan, the London bombings, the Bali bombing and the multiple sites associated with Anders Breivik’s attacks in Norway of 2011. I studied the architectural renderings made upon such sites to reclaim ‘security’ (as the absence of mortality from public life) and interviewed the multiple stakeholders involved in designing memorials and museums, curating post-​terrorist space, judging memorial design competitions and, when possible, activists who contest the memorial representations made upon such sites –​including relatives of the deceased. The reader will note that the Balinese case study does not, at first glance, fit within my justification of case study selection. Indonesia is not usually 7

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Death and security considered a ‘Western’ state. However, the stories of reconstruction and memorialisation after the Bali bombing speak, in very interesting ways, to the ‘Western’ (re-​)colonisation of the island region through practices of tourism by Australians, in particular. The bombings targeted a Westernised club and bar on the tourist strip that forbid entry to local Balinese/​Indonesian patrons. This particular tourist strip (Jalan Legian) is also firmly interwoven into performances of Australian Westernised identity and sovereignty within the East Asian region. Tourism to Bali is a ritualised performance of Australian ‘place’ within the region, undertaken by young travellers and families. Furthermore, Australian activist groups and politicians have dominated the campaign to buy the bombsite so that a ‘peace park’ might be constructed to honour the memory of the dead, rather than a commercial construction. The Balinese discourse on death is, as one might expect, associated with Hinduism and reincarnation –​and locals often expressed bewilderment and frustration with commandeering Australian efforts to obtain the site for a pointless endeavour. Given these considerations, my Balinese case study does not strictly fit the criteria of an attack upon the ‘West’ but it is very useful for highlighting the ways in which secular cultures of death operate, juxtaposed against religious alternatives. The physical reminder of mortality upon destroyed space is only problematic for ‘Westernised’ performances of sovereignty and security (given the removal of divine mitigations of death through salvation). The Balinese were not worried about creating a marker to the dead because their everyday religious practice involves placing floral offerings on the street to appease gods and demons. The dead have already taken their place within the reincarnation system. As such, the main concern articulated to me by Balinese people was the need not for a memorial, but for the restoration of the tourist income upon which they depend and, occasionally, articulations of the need for a more balanced ‘cultural tourism’ rather than the excesses of the party tourism currently associated with the Kuta region. The unmarked memory of public death is not as problematic for the Balinese as for the Australians. The need for permanent post-​terrorist commemorative markers seems to be a secular endeavour. Without God, states require performances of ‘retrospective security’ (where deathly events are mitigated through discourse and architecture) to conceal the aporia at the heart of their supposed omnipotence. They can’t rely on divinity to efface mortality, so the performance of security is used (anticipatorily) to create objects of death that can be ritually destroyed, and retrospectively to conceal the salience of mortality within memorial forms. This introductory chapter now turns to explore the ways in which we might explore the ontological relationship between death and security, and the critical purchase we should attain by doing so. 8

Introduction

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Beyond biopolitics Death is simultaneously silent and very loud in contemporary political discourse. Security discourse screams about potential threats lurking around every corner, but academic discourse neglects mortality. Life is everywhere in theorisation of security, but death is nowhere. We live in a political era where life is remorselessly deployed, measured and controlled as the subject of governance. As Foucault has shown us, the biopolitical state rules through the technologies of medicine, statistics, incarceration and militarisation associated with making life live. Life is totalised; life is made functional; and most recently, life is rendered by resilience discourse as the self-​ordering complexity present within systems, structures and populations. Resilience is the most contemporary step taken within the extension of biopolitical governance. Critical debates rage around how to frame the particular distinguishing motif of resilience (Aradau 2014; Chandler 2014; Dillon 2007; Dillon and Reid 2009; Evans and Reid 2013; Joseph 2013; Lentzos and Rose 2009; Walker and Cooper 2011), but all agree that the operationalisation of emergent and self-​ordering life against the possibility of disruption and emergency is central to understanding the contemporary security climate. One would think death had been effectively silenced, given the discursive prominence of ‘making life live’ in policy and academic literatures. There is no theory of mortality in IR, contra multiple theorisations of life2 –​albeit necropolitical and thanatopolitical approaches do operationalise a specific (and limited) understanding of death. Necropolitics and thanatopolitics interpret death as ‘killing’, rather than mortality. Death is conceptualised as a method of killing deployed within the project of making life live. But what about the great abyss of mortality? Carol Cohn first noted the strange absence of death from IR when confronting the sanitised abstraction of nuclear discourse (1987), and since then, very few works have interrogated the role of death within politics.3 Yet death is politically functional. We are governed through the rhetorical invocation of the spectacular catastrophic event of death: the terrorist attack, the enemy invasion and the pandemic. Politicians and security practitioners talk about death all the time, yet they sublimate it within the promise of security. Death is the terrible spectacle that is fleetingly introduced in order to underwrite the protective mandate of the state. Death is both silent within security, and loud. As during the religious era, practices of dying are bound to salvation: security, as provided by the benevolent sovereign, is the answer to death. Death and security are an ontological couplet. Imaginaries of spectacular, sudden violence are the frame of reference against which security claims are made. But in the contemporary era, perhaps more than any other, the deathly content of such material sits awkwardly against the resolute deployment of vital metaphors within security. How do you situate massacre and horror within a clean, 9

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Death and security functional discourse about the self-​ordering, irrepressible vitality of critical systems and populations? How are deathly events deployed alongside resilient security? Death sits very awkwardly alongside the functionalisation of life. Critical security studies have not dealt with the role of mortality. But let it be clear that I am in agreement with the multitude of critical security theories which argue that dangers are not objective features of life, but rather constituted threats that serve the project of statecraft. For example, David Campbell’s seminal work of critical security studies, Writing Security (1992), deftly explores the practice of US foreign policy to show that the function of security involves the constitution and maintenance of an external Other against which state identity can be propagated. Similarly, biopolitical readings of security also argue that the claims of security policy should not be taken at face value. Building upon Foucault’s delineation of historical shifts in the methods of political rule, biopolitical studies of security explore the ways in which population is managed as a living, calculable object (Dillon and Lobo-​Guerrero 2008). Circulations that increase the productivity of species life are maximised, while those that threaten this capacity are monitored and suppressed. It must be expressly stated that I agree with these theses and do not intend to argue against them. Rather I will argue that the situation for these variegated functions of security is broader in nature. Security indeed functions through the facilitation of capitalist circulations and to consolidate national identity against the threatening Other, but both practices are components within a broader response to mortality. To situate biopolitical and social constructivist readings of security within a broader response to mortality, we must broaden the scope of our questions. Quite simply, let us begin by asking: why death? Why are death and survival the discursive tableau against which security is articulated and performed? Why are the management of circulation and the performance of state identity undertaken against the spectre of deathly potentials like terrorism, pandemics and war? Asking this question allows us to perceive, and question, the alignment of traditional and critical security theories around the framing association between insecurity and death. Traditional and critical security theories are actually in tacit agreement with each other, despite their many disputes. Whether security is something that can be objectively attained à la traditional studies or is discursively performed to serve the ends of biopolitics or identity, it is framed against deathly potentials. And no one questions this. What work is this morbid association doing? This frame is reconstituted everywhere in security theory and state theory. Social contract theories, for example, base their arguments about the foundation of the liberal state upon an illusory moment whereby people accepted subjecthood by exchanging their natural capacities (to kill and steal) for the right to protection. They find the foundation of sovereignty in the organised protection of life –​in the provision of 10

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Introduction security against chaos and death (Hobbes 1991; Locke 1821). Traditional security studies also accept the association between insecurity and death, between security and the prevention of death. The entire discipline of strategic studies is organised around the study of forces, enemies and scenarios that are constituted as threats to security given their deathly potential. On the other side of the field, critical security theories advocate different readings of how security functions (through the function of identity constitution against the Other (Campbell 1992), or through the discursive rendering of an emergency, accepted by an audience, that legitimates exceptional measures (Buzan et  al. 1998)), but are similarly unquestioning of why security should take life and death as its rhetorical medium. More recently, the emerging field of ontological security studies appeared to have the potential to intercede on this question. Ontological security studies, as the name would suggest, understands security as an ontological practice. However, rather than question security’s ontological performance against death, the field has largely explored questions of identity consolidation in international practice (Kinnvall 2004, 2006; Mitzen 2006; Steele 2008) –​ deepening the social constructivist position. The ontological foundation of security itself still goes unquestioned. Why is insecurity linked to the frame of death? Because security is a responsive performance that acts upon the disruption posed by mortality to modern, rationalist forms. If we open this question of discursive association, we open the potential to see security differently. In the rest of this chapter, I will explore how the silence in security theory about the association between insecurity and death extends to a suspicious silence on mortality more generally. Subsequently I will build the argument that death and security form an ontological couplet –​a discursive bind forged in the birth of rationalism, and the death of God. It is no coincidence that the demise of divinely ordained kingship and the emergence of rationalism and individualism occurred simultaneously with the birth of security. The work of religion was involved in the consolidation of authority, meaning and futurity against the knowledge of mortality. But the problem of mortality once alleviated by the promise of immortal salvation has become antagonistic in its removal, prompting the creation of a secular, earthly salvation: security. At present, there is not an easily identifiable literature with which to address these concerns. While biopolitical analysis dominates the IR literature through its exploration of questions pertaining to species-​life, there is no equivalent for death. The question of mortality is ignored by International Relations, to a large extent. The discipline that lays claim to the conceptual territories of war and security, to distinguish its remit from that of political theory, does not explore mortality despite its ‘academic ownership’ of violent terrain. Instead, the experience and salience of death is made silent while the business of international politics is described through abstracting discourses 11

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Death and security of ‘collateral damage’, bomb ‘footprints’, ‘coercion’ and ‘shock and awe’. This studied avoidance of death might come as a surprise, given the fundamental occupation of security practice and study with issues related to killing and survival. However, it is not uncommon. Mortality is purposely effaced across many spectrums of life, especially within those practices established to manage bodies that have ceased, or are ceasing, to live. Death industries, for example, function to efface the spectre of mortality. In her seminal text on the sociology of death, Jessica Mitford has excoriated the American funeral industry through an exploration of the multiple ways in which the death industries have externalised the end of life, removing it from view, while making pretence of life’s altered continuation (through processes, names and sites that give the appearance of continuation in another form) (Mitford 1963). Funeral industries act upon death to mitigate mortality –​effacing the inevitable while, paradoxically, taking death as the referent object of practice. Similarly, I will argue here that security practices and literatures function to efface mortality by performing a prospect of ontological immortality juxtaposed against objects of insecurity. In reading security as sociology of death, I will explore the practices performed to alleviate the ontological disruption of death, destruction and mortality. Like the funeral director performing rituals upon the deceased body, security mediates the incursion of death. It performs the masquerade that death doesn’t destabilise our rational systems, upset the continuation of the capitalist economy or disrupt the imagination of perpetual communities. Much of the existing IR-​related literature that touches upon death is interested in the biopolitical significance of killing, rather than the ontological coupling of mortality and security. Biopolitics has a deathly undercurrent  –​one understood by Giorgio Agamben as the state of exception and Achille Mbembe as necropolitics. Both theses explore the creation of death-​worlds by biopolitical structures and the killing of life deemed unqualified. Killing is undertaken by the state within the broader remit of making life live, as so succinctly expressed by Michael Dillon and Julien Reid (Dillon and Reid 2009). The state kills to secure and consolidate its project of life. This literature replicates the discursive association between security and life, insecurity and death –​even if killing is the means by which security is attained. The reason I am not using a necropolitical or biopolitical inspired approach to interrogate death and security is that both put the state first. Their argument is that the state utilises killing and death to assert itself and to consolidate its vital management of population through disposing of unqualified life. As a result, the state appears to be in control of its relationship with mortality. Yet philosophical treatments of mortality accord far more significance to mortality. Mortality, for Bauman, Heidegger and Agamben (in his early work), represents the void that stimulates the constitution of language and politics. Knowledge of mortality, 12

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Introduction specific to humans, constitutes knowledge of a domain beyond the control of the state or society. Mortality comes first. In the post-​Snowden era, it is important for critique to avoid consolidating the image of the state as omnipotent and contributing to the illusion of power. To work towards any potential for change, we must first disarm the state of its simulation of omnipotent sovereignty. The compelling reading of sovereignty made within the psychoanalytic trajectory enables us to do this by way of incorporating mortality into an understanding of politics. Psychoanalytic readings of sovereignty draw from Lacan’s assertion that master signifiers (such as sovereignty, freedom or God) cannot be defined without tautology or circularity (Derrida 1990; Edkins and Pin-​Fat 1999; Žižek 1989). Instead, they function to underpin the symbolic ordering of signifier and signified while they themselves remain unfixed. They hold the realm of representation together. When this psychoanalytic frame is used to understand sovereignty (Edkins and Pin-​Fat 1999; Heath-​Kelly 2014), we find that the mystical power to command is actually co-​ constituted through upwards and downwards glances between sovereignty and subjectivity: the sovereign is made ruler through the subjection of subjects, and the subject exists because there is something to subject her. Authority and politics, then, are not stable or quantifiable; instead, they are products of subjection and recognition. When recognition of authority fails, during a political revolution, so does sovereignty. It ceases to be. How does this necessitate the inclusion of mortality into the theorisation of sovereignty and security? Because mortality threatens the state’s claim to authority and omnipotence. Subjects are conscious of their mortality –​and thus conscious of the limit of the state’s power. We know we are going to die and that it will be the end. This threatens the recognition accorded to the sovereign as sovereign and omnipotent. The performance of sovereignty must respond to mortality to maintain the constitution of authority. This is the function of security: the objectification and mitigation of death. To be sovereign, the state must banish death. I will first outline the dimensions of three popular theories that supposedly deal with death in IR, before offering a different perspective: one that begins with mortality as an ontological problem created by the birth of rationalism, and to which the modern state attempts to respond. The problem with existing theories is that they begin with the state as actor, rather than the state as responsive. For those drawing from Agamben’s influential Homo Sacer thesis, politics consists of the perpetual performance of distinction from bare life. This performance of distinction often takes the form of negation through the infliction of death (Norris 2005). Death, here, should be understood as ‘killing’ rather than mortality. The reception of Agamben’s thought in critical security studies has explored the production of bare life within the international domain as the regrounding of law through its constitutive outside. Agamben himself has argued that the most perfect example of the rendering of homo sacer occurs 13

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Death and security during the War on Terror, at Guantanamo Bay (2005: 3–​4; see also Butler 2004). As a concept, bare life is very useful for explaining the deployment of exceptional violence upon external others because it produces ‘qualified’ life within the polity through the negation of ‘unqualified’ life. The state kills and creates bare life to produce qualified life inside the polity. But, unlike in his early work, this reading places death firmly in the hands of the state –​rather than the state in the hands of death. The state is an actor of sovereign proportion, presented as omnipotent rather than responsive. Other recent texts in IR suggest a surge of interest in deathly matters, and a similar theoretical perspective, including Finn Stepputat’s anthropological edited collection on the governance of the dead (2014) and Jessica Auchter’s The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations. Auchter’s (2014) work explores the practice of statecraft through the performance of a life/​death distinction via sites of memorialisation. She expands upon traditional explorations of memorialisation, which tend to focus on the fixing of historical narrative and national identity, by using ‘hauntology’ to explore the performance of qualified and unqualified lives. Like Agamben, she understands statecraft as primarily ontological –​creating and distinguishing viable lives from those that are unwanted, unworthy and unqualifiable. Using Derrida’s comments on ‘haunting’ as the excess beyond the life/​death binary, she explores the implicit excess and contestation present within memorials to genocides, border-​crossing and 9/11. The performative distinction between life and death made at the memorial site leaves things silent –​and exploring those silences allows one to challenge the practice of statecraft. Again, in this Derridean reading of death and politics, her methodology treats the life/​death binary as part of statecraft. Once again, death is placed in the hands of the state rather than vice versa. It is for similar reasons that this book does not utilise the necropolitics approach, made popular by Achille Mbembe (2003). Mbembe explores the deployment of the space of living-​death as corollary to biopolitics. Using Agamben, Schmitt and Foucault, Mbembe argues that the instrumentalisation of life under biopolitics requires a simultaneous destruction of human bodies and populations. It is through the infliction of death that qualified life is produced through juxtaposition and distinction. Mbembe’s particular focus takes the colonial subjugation of populations, modern and historical, as the epitome of this tendency. Again, the rendering of death and security in ‘necropolitics’ hangs upon the process of statecraft as it creates an ‘Other’, then subjugates it to the form of bare life. We again encounter the privileging of the state in this model –​where life/​death is a performance of statecraft rather than that which always already situates the state. But not all literature within IR follows this trajectory. The notable exception can be found in the work of Michael Dillon, who offers a very different treatment 14

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Introduction of death and security –​even if he doesn’t address mortality by name. In his article of 2011, Dillon uses the political theology of Roberto Esposito to rethink security as the ‘katechon’ posed against the threat of the end-​times (the eschaton). Exploring the transition from ecclesiastical terminology to that of the sovereign state, Dillon finds convergence between the worlds of Judaeo-​Christian religion and security. He deploys some Agambenian/​Schmittian themes, noting that the constitution of the eschaton is a performance that functions to embed the state through contrast, but there is a realisation of the ontological significance of ‘end-​times’ and its coupling with security. Here security is a necessary ontological technology to counteract the unthinkable end. Thinking against biopolitics: security as sociology of death Much has been written by philosophers on the salience of mortality that has not been taken up in security studies, despite the exception of Dillon’s utilisation of Heidegger and Esposito. Despite differing treatments of the subject, there is some commonality of opinion between major thinkers of the twentieth century that mortality is fundamentally connected to the emergence of systems of thought, language, culture and ethics. These systems respond to the challenge of foreknown death; indeed mortality stimulates cultural efforts to produce meaning and ethics, in spite of inevitable negativity. Peter Sloterdijk dedicates a chapter of his Spheres trilogy to the foundational negativity of death and absence that propels human societies into the articulation and constitution of places. In his reading, the development of culture has thanatological origin: The omnipresence of images depicting ancestors and Gods, of amulets, fetishes and charged symbols in older cultures shows how great the need is to round off the present world with pointers to substantial absent things, to augmenting and encompassing elements. The necessity of images stems from the coercion of the intelligence by death and absence […] Is culture as a whole not an overreaction to absence? When missing things become conspicuous, morphological pressure ensues: empty spaces want to be filled again […] Death is the first sphere stressor and creator of cultures. (Sloterdijk 2014: 142–​3, 164)

Here death motivates and stimulates the constitution of ethical, geographical, cultural and political paradigms. These discourses then mitigate and sublimate death anxiety through their assertion of perpetual realities. The emergence of rationalism during the demise of religious mediations of death in ‘Enlightenment’ Europe should be no surprise to us, given this line of analysis. Where one elixir faded, another remedy was constructed so that our mortality and impermanence might be obscured once more. What I  will call ‘mortality philosophy’ argues, utilising insights from Heidegger and Hegel, that mortality is foundational of projects that make life, culture, politics and discourse. Death comes first; death must then be effaced by 15

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Death and security intellectual and political activity because mortality exposes reason’s lie –​and the lie of the sovereign. As Zygmunt Bauman expresses this paradox: reason cannot think death. Thought cannot grasp its own non-​existence. Mortality is beyond knowledge and exposes the charade of knowing. But, its negativity simultaneously provides a constitutive outside. Our knowledge of our unresolved mortality necessitates a huge cooperative effort from systems of human culture and society to live life as if mortality were not around the corner, as if life were meaningful when it will all amount to nothing (Bauman 1992: 7). Ernest Becker agrees, stating that: ‘All culture, all man’s creative life-​ways are in some basic part of them a fabricated protest against natural reality, a denial of the truth of human condition […] Society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning’ (Becker 1973: 33–​7). This contention has been explored by philosophers and literary figures including Hegel, Heidegger, Sloterdijk, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Camus and Agamben, among many others. For existentialist thinkers such as Camus and Sartre, mortality was represented as the absurdity that plagues existence –​disrupting all attempts to behave meaningfully or to find meaning. Their solution was act in ‘good faith’, always in cognisance of absurdity rather than taking part in the charade that it can be effaced. Heidegger approached mortality through language, and language through mortality. He argued that the unique human awareness of mortality is intimately linked to the unique human propensity for language (Heidegger 1971, 2000). Language functions to place an illusory stability and permanence onto our experience of the world; it responds to the nothingness inherent within mortality. As Oberst interprets Heidegger: ‘The urge “simply to tell” points at intrinsic connections between language and death […] Death’s factical reality drives humans into speech to overcome the nothingness’ (Oberst 2009: 45). Dasein is Dasein, for Heidegger, because it exists in relation to death. In contrast, animal life does not die but simply ceases to live. Heidegger states: ‘Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between death and language flashes before us, but remains unthought’ (Heidegger 1971:  107–​8). It is the knowledge of mortality that constitutes Dasein’s unique potentiality, and its capacity for language. This capacity for language, according to Hegel, Heidegger and Agamben, is structured around negativity. Death shows what language can never say, but simultaneously throws humanity into an unresolvable conflict by stimulating language to efface this limit point (Norris 2005: 6). Language functions to conceal negativity through its attribution of names that assert identity against difference, distinguishing objects through negativity (this becomes this because it is not that). The negative foundation of politics and knowing is endlessly and traumatically repeated through identity distinction. This practice encircles negativity rather than locating it in ontology. This particular deceit of language in the concealment of negativity has been exposed by Agamben 16

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Introduction in relation to the function of pronouns. Modern linguistics classifies pronouns not as the ‘I’ or ‘you’ they signify, but as indicators of utterance –​they are indefinable outside the instance of discourse (Agamben 1991: 23). They are empty signs that relate only to instances of discourse taking place. ‘I’ and ‘you’ are not attached to speakers. Instead, they function to conceal the absence, lack and negativity at the heart of language. Pronouns, and language more broadly, are forms that mitigate negativity, lack and mortality. Contrasted with biopolitical and necropolitical theory then, mortality philosophy makes a bold claim that everything starts with mortality/​negativity and the subsequent need to efface. However, this book shies away from Bauman and Becker when they argue that all human culture, everything, always, is a response to human knowledge of mortality. Instead, it steers a path between the extreme positions of biopolitics (where the state is the primary actor) and mortality philosophy (that everything comes from its relationship with death) by engaging sociologies of death practice. Because, of course, death is not stationary. Understandings of death shift over time, constituted through their representation in society. The contemporary security context is a temporary stage of modernity and postmodernity, where secular politics had to respond to the implications of the death of God. First let us briefly consider shifts in deathly practices so that we might see their evolution in correlation with biopolitics. Historical sociologies of dying point to an interesting finding: death that was once ‘tame’, accepted peacefully in society, has become savage (Aries 1983: 614). Death has become a problem. Philippe Aries has undertaken an exploration of representations of death and dying across the history of ‘Western’ culture (Aries 1974). He identifies the trope of the ‘tamed death’ in the ancient world, where works of literature portray the business of dying without taboo or fear. Death was simple in these works; the dying person would receive prior knowledge that the end was upon them, usually while confined to bed, take steps to prepare their affairs and then simply die. Aries comments that: The old attitude in which death was both familiar and near, evoking no great fear or awe, offers too marked a contrast to ours, where death is so frightful that we dare not utter its name. This is why I have called this household sort of death ‘tamed death’. I do not mean that death had once been wild and that it had ceased to be. I mean, on the contrary, that today it has become wild. (Aries 1974: 13–​14)

Aries shows across his broad study that the ancient death was simply a fact –​ not to be escaped or glorified. It didn’t matter. So how has death become wild? Aries points to multiple shifts in the Middle Ages that made death problematic. Across the Middle Ages, social practices around the Reformation and Counter-​ Reformation began to affect the business of dying. The deathbed scene, once central to the salvation (or otherwise) of the soul, was replaced. Death once 17

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Death and security meant the physical agonies of passing and a ‘good death’, faced without hysterical emotion, was praiseworthy. This ‘good death’ was itself a development in death custom: the ancient tame death (likened to sleeping) turned into an individualised encounter with celestial observation. This representation of death as the deathbed scene developed alongside (from the eleventh century onwards) the practice of individualised tombs to house the dead. Shifts in the sociology of dying reflected the growing awareness of individualised identity (Aries 1974: 51). An ancient collectivised acceptance of a tame death shifted towards an understanding of ‘one’s own death’, with the advent of individualised subjectivity. Running in parallel with the development of capitalism, rationalism and modern subjectivity, dying becomes personal –​and takes on dimensions of being terrible. By the time that mind–​body dualism came to intellectual prominence, the interpretation of death as the physical deathbed scene changed  –​becoming more akin to the metaphysical breakdown of that which makes us human (Aries 1983: 300). The sting of death shifts from physical disintegration to the form of metaphysical loss, separation and disappearance. Death, in reflection of the uptake of rationalism in the late Middle Ages, becomes terrible. It destroys the self. By the eighteenth century, Aries shows how death becomes macabre in its representation across art and literature. Rather than a natural, tame occurrence it becomes the transgression that rips the subject from ‘daily life, rational society and monotonous work’ (1974: 57). The death of the Other becomes the supreme rupture of mourning at the same time as intellectual positivism and nationalism reach their zenith in the nineteenth century, and, as Aries puts it, the cult of remembrance was born. As capitalist politics moved towards the era of biopolitics and the fostering of life and circulation, the threat of mortality took on ever more sinister and terrible connotations. By the mid nineteenth century, death was shameful and forbidden –​hidden from public view. People no longer died at home, but in the hospital. This culmination is closely connected to the transition from early forms of capitalism and nationalism to biopolitics, and Aries’ work can be read to mirror Foucault and Agamben when he describes how: Death in the hospital is no longer the occasion of a ritual ceremony, over which the dying person presides amidst his assembled relatives and friends. Death is a technical phenomenon obtained by a cessation of care, a cessation determined in a more or less avowed way by a decision of the doctor and the hospital team […] Death has been dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it impossible to know which step was the real death. (Aries 1974: 88)

Death, in the era of biopolitical governance, has been hidden from view –​and so too has everything that reminds us of death. Practices of dying have clearly shifted alongside practices of living and the secular rational era has no answer 18

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Introduction to mortality except medicalisation and effacement. Death, in this era of life, has become terrible, wild and untamed. Deathly practices and representations have shifted across history, reflecting the shifts whereby economic, political and societal structures constitute the meaning of life. Death has not stayed static across history. However, there is something remarkable about the conception of mortality that accompanies the rationalist era. Mortality is defiant without the figure of god. Secular rationalist authority cannot defeat death; instead, it is riven with contradictions: the omniscience of reason cannot penetrate the experience of dying; the omnipotent sovereign cannot prevent the inevitable; we have knowledge of our own mortality and yet we are still compelled to act and live. Security is the response that reaffirms the symbolic order of sovereign and subject. Zygmunt Bauman, in particular, explores wide-​ranging philosophical literature on the function of rational, cultural and linguistic systems as effacing death. Drawing from Schopenhauer, Becker and Freud he argues that a multidirectional relationship of encirclement connects such systems with mortality. Human cognisance of death provides the impetus for religious and philosophical systems that then prove incapable of signifying death-​in-​itself. Death, Bauman states, ‘is the ultimate defeat of reason, since reason cannot “think” death’ (1992: 12–​13). It is a non-​object, a void, both traumatic and absent. As such, mortality gives rise to cultural and philosophical systems but those systems can only encircle death –​they are unable to represent or signify death because it is beyond their bounds. Multiple strategies are then developed by societies to mediate the void, or ‘lack’ to use a psychoanalytic term, of mortality by breaking death into component parts and then acting upon them, making a pretence and masquerade of life as continuous and un-​plagued by absurdity. These strategies primarily include the development of rituals around the disposal of bodies that function to expel them from the sight of the living, the development of medical sciences to both postpone the inevitable and then scientifically explain it when it occurs, and the deployment of religious and spiritual rituals to efface the existential horror that confronts the bereaved (Aries 1974; Bauman 1992). These strategies are all aimed at the living –​those left behind who are confronted with death, and its disruption of rational security and mastery. These strategies mediate the sudden reappearance of mortality from its suppression. Security, as the object of warfare and policing, is also a compartmentalisation of the mortality problem (Huysmans 1998). While security research is dominated by theories that explore the deployment of life, only Jeff Huysmans has pointed to the potential connection between death and security in his 1998 article ‘Security! What Do You Mean?’, arguing that security can be understood as the responsive practices by which political communities alleviate mortality anxiety by making, and then disposing of, objects of threat (1998: 237–​8). In 19

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Death and security its response to the negating presence of mortality, the state becomes arbiter of life and death, performing ‘security’ to keep mortality outside the domain of the polity –​alleviating the void. Functionally, security acts to efface the problem of mortality by constituting threat-​objects that threaten the existence of the community, acting against those totemic objects, and performing the prospect of secure existence as defined against death. Security and warfare exorcise death from political consciousness, despite their use of its tools, through their totemic performance of threat mitigation upon objects classified as dangerous. Death is banished through processes of locating danger and fixing it. So while David Campbell’s work (1992) has shown how the discourse of danger is functional for the performance of national identity, rather than representing objective dangers that threaten the community, we might develop the performative security thesis around the philosophy of mortality in two ways. First, by arguing that the reproduction of identity through foreign policy is an imagination of immortal political community that mitigates the salience of death; and second, that the discourse of danger creates objects that represent mortality and can be acted upon and exorcised –​once again, performing the immortality of political community through ritualised sacrifice. The conventional approach of modernity to mortality, within the remit of security, has involved the creation of standing armies that can march against threats, and weapons that can be fired to suppress our mortality by inflicting death upon others. But it is important to note that the security masquerade is kept fully intact during this performance –​death is rarely spoken about and security is an exceptionally serious business that cannot be questioned. It is indeed an exceptionally serious business –​the void that plagues rationality, sovereignty, culture and capital must be filled at all costs –​but this is kept hidden beneath the performance of really existing dangers and terminology that abstracts from what is really at stake in warfare. Mortality is kept silent through the refusal to discuss war and security in terms of death. Here we should note Carol Cohn’s seminal exploration of the abstraction in strategic discourse (1987), but also the numerous contemporary critiques concerning the immortalisation of ‘our’ war-​dead relative to the refusal to count ‘their’ war-​dead as anything but estimated collateral damage (Butler 2004; Gregory 2012; Zehfuss 2009). This unsavoury calculus of mourning goes hand-​in-​hand with the identification of our violence as morally justified and abstracted intervention, while others wage deathly terror against us. In both examples, language sanitises the infliction of death so that our soldiers live on in immortality while their ‘dead’ were never fully entitled to life in the first place. Death never really ‘happened’, as such. Our killing is abstracted from mortality in its technocratic discussion as intervention or nuclear technology (Cohn 1987) rather than the infliction of searing pain and terrible deaths, whereas the violence inflicted towards us is called ‘terror’ to objectify it as a ‘danger’ that can be supressed. Effacement 20

Introduction

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of mortality occurs here through the targeting of such dangerous objects with war: they are ritually dispatched to perform the immortality of political community vis-​à-​vis objects of threat. As such, we might consider the security–​mortality relationship to operate through objectification and silencing in the era of modernity. Objects of danger (‘threats’) are produced with which to invoke and resolve issues of mortality, whereas the deathly capacity of war-​making is silenced within this process to maintain the illusion of death effacement. Notes 1 John Hamilton has written an excellent genealogy of security that traces the development of the Roman securitas through the Renaissance era and the major thinkers of the Western philosophical canon, up to the present day. His careful exegesis shows that while the ancient Roman and Greek societies had a notion of securitas, this was not employed as a political or philosophical concept in any sustained manner before (at least) the late fourteenth century. Rather, ancient meanings of securitas lean towards the care for one’s inner being through enactment of moral precepts and social performances (Hamilton 2013). Franz-​Xaver Kaufmann interprets this sudden shift in the deployment of security to the weakening of Church and imperial institutions and the ascendance of the rationalist paradigm. When the individual human subject becomes the primary producer of knowledge, and is not overawed by sovereign institutions that claim to provide protection from death and sin in exchange for loyalty, the era of security claims begins (Kaufmann 1970). Mortality, we can therefore argue, was held back by a new performance of perpetuity. 2 Although François Debrix and Alexander Barder have written of the need to reach beyond biopolitics to engage with horror, in relation to violence, terror and death (2012). 3 This introductory chapter will address research undertaken at the intersection of death and politics by Jessica Auchter (2014), Jeff Huysmans (1998) and Finn Stepputat (2014). However, it is important to note the scattered and limited existence of such texts, and the lack of research trajectory around death, contra the dominance of vital approaches like resilience and biopolitics.

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The problem of dying while resilient

I

introductory chapter, I outlined a sketch of the ways we might think of security as the protection of sovereignty through the effacement of mortality and death. Using insights from Agamben, Aries, Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, Sloterdijk and Bauman, I showed how mortality disturbs the rationalist and modernist edifice of political sovereignty. Security was then postulated as one of many methods by which the knowledge of inevitable death –​the limit point of rule –​is effaced. In the era of modernity, security conceived of threat-​ objects and then acted against them with military/​preventative tools to banish mortality and perform the perpetual nation state. This chapter develops the previous analysis of the relationship between death and security for the era of resilience. Resilient security strategies diverge somewhat from traditional ‘prophylactic’ policies and are coming to dominate the policy agendas of states and international institutions. Instead of promising that a stable and impermeable lifeworld can be maintained through security barriers, resilience reframes security –​in part –​around the inevitability of disaster events. Death is not restrained behind a prophylactic barrier. Rather, resilient security admits that unpreventable terrorist attacks, floods and pandemics will strike –​and reframes security around the capacity of life to adapt and recover. Death becomes part of security. I will allude to this as a postmodern era of security, but one should not conceive of a sudden epistemic break between security eras, given that the seeds of resilient security can be unearthed in previous eras of emergency planning through genealogical methods (Zebrowski 2015). Security now, apparently, admits the inevitability of death and has stopped the rhetorical pretence that the military and security services can always prevent the incursion of death. The promise made by security officials to the public is no longer made exclusively in terms of prevention, but also upon the prospect of resilient recovery after the crisis. Death has quietly made its way into the performance of security and the mitigation of mortality has changed tone. n the

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The problem of dying while resilient This chapter explores the discourses of the resilience era to ascertain the contemporary relationship between death and security. But rather than finding a genuine shift in that relationship from the pre-​resilience era, it argues that resilience is an increasingly sophisticated charade that continues to efface mortality. Despite the supposed acceptance of unpreventable disaster events, security still functions as a practice of mortality effacement. The prospect of inevitable calamities is used as a foundation for the imagination of ‘secure’, adaptive continuities. Security is rearticulated around the innate potential for recovery within vital systems to disruption and disaster. Life is used to defeat death and protect the performance of sovereignty. The chapter first explores the development of resilient security policies before analysing their ontological relationship with mortality. The disastrous genius of resilience? ‘Resilience’ discourse has come to prominence within the security landscape. Instead of predicating security upon the prevention of death (the prophylactic approach), resilient security policies operate through the spectre of the un-​ preventable event: conceiving of inevitable disasters against which they imagine innate ‘adaptive capacity’. In this security dream, societies can organically recover from terrorist attacks, severe weather episodes and pandemics –​if their adaptive capacities are encouraged and maximised. While security has traditionally made objects of mortality, such as enemies or risks that can be held at bay and countered (thereby effacing death and its significance), the post-​9/​11 era has seen policymakers declare that we must learn to live with unpreventable risk. Catastrophes, it seems, can no longer be prevented. In the words of the UK’s National Security Strategy, only an approach focused upon attaining resilience in the face of inevitable events can provide the ‘radical transformation’ of security policy necessary in the post-​Cold War ‘era of uncertainty’ (Cabinet Office 2010a: 3). The US Department of Homeland Security has provided a similar reading of the contemporary era in their 2007 National Security Strategy, whereby insecurity is now a fundamental condition that necessitates that we live with risk rather than against it. For example: Despite our best efforts, achieving a complete state of […] protection is not possible in the face of the numerous and varied catastrophic possibilities that could challenge the security of America today. Recognizing that […] we cannot envision or prepare for every potential threat, we must understand and accept a certain level of risk as a permanent condition. (Department of Homeland Security 2007: 25)

Security is not possible, apparently, in the sense that it once was. Death cannot be held at bay. As such, the resilience era signals a discursive shift from the 23

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Death and security era of ‘security as prevention’ towards a security that must be attained despite, and through, inevitable insecurity. It postulates the undefeatable danger before introducing its reformulation of security as the salvation to be found within ourselves. Interestingly, threat is now located inside the polity in the resilience rendering. Our own systems potentially hold the potential for collapse in response to external ‘shocks’ (note that terrorist events and disasters are no longer framed as threats, but ‘shocks’). The contemporary resilience discourse evolved in part from explorations of the complex layering and tight coupling of systems that resist linear attempts to prevent collapse (Perrow 1999; Walker and Cooper 2011). Resilience objectifies threat within the potential for complex infrastructural systems to collapse when faced with external shocks, and then stresses the importance of building ‘slack’ and ‘adaptive capability’ into the workings of such systems to mediate and absorb shock –​leading to an assumed return to normality (Lentzos and Rose 2009; Lundborg and Vaughan-​Williams 2011). Resilience brings the formulation of danger inside the polity and as such, insecurity supposedly cannot be countered in the traditional way. States cannot send armies to defeat themselves; instead, security must be found in the careful preparation of systems to withstand shock without collapse. The impact of rethinking security policy towards ‘resilience’ is best seen in the shifts undergone within international disaster management strategy. After multiple discursive shifts, disaster response policy now defines the causes of disaster as poor planning, rather than hazard events. Physical hazards (earthquakes, hurricanes, floods) are not understood as disaster events; rather disaster resides in the lack of contingency planning made around complexly interlinked infrastructural systems. Disaster apparently resides within our systems, not the hurricanes and floods that ‘shock’ them, so disaster ‘response’ must focus on anticipatory mitigation of vulnerability in these systems. But it didn’t always used to be this way. Before the advent of resilience, disaster management studies used to centralise post-​event response. Literature and practice were occupied with strategies for the mitigation of suffering in disaster areas. The disaster site was extremely prominent, because disaster was understood as the physical event that impacted upon populations. Yet disaster studies have undergone a three-​stage paradigm shift since the 1970s whereby the focus on post-​event, site-​centred recovery has been replaced with an orientation towards pre-​event mitigation (Grove 2013, 2014). During the 1970s and 1980s, researchers inspired by Marxist political economy problematised the notion of disaster as an exceptional, exogenous event. Critiquing the dominant view that disasters are extremes in the geophysical process (hurricanes, floods, earthquakes), they demonstrated the centrality of capitalism to the impact wrought by hazard events. Geophysical events will always happen, but capitalist processes make sections of population vulnerable and 24

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The problem of dying while resilient precarious to the impact of these natural hazards –​creating disasters (Hewitt 1983). This Marxist reframing of ‘disaster’ as the making-​vulnerable of populations by capitalism, rather than just the force of the physical event, provided a critical reframing of the assumptions of disaster management. A pertinent example of this paradigm shift in disaster studies can be found in Susman et al.’s blistering critique of the dominant approaches (of the 1970s and 1980s) that located Africa as a region susceptible to natural disasters. This depoliticised mainstream framing of disaster, they argue, not only misunderstands the composition of disaster (as a hazard event rather than the interface between vulnerable population and extreme physical events) but also conceals the responsibility of Western imperialist ventures and continuing capitalist exploitation for the creation of vulnerable populations: The population of the underdeveloped areas are becoming more vulnerable […] Underdevelopment is not just a contemporary phenomenon, nor is it a self-​propelled process in isolation. It is an integral part of the process of development of the capitalist countries of the world. As capitalism has evolved, so has underdevelopment. As capitalist penetration reaches the furthest parts of the periphery, the ability of local populations to be self-​reliant decreases. (Susman et al. 1983: 272–​3)

This shift towards viewing disaster as a category constituted through both pre-​ existing economic structures and the impact of sudden shocks was accelerated in the 1990s through the deployment of ‘vulnerability’ as the matrix through which to understand disaster. Rather than the interplay of just economic factors and sudden shocks to infrastructural systems, disasters came to be seen as the product of multiple indices –​including the precarity constituted for citizens through structures of gender, race, age, class, poverty (Grove 2014). These advances in research transformed the mandate of disaster studies from post-​event recovery to the critique and problematisation of those structures that make the impact of hazard events imbalanced. This research showed that disasters are more disastrous for some than others, providing pertinent critique of the dominant technocratic frames within disaster management. This was excellent for advancing the field of disaster research. But then, alongside the advance of neoliberal economics, the discourse of resilience came to prominence. Ironically and paradoxically, it was critical research that opened the door for resilience, by (in good faith) reframing the disaster as systemic interplay rather than the hurricane, flood or earthquake event. Resilience reversed the progress made towards situating disaster vulnerability in social structures, because the resilience paradigm devotes little energy to understanding the roles of social structures (gender, capitalism, race) in the creation of vulnerability. In resilience discourse, risk and vulnerability are simple and politics is not complicit in their construction. Broadly speaking, technocracy is the solution to a problem understood as technocratic. For example, 25

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Death and security contemporary mainstream resilience research often points to information technology and big data as tools that can assist risk assessment and mitigate the human cognition bias that underestimates threats when faced with complex systems (Comfort et al. 2010). Similarly, vulnerability is treated as a technocratic issue. As a depoliticised state of being, vulnerability can be solved through the training of subjects in approved behaviours –​not by changing the structures that produce inequality. The UK Community Resilience programme, for example, creates a hierarchy of subject categories from resilience ‘champions’, ‘experts’, ‘volunteers’ and the ‘vulnerable’. While ‘resilience champions’ are local community representatives with the ‘energy and enthusiasm’ to take leadership roles, the ‘vulnerable’ are defined as those who have recently had operations, the aged, those without transport, transient groups and those who might find emergency information hard to understand (Bulley 2013). Some scholars understand the resilience oeuvre as empowering, such that it takes individual agency into account and doesn’t posit a determinism of social position (Brown and Westaway 2011; Milliken 2013; Murphy 2007). They argue that resilience provides a better framing of the bottom-​up agency that subjects can demonstrate in times of crisis, contra the Marxist-​inspired disaster management paradigm of old (where subjects were boxed into socio-​ economic categories). However, many contemporary scholars disagree. Rather than subscribing to the promise of resilience, they have highlighted the innate neoliberal governmentality at play within its social engineering and the implicit negative categorisation of subjects in terms of their own supposed ‘vulnerability’ to disaster (Grove 2013, 2014; Joseph 2013; Welsh 2014). The vulnerable are not ‘full’ subjects, in terms of the hierarchy of subjectivity employed within resilience documentation. They are defined in terms of what they lack (Bulley 2013). These ‘vulnerable’ persons and communities are the subject of resilient planning for disaster recovery –​not the hazard event; they must be trained to cope with their precarity and to demonstrate resilient behaviours. Deploying the ideological agenda of neoliberalism, their precarity is their problem to solve –​it is not the responsibility of the state or society. The academic position on resilience is thus contested, despite the dominance of the concept within the disaster management discipline. However, resilience discourse has colonised the policy world as an unproblematic solution to most problems –​no matter what it means or represents. One can look at the extensive deployment of ‘resilience’ in international disaster management strategies. For example, the United Nations designated the entire 1990s as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR). Not many concepts get their own decade. This initiative aimed to develop international disaster management by consolidating the move away from the hazard-​specific approach that had previously ‘handicapped’ policymakers and practitioners by artificially separating droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes (Lechat 1990). Instead, the new 26

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The problem of dying while resilient ‘integrated’ model of disaster management would cut across types of disasters and homogenise them as disruptions that could be foreseen, prepared for, mitigated and recovered from. The primary measures to be taken within the integrated approach targeted social systems as the objects of intervention. Typical of the resilience approach, vulnerability mapping of populations was placed high on the agenda and necessitated the governmental training of vulnerable communities to manage their own risk. But as the Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction came to a close, the Secretary General of the United Nations was compelled to keep disaster reduction on the international agenda. Why? Was a decade not enough time to implement resilience policies? Speaking at the close of the IDNDR in 1999, Kofi Annan acknowledged that efforts to coordinate early warning systems, vulnerability mapping and disaster recovery operations had not sufficiently met the challenge of the upsurge in disasters of 1998 (Annan 1999). Indeed the cost of weather-​related disasters in 1998 alone exceeded similar costs for the whole of the 1980s. Resilience approaches seem to have made things worse, not better. Rather than change tack, the international community has extended the ‘disaster preparedness decade’ into the twenty-​first century via the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–​2015, aiming to (once again) build the resilience of nations and communities to disaster. But as Annan himself admitted, this extension and repetition of action involves a paradox: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we confront a paradox. Despite a decade of dedicated and creative effort by IDNDR and its collaborators, the number and cost of natural disasters continues to rise. The cost of weather related disasters in 1998 alone exceeded the cost of all such disasters in the whole of the 1980s’ (Annan 1999). So does resilient preparation work, or not? The assumption contained within the UN documentation surrounding these decades of international action is that consolidating the multi-​scalar integration of disaster preparedness and mitigation policy is useful, yet still in its infancy. It has not yet succeeded in the mission of alleviating the cost and frequency of disasters. The complex interconnection of infrastructural systems is only increasing, creating greater costs when disasters occur and necessitating greater efforts towards building resilience. The most cynical of commentators could at this point invoke the maxim of Albert Einstein, such that insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. The integration of early warning systems and plans for disaster recovery are clearly not working, given the escalation of costs associated with disaster, so why are national and international communities stuck within the discourse of resilience as the answer? Because resilience contains and deploys a disastrous genius. Resilience is extremely functional –​just not in terms of preventing disaster. It provides a new and sophisticated method by which governments and international organisations can problematise issues (terrorism, poverty, hazard events) and perform 27

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Death and security their resolution. Albeit, this resolution occurs discursively rather than practically. Resilience doesn’t stop events or even mitigate their impact, as we have seen in the United Nations’ own documentation, but it provides a compelling story about post-​disaster recovery (where the adaptive properties of systems enable the creation of an improved world) and the reimagined roles of the state and civil society in the face of unpreventable insecurity. This re-​evaluation of state responsibility involves the neoliberal devolution of responsibility for maintaining security onto the population and local resilience fora, but also marks a shift in the articulation of security policy regarding the possibility of providing prophylactic safety. A new discourse? Since Thomas Hobbes’s treatise of 1651 on the formation of the modern state, the social contract understanding of the state has centralised the trade-​off between citizens’ submission to the law in exchange for the provision of physical safety by the state (Hobbes 1991). This is an important source of the traditional prophylactic discourse of security, where the state maintains a territorial barrier between its citizens and danger. Other canonical figures in the history of liberal political philosophy have focused on the same exchange, highlighting the surrender of ‘natural’ rights (understood as the ability to do anything of one’s choosing) for the physical security provided by the sovereign state –​such that others may not use their ‘natural rights’ against you (Locke 1821). Leaving aside that the social contract is a fiction, and that no such moment of agreement took place between subjects and rulers, the prophylactic discourse of security has a long history in statecraft. The contemporary rise of resilience represents the culmination of two (long historical) shifts in this tradition. First, state resilience discourse understands that threats might not stem from external enemies:  building upon the turn towards Critical Infrastructure Protection, resilient security strategies understand that threat may actually stem from our own infrastructural systems and their complex interdependence. Danger may actually lurk inside the polity –​in the tight coupling of complex systems (Perrow 1999) and the consequences of integrated system collapse (Boin and McConnell 2007). Disaster is no longer defined as the physical event or the enemy that impacts upon us, but the lack of preparation for such inevitability. As such, we might have to secure against ourselves –​using technological solutions to outweigh our human cognitive deficits that lead to the underestimation of risk in contexts of complexity (Comfort et al. 2010). Second, in a move that appears decidedly neoliberal, the state has now devolved and abrogated its responsibilities to ensure security. It has decided that events cannot always be prevented and, as such, its mandate is not dependent 28

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The problem of dying while resilient upon the maintenance of physical integrity. In this ‘privatisation’, citizens become responsible for ensuring their own security (Bulley 2013; Joseph 2013; Welsh 2014). Pre-​emptive resilience fora are constituted so that ‘resilience champions’ may liaise with ‘experts’ to respond to events, alleviating the responsibility of the state to intervene. Yet this abdication of responsibility does not mean that state involvement with security is dead. Instead, with a cunning sleight of hand, resilience involves the incorporation of insecurity into the remit of security. The disastrous genius of resilience is demonstrated within the appropriation of insecurity. The unpreventable event is now crucial to the performance of security, state and the mandate to rule. The state secures through the failure to secure (Heath-​Kelly 2015a). This transition between discourses should not be understood as a sudden epistemic break. Indeed, as Chris Zebrowski shows, the transition should not even be located within the late twentieth century –​as other scholars contend through analyses of systems ecology, economic neoliberalism and the post-​Cold War hegemony of liberal biopolitics (Evans and Reid 2014; Walker and Cooper 2011). While critical resilience scholars tend to assume a sudden emergence of resilience from the 1970s onwards, given the timing of Holling’s seminal treatment of the concept within systems ecology and the recognition awarded to Friedrich Hayek’s economic theories, Zebrowski’s detailed genealogy of resilience uncovers a long history whereby the properties of life were operationalised against threats and crises (2015). From the articulation of esprit de corps in Napoleonic military strategy, through the recognition of ‘vital’ industries within wartime and peacetime strike-​breaking by the British state, security discourse has progressively operationalised vitality against the emergency (Zebrowski 2015). Through the analysis of the roots of emergency planning, we can see that governments have always been sensitive to security threats that come from within their borders  –​particularly those relating to the administration and maintenance of population-​level functions (electricity supplies, the general strike, transport provision). We must note that the prophylactic model of security is underwritten by the concurrent development of emergency management techniques that, eventually, led to the reframing of security discourse around resilience. But where emergency management practices developed behind the scenes, security discourse still maintained the narrative of prophylaxis. The best example of this juxtaposition comes from the simultaneous planning for nuclear attack in the 1950s, and the discursive prophylaxis of deterrence. While civil emergency practitioners secured the future through emergency preparation against the spectre of the unpreventable event, governmental security discourse still maintained the narrative of deterrence as a protective barrier that would achieve safety through prophylaxis. Publicly, security was still promised as protection from the nuclear event –​not through the reconstitution of community 29

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Death and security in the aftermath. Despite the historical presence of emergency management techniques then, something remains new about the contemporary era of resilience: it is the performance of security through imaginaries of the unpreventable event in governmental security discourse. In previous eras, governmental rhetoric still promised a prophylactic defence against death. So, death and disaster have now moved from their previous location in emergency planning ghettos to colonise the grand security narrative. In the United Kingdom, this discursive transition is often framed as the move to an ‘age of uncertainty’. This policy epithet signifies a perception of proliferating risks in post-​Cold War global society that will inevitably lead to unpreventable events, thus necessitating a turn towards ‘resilience’ such that their effects can be mitigated. The ‘era of uncertainty’ is centralised within major policy documents such as A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty:  The National Security Strategy (Cabinet Office 2010a) and Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The Strategic Defence and Security Review (Cabinet Office 2010b). This ‘age of uncertainty’ is framed contra the ‘predictable risks’ of the Cold War era that, British policy suggests, came from ‘state adversaries through largely predictable military or nuclear means’ (Cabinet Office 2010a:  19). Lamenting that supposed past, these strategic documents find solace in ‘resilience’. While threats may come from unforeseen locations, inside or out, it is possible to remain ‘adaptable’ and to delegate the responsibility for disaster mitigation to citizens: But we cannot prevent every risk as they are inherently unpredictable. To ensure we are able to recover quickly when risks turn into actual damage to our interests, we have to promote resilience, both locally and nationally. Ensuring that the public is fully informed of the risks we face is a critical part of this approach. (Cabinet Office 2010a: 25)

The US Department of Homeland Security has provided a similar reading of the contemporary era in their 2007 National Security Strategy, whereby insecurity is now a fundamental condition that necessitates that we live with risk rather than against it. Similarly, Australia has codified its Critical Infrastructure Protection around the concept of resilience as providing security despite (and through) insecurity. Identifying a climate of ‘increasing complexity’, the Australian government has invoked the necessity of less linear, more adaptive and organic responses to the unforeseeable events that will inevitably shock infrastructural systems (Australian Government 2010). Rather than imagining a supposedly unattainable goal of security –​characterised as the absence of disruptive events –​the resilience discourse advocates the acceptance of insecurity as a fundamental condition. This acceptance can, it is imagined, lead towards successful mediation of systemic disruption by focusing attention on critical infrastructures and systems rather than on events and/​ 30

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The problem of dying while resilient or enemies. Insecurity becomes the explicit condition of security, as security is performed through the unpreventable event. Crucially, resilience imagines a recovery-​to-​come to stabilise its deployment of the unpreventable event. While we are insecure, in the sense that governments cannot prevent all hazard events from impacting upon us, we are told that we are not actually insecure –​resilience will save us by mitigating the event through the recovery-​to-​come. Our recovery is discursively ensured. While events will occur and people will die, and the state cannot save them, the damage will be limited because the deployment of resilience will stop the impact of events cascading across interlinked infrastructural systems. Resilience, then, secures us through our insecurity. This is its disastrous genius. It alleviates the state from the necessity of preventing all terrorist attacks and hazard events while discursively asserting that the recovery-​to-​come will ensure that life continues as normal. It doesn’t seem to matter that the application of resilience to international disaster management over several decades was determined, by the United Nations, to have failed to improve the response to disasters. The appeal of resilience is not linked to the ability to prevent or mitigate events; otherwise, its failure to improve disaster response would matter. Instead, the disastrous genius of resilience stems from its anticipatory erasure of the disaster’s consequences. We are promised the recovery-​to-​come. Temporality is crucial to the promise of resilience. By focusing on planning the future recovery from future disasters, states and international institutions can abrogate their responsibility to prevent those emergencies while also sublimating the anxiety associated with risk. Security strategies enact this performance by focusing on ‘horizon-​scanning’, risk-​mapping and risk registers to identify the future event –​exercising resilience through scenario exercises for emergency responders. Ben Anderson and Pete Adey have explored the bizarre temporality of contingency exercises, where health and government officials were gathered together in 2009 to ‘exercise’ emergency in a hotel room. They were tasked with managing an outbreak of pandemic swine flu and making pressurised decisions about the allocation of limited hospital beds (Anderson and Adey 2011). The authors contemplate how the exercise of emergency deploys imagined time–​space that is neither present nor future, one that can be understood here as the constitution of the recovery-​to-​come. In a similar study, Claudia Aradau and Rens Van Munster have also explored the imagined space–​ time of the emergency exercise (Aradau and Van Munster 2012). Focusing on an emergency exercise carried out by the City of Sunderland involving a foreign-​registered, and possibly terrorist, lorry carrying suspicious chemicals, they explore the ways in which the conjectural knowledge deployed in such simulations effects the withdrawal of time (this is neither the present nor the future) through the intensive management and scrutiny of public space. These scenario exercises demonstrate the deployment of the recovery-​to-​come within 31

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Death and security the resilience frame –​enabling the stable appropriation of insecurity by security actors. The new formulation of security, vis-​à-​vis inevitable risks, takes the shape of resilient and adaptive continuity within communities and infrastructure. To put it bluntly, life cannot be anaesthetised to shocks but with the right conditions and preparation it can manifest its own contingency in evolutionary response, coming out stronger for having been challenged. Here resilience deploys metaphors from the body to think of systems as components of a living being that can develop immunities and strategies against illness or infection (Lundborg and Vaughan-​Williams 2011). Locating danger inside the polity and rendering it inevitable, rather than preventable, marks a shift in security discourse. What then of the contemporary relationship between security and the effacement of death? Clearly much has changed. Security no longer makes objects of death outside the polity that can be resolved through the application of military or political tools. Neither does security imagine a perfect utopia of safety contra those objects. Now security involves securing and maintaining the adaptive and vital characteristics of systems so that they might self-​heal and deploy their own evolutionary contingency to work around shocks. Thinking resilience policy as postmodern death effacement Can we still read security as sociology of death in the era of resilience, where ‘death’ is supposedly brought inside the security paradigm as unpreventable danger? I will argue here that nothing significant has changed since previous eras of security. Security still effaces the prospect of mortality; however, resilience is somewhat more sophisticated in its means. Bauman’s exploration of the shift in mortality management between the eras of modernity and postmodernity proves extremely helpful here. Whereas modernity broke the mortality problem down into fixable objects (totemic threat-​ objects representing death) that were used to exorcise the anxiety of death, he argues that postmodernity is different. It mitigates mortality by breaking immortality into objects. In the modernist paradigm, immortality was promised through the collective continuity of the nation. This was the remedy for death. However, in the postmodern era it is immortality that has been broken down into component objects  –​rather than mortality (Bauman 1992). Linear time has broken down into the era of fluid time. Here immortality is regularly conferred and destroyed, through media, culture and emergency rehearsals, rather than assumed to follow the linear life–​death–​immortality trajectory as it did during the era of modernity. In the era of non-​linear fluid time, life is fragmented, magnified and destroyed at breakneck speed –​offering a constant rehearsal and repetition of the life–​death dialectic through high-​tech media. This objectification 32

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The problem of dying while resilient and deployment of immortality is used to efface death, rather than the objectification of threats. Life is now used to defeat death, as it were. At this point, it becomes possible to reconsider the resilience era as a postmodern strategy of death effacement. Security now performs the masquerade of continuity and coherence –​not by preventing the disaster event, but by thinking life against death. Utilising the ontology of the resilience era to focus on the adaptive potential of the systemised ‘body’ of the polity, threat can be alleviated by ensuring the immunity of infrastructures and communities to shock. The adaptive capacity of life is used to efface the salience of mortality, rather than the deployment of prophylaxis. For example, communities are framed as the organic life-​systems within policies of social resilience that can assist the emergency services during an event and self-​heal afterwards. The UK Cabinet Office states: ‘Community Resilience is about communities using local resources and knowledge to help themselves during an emergency in a way that complements the local emergency services’ (Cabinet Office 2012, cited in Rogers 2013). These framings of communities as self-​aware, self-​sustaining entities not only imbue them with characteristics of organic regeneration, but, as Peter Rogers notes (2013), community resilience redeploys notions of enduring (everlasting) national spirit, such as the often-​invoked ‘Blitz Spirit’ of British tenacity, to sustain these articulations. Indeed localisation is a prominent feature of emergency response protocol that emphasises the increased effectiveness of local responders, rather than distant state bureaucrats, given their familiarity with the affected area (Cabinet Office 2013; Department of Homeland Security 2013). The local has the power to self-​heal in the face of emergency. Here the ‘immortality’, to use Bauman’s phrase, of national spirit and identity is deployed alongside the immortality associated with vital contingency, where life overcomes obstacles. Death may have been brought inside the polity through the framing of unpreventable risks in the ‘era of uncertainty’, but the resilience paradigm remakes insecurity as the way in which a stronger, more secure society is achieved. Mortality is still effaced through this masquerade that treats insecurity as an expected occurrence that can be suppressed and conquered through life’s innate adaptive continuity. Resilience governs through insecurity (Lentzos and Rose 2009: 235): it discursively effaces death through the promise of recovery, rather than associating security with the absence of deaths. Actually occurring deaths do not disrupt the postmodern security paradigm because ‘life’ continues to respond and adapt. This deployment of vitality is the new face of the mortality masquerade. Resilience has taken death inside the polity, inside the security technologies designed to efface it. This is a particularly cunning move. The resilience era has negated the possibility of failure. It is no longer significant that efforts to prevent terrorist attacks and disasters can fail, because security is no longer reliant upon prevention to efface mortality. Deaths are now allowed to happen 33

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Death and security within the framing of security, because security is no longer the protection of individual citizens. Security is the evolutionary and adaptive potential within life itself. Where classical realism argued that state security in the international arena was played out within cyclical temporalities of failure, resilience embodies the reversal of the classical realist tragedy. Where security is an inevitable failure in classical realism, failure has become inevitable security in the resilience era. Death has become productive of security. This leaves us in a fascinating position. The state still discursively relies upon aspects of social contract theory to command our obedience (it takes responsibility for our ‘security’ in exchange for our subjection to its rule), yet simultaneously it has disavowed the potential to attain ‘security’ (interpreted as a state of safety). Security has shifted from a meaning of ‘safety’ and ‘protection’ applied to citizens. It now signifies the protection and consolidation of vital systems and their adaptive capacity to respond to disruption. Subjectivity has been reconfigured now that the state has shunned its mandate of protection and requires us to live ‘with danger’ (Evans and Reid 2014). We are still required to recognise the sovereign, in exchange for protection. But this protection now classifies subjects not as people, or even as population, but as abstracted, systematised vitality. At the surface level, this paradigm shift seems to function. Security is deployed in multiple fields through ‘capacity-​ building’ exercises that prepare for future disaster events. However, there are unresolved kinks in the application of this security move. We are bombarded with reminders of threat and responsibilised for reporting ‘suspicious activity’ as well as maintaining our own safety through non-​risky conduct. The state still deploys the notion of danger in order to subject us and guarantee its recognition as sovereign. But it doesn’t exchange this subjection for individual protection. It works to protect vital circulations, not individuals. The individual must comply with security and obey the state, but cannot expect to be ‘saved’ in return. There is a gap here, caused by the incomplete shift from security to resilience. We can call this a gap in mortality mitigation. If the promise of resilience were enough to sate death anxiety, there would be no need for the state to continue to promise the prevention of terrorist events –​or to require our participation in reporting ‘suspicious’ conduct. And yet we are still governed through this imperative. Resilience will never be enough, because we have been forged as individual subjects against the image of a sovereign protector. The sovereign needs subjects for the purposes of its recognition, and given that we are produced to recognise the sovereign our subjectivity is also tied up in the promise of authority, sovereignty and security. We are created as individual subjects, death still threatens us as subjects, but the promised salvation of security now treats subjects as systemised vital capacity. So what are the consequences of this move for the subject in the era of 34

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The problem of dying while resilient uncertainty? How do we die, now that we are resilient? And how does the state deal with those events that violently disrupt the discourse of resilience? Given that resilience and anticipatory security have colonised the future to make their promises of perpetuity, we need to look for answers outside anticipatory temporalities. The imagined future is the terrain of the security masquerade where death can be conquered and tamed. As such, to understand the connections between death and security we need to look backwards at events that have already happened. To build the argument that security is a performance that functions to mitigate mortality, we should be able to identify the practice of security after the bomb blast. Death happens in the present tense and has happened in the past, therefore if security is the mitigation of mortality (to protect sovereignty) then we should find evidence of security practice in emergency response and the reconstruction of post-​terrorist space. The performance of ‘adaptive life’ and the effacement of death must be present after the bomb blast, otherwise the promise of resilient security would become overcome by its own aporia. The excess of death, if not exorcised through various security techniques, would spill over and expose the meaninglessness of resilience. This book now turns to explore the practices that occur at bombsites to mediate the incursion of death. These practices of emergency management and reconstruction respond directly to the gap in the resilience promise. Resilient security states responsibilise us for our own security and promise us an evolutionary, adaptive society that can withstand shocks –​but they also require our recognition of their sovereignty. This sovereign authority is still compromised when bombs explode, causing chaos and trauma. So what happens at the bombsite? How is the incursion of mortality policed, tamed and erased? What can responses to past events show us about the relationship between sovereignty, security and mortality?

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Containing the spectacle: disaster management

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a theoretical conception of security (in both prophylactic and resilient forms) as the effacement of mortality, the rest of this book explores security practices to test the reading. Do they mitigate mortality? In particular, the book interrogates non-​anticipatory practices of security. It argues that by reading security as sociology of death, one can incorporate temporalities of practice usually ignored within the International Relations (IR) literature and subvert the traditional understanding of threat as ‘future potential danger’. Death isn’t just a future possibility; it is happening and has happened. If security functions to mitigate death, then it acts in the present tense and upon the past. Sovereignty also needs to be protected against the visceral evidence of disasters that have already occurred  –​lest its authority experience disruption. The book is thus arranged around a temporal structure that moves from ‘present-​tense’ security through ‘retrospective’ security, with emergency management processes (present-​tense security) being the focus of this chapter. The chapter explores the questions: how do emergency management policies and practices enact security? In which temporalities do they frame ‘threat’, and do we witness the suppression of mortality through their operations? The chapter explores the ambiguous situation of emergency management within security policy. Emergency management is not explicitly understood by governments as a security measure, given that security is associated with future threat and emergency management happens in the present tense. However, despite this ambiguity, emergency management is embedded within security policies of disaster recovery. In this chapter, emergency management is exposed as a technique of mortality effacement. To set the scene for this exploration, it must be made clear that I am not discussing the more prominent conceptualisation of emergency response as the imagination of the future disaster and/​or strategies to build aving outlined

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Containing the spectacle resilience with respect to that imagined event. The simulation and exercise of future crisis events has been covered at length in IR as a pre-​emptive security practice (Anderson and Adey 2012; Aradau and Van Munster 2011) alongside myriad explorations of catastrophic imaginaries, pre-​mediation (De Goede 2008; Grusin 2004) and contingency (Dillon 2007; Lentzos and Rose 2009). All these studies, and many more, explore how security is deployed against the spectre of ‘what might be’. They project ‘threat’, and security action, into the future. But studies of the ‘in-​the-​moment’ emergency response are largely absent from the IR literature. Temporality seems to be an issue that is, so far, only addressed in terms of futurity in the security studies literature. Little has been written within disciplines of IR and security studies about in-​ the-​moment emergency response protocols. This is because ‘security’ is discursively predicated against the future threat. Threat, as the counterpoint against which security is performed, is by definition that danger that has not yet happened. As a result, security is thought as an anticipatory mechanism. As I  will soon argue, it is problematic that critical security studies has accepted this hegemonic discourse of security as anticipatory. To open new potentials for security research, this chapter moves away from futurity to consider in-​the-​moment emergency response. It asks:  how are first responder guidelines positioned within security discourse and practice? As we will see, the answer to this question is that they are positioned awkwardly within official policy discourse –​given their temporal dissonance –​but their actual operations clearly demonstrate the step-​by-​step suppression of mortality. In policy discourse, emergency management is framed within the anticipatory agenda of maximising adaptive capacity and organic, self-​organising recovery in the face of the disaster. Given the dominant discourse of security as future-​oriented, emergency management is awkwardly positioned as an anticipatory security device. For example, the UK government’s policies on disaster response treat the ‘psychosocial’ consequences of mass casualty events as issues pertaining to the management of population against future disruption. Policies on responding to disaster are framed against the potential future threatening consequences. These documents tackle the shocking nature of mass casualty events by recommending the immediate and sustained application of psychological treatments to witnesses, rescuers and survivors (Cabinet Office 2013: 115–​34) to alleviate the potential for ‘alarm or extreme behaviour’ as well as ‘public disorder’ (Home Office 2006: 47). The threat is still located in the future, even in the aftermath of an emergency event when disaster response and recovery are being performed! This anticipatory temporality is typical of resilience era security  –​ yet it is paradoxical and ironic. Emergency response is supposed to ‘respond’ to something that has already happened, rather than prepare for the future. Security policies are comfortable in anticipatory terrain, given that this fits their deployment of threat, but not all ‘response’ documentation acts upon 37

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Death and security the future. Structures have to be put in place for response to emergencies in the moment. This is where in-​the-​moment emergency management becomes very interesting, because the state is forced away from its preferred temporality of security. I focus on in-​the-​moment emergency response guidelines for first responders in this chapter to expose the ambiguity of security when it is denied an anticipatory remit. The resulting documentation becomes frayed and confused. I will show in this chapter that when anticipatory temporality is removed from security action, so is the language of security. The terminology of security is profoundly dropped from emergency responder guidelines, which instead take the tone of logistical and humanitarian action. Given the traditional formulation of security as an anticipatory technique against future dangers, ‘security’ gets lost in non-​anticipatory guidelines. We expose something about the performance of security when we explore the uncomfortable situation of in-​the-​ moment emergency response within security policy. So how do we know that in-​the-​moment response is a security practice if the language of security is removed from its doctrines? First, the resilience era has incorporated disaster recovery and response into all major security policies. So a relationship between response and security must exist –​even if it is discursively confused. Second, this chapter makes the argument that interpreting security as the effacement of mortality enables us to dramatically broaden the scope of research to include non-​anticipatory temporalities of security. Such a framing allows us to shed new light on security practices that operate in the moment of emergency rather than within the accepted temporality of security action (against the future threat). Indeed security as the ontological response to mortality enables us to respond to the dramatic under-​theorisation of emergency management identified by Christopher Leite (2015). Death happens in the present tense  –​ so security happens in the present tense. It isn’t always predicated against the future danger. It is important to make this temporal shift for the same reasons I have given for moving away from the usage of biopolitics common within IR (beginning with death, rather than the state, enables us to expose the masquerade of security and sovereignty). By staying within the remit of security discourse (and describing what it does within similar temporal and functional frames), critical research ends up repeating and consolidating some of its assumptions. Security practice is founded upon the assumptions that security protects and fosters life by acting upon the threat of destruction, pandemic or invasion. Threats –​in this definition  –​are dangers that have not happened yet. Security discourse thus takes an anticipatory frame. By and large, critical security research has reproduced this foundational assumption even as it performs critique. Critical security research focuses upon anticipatory technologies (Amoore 2013; Amoore and De Goede 2008; Anderson and Adey 2012; Aradau and Van Munster 2011; 38

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Containing the spectacle De Goede 2008, 2012) and reaffirms the framing of security acting against future danger. So, while we critique the deployment of futurology and anticipation in security practice, we end up reaffirming the central component of this discourse –​ that security acts on the future in the name of protecting the population. This is potentially unhelpful as it consolidates the association between ‘threat’ and the future danger to population, when threat might also come from the past. We can do better than this in our critique. We need to better challenge the association of security with future threat, because the future is extremely useful for the performance of sovereignty. The future is clean, because by its very nature it has not yet happened. The imagination of security takes place in an anticipated future where the problems of day-​to-​day destruction and failure need not be addressed. Futurity is very convenient for the performance of security, and thus sovereignty, because no disruptions are present there. But what if we were to think threat and danger differently? What would happen if critical research freed itself from the requirement to think ‘threat’ as the future danger? What if we engaged with the mess of security on the ground? And what would happen if we did this while refusing to recycle notions of security as the protection/​fostering of life? This book is the result of an attempt to find out, through the study of practices that occur at the bombsite as in-​the-​ moment and retrospective security. This book casts the lingering presence of death at the bombsite as a danger that comes from the present and the past (not the anticipated future). The threat is mortality. Sites of death expose the charade of sovereignty, because they challenge the performance of authority and control so necessary for the illusion of sovereignty. When we associate security with mortality effacement, rather than the prevention of future danger (‘threat’), we open a new direction for critical security studies. Threat, in the mortality paradigm, doesn’t necessarily come from the future. It can also be present in the immediate present and the past, because death has made itself felt in the present and the past. Security practice, then, might exist outside the anticipatory remit provided for it by policy. Rather than accepting the hegemonic claim that security acts upon the future threat to protect us, this book explores the practices performed against death that is immediately unfolding (emergency management) and that which has already happened (the reconstruction and memorialisation of post-​terrorist space). By looking at threat in a different temporal frame, it is possible to disrupt the association of security with the protection of life against future danger. If security acts at the bombsite where the devastation is already apparent, then we can show that security is not interested in protecting life but rather effacing mortality to consolidate the illusion of omnipotent sovereignty. We attain critical purchase by exposing this conceit. This chapter will reclaim emergency management as security practice by looking at it as the mitigation of death. It will begin by observing the reliance 39

Death and security of security policy discourse on anticipatory temporalities, before later moving to explore the components of in-​the-​moment emergency response practices and their effacement of mortality.

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No future, no security? The strange emptiness of emergency response policy This chapter addresses emergency management as an effacement strategy relative to mortality. The appearance of sudden violent deaths in our midst exposes the myth of sovereignty (that there is control, order, authority, certainty and cohesion), and practices of emergency management and recovery function to erase that irruption. They stage a performance of the receding emergency event by (among other practices to be explored in this chapter) walking the police cordon back towards the epicentre of destruction, and restoring the knowability of bodies damaged and destroyed by explosions. Given that security is predicated against future threat, emergency response policy is unsure of how to attain security in the present tense, so in this state of ambiguity, it performs. But while the emergency event has come to dominate security imaginaries of the Global North, contingency planning came from humble origins. Emergency response began its life as a set of practices used to suppress labour unrest in the early twentieth century. Its purpose was to ensure the continuation of essential supplies and industries affected by industrial stoppages. Chris Zebrowski demonstrates the emergence of planning discourses around the potential for organised labour to hold infrastructure to ransom. The British Emergency Powers Act, the first formal emergency planning document to exist, emerged during the context of the First World War, which spurred government officials to securitise certain supplies as ‘essential’ for the first time (Zebrowski 2015: 22–​ 51). Infrastructure was conceptualised as an important component of the state for the first time in the context of total war and domestic subversion. In an interesting parallel to George Sorel’s work of ten years previous, and in anticipation of Walter Benjamin’s publication of Zur Kritik der Gewalt in 1922, British officials explicitly identified the general strike as the catastrophic event of violence that would necessitate the use of emergency powers to secure life –​rather than the world war. Infrastructure was made the referent object of security in these wartime strike-​breaking powers. The powers were later formalised as the Emergency Powers Act in 1920, against an economic context where membership of labour unions had doubled to eight million by 1919 (Zebrowski 2015: 22–​51). We can observe, then, that emergency response is thoroughly capitalist in its origination and that the protection of the ‘essentials of life’ stemmed from an antagonistic relationship between government and organised labour. ‘Emergency’ planning had shifted somewhat by the early stages of the Cold War, when it re-​emerged as ‘civil defence’ in the era of the nuclear arms 40

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Containing the spectacle race. The figure of the striker was replaced by the militarised imagination of nuclear holocaust. Planners in the United States, followed by their European counterparts, began articulating strategies for the management of national infrastructures in the event of nuclear attack (Collier and Lakoff 2008; Davis 2007). They prepared protocols for the consolidation of resources and population in the aftermath of an expected bombardment. But at this point in history, security discourse still maintained that prophylactic protection was eminently possible  –​and civil defence was a planning exercise confined to government departments. Security was not practised through the prospect of the unpreventable danger, as it is now. Rather a discursive separation was still maintained between civil defence and security policy: security was deployed through the prevention of future danger. Civil defence was a separate category. It wasn’t until the rise of the resilience discourse in public policy and the occurrence of 9/​11 that security discourse was radically reorganised and the prophylactic principle was dropped. Managing the inevitable emergency has since become central to the performance of security (Amoore and De Goede 2008; Anderson and Adey 2012; Aradau and Van Munster 2011). Death has come inside the polity. And this performance of security through the emergency event involves a particular temporality. The resilience era uses contingency planning exercises, usually relating to terrorist events, to a high frequency. The imagination and simulation of future events function as explorations of contingency and non-​linear emergence (Anderson 2010: 227), and for our purposes extend the governance over death to those future-​inevitable happenings. Techniques of enactment are used to improve personnel response to the mass of bewildering information around them, including their awareness of particular facts that might appear insignificant until their non-​linear connection to the event is made clear. This contingency flavour is quite distinctive to emergency response training in the resilience era. As Aradau and Van Munster have noted, the abundance of detail provided for participants at the outset of contingency scenarios serves to provide clues about the future event. In the City of Sunderland’s joint response exercise, the introductory preamble contained a vague reference to ‘East European political issues’  –​which was later revealed to be a crucial detail once the exercise focused upon a lorry carrying chemicals that was found to have Polish registration (Aradau and Van Munster 2012). The explorations of non-​linear emergence are designed to train participants to pay attention to seemingly meaningless details, which may attain importance in relation to future developments. Security practitioners must be trained to work with contingency and non-​linear emergence rather than against them, echoing the Revolution in Military Affairs doctrine (Dillon 2007; Dillon and Reid 2009; Massumi 2010). Anticipatory exercises, therefore, train personnel to 41

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Death and security secure through insecurity; death and danger are rehearsed, brought inside the polity and their salience reversed. Emergency management is thought in future tense. However, across North America, European nations and international institutions like the United Nations and European Union, security policy has been split into four (apparently distinct) categories relating to prevention, preparation, response and recovery (Department of Homeland Security 2007; European Council 2010: 16; Home Office 2011). Recovery and response are hereby brought into the remit of security policy. Yet despite this reorientation of security policy into supposedly divergent temporal streams, anticipatory temporalities still dominate. Strategies for response and recovery operate through, bizarrely, anticipatory means to build resilience to the future emergency. Why has this temporal short-​circuit occurred? The turn towards resilience relies upon a heritage of precursor discourses, namely ‘security’, so it is not discursively free to implement its operations without complication. Officials cannot freely rewrite policy temporality, even while incorporating disaster response and recovery into security policy. The aim of resilience is still implicitly tied to attaining ‘security’. Security, however, has never been adequately formulated as a present-​tense state of being, because it is unavoidably juxtaposed with protection from ‘threat’. ‘Threat’, by its discursive constitution, hasn’t happened yet. As such, policies of resilience and/​or security are still discursively trapped in the logic of anticipation. That causes a problem when emergency management is introduced as a present-​tense practice. Security has only previously been articulated against the future threat, so there is no clarity about how to attain a state of security in the present tense. ‘Response’ and ‘recovery’ thus become mitigations of future danger. But, outside security policy documents, governments must pass guidelines for in-​the-​moment emergency response to police, fire and rescue and ambulance services. So what can we learn from exploring in-​the-​moment guidelines for the first responders to disaster scenes? We learn, first, that security is evacuated from the documentation. In-​the-​ moment emergency response guidelines provided to responders do not deploy an anticipatory remit. This provides us with an interesting window on the current formulation of security. Where anticipatory temporality is dropped in in-​ the-​moment emergency response, it is important to note that security is also dropped. Where there is no future, there is no security. The move to present tense empties emergency response of security discourse. These policy documents are not framed in terms of attaining security despite their incorporation into resilient security planning. Policy formulations avoid the topic of attaining security in the aftermath of a disaster, instead providing structural protocols for interagency cooperation and communication (Cabinet Office 2013; Department of Homeland Security 2007) as well as the logistical division of actions undertaken 42

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Containing the spectacle by various agencies of the state (forensics, the NHS, coroners, police and local councils). So while these protocols have been brought within the remit of security policy by virtue of their inclusion within resilience strategies, they are ambiguous about their relationship to security. Given the incomplete overhaul of security policy in terms of resilience, emergency response has entered the fray but remains askew. No one quite knows how to frame a security protocol that works ‘backwards’ on the event that has already happened or is happening. Exploring why security has been erased from the aims of emergency response, despite their supposed relationship, helps us to look at security anew and to problematise ‘death’ in the resilience era. Most emergency response policy says surprisingly little about the implementation of in-​the-​moment emergency response. Reflecting the contemporary entanglement of resilience discourse with preceding eras of ‘security’, policymakers seem unsure how to detail the methods by which emergency management can attain security in the present tense. The discursive heritage of security juxtaposes it against potential threat, not the happening event. As such, documentation of emergency response by the Department of Homeland Security, Cabinet Office and United Nations (Cabinet Office 2013; Department of Homeland Security 2013; United Nations 2013) is very light on prescriptive steps. Instead, these documents of ‘response’ are long bureaucratic missives on goals for interagency communication and hierarchical structures of response, replete with meaningless buzzwords. But buried deep inside the policy frameworks of anticipatory resilience, one can find the emergency response protocols provided to those responder agencies and civil protection professionals likely to respond to emergency events. These protocols are manuals for the objectification and compartmentalisation of mortality, demonstrating the return to the modernist paradigm during the era of the postmodern. The UK Cabinet Office advises that these protocols are intended to complement practices of emergency preparedness, where potential catastrophic futures are imagined and exercised. Yet the emergency event is constituted very differently in ‘recovery’ documentation than it is in pre-​emergency preparedness. While the imagination of the future event is properly postmodern in Bauman’s terms, because it exceeds every boundary in order to explore contingency and the unknown (for instance, the simulation of dirty bombs in downtown Los Angeles), in-​the-​moment emergency response does not constitute the event as unknown nor contingent. It doesn’t secure through insecurity and contingency; instead, it constitutes the event through lexicons of the already known. Regardless of the context, it is ordained that the event can be effectively shut down by applying the steps contained within the relevant documentation. Events, and their courses, are already pre-​known in response policy. Once death has broken through the masquerade, the modernist playbook is reinvoked to resecure the facade of sovereignty. 43

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Death and security If anticipatory technologies function to explore contingency in their performances of ontological security through resilience, then in-​the-​moment emergency management and response function to smother it. Emergency responses to major incidents attempt to absorb the ‘emergence/​y’ of the event and consign it to the past as quickly as possible. And whereas anticipatory scenarios and simulations are figured around the emerging unknown, emergency response protocols tightly bind the event within conditions of the already known. This contrast is important because it points to the sudden switch back to the tools of modernity, in Bauman’s terms. Threat is once again objectified and suppressed –​rather than imagined as the contingency that fosters life’s emergence. In the next section I will read in-​the-​moment emergency management as a performance that attempts to clean up the spaces in which our rational and secure foundations have been blown apart. I will explore the contrast between the attempt to mitigate mortality through resilience policy’s anticipatory tools of auto-​immune response (the narrative of vitality and adaptivity in the face of emergency) and the contrastingly frantic function of post-​event techniques to mop up the salience of mortality when the event breaks through attempts to prevent it. The reversion from the supposed acceptance of contingency in resilience theory to strategies of containment reflects the chimera of resilience policy: it does not really allow death or contingency into the remit of security. This is a mere pretence that dissolves under scrutiny. Mortality effacement is still the key functionality of security policy, even in the discursive era of resilience. Performing the cordon, knowledge and emergency management Tracy Davis, a performance scholar, has explored the civil defence practices of the Cold War as ‘stages’ (in the sense of theatre architecture) of emergency (Davis 2007). She reads emergency training exercises, and the ritualised education of the American, Canadian and British public in ‘duck and cover’ drills, through lenses of rehearsal and acting: undertaken in preparation of survival in a catastrophe, even when mutually assured destruction made this laughable. In somewhat related fashion, I  use the notion of performance in Judith Butler’s sense of performativity to explore the enactment of emergency management. This performance against the spectre of the crisis constitutes the meaning of security in the present tense. As we saw in the previous section, governments cannot articulate how to attain security in the present tense, but by performing the restoration of normality through the steps of emergency response their police, paramedics and firefighters constitute the meaning of security for the present tense. Where emergencies are threatening for states given their contingency and unexpected developments (Dillon 2007, 2011), emergency response suppresses the ‘emergence’ of the disaster through receding cordons of knowledge. It ‘knows’ the emergency at all turns, to perform its de-​escalation. It ‘knows’ 44

Containing the spectacle

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and suppresses the incursion of death to reconstitute the performance of sovereignty. By exploring in-​the-​moment measures of emergency response, we see that the meaning of security is the reassertion of regularity contra the contingency and movement of the event. The reassertion of certainty and the cessation of unexpected movement are the steps used to suppress the incursion of mortality and uncertainty. I will now explore the various ‘acts’ in the stage play of emergency management, paying attention to their theatrical performance of receding emergency: Act One: emergency declaration and temporal bounding The primary step in reclaiming security from the breach imposed upon it by sudden mortality is the declaration of emergency. When faced with an emerging and unpredictable crisis, response agencies immediately apply temporal bounds upon the event to suppress its contingency. The disaster cannot continue ‘emerging’ if it can be placed upon a timeline. So timelines are suddenly applied. The process of declaration initiates a performance whereby the ‘emergence’ of emergency is countered through the performance of knowledge. Declaration of emergency places the event on a timeline towards its completion, according to pre-​prepared diagrams of stages of emergency. The timeline elaborates upon an end-​stage for the event, and thus contingency is actively supressed. The history of emergency management shows a clear link between the growing importance of the ‘power to declare’ an emergency and the birth of the ‘modern era’ of disaster management, especially in the United States where the decline of the Soviet Union brought about the slow death of the ‘civil defense’ era and the rise of security articulated around ‘emergency’ (resilience). The Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act was signed into law by President Reagan in 1988 and commentators remark upon the connection between its historical context and the robust redefinition of emergency powers contained within –​demarcating the beginning of the ‘modern era’ of disaster management (Sylves 2015: 72). The Act authorised the president to take performative control of emergencies, through the verbal statement of declaration. At the end of the Cold War, and the end of the prophylactic discourse of security as deterrence, the seeds of resilient security are evident in the turn towards performance of emergency response and declaration. The post-​Cold War executive takes immediate control of the emergency event through the performative utterance of declaration and the assertion of timelines towards the emergency’s end. Protocols list the features that constitute emergency, such as overwhelming numbers of casualties or the overwhelming of local capacity to respond (Meyers 1994: 25–​9). Responders must ‘declare’ the state of emergency to other agencies and command structures using the set phrases (usually:  ‘initiate major incident procedure’ in the UK) (LESLP 2012). The emergency is thus called into 45

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Death and security being. This assertion of the event’s immediacy is intended to enable extraordinary coordination between agencies and the deployment of resources, but its declaration also performatively invokes the end of the event. It bounds the event within temporal limits and enables the mitigation of mortality. Once the declaration of a ‘major incident’ has been made, the emergency can be placed on a timeline to completion. The declaration asserts a temporality, the stages of which are often mapped in emergency response documentation. The London Emergency Services Liaison Panel provides a diagram that traces the temporal stages by which the emergency can be exorcised.1 The diagram demonstrates how the ‘restoration of normality’ begins with the declaration of an emergency event, even though the scene is still burning and bodies remain scattered. So even at this very early stage of emergency declaration, before anything else has happened, the end of the event is prophesied and called into being. Emergency management diagrams of this sort assert the convergence of the beginning of the event and the beginning-​of-​its-​end, while the formal UK Guidelines for Emergency Response similarly highlight that the response period ‘is relatively short […] lasting for a matter of hours or days’ (Cabinet Office 2013: 10). As such, the declaration of emergency presences the disaster and performs its entry into the polity, but also simultaneously asserts control over that which is supposedly outside control. Declaration bounds the event within temporality. This first act in the performance within in-​the-​moment emergency response is fascinating in its contrast with anticipatory policies of security. Unlike the constitution of the event in anticipatory imagination, the duration of the emergency is already fixed and accounted for. While resilience policies imagine the event in terms of its unknowable origin, direction and duration (its contingency), emergency response protocols begin by asserting its known immediacy and its imminent conclusion. This knowledge technique, and others subsequently addressed, represents the return to modernist tools of mortality suppression in the postmodern era. The irruption of the mortality event immediately coincides with its suppression through the application of knowledge and time. While in-​the-​ moment emergency response is awkwardly framed within security policy and alienated in such language, it clearly reflects the compartmentalisation and effacement of mortality associated within traditional security policy. We see that the legislative centralisation of declaration within disaster management occurs within a discursive constitution of emergency management as performance. Without the existential Soviet enemy, the performance of emergency response had to be invigorated (as performance) to bear the weight of an era where political elites no longer promised security through prophylaxis. Where unpreventable and unpredictable events become the paradigm through which security is deployed, performance becomes centralised in emergency management to mitigate this abrogation of the state’s promise to protect citizens. The state performs the end of emergency to simulate the restoration of sovereignty 46

Containing the spectacle after a disaster event. It performs recovery to simulate a meaning of security in the present tense.

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Act Two: walking the cordon Once the declaration of an emergency event has occurred, thus implementing temporal boundaries upon it, the event is framed as problematic in terms of spatial emergence. It moves from time to space in its performative constitution and suppression. The next step in response protocols is to spatially bound the site through the deployment of ‘inner’ and ‘outer cordons’. Then, the event can no longer grow. It will be bounded and, through the application of knowledge and cordons, no longer spatially emergent. It will stop being emergent and the state will feel easier with regard to its performance of sovereign authority contra mortality. The emergence of death is constrained. The inner cordon erected by police functions to ‘provide immediate security of the hazard and potential crime scene’, while also protecting the public and ‘controlling’ sightseers (Cabinet Office 2013; LESLP 2012: 16–​18). A separate spatial area known as the ‘outer cordon’ is established beyond the inner cordon so that ‘vetted people’ may have access to the scene. Finally, an exterior orbit cordon is established further back still, so that vehicles may not approach the scene. These strategies of bounding the event draw limits around its emergence and once these markers are in place, the event cease to emerge any further. Subsequently, the management of the manifesting event is undertaken through processes that gradually shrink the inner and outer cordons, performatively enacting the spatial withdrawal of the event. In the aftermath of the 1996 Manchester bomb, this withdrawal involved an additional stage given the size of the blast whereby the inner cordon was sub-​divided into six management areas (Williams et al. 2000). Alongside the physical performance of cordoning, media are simultaneously held at bay through the calculated release of information by trained spokespeople. Indeed, controlling the reporting of the event is understood as spatial governance that ‘minimises the wider impacts’ of the event and controls its repercussions upon public confidence in the emergency services (Cabinet Office 2013: 135–​52; LESLP 2012: 54). Once again, we see the modernist playbook at work –​mortality is compartmentalised, suppressed and then mitigated through a preordained apparatus of knowledge in order that the sudden appearance of death might be vanished. This is far removed from the resilience playbook of contingency and the supposed organic response of vitality. The salience of the emergency demands the immediate suppression of mortality rather than relying on the organic self-​ healing mechanisms imagined in resilience policy. Security in its traditional form of mortality effacement (compartmentalisation through the enforcement of prophylactic barriers) is clearly present within the management of cordons, 47

Death and security which demarcate and establish barriers before effecting suppression. These cordons are then ‘walked backwards’ by police towards the epicentre of the event, performing the vanquishing of death.

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Act Three: knowing the bodies Once cordons are in place, the event is both temporally and spatially circumscribed. It can no longer emerge along either axis. At this point, the focus of event management then constitutes the location of the emergency through the next unknown frontier:  it seeks to know the bodies that are trapped, injured, walking wounded and deceased. Through practices and protocols of emergency response the event is constituted as manifesting spatially in these bodies, which must be ushered into holding centres, ambulances, cut free from debris and transported to morgues. Emergency management uses bodies to suppress the contingency of the emergency. First it attends to the bodies that are scattered. The event ceases to be ‘emergent’, and thus mortality’s salience is effaced, when bodies return from a state of being unknown. The emergency is closed through processes of ‘triage’ and ‘reconciliation investigation’. According to international protocols, recovered bodies must be grouped and counted according to their degree of injury (Coppola 2011:  312; LESLP 2012:  34–​5)  –​returning them from the state of being unknown, compartmentalising the event and its fatal consequences. When the time comes that no new casualties are being presented to responders, and when victims are being evacuated to hospitals and morgues, the disaster can be closed through the completion of labelling and identification procedures. Ambulance crews are instructed to supplement the triage tags attached to victims with personal details. Police responders are instructed to attach identification labels to deceased bodies, while maintaining an accurate count of the numbers of bodies dispatched to hospitals and morgues (Home Office 2006: 25–​ 47; LESLP 2012: 36). Once the numbers of bodies ceases to fluctuate (and, it must be added, once the structural condition of the scene ceases to change), the disaster can be closed through standardised processes of ‘disaster victim identification’. Trained personnel log the locations of bodies, and body parts, and assign them unique numbers. Pathologists then implement the stage of ‘reconciliation investigation’ –​where the uncertainty of the event is closed through the reconciliation of deceased bodies (and body parts) with their displaced living identities (LESLP 2012: 39). The process of disaster victim identification is described as the ‘the attribution of the correct name to human remains’ by forensic scientists (Cordner et al. 2011). This extremely telling phrase speaks of the problematic excess caused by remains. Remains linger until they can be named. Once they are named, they return from a state of excess and become ‘the body’. The body, unlike ‘remains’, 48

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Containing the spectacle is known. This reconciliation performs the transformation of the excessive horror that lies beyond control and comprehension (mortality) into the restitution of normality. The remains become the named body, which is returned to the family once the coroner has recorded their manner of death and closed surrounding questions. Sociologists of disaster have commented on practices of body recovery, highlighting the social and cultural underpinnings of practices that otherwise make little sense. Sue Blanshan and Enrico Quarantelli note the comments of an Italian general tasked with disaster recovery after the 1963 Vajont Dam disaster that killed 1,800 people, who opined that it was absurd to use the labour of thousands of soldiers to ‘dig down through 10 feet of rocks and stones to find a body so we can rebury it in only 5 feet of dirt’ (Blanshan and Quarantelli 1981). Noting the prevalence of procedures dedicated to the recovery and identification of human remains, and the sheer amount of labour power, Blanshan and Quarantelli highlight the centrality of restoring personhood within practices of disaster recovery. The authors note that even the early stages of body recovery, such as ‘clean-​up’, function to return a degree of identity to a body through the gentle removal of mud and combing back of the hair. Disaster strips the body of its personhood alongside other such bodies  –​ creating a zone of rubble and remains. This disidentification is unacceptable to cultures versed in modernist individualised subjectivity, and the recovery of personhood is central to the effacement of the disaster event and, as such, mortality. Remains are treated gently and with utmost respect to initiate the performance that brings back their personhood. This performance of mortality effacement through the restoration of identity is undertaken slowly, to effect accuracy, and is presented as infallible –​given the seriousness of the matter at hand. With that in mind, it is rarely reported that in the aftermath of the World Trade Center collapse samples of chicken and hot dogs (originating from restaurants in the towers) were carefully collected, cleaned and dispatched to the Mortuary Response Team in the mistaken belief that they may be human (Simpson and Stehr 2003: 117). Again, these personhood procedures are never called security –​despite the situation of disaster response policy within security. They are not called security because security is thought against future threat. It has a different discursive temporality. And yet, as researchers we can perform our own reconciliation of identity at this point. We can reconcile disaster victim investigation and triage with their status as security components by interpreting security as the mediation of mortality through compartmentalisation and effacement. These processes perform the return of certainty and thus the suppression of contingency. They use prophylactic barriers to remove mortality from the polity and separate it from the world of the living. 49

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Death and security Finally, once scattered bodies are receiving attention, emergency responders are directed to turn their attention to those bodies that are unexpectedly moving. Disaster response protocol frames survivors as ‘looters’  –​and in doing so, reconstitutes them as components within the continuing emergency. Survivors become embodiments of the disaster event and its deathly incursion. Within the remit of the Homeland Security disaster response framework, for example, individual US state policies discuss the responsibility of local police and attached military units to initiate ‘anti-​looting patrols of evacuated areas’ alongside their search and rescue tasks (State of Connecticut 2011: 15). Researchers have long contended that ‘looting’ is a disaster myth that is propagated through the media (Constable 2008; Fischer 1998; Tierney et  al. 2006), yet the problematic policy framing of disaster-​displaced persons as embodiments of the disruptive event resembles the trend within risk-​based security practices to blur the line between categories of the at-​risk and risky (Aradau 2004; Heath-​Kelly 2013a). Instead of dedicating necessary resources to helping those lives made precarious by Hurricane Katrina, disaster management practitioners and agencies targeted sustenance foragers (Constable 2008) as threatening embodiments of the emergency and authorised suppressing force against them. In Constable’s estimates, rather than helping to alleviate the emergency this misdirection of resources cost hundreds of lives in New Orleans (2008: 524). Bodies become the stage upon which the emergency is performatively constituted as emergent, and the event is suppressed through performance of knowledge of injuries and identity. Simultaneously, unexpectedly moving bodies are performatively constituted as ‘looters’ rather than victims of the event, in an instance whereby the securitisation of contingency by the state ends up targeting its own populace. And once again, this compartmentalisation strategy of security frantically tries to close the emergency through suppression, in direct opposition to the resilience policy discourse that imagines a scenario of organic adaptations and evolutions. Act Four: boring the emergency out of existence What else moves unexpectedly, apart from bodies? What else can the frantic performance of disaster suppression perform as a totem of the emergency? News moves unexpectedly. After a disaster event, information becomes dangerous, suddenly emergent and uncontrollable. How does disaster response frame the suppression of multiple conflicting streams of information as threat and how does it suppress that uncontrolled movement? The securitising response is to flood the airwaves with an official narrative and suppress all other streams of news. We are all familiar with the barrage of information and media coverage that accompanies any major incident –​but 50

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Containing the spectacle how does this ‘informing’ function? What does it do to the emergency? Rather than concealing the evidence of disaster events in order to protect an image of sovereignty, sensationalised visibility is afforded to crises in order to effect their mitigation. This, paradoxically, is key to the performance of emergency mitigation. Bombardment with information is functional. As Ignacio Ramonet has commented with regard to the first Gulf War, ‘Overinformation led to disinformation. The avalanche of news –​often uncooked –​broadcast “live and in real time” made viewers hysterical with the illusion that they were being informed’ (Ramonet 1991). And of what were they being informed? The mass distribution of ‘uncooked, real time’ information functioned to inform the public only that the ‘crisis’ was under control (Raboy and Dagenais 1992: 7). Constant coverage of terrorist attacks and the frequent statements of official police and government spokespeople do not ‘inform’ the audience through content, which is often extremely lacking; rather they simulate the control of crisis while accelerating the decline of the emergency’s salience –​such that it subsequently stops being news and, thus, an emergent crisis. Visibility effects the illusion of control, and control effaces the excessive disruption within the emergency. Much has been written in the disciplines of International Relations, philosophy and cultural studies on the role of the media in constituting hegemony and thus protecting the status quo. These literatures explore how media content is used to construct discursive realities and perpetuate hegemony. Media frames are used to constitute identity and knowledge. I will address this literature before making the argument that we also need to look at the ‘materiality’ of rolling news, rather than just the content of media frames. By this I  mean the functionality of constant coverage, and how it fills an emergency with hundreds of mindless details that simulate the illusion of control over the event and the emergency’s salience is mitigated. The critical philosophical treatment of cultural industries, including news media, owes a substantial debt to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who argued in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1991) that culture industries had the specific function of legitimating capitalist societies. Dispelling the image of a ‘free media’ under capitalism, they reframed the culture industries as important agents of socialisation and mediators of political reality. The Frankfurt School borrowed insights from Gramscian theory regarding the ways in which capitalism rules through consent, rather than solely coercion, and analysed the ways in which this consent is manufactured in modern mediatised societies. Through framing and silencing, culture industries maintain control of mass perception. In Policing the Crisis (1978), Stuart Hall and colleagues applied these insights to the contemporary age, analysing the constitution of a ‘mugging crime wave’ through news media. Here they study the social production of ‘news’ through 51

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the bureaucratic organisation of news media organisations, and the discursive organisation of what ‘makes sense’ as a story (and gets selected because it sells). They argue, with reference to the discursive construction of ‘mugging’ in the British press, that: Problematic events breach our commonly held expectations and are therefore threatening to a society based around the expectation of consensus, order and routine. Thus the media’s mapping of problematic events within the conventional understandings of the society is crucial in two ways. The media define for the majority of the population what significant events are taking place, but, also, they offer powerful interpretations of how to understand these events. Implicit in those interpretations are orientations towards the events and the people or groups involved in them. (Hall et al. 1978: 56–​7)

The ideological role of the media, they argue, ensures the propagation of the ideas of the ruling class –​closing the space available for counter-​narratives and challenges. These ideas have found traction in constructivist IR and criminology, especially within treatments of political and media discourse during the ‘War on Terror’. Before the War on Terror, David Altheide authored his important treatise on fear, Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis (2002). He argues that we are witnessing the growth of a fear industry, within which the media are primary players. The media’s role is understood in relation to the constitution of identity –​and fear is the most salient discourse against which to construct an ‘us’. The media present images of a threatening Other, whom we should fear, and in doing so constitute an identity for those who are threatened. This position is echoed by Richard Jackson’s Writing the War on Terrorism (2005), exploring how political and media discourse constitutes identity in opposition to an object of fear (the terrorist). This identity discourse then enables political action and restricts the space for dissent. These analyses of media, fear and crisis focus on the content of the news frame: the threatening Other and their relationship to us. Framings employed to make sense of disasters are obviously important in the construction of meaning –​but what about the moment when sites of death are broadcast to the world, without knowledge of the causes or perpetrators? It is in this moment that we witness the spectacle of mortality in full force. Jenny Edkins has detailed the ways in which trauma is experienced as an unreality, something that escapes the realm of language and cannot be contained, returning in nightmarish flashbacks over time (Edkins 2003). When terrorist attacks such as 9/​11 are broadcast, the audience witnesses the horror of mortality as it bursts through the normal everyday suppression of such matters. The excess beyond sovereignty is made plainly visible, even if it cannot be represented in language. These

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Containing the spectacle moments temporarily disrupt the sovereign claim to authority and generate an extensive array of actions to mitigate the explosion of unreality, concealing it once again with ‘security’. Twenty-​four-​hour media coverage is a way in which this phenomenon of horror is contained. After the attacks, commentators fixate on the intricate details connected to the emergency –​the last known sightings of perpetrators, the exact timings of building collapse and the tediously empty statements of local officials. This coverage functions not to distribute information to a public, but to simulate control and knowledge over the stunning emergency (Raboy and Dagenais 1992: 7). The content of the media frame is actually redundant. Streaming coverage is actually communicating: ‘we know things! Things can be known!’ Like walking-​the-​cordon or identifying the dead, this practice reinforces the symbolic order of the known and the knowable over the irruption of trauma. It creates a prophylactic boundary through manipulation of the airwaves to restrain the incursion of mortality. This is how security operates in the moment. Danny Schechter details the coverage of the 9/​ 11 attacks in Media Wars:  News at a Time of Terror through the journalistic notes he took during the time. He reports that reporting of facts regarding the plane strikes quickly descended into the puppeting of familiar pundit commentaries to maintain the barrage of information, alongside the repetition of the same visual shots of the burning wreckage (Schechter 2003: 5–​7). Only two days later, on 13 September, did major news stations articulate the events within a frame of war. Before that point of articulation, the media simply made noise to control and fill the gap opened by the events. This noisy echo-​chamber phenomenon has become the staple media response to terrorist events and was evident in the response to the London bombings of 2005, the Boston bombing of 2013 and the Paris shootings of 2015. Images of destruction are repeated endlessly, news anchors cut away to the latest snippet of unconfirmed speculation, police officers speak slowly and carefully on camera with excessive detail about the exact timings of non-​ events regarding scene stabilisation. This is all to simulate knowledge and control, to fill the awful void of trauma caused by mortality’s sudden reappearance. Constant coverage functions to bore the audience away from the screen and thus bore the emergency out of existence. Once again, the techniques of prophylactic security return during in-​the-​moment emergency response –​when the aporia of sovereignty becomes visible. Barriers are constructed to remove death from the polity and neutralise the traumatic excess –​ this is security.

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Curtain falls? The move to disaster recovery In Acts One to Four, we saw how emergency management practices constitute the event in very different ways than anticipatory techniques or policies of resilience. Emergency management seeks to smother and absorb the uncertainty of the event through the performance of knowledge, control and stabilisation. At all stages of response, it contains (and constitutes) the event through receding cordons –​both spatial and relative to knowledge. In sequential order, the declaration of the emergency begins by invoking its temporal end; then the exceptional space of the event is limited through media management and reduced through the withdrawal of the cordons placed around it; subsequently the emergency is spatially constituted through gathering wounded, deceased and risky bodies; and finally the event is closed through the tagging, relocation and ‘reconciliation’ of these bodies with their identities. Simultaneously rolling media coverage plugs all desire to witness the mortality event with endless, repetitive injections of ‘knowledge’ into the gap of the unknown. These performances mitigate the irruption of mortality by performing the receding emergency and the advance of knowledge, simulating the return of control and normality. Events are already known through processes of emergency management  –​their conclusions are already foretold and their impacts are pre-​ bounded. The constitution of events through emergency response, then, takes an almost opposite approach to contingency than that of precautionary and anticipatory security. This contrast is important for understanding security as the effacement of death. It points to the excess of death that suddenly disrupts the illusion of perpetuity and continuity within the resilience era and demands an immediate return to the ‘objectification’ techniques of older security –​where danger is compartmentalised and suppressed through the performance of knowledge. The resilience policy’s position vis-​à-​vis the supposed inclusion of death and contingency is exposed as a fraud: security still functions to efface mortality. Emergency management performs the event out of existence; it performs the receding spectacle of death and the restoration of normality. But emergency response is not successful. This application of absorption practices during emergency response and rolling news coverage is supposed to close the emergent event. And yet events are not closed by the ‘reconciliation’ of bodies with their identities nor through the restoration of critical infrastructure, as security discourses would have us believe. Neither does media overload render the sudden emergence of mortality benign. Rather, death continues to be acted upon through retrospective political practices at bombsites in subsequent months and years. Its resonance is evident within memorialisation

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Containing the spectacle projects, commemorative ceremonies and disputes over the use of ‘sacred’ post-​ emergency ground. All respond to the excesses of mortality that spill over the hurried efforts to close its emergence and to deny its continued resonance. In essence, the lingering resonance of the event is evident in the range of practices performed subsequently in its name. The practice of establishing permanent memorials to emergency is rarely envisioned within discourses of resilience and emergency recovery –​so what is the significance of this symbolic architectural redevelopment? Most work in memory studies points to the political function of commemoration, where the past is renegotiated and remade in the present to assert particular narratives of victimhood, triumph or nation  –​or the function of disrupting such narratives in the case of counter-​memorials (Edkins 2003; Hite 2012; Young 1992). Acts of memory accord significance and reproduce/​disrupt established politics. But what of memorials to bombsites? As Lisle has argued, the memory of terrorist bombings is used to securitise identities as suspect (see also Hutchison 2010) and to reassert discourses of global cosmopolitan citizenship (Lisle 2013). But can we also understand them as security practices that work to efface death and to reassert ontological integrity contra mortality? To explore the excess of events beyond emergency management practices, it is interesting to consider the near-​ubiquitous construction of memorials upon sites of contemporary urban destruction. Their function is to mop up the afterlife of the event and to remake it, or, as Tom Lundborg explains relative to the architectural designs for the Freedom Tower, to govern the trauma of an event by ‘folding’ it into an architectural form (Lundborg 2012). These are retroactive, and sometimes unofficial, security practices that act to contain mortality and to secure it within discourses of resilience and nation. Within this remit the architectural rendering of the disaster event into a memorial speaks to the ‘mopping up’ of disruptive resonance and the remaking of political space. Memorials secure through the failure to secure (Heath-​Kelly 2015a) –​effacing the horror of mortality through ritual and elaborate stonework. In reading security as sociology of death, it is important to note that the emergency event exceeds the imagination and control of the emergency response practices designed to smother it. Emergency management is meant to stabilise and contain the event –​and yet the salience of mortality does not stop when the fires are put out and the bodies removed. Violent deaths continue to be politically significant long after the bodies and rubble are hidden from view because such events burst through the charade of security in spectacular fashion. These evidences of mortality leave marks on the imagination of the political community, as well as bodies and space. This is by no means a novel statement:  the disciplines of memory studies and trauma studies have long explored the continued

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Death and security resonance of those events that states have tried to silence (Caruth 1995; Edkins 2003; Felman and Laub 1992; Hite 2012), as have readings of ‘scars’ that haunt politics (Steele 2013). But these hauntings are important for the conceptualisation of security. They speak to the excess of mortality that escapes the suppression tactics of emergency management and disrupts the performance of sovereignty and order. The resonance of death continues to disrupt authority, even when the debris is cleared away and the bodies buried. And the next chapter begins to explore the formulation of post-​disaster memory as a security arena, to be intervened upon through techniques of counselling and architecture. Only then is mortality securely concealed from view. Note 1 Which cannot be reproduced here, given copyright restrictions, but can be freely accessed online from LESLP (2012: 8).

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Reflecting absence? Disaster recovery and the World Trade Center

W

after a disaster, and why? Security policies commonly divide their mandate into four sections (prevention, preparation, response and recovery), and the previous chapters have explored how ‘preparation’ and ‘response’ are blurred in policy and become somewhat indistinguishable. In security policy, both are performed through the anticipation of the future emergency. ‘Response’ has now become the recognition of systemic vulnerabilities within the polity through the imagination of the future event. Having outlined this overlap, and the reasons behind it, the previous chapter then moved to interrogate the protocols and practices of in-​the-​moment disaster response. What happens outside the anticipatory frame? It found that removing the futuristic temporality for the conduct of security also meant that ‘security’ actions were reclassified as logistical and humanitarian actions. Without the future, there is apparently no security. The chapter then explored these ‘logistical and humanitarian’ processes performed upon emergencies to mitigate their impact and read them through the lens of mortality effacement. Through this frame, it was possible to reintegrate them into the realm of security practices and explain their situation within security policies. Emergency management suffocates the incursion of mortality through the reconstitution of knowledge and normality. It explicitly performs, and thus makes real, the vanquishing of the disaster and the withdrawal of death. It mitigates the emergency event, through cordons, timelines and bodies, to produce an image of adaptive immortality contra death. Thus, emergency response performs the receding emergency to simulate the existence of certainty, cohesion and authority. It defeats death through in-​the-​moment performance of the emergency’s end; emergency management is a security practice that reconstitutes the authority of the sovereign. Disaster recovery, the subject of this chapter, is the subsequent step in the performance of security. It follows disaster response and identifies danger that comes from the past. Its solution for death (and, as such, its security content) is hat happens

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framed within a longer-​term management of resilience after the disaster. It is defined in terms of the adaptive capacity present within communities to bounce back stronger for having been affected by a challenge; like emergency management, disaster recovery performs the withdrawal of death and the triumph of life but over a longer time period. For example, in UK policy: Recovery is a complex and long running process that will involve many more agencies and participants than the response phase. Recovery is defined as the process of rebuilding, restoring and rehabilitating the community following an emergency, but it is more than simply the replacement of what has been destroyed and the rehabilitation of those affected. Local communities may also look upon an emergency as an opportunity to regenerate an area. Regeneration is about transformation and revitalisation. (Cabinet Office 2013: 81)

The UK government policy on emergency recovery goes on to state that recovery is a ‘complex social and developmental process’, which works to best effect when ‘communities exercise a high degree of self-​determination’ (Cabinet Office 2013: 83) –​highlighting once again the similarity between neoliberal understandings of the free market as a creative force and the conceptualisation of resilient security (Walker and Cooper 2011). Recovery is presented as overlapping with ‘regeneration’, and connected with the visual and psychological reintroduction of ‘dynamism’ to an area and the reduction in demands made upon local services (Cabinet Office 2013:  83). This dynamism again seems to rely upon the notion of economic vitality. Indeed, policy guidance notes that two of the first three steps to be undertaken by the immediate Recovery Coordinating Group are the determination of opportunities for ‘economic development and regeneration’ and for ‘increasing the social and physical resilience of the area’ (Cabinet Office 2013: 94). While unmentioned, this British framing of disaster recovery seems to rely upon the example of the Manchester bombing of 1996. The IRA bomb was placed in the commercial centre of the city and decommissioned 57,000 square metres of office space, causing a loss of an estimated £50 million in retail turnover in the subsequent two months (Williams et al. 2000). The recovery from the bombing is framed as an archetypal success in political discourse, given that it fostered extensive public–​private partnerships through the Millennium Task Force that led to the economic redevelopment of the city centre. The masterplan for this economic redevelopment clearly prioritised the economic regeneration of the city centre, in the context of Manchester’s preceding urban decline, and notes how planners carefully opened ‘sunken’ areas like Piccadilly Gardens for public use to counter their previous occupation by ‘drug dealers’ (EDAW 2002). In terms of city planning then, disaster events are framed in recovery policy as opportunities for commercialisation through resilience and regeneration. This is their supposed vitality. Effacing a disaster, and the evidence of mortality,

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Reflecting absence? seems to rely on the stimulation of economic growth. This is the performance that constitutes ‘life’s adaptive response’ to the incursion of death, qua the resilience discourse. This is how mortality is mitigated post hoc. Design is used to suppress memory and spatially exclude dark sunken areas of urban decline, while stimulating commerce. This is both memory work and the promise of a ‘dynamic’ future. It is the mitigation of visual reminders of mortality (bombsite space) and the simultaneous performance of resilient, adaptive vitality that can overcome disastrous events. But, as we see in recovery policies, this physical and economic regeneration of bombed areas is not enough by itself. Policymakers identify that other measures are also required to completely suppress the disaster event, even after the streets are cleared and commerce stimulated. There is also a non-​spatial, non-​economic lingering of death. Policymakers understand that the event, or mortality as we understand it here, continues to wreak its destruction through memory. The event site may be physically concealed through urban planning and regeneration, and the bodies collected and treated, but a threat continues to emerge from the past –​necessitating recovery actions performed upon memory. The incursion of mortality, with all its challenges for political sovereignty, lives on within human memory. Emergency recovery frames the event as still ongoing then –​even at this late stage. This framing of mutating emergency is reminiscent of the sudden jumps in response protocol, which constituted spatial and temporal components of the emergency in a sequence that moved from bombsite to bodies and then media. We witness another such performative constitution of emergency within disaster recovery, as located in memory. Of the four areas to which recovery professes to attend (environment, infrastructure, economy and humanitarian assistance), humans are the most difficult to remake after a disaster. Humans remember death and destruction, unlike concrete and infrastructure, which can be (relatively) quickly repaired. Death lives on, hidden within human memory. Memory is thus threatening to the recognition of the sovereign as authoritative contra death. As such, efforts to consolidate recovery actively work upon memory through techniques that act upon trauma (such as counselling) and treating the memory inherent within the visual landscape (such as memorialisation). This chapter explores the ways in which disaster recovery is practised through the effacement of death via its situation in memory. Crucially, it argues that practices undertaken upon memory, through psychological treatment or the construction of memorials, are security actions –​rather than occurrences that follow the security event. They mitigate the experience of mortality through retrospective action. They reconstitute security and political sovereignty and, as such, they are security practices.

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Thinking memory and trauma practices as security Apparently, emergency management (the immediate application of suppression technologies upon emergencies) doesn’t work. It must be unsuccessful in mitigating the emergency event; otherwise, disaster recovery would not be required. Stopping the spread of fires and identifying the victims apparently does not stop the emergency. What remains of the emergency then? And what does this conceptualisation of emergency reveal? Policies of emergency recovery identify the disaster as remaining disruptive in the forms of traumatic memory and grief. While it has been noted that the incursion of mortality into the polity provokes the application of immediate psychological treatment (including the immediate deployment of 9,000 mental health specialists to the World Trade Center site on 9/​11; Fassin and Rechtman 2009:  1), security policies also remain concerned about traumatic symptoms that become evident later. Disaster recovery policy in the UK, for example, recommends the application of psychological tests upon victims and witnesses months after the event (Cabinet Office 2011). This demonstrates an attitude of prolonged vigilance with regard to the lingering, not quite quelled, emergency as it resides within people. The emergency lives on within people and their memories and cannot be said to have ended until tests have concluded in favour of health and recovery, months after an event. The US Department of Health and Human Services provide a similar analysis of the ongoing role for mental health services in witnesses’ and survivors’ lives up to a year after the emergency event (Meyers 1994). This recognition of a continuing presence of the event after the conclusion of disaster response activity speaks to a very interesting form of retrospective security. Exposure to the incursion of mortality buries a piece of the event within people, which must be brought to the surface and safely removed so that sovereignty can maintain the illusion of authority contra meaninglessness and inevitable mortality. State sensitivity to the hidden emergency as it lingers within people also connects traumatic witnessing to the functionality of commemoration. Memory is both internal (treatable through therapy) and public, so security attempts to resolve the lingering presence of death through public events. The US Department of Health and Human Services provides a handbook for mental health professionals involved with disaster recovery that discusses the role of commemoration in terms of trauma treatment. The document connects the recurring nature of traumatic memory to increases in symptoms and challenging behaviour around the time of anniversaries of disaster (Meyers 1994: 94–​ 7). It recommends that flyers be distributed to ‘educate’ communities about their symptoms around the time of anniversaries, and that memorial ceremonies should be organised to enable healing through the reframing of grief as the continuing flow of time and life. 60

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Reflecting absence? The anniversary of a disaster event is thus framed as problematic. For policymakers, it is the temporal window that provides evidence of the continued lingering salience of the emergency. The memory that death broke into the polity and demonstrated the impotence of supposed sovereign actors still haunts politics. It is feared that these subjects who remember their experiences of the disaster are not functioning properly: they are not able to constitute sovereignty through their recognition of authority, because they have seen too much of tragedy and horror. They have stared into the abyss of negativity and absence that belies claims to symbolic and political order (Agamben 1991; Bauman 1992; Becker 1973; Heidegger 1971; Sloterdijk 2014: 142–​86). They know that the state makes imperfect claims to control, authority and power. US disaster recovery policy deals with this lingering emergency, and its disruption to the recognition of sovereignty, through appeals to resilience. The anniversary of a tragedy should, they suggest, be tailored towards narrativising the continuation of life –​enabling ‘healing’ through the compartmentalisation of death within a narrative of vitality and social perpetuity. UK policy documentation on disaster commemoration takes a similar, if slightly more prosaic, approach, interpreting its functionality as the exhumation of dangerous feelings that linger as remnants of the exposure to death. Here commemoration ceremonies are described as functional opportunities to dispel the continuing impact of the emergency by giving survivors and witnesses a place and time to ‘express themselves’ (Home Office and Cabinet Office 2005; Eyre 2006: 58–​ 60). The importance of organising commemoration, in this component of the disaster recovery stream of security policy, is articulated around bringing healing through healthy grieving. The disaster event is framed as impacting upon social structures as well as physical ones –​and once physical damage is repaired, disaster recovery must attend to community resilience. Drawing from academic studies of trauma, commemoration policies frame their purposes around moving survivors and families through stages of grief. They deploy site visits for the bereaved to assist them in moving on from denial and shock. Subsequently their work moves out in concentric circles to address the grief of the local community surrounding the site through weekly ‘services’, followed by the main memorial service that addresses the entire nation through a television broadcast and the participation of major political and public figures. Within this reading of grief and memory as lingering insecurity, the bereaved and survivors are framed as ‘key stakeholders’ who should be consulted regarding commemorative events (Eyre 2006; Nicholls 2006). The literature argues that consultation in commemorative processes and having a say may be integral, indeed fundamental, for recovery. Quoting the noted trauma theorist, Judith Herman, the UK government’s literature on memorialisation, commemoration and disaster recovery advises that: ‘Recovery requires remembrance and mourning […] Restoring a sense of social community requires a public forum 61

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Death and security where victims can speak their truth and their suffering can be formally acknowledged’ (Herman 1997: 242). Anne Eyre, who wrote a commissioned report for the Department of Media, Culture and Sport on the humanitarian aspects of emergency recovery, similarly states that:  ‘recovery requires a sense of social community in which people feel supported in looking back and looking forward […] It is only when this kind of support exists that survivors from disasters are really able to talk about recovery’ (Eyre 2004:  27). Dealing with the past and suppressing the disruption of mortality, then, requires a commemorative ceremony to excavate the lingering emergency from its presence within grief. Security will not be re-​established until all traces of the incursion are scrubbed clean through the performance of recovery. Interestingly, this uncovering and exorcism of grief through commemoration does not occur without a sudden turn towards religious ritual within secular policy. This recourse to religious ritual points clearly towards the salience of death as problematic for secular politics –​such that it necessitates religious symbolism to efface mortality. The UK government outlines its commemoration policy for major disasters in a (spectacularly misnamed) document, The Needs of Faith Communities in Major Emergencies (Home Office and Cabinet Office 2005). Very little of this document relates to the needs of faith communities  –​only the guidance notes regarding the dietary customs that should be respected when catering for each religious group at a commemoration ceremony. Instead, the document borrows from religion, rather than attending to the needs of the already religious. It details the ‘humanitarian’ technique of commemoration and memorialisation that can bring healing after a disaster, heavily recommending holding a non-​denominational service regarding the end of life that can ease the suffering of those affected and bereaved. The guidance provided by the government for commemoration within disaster recovery deploys every component of a religious funeral service except the discussion of God, including an order of service, candles, tributes and songs: The Memorial Service: There are a number of key issues to consider when planning a memorial service: […]

•

•

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Order of Service –​ideally should reflect the variety of faiths involved in the disaster, with perhaps a non-​religious song. When a large number of people have died it may be appropriate to list their names here. Personal reflections  –​there should be opportunity for at least one representative of a deceased victim, one survivor, and (ideally) a member of the responding emergency services to speak. Personal tribute leaflet –​to accompany the Order of Service. This can contain photographs of the deceased, subject to family agreement and short personal tributes to each of those who died. 62

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Candles –​if practical, one for each of those who died, plus perhaps one to represent the survivors; each to be lit by a member of the deceased’s family. It is more sensitive to add a label with the name of the deceased on each candle and the candle can be given to the families when the service is over. Filming –​experience has demonstrated the value of filming the memorial service for the families and survivors; this needs prior agreement with the owners of the venue. Planners should also consider the possibility of relaying the service via television to other venues nearby, for example community centres and cinemas […]. National Service –​there may also be a call for a national service or mark of respect to be held after a major incident. This may involve senior members of the royal family and government. The same considerations of timing and consultation with those affected by the incident described above should take place. In the event of a disaster in the United Kingdom with victims from other countries, early consultation with representatives from that country will be essential. (Home Office and Cabinet Office 2005)

Two things are interesting about this state commemoration policy. First, it demonstrates an immediate return to the religious service to dissipate the problematic excess of mortality after a disaster. The state apparently feels a problematic consciousness of its inadequacy vis-​à-​vis mortality and, within the remit of security strategy, authorises a return to religious ritual to protect sovereignty from disruption. Religious ritual provides an answer to death, and the state practises its own variant of a funeral service. The anniversary service for the dead of the Bali bombing, for example, was a hybrid religio-​secular performance where loss and grief were inserted into narratives of resilient adaptation –​using songs, service booklets, political leaders and prayer (Heath-​Kelly 2015a). Subjects also feel a compulsion to deal with their grief by returning to religious ritual and are drawn towards places of worship in the aftermath of disasters, as Pettersson has commented of the response to the deaths of 800 people in the Estonia ferry disaster in the prominently secular Sweden (Pettersson 1996). People travelled to churches and cathedrals in large numbers to alleviate their shock and pain. This is discussed by the author as an indication of ‘latent religion’, whereby churches become sources of comfort and support in times of crisis. For our purposes here, it can also be regarded as the momentary recourse to a previous paradigm of mortality effacement. The state, and its subjects, turn towards religious ritual to borrow some of its discursive power in alleviating the anxiety of mortality. As discussed in the introductory chapter to this book, religious systems provided a substantial symbolic mitigation of the mortality problem –​something the secular state aspires to through the practice of security and nationalism. And in moments of disaster, where mortality smashes through the discursive systems constructed to 63

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Death and security constrain it, we see citizens and states recall religious rituals to assist in the mitigation of death. Second, the UK government’s commemoration document emphasises the temporality of the ongoing emergency when discussing commemoration:  it is a post-​event policy of disaster recovery, yet it is entitled ‘The Needs of Faith Communities in Major Emergencies’. This is a clear indication of the problem of mortality remaining present after an emergency within the form of grief. Security is clearly responding to a problem that remains present after an emergency: that of mortality as an excess. And it is not just the UK that puts such an emphasis on commemoration as an integral feature of the disaster recovery process. The United States’ National Transportation Safety Board has codified responsibilities for the holding of a memorial service for the families of victims, in the event of a fatal air crash on American soil (National Transportation Safety Board 2008). Disaster recovery is a component within security policy, and security policy requires that memory be acted upon as a locale of mortality. The emergency continues while it lingers in memory –​and commemoration ceremonies, alongside the construction of memorials, are the recovery strategies used to close the event. In both UK and US discourses, then, the anniversary of the emergency is problematised as bringing the lingering presence of death to the surface through heightened symptoms. Yet in the style of the resilience oeuvre, the anniversary is also welcomed as an opportunity to access and subsequently exorcise the hidden remnants of the emergency. The commemorative ceremony provides an opportunity to act upon that which is hidden –​the continuing presence of death that lingers in memory. At first, the directly affected are monitored through psychological tests and given the opportunity to exorcise their grief through site visits, then the local community can come together to expel their grief in a designated place of worship, and finally the entire country is addressed by the televised memorial service. These ‘stages’, in the performative sense, provide the mechanism by which hidden grief can be brought to the surface and resolved through talking, sharing and coming together. They are also evidence that the state practices retrospective security:  constituting grief as an ongoing security issue that must be acted upon, brought to the surface and resolved. This ‘bringing to the surface’ is also crucial to explaining major shifts in policies regarding permanent memorials to disaster events and their design, as will be addressed in the subsequent sections of this chapter. How should we approach such retrospectively oriented security policy? Literature on trauma studies provides a helpful resource in modelling the application of psychotherapy as a political technology. It is used to reintegrate subjects into society and close the exposure to devastation through medical applications of governmentality (Fassin and Rechtman 2009; Hacking 1995; Howell 2011, 2012; Pupavac 2001; Rose 1998; Summerfield 2001; Young 1997). These 64

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Reflecting absence? studies provide a basis for reading disaster recovery as a practice of retrospective security, but they address the application of psychological therapies rather than security policies and commemoration. However, we can build from this reading of trauma to read retrospective security as the quietening of mortality, as it lingers in memory after the emergency, and the attempt to reintegrate subjects into their relationship with society and sovereignty. Studies of memory can also prove useful in their readings of historical narrative as political. They often follow the constructivist approach to identity and focus on which public narratives are utilised to constitute the discourse of the present through the past. Memorialisation and collective memory consolidation are understood to follow a security event, primarily war, serving political ends by providing a symbol of heroic and enduring national identity (Finney 2011; Hodgkin and Radstone 2003). Literature on the functionality of post-​terrorist memorials focuses on the duality of the retrospective marker to the event and the simultaneous subjectification of the viewer as a cosmopolitan, ethical agent (Lisle 2013; Veil et  al. 2011). The Latin origin of ‘monument’ is monere  –​ the meaning of which extends beyond ‘reminding’ to ‘admonishing’ and ‘instructing’; thus memorials instruct visitors about what is to be valued in the future as well as the past (Blair et al. 1991). But in this literature, memory work is not considered to be security relevant. Identities are constituted through the symbolisation of past events and the instruction regarding the future, but this is not explicitly connected to security practice. However, exceptions do exist that can lead us towards an analysis of memory practice as security, rather than something that follows a security action. Jenny Edkins, in particular, has written revealingly of the reliance of governments and modernity on the invention of linear time (2003). This linearity is radically disrupted by traumatic (‘political’) events, which cannot be incorporated into the symbolic and political order. Instead, their incommensurability results in ‘trauma time’ –​where the events return unbidden, again and again. She turns to explore memorialisation as the reassertion of linear time and state identity, while counter-​memorials (such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, or the Cenotaph, in her reading) function differently  –​refusing to fix or ‘narrate’ the event, and instead encircling the trauma and leaving the memory of war disruptive. While Edkins doesn’t explicitly identify memorialisation as a security practice, her analysis points to the ways in which architectural renderings are used by states to close disruptions to the symbolic order caused by wars or terrorist attacks. It is possible to build on her analysis, and others, to rethink memorialisation as security: as that which acts upon the lingering presence of death to mitigate mortality and reassert sovereignty. Beyond the International Relations (IR) literature, other work exposes cultural practices that function in a similar way. The work of anthropologists researching post-​disaster cultural practices shows 65

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Death and security us how people adopt behaviours to mitigate the continuing disruptive influence of mortality. For example, in 1991 in Oakland, California, a spark on a hillside rapidly escalated into blaze that incinerated 25 people and 3,000 homes below. One of those forced to flee was Susanna Hoffman –​an anthropologist who lost her home, her books, her unpublished manuscripts, her pets and every other possession. From her unique position as an anthropologist affected by the blaze, she has been able to document what happens after a disaster in precise detail. The most prominent features of disaster recovery identified by Hoffman do not relate to the logistical or humanitarian classifications so prized in policies of disaster response and recovery, but are oriented towards symbolic labour. When calamity struck the affluent residents of Oakland, their conceptual schemas were ripped apart. The separation enforced by capitalism upon ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ to enable dominion over resources collapsed (Harvey 1996). ‘Nature’ tore through the domain of the cultural, despite being allocated to a subordinate conceptual domain. In response, the surviving residents immediately turned to ritual and totems to resurrect the conceptual distinction of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ upon which their lifestyles depended: ‘These people resided in an urban, industrialised, far from parochial situation. By anyone’s standards they led very worldly lives. Yet ritual arose among them immediately. They built shrines, invented ceremonies, and told sagas’ (Hoffman 2002: 118). In the initial stages of the Oakland community’s action, the symbolic labour of disaster recovery involved prayers, large gatherings of people and visits by public officials. These activities ‘displayed accoutrements of culture’s persistence  –​a stage, music, cooked food’ (Hoffman 2002: 123). Cultural items that survived the blaze (such as car keys, dishes and vases) became shrines –​as did natural items, like trees. Treated as altars, local residents adorned the trees with gifts, messages and trinkets. These rituals functioned to reassert the symbolic hierarchy whereby culture presides over nature. Interestingly, the survivors of the Oakland firestorm also responded to a more prolonged pollution of cultural items by natural forces. After the initial stages of their activity, their most pressing issue became the powerful imagination of once domestic animals turning feral. Three years of activity (setting up pet hotlines, foster care centres for ‘fire pets’ and the publication of an expositive book) were generated from the symbolic fear of nature’s continued perversion of the cultural sphere. The pets-​gone-​wild must be found and turned back into cultural items. Interestingly, this spectre of the feral post-​disaster house pet mirrors the embodiment of the disaster event in the body of the looter: as drawn from the symbolic disaster imaginary of the state. It wanders wild and must be captured or killed. The excess of the emergency event lives on in its imagined performance in the bodies of pets and people. In Hoffman’s anthropological vision, these symbolic dimensions of disaster recovery are functional. Natural disasters revoke the symbolic order of 66

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Reflecting absence? modernity and industrial capitalism, which have produced human existence as separate from nature (Harvey 1996; Oliver-​Smith 2002). Nature exists in this schema as that which can be exploited by humanity and, furthermore, is often pejoratively invoked as a concept to relegate people into a status unworthy of rights or care (see also Agamben 2005). This hegemonic opposition between nature and culture is the frame that constitutes subjectivity in the era of modernity and capitalism. However, the disaster turns the tables and smashes through this symbolic organisation of reality. Beyond the physical devastation caused by disasters, this is the locus of their disruptive force: they disrupt the organising structure of reality. Subjects are displaced from their situation in a previously stable symbolic order. And disaster recovery functions to reassert the familiar conceptual schema where humanity sits at the top by ritualising and knowing the disaster event. Similarly to disaster response, knowledge production is the means by which emergency and disaster are mitigated. This chapter uses these insights to explore the rituals undertaken in the post-​terrorist space, particularly memorialisation, as security practices. These sites have not been destroyed by ‘nature’ but rather by rogue human action. As such the symbolic labour of disaster recovery does not function to subjugate ‘nature’ beneath culture, but to sublimate the memory of death at the hands of others through narrative and architectural design. Memorials mitigate the lingering excess of death that plagues destroyed space. They reassert continuity and ‘resilience’ against the spectre of mortality. They close the event and incursion of death. They are security practices that work retrospectively, consolidating the image of recovery and the reintegration of the subject vis-​à-​vis sovereignty. They perform the closure of mortality’s sudden irruption. Policy, history and the memorial Following the commemorative ceremony to victims of disaster, the permanent memorial to the terrorist attack is designed by prospective architects, chosen through competitive process and then constructed. It is discussed in government policy documents as a place where victims can express their grief and move towards healing in a place that recognises their loss (Eyre 1999, 2006) –​ dealing with the excess of mortality through the recognition of those lost. But permanent memorials were once reserved for the glorification of the nation through images of dead soldiers –​a stone representation of the blood myth underpinning sovereignty. How are the bodies of tourists, office workers, commuters and summer camp attendees incorporated into this practice? They were never supposed to be sacrificed so that the nation might live on. The memorial artifice has had to change form to adapt to its role in securing trauma after attacks on civilians. How has it changed? And what do these changes signify? 67

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Death and security By exploring changes in the scale of memorial architecture upon post-​ terrorist space, we can interrogate the relationship between politics, security and mortality between the eras of modernity and postmodernity. We can see how the memorial has come to occupy its prominent position within the cultural and architectural mitigation of death. In the contemporary era, we see the construction of large memorials –​even memorial and museum complexes –​on the sites of terrorist attack. This, in itself, is a development. In previous eras of response to terrorism, sites of destruction were marked with simple plaques. For example, the Manchester bombing of 1996 (discussed earlier) was marked with a simple plaque on a postbox that survived the blast. Urban redevelopment was deemed sufficient for the accomplishment of the recovery, without a need for memorialisation. Similarly, the IRA’s Brighton hotel bombing that targeted the ruling Conservative Party’s conference of 1984 and nearly assassinated Prime Minister Thatcher was met with a reconstruction of the Brighton Grand Hotel and, again, a simple plaque in the lobby. Furthermore, the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974, which killed 21 people, are marked with a simple plaque inside the grounds of the city-​centre cathedral. Bombs exploded at the city-​ centre pubs The Tavern in the Town and The Mulberry Bush. The former was reopened under the name The Yard of Ale, only to succumb to the UK’s indoor smoking ban of 2007 that contributed to it going out of business (Griffin 2010). The Mulberry Bush also reopened under a changed name, but was turned into a tourist information centre (unrelated to the bombing) in 2003. Former Lord Mayor of Birmingham Jim Eames explained that a decision was made to dedicate a small plaque to the victims in the cathedral, away from the sites, to avoid enflaming hostility between communities in Birmingham and making ‘a big thing’ out of the events: ‘We thought it reasonably wise not to make too big a thing about it, the council didn’t seek to push it too much in the social life of the city. They [memorials] serve to remind people of events such as that but they can also aggravate people. History needs to be recorded but it can do damage’ (Eames quoted in BBC 2004). Memorialisation of the event was deemed a threat to community relations in Birmingham, rather than a necessary component of recovery. Yet, nine years after the Manchester bomb, the 7/​7 bombings that struck London’s transportation network were deemed to require more than repair and a Tube station plaque. A memorial competition was organised under the auspices of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, and won by the Carmody Groarke architectural firm. A commissioned monument was constructed in the south-​east corner of London’s Hyde Park, at a cost of £1 million, consisting of fifty-​two stainless steel pillars representing the (non-​terrorist) lives lost in the bombing. Each pillar is 3.5 metres tall and marked with the victim’s name and the time and place of death. The casting of the steel was designed so that each pillar has individual characteristics in the steel, in a gesture towards representing the individuality of each victim. 68

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Reflecting absence? This dramatic shift in political attitude between ‘not making a big thing’ of a bombing to commissioning expensive monuments requires explanation, because it has also been seen elsewhere. In American history, we see an even more striking transition. Before the Oklahoma bombing of 1995, the memorial was reserved for military deaths and the communication of the heroic sacrifice myth. Terrorist events did not receive memorials. Against the contemporary precedence of large commemorative monuments, Erika Doss poses the question of uncommemorated historical violent episodes, such as the 1864 massacre of 133 Native Americans at Sand Creek, the 1927 school bombing in Bath, Missouri, which killed 46, and the 1958 school arson in Chicago that killed 95 (Doss 2002: 64). The bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988 marked the subtle beginnings of a shift in disaster recovery through memory. It was almost not memorialised because memorialisation has historically been reserved for military campaigns and the consolidation of national identity through symbols of sacrifice and heroism  –​not dead civilians. Yet a sustained campaign of family member activism in the United States ensured that the memorial landscape shifted to include the victims of Pan Am 103 (Britton 2008: 5) and a memorial was constructed in Arlington cemetery. The memorial took the form of a cairn (a small tower constructed from Scottish stone, given the final resting place of the aeroplane in Lockerbie) and resides in the traditional military spatial context for those killed violently. Similarly, memorialising terrorism remained non-​automatic in the aftermath of the 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) bombing, given the association between memorials, military campaigns, sacrifice, heroism and nation. The first terrorist attack on the WTC in Manhattan involved a truck bomb in the car park of the North Tower and killed six people while injuring one thousand more. Like the Pan Am scenario of five years previous, the commemoration was minimal: a granite fountain with a plaque on the plaza of the WTC. Such a minimal reaction, ‘not making a big thing’ of bombings, to paraphrase Lord Mayor Eames, seems incredible when juxtaposed with subsequent developments in memorialisation. Indeed, Joel Sternfeld also notes the absence of commemorative markers to the deaths of 81 people at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, the site of a mass suicide in response to FBI action against the group in 1993 (Sternfeld 1996). But in 1995, mega-​memorial culture began to take hold in relation to terrorism and emergency recovery. It was in this year that Timothy McVeigh, apparently incensed by the deaths of the 81 Branch Davidians at Waco, parked a truck bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma –​which housed the regional offices of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The bomb caused massive structural damage to the building and killed 168 people. Almost immediately the site became a beacon for tourist pilgrimages, 69

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Death and security to the extent that the Department of Transportation had to erect direction signs on local highways to guide people to the bombsite (Doss 2002: 67). By 1999, 50,000 items (such as baseball caps and teddy bears) had been attached to the ‘Memory Fence’ that surrounded the site. One wonders why so many citizens –​ most without relationships to the victims –​felt compelled to travel to the site to leave items and messages. Those without personal connections to victims are not bereaved in the traditional sense. Their reaction seems provoked by the shocking incursion of death into the public sphere, where a common vulnerability in the face of mortality inspires empathetic feelings that ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. The incursion of mortality displaces the subject from the symbolic order created by political sovereignty. Within weeks of the bombing, Oklahoma City Mayor Ron Norick appointed a 350-​member Memorial Task Force to organise the construction of a permanent memorial on the site. They organised an open competition for designs that resulted, by April 2000, in the construction and dedication of the $29 million Oklahoma City National Memorial, composed of 168 empty bronze, steel and glass chairs –​one for each of the victims. A Memorial Center was also constructed at the site. It is designed to fulfil three tasks: its ten-​chapter storyline narrates the timeline of physical destruction and recovery; its Gallery of Honor displays images and personal mementos of those killed; and it also houses the Oklahoma City Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, which researches the causes and effects of political violence, organising conferences and funding academic chairs to further research in the areas of psychiatry and behavioural science (Doss 2002). The political factors influencing the Oklahoma bombing (including the perpetrator’s fury at the FBI-​provoked Waco siege deaths) are left vague in the memorial museum, which is perhaps unsurprising given the discursive battles that occurred in the aftermath of the attack over labelling it as ‘terrorism’. Edward Linenthal has provided an excellent analysis of these struggles, documenting how the attack was initially reported as the work of ‘Muslim terrorists’ and how calls were made for military action against foreign governments as yet unknown, before the identity of the perpetrators became known (Linenthal 2001: 17–​19). The revelation that white Americans were responsible for the attack raised questions about the application of the terrorism signifier, given that violence by white people seems to fall outside the discursive remit of terrorism suspiciously often. The event disrupted the application of the terrorism signifier, which is usually only applied to non-​white violence. It took prolonged political efforts to externalise McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols as extremists (including the presidential removal of McVeigh’s war honours for service in the Gulf War, his right to burial in a military cemetery granted alongside his Bronze Star, and the media denigration of the two as paranoid and ideologically deviant) before the application of the terrorism signifier was once again felt to be secure (Linenthal 2001: 19–​20). 70

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Reflecting absence? Given the silencing of these matters in the Memorial Center in favour of an event timeline and the gallery of the victims, Linenthal comments that its primary function seems to be ‘a protest against the anonymity of mass death’ (Linenthal 2001: 233). The Memorial Center only educates through the medium of an event timeline so its function, instead, seems to be death mitigation. Like the processes of identification that occur during disaster response which return ‘remains’ to their human status through association with living identity, the Gallery of Honor and the individual chairs to the victims reclaim them from the jaws of anonymous death. They are known, once more, through the assertion of their living identities and place within the perpetual community. Linenthal presciently comments that: Their deaths would be redeemed by becoming public. The spectre of meaningless death would be contained through the physical presence of individual memorial chairs and through the civic rhetoric of ‘lessons’ of the bombing. These dead, the memorial tells us, are still among us, they still teach us, we redeem their deaths by our willingness to be touched and transformed by the public legacy of their deaths. (Linenthal 2001: 233)

The dead, as such, become sacred relics –​reclaimed to speak of civic resilience. This is a cultural mitigation of the troubling dimensions of mortality. The construction of this massive memorial centre, alongside the high levels of public visits to the site, suggest that the event disrupted the structuring of political reality through sovereignty and subjectivity. The incursion of mortality inspired, in a cultural and political response to this disruption, the attribution of sacredness on the site where so many died. The site became sacred space. This designation enabled the mitigation of the incursion of mortality through a reframing of the moment of death as the sacred transition into the afterlife (Veil et al. 2011) that supposedly holds lessons for the community that remains. The post-​terrorist site becomes exceptional space. This attribution of sacredness upon post-​terrorist space is common within the discourse of both family groups and public bodies (Donofrio 2010; Kilde 2011), and represents another slip into religious rhetoric when the salience of mortality disrupts the secular constitution of sovereignty and subjectivity. The enormous symbolic statement constructed upon the Alfred P. Murrah site was replicated, in spirit, after the 9/​11 attacks in Manhattan. A memorial committee was established to adjudicate over the design commission for the redevelopment of the site, and selected Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence from 5,201 entries sent from 63 nations. The resulting process to get the design built was fraught, to say the least, involving protracted financial and political deliberations, lengthy delays, as well as the somewhat forced incorporation of Peter Walker’s landscaping expertise to ‘humanise’ the abstract design (Goldberger 2004). And yet the parallels between the Oklahoma and New  York projects are clearly apparent. An enormous design occupies the public space of the city, 71

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Death and security highlighting the absence of lives and buildings that once were (through empty chairs in Oklahoma and giant marble pools on the footwells of the towers in New  York). These designs are then softened for public consumption with the landscaping of green areas and the prominent use of trees planted in ‘linear rhythms’ to symbolise growth and rebirth (and, given the linearity, one might suggest ‘order’). The memorial plazas are accompanied by ‘national’ museums that detail the timelines of the attacks and the emergency response, using artefacts from the day. And most strikingly, both Oklahoma and New  York utilise the symbol of the ‘survivor tree’ –​taking trees recovered from the attack and replanting them on the site as symbols of the completed recovery, and adaptive strength, of the national spirit.1 How can we explain the transition from a reluctance to memorialise and the use of small plaques to remember the dead, to the era of the mega-​memorial and museum complex? Why do bombings receive such different responses through the eras? The relationship between death and memorialisation has clearly not remained stable. Pierre Nora’s sociology of memory suggests that we make so much of sites of memory because, paradoxically, so little social memory transmitted through family and community remains to us (Nora 1989). Social transitions through capitalism towards neoliberalism have damaged the community ties that used to ground society and provide its living memory. As such, new architectures of memory emerge to undertake the symbolic labour required of the past in the constitution of national identity. I  would suggest that, alongside this social process, we should also consider the change in mortality effacement that has occurred with the transition to postmodernity. Zygmunt Bauman is hesitant to date the transition to postmodernity, given that social practices of modernity and postmodernity run alongside each other in each era (Bauman 1992). Yet shifts in memorialisation practice make it clear that such a transition has occurred. Security discourse has moved away from linear military techniques of mortality effacement (threat comes from a known enemy, the known enemy can be suppressed) towards the fluid time of endless repetition of death events and recovery. In the security policies of the UK and the US, we see this in the post-​Cold War transition towards resilience whereby insecurity and uncertainty are the given climate, events are unpreventable and the security promise is recalibrated around the adaptive recovery that can be exercised through scenario planning. This security shift accompanies the shift in memorialisation. The memorial has become such a prominent feature of disaster recovery because it physically enacts and performs the new discourse of security: insecurity may be permanent, but security can be found in our capacity to recover as a society. The dead are reclaimed from anonymity and become immortal sacred relics with lessons to teach us. Memorials have become a prominent practice of retrospective security because they translate death into recovery through 72

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Reflecting absence? architectural means and the articulation of sacred space, in an era that depends upon the promise of demonstrable recovery from disaster. Beyond their function for the survivors and family members in expelling traumatic symptoms and the lingering remnants of the emergency, memorial architectures also respond to the wider public void that is opened in sovereignty by atrocity. Debbie Lisle has explored the functionality of voyeurism and memory at post-​terrorist space in her interrogation of the 9/​11 viewing platform that was constructed to facilitate the crowds descending on the WTC site each day to ‘view’ Ground Zero (Lisle 2004). She argues that the intense cultural mediation of the event through media contributed to the powerful desire to experience the ‘reality’ of 9/​11 through viewing –​visitors wanted to touch the real. Using the work of Bauman and Guy Debord, she argues that postmodern subjects exist in an over-​signified world, the society of spectacle, and when devastation was visited upon the United States (rather than a distant land) an opportunity to visit-​the-​real was perceived to exist. Psychoanalytic theories describe this desire to look upon the forbidden as voyeurism. Seduced by the discourse of authenticity, tourists (both domestic and international) flocked to view Ground Zero –​ only to find that they couldn’t find the real, authentic 9/​11. They found other tourists, queues and recovery work. Their voyeurism failed to attain mastery or consumption of the spectacle. We can reinterpret Lisle’s arguments regarding the viewing platform at Ground Zero to apply to memorialisation upon post-​terrorist space. Struck by the sudden irruption of mortality into the polity, viewers were disturbed. The symbolic universe constructed between sovereignty and subjectivity was disrupted by the carnage. This excess, which lies beyond the conventional structuring of reality by political discourse, found its expression in voyeurism –​a need to consume the imbalance and reconstitute the subject position vis-​à-​vis the event. This is the excess to which memorialisation responds. It fills the gap that emerged between the mutual constitution of subject and sovereign by redirecting the gaze. Instead of looking at the irruption of mortality, visitors are provided with something to consume:  a narrative of the attack, an architectural rendering of the losses, and then the envisioning of recovery. This fixes the excess of the deathly event by focusing the gaze on knowable reality, rather than the spectacle, and reasserts security through the performance of urban recovery and symbolic labour. The question of how memorialisation functions will be continued in the next section. It is important to address the transition from military memorials to the contemporary form constructed on post-​terrorist space. The granite and marble edifices of old have undergone a startling design shift. In the following section I  explore how the 9/​11 Memorial and Museum explicitly renders the resilience discourse in form and content. It explicitly attempts to render visions of absence and loss, rather than heroism, effectively mitigating mortality 73

Death and security through (paradoxically) its visualisation. The policy of disaster recovery uses these designs to act upon the emergency that lingers within human memory, drawing it to the surface through aesthetic design.

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Reflecting absence? History has witnessed not simply a shift in the size and prominence of memorials since their application to terrorist attacks, but also an important change in their design. They have become representations of death and absence, rather than granite and stone tablets to heroism and national glory. This section explores the rendering of ‘absence’ made within the memorial design for the WTC site in Manhattan. It situates the turn towards representations of absence and loss in memorial history, before exploring what this means for the relationship between death and security in post-​terrorist architecture. What does it mean when states commission enormous and costly representations of death and horror within the polity, rather than stone tablets to national glory? What does this do with regard to the mitigation and resolution of disaster space? Traditionally, states have constructed granite obelisks to their own glory in the aftermath of wars (Edkins 2003). Clearly there is a striking design difference between the traditional memorial form (Figure  3.1) and that of contemporary memorials upon post-​terrorist space (Figure 3.2). And yet contemporary memorials on post-​terrorist sites are not the first to operationalise representations of loss and death. Their designers have drawn from the history of counter-​memorials to genocides and unpopular wars. The most prominent of these include Maya Lin’s enormous black marble wall listing the names of 58,000 dead American soldiers on the Washington Mall, Edwin Lutyens’s Cenotaph obelisk in London to the British dead of the First World War and Daniel Libeskind’s (who also designed the Freedom Tower component of the WTC redevelopment in New York) Jewish Museum in Berlin, which uses voids and zig-​zagging form to disrupt the illusion that Holocaust history could fit a rational pattern of knowledge or traditional museum structure. These examples, and many more (Hite 2012), are sometimes understood to be ‘counter-​ memorials’ or to embody ‘postmodern monumentality’ (Blair et  al. 1991) because rather than glorifying war dead in the style of a traditional war memorial, they use design to hold up examples of horrors within history –​implicitly asking questions about state responsibility for killing and refusing to provide simplistic narratives that defuse that horror. Jenny Edkins has argued that the Cenotaph and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial subvert the traditional statist memorial form because rather than glorifying the state through heroic symbolism, these structures encircle trauma –​refusing to mitigate the horror of the past, and leaving it open (Edkins 2003).

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Reflecting absence?

Figure 3.1  Coventry War Memorial

To give visual examples of the contrast in monumental architectural styles, the Coventry War Memorial (Figure 3.1) is a classic example of the traditional memorial form that utilises a stone obelisk to convey authority, eternity and glory to the state through the sacrifice of its citizens. Postmodern monumentality is represented through the design of Reflecting Absence (Figure 3.2), which uses voids to represent the loss and trauma inflicted during the 9/​11 attacks. They are inversely related –​with the traditional monument reaching into the

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Death and security

Figure 3.2  Reflecting Absence 02

sky to symbolise glory and eternity, while the postmodern example digs deep into the black pit of absence, loss and despair. Counter-​memorials use absence and disruption in their designs, through jagged lines and invocations of darkness, to resist the statist culture of war and its security discourse. There is no heroism here, no triumph. But the appropriation of this design form within post-​terrorist memorials functions very differently. Here absence and loss and not rendered politically to resist the state. Indeed, the state pays for post-​terrorist memorialisation, so the process must be functioning in some way other than exposing the fallacy of sovereign authority. I  will argue here that, unlike counter-​memorials, these designs upon disaster sites have become integral to the state’s mitigation of insecurity and the reassertion of sovereignty. Death and absence are visualised in order to perform security. This effacement of death through visualisation may seem paradoxical at first, but the story of Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence design, as communicated to me during our interview, provides a revealing window into the appropriation and visualisation of death in order to serve the interests of mortality mitigation and resolution. I will reflect upon our conversation here, exploring the implicit moments within his story where it became clear that his design was purposefully shifted by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) from a representation of impossible horror towards the state-​sanctioned community 76

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Reflecting absence? resilience discourse of the nation. Reflecting Absence transitioned from a representation of horror, absence and mortality to a celebration of recovery and the human spirit. It went from Reflecting Absence to mitigating absence through enshrining resilience. Arad’s image of absence was incorporated within the performance of resilience to unpreventable events of carnage –​thereby reasserting ‘security’. On 11 September 2001, Michael Arad witnessed the second plane striking the WTC towers from the rooftop of his apartment in the East Village. When we spoke, he began his testimony by explaining how he felt that rebuilding the WTC site initially seemed impossible. In the aftermath of the attacks, he would travel to work at the New York City Housing agency as a young unknown architect and stare at ‘two impossible voids’ in the skyline. He pluralised impossibility when referring to the missing towers, and used ‘impossibility’ again to describe the task of replacing them. Everything was ‘impossible’ –​something that clearly resonates with the literature on trauma regarding the event that cannot be incorporated into our schemas of understanding and instead becomes problematic, repetitive memory. Before any competition for memorial design was announced, Arad felt compelled to sketch an ‘impossible’ design: I was drawn to the vicinity of the site so I thought about a memorial that would be in the Hudson River which was two blocks away from the site. I imagined the surface of the river shorn open forming these two impossible voids. Water doesn’t behave that way. You can’t tear it open and create a hole in it, but that image for some reason came into my mind. That notice of rupture and absence. It felt like a way of giving it a physical form. I was very intrigued by the idea, whether you could actually do something like that. For a while, that idea was knocking around in my head. I ended up making a small physical model of it. I took that idea and realized it in a foot-​by-​ foot Plexiglas model where you created this sheet of water that was shorn open with these two voids of water cascading into a hidden row of walls below it and re-​circulated back up the sides. It looked like this black plane that the cable is on and all of the sudden [there are] these two holes. I did that as a self-​directed, cathartic exercise. There was no competition, there was no request from anybody for a design. It was something that was very personal and important to me. (Interview with Michael Arad 2014)

He designed an impossible thing, tearing apart the Hudson River where the shadows of the towers once lay. He produced a rendering of void and loss so perfect that it would be impossible to create in the world: an impossible representation of the ‘impossibility’ of what was witnessed that day (narrations of trauma often accord the signifier ‘impossibility’ because of the significance of the breakdown in the symbolic order that structures experience: this cannot be happening). And once his act of catharsis was complete, it was placed upon a shelf in his apartment. This model remains the original design for Reflecting Absence. At this point, it remained a sketch of a counter-​memorial. 77

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Death and security The design remained on that shelf, physically and mentally, until the first component of the WTC reconstruction was announced: Daniel Libeskind’s (of Berlin’s Jewish Museum fame) original 2003 masterplan for the site.2 Libeskind proposed, interestingly, to revoke the division imposed upon Downtown Manhattan by the construction of Minoru Yamazaki’s twin towers. He wanted to fix the alienation wrought upon the Downtown area by the construction of the towers. Prior to the construction of the WTC, the Downtown area was a bustling neighbourhood of immigrants, the Washington Market and a popular street known colloquially as ‘Radio Row’, where Manhattanites would purchase their stereo equipment in the 1960s. The construction of the towers involved huge destruction (Tchen 2002). In a bold interrogation of the WTC construction as architectural terrorism, Eric Darton has drawn parallels between the disregard for human life involved in building the towers (destroying communities and displacing thousands of residents in exchange for minimal compensation for the sake of monumental cold concrete towers to financial prestige) and the disregard for humanity involved in destroying them (Darton 2002). When I spoke to Steven Davis, the lead architect behind the 9/​11 Museum, we discussed the damage that the (now mythologised) towers did to Manhattan upon their construction. Davis recalled the transition of the Downtown area from bustling communities and tradespeople to a self-​ contained financial city-​within-​a-​city: I can remember Radio Row. I used to go and buy my stereo-​kit down on Radio Row. There was a great place that I would go down to. Then in the ’70s the Trade Center was built and around it was nothing. It became an incubator for a lot of major commercial development, but it was designed as a megastructure  –​a self-​contained, commercial city that was defined in function as a kind of ‘city within a city’. It was successful. It was far more successful than anybody dreamed and it incubated a lot of development. There was enormous growth. The density around the trade center increased dramatically, but it was the same, really focused complex. (Interview with Steven Davis 2014)

Daniel Libeskind’s masterplan for the WTC redevelopment involved reversing some of the decisions taken in its construction. One of the central aspects of his design was reincarnating the famous grid system of roads in New  York upon the site, bringing the previously removed Fulton Street and Greenwich Avenue back into connection. This was intended to bring vitality back onto the site, which was desolate of people during the weekends when the tower still stood. Arad, however, sprang into action when Libeskind’s design became public. Bringing Fulton and Greenwich onto the site meant dividing the reconstruction project into quadrants. Arad studied the masterplan and noted the division of the site into ‘cultural’ and ‘economic’ zones, and the way that it would box the proposed memorial into a closed area. The horror of what had happened upon 78

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that site, he suggested, could not be contained –​so no design should attempt to box it into a compartment: The largest quadrant, measuring about 8 acres, aside for memorial and cultural uses were not really specified other than their square footage, which I  always found entertaining that you could measure culture by the square foot. You know, a bushel of culture [laughter]. The memorial site itself he suggested these large buildings on Greenwich and Fulton that would shield the site from the rest of the city, creating these tall walls and multi-​story buildings. Then behind them was this sunken area where the memorial would be. That was what was open to the competition. It felt to me as if it was removing the site from the city, that it did not create a public space in the normative sense, like Washington Square where you have that connective grid. You have that openness, that seamless transition from one space to the next without changes in topography and grade. Almost as a polemical response, as a ‘letter to the editor’, I said, ‘these are the guidelines, but this is the memorial that I  would envision,’ which is very different from the guidelines. So I ignored the guidelines in a sense. I said, ‘Bring everything up to grade, remove these buildings from the site, and make it an open [and] public space’. That in my mind was what was so critical to the way we responded to the attack. (Interview with Michael Arad 2014)

Inspired by the attempt to minimise horror and history, Arad took Reflecting Absence from the shelf in his apartment and began to reinterpret it within (some of) the guidelines for the memorial competition. Already at this point in the story, the impossible design for the impossible memorial has begun to shift in articulation. It no longer sits within the Hudson, but has been transposed onto Libeskind’s masterplan of the site. Could it remain a counter-​memorial as it became reinterpreted for a realisable site? Interestingly Arad was resisting the efforts of the LMDC to minimise the memory of death on the site and to compartmentalise it by the square foot, behind tall buildings and within the rearticulation of the rational urban design of Manhattan’s grid system. Arad’s submission to the memorial commission disobeyed the rules and challenged the judging committee to accept a design that rendered the overflowing memories of the event which refuse to be portioned into a compartmentalised site.3 He offered a rendering of the memory that couldn’t be secured within a ‘cultural area’. At this point, his design utilised two stark abstract representations of absence  –​the footwells of the twin towers. Visitors would descend beneath the WTC plaza to view the names at the bottom of the reflecting pools. His design was selected as a finalist based upon the quality of its architectural vision. It retained its counter-​memorial aesthetic by enforcing voids upon the Manhattan landscape. Its memorial pools caught the attention of prominent juror Maya Lin and have been compared to Michael Heizer’s Double Negative land art, which juxtaposes a natural canyon in Nevada with an enormous man-​made trench, fifty feet deep. Both works consist, essentially, of what is not there. This focus on what cannot be rendered is typical of ‘postmodern monumentality’ 79

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Death and security (Blair et al. 1991). The jury loved the bold and uncompromising representation of horror, loss and absence. And yet, what made the design so striking ultimately became its artistic undoing. Arad’s design underwent numerous tweaks to reduce its stark aesthetic before it was announced as winner. Would the families and the public ‘get’ such a design? Prominent memory scholar James Young, who wrote about his experience as a juror for the 9/​11 memorial competition (Young 2006), noticed that none of the designs selected to be finalists contained gardens –​the traditional artistic metaphor for healing. He swiftly advocated for garden-​based designs, causing the pool of finalists to switch dramatically (Goldberger 2004: 227). The jury, when making recommendations to the finalists for amendments to design, then invited Arad to collaborate with a landscape architect, Peter Walker, whose work possesses a similar aesthetic but whose design had not succeeded in reaching the final. Arad and Walker worked on Reflecting Absence together, using a plaza of trees and soft grass landscapes to soften the design and balance its stark representation of absence with the imagined potential of regrowth and vitality. Indeed, Walker was very candid when we spoke, suggesting that it was the political representative to Mayor Bloomberg who intimated that the starkness of Reflecting Absence was unwelcome and would require significant softening to serve the purposes of the LMDC. He stated: Michael’s original scheme was to pave the whole thing [the plaza]. I think he had three trees or something like that. It was very architectural sort of scheme. None of the jury members liked that. One of the jury members, who was vice-​mayor, so very close to Bloomberg, we heard through them that the mayor wanted this not to just be a memorial but it also had to be a significant open space, a recreational open space for the neighbourhood. It’s probably the most dense neighbourhood, well it is the most dense neighbourhood in the United States. Maybe outside of Asia, in the world! […] Every building is 30–​60 stories high, so really big. We had to come up with something that had the mood of the memorial: the serious and to some extent sombre quality of the memorial, but we also had to make it amenable to people who were going over there to have a smoke or to eat their lunch or to sit with a friend. Not exactly a baseball field but something where urban recreation could take place. People could sit on the lawns and so forth. That was our task. (Interview with Peter Walker 2014)

Trees and gardens could soften the design –​they could make it amenable to the favoured political narrative of renewal and resilience. So after his design was selected as the winner of the competition, Arad’s reflection of absence came to embody the performance of resilient security through the architectural invocation of recovery. His design shifted from being the impossible memorial sunk within the Hudson that opened our eyes to the horror and uncontrollable forces of loss and death, to the facilitator of resilient recovery through public space. The selection jury forbade Arad from building his memorial underneath the plaza, placing the names in a sombre underground tomb; rather it must be at 80

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Reflecting absence? ground level, and he must work with the experienced partner Peter Walker to landscape and beautify the plaza area. Walker confirmed all this, and spoke revealingly of the time it took Arad to accept the narrative shift imposed upon his design (interview with Peter Walker 2014). In summary, Michael Arad won the competition with his design –​but was then overruled on every major design component. His co-​designer noted that he was frustrated with these changes and eventually the pressures within the LDMC resulted in a sideways move for Arad, who was given executive control of the ordering of the names on the memorial, rather than the memorial as a whole. While he was moved sideways from artistic control, his design came to embody the postmodern security discourse of resilience, rather than its intended situation within the postmodern school of architecture. It became the performance of recovery through community and public space, rather than the twenty-​first century’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Rearticulated for the WTC site, the design (in the words of Arad) now focused on recalling the intense sense of community felt in Manhattan after the attacks. Rather than reflecting impossibility or absence, Arad’s design became articulated around the gathering of New Yorkers on Washington Square to be together after 9/​ 11. Washington Square is, of course, the only piece of open green space in Downtown Manhattan –​a fact that is not lost on the designers of the 9/​11 Memorial. Arad now speaks of his design as the rendering of that coming together and commonality of people that made him feel part of the nation. The design shifted from impossible voids to a celebration of life that could bring people together on their lunch breaks (which Arad repeated several times), alongside history: I thought of my own experiences here in New York following the attacks and how critical public space was to my response personally and to the city’s response, which was the fact that we had places to come together physically, literally to stand side-​ by-​side. That was very critical. I  remember we went to places like Union Square, Washington Square, street corners around my neighbourhood and having this sense of community which for me was quite startling. I had been living in New York for about three years and I felt somewhat like a stranger in the city. That sense of anonymity and distance evaporated. All of the sudden you felt this sense of kinship with people who were still strangers to you. You didn’t know their name but you were standing next to them and there was this sense that we were in this together. It kind of shocked me when I went out and bought an American flag and hung it out of my window –​that sense of belonging that I had not felt before. I think it was the trauma of this event and the way in which New York responded with a lot of courage and compassion were the result of having that public space for us to come together as a community. If we didn’t have that, I think you would have seen a very different response […] If it was like the Libeskind initial plan, sunken and removed, and you went there to visit it and left, it would over time, no pun intended, die. It would not become part of the everyday life of people. I think it will remain part of the everyday

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Death and security life of people. You’ll come down from that office floor with a friend for lunch. You’ll sit on a bench next to a memorial pool and you’ll talk about whatever, you know, your kids, the game you saw on tv last night. Then you’ll go back up to the office. But the people who are commemorated here, their names are right there and they are the people who are having lunch there on their lunch break at work or the people who live in this neighbourhood are going through with their kids. I think it’s very important to bring all these groups together. When you come here on that once in a lifetime pilgrimage –​you have plenty of visitors doing that now –​you see people that are going to be working in these buildings here, hopefully coming out on their lunch-​break during the day or just living here in this neighbourhood. It underscores the incredible ordinariness of life that was so brutally cut short here. (Interview with Michael Arad 2014)

Death became redesigned as life, as continuity and recovery. Reflecting Absence became realised as a beautiful site in Downtown Manhattan where corporate and social vitality was ensconced in the landscaping of the design. Here the memorial invites one to witness death through the enormous black marble footwells of the towers, which visitors are initially drawn towards, but to then witness the carefully tended grass, the trees that change with the seasons and the crowds who mill around the plaza. The mortality resonant upon the WTC site has been mitigated through the explicit arrangement of its design around resilience. It mirrors the resilience discourse of unpreventable tragedy leading to urban recovery that ‘bounces back better’. This can be seen in the modelling of the site around both the dark and light sides of the resilience discourse: the unpreventable deaths, and the promise of the recovery to come. The dark side of resilience is embodied in the black marble tombs, engraved with the names of the victims. We are invited to view their horror. And yet we can never truly emotionally engage with the significance of that absence and horror. The light side of resilience surrounds and overwhelms this area with its platitudes to perpetuity and recovery. The water that flows over the names symbolises the flowing of time and change, conveying that society is not stuck within the moment of terror. Similarly, the trees grow and change with the seasons, articulating a continuity of life (interview with Walker 2014). The striking honesty of Arad’s original design has been co-​opted and watered down, so that the reconstruction of the WTC reflects nothing but the jingoistic politics of resilient security. It has been appropriated into the traditional memorial function (glorifying the sovereign through a narrative of eternal nation and community) despite, and through, its utilisation of counter-​memorial aestheticism (voids and absence). And, in case the message wasn’t clear, the WTC site also explicitly addresses the issue of resilience and recovery through two important design considerations: the Survivor Tree and the Slurry Wall. These design features function to entice the voyeuristic gaze (which seeks to touch the event that disrupted the symbolic order) before re-​narrating the moment of horror and death within a story of resilient life. 82

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The survivor trees In the aesthetics of postmodern memorial architecture (Blair et al. 1991), design runs against statist desires to conceal and mitigate mortality. The abandonment of the traditional memorial form has led to a design era that highlights trauma and absence, rather than concealing them. To reclaim memorialisation as a security practice –​one that mitigates the disruption made by death to authority –​against this architectural trend, we see the adoption of living relics as objects that perform renewal upon post-​terrorist space. In this vein, ‘survivor trees’ are now found at both the Oklahoma City National Memorial and the 9/​ 11 Memorial Plaza. These are trees pulled from the debris of bombsites and symbolically reclaimed as evidence of resilience and regeneration. They soften the bleaker aspects of contemporary memorial design, muting any representation of horror and mortality. The first American survivor tree stood beside the Alfred P. Murrah building and was damaged in the Oklahoma bomb blast of 1995. It was to be removed, like all the other rubble, but the Memorial Task Force recognised the potential symbolic power of the surviving American elm to perform hope and renewal, and thus wrote its inclusion into design parameters for the memorial competition. There was potential in this object. The tree could be re-​symbolised as the hope and strength of the American people, and it could perform the recovery and resilience they craved for the site. The Oklahoma Survivor Tree now stands in pride of place at the high point of the Memorial Terrace. Inscribed around its base are the words: ‘The spirit of this city and this nation will not be defeated; our deeply rooted faith sustains us’ (Veil et al. 2011). The living form of the tree is used to perform renewal and resilience upon the site, functioning  –​like the rest of the reconstruction  –​to mitigate the salient reminders of mortality upon the site. Visitors can purchase seeds from the Survivor Tree to plant elsewhere in their own ritualised performances of resilience and overcoming adversity, perhaps in their own gardens. The tree also, once again, casts light upon the recourse to quasi-​religious discourse within disaster recovery operations to repair the damage done to sovereignty during a disaster event. Faith, and the powers of life, will overcome any adversity (we are supposed to believe). Indeed, the Survivor Tree performs recovery and mitigates the reminder of horror so well that its legend was transposed onto the WTC site in Manhattan to further mitigate the lingering memory of mortality that disrupted political and commercial authority. The Ground Zero Survivor Tree is a Callery Pear –​one of several such trees rescued from the wreckage of the collapsed twin towers after a month under rubble. It originally stood on the windswept plaza surrounding the towers. In the aftermath of 9/​11 it was found and sent to a specialised nursery so that it could recuperate: Arthur Ross nursery in the Bronx (Reynolds 2010–​11). It has since 83

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Death and security been turned into an immortal symbol of resilience by the stage managers of New York’s recovery: genetically mapped by arborists at Bartlett Tree Experts so that its DNA can be grafted onto other trees as time passes, and replanted upon the WTC Memorial Plaza. The Survivor Tree will never die. The Survivor Tree has now been replanted on the WTC site, with much promotional fanfare, forming part of the landscape relief that softens Arad’s reflecting pools, and has become a prominent feature within the 9/​11 Memorial and Museum’s advertising campaign. The Callery Pear is providing a voice and vehicle for retrospective performances of resilience after tragic events in the United States. It retrospectively mitigates the incursion of mortality. On 10 October 2014, the National September Memorial and Museum sent email correspondence to everyone signed up to their mailing list (affiliates and donors, visitors to the museum), notifying them that the museum has welcomed over one million visitors since its public opening in May 2014. The email contained a link to a video of the Survivor Tree’s testimony, a poem for children authored for the 9/​11 Museum by Rick Williams and Marcel Yunes. The tree’s testimony is read by Whoopi Goldberg while a visual depiction of the tree’s story plays underneath the audio track. The Survivor Tree states: From the worst day of all, to my comeback with glory; I’m the Survivor Tree: this is my story. I was a strong pear tree at the World Trade Center. I was strong every spring; I was strong every winter. One day in September, when the buildings came down, it was the worst day of all –​it was the worst day around. We lost family and friends, there was darkness and flashes; I fell to the ground surrounded by ashes. Then the whole world felt sad and I really did too, but we all came together, helped each other pull through. And the workers, they found me, but I was in trouble; as I’d spent more than a month, buried in rubble. My branches were torn and my trunk was all black; and they worried that none of my leaves would grow back. But one branch proclaimed: ‘I’m alive! I’m alive!’ My leaves said to the world, I was gonna survive. When they took me to heal, I was treated with care; and my branches grew thirty feet in the air! You can see in my trunk where I  go light from dark, where my limbs were reborn, where I grew brand new bark. My blossoms remind us how strong we all are: I’m a living reminder of how we rose from the dark. But the power of hope –​there’s just one way to sum it: there’s nothing so bad that we can’t overcome it. (9/​11 Memorial & Museum 2014)

This text perfectly communicates the mission of disaster recovery –​to remove all traces of horror and mortality from human memory, reframing their narrative around renewal and resilience. The video concludes with text that advertises the 9/​11 Memorial and Museum to potential visitors, telling them that the Survivor Tree continues to stand tall as a symbol of hope and rebirth that welcomes visitors to the memorial and museum. But the Survivor Tree does not just stand as a talisman to recovery on the WTC site; its reach extends further than that. The carefully tended genetically identical saplings spawned of this tree have been sent to other sites of tragedy 84

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Reflecting absence?

Figure 3.3  Reflecting Absence, World Trade Center Memorial Plaza, 29 July 2014

and disaster in the United States –​including the Boston bombing, the areas of New  York damaged by Hurricane Sandy and the hometown of nineteen firefighters who perished tackling a wildfire blaze in Arizona. The tree is being performed as a national symbol for disaster recovery, its offspring sent to comfort (and discursively connect) the survivors of any natural or deliberate tragedy (excluding gun crime: given the political context of gun ownership in the United States, gun crime is never represented as an exceptional event/​terrorism (see Tyner et al. 2014)). 85

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Figure 3.4  The Survivor Tree, World Trade Center Memorial Plaza, 29 July 2014

Why is it necessary to engage in such kitsch symbolism? Why is it necessary to discursively connect the communities affected by radically different events? The tree will do nothing to help flooded communities or those recovering from bomb damage. It also adds nothing to the dissemination of historical information vis-​à-​vis 9/​11 at the memorial site. Even the co-​designer of the WTC memorial site, Peter Walker of PWP landscape architects, commented disdainfully on the kitsch representation of the tree by the PR management teams operating for the museum and memorial. During an interview with the author, he explained that 86

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Reflecting absence? every Callery Pear tree has the same DNA –​so genetically mapping the Survivor Tree and transplanting its material into other trees is redundant (interview with Walker 2014). Yet the imagination of the PR representatives of the WTC redevelopment who manage the tree, and the poets who gave it voice, have clearly seized upon an object with large symbolic potential. As Walker suggested to me, there is nothing unique about this tree apart from its attributed ‘personality’. The Survivor Tree has become an artefact of recovery because it explicitly performs resilience and recovery. It invites people to hear its story of overcoming death through hope, cooperation and strength. It reframes the architectural design of the WTC site around social perpetuity and vitality: embodying the practice of security (the mitigation of death). It performs the mitigation of mortality on post-​terrorist space by turning death into life, mitigating horror and meaninglessness by reinstituting the site, and the viewing subject, within the symbolic order of the resilience era. And it is not the only such memory object to undertake such symbolic labour in the recovery architecture at Ground Zero. The Slurry Wall A similar performance to that of the Survivor Tree also occurs underneath the WTC plaza. Here one can locate the 9/​11 Museum. The entire edifice of the 9/​ 11 Museum is built around the authenticity of viewing and interpreting horror. Unlike a conventional museum, built to contain memory artefacts, the museum itself is intended to be the object of the gaze. It is built within the footwells of the fallen towers, where the buildings’ car parks once stood. It appropriates themes of counter-​memorialisation and postmodern monumentality in its very architecture through its situation in the void. One would expect such a design to take on an explicitly pacifist theme, like the destroyed cathedral in Coventry that is left in ruins as a warning to future generations about the horror of war. Yet the design utilises authenticity and horror to resolve the trauma of mortality; like the Survivor Tree, the museum operationalises death to perform security and resolution. The museum is explicitly designed around authentic experience of the absence of the twin towers, offering visitors the ‘authentic experience’ of visiting their sunken graves, while simultaneously framing their journey through the museum so that the theme of resilience and recovery concludes their visit. Like Reflecting Absence above, the museum explicitly caters to the voyeuristic desire to touch and experience the mortality event in an ‘authentic fashion’ –​ before reframing the visiting experience around themes of recovery and regeneration. The promise of deathly authenticity is the hook that lures the gaze, but the museum’s mission is to mitigate the excess and salience of the 9/​11 event through knowledge and retrospective narrations of recovery. 87

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During my conversation with Steven Davis, one of the designers of the 9/​11 Memorial Museum, he emphasised the effort to utilise and convey authenticity during the visitor’s experience. The museum occupies the spaces that were once car parks underneath the towers, and Davis described the design challenge as the inverse of a normal museum that houses artefacts; instead, the structure itself, and its voids, are the artefact: Our project doesn’t have any outside, as museums are normally icons that contain exhibits, this is the universe. The icon is the exhibit. We got our heads around how to design an inversely conceived museum. We have a façade. Our roof is the Memorial Plaza, our floor is the bedrock. To the west we have the slurry wall, to the east we have the PATH train and PATH station. North we have Freedom Tower, south we have the big Chiller plant [air conditioning project that uses water from the Hudson to cool the museum]. (Interview with Steven Davis 2014)

This inverse relationship with the material of history was made central to the design and explicit within the visitor’s journey. Davis described how the interplay between structural factors and subjectivity informed various transitions within the design: The authenticity of the site is a really critical element of the design. So the pools are perfectly aligned with the footprints beneath them –​to the millimetre […] The spatial sequence was progressively disclosed. We controlled the views, we unveil the spaces. There is an inherent narrative in the procession through the museum. But if you think about how people experience memorials, museums, public space, etc. you have to make a series of decisions. Everybody has to make a series of decisions. The first decision is to visit: how you get your information and how you get your itinerary, that’s very much a part of the experience. You arrive intentionally, or casually to visit the memorial. You cross through a series of thresholds. One is from the city. You’re out in lower Manhattan, there’s an enormous amount of activity, and move from that world into the world of the memorial itself, and you engage the pools. There’s a transformation there. Next decision is to visit the museum. You enter the museum and it’s a little bit jolting because there’s a very high level of security […] So you enter the museum pavilion, and you go through an emotional transformation, and you descend from the pavilion into our museum. I would recommend that you take the stairs and that you slowly digest the power of those tridents at the entrance. The tridents weigh about 70 tonnes, they’re really big. Their foundation foots go all the way to rock. The pavilion is light and airy, the museum is not. It’s quite solemn, but it’s not gloomy! It’s solemn. You orient yourself in the arrival space which is called ‘Concourse Hall’. It’s on the same level that the concourse of the World Trade Center was. Your eyes need a few minutes to acclimate to the change in the ambient light. You’ll look around and realize that you’re standing in between the Towers. To your right you’ll see one of the corners of the North Pool, and to your left you’ll see a corner of the South Pool. That moment of being between the Towers is being recreated several times. At Concourse level it’s once. Below there’s an overlook we call the ‘East Overlook’, it’s the second overlook. The third –​plaza concourse, East overlook, and then when you finally arrive at bedrock, you’re there again. So it’s being reinforced. (Interview with Steven Davis 2014)

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Reflecting absence? The journey through the authenticity of the site, a descent over several floors, is accompanied at all times by rescued items from the rubble of the collapse. Viewers are invited to engage with twisted steel girders and fire engines crushed by the towers, and the timeline of the day is explained by numerous exhibits. Death is supposedly everywhere, but at the bottom of the museum, its heart, you are confronted with the portrayal of recovery. The Slurry Wall is the design centrepiece of the museum. The Slurry Wall mirrors the Survivor Tree above. It is the emotional heart of the museum: it is a testament to recovery and resilience. As the original foundation wall for the towers, the wall held back the Hudson River. At this point, it was simply a wall. But during the collapse of the towers, the Slurry Wall was so badly damaged that engineers feared that it could collapse during the removal of rubble. The rubble was holding the wall up, preventing the river flowing into the city’s subway system. Facing the prospect of another disaster, caused by their own disaster recovery efforts, engineers inserted ‘tie backs’ into the wall to absorb the pressure of the river. These now look like giant rods inserted into the wall (Figure 3.5). The wall stopped being a wall at this point, and became symbolised as a relic of the recovery operation and of New York’s resilience. Steven Davis recalled how Libeskind’s masterplan design for the site seized upon the symbolism of the Slurry Wall and ‘romanticised it to great effect’ (interview with Steven Davis 2014). It became the cornerstone of the disaster recovery plans for the regeneration of the site because it could speak of heroism and resilience through the clever appropriation and reframing of tragedy. The US Congress then picked up on this symbolic significance, as articulated in the design masterplan, and issued a protection order, preserving the Slurry Wall as a ‘historic remnant of a period of significance’. Any construction taking place on the site would be required by federal law to leave the Slurry Wall untouched.4 The ‘period of significance’ relates only to the nine-​month period of recovery work undertaken at the site. Libeskind, Congress and the museum designers have made a historical artefact of the recovery effort through the wall –​not the event of 9/​11. The centrepiece of the 9/​11 Museum is thus the recovery of the nation. Recovery is being memorialised, rather than the event of 9/​11. The wall is mythologised as a symbol, performed and viewed to reconstitute the constitutive relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity. It embeds resilience into the memory work undertaken on the site –​like the Survivor Tree above it. The relic of mortality is appropriated as the signifier of security: it becomes the symbolic proof underlying the resilience discourse that events will damage us, yet we will carry on.

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Death and security

Figure 3.5  The Slurry Wall, 29 July 2014

Concluding thoughts on the appropriation of absence At all stages of the Memorial Plaza and Museum, then, we are presented with designs that claim to authentically represent absence and loss. The footwells of the towers utilised within Arad’s design, and the location of the museum in the cavernous foundations of the site, speak clearly of the voyeuristic desire to experience the ‘reality’ of the event that destroyed the symbolic order (Lisle 2004). They sell the event through death. And yet this replication of techniques from

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Reflecting absence? counter-​memorials does not evidence a shift in state practice. The state is not commissioning memorials that recognise the significance of the mortality that belittles political power. Instead, the voyeuristic response to events that smash the symbolic order (like 9/​11) has been appropriated in the mission of security. The state uses the desire to experience and know the event through designs that represent absence –​falsely promising access to the ‘reality’ of the event –​but it situates those representations within broader narratives of recovery, resilience and regeneration. Death has been appropriated to speak of life. We flock to sites of devastation as a response to events that radically disrupt the production of subjectivity vis-​à-​vis sovereignty –​but we do not gain knowledge or experience upon our arrival. Instead, the memorial architecture of the War on Terror era has appropriated the moment of disruption and insecurity to reaffirm the discourse of postmodern security:  endlessly rehearsing moments of emergency within its depiction of perpetual vitality. The design shifts of the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries towards recognition of absence and loss upon post-​terrorist space actually work as a chimera. They have been co-​opted to speak of security, resilience and perpetuity. We do not engage with death at these sites. Instead, we witness what we are supposed to see: resilience. Viewing constitutes us as the resilient subject and reincorporates us within the sovereignty–​subjectivity matrix, dispelling all that was excessive about the disaster event. Disaster recovery, then, fixes the lingering presence of death by fixing subjects. It acts upon memory to re-​narrate the disaster event within a story of regeneration and perpetual vitality. The representation of absence becomes a beautified picnic site for office workers, re-​narrated as the spatial memory of the gatherings of New Yorkers on Washington Square in the aftermath of the attacks. Notes 1 The WTC Survivor Tree is addressed at length later in this chapter. 2 The overall development project has since been divided into four, with Libeskind providing the masterplan for the entire sixteen-​acre site, Arad’s memorial plaza occupying an eight-​acre quadrant on the footwells of the towers, the Davis Brody Bond architectural firm designing the museum component of the site and Santiago Calatrava taking responsibility for redeveloping the PATH train station that connects the WTC site to New Jersey. Those interested in the protracted political processes affecting the reconstruction of the WTC, and disputes between political bureaucracies, economic interests and architectural firms, should consult Goldberger (2004). 3 The jury consisted of four design architects and artists, including Maya Lin, three arts community professionals, two academic and cultural historians, two political representatives, one local business and community leader, and one family member (Young 2006: 221).

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4 It is important to note the degree of similarity between the framing of the WTC Slurry Wall and the ‘Survivor Wall’ at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, which uses granite salvaged from the 1995 bombing to construct a wall upon which the names of over 600 survivors are listed (Veil et al. 2011). This overlap is extended with regard to the presence of ‘survivor trees’ at both sites.

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Reclaiming place and self-​harming architecture: Norwegian experiences of death and security

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chapter explored the ways in which absence and trauma have been co-​opted within memorialisation at the World Trade Center site to reinstate ontological security upon disaster space. Postmodern monumental themes are used to draw visitors to the site, who wish to view and consume the deathly event that disrupted the symbolic order, but architectural design then ‘secures through the failure to secure’ (Heath-​Kelly 2015a):  re-​ narrating a horrific event as evidence of resilience and national endurance. Trauma is folded into architecture to diminish its power (Lundborg 2012). This cynical co-​option of postmodern design themes can be understood as the bolstering of sovereignty during a period of disaster recovery. Such memorialisation is a security practice that occurs retrospectively to efface and mitigate the emergency, acting upon its residual place in human and spatial memory. It defeats death by building a totem to resilience. This chapter moves away from Manhattan to explore the competing memorial claims that are made upon sites connected to Anders Breivik’s attacks of 22 July 2011 in Norway. Having detonated a car bomb outside Oslo’s government buildings (killing eight) to protest against the support for multiculturalism in Norway, Breivik drove to Utøya Island: the site of a social-​democratic youth summer camp. This was apparently enough, in Breivik’s ultra-​right-​wing mindset, to justify its selection as a target. He changed into a police uniform, took the ferry across the water to the island, and executed a further sixty-​nine people. If security is an ontological practice of mortality effacement then we should see it in action after the Norwegian terror attacks. As such, this chapter looks at the divergent efforts of the Norwegian state and local parties to respond architecturally to the terrorist attack, how these efforts differ substantially in their design and yet share the objective of mitigating the lingering insecurity resonant upon post-​terrorist space. Like New York, the Norwegian state ran an international memorial competition to organise their national architectural response. And like New  York’s selection of Reflecting Absence, Norway’s arts council he previous

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Death and security (KORO) selected a design that centralises absence. Jonas Dahlberg’s winning design, Memory Wound, will slice a 3.5-​metre gash from the landscape around Utøya Island. The memorial design is a literal representation of what is absent, lost and can never be recovered. It is a striking intervention upon the landscape. This chapter explores the selection of postmodern monumentality in response to the attacks of 22 July, while contrasting this with civil society memorialisation and popular protest. These other locally organised, non-​state forms of memorialisation and protest make different claims on space and memory. They don’t make a representation of horror or absence but instead assert the notion of ‘place’. They attempt to reclaim ‘place’ through memorialisation or through contestation of the states plans for reconstruction in Oslo. These activities are intended to remove the memory of horror by reconstituting previous spatial and social meanings associated with sites. For example, the redevelopment of Utøya Island is organised around the reconstitution of its previous ‘place’ (happy, social-​democratic youth camp), and public protests use the rhetoric of ‘place’ against the government’s strategy to redevelop the bombed Government Quarter and tear down certain buildings. The utilisation of ‘place’ is explored here through Heideggerian and phenomenological geographical literature that focuses on place as an axis upon which subjectivity is constituted. Place is central to being-​in-​the-​world. These accounts focus on the constitution of subjectivity through emplacement in the world, as well as the effacement of death that happens through the assertion of place-​meaning. Permanent place names belie the inevitability of death, rupture and change. This is, of course, very relevant to the activities undertaken on post-​terrorist space that practise security through the recovery of place. Places, as they will be explored here, are social constructs of perpetuity, articulated contra the void of meaning in mortality. The restitution of such meanings upon post-​terrorist space mitigates death through its lingering presence in memory and space. In summary, this chapter explores an interesting contrast in the ways design has been used in Norway to conquer and efface death upon post-​terrorist space. The state confronts the deaths of citizens through an architectural rendering of absence (Memory Wound), which I will later describe as an architectural form of self-​harm upon the landscape, whereas civil society memorial designs (and popular protests) mitigate death by reconstituting and reimagining the prior meaning of place. Both, in a sense, are security practices given that they respond to the incursion of mortality (the negative foundation, which eludes meaning) and attempt to re-​secure the production of meaning, certainty and politics. It is interesting to see this mirroring across state and civil society practice because, as was postulated in the introductory chapter, mortality affects and drives many levels of action. It is a productive force that drives cultural, linguistic and political activity to efface the meaninglessness of a world in which existence is temporary. 94

Reclaiming place and self-harming architecture Security is present in both levels of architectural and political response to terrorism, but the design varies.

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Memory Wound: architectural self-​harm? Many actors are attempting to mark the legacy of those killed in the Utøya shootings and Oslo bomb attack of 2011. It is planned that the events of 22 July will result in no fewer than four architectural responses to the attacks. The AUF (Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking –​Workers’ Youth League) are organising the plans for the Utøya Island renovation and memorial, while the Norwegian government has commissioned one monument overlooking Utøya from the mainland at Sørbråten (called Memory Wound), one temporary memorial at the bombed Government Quarter in Oslo by the same artist and then a permanent reconstruction of the Government Quarter to be completed in two stages (by 2024, then 2064). This chapter explores how these projects use design in very different ways to perform recovery from disaster and the mitigation of deathly resonance. The AUF’s activity on the island focuses on reinvigorating the sense of vitality connected to Utøya’s political history, reclaiming its ‘place’ identity, whereas the official national memorial at Sørbråten centralises absence and unhealable loss within design. That is a huge contrast. The chapter compares the utilisation of postmodern monumentality to end trauma, in the style of Memory Wound, with the civil strategy of consolidating place  –​relying upon Heideggerian-​inspired geographical readings of place as the counterpoint to death. It argues that state appropriations of postmodern monumentality in Norway (and New York, see previous chapter) explicitly render representations of trauma and absence to deplete the power of death, and to reassert values of resilient subjectivity, whereas civil society actors take a softer architectural approach to death –​confronting it through the architectural reclamation of place-​meaning. Yet both are retrospective performances of security that recover disaster space from the presence of mortality. How should we consider the dynamics of place upon post-​terrorist Utøya Island? It is important to understand the island’s political history when considering both its selection as a target and the attempt to architecturally reclaim the site. Utøya is currently owned by the AUF (Workers’ Youth League) and used for fostering progressive youth politics under the umbrella of the Labour Party, but, interestingly, it was historically owned by the right-​wing figure Jens Bratlie. Bratlie was prime minister of Norway between 1912 and 1913 for the Conservative Party and used Utøya as a summer residence during his political career –​which included a close affiliation with the proto-​fascist manoeuvrings of Vidkun Quisling in Norway during the 1930s (interview with Jørgen Frydnes 2013). After its use as a quasi-​fascist island resort, Utøya was sold to the Oslo and 95

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Death and security Akershus Trade Union Movement in 1932. The trade union movement established the tradition of summer camps on the island, but during the 1930s these served the purpose of accommodating poverty-​stricken children from Oslo and increasing their bodyweight during their stay (interview with Jørgen Frydnes 2013). Utøya was then gifted to the AUF in 1950, who have since utilised the island for political summer camps (once referred to by current Prime Minister Stoltenberg as the ‘most important site for political speeches’ in the Norwegian political calendar) (interview with Jørgen Frydnes 2013) and who have lent the site to other organisations for their own gatherings (including the Norwegian People’s Aid Youth, the Youth Organisation for Lesbian and Gay Rights, the Red Cross and various trade unions). The island has been intrinsically connected to the development of social-​democratic politicians in the contemporary history of Norway, with eight out of twelve current ministers having attended summer camps (interview with Jørgen Frydnes 2013). Furthermore, its legacy includes once hosting Leon Trotsky when he fled the Soviet Union. The island’s political history is the reason Anders Breivik selected it as a target. Utøya was a symbol for the development of left-​wing politics, pluralism and multiculturalism in Norway. The brutality of Breivik’s attack shocked Norway. The country’s peaceful history led to 22 July becoming the most infamous tragedy to befall the country since the Second World War. In a national survey undertaken after the attacks of 22 July, one million Norwegians of the total five million population affirmed that they had been personally affected by the events. This dramatic survey result reflects both the small population of the country and the fact that the victims had been drawn from all over Norway’s territory to attend the summer camp  –​meaning that one in five Norwegians personally knew of someone who was injured, killed or escaped (interviews with Jørgen Frydnes 2013 and Jørn Mortensen 2013). The impact of 22 July on this small nation was intense, and many Norwegians interviewed for this project spoke of the event as an ideological attack upon democracy as well as a brutal massacre of human life. Norway’s response to terrorism has been laudable, when compared with the descent of the United States and United Kingdom into surveillance regimes and wars after their own experiences of violence. Two days after the attack rocked his country, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg addressed the memorial service in Oslo Cathedral with promises that Norway would never surrender its social-​democratic values and that the answer to terror is more democracy, not less. Norway refused to follow the path of the United States or European nations towards extensive counterterrorism policies that damage civil liberty. During his trial, Norway’s judiciary extended every legal right and courtesy to Breivik that any other defendant would expect, eventually sentencing him to twenty-​one years in prison –​the maximum sentence possible for his crimes. Quite the contrast to Guantanamo Bay. Yet despite this contrast, there appears to be a strong similarity in the memorial response to violent death between Norway and the United States. Mortality 96

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Reclaiming place and self-harming architecture is understood to linger in memory and must be expunged during disaster recovery. Like New  York, a memorial competition was arranged by the Norwegian state to assist the recovery from disaster. A particular problem for the memorial endeavour was that two separate interconnected designs would be needed to connect the Utøya site1 with that of Breivik’s bomb attack on the Oslo parliament. Norway’s arts council, KORO, formed a judging committee comprising seven people to run the memorial commissioning process  –​two artistic consultants drawn from the Norwegian Institute of Fine Arts and Office for Contemporary Arts, two representatives of victims’ organisations, two representatives of government and one appointed architect. I was able to obtain interviews with the artistic consultants, Jørn Mortensen and Per Gunnar Eeg Tverbakk, in 2013, once the international competition for designs had opened, but prior to its conclusion. At this point they were receiving entries but had not selected a winning design. When I asked them how the entries would be judged and what a successful design might look like, they clearly indicated that their preference would use the postmodern monumentality aesthetic detailed in the previous chapter. Mortensen stated that the winning design would likely ‘recreate the trauma’ of the attack to achieve design relevance: We have a few goals for the work or the piece, the space, the site. I’ve used the word ‘relevance’. I think it’s very important that it stands out and feels relevant for those who were directly and indirectly confronted with the incident […] Instead of pointing to some sort of formative or aesthetic, significant traces or characteristics, I think it’s a matter of relevance. The other thing is that we want –​and I think if it becomes relevant –​people will also participate, take part, use it, and renegotiate it over and over again. That’s a second parameter here. If the sites are renegotiated as time goes, I think we will succeed. Putting up a monolith or a vertical thing that freezes time is not what we want to do. We want to recreate the trauma, but also the values that we believe in. (Interview with Jørn Mortensen 2013)

Per Gunnar agreed, concisely stating that the 22 July memorials could not replicate the style of traditional statist monuments and their communication of authority: ‘If you look back to the monuments, the classic monument is very brutal and authoritative. We can’t make such a memorial’ (interview with Per Gunnar Eeg Tverbakk 2013). Mortensen identified that an appropriate and relevant design would artistically remind of the horror of the death event –​and pointed to post-​terrorist architecture in Oklahoma, as well as the Berlin monument to the Sinti and Roma who died in the Holocaust (Figures 4.1 and 4.2), as good examples of stark design that appropriately created sites of ‘sacred reverence’ (interview with Per Gunnar Eeg Tverbakk 2013) in chaotic urban landscapes. Interestingly, he did not make mention of Reflecting Absence in New York as an example of such architecture. When the winning design was unveiled in February 2014, it was clear that the jury had received their dream entry. KORO commissioned Swedish 97

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Figure 4.1  Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered under the National Socialist Regime, Berlin, 20 August 2013

artist Jonas Dahlberg’s Memory Wound for the peninsula opposite Utøya Island. Like Arad’s Reflecting Absence, the design caught the attention of the committee due to its stark aesthetic that utilises the style of postmodern monumentality to full effect. The design involves cutting a gash through the peninsula, 3.5 metres wide, to explicitly represent the ‘taking away’ of life that occurred on 22 July 2011. The landscape is literally torn apart by the design. The names are inscribed onto the rock face opposite the viewing platform. The gash makes it impossible to reach the headland that points towards the island –​physically modelling the impossibility of traumatic witnessing: you cannot reach the truth or reality of the matter. The excavated rock and soil will then be transported to the site of the Oslo memorial to form a path between the government buildings, connecting the two sites of massacre. Jonas Dahlberg explicitly describes his design in terms of absence and rupture –​demonstrating reliance on a similar artistic and monumental history as Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence: The concept for the Memorial Sørbråten proposes a wound or a cut within nature itself. It reproduces the physical experience of taking away, reflecting the abrupt and permanent loss of those who died. The cut will be a three-​and-​a-​half-​meters-​wide excavation. It slices from the top of the headland at the Sørbråten site, to below the

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water line and extends to each side. This void in the landscape makes it impossible to reach the end of the headland […] Visitors will be on one side of a channel of water created by the cut. Across this channel, on the flat vertical stone surface of the other side, the names of those who died will be visibly inscribed in the stone. The names will be close enough to see and read clearly –​yet ultimately out of reach. The cut is an acknowledgment of what is forever irreplaceable. This experience hopes to bring visitors to a state of reflection through a poetic rupture or interruption. It should be difficult to see the beauty of the natural setting, without also experiencing a sense of loss. It is this sense of loss that will physically activate the site. (Dahlberg 2014)

Figure 4.2  Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe murdered under the National Socialist Regime, Berlin, 20 August 2013

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Death and security Such a design is as far removed from the traditional memorial form as can be conceived. It operationalises horror, loss and wounding. It does not minimise the horror of death. Furthermore, it seems that the bold design has the full support of the Norwegian state and local government –​so unlike the example of Reflecting Absence at the WTC, Memory Wound will not be co-​opted to speak of adaptive continuity and resilience. It is a startling and uncompromising artistic endeavour. And yet I will now argue that all is not as it seems. Memory Wound, while bleak, honest and possibly artistically brilliant, has been commissioned for a purpose –​and that purpose is security (the effacement of death). To make this argument, let us first consider why the Norwegian state allows and selects such a design. Is it not uncomfortable with the proximity of mortality, and reminders of horror, in the vicinity of its statehood? The function of Memory Wound becomes evident when we consider its location. Memory Wound will not be constructed upon Utøya –​but opposite the island on Sørbråten peninsula. Utøya Island is owned by the AUF political party who are organising their own memorialisation and reconstruction of their site. My interviews with the New Utøya team provide the empirical material for most of the rest of this chapter. The island will be marked with a memorial that honours the victims, as well as renovated to resignify and architecturally reclaim the buildings from their connection with Breivik’s massacre. Given that this redesign is already occurring, one would expect the Norwegian state to organise the memorialisation of the bombed Government Quarter alone. Yet they have organised and funded an international design competition that expressly attempts to process both the Utøya and Oslo sites. Why the need for a second memorial, when the AUF are already undertaking that task? Why the need to over-​signify? Quite simply, we are witnessing a compulsion to mark and remake space after terrorism. The AUF have made their plans for the redevelopment of the island but the state cannot tolerate being inactive with regard to the mitigation of the deathly events –​a compulsion is felt to efface mortality through symbolic labour. The state must reassert its performance of control over mortality to avoid exposure as a limited God. It must make a visitable image of the tragedy to perform that authority. And as such, the Norwegian state has commissioned its own memorial for the Utøya site –​which it cannot place upon the island. Instead, the state is building its marker as close to the island as possible: purchasing land on the adjacent peninsula in its attempt to resignify and control the irruption of mortality. So while Dahlberg’s design is a stunning and unflinching engagement with loss, horror and mortality, its contextual situation within issues of space and political authority can reveal the functionality of memorialisation: even when death is referenced in design, memorialisation functions to mitigate mortality by resignifying post-​terrorist space. The design is ambivalent –​demonstrating 100

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Reclaiming place and self-harming architecture openness to both absence and death while also functioning within a disaster recovery effort to mitigate and suppress that resonance. Interestingly, the local population of Sørbråten seem to hate the design. They do not want such a brutal reminder of horror cast upon their land and have organised protests and lawsuits against its construction. They live every day with the memory of the shootings and, given its prominent location next to the main road towards Oslo, would not be able to avoid the memorial’s additional provocation to remember. They describe the gash planned for the peninsula as the ‘rape of the landscape’ and a ‘hideous monument’ (The Local 2014a). The parents of one of the victims, Sharidyn Svebakken Bohn, a 14-​year-​old who was shot dead on Utøya, said that they did not want her name included on the memorial (The Local 2014b). So what is this design for? Who is this design for, if such opposition has caused its construction to be postponed pending public consultations? Memory Wound was selected as the design form that best dissipates lingering trauma through direct representation of the emergency event. Consider, for example, the government-​commissioned treatises on disaster recovery, discussed in the previous chapter, that envisage commemoration services and memorials as anti-​trauma devices. The performance of such rituals enables the expression, and expulsion, of traumatic symptoms through the visualisation of the disaster event and its horror. This openness, in the discourse of disaster recovery, prevents the hidden lingering and festering of the emergency (mortality). Instead, the event becomes processed through architecture:  it becomes visitable and functional. Otherwise, why the need to build it? Memory Wound resignifies the site and thus effaces the resonance of the real wound: the irruption of mortality left by 22 July 2011. Adrian Lahoud has written of these post-​traumatic scars upon landscapes in temporal terms. He states that ‘Trauma names the moment after our image of the future is destroyed but before it has been replaced […] The term post-​traumatic refers to the evidence of the aftermath: the remains of an event that are missing. The spaces around this blind spot record the impression of the event like a scar’ (Lahoud 2010: 19). The memorial fixes this void  –​this unresolved temporality and spatiality of emergency. The reconstruction paves the event and re-​narrates the story with a conclusion. It is functional. We can thus think of Memory Wound as self-​harming, purposeful scarring. Norway is inflicting a wound upon its landscape to deal with the inescapable resonance and horrific incursion of mortality. It cuts itself to demonstrate the pain, the grief, the dislocation. It marks, it visualises, it brings to the surface; and by doing so, it concludes the temporal and spatial ambiguity of post-​traumatic space. The event is located in the past once the stylised, designed and intentional scar leaves its mark. Disaster recovery is complete at this point, with death secured by discursive boundaries of time, place, memory and architecture. 101

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Taking back Utøya: dissipating mortality, reclaiming place Across the water from Sørbråten, no one has any need for more scars. This section discusses the author’s fieldwork visit to Utøya Island and interviews with members of the New Utøya project to architecturally redesign the island. It explores how the AUF frame their desires for renovation and reconstruction in terms of place –​not with abstract, stark architectural design. Such invocations of place deploy the heritage of sites as their strategy of recovery. Attacked places, it is argued, have been changed. They are exiled from their pre-​existing situation in the public imagination through the horrors that took place there, and will not recover until they are redesigned and reformulated. Architectural redevelopment ‘normalises’, so that sites might be ‘taken back’ and regain (some of) their previous identity. Place is reclaimed through practices that happen at post-​terrorist sites. This is clearly a very different approach from the manipulation of images of absence, as utilised within Memory Wound or Reflecting Absence. This chapter explores the functionality of ‘place’ within civil society approaches to post-​terrorist space, arguing that despite the differing aesthetics from postmodern monumentality these approaches still secure, and still efface death. They use different aesthetics but have the same objective. This is the social and cultural dynamic provoked by death anxiety, a relative of the statist form that takes a different design path. To situate the following discussion of the New Utøya project, it is important to first establish a working understanding of what is meant by ‘place’. Tim Cresswell has provided the best introduction to recent work in geography that explores the meaning of place by explaining that ‘Place is a word that seems to speak for itself […] Place is not a specialised piece of academic terminology […] It is a word wrapped in commonsense’ (Cresswell 2004: 1). He discusses the example of a student moving into halls of residence, faced with a space –​air, furniture and the marks from previous inhabitants. The student then puts posters up and makes the place their own. The space is turned into place. The place literature often establishes the meaning of place by contrasting it with space. For example: 40.46 N 73.58 W does not mean that much to most people […] to most of us these are just numbers indicating a location –​a site without meaning. These coordinates mark the location of New York City […] immediately many images come into our heads […] We might think of skyscrapers, 9/​11, shopping or of any number of movie locations. Replacing a set of numbers with a name means that we begin to approach ‘place’. If we heard that two planes had flown into 40.46 N 73.58 W it would not quite have the same impact as hearing that they had flown into New York, into Manhattan, into the Twin Towers. (Cresswell 2004: 2)

Similarly, Yi-​Fu Tuan argued that ‘space’ and ‘place’ are concepts embedded within a dualistic relationship whereby space is abstract but place is the result of 102

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Reclaiming place and self-harming architecture human experience of locations and their endowment with value (Tuan 1977). Space becomes place through experience and social construction. Cresswell has built upon this argument by showing that place is not just a ‘thing in the world’, but a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the world around us (Cresswell 2004:  11). Place is the situation of experience, as well as the quality of that which is experienced. In the trajectory that has followed Tuan’s work, place is intimately connected to experience rather than to nomothetic theorising. Indeed, in the contemporary Heideggerian and phenomenological treatments of place, the situation of human life within place actually provides the remit for intentional consciousness –​where intentionality implies consciousness of something (Malpas 1999). Situation in place is fundamental to the constitution of subjectivity as being-​in-​ the-​world. As Cresswell explains: The philosophy of phenomenology was developed by Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl in the nineteenth century and its central concern is with what philosophers call intentionality. The word intentionality refers to the ‘aboutness’ of human consciousness. That is to say that we cannot (the phenomenologist would argue) be conscious without being conscious of something. Consciousness constructs a relation between self and the world. Relph’s argument is that consciousness is not just of something –​but something in its place. The only way that humans can be humans is to be ‘in place’. Place determines our experience. (Cresswell 2004: 22–​3)

The Heideggerian dimension to this formulation is developed by J.  E. Malpas, who reminds us that Dasein cannot be reduced to the positioning of the subject within space; rather Dasein is fundamentally an ontology that emphasises being-​in-​the-​world. Dasein is shaped through its situation in the world and this situation in time and space constitutes subjectivity itself (Malpas 1999: 34–​5). Given the Heideggerian framings of place, we should not be surprised that place and mortality also have a fundamental connection. ‘Dwelling’ (living, in Heideggerian terms) can only happen in place  –​it is not to be considered abstracted. It is also temporary in time. The finitude of existence is evident with our longing for perpetual places that do not age, wither and die. As Malpas succinctly expresses the connection between place and mortality: ‘Death is not some “accident” to which we just happen to be unusually (in fact, invariably) prone. To be who and what we are is to be creatures whose located, spatialised existence brings death inevitably in its wake’ (Malpas 1999: 191–​2). Death causes us to long for place and make political attributions of place-​meaning. The prospect of negativity must be effaced, mitigated and secured –​through the assertion of perpetual place. Rather unsurprisingly, then, Tuan’s classic study of place opened with the line:  ‘Place is security’ (Tuan 1977:  1). The constitution of places through human experience provides the aura of permanence, foundation and security –​to counteract the death anxiety that permeates 103

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Death and security human existence. Elsewhere Tuan speaks of the ‘universal human impulse to transform space into home or world’ (Tuan 1991), containing those abstract and unknowable scales of existence into knowable, named and secure realities for ourselves. This carving out of permanences within a world of instability is a security strategy (Harvey 1996: 261; Smith et al. 1998: 4): knowing is naming, is controlling, is effacing the unknown, is mitigating mortality. Place-​meanings are social strategies against mortality. But their importance in the constitution of power, politics and subjectivity can also make places targets. On 22 July 2011, Anders Breivik targeted certain locations because they meant something. He didn’t select the Oslo Government Quarter or Utøya Island randomly; rather he selected places known through their symbolic association with multiculturalism and social-​democratic politics. Why? Because inscriptions of place can be wiped away by violent events, such as bombings. Places are experienced very differently after they are destroyed or associated with horror. Violence can be used to contest, destroy and counter-​inscribe the meaning of space (as well as bodies) (Coward 2009; Heath-​Kelly 2013b; Scarry 1985). Violence changes places. Bombsites thus make uncomfortable viewing and are visually disruptive, not only because of the memories of horror that they provoke. They disrupt the scopic regimes in which they sit (Lisle 2004); they speak of disruption, impermanence, rupture and death. For example, ten years after the Bali bombing the unmade space of the Sari Club continues to provoke activism for a ‘peace park’ –​despite the presence of a huge memorial to the bombing victims nearby (Heath-​Kelly 2015a). It is difficult to imagine or experience place in the same way, when post-​terrorist space lingers in the background (Figures 4.3 and 4.4). Breivik turned Utøya into a place of horror, rather than the progressive political hope it once represented. In response, the changed place-​hood of Utøya is central to the AUF’s plans to ‘normalise’ and redevelop the island.2 Before I was allowed to set foot on the island, the project manager for the New Utøya3 initiative, Jørgen Frydnes, clearly articulated that I must understand the island’s history. He tutored me on the history of the place on our walk down to the ferry that makes the crossing, and during our walk around the island. Initially, I didn’t fully understand the significance of the injunction made by Jørgen. While I was happy to agree to his conditions, and grateful for the opportunity to view the island’s current condition while hearing him describe the future plans for building work, the significance of the island’s history to the New Utøya project only became clear to me later. The project to ‘normalise’ the space of Utøya requires, in the terms of its protagonists, a campaign to retake its place –​where place is constituted through the cultural history of the island –​and to contest the post-​Breivik public imagination of the island as a sinister massacre site. The project works to defeat the visual rendering of death upon memory that scripts the current place identity 104

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Figure 4.3  The Oslo Government Quarter adorned in protective covering, post-​bombing, 13 August 2013

Figure 4.4  The Oslo Government Quarter adorned in protective covering, post-​bombing, 13 August 2013

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of Utøya. The project involves architectural plans for the removal of some particularly traumatic buildings, the redevelopment of existing facilities, a private memorial and changing the appearance of the built vista as it appears from the ferry ride over the lake  –​the image that has saturated media coverage of the attacks and rendered Utøya ‘sinister’ in the public imagination. The project website describes the aims and objectives of New Utøya in the following terms: After a comprehensive assessment AUF has chosen to move forward in the process to rebuild Utøya. We believe that this is the best way to honor the victims of 22 July 2011. By creating new Utøya –​an inclusive forum for fellowship, idealism and commitment –​we will also prove that the offender failed to tear down the community in cooperation built up. Utøya will again be a place of democracy, tolerance and equal opportunity. (New Utøya 2014, emphasis added)

The re-​establishment of Utøya as a place for activism, idealism and political awakenings demonstrates a clear connection between recovery and place. When project manager, Jørgen Frydnes, described the project he expressed a connection between the concepts of ‘rebuilding’ and ‘reclaiming place’. This was often phrased as ‘taking the island back’, by both Jørgen and the New Utøya architects, Fantastic Norway (interview with Fantastic Norway 2013). Jørgen explained that he was called to lead the project in the days after Breivik’s attacks, following the almost immediate decision of the AUF leaders that the island must be ‘taken back’ as a place: ‘Some of the leaders already on the Friday and Saturday had these grand ideas of not losing the place; taking it back. That was the day after. There was no planning or research. It was the idea that he [Breivik] had taken so much away from us that he should not be allowed to take away this beautiful place’ (interview with Frydnes 2013). The underlying motivation of the New Utøya project is place-​related then. The AUF articulate an explicit concern that Breivik has not only claimed lives, but he has made a claim upon the ‘place’ of Utøya that must be contested through a reassertion of the island’s positive meaning and history.4 They have chosen to respond architecturally to retake the place. In the weeks and months that followed 22 July 2011, the AUF liaised with architectural firms to slowly discuss the potential future of the island. Every two weeks since the event, the Oslo architectural firm Fantastic Norway met with the AUF planning committee –​and occasionally survivors of the attacks. Erlend and Håkon of Fantastic Norway described their work with the youth as a project dedicated to ‘reoccupying the image of the island’, clearly highlighting the importance of place in the restoration of the island. The lingering image of the island, post-​Breivik, is sinister, dark and separated from the AUF’s experience of happy summer camps and political awakenings. His actions damaged that ‘place’, and Fantastic Norway understand their brief as contesting the media images of horror that have come to ‘re-​ place’ the political history of the island as its defining spatial imagination: 106

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Reclaiming place and self-harming architecture HÅKON:  One of the issues that caught our eye very early was that from being such a positive place naturally, now the island was known to the general public as a terrible, terrible horror. ERLEND:  Yeah, the image. HÅKON:  And that image was very often represented [by the] journalists and the photographers and everyone standing ashore looking at this dark … ERLEND:  End of days picture. HÅKON:  This heavy, rainful sky, and there might even be kids on the island while you were watching the image […] For us, I mean, this wasn’t the main entry angle for what we did but one of the important things would be for us to re-​establish the image of the island, because something has happened after. ERLEND:  [And] also bearing in mind that most people never go to the island, so that image would be what they know as the island. So it was important to change that image from something sinister to something that literally had gone through a change, so that was something which becoming quite clear that we needed to deal with. HÅKON:  Very much about reoccupying the image of the island. (Interview with Fantastic Norway 2013)

Here the architectural plans to dissipate the sinister renderings of the island enact recovery through a renegotiation of place-​meaning. The time and place of Utøya before 22 July is recovered from the temporal/​spatial limbo imposed by the massacre and post-​traumatic space (Lahoud 2010), and renegotiated. Erlend and Håkon described the New Utøya project aims as ‘reclaiming the image, as the final say’ –​ serving to close the traumatic events within an architectural move to ‘re-​occupy’ the place and image of the island (interview with Fantastic Norway 2013). As such, the aim of the New Utøya project is to reclaim continuity with the island’s history and place-​hood –​in response to the traumatic break in its identity that Breivik deliberately engineered. When the island returns to functionality as a site for summer camps, from its current formulation in the public imagination as a sinister site of horror, it will have adapted to the traumatic break imposed upon it. The reclaiming of place will re-​establish continuity with the island’s history, while incorporating the events of July 2011. The island will live again. It will be recovered, in public perception, from the deathly resonance that lingers there. The promotional images used to display the aims of the New Utøya project (Figures 4.5 and 4.6) demonstrate this ambition visually. Light is used to blast away the incursion of mortality, alongside the repositioning and modernisation of the facilities; light is used to reinvigorate, reclaim and irradiate the trace of death. And beyond these design images, the actual practice of renovation and reconstruction has now begun –​using very different techniques than the quick, industrialised and professionalised methods of state-​organised reconstruction. The New Utøya team does not use heavy machinery, nor design buildings that would require their usage. Instead, everything is done by hand. This approach 107

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Figure 4.5  Early promotional image of the New Utøya project

is called dugnad  –​a traditional form of Norwegian volunteer labour, which is socially compulsory community service and applicable to all social classes and groups (interview with Frydnes 2013). Everyone is required to get their hands dirty doing renovation or building work in the community. The architects behind the New Utøya project explained that they, in conversation with the AUF, decided to utilise this approach to embed the values of democracy and sociality into the project. Local materials would be used, by local people, to rebuild their island. Nothing (or very little) could be used in the design that went beyond the lifting capacity of two people (interview with Fantastic Norway 2013). 108

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Figure 4.6  Early promotional image of the New Utøya project

The New Utøya team regularly contacts the local community and sometimes the families of those injured and killed on the island to attend dugnad events, operationalising the values of the project within its construction methods. Indeed, shortly before my visit to the island in 2013, the first steps had been taken in the renovation and recovery of the island through dugnad. AUF members invited the family members of those killed and injured to begin the process of hand-​constructing a small fence along the cliff path of the ‘love trail’, so named because youth often walked hand-​in-​hand there during summer camps. On the second anniversary of the shootings, over one thousand people turned up to help with the fencing (interview with Jørgen Frydnes 2013). More recent dugnad has involved laying slate and clearing a new trail across the island to the memorial site, which should be complete by the fourth anniversary of the shootings. In the New Utøya project, then, both reconstruction design and methods are tailored towards the recovery of place and life. Machinery is avoided in favour of communal labour, so that the value of human life and togetherness is embedded within the materials and methods of the project. The resonance of the horror of 22 July is identified as continuing to affect the island, and the strategy for recovery uses the vital power of community labour to remake the vista of the island  –​shedding the mediatised image of death, darkness and horror. Is this redevelopment a security practice, undertaken socially rather than by the state? Interestingly, Erlend and Håkon commented at length on safety and security in their discussion of the New Utøya project. During the early phases of project development, they talked to the AUF about the various ways in which the island could be made to feel ‘safe’ again. Initially this involved trialling plans for the provision of escape boats around the island, or even a bridge connecting with the mainland, for example: 109

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Figure 4.7  The Love Trail Fence at Utøya Island, 13 August 2013 I mean there’s obviously things that come out earlier in the project like protection. Should we have escape boats on the island? Should we build a fence around it? Wouldn’t that just be the opposite of what we really want to do because in relation to the national response to this was kind of beautiful. [It was] focusing on the prospect of love and caring for each other. This was very often early on things that would be discussed like ‘Would we feel safe here again?’ (Interview with Fantastic Norway 2013)

These infrastructural components of safety and security, so prized by governments and the pre-​emption/​risk discourse of security, were quickly rejected in 110

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the discussions that occurred between the AUF and their architectural partners because they would not contribute to the feeling of safety. Instead, that feeling of security would come from the restoration of Utøya as a place –​in the sense that it was previously known to the youth who utilised the island. Technologies more associated with prevention (like surveillance, crash-​bollards and escape routes from crowded places) were considered counterproductive, in that they would contribute to a sense of insecurity rather than safety: ERLEND:  We want to create spaces where you would feel locally safe, where your back is safe […] We wanted to look upon that to make you personally feel safe. That’s the task. You can’t protect it, it’s an impossible task […] You don’t want to meet the terror with terror. HÅKON:  I think it’s important because if you respond to it [terrorist attacks], if you let that be determined by a kind of canvas that they drag you up [who knows] the sick things that might happen? Any day, any crazy things might happen. There might be a guy standing there on the roof with a bazooka. It almost never happens. You’re supposed to prepare for that? That kind of society would be a really ugly one. I think for us it’s about how you determine safety […] It would have been a terrible place to be. You would constantly be reminded that something absolutely nightmarish might happen. That’s not safety […] If it’s safety that you’re talking about; social safety and feeling a sense of belonging. [Feeling] that it is a good place. Bring that silhouette [back] again, feeling that this is something strong. We made this as a kind of response that we want to continue here, that’s also kind of a safety […] This is our place. We took it, but not in an army way. (Interview with Fantastic Norway 2013)

As such, the restoration of Utøya as a safe place has been formulated by Fantastic Norway and the AUF as involving the explicit rejection of the most central tenets of contemporary security discourse –​anticipation, preparation and the acceptance of the inevitability of catastrophes. They refuse to enter the discourse of unending threat and the need to pre-​empt. And yet, in focusing on restoring the island to functionality through the reassertion of place (by renovating the island’s facilities for summer camps and gently adjusting the silhouette of the buildings as the island is viewed from shore, so that the island no longer resembles the sinister mediated image of 22 July 2011), they achieve a recovery and security that government discourse is often blind to:  the reassertion of place continuity. This, it is hoped, will end the traumatic disruption imposed upon the site. Rather than engineering a sense of security with escape boats or a bridge, which would necessarily fail in the opinion of the site’s curators because they would counterproductively remind of danger, a relationship with place is being rebuilt. This relationship with safety and security is the effacement of mortality, and its lingering presence in memory, through the rearticulation of place  –​place being a representation of perpetuity. The response to memory, through place, is a security practice –​one designed and articulated in different terms to that of the state and its self-​harming architecture. 111

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Disaster recovery as urban renewal: Oslo Government Quarter While the rural settings of Utøya and Sørbråten have seen the AUF and the Norwegian state address Breivik’s attacks in their designs (Memory Wound; New Utøya), the city-​centre location of Breivik’s bomb attack has been approached largely as an issue of urban planning. This section explores the rationale behind the Norwegian government’s attempt to frame disaster recovery post-​22 July as an issue of urban renewal, while also examining the public protests against the redevelopment of the Oslo Government Quarter that make claims upon place-​meanings. Utøya and Sørbråten will undergo transformations that directly represent (Memory Wound) trauma or attempt to reconfigure landscape to mitigate trauma, but the Oslo Government Quarter is state land managed by Statsbygg –​ the state property ministry. Their plan for the reconstruction of the Government Quarter is oriented around modernisation of facilities and the maximisation of economic potential. Like the recovery of Manchester city centre after its bombing (see previous chapter), recovery is prefaced around economic and planning concerns –​not memorialisation.5 The lingering presence of death within memory and landscape will be effaced through the modernisation of urbanity and the performance of a vibrant, vital city centre. However, this approach to destroyed urban space in Oslo has not precluded protest. Vocal and pervasive critique has arisen from the denizens, articulated  –​once again  –​through the notion of ‘place’. Like the discourse of renovation and reclamation at Utøya, Norwegian citizens have made counterclaims regarding the appropriate redevelopment of the Oslo bombsite through the restoration of place-​meaning. This section explores the contrast between the statist effacement of urban death-​space through modernisation, urban renewal and blanket redevelopment, and citizen critiques of the state’s approach (which implicitly claim a different, social strategy for the mitigation of traumatic space through the reclamation of place-​meaning). The Oslo Government Quarter comprises several different ‘blocks’, largely modernist and functional in style, all dominated by the overbearing high-​rise structure of Høyblokka (Figure 4.8). Henrik Bull’s ‘G-​Block’ was constructed in 1906, followed by Erling Viksjø’s high-​rise (Høyblokka) in 1958 and the Y-​Block in 1969. After Viksjø’s death, the development of the Government Quarter continued with the construction of S-​Block in 1978 and R4 in 1988, as well as the adaption in 1980 of Møllergata 19, the city’s former police station, built in the 1860s and 1870s. Finally, in 1996, building R5 was added. Despite Picasso’s collaboration with the architects in its construction (Figure 4.9), the Government Quarter in Oslo has never generated much public affection (Heath-​Kelly 2015b). The passionless naming of the buildings, and the absence of alternative public nomenclature for them, points towards their status prior to 22 July 2011. Nobody had much interest in them. As Mattias Ekman 112

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Figure 4.8  Høyblokka towering above Y-​Block, 13 August 2013

has argued, the Government Quarter is located away from the main tourist trails in Oslo and failed to develop a symbolic persona in the style of the Parliament Building or the Royal Palace (Ekman 2013a, 2013b: 279). He argues that while most Norwegians possessed some conceptual understanding of the spatial location of the government buildings, these fragmentary framings located the buildings as somewhat featureless bureaucratic functionaries in the state apparatus. The agency responsible for government buildings (Statsbygg) in Norway produced an initial post-​bombing report that recommended the demolition of multiple damaged structures based upon a cost analysis. In consultation 113

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Figure 4.9 Picasso’s The Fisherman in concrete, Y-​Block, 13 August 2013

with LPO Arkitektur, an Oslo-​based architectural firm, Statsbygg estimated a 400 million krone cost for the functional restoration of the existing government buildings –​a cost that exceeds, they argue, the demolition of the buildings and the construction of newer, more practical and efficient facilities (interview with Lisbeth Halset 2013; interview with Elisabeth Seip 2013). Lisbeth Halset, a senior partner at LPO, explained that the financial procedures that govern the decision-​making process with regard to state buildings forced a recommendation of demolition, even though she personally favours an alternative course of action that would retain the existing buildings (interview with Lisbeth Halset 114

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Reclaiming place and self-harming architecture 2013). This application of financial managerialism has important implications for the remaking of place at the Government Quarter and has produced heated debate. The official ‘demolition’ proposal for the Oslo Government Quarter focused on the importance of replacing dated facilities, the provision of designed-​in security by eliminating existing structural vulnerabilities (such as the main road that currently runs underneath one of the buildings), and increasing the circulation of trade and population by redesigning the quarter. Minister Rigmor Aasrud, the responsible minister at the time, publicly cited a pre-​2011 risk and vulnerability report that revealed ‘varying resistances to critical situations, especially in power and cooling’ throughout the aged facilities (Aasrud 2012). Despite their structural integrity, Aasrud introduced the possibility of demolishing buildings (including the prominent Høyblokka –​the high-​rise) so that infrastructure, facilities and urban circulations might be optimised. She commented that the cultural value of the buildings, while important, should be outweighed by managerial/​urban-​planning perspectives on functionality, risk evaluations and the appropriate use of land in Oslo city centre –​all of which frame space as a composite of infrastructural, economic and systemic features: The current government quarter was built up over a period of over a hundred years. The requirements for equipment and standards have changed a lot along the way, [especially] energy and universal design, functional and secure ICT infrastructure, the capacity and safe supply of water, power and cooling /​heating, and last but not least, the new security requirements and security solutions have emerged […] How to shape urban space so that it is available to residents, and possible to run a business and achieve good communication through the center of town. It should be about how we can create future-​oriented jobs with the help of today’s technological possibilities to facilitate interaction as we know from a modern working and which also are more energy-​and environment-​friendly than what we had. (Aasrud 2012)

However, contra the managerial/​ technocratic discourse, there has been a large public backlash against the proposal to demolish sections of the Government Quarter –​and the implicit framing of the response to 22 July as urban renewal. The Norwegian public rejected these infrastructural visualisations of recovery and instead demanded a restitution of place through the retention of Høyblokka (also known as H-​Block) and its culturally significant components. Crucially, this support for the retention of the site and its place heritage occurred despite the prevailing pre-​2011 public ambivalence towards the buildings. This, as I  will show, demonstrates that public affection for the buildings is not based upon long-​standing recognition of cultural worth but is generated by the social need for the mitigation of mortality. This takes an architectural form through the articulation and constitution of place-​meaning, and the campaign to retain H-​Block. Once again, place is the conceptual vehicle for the social mitigation of death. 115

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Death and security Before 2011, nobody really cared about the government buildings in Oslo. Despite the collaboration of Pablo Picasso, Carl Nesjar and Erling Viksjø in the innovative sandblasting of Picasso’s sketches onto the external and internal walls of the Government Quarter, the government buildings failed to develop a symbolic identity in the same vein as the Oslo Parliament Building or Royal Palace (Ekman 2013b: 279). They are located away from the main tourist trails in the city and their imposing concrete modernist style made them difficult for the public to love. Ekman argues that, prior to Breivik’s bomb attack, most Norwegians possessed little interest in the government buildings, which were regarded as somewhat featureless bureaucratic functionaries in the state apparatus (Ekman 2013a). However, since 22 July 2011 this ambivalence has radically shifted. Within hours of the bombing, the Government Quarter buildings became the most talked about structures in the country. Statsbygg’s own media analysis of the debate that occurred in the five months after the bombing demonstrates the huge public interest in the conditions of the Government Quarter, apparently motivated by apprehension that the government might choose to demolish the central structures (Statsbygg 2011; Ystrad 2013:  33–​4). Additional research has shown that 120 times more photographs of the Government Quarter were uploaded in the year following 22 July 2011 than in the previous year. A fifth of these (almost 2,500 pictures) were published in the week after the bombing –​ more than one-​and-​a-​half times as many as those published in the preceding ten years (Ekman 2013b: 258). Suddenly the Government Quarter was an important place, publicly saturated with symbolic meaning. Successful disaster recovery has become associated with the reclamation of place-​meaning (signified by the retention of Høyblokka) as well as renovation of the area. People have taken the building into their hearts as a symbol of popular resilience against death. These popular sentiments and protests led art historian and architecture expert Anne-​Kristine Kronborg to state: And now, after the terror attack, there is no doubt that it [Høyblokka] will take a new and towering place in our collective consciousness […] In our shared memory and in the history of architecture, Viksjø’s government high-​rise will be standing steady as the mountain and as a composed and sophisticated piece of architecture and maybe also a symbol of the society we wish to be. The high-​rise will continue to tower –​not oppressively and brutally –​but with a self-​consciousness that cannot be bombed to pieces. (Kronborg 2011: 13)

The Norwegian intelligentsia has always, they claim, recognised the special worth of the site  –​and it is they who lead the debate on the appropriate redevelopment of the quarter. Professor Elisabeth Seip of the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, who was approached by Statsbygg to provide a report on the cultural significance of the site, articulated her concerns to me that the official perspective is ‘extremely limited’ in focusing on financial matters, given the enormity of the event that befell Norway in 2011 (interview with Elisabeth 116

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Seip 2013). Her astonishment at the proposal to demolish (against the advice of her report) also incorporated her surprise at the official disregard for efforts to list the buildings as a heritage site, a process that was nearly complete at the time of the bombing. In the aftermath, this listing process has been disregarded as evidence for the importance of retaining the buildings. Instead, the violent destruction of the quarter has been interpreted as an opportunity to maximise the economic and circulatory potential of the area. Seip stated: I think it is not understood that this [Høyblokka] is a very nice piece of work also in an international context when it comes to modernism […] And I  think it quite defends itself in our architectural history […] They are people who don’t like it. They think it looks like, they don’t see the beauty of the thing. But it’s a well-​made object from its period. There is not discussion about that. The interesting thing is that the office of the Directorate of Monuments and Sites, they were working on listing the building […] It was almost finished when the bomb spread. (Interview with Elisabeth Seip 2013)

The incorporation of Picasso’s sketches into the structures has become a particularly salient narrative within the spirited defence of the Government Quarter. For example, after the report on reconstructing the Government Quarter was published, Oslo museum directors Lars Roede and Nina Berre were quoted in an interview with the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten hailing the sandblasting technique used to integrate Picasso’s sketches into the concrete structures of government, opining that the buildings represent a ‘central work of Norwegian architecture’ (Nipen 2011: 6). Similarly, at the time of this author’s visit to Oslo, the Museum of Architecture hosted an exhibit on this very technique, further developing the public narrative of retaining the government buildings as important features of national cultural heritage. Simultaneously, the somewhat bleak concrete modernism of the buildings has been reframed by commentators as a valuable statement of Norwegian egalitarian values. Roede and Berre narrate the history of the government buildings as the ‘architectural centre-​point for Norwegian nation-​building’, where the high-​rise and Y-​Block exemplify the ‘foremost examples of modernism in Norway in the 1950s’. Berre further commented that: ‘The High-​Rise can also be considered as a symbol of the social democracy that evolved in Norway, with the grid architecture which parcels the building into a series of rectangles. This equality and regularity can symbolise the democratic values the building represents’ (Berre quoted in Nipen 2011). Similarly, Espen Johnsen, an art historian at the University of Oslo, publicly proclaimed after Breivik’s bombing that: The architect Erling Viksjø’s government building stands as our foremost symbol of the new monumental architectural design that was recognized in the decades after the war. The goal was to create new community-​symbols to be used under the reestablished democratic society. Through a revised modernist idiom the architect and the artists succeeded to integrate the architecture and the art into a new unanimity.

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The Government Building represents the primary structure of this architecture ideal. (Johnsen 2011: 5)

These discussions clearly indicate a surge of interest and affection for buildings once shunned in the public imagination –​a surge provoked by dissatisfaction with the government’s effacement of place in the redevelopment of the Government Quarter. A  powerful narrative has emerged in public discourse about the cultural value of the buildings and the artworks etched into their concrete. In the aftermath of Breivik’s bomb, then, the site has been ‘re-​placed’. No longer is the Government Quarter disregarded; instead, it is publicly reimagined as an important site of cultural and architectural heritage. Popular activism to reclaim and retain the place of H-​Block was successful and the Norwegian government announced in 2014 that it would repair the high-​rise and incorporate it within the wider redevelopment of the Government Quarter. A piece of history would be retained within a far larger project of urban renewal, provoked by the attacks of 22 July. This provides a very interesting insight into the dynamics of place within post-​terrorist architecture and disaster recovery. The place-​activism in Oslo has successfully reinvented H-​Block from an ignored, ugly tower block into a crucial symbol of Norwegian identity. It was the incursion of mortality that provoked this startling turnaround, combined with the special ability of architectural design to mitigate the lingering reminder of death that resides in destroyed and damaged space. Death continues to linger within place after trauma, so a place-​based response is required to close and secure the event. The power of place, I would argue, stems from its intrinsic connection to life. Lives are lived within socially constituted places, not in abstract spaces, and they are essential to giving meaning to social existence. This meaning is the counterpoint to mortality and negativity. It is the assurance that there is certainty, a rational foundation and authority. In the aftermath of a brutal massacre, the restoration of these illusory dynamics becomes pressing. Trauma opens up the social fabric to the realisation of mortality and foundationlessness –​and the reclamation of place during disaster recovery offers a path whereby the trauma can be closed, re-​narrated and concluded. Death can once more be buried and subdued beneath the performance of life. But states don’t seem to think in these social terms. As we have seen at the WTC in Manhattan and at the Sørbråten peninsula, states instead favour ‘self-​ harming’ architecture that employs postmodern monumentality to carve a wound into space –​objectifying the trauma within a bounded space, containing it within a visitable design. States also respond to post-​terrorist space with enormous architectural modernisation projects that effect urban renewal. This was seen in Manchester after the 1996 bombing (see previous chapter), in Downtown Manhattan after 9/​11 (with the opening of the ‘Freedom Tower’ as a tourist landmark within the new WTC plaza in 2015), and will also be seen in Oslo. 118

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Reclaiming place and self-harming architecture Oslo will still carry out an urban renewal of the Government Quarter, so large that it will take fifty years to complete. The bombing of the Government Quarter has unleashed the desire to remake the entire district around the H-​ Block with sleek, angled glass and steel towers, demonstrating more than a passing resemblance to the design of Daniel Libeskind’s ‘Freedom Tower’ at One World Trade Center, New  York. The Norwegian government has hired six prominent architectural firms to prepare speculative designs for the new district, so that zoning plans can be properly determined (Statsbygg 2015).6 Each firm has provided designs for towers to accommodate the required workspace for government employees, but has made aesthetic choices for obtuse angles constructed from glass and steel –​remodelling the Oslo Government Quarter in the style of an anonymous financial district in London, New York or Tokyo.7 It is interesting that the state compulsion within disaster recovery reconstruction tends towards massive urban renewal, when the social tendency is for the reclamation of historical cultural place-​meanings.8 Perhaps the simulated movement and vitality of capitalism and economic power represents an official version of the architectural promise of hope, perpetuity and life. Capitalism is the state’s vision of vitality and perpetuity  –​something that can be imposed upon post-​terrorist space to expunge the evidence of mortality. Conclusion The Norwegian experience of post-​terrorist space has provided three separate architectural projects for our discussion of death and security. This chapter has explored how the national memorial, Memory Wound, tears into landscape in a self-​harming gesture that expels the deeper wound underneath  –​ the incursion of horror and mortality that shattered illusions of sovereignty and security against death. It then turned to explore the remaking of place on Utøya Island, which reclaims the site from the resonance of mortality that has haunted the island since Breivik’s massacre of 2011. Finally, the chapter explored the state’s urban renewal project for the Oslo Government Quarter and the public protests that have used claims of place to retain H-​Block within the modernisation plans. This is an enormous amount of architectural activity to follow the events of 22 July, especially when one considers that the buildings on Utøya, as well the Government Quarter, remain structurally sound and could be repaired without the extensive projects planned. As I  have shown throughout this chapter, the architectural response to the attacks functions not as a structural method of stabilisation, but as a political method of recovery. The expense of these projects, as well as their scale, indicates the importance of redesigning landscapes after the incursion of death. 119

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Death and security This has occurred in Norway through three types of aesthetic:  the self-​ harming memorial, the reimagining of place and massive urban renewal. Despite their differences, all function to mitigate the evidence of mortality upon memory and public space, and its disruption of the symbolic order of sovereignty and subjectivity. It has been interesting to consider the aesthetic differences between state and civil society projects in this light. Whereas the Norwegian government (and that of the United States) has memorialised through self-​harming memorialisation and practised urban renewal upon post-​terrorist space, civil society organisations and the public have articulated their desires for redevelopment around the ideas of place and heritage. The state forms of response to post-​terrorist space are split between bold artistic objectifications of trauma and absence and, equally bold, urban renewal projects that embody the power and vitality of capitalism and modern statehood. Death and life are emblazoned upon the polity. Civil society efforts, however, take a softer aesthetic direction and advocate for the reimagination and restitution of previous place-​meanings to dispel the haunting of space. Why this difference in aesthetic volume? While both state and civil society are performing security by responding to the incursion of mortality, civil society’s efforts are not tasked with protecting the illusion of sovereignty:  that is the task of state security practices alone. Civil society organisations, in this case study, have responded to the aesthetic disruption of place –​upon which cultural and societal performances of stability and perpetuity are made. But the state has the additional responsibility of closing the void that appeared in the symbolic order, lest its sovereign claim to authority and control would be exposed as fraudulent in the face of death. As such, the disaster recovery oeuvre of security policy tends towards the contemporary construction of bold objectifications of death (Memory Wound, Reflecting Absence) so that the resonance of mortality might be contained, visited and thus expelled, alongside expansive urban renewals that objectify the life of the polity within capitalism. Life is narrated as triumphing over its adversary through this architectural fable. Notes 1 Specifically meaning the peninsula overlooking the island –​not the island itself, which is privately owned by the AUF and thus unobtainable for the state. 2 The term ‘normalise’ was repeatedly used by members of the New Utøya team. 3 See the official AUF site: www.utoya.no; and the Fantastic Norway designs:www.fantasticnorway.no/​?portfolio=xxx (both pages last accessed 2 January 2014). 4 The project website states that ‘We invite new generations to a finer and safer Utøya –​where the island’s spirit and traditions are preserved in partially new surroundings. This work has as its overall policy to be based on Utøya years of culture and history and strengthen this. Key values in the project are security, unity and community’; see New Utøya, ‘Aims and Plans’, at www.utoya.no/​nye-​utoya/​mal-​og-​planer (last accessed 8 January 2014).

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Reclaiming place and self-harming architecture 5 It must be noted that the divergence between the urban renewal approach and that of memorialisation at Sørbråten is not simply an urban/​rural divide –​many cities, including New York, Oklahoma and London, commission memorials to terrorist attacks. However, the urban renewal approach in Oslo seems to be the result of the double attack of 22 July, where the majority of deaths and horror took place outside the city. Therefore the state appears to prioritise memorialisation at Sørbråten rather than Oslo, even though a temporary memorial will stand in the Government Quarter until the redevelopment takes shape. 6 Interestingly, one of the firms is Snøhetta –​a major architectural player in New York and Oslo, which once submitted a design to the 9/​11 memorial competition. They were not selected, but ultimately designed the 9/​11 museum pavilion linking Davis Brody Bond’s museum (see previous chapter) to the above-​ground world. Snøhetta now appears to be a leading contender in the Norwegian reconstruction process and demonstrates the tendency of submitting designs to any post-​terrorist design opportunity. 7 The proposals can be viewed here: www.archdaily.com/​619834/​6-​proposals-​revealed-​for-​ oslo-​s-​new-​government-​quarter (last accessed 20 July 2015). 8 Similar to the campaign to retain H-​Block, contestation of this urban renewal process (to date) has come from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. The students submitted their own, uninvited, design contribution to the government process  –​retaining all the historic buildings and avoiding towers of glass and steel, which are described as ‘violations’ of the existing landscape (Henriksen 2015).

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Mutating disaster space: itinerant death at the Ground Zero Mosque and Bali bombsite

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is no greater proof that mortality is a force that provokes security action than those post-​terrorist sites that defy the expectation to remain still. If bombsites were not animated by mortality in the years after terrorist attack, they would remain fixed in terms of their coordinates and definition. They would not expand or contract. They would be settled sites, awaiting reconstruction. Rather unexpectedly, however, bombsites move. They are not fixed as the distance contained between borders of destruction, nor as the wider terrain upon which rubble fell. Instead, constitutions and performances of disaster space are made upon places outside the epicentre of destruction, expanding the spatial bounds of the disaster and, conversely, such claims cease to be made on other places –​causing bombsites to shrink. How should we consider this mobility and mutation? As I will explain in this chapter, it is the practice of security undertaken by non-​state actors to mitigate the presence of mortality that sometimes causes the constitution of disaster space to shift. I will explore the contingency of post-​terrorist space in this chapter through examples of mutating disaster sites in Bali and Manhattan. In both cases, activist groups and protestors have applied a binary of sacredness and profanity to spaces, which led to the expansion or contraction of disaster sites. The process of expansion has occurred in relation to Manhattan’s Ground Zero through the example of the Park 51 development two blocks from the World Trade Centre (WTC) site. This community centre on Park Place contains an Islamic prayer room, but unlike many other such structures that include prayer rooms (for example, the Pentagon or most airports), it was characterised in the American media as a mosque. The divergence in this naming occurred in response to the site’s proximity to the WTC, which informed activists’ labelling of the development as profane. The Park 51 centre became the raison d’être for groups such as Stop the Islamization of America, who ran extensive media campaigns and organised erhaps there

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Mutating disaster space political rallies characterising the development as a ‘triumphal mosque’ and a profane violation of sacred space. As I will describe in this chapter, this activism enacted a reconstitution of disaster space  –​stretching the 9/​11 site to incorporate Park Place. The WTC site has expanded: Park Place is remade as sacred ground within the boundaries of Ground Zero during this activism. And this is not the only spatial reconfiguration of disaster space in Manhattan. I will also explore the transportation of rubble (including human remains and possessions) from the WTC to a landfill in Staten Island. The landfill was redesignated as a crime scene for the purpose of disaster recovery operations and was thus officially incorporated into the ‘sacred’ space associated with the 9/​11 attacks. It became part of Ground Zero though official designation. Furthermore, beyond official processes, non-​state actors have also applied discourses of sacredness to the landfill that mutate the original spatial location of Ground Zero. The activism of groups such as WTC Families for a Proper Burial contests the storage of human remains upon the landfill. Their activism utilises a discourse of the profane contamination of the sacred, whereby the landfill site contaminates the sacred unidentified human remains. In legal and activist discourse, the Fresh Kills landfill site in Staten Island has become part of Ground Zero, demonstrating the mobility and mutability of disaster space.1 Outside Manhattan, we can also find indications of the same mutability of disaster space. Similar dynamics of sacralisation and profanity, and their effect upon the constitution of disaster space, can be seen in the troubled attempt to redevelop the sites affected by the Bali bombings of 12 October 2002. On this day, two coordinated bombs resulted in the deaths of 202 people in the nightclub-​ saturated area of Kuta. The first bomb exploded in Paddy’s Bar, an Irish bar on the main strip ‘Jalan Legian’, and drove revellers across the street towards the prominent Sari Club –​where a truck bomb detonated. This resulted in an inferno taking hold of the multi-​storey club and trapping tourists and Indonesian bar staff inside.2 A memorial was rapidly constructed, adjacent to both bombsites, but the owner of the Sari Club site intends to construct a new nightclub on the valuable land. In this chapter, I explore the activism surrounding these plans. Activist groups make claims upon the sacredness of the ex-​Sari Club ground upon which people died, juxtaposed against the profanity of a potential nightclub standing on the site. The Bali Peace Park Association, composed largely of Australian activists, advocates instead for the construction of a peace park upon the site of the ex-​Sari Club  –​a place for quiet contemplation. They have succeeded in halting the construction of a new club upon the bombsite (at the time of writing) by articulating a powerful narrative of profanity threatening sacred ground. And yet my fieldwork revealed processes by which this constitution of sacred space has altered the geography of the bombsite. The ‘bombsite’ has ‘shrunk’, such that it excludes the site of Paddy’s Bar. In the effort to prevent the construction of a nightclub upon the ex-​Sari Club site, 123

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Death and security the disaster space of the bombings has contracted to the external boundaries of that destroyed structure. Paddy’s Bar has been forgotten and there is no contestation of the Quiksilver shop that now stands on the site. How can a surf shop built upon a bombsite be unproblematic while a potential nightclub is framed as the worst excess of debaucherous profanity? This chapter explores the dynamics of disaster recovery and activism such that one bombsite can be forgotten and unproblematically reconstructed as a surf shop, while the other endures a decade of activism and legal wrangling over landownership. How can it be possible that bombsites expand and shrink? I will show in this chapter that this mutating constitution of disaster space is directly connected to the resonance of mortality left upon post-​ terrorist sites. But how should we consider this resonance? Is the lingering of mortality an effect of human constitution, or a pre-​social force that drives human activity to seek architectural resolution? I  will make the suggestion here that both are applicable –​and both are required to explain the mobility of death-​space. To reflect upon mortality as agentic is provocative and interesting, given that death does not fit the conventional frame of an actor (unless personified as the Grim Reaper). And yet mortality can be understood as both substantively active and socially constructed. Like the discussion of place in phenomenological geography (see previous chapter), where place is not simply the ascribed character of a space but also provides the remit for intentional consciousness, mortality is both constitutive of human subjectivity and constituted through that same relationship. Where geographers argue that place is the necessary axis that makes subjectivity possible yet is simultaneously constituted by that subjectivity (Malpas 1999; Smith et  al. 1998), my position here is that mortality is the necessary axis that makes culture and politics possible (Agamben 1991; Bauman 1992; Becker 1973; Heidegger 1962), while it also experiences varied social constitutions such as ‘tame death’ and ‘terrible death’ over history (Aries 1974, 1983). Death and place are intersections between subjectivity and the world. They locate our experiences, but are also then socially described and constituted through discourse. How does this work in practice? At the bombsite, mortality is a force that situates and provokes human action as well as something constituted through social construction. These sites, in the contemporary era, remain troubling to societies (of Judaeo-​Christian heritage) until they are marked by memorials and reconstructed through urban planning. This book has so far suggested that death provokes suppressing activity that can be described as security. Mortality is substantive then –​it pushes architecture to perform security by absorbing the resonance of death, if you will. And yet, Philippe Aries has shown us that death’s meaning shifts over time through his genealogy of social practices –​so mortality is also subject to social constitution. Death is a site of intersection between 124

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Mutating disaster space substantive and socially constructive forces. And if we take this approach, we can begin to explain why bombsites move –​something that literatures of geography and memory studies have not attempted to address. The expansion and contraction of death-​space, as seen in New York and Bali, results from the unresolved presence of mortality that becomes restless during excessive delays in reconstruction. As previously discussed, this morbid haunting destabilises the symbolic order of subjectivity and sovereignty: it exposes the aporia of politics and reason. Sovereigns can’t be sovereign if their impotence is boldly proclaimed through the lingering of destroyed space. States build memorials to contain and efface this disruption. Why then do bombsites move? The cases of Bali and Manhattan are characterised by long delays in the reconstruction of destroyed space. Mortality remains evident for many years. Activists then take up the cause of mitigating this residual morbid energy by making claims about the threatening incursion of profanity upon sacred land and organising campaigns for the protection of such space. Activists are provoked into action by the substantive force of mortality, which disturbs the subject positions of those who gaze into destroyed space, and their action socially constitutes death through discursive frames of sacredness and profanity. These actors perform security by banishing the troubling excess of mortality. But rather than utilising physical reconstruction to achieve this, as the state does, they use discourses of the sacred and profane to further their cause. Why does this method lead to the spatial mutation of bombsites? Because, unless activists are directly contesting the memorial planned by the state, their activism is directed outside the memorial zone. They respond to the problem of mortality evident upon destroyed space by identifying a profane force that threatens something spatially separate from the (already rebounded) memorial zone. As the memorial is normally located close to the epicentre of disaster space, this activity gives the impression of movement in the location of disaster space. And this movement of disaster space shows that mortality drives the quest for retroactive security and the closing down of traumatic space. That this articulation of mortality and security by activists involves the discourse of sacredness reveals a deep anthropological component within the social ordering of life and death. Rituals relating to sacredness and profanity are studied at length within the discipline of anthropology as social and cultural devices. Interestingly, this literature demonstrates a pronounced division between those scholars who study the sacred as the manifestation of divine resonance (Eliade 1959) and those who approach sacredness as the result of social construction, functional in the constitution of identity or the transfer of charismatic authority to institutions (Chidester and Linenthal 1995; Durkheim 1915; Smith 1987; Weber 1963). This divide echoes the complications of thinking mortality vis-​à-​ vis agency and social construction. Sacredness in the anthropological literature is either substantive or socially constructed (Kilde 2011), never a combination 125

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Death and security of both. But bombsites are not religious relics once touched by saints, nor solely the result of social construction. As discussed earlier, they make things happen as well as experiencing social constitution. This anthropological demand to see the sacred through competing unidirectional theories would seem to imply the subject as separated from the world of objects. The sacred is either the result of divine contact or a functional manifestation of secularisation. In both these accounts of the world, people are constituted as separate from the world they live in –​either a god made them so, or they make their own worlds by standing separately and imposing meaning. But if we instead take the psychoanalytical position of subjectivity embedded within and constituted through the symbolic order (Edkins and Pin-​Fat 1999; Žižek 1989, 1991), we do not need to conceive of a rational, separated actor nor a separation between subject and the world. For example, Lacan deconstructed the border between the psychic inside of the subject and the social outside in his bold remodelling of the Freudian unconscious around language (Tomšic and Zevnik 2015). Language is (as is commonly understood) a tool for expression and social construction, but it is also the landscape upon which subjects are subjectivated –​ resembling the multidirectionality implicit within the concept of place. If we don’t begin from the understanding of a Cartesian subject, then we don’t need to limit ourselves to a divided understanding of the world that separates substantive and socially constructed phenomena. Multidirectionality instead allows us to value both the substantive and social dimensions of the sacred. The sacredness at the bombsite is substantive because it is the manifestation of a breach in the symbolic order caused by violence, as Lisle has indicated in her discussion of the popular compulsion to view the site of Ground Zero (Lisle 2004). People are seduced by the desire to see the ‘real’ but are disappointed upon their arrival. Concurrently, the sacred at the bombsite is also the result of social construction because its articulation in discourse is dependent upon pre-​existing webs of meaning. Death and the performance of the sacred/​profane are thus connected. Violent public death disturbs the symbolic order and produces securing reactions of memorialisation and the social attribution of sacredness threatened by profanity. What we witness in the mutating spatial dimensions of post-​terrorist space is the ritualised effacement of mortality. Death provokes action because the lingering of mortality is substantive. In its subsequent social constitution, profanity must be excluded from such space so that the site can be constituted as exceptional. Why must it be separated from normal space? By rendering post-​ terrorist space as exceptional, distinct and sacred, its exposure to death becomes less threatening to the wider social order. It is special and different. Through this social constitution of sacredness as unique to a specific site, mortality’s resonance is contained upon the site and transformed. This captured resonance now cannot pollute the wider symbolic and political economy in which it sits. 126

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Mutating disaster space The attribution of a profane threat enables disaster space to be symbolically resolved. Mirroring the dynamics of security practice described in the introductory chapter to this book, an enemy is designated (the profanity threat) and efforts are then made to vanquish the threat-​object. The protection of the sacred space from profanity enables the ritualised performance of security and thus mitigates the resonance of mortality. It resolves the unreconstructed, unresolved space. The mobility of disaster space and the performance of the sacred/​profane show us that mortality exists as a ‘force’ outside/​before human constitution, as well as itself experiencing social constitution. Public death provokes the undertaking of activism and ritualised security through its resonant disruption of the symbolic order. It disturbs the performance of sovereignty and the situation of subjectivity. Activist groups then perform security by binding mortality within the discourse of profane and sacred, tending to alter the spatial constitution of the disaster site as they do so. Ground Zero Mosque? Expanding the boundaries of Ground Zero In September 2001, 51 Park Place was a Burlington Coat Factory outlet that stood two blocks from the WTC site. On the eleventh day of that month, the fuselage from one of the hijacked planes to strike the nearby twin towers landed on the roof of the Burlington Coat Factory outlet, causing relatively extensive damage. The store closed, never to reopen. 51 Park Place experienced very little public attention in the years that followed 9/​11. The damaged building stood empty. Downtown Manhattan was an unattractive area for investment after the collapse of the towers and the economic downturn of 2008 further diminished the value of property. During this period, the Muslim communities of Manhattan were experiencing overcrowding in the Downtown Masjid mosque and Sharif El-​Gamal, chairman and chief executive of Soho Properties, began looking for alternative sites in Lower Manhattan. Once the economic downturn affected property prices, he purchased 51 Park Place with the intention of constructing a community centre that mirrored the Jewish Community Center of the Upper West Side –​which provided social facilities, including swimming, to the local area while also offering religiously sanctioned food and space for prayer. Once the site was purchased, Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan joined the project. Khan worked as executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA) –​a non-​profit organisation dedicated to building bridges between Islamic and non-​Islamic communities through cultural and social advancement (Duer 2012: 11–​12). Her influence, alongside the religious expertise of her husband, led to the rearticulation of the project as the Cordoba Initiative: an interfaith community centre that could also offer appropriate prayer space and halal food to local Muslims (interview with Katerina 127

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Death and security Lucas 2014). The centre was never intended to be a mosque, nor was its purchase in anyway related to the events of 11 September –​except that the location experienced more devaluation of property value in the economic crash than other districts of Manhattan. However, in early 2010, local news stories about the purchase of 51 Park Place and the application made by the developers for religious tax-​exempt status became national fodder. Pamela Geller used the phrase ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ for the first time on her neoliberal, neoconservative website Atlas Shrugs. Geller, at this time, was a relatively unknown right-​wing activist. But she has since propelled herself to notoriety by fostering the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ controversy in the national and international media. She founded the group Stop the Islamization of America (SOIA) with fellow activist Robert Spencer (famous for his blog Jihad Watch) to foster activism and controversy regarding Cordoba House. Through their organisations and websites, Geller and Spencer organised protests against the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ in June 2010, which Geller opines attracted thousands of people –​‘representative of the 70% of Americans who opposed the mosque’ (interview with Pamela Geller 2014). Other reports suggest that attendees numbered in the hundreds (CNN 2010). The controversy then ignited across the media, with Geller invited onto numerous talk shows to discuss the issue. The ultra-​neoconservative Republican Party offshoot known as the Tea Party even created a PAC (political action committee) advert on the issue entitled ‘Kill the Ground Zero Mosque’. The television advert condemns the ‘political classes’ for doing nothing to prevent Muslims building ‘a thirteen story triumphal victory mosque on the site of the WTC’.3 Interspersing images of the 9/​11 attacks with marching jihadists, the advert expressly designates the ground of the WTC as sacred land in danger of contamination from the profane manifestations of Islamic conquest. It speculates that an enormous ‘victory mosque’ is to be constructed on the WTC site. The advert then ends with an image of the crossbeam pulled from the wreckage of the twin towers during the recovery of the site, to invoke the implicit Christianity of the site while situating the controversy within notions of civilisational conflict between the religions. When we spoke, Pamela Geller defended this inflammatory rhetoric by invoking a dubious historical narrative concerning the construction of mosques upon the site of Islamic conquests. I questioned her about the two blocks’ distance between 51 Park Place and the WTC. She argued that the Park 51 site was explicitly part of Ground Zero given the trajectory of the plane’s fuselage, and the construction of an ‘enormous mosque’ at this site would communicate an unacceptable message of victory to the Islamic world, consistent with this ‘history’ (interview with Pamela Geller 2014). But does the entry of the fuselage into the building make 51 Park Place part of the Ground Zero site? Debris from the towers landed in a wide radius across Manhattan in September, but the spatial designation of Ground Zero has never 128

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Mutating disaster space been extended accordingly. However, many people were horrified by the prospect of an Islamic prayer space and community centre two blocks from the WTC –​so there is something salient about the issue and its spatial claims. Indeed the controversy took on global proportions. I remember students of my undergraduate modules (on political violence, broadly construed) in the United Kingdom using lectures and seminars to pose questions about the issue, while I  guided them to be cautious of assuming any relationship between the media hysteria and the facts. President Obama and the one-​time vice-​presidential candidate Sarah Palin publicly weighed in on the issue, with Obama highlighting the constitutional right to religious worship and Palin making grammatically nonsensical comments about ‘the heartland being stabbed through the heart’ by the potential ‘mosque’ (Carpentier 2010). During this time, the staff at Park 51 hired a PR firm to handle the incessant hostile attention and media requests while they quietly continued their work to develop the community centre (interview with Katerina Lucas 2014). As with all media-​induced hysterias, the issue seemed to fade as quickly as it appeared –​once the tenth anniversary of 9/​11 had passed, at least. The consequences have been unfortunate, however, for the Cordoba House team, who had rebranded their project as two separate entities: Park 51 (the community centre) and Prayer Space. They lost numerous imams over the period and Park 51 stands unfinished. Katerina Lucas, an ex-​employee, recalled how the gallery space was officially opened on 20 September 2011 with the exhibit of ‘New York Children’: an exhibition of photographs of children living in New York from a wide range of ethnicities –​a telling assertion of multiculturalism –​which was attended by 500 people, including the brother of a Sikh murdered in a racist attack after 9/​11 (interview with Katarina Lucas 2014). The gallery now stands dirty, she told me, and the rest of Park 51 remains a half-​finished construction site. The most recent news is that Sharif, the owner, is trying to sell the building to property developers. This sad ending to an optimistic project was caused by the perception that Park 51 (see Figure 5.1) would be a profane incursion on sacred ground. What can we learn about the mutability of disaster space from the Ground Zero Mosque debacle? Certainly a lot of the opinions voiced against the project fall within the remit of Islamophobia. Many of the protestors who demonstrated against the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ held extremely offensive placards denouncing Islam, and Mara Duer’s survey of participants shows that demonstrators predominantly associated Islam with a ‘global threat’ and opposed the Park 51 building on the grounds of ‘security’ rather than identity or aesthetics (Duer 2012: 95–​9). While some of these political opinions might be more associated with fringe groups, the discourse of spatial proximity to Ground Zero penetrated the mainstream consciousness and international debate. It is these spatial dynamics that 129

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Death and security

Figure 5.1  Park 51, 21 August 2010

are central to the discourse of profanity threatening sacred ground. Despite being two blocks away from the WTC site, the community centre was articulated as existing upon Ground Zero. This spatial argument was repeated incessantly in media coverage of the controversy, performatively extending the space of Ground Zero to 51 Park Place. This performative endeavour soon colonised the debate, to the extent that centre-​ground commentators and politicians (including former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani) who initially supported the freedom to worship near Ground Zero began to criticise the Park 51 project on ethical grounds as being ‘too close’ to the WTC site. The centrist argument became that just because the Constitution affords the right to build a place of worship freely, it doesn’t mean it should always happen. The legal permissibility of the Park 51 project was contrasted with an ethical judgement made relative to proximity and 130

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Mutating disaster space avoiding the provocation of bereaved families (Kilde 2011; Strand 2010; Van Susteren 2015). This mainstream discourse of proximity performs the incursion of profanity upon the sacred by imploring the Park 51 developers to build elsewhere. Park Place, they argue, is just too close. So how close does a Muslim prayer space need to be, in order to risk ‘contaminating’ the sacred space of Ground Zero? Sally Regenhard spoke at several ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ rallies, given her prominence as an activist for families of 9/​11 victims. She lost her son, the firefighter Christian Regenhard, during the collapse of the towers and has since dedicated her life to improving skyscraper safety and representing victims’ family associations against what she sees as large corporate interests. She explained to me that the ‘mosque’ would have been too close to the WTC site because from the corner of Park Place, one can see the ongoing reconstruction work. You could see into the Ground Zero pit from that corner. Sally described the distance in anthropomorphic terms as ‘a stone’s throw –​if you’re a good thrower’ (interview with Sally Regenhard 2014). Is ‘too close’ a distance that can be judged according to sightlines or throwing abilities? Interestingly, many maps were developed in an attempt to resolve this question of proximity between the sacred and profane. The New York Post published a Fire Department New  York map, in response to the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ controversy (about which the Post published 335 articles, according to a search of their website), which located the discovery of all human remains, marking their distance from Park 51.4 The map thus implicitly widens the conception of Ground Zero to the furthest spatial extent at which human remains were found. Human remains, in this discourse, are the determinant of sacred space. As an embodiment of the deathly event, their resting places are used to articulate a sacred zone. But even when Ground Zero mutates to these spatial coordinates, Park 51 is still 348 feet further north than the extreme boundary of human remains discovered. Does the threat of profanity emerge from the proximity of 348 feet? The question is left unresolved by the map. Other maps were produced in critical response to the Ground Zero controversy, highlighting the nonsensical discussion of profanity through proximity. These maps showed that strip clubs and betting facilities also exist in proximity to the WTC site –​but none of these have been articulated as a profane incursion upon sacred ground (Procon.org 2010). The spatial proximity of the alcohol, gambling and sex industries remains unproblematised. What then has driven this campaign against the spatial proximity of an Islamic building? I will argue here that there are both substantive issues relating to mortality and security, as well as issues relating to the social construction of threats. For ten years after the attacks, the WTC site stood as a solemn hole in the ground. Wrangling between different branches of government, different design conceptions, and between private and legal interests, slowed the recovery 131

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Death and security effort to a standstill (Goldberger 2004). This contributed to the restless force of mortality upon the WTC site –​the destroyed space continued to expose the aporia in the symbolic order between sovereignty and subjectivity. It was disruptive. Simultaneously, these ten years were responsible for the American-​led invasions of Islamic countries and the massive expansion of counterterrorism technologies and discourses that greatly extended the characterisation of Muslims as a potentially dangerous Other (Croft 2006; Jackson 2005). Both these trajectories informed the application of sacred and profane categories to 51 Park Place. The lengthy delays in reconstruction left the Ground Zero site as a painful, traumatic reminder of insecurity that rendered mortality restless. This then provoked activity within the community to secure the void –​ and thus resecure subjectivity vis-​à-​vis sovereignty. This activity constituted the problem through public discourse of the neo-​Orientalist ‘War on Terror’, using the figure of the Muslim ‘other’ to articulate profanity, and targeted a project run by Muslims in the vicinity of the sacred disaster site. And disaster space moved during this application of the sacred/​profane binary. Park Place became part of Ground Zero. Mortality provoked security actions by non-​state activists and their actions mutated the space previously associated with Ground Zero. To conclude this section, it is important to remember that the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ protestors did describe themselves as acting in the defence of security, as revealed in Mara Duer’s surveys of ‘anti-​mosque’ demonstrators (Duer 2012:  95–​9). However, they were not security actors in the sense that they defended America from a ‘threatening’ Islam, as they themselves believed. Rather, demonstrators and commentators performed security through the articulation of profanity. They responded to the substantive lingering presence of mortality and ritualised its effacement. Through their political performance of the sacred and the profane, they performed a totemic spectacle through which mortality was transformed from a boundless terrifying force into the representation of a profane enemy. Unfortunately their construction of an enemy was informed by political and media othering of Muslims. This ‘enemy’ was then countered with protests and endless denunciation until it retreated and the space was ‘saved’. Retrospective security was then achieved. The opponents of the Park 51 project invented their own political issue around a cultural centre two blocks from the WTC site. This invention was a functional manifestation of the disruption posed by mortality as it lingers upon destroyed space, and a functional performance of security. Death was reimagined as the profane incursion upon sacred space, and death was vanquished. Human remains in landfills, human remains ‘on display’ While the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ controversy garnered worldwide interest, Manhattan’s disaster space has also expanded south-​west from Ground Zero to 132

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Mutating disaster space include the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, as well as dropping seventy feet below the earth at the WTC site. These mutations of disaster space, and associated discourses of profane contamination of the sacred, have received less attention. How are Staten Island and the underground of Lower Manhattan connected, and how did the space of Ground Zero shift to incorporate them? The Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island and the 9/​11 Museum underneath the WTC plaza are connected through their hosting of human remains from the collapse of the twin towers. Both the museum and the landfill site contain human remains, and refuse to surrender those materials according to the wishes of some victims’ family activist groups. The Fresh Kills area is an estuary that contained New York’s primary landfill from 1947 until March 2001 –​when the Environmental Protection Agency and local government advised closure given extensive pollution. It stank and ceased operation six months before 9/​11. However, despite this environmental unpleasantness, the site was subsequently redesignated as a ‘crime scene’ on 12 September when it reopened as a sorting ground for recovery workers to sift the rubble of the twin towers. Let us pause to consider that, momentarily. By executive decision, a landfill site many miles from the WTC was designated as a crime scene the day after 9/​ 11. Yet a crime scene is terminology for a site where crime took place, not a place where evidence will be taken, otherwise all police stations and forensic laboratories would be referred to as crime scenes. The exceptional situation led to explicit, official mutation of the Ground Zero boundaries. We can realise, then, that even the anticipation of the arrival of sacred rubble and human remains was enough to spatially extend the boundaries of Ground Zero to Fresh Kills. Legally, the Fresh Kills landfill was constituted as part of the Ground Zero crime scene until recovery operations concluded in 2002. Since then, the site has maintained an ambiguous spatial relationship to Ground Zero through claims made regarding the profanity of hosting unrecovered human remains upon a landfill. Family members have been critical of the processes by which remains were identified and recovered, and the subsequent refusal of the city to relocate the rubble that is potentially harbouring pieces of their relatives. In opposition to this discourse of profane contamination, recovery workers from the site have hailed Fresh Kills as ‘hallowed ground’ given its centrality to the recovery effort (Marra and Abbate 2015) and the City has explicitly detailed the ritualised measures it took to protect sacred material and its plans for a memorial on the Fresh Kills site, performing a narrative of sacred space. What happened in the days and months after 9/​11 to integrate this landfill site into the story –​and space –​of Ground Zero? The New York State Museum details the process whereby barges carried rubble from Manhattan to Fresh Kills, where it was loaded onto ‘dump trucks’ and driven up the hill to be ‘processed’ onsite (NYSM n.d.). Each barge was capable of holding 650 tonnes of material, 133

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Death and security and seventeen arrived every day in December 2001. What the official websites fail to mention in their sanitised descriptions of the transfer process is what local residents of the Downtown area could see. Sally Regenhard, an activist who lost her son in the 9/​11 attacks, told me that the trucks removing rubble from the WTC disturbed local residents greatly because they dripped blood on the streets as they passed (interview with Sally Regenhard 2014). In her criticisms of the disaster recovery process, she alleged that Mayor Giuliani responded to the media outcry by ordering the trucks to be hosed down before leaving the site (rather than redesigning the rubble removal process). This then created a new problem of washing human remains into the drains underneath the city, and utility workers have found human remains in the sewers in the years since (interview with Sally Regenhard 2014). Her description of these failures alleges a deep profanity with regard to the treatment of human remains. While smaller pieces of rubble, and people, may have ended up in the sewers, the Fresh Kills landfill provided the primary base for extensive sifting of rubble by disaster recovery professionals and the FBI. During the ten-​month recovery effort at Fresh Kills, rescue workers screened and sifted the 1.2 million tons of material that came from the WTC site (NYC Parks n.d.). This enormous amount of material was sifted through machinery with holes measuring one-​quarter of an inch, to recover as much human material as possible. Anything found was removed and taken to the New York City Medical Examiner’s office for identification and safekeeping. But the sifted rubble, which unavoidably contains small and atomised pieces of people, remains on the landfill. Family members of WTC victims are, understandably, often very upset that pieces of their loved ones were potentially transported to a landfill in a garbage truck and then left there. When I spoke to Sally Regenhard (a prominent activist within 9/​11 family groups and the only family member to sit on the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation that dealt with questions of disaster recovery), she couldn’t contain her anger and disgust at the profane mishandling of the recovery effort. At the time of our conversation, a Malaysian airlines jet had been shot down over Ukraine and international media was replete with desperate speculation about the human remains scattered across a war zone, with vital evidence decaying. Ms Regenhard equated the two situations and despaired that the public do not realise that this disrespectful treatment is exactly what happened with the victims of 9/​11 (interview with Sally Regenhard 2014). The proximity of household waste to potential human remains has been articulated as an issue of profane contamination of the sacred by various 9/​ 11 family groups, including WTC Families for a Proper Burial and other associated organisations that joined a failed lawsuit to force the City to move the rubble. The chairwoman of WTC Families, Diane Horning, stated on behalf of her network of 9/​11 families that: ‘We would rather bury pulverized concrete

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Mutating disaster space in a respectful place than to have our loved ones left with the garbage’ (Horning quoted in De Palma 2004). But in response to the dissatisfaction of many families with the location of the sifted rubble, local government agencies have publicised their efforts to ensure the respectful and sacred treatment of the potential human remains. They have recognised the claim to sacred space made upon the landfill. New York City Parks, the agency responsible for the future development of the Fresh Kills landfill, provides extensive detail on the burial procedure followed onsite to prevent contamination. They state that: After the FBI, NYPD, and Office of Emergency Management determined the process of retrieval had been exhaustive and complete, the screened and sifted WTC materials remaining at Fresh Kills were placed in a 48-​acre area (the materials area), immediately adjacent to the recovery site on the West Mound (Section 1/​9) at Fresh Kills. A layer of clean soil at least 1 foot deep was placed in this area prior to placement of the screened materials; afterward it was covered with additional clean soil to protect the site and control erosion. The area is clearly marked to prevent disturbance. (NYC Parks n.d.)

The City has performed its own secular purification rites and burial for the WTC material in a public relations effort to mitigate criticism of the profane treatment of human remains. ‘Clean soil’ has been placed underneath the ‘materials’, and then on top of the materials, to ritually perform a burial. Furthermore, recovery workers have written books depicting their time at Fresh Kills that explicitly claim the site as sacred and hallowed ground given the dedication of recovery workers to healing the wounds left by 9/​11 (Marra and Abbate 2015). Given that the city authorities and ex-​workers have gone to such lengths to minimise accusations of profanity, thereby implicitly recognising claims to the sacredness of the site, to what extent is Fresh Kills a spatial mutation of the original Ground Zero site? Has it become part of Ground Zero through its constitution as the receptacle of human remains? The City officially designated the Fresh Kills landfill as a crime scene on 12 September, implicitly incorporating the site into the spatial boundaries of Ground Zero. Since the decommissioning of the recovery process, the landfill has been characterised by family member associations as part of Ground Zero given that it contains transported and unrecovered human material. Furthermore, it maintains an emotional connection with the bereavements that befell their families –​the landfill site continues the sense of betrayal they feel at the hands of government agencies, media and politicians. Their loved ones were potentially carried to a landfill and requests to remove them from that site have been ignored, and then defeated in court. If trauma is the experience of violence coupled with betrayal by authority, as Jenny Edkins argues (2003), then the landfill is a continuation of the Ground Zero site in both spatial and emotional terms.

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Death and security Beyond all these considerations, one final aspect of the disaster recovery at Fresh Kills cements the spatial extension of Ground Zero onto the site. The final twist in the odd tale emerged with the announcement of a memorial to be constructed upon the landfill. This memorial will honour the work of the recovery workers who toiled in challenging conditions, but will also mitigate the resonance of mortality that has followed the rubble to Fresh Kills. As we have seen throughout this book, memorials serve to mitigate mortality through architecture –​so we can confirm that Fresh Kills is considered part of the Ground Zero site, because mortality is considered active there. The aesthetic chosen for the memorial also indelicately confirms the place identity of the site as part of Ground Zero. The forms of the twin towers will be reincarnated in giant earthworks on the site, to scale, near the West Mound location of the sifted ‘materials’ (NYC Parks n.d.). The architecture where the victims died will be recreated on the landfill to which their remains were carried. And, one will apparently be able to see the Freedom Tower from the memorial when it is complete. The landfill site is thus inescapably situated within sightlines and mirrors of Ground Zero. It is kaleidoscopically located in a mutated spatiality that stretches from Lower Manhattan to Staten Island –​one where distance does not diminish the scale of the twin towers, which will be reconstructed to full size as they lie on the earth. The explicit spatial mirroring of the twin towers upon the landfill speaks to its incorporation within Ground Zero, and the lingering presence of (transported) mortality upon the site that requires mitigation by the state (through memorialisation) and by society (through the application of profane/​sacred binaries and the ritualised containment of mortality anxiety). Ground Zero has expanded to Staten Island’s primary landfill site. But this is not the only extension of Ground Zero. Fresh Kills has a sister site. While unrecovered genetic material is buried at the landfill, the recovered yet unidentified tissue has been moved from Staten Island. While the unrecovered victims will lie alongside the architectural reconstruction of the twin towers in earth at the Fresh Kills landfill, the recovered remains are condemned to return to the site of their deaths. They have been moved to an underground vault beneath the WTC plaza, inside the 9/​11 Museum. The remains that were successfully removed from the rubble at Fresh Kills  –​but not identified  –​journeyed back to the WTC where they died. They have retraced their journey across the water, in reverse, back to the site of their deaths –​further confirming the kaleidoscopic vortex of place that connects the State Island and Manhattan sites. These unidentified yet recovered remains have been placed in a repository seventy feet below ground in the 9/​11 Museum. Their resting place is beneath the old car parks that once stood underneath the towers. Unsurprisingly, family groups are enraged that victims are once again entombed beneath the WTC after having been dug out, removed in dump trucks, 136

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Mutating disaster space transported to a landfill, sifted by machinery, tested by science and then sent back to the place of their deaths. Beyond this profanity, they contest the storing of unidentified remains within the 9/​11 Museum –​asking how it can possibly be reasonable that people’s remains are left on display. Activist groups have campaigned for the remains to be brought above ground and placed in a respectful receptacle  –​such as a tomb for the unknown soldier (Stepansky et  al. 2014). In an attempt to dissuade officials from storing remains in the underground site, multiple protests were led by prominent activists Rosaleen Tallon and Jim Riches –​who both lost relatives in the 9/​11 attacks. Prior to the transfer of the remains to the museum, Tallon led a vigil at the WTC site where family members slept on the pavement outside the museum for up to twenty-​one consecutive nights to highlight their anger (interview with Sally Regenhard 2014). This failed to change the decision of the authorities, so a further protest was staged on the day the remains were transferred. While firefighters saluted the remains as they were moved, the family members stood alongside with black tape covering their mouths to publicise the silencing of their dissent. The 9/​11 Museum opened on 21 May, offering guided or self-​guided tours of the relics pulled from the rubble and deposited along the museum’s descending underground pathways. Museum visitors cannot access the repository of human remains but a sign attached to the wall informs them of the presence of unidentified remains in the adjacent coroner’s office. Family organisations are horrified that the dead are incorporated into the museum artifice, for ‘gawkers’ to imbibe some feeling of authenticity from their presence, and prominently campaign for the remains to be brought above ground –​freed from the cavern in which they reside, which is replete with twisted steel and smashed components of the twin towers (Figures 5.2 and 5.3). Why are human remains present within a museum? I  put this question to Steven Davis, the architect who led the design of the museum. He offloaded the blame for the storage of remains on ‘the client’, which can only mean the city authorities who commissioned the redevelopment of the site, while minimising the profanity involved in their presence due to the fact that visitors cannot see them: Here’s the thing about architects that you need to understand:  we have clients. Clients take decisions. Unless we find that there are issues of such enormous ethical conflict that we can’t accept the direction, we carry out the programs of the clients. Now the decision to house the unidentified remains was taken a very long time ago. It’s being done as transparently as it can be done without putting it in a fishbowl. So yes, there’s a little office of the New York City Medical Examiner. It is inaccessible to anyone who has no reason to be there […] Someone decided at a pay-​grade way above mine that it should be here. (Interview with Steven Davis 2014)

It is unusual, but not unheard of, for museums to display human remains. While human hair and artefacts are displayed at the Auschwitz site in Poland as evidence of the genocide that took place there, post-​terrorist sites have usually not 137

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Death and security

Figure 5.2  Interment of unidentified remains at the 9/​11 Museum, 24 May 2014

Figure 5.3  The remains of a crushed fire engine at the 9/​11 Museum, 29 July 2014

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Mutating disaster space followed suit. The human remains recovered from the Pentagon were buried in Arlington cemetery, for example, and those unidentified remains recovered from Flight 93 (which crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001) were buried upon the site –​now designated as a cemetery that is off-​limits to the public. So the decision to store remains underneath the WTC plaza is idiosyncratic, to say the least. Given the tight-​lipped obstinacy of officials and curators surrounding decisions relating to 9/​11 reconstruction in Manhattan, we will probably never know for sure how and why human remains ended up in the museum. But what follows from this is the clear designation of the underground space beneath the WTC site as an extension of Ground Zero. Family member discourse constitutes the underground space as a profane location for the storing of the dead because it replicates their entombment in rubble on 11 September. But has Ground Zero ‘moved’ in this controversy? Does a site seventy feet below Ground Zero still count as Ground Zero? Does place descend into the earth, or is place constituted through the visual and thus operational at ground level? Is Ground Zero at ground level, and does the claiming of this underground site constitute a spatial mutation? As I will discuss fully in the subsequent chapter, disaster space is ordinarily constituted through the visible. It resides at ground level rather than being underground, because visibility is central to the politicality of events. Visible aftermaths of destruction are in the interests of militant groups because they perform the destruction of the symbolic order (Heath-​Kelly 2013b, 2014). The point of explosions is to communicate insecurity. To effect terror, disaster space needs to be visible. Retrospective security responses to terror also act through visuality, recolonising sites through architecture and memorial. Terror and security operate at ground level, thus Ground Zero is conceived at ground level. As a result, the application of sacred/​profane dichotomies to a place seventy feet below the 9/​11 plaza in family member activism could reasonably be called a mutation of Ground Zero boundaries –​even if it is not such a substantial expansion as that witnessed within the reach to Staten Island. Like the 51 Park Place controversy, the attribution of profane contamination of sacredness in the bedrock beneath the WTC plaza relocates the site of Ground Zero. The site has moved through the social contestations practised in its name, but also the official constitution of the Fresh Kills landfill as part of the Ground Zero crime scene. Civil society groups respond to the incursion of mortality by socially constituting their grief and anxiety in terms of sacredness and profane incursion. The application of this discourse to spaces that are below, two blocks adjacent to or on another island than the WTC plaza effects the expansion and movement of the Ground Zero site. Mortality resulted in security action being undertaken by civil society groups outside the delayed memorial centre of destroyed space, thus resulting in the mutation of disaster space. The agency of 139

Death and security death provoked civil society protest in an attempt to contain and supress mortality and accordant anxiety. This chapter now moves away from the case of expanding disaster space in New York to explore the example of a contracting bombsite in Bali, comparing the articulations of sacredness and profanity that enable death-​space to spatially mutate.

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Death in paradise: introducing Bali Ten years after the Bali bombing, I undertook the first fieldwork of this project. I travelled to Bali in October 2012 to attend the tenth anniversary commemorations of the attack that ripped through Jalan Legian in Kuta, and to interview the Bali Peace Park Association about their long-​running campaign to obtain the ex-​Sari Club site for a peace park. As stated earlier in this chapter, the Bali bombing of 2002 involved two separate explosions. Drinkers in Paddy’s Bar were attacked by a suicide bomber and the surviving bystanders fled across the street towards the Sari Club. A  truck bomb then exploded, trapping hundreds inside the burning club. Some 202 people died –​including 88 Australians, for whom the island is relatively local tourist destination. I travelled to the island to interview the Bali Peace Park Association, who had gathered for the tenth anniversary commemorations of the bombing. I was interested in their designs for the Sari Club site, given that the local authority had already built a large memorial to the bombings next door to the land. Why the need for a Peace Park? What is it about the bare ground of the ex-​Sari Club that spurs activism for a second site of memorial architecture? The Bali Peace Park Association is almost entirely composed of Australians. It was initially formed to oppose the efforts of the landowner to rebuild the Sari Club as a nightclub. In their initial activism, the group managed to prevent the construction of this nightclub by quickly noticing the arrival of heavy machinery onsite and petitioning Bali’s Governor I Made Mangku Pastika (formerly the Chief of Police who captured the bombers) to forbid construction (interview with Dallas Finn 2012). Their claims about the inappropriateness and profanity of a nightclub standing upon the site where so many died were successful in obtaining a judgment from the governor. But since then, the site has remained unreconstructed. Over ten years has passed. The bare earth sits in the middle of Bali’s busiest tourist strip and this un-​ rebuilt space has begun to cause its own problems. In the incredibly dense area of Kuta, locals have begun using the space to park vehicles and sometimes the site is used as a rest-​stop for labourers who buy refreshments –​eliciting more claims of the profane desecration of sacred space from Australian activists and the media. 140

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Mutating disaster space In the discourse of the Peace Park organisation, the car park is a disrespectful use of sacred ground where so many died (interviews with Anne Aly 2012; Dallas Finn 2012; Sharon Nash 2012; Nick Way 2012). The association seeks to obtain the land and build a garden that is aesthetically and acoustically separated from the clubs and bars that surround the site, to construct a peaceful zone where family members –​and the public –​can go to contemplate and remember the victims. This, in their view, is an appropriate and respectful response to the sacredness of the site where so many perished. Their campaign resonates with Australian public discourse and attracts media and political attention around the time of each passing anniversary, but then fades into obscurity outside these temporal markers. But support for the Peace Park agenda is not comprehensive or universal. There is a cultural divide that affects the perception of the site and thus the plans for its future. This is important for our consideration of mortality, its substantive force and its social interpretation. While the site is constituted as ‘empty’, ‘bare’ and ‘disrespectful’ in Australian media discourse, local Balinese remained ambivalent about the architectural future of the Sari Club site. When I told them that I was visiting to study the Bali bombsite and its reconstruction, locals would respond with much eye-​rolling and occasional expressions of disdain that ‘the Australians’ could still care about the site after so much time had passed. Even though Balinese society was horrified by the bombings, the incursion of mortality has not seeped into their understanding of the site as needing architectural exorcism –​as it has within the Australian discourse. Instead, the Balinese religion (Hinduism, with influences drawn from Buddhism and animism) manages mortality through the prospect of karmic reincarnation and the depositing of offerings to the spirits frequently left on pavements, shrines and walls. As I  learnt during my time on the island, death is conceived very differently in Indonesia. Publicly it is regarded as a matter of fact that does not lead to excessive periods of public mourning nor the need for memorialisation (interview with Made Wijaya 2012); instead the struggle for life continues, and the dead are honoured (in Bali, at least) with offerings and tributes. Death has been dealt with through the application of these rituals, and rituals provide (in our terms) security. As Made Wijaya, designer of the Peace Park plans, explained: ‘There’s no tragedies in Bali because there’s always a ceremony to balance it’ (interview with Made Wijaya 2012). In the opinion of ex-​pat Australians who have immersed themselves in Balinese culture, the prolonged Australian struggle to claim the site of the Sari Club is regarded by the Balinese as an excessive and embarrassing display of uncontrolled (and possibly feminised) hysteria. Made Wijaya explained to me that: Indonesia is a very tolerant society and their reaction is always, even when a plate drops in restaurant, everyone just ignores it, whereas in our society, everyone turns and goes ‘Aaaaaarghh!’ So in that way, they are slightly more mature than us. And

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particularly in dealing with death, they were equally horrified by the all of the breast beating of the Middle East around funerals and all that screaming. […] There is a word habak, this a thing of, this hoping in getting on with it, moving on, rather that need to have this reminders. (Interview with Made Wijaya 2012)

This reading of the Balinese approach to death situates their matter-​of-​fact practicality in cultural and religious tradition, and may be an Orientalist reading. We should be aware of this –​especially given that it was articulated by Made Wijaya, a flamboyant ex-​pat Australian who has re-​identified himself with Balinese culture, holds status within the local caste system and speaks fluent Bahasa (the official language of Indonesia). But it is, however, a reading that is upheld in the academic study of Balinese culture. Degung Santikarma, a Balinese academic, explores how Balinese culture views death as the temporary release from human form encompassed within an endless series of karmic progressions (Santikarma 2005:  320–​1). This is but one dimension to the ambivalent reception of the Peace Park plans by the Balinese. There are also multiple historical and political dimensions that underlie the different attitudes towards the bombsite between Australian and Balinese popular opinion. One must realise that Bali occupies a particularly tumultuous position within Indonesian political history and that the tourism industry is closely connected to the concealment and silencing of mass murder. Reconstructing death sites as tourist infrastructure is nothing new. In his classic study of the varied ‘images of Bali’ deployed between pre-​colonial and post-​colonial epochs, Adrian Vickers (1990) has identified the major ‘makings of place’ that have constituted the island as a tourist paradise. From the first European encounters with the island in the sixteenth century until the early twentieth, the image of ‘savage’ Bali dominated representations of the island. Early European writers condemned it as an island of theft and murder, symbolised by the Malay kris dagger. However, once Dutch colonial control was consolidated in 1908, the island began to be promoted as a tourist paradise to erase memories of the ruthless struggle between its inhabitants and their colonisers for political supremacy. European elites began to holiday on the island at hotels built upon the sites where Dutch soldiers blasted the Balinese resistance with cannon (Santikarma 2005: 315), while Orientalist scholars exoticised and centralised ideas of Balinese culture within their place-​making. The island became ‘paradise’. The Indonesian revolution after the Second World War led to the consolidation of the image of Bali as a paradise during Sukarno’s rule, before the political instability of the 1960s led to mass purges on the island as Suharto’s regime came to power (Vickers 1990). As Vickers argues, tourism has remained the defining feature of the Balinese image under both presidents (inherited from the Dutch strategy to silence memories of massacre). The Suharto ascendancy was particularly reminiscent of the Dutch campaign to consolidate the ‘paradise image’, as the regime utilised a pervasive and menacing silence around the slaughter of 142

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Mutating disaster space approximately 100,000 Balinese (leftists, or alleged leftists) to produce Bali as a quiet and beautiful subject of New Order Indonesia (Darma Putra 2003; Dwyer 2009). This making of place was maintained throughout the post-​1965 climate by the military-​backed censorship of politics and art that prevented the expression of anti-​government or communist sentiments –​in contrast to Orientalised images of the island as harmonious and apolitical (Darma Putra 2003: 75–​8). This history of a violent, colonised and contested Bali receives little attention in the construction of the tourist political economy. Those who visit the island are often unaware of the colonial and state-​encouraged massacres that tore Bali apart. The only violence associated with the ‘peaceful paradise of Bali’ in the contemporary imaginary is the bombing of the Sari Club in 2002 –​the memorial for which is a prominent ‘attraction’ in tourist guidebooks. And guidebook writers are not the only protagonists in this elision of history. Even the island’s governor elided the topic of the 100,000 dead when characterising the 2002 bombing (which killed 202)  as ‘the worst tragedy the island has experienced’ (Dwyer 2009: 114). Locals also remain implicated in the silencing of the atrocities of 1965–​66, having experienced forty years of repressive censorship under Suharto while continuing to live alongside perpetrators in their communities (Dwyer 2010). This pervasive silence about the mass violence on Bali and the bloodshed surrounding the Suharto ascendancy is intertwined with the performance of Bali as a tourist paradise. Like his predecessor, Sukarno, Suharto championed the tourist industry on the island as both a money-​maker and a discursive prop for the national ideology of ‘pancasila’ –​which advocates unity through the diversity of the many peoples who make up Indonesia (especially the idiosyncratic Balinese) (Vickers 1990: 178–​83). However, the New Order regime made a unique connection between memory and tourism when performing Bali as a paradise in the wake of genocide, by forcing Balinese survivors of 1965 into the informal tourism industry. Suharto’s junta prevented survivors from obtaining the official ‘letter of non-​involvement in the PKI’s September 30th Movement’ (blamed in official discourse for a coup attempt in 1965) required for salaried employment (Dwyer 2009:  119). These survivors then became dependent on the tourism industry, their economic survival linked with the self-​censorship of their memories. The violence of the New Order regime, the tourist image of Bali and suppression of memory all intersect in strategies of place-​making to banish narratives of political oppression to the boundaries of discourse. And as a result, Bali has become ‘the place of peace’ exoticised in the tourist fantasy and lamented on post-​Bom-​Bali placards (‘Bali Loves Peace’, ‘Save Bali’) and in beach ceremonies of hippy tourists (Wijaya 2008: 146–​54; see also Santikarma 2005: 317). And the most striking image of the silence that underwrites tourist place-​making on Bali is the revelation that some of the grand five-​star hotels built to promote the fantasy of harmony and peace actually stand on mass graves from the killings of 1965 (Byrne 1998).5 143

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Death and security To be blunt then, it is reasonable to argue that the tourist industry of Bali has always been built upon sites of mass death. The Balinese eye-​rolling towards Australian campaigners for the memory of the 202 killed in the Bali bombing, and their ambivalent disregard for discourses of sacredness attached to the ex-​ Sari Club, are connected not only to religious adherence but also to the political history of the island. The Balinese attitude of ‘getting on with it’ after the bombing, rather than campaigning for a second memorial space, is partly a functional response to political history. But similarly, the Australian activist discourse that tries to claim the ex-​Sari Club site for a peace park is also political. Australian activism makes claim to the ex-​Sari Club site, even though it is Indonesian territory, because they feel they are entitled to claim it. This sense of righteous and unquestionable ownership of another land stems from the tourism industry’s framing of travel to the island as a cosmopolitan encounter between an idyllic naturalised culture and a mature globalised market willing to appreciate it. It is neocolonialism played out through the political economy of tourism. The island is assumed to be ‘Australia by proxy’ (interview with Anne Aly 2012) and thus the bombings were represented as the incursion of mortality upon Australian society –​requiring retrospective security to alleviate this disruption. Bali plays an important role in Australian nationhood, thus Australian political actors and media have interpreted the bombing of Kuta as an attack on Australia. During its early history, the Australian post-​colonial project deployed multiple boundaries against imagined Others to secure its nationhood (Burke 2008; Perera 2009). Like Robinson Crusoe, the population found itself on a vast desert island, haunted by the footprints of the Aboriginal Other and intimidated by the looming presence of Asia. And like Robinson Crusoe, the islanders began to put up boundaries to consolidate their communal identity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, practices of othering were undertaken to secure the national self through means of fear but, as Annette Hamilton has argued, these practices were soon supplemented with ridicule and eventually the assimilation of images of the Other through desire (Hamilton 1990). While the subjection of difference is still apparent in political policy (for example, the Howard government’s suppression of Wik land management rights granted to Aboriginals by the High Court; Burke 2008: 183–​8), the commodification and appropriation of Aboriginal art and the domestication of Asia through mass tourism have become important tools in the reproduction and imagination of the Australian national identity. Cultural appreciation and appropriation has become tools of political rule alongside segregation and suppression. Identity practices do not just engender the construction of an impassable wall between Australia and Asia, between self and Other. There are other practices that operate by tracing and commodifying that distinction, as Edward Said 144

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Mutating disaster space noted of the construction and deployment of the ‘Orient’ by European elites (Said 1978). This tracing is not always undertaken via a conception of threat but by virtue of the consumption, reproduction and partial assimilation of images of difference. In Australia’s relationship with Indonesia, this relationship is undertaken through practices of tourism. Bali was often described to me by interviewees as ‘Australia’s playground’, where a ‘rite of passage’ takes place for Aussie youth. The island has long played a role in the securing of the Australian identity within the region. Young adults travel to Bali to get their first taste of spiritualism, ‘jungle fever’ (interview with Made Wijaya 2012) and to experience the world beyond. These experiences of sun, sand and sex on the shores of a different (but nearby) land balance the discourses of threat and desire felt towards the Other –​helping to reproduce the territorialised Australian self through performative and affective contrast with a land that is different and risky, but –​until the bombs of 2002 –​not too risky. Anne Aly, an Australian social scientist who also researches the impact of the Bali bombing, explained to me that: Australia has a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to Asia because of our geo-​ political position where we’re kind of this white outpost in an Asian region. So it’s like we’re Asian, but ‘ssssh –​we’re not Asian!’ So it’s almost like we’re part of Asia but we’ve differentiated ourselves culturally. Our closest cultural kinship is with the UK and the US, who are miles and miles and miles away. And our closest neighbours are Asian. Our closest neighbours are the biggest Muslim nation in the world as well, Indonesia […] So the tradition is that Bali’s always been part of that rite of passage, and for family holidays as well. (Interview with Anne Aly 2012)

We can approach the relationship between Australian and Bali through Syed Islam’s depiction of tourism as a ‘machine of othering’ (Islam 1996). He argues that it functions to reproduce the distinctions upon which the nation-​state system is predicated (on travel writing, see also Lisle 2006). For example, when examining Claude Lévi-​Strauss’s discussion of a trip to Calcutta, Islam makes clear that a traveller creates their passage through the articulation of difference: By placing Calcutta in his discourse as a place of filth and chaos, Lévi-​Strauss articulates his passage into another place. Strangely, his discursive othering of Calcutta not only signals his passage there, it also brings into effect the very boundary between his point of departure and Calcutta which he has supposedly crossed. The travel from point to point redoubles […] the disjunctive relationship between the same and the other. (Islam 1996: 68)

The Australian self is thus constituted through its ‘benevolent’ relationship with its Southeast Asian neighbours, whom it patronises (in both senses of ‘providing business’ and ‘treating in a condescending manner’). However, these Australian practices of the securing of self were disrupted by the Bali bombings. Suddenly young people were being flown home from their holidays on medical evacuation 145

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Death and security flights, in boxes, in charred pieces, and sometimes the boxes were even empty because their bodies could not be found at all. Mortality brutally disrupted the performance of Australian identity (interview with Anne Aly 2012), disrupting the performance of Australian subjectivity. And with the Bali Peace Park Association’s success in preventing a new nightclub being constructed on the site of the ex-​Sari Club, the unresolved site continues to disrupt the performance of Orientalised tourism to an ‘idyllic’ neighbouring culture. Mortality is actively disruptive:  the void of the ex-​Sari Club is a dark void eating into the Jalan Legian strip of neon bars and clubs, ominously facing the memorial that was hastily constructed to mitigate the incursion of death into the tourist fantasy. Indeed the unreconstructed site disrupts the functionality of the memorial in closing the trauma of the event through its architectural narrative. The presence of mortality lingers on at the ex-​Sari Club site, disrupting the performance of Australian sovereignty and subjectivity and thus provoking activism. Dancing and shopping on sites of mass death: mutating bombsites The response of the Australian Peace Park activists to the lingering presence of mortality upon destroyed space is twofold. First, their discourse explicitly claims the ex-​Sari Club as sacred ground, given the mass death that took place there, and denounces its use as a car park as profanity. Second, the activists explain that the current memorial is insufficient to honour the dead of the Bali bombings because it wasn’t constructed on the ‘exact location’ of the bombsites. The memorial is actually constructed at an intersection upon Jalan Legian, in between the sites of Paddy’s Bar and the Sari Club. An explicit spatial connotation of the bombsite as limited to the ex-​Sari Club site becomes apparent here. Chairman of the Peace Park Association, Nick Way, explained that bombsites are considered sacred ground given their association with violent public death –​and the placement of the memorial on neither bombsite has necessitated the campaign for a peace park, to correctly mark that sacred land: The problem here, I  think, in the eyes of many international people and a lot of Indonesians, is that the memorial is not on either of the sites. It’s not on Paddy’s and it’s not on that site. All these people died, so –​usually in a massive atrocity, a civilian atrocity or sometimes a military atrocity, that site is just considered sacred. But because of the fact that the land owner could not be found or was maybe asking for too much money or whatever and the memorial had to be built for the first anniversary, because that was just an international imperative, people had to be able to go somewhere and it obviously went down to the wire. The building, I think, was only finished a week or two beforehand. Which it would have been in any country, not just in Indonesia. But the difficulty with the memorial as it is, is that it is not directly related to any of the places where people died. That’s a bit of an insult to some of the

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people, I suppose. Unfortunately many people died or were injured in the street there, where it is. It is a good compromise but it is also –​it is not complete because the Sari Club is the epicentre of the destruction. The vehicle was parked right next to the Sari Club […] and so the present memorial is, I think, it’s slightly lacking in the fact that it does not actually cover one of these areas. (Interview with Nick Way 2012, emphasis added)

This is an interesting reading of sacredness as constituted through the spatial density of fatalities. It mirrors, in many ways, the maps drawn of human remains found around Ground Zero in an attempt to delineate the zone of sacredness. How can the organisation oppose the perfectly sensible decision to build the memorial in between the two bombsites, on publicly owned land that would not require endless disputes with private landowners? The destroyed space of the ex-​Sari Club is the focus of so much activism and controversy because its brute materiality disrupts the tourist experience of consumable space. Mortality continues to linger there, in the Australian gaze. To substantiate this argument, it is important to consider the very different fate of the other tourist bar destroyed in the 2002 bombing. Paddy’s Bar has been remade to fit the Kuta landscape. It is now a Quiksilver shop with a bar overhead, yet this goes completely unremarked in political discourse. Even more tellingly, the Paddy’s Bar site was roped off during the anniversary visit of Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard –​it was physically separated from the area of ‘the event’; left as a section in which crowds gathered to watch (Heath-​Kelly 2015a). The silencing of the Paddy’s Bar bombsite, in contrast to the disruptive status of the ex-​Sari Club site, is interesting for our discussion of the retrospective securing of mortality –​the redevelopment of Paddy’s Bar as a surf shop and bar could be an even larger political issue than the gaping space of the Sari Club, but it was not acknowledged in official visits or media discourse. Why? Asana Viebeke Lengkong, the original beneficiary of USAID funding to research the redevelopment of the bombsites and a peace park activist, remarked to me that Paddy’s attracted less attention because ‘it was a suicide vest explosion, so some people got shrapnel. But the Sari Club was the impact, what happened in the Sari Club is two tonnes of bomb, and it’s an impact, it’s one thousand degree heat, so it’s a total barbeque’ (interview with Asana Viebeke Lengkong 2012). The impression is given by activists and journalists that the Sari Club site was different due to the increased body count and visceral carnage. Furthermore, Nick Way, the association’s chairman, defended the decision to remain silent on the reconstruction of Paddy’s because the Sari Club was the primary international signifier of the disaster –​thus only the Sari Club requires responsive architectural redevelopment (interview with Nick Way 2012). In a circular argument, he explained that the lack of controversy over the reconstruction of the Paddy’s bombsite as a Quiksilver shop retrospectively justifies the peace park activism for 147

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Death and security the Sari Club –​because this shows that international audiences associated the bombing with the Sari Club and have forgotten Paddy’s. Something about the Sari Club site is attracting political attention, when the redevelopment of the surrounding area into the tourist economy does not. Why is the redevelopment of Paddy’s Bar not a salient political issue? How can it have been forgotten to the extent that it was physically separated from the sacred area visited by the prime minister? Why is the redevelopment of one bombsite as a Quiksilver shop unproblematic, when the use of another bombsite as a car park is called a desecration? The activists’ success in obtaining a veto for commercial building on the Sari Club site and preventing the emergence of another nightclub has effectively stymied the mitigation of death –​security has been denied. While the construction veto is viewed as a success because the site now possesses the potential to become a peace park, the site has remained as a dusty space where motorcycles are parked. As such, it has not been resignified nor concealed within the surrounding tourist economy. It remains disruptive and unsecured. It is stalled and disruptive. This delay in resolving the site prolongs the existence of the aporia between sovereignty and subjectivity –​where Australian tourists can no longer enjoy their status as cosmopolitan consumers of local culture, privileged subjects protected by the sovereigns of economy and regional politics. Instead, this subject position is disturbed by the excessive presence of mortality upon Kuta’s busiest tourist strip. Contrastingly, the space of Paddy’s Bar goes unremarked because its resonance has already been sealed and prevented. It looks like any other surf shop/​bar combo on the Legian strip. The blazing ruins of the club have become the signifier of the disaster, and the site of the Bali bombing has spatially mutated to exclude the already pacified site of Paddy’s Bar. Indeed the ‘bombsite’ has shrunk to exactingly precise dimensions. Nothing beyond the walls of the ex-​Sari Club is claimed as sacred space; only the internal space of the long-​destroyed building must be defended against the incursion of profanity. We see this demonstrated within the ugly controversy that erupted during the tenth anniversary of the bombing. The tenth anniversary commemorations were tarnished by a series of bad-​tempered exchanges that took place between journalists and the Kingsley Australian football club (which lost seven members in the bombings) over the Internet and through print media. A photograph was shared of one of their current players urinating ‘on’ the Sari Club site, accompanied by vicious denunciations and demands that he be named. In a statement on behalf of the football club, President Keith Pearce defended the man by arguing that he was clearly standing just outside the Sari Club site, with his feet on the boundary, urinating in an alley that runs alongside the external wall (Pearce cited in Feely 2012). Therefore the urination is not scandalous. But surely if the blast radius were so large, an alleyway at the side of the club would have been the site of violent 148

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Mutating disaster space deaths –​thereby rendering it sacred, and at risk of being desecrated by urination. The spatial circumscription of the event to the external boundaries of the club, in this discourse, reveals the dynamics of mortality and reconstruction. Urination is only profane when it lands on the unsecured remnants of what has not been replaced; reconstruction, however, conquers mortality and provides immunity against the incursion of the profane. The substantive force of mortality is only evident on unreconstructed space. As such, only the ex-​Sari Club site generates activism with regard to sacredness and profanity. Conversely, it becomes okay to shop upon the site of the old Paddy’s Bar but not to dance or piss on the ground of the Sari Club, because the construction of a Quiksilver has already contained the resonance of mortality. As I have shown here, the delay in reconstructing destroyed space is responsible for continually disrupting the co-​constitutive relationship between subjects and sovereignty. Mortality lingers as a disruptive excess, disrupting performances of the tourist gaze (Urry 1990). This unreconstructed space has driven activists to form the Bali Peace Park Association –​not the profane reconstruction of a bombsite as a Quiksilver shop. The discourses of sacredness and profanity are not immediate or objective; instead they follow prolonged delays in reconstruction, such as the ex-​Sari Club and Ground Zero Mosque sites. The fate of Paddy’s is apparently uncontroversial because mortality has already been mitigated upon the site, and security performed. No one can see destroyed space. However, the site of the ex-​ Sari Club remains disruptive and demanding of retrospective security measures. It is dangerous because it is still destroyed. The excess of mortality at the site prevents the seamless performance of meaning, power and economy. As such, it must be obtained and architecturally transformed –​thus integrating it within the tourist landscape and closing the abyss of destroyed space. This performance of security by non-​state actors gives the impression of mutating disaster space, as the Bali bombsite shrinks to fill the external walls of the Sari Club through their activism. Paddy’s is uncontroversial. Instead, sacred space is determined according to minute calculations regarding the placement of feet while urinating near the ex-​Sari Club, because unreconstructed space is dangerous to the performance of perpetuity, authority and stable subjectivity. It is resonant with mortality. Conclusion: itinerant bombsites and the wandering of mortality As I stated in the introduction to this chapter, perhaps there is no greater evidence that mortality is a substantive political force that provokes security actions than the examples of mutating disaster sites. If death were simple, rather than embedded within the production of culture and politics, then bombsites would remain still. They would not suddenly transport themselves from Manhattan to Staten Island, nor expand several blocks from the World Trade Center to Park 149

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Death and security Place, nor shrink from the size of two explosions down to the exact spatial dimensions of the ex-​Sari Club. Why do bombsites move? The explanation for such expansions and contractions is derived from the claims made by activists regarding the profane contamination of the sacred. These claims are directed at spaces not already occupied by memorials because memorialisation neutralises the agency of mortality upon destroyed space by narrating, thus closing trauma (Edkins 2003; Lundborg 2012). Instead, the lingering of mortality provokes security action from civil society, directed at sites outside the memorial zone. This gives the impression of bombsite movement. Earlier in this chapter I  commented on the particularly anthropological dimension to this security work by non-​state actors. These actors use discourses of profanity and sacredness to efface the mortality that lingers upon destroyed space, rather than building memorials as states do. To conclude this discussion, it is important to contextualise these appeals to the sacredness of death-​space within the experience of Western cultures –​given the different reaction to the architectural development of the Sari Club displayed by the Balinese. Given the different political histories of these societies, we should be careful about commenting on Balinese relationships to death. I  have tried to highlight the cultural political history of the Balinese in this chapter (‘there’s no tragedies in Bali because there’s always a ceremony to balance it’; interview with Made Wijaya 2012) to emphasise the cultural specificity of Western hysteria towards mortality. This hysteria –​whereby space associated with mass death is deemed sacred and requires a monument –​is the product of secularisation, individuation and rationalisation. This discussion of mortality’s substantive force in the aftermath of modernity can provide an interesting development and extension of existing work in political theology. Scholars of political theology rightly identify the processes by which modernity’s political architectures borrowed from previous discursive and institutional manoeuvres of the Christian Church (Agamben 2011; Debrix 2015; Kantorowicz 1957; Santner 2011). They particularly scrutinise the legitimation of sovereignty through association with the popular body in the era of democracy. Following the Church’s appropriation of Christly sovereignty, by instantiating an institutional authoritative ‘body’, and the monarch’s appropriation of divine authority by instantiating a ‘royal’ body, the era of democracy constitutes a ‘popular’ body upon which sovereignty is predicated. Santner and Debrix have commentated on the relationship of security to the protection of this new sovereign body –​the population –​as a biopolitical endeavour. I am intrigued by these arguments and endorse them; however, I believe that the evidence of bombsites enables us to go further in this discussion.

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Mutating disaster space Beyond the discussion of institutional shifts in the body politic once the Death of God took hold, we also need to think about the subject’s shifting experience of security and sovereignty. The state may have developed its performance of sovereignty through the reification and protection of the body politic, à la the Church’s previous appropriation of Christ’s sovereignty, but the symbolic order does not just consist of official representations in a vacuum. These are not discursive manoeuvres in the dark. The subject’s recognition of sovereignty is also required for the political order to stand. And the subject’s relationship to authority changed with the public removal of promises to immortal salvation (Aries 1974, 1983). The translation of individualised heavenly salvation to collective security for the nation, during modernity, left a vulnerable aporia in the fabric of the symbolic order. Individuals still die, but are only promised communal perpetuity through the nation. This is why we see prolonged Australian activism for a second memorial on the Bali bombsite, while the Balinese understand the matter of death to have been closed through the religious rituals used to purify Kuta. Both cultures undertake purification rituals for public space after violent death. But without the promise of karmic reincarnation, the secular culture is more profoundly shaken by the incursion of death. It requires every millimetre of the disaster space to be rebuilt and redesigned, to silence the deathly excess that remains. The incursion of public death disrupts the immersion of subjects within the discourse of collective security provided by the sovereign and thus their implicit recognition of the sovereign claim. The secularised ‘God’ dies, in effect, when the flesh of subjects is publicly attacked. This explodes the foundational aporia within the edifice of the secular project of authority, legitimacy and sovereignty. Death irrupts through the cultural and political structures designed to quell mortality’s awkward disruption of everything and anything. Notes 1 The etymology of the name Fresh Kills reflects the Dutch word kille, meaning riverbed or water channel. The Fresh Kills area is an estuary that was utilised as New York’s primary landfill from 1947 until March 2001, when the Environmental Protection Agency and local government advised closure given extensive pollution. The site was subsequently redesignated as a ‘crime scene’ on 12 September when the site reopened as a sorting ground for recovery workers to sift the rubble of the twin towers. In 2008, the parks authority began to reclaim the landfill site as a major park and wetlands site. 2 The Sari Club did not permit locals to patronise the club, but thirty-​eight Indonesians died in the attacks, including many bar staff. 3 Available at: www.youtube.com/​watch?v=mjGJPPRD3u0 (last accessed 3 August 2015). 4 http://​batteryparkcity.com/​news/​grim-​map-​shows-​suggested-​boundaries-​of-​ground-​z ero (last accessed 5 August 2015).

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5 The bloodstained fields of the 1965 killings are not the only macabre spaces utilised for hotel construction. In deeper reflection on the connection between the Balinese tourism industry and silent spaces of massacre, Degung Santikarma notes that the ‘original pillar of Balinese tourism, the Bali Hotel in Denpasar’ was built by the Dutch on the bloodstained land of the 1906 puputan massacre –​the Balinese last stand against colonial occupation (Santikarma 2005: 315).

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Bombs without bombsites: memory and security without visibility

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a technique that utilises visibility to re-​narrate an event and, as argued here, to re-​take place from the incursion of mortality. As Lewis Mumford argued in The Culture of Cities, the impenetrable and eternal aesthetics of memorial stones, plinths and pillars convey a ‘deceptive assurance of life’ (Mumford 1938:  434). This book has explored the efforts of states and activist groups to delineate the spatial location of the emergency event and then exorcise its morbid resonance with architecture; to use stone, steel and glass to provide an assurance of life contra mortality. We have called this ‘retrospective security’: security practice that identifies danger as emerging from the past. The existence of retrospective security indicates that security exists to efface mortality, contra other arguments made about the functionality of anticipatory practices. But can you successfully memorialise an event that was invisible? Can you use a visible, physical design to efface a bombsite that is unseen? These may seem like abstract questions; however, these are issues that directly affect the commemoration of the London bombings of 2005, which killed 52 people in four separate suicide-​vest explosions. Three of those explosions occurred on the Underground train network, while one destroyed a bus in Tavistock Square. As most of these bombs detonated underground, little permanent visible damage remained in the aftermath of the event. While this might be considered a positive, given that the recovery from the bombings would not need to contend with collapsed buildings or piles of rubble, it has caused unexpected problems for the memorialisation of the bombings. In previous chapters, this book has explored the dynamics of place and space in the mitigation of death, looking at how retrospective security is performed through architecture upon destroyed space. But what happens if there is no visible destroyed space upon which to act? Is mortality still active? Is retrospective security required to exorcise mortality from invisible sites, where bombs-​without-​bombsites have exposed the aporia in the sovereign’s emorialisation is

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Death and security performance of authority but left no visible site upon which to reverse this incursion? This chapter poses questions about visibility within the targeting rationale for bombings and the disaster recovery process. It argues that the London bombings –​having left no damage upon the visible landscape (except the No. 30 bus in Tavistock Square, which was removed not long after) –​have resulted in an ambiguous climate of haunting and forgetfulness in the capital. There is no spatial context for the disruption of the symbolic order, given that most of the destruction occurred underground, yet the memory of mediatised images from that day lingers. The British public remembers media coverage of the exploded bus and the grainy images of commuters being led down underground passages, caught on survivors’ mobile phones. The bombings disturbed the performance of sovereignty and subjectivity –​but there is no visual location identified as the ‘place’ of the bombings, which can then be commodified and reified through recovery practices. The resonance of mortality floats, unconnected to any particular site, and the bomb-​without-​bombsite has thus complicated the performance of memorialisation and the mitigation of mortality. As a result, memorialisation has occurred at distance from the train and bus bombings. The 7 July Memorial avoided the affected Tube stations and Tavistock Square location, and Hyde Park was instead chosen as its location –​at a considerable distance from the bombings. Tucked into the south-​east corner of Hyde Park in London, fifty-​two stainless steel pillars have stood since 7 July 2009. These make up the official memorial for the victims, an unobtrusive testament of which many people are unaware. The abstract and sparse design firmly situates the 7 July Memorial in the postmodern monumentality tradition of post-​2001 memorialisation, where architecture invokes themes of loss and horror to, paradoxically, mitigate their effects. As discussed in Chapter  3 of this book, contemporary post-​terrorist memorials make explicit and abstract representations of absence to exorcise the resonance of death. However, we can be sure that the 7 July Memorial has been unsuccessful in mitigating the continued resonance of mortality, because a subsequent campaign for a new memorial has emerged. Campaigners have responded to the failure of the memorial to absorb the resonance of the 2005 event, by demanding a new memorial for the Tavistock Square site of the bus bomb. The first section of this chapter discusses the response of the Tavistock Square Memorial Trust to the ambiguity of bombs that left no bombsites, of disruptions to the social order that left little visible destruction on which to perform recovery and security. The Trust is currently raising funds to construct a memorial in Tavistock Square to those who died in the London bombings, designed by Carmody Groarke –​the architects behind the Hyde Park memorial. The significance of the square is that it is the only above-​ground visual link to the events. The No. 30 bus was destroyed 154

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Bombs without bombsites

Figure 6.1  7 July Memorial, Hyde Park

in Tavistock Square by Hasib Hussain after he failed to detonate his rucksack underground, like his three accomplices. The campaign to build a memorial at Tavistock Square expressly contributes to the conclusion of this book that memorialisation is a security practice that retrospectively mitigates the incursion of death by recolonising the bombsite. Even if no visible damage is left by terrorist attacks, the disturbance of the symbolic order by mortality necessitates that a memorial be established in spatial proximity to the deaths. There is no bombsite, as such, but the incursion of mortality haunts the city until it is mitigated through the reclamation and marking of place. The second section of this chapter expands the analysis of the connection between visuality, mortality and security by considering reactions to other bombs-​ without-​bombsites: those bombsites we cannot see because they are thousands of miles away. In particular, the section draws upon literatures of grievable life and memory studies to explore the forgetting of deaths caused by protagonist nations of the ‘War on Terror’ in airstrikes. No memorials are constructed to the dead of these attacks, who often remain uncounted. They are relegated to the status of collateral damage incurred during the prosecution of supposedly legal and necessary foreign policy mandates. And yet some of these deaths have unexpectedly crept onto the World Trade Center (WTC) plaza in Manhattan and have begun haunting the site. They have appeared in the form of an unexpected statue. 155

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Death and security The De Oppresso Liber statue, otherwise known as ‘America’s Response’, is an iconography of the patriotic valour of the American Special Forces. During Operation Enduring Freedom, specialised units took to horseback to prosecute terrorism on Afghan soil. These ‘horse soldiers’ of the War on Terror have now been immortalised in bronze. Paid for by Wall Street firms whose employees lost friends in the 9/​11 attacks, as well as right-​leaning celebrity activists and a movie producer, the statue stands at the entrance to the PATH station at the WTC site. The statue was intended to reify the glory of the US military but, I will suggest, has had the unintended effect of haunting the WTC site with the memory of Afghan lives lost in America’s response to the 9/​11 attacks. Bombs without visible bombsites from thousands of miles away now echo on the Manhattan site, and no one seems quite sure where to locate the statue now that it has arrived. Unexpected echoes of distant deaths and militarised aesthetics of heroism jar with the staged beauty and civic resilience of the 9/​11 Memorial Plaza, emphasising the violence that has been silenced for so long. Finally, the third section of this chapter concludes the discussion of invisible bombsites and their importance for thinking security, mortality and memory by considering the touristification of the completed memorials and redevelopments in New York, London, Norway and Bali. Taking the case studies together, and exploring the viewing of contemporary memorial scenes, we can see the functionality of memorial gazing. Once the bombsite vanishes, memorial scenes become attractions endlessly reproduced in the ubiquitous tourist photograph as signifiers of cosmopolitan resolve and resilient liberal order. They take on digital and cultural lives as visited, gazed upon places. The mortality that once disturbed the site is banished, and the ritualised tourist pilgrimage to the memorial scene instead reifies the sovereign symbolic order –​and the subject position of the one who views the memorial object. These three contexts are used to explore the role of visuality in the retrospective absorption of mortality. The invisibility of a bombsite may disrupt the domestic symbolic order by complicating memorialisation, as I will argue with regard to efforts to construct a second memorial to the London bombings, but invisibility can also be functional –​when it concerns the dead of one’s enemy. The invisibility of bombsites in Afghanistan and Iraq means they fail to resonate with audiences in the Global North. They are embedded within what Judith Butler (2009) calls ‘frames of war’ and enable the paradoxical calculus of war to exist. In short, these frames enable audiences to weigh the deaths of one’s compatriots and the distant Other differently. The chapter concludes by discussing the performance of terrorism upon cities, given that the destruction of urbanity has profound effects upon the constitution of ontological security (with reference to Martin Coward’s (2009) work on Urbicide). It should never be forgotten, of course, that Osama Bin Laden and Mohammed Atta trained in architecture and civil engineering before becoming 156

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militants –​they learned about building and urban scopic regimes, and how the destruction of ontological security could be practised through the destruction of buildings. Buildings are representations of our collective permanence and identity, contra mortality, and destroying them removes a cornerstone of ontological security. But during retrospective security practices, new buildings rise like phoenixes from the ashes to reconsolidate the performance of ontological security through architecture and public space. 7/​7 and the security ambiguity of dying underground Throughout this book, the connection between mortality and security has been explored through the remakings of bombsites. The book has explored the deployment of architecture and memorialisation upon post-​terrorist space to mitigate the resonance of mortality and to reconstruct imaginations of perpetuity and undisrupted sovereignty. Being ‘seen’ is crucial here. Just as political violence enacts insecurity in a visual manner by destroying space, reconstruction reverses that enactment through visualised reconstruction. The battles over disrupting and conserving the symbolic order take place upon visual terrain. So what happens when a bombing leaves no visible destruction? I will argue here that the 7/​7 bombings that occurred in London in 2005 were largely invisible. Detonations occurred underground on three Tube trains, before the fourth bomber left the Underground network and boarded a London bus, detonating his device in Tavistock Square. The bus was blown apart but there was no damage to the square itself. The broken bus was soon removed. The bombings caused the level of mediatised hysteria that one has come to expect of post-​9/​11 terrorist events, dominating international news for weeks and expediting the publication of the UK CONTEST strategy and the development of the United Kingdom’s counter-​radicalisation agenda. The spectacle of the event temporarily dismantled the performance of sovereignty and subjectivity, leaving social trauma in its wake. And yet there was precious little terrain for the performance of disaster recovery after the event. There was no bombsite upon which to perform reconstruction and to mitigate the incursion of mortality. Three sites were underground and thus shielded from public view, except for published mobile phone photos of the smoke-​filled tunnels of the London Underground, whereas the destroyed bus was quickly removed from Tavistock Square leaving no permanent marks. Mortality lingered in a nebulous but non-​ visual fashion. Memorialisation was felt to be required, as with all major terrorist events of the post-​1995 era. But where? Where could recovery be performed through architecture when no destroyed space was available for exorcism? In keeping with the themes of this book, the initial proposed site for the 7/​7 memorial was Tavistock Square, from where the destroyed bus was removed. The place of 157

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Death and security destruction is, as I have argued throughout this book, central to the mitigation of mortality. But the restricted space available in Tavistock Square precluded its use as a memorialisation site: it was deemed too small for the footfall that would be associated with a national memorial (interview with Philip Nelson 2015). As a result, the national memorial to the 7/​7 bombings was instead unveiled in London’s enormous Hyde Park on the fourth anniversary of the event, 7 July 2009. Constructed by architectural firm Carmody Groarke, the memorial consists of fifty-​two steel pillars (stelae), which represent the victims of the bombing. The stelae are grouped in four clusters, representing the four explosions and the spatial connection between the deaths, and each has slight individualities from the casting process to represent the individualities of each victim. The somewhat random placement of the memorial in the south-​east corner of Hyde Park was explained by Philip Nelson, the chair of the Tavistock Square Memorial Trust, as an aesthetic decision designed to enable the poignant accidental discovery of the memorial by passers-​by (interview with Philip Nelson 2015). The lack of spatial connection to the bombsites is reimagined as an aesthetic choice linked to surprise discovery and affective response, rather than the lack of space in Tavistock Square that actively caused the memorial to be built in Hyde Park. The lack of spatial connection between the bombsites and the memorial has meant that the 7 July Memorial has failed to mitigate the lingering resonance of mortality left by the attacks. How do we know this? Because activists have now established a serious campaign to construct a new memorial at the closest point to the visual remnants of 7/​7: the bus bombing in Tavistock Square. Their campaign for a new memorial means, we can conclude, that the existing memorial has failed to do its job. Societal groups are still responding to the disruption of a bombsite left unfinished and unresolved –​and their campaign prioritises the spatial location for the new memorial in proximity to the Tavistock Square bombsite. Despite being ‘invisible’, then, ‘invisible’ bombsites still require memorialisation at close proximity to alleviate their disruption of the social fabric. Mortality still lingers at the bombsite even if destruction is not visible. Like the ex-​Sari Club in Bali, the London bombings will continue to resonate until their space is reclaimed through architecture. The Tavistock Square Memorial Trust is run by a collection of philanthropists from the district of Bloomsbury, patronised by the Duchess of Bedford. Its chair, Philip Nelson, proudly traces his family lineage back to Admiral Nelson, the British naval leader of the eighteenth century, and provides an allusion to this link on his personal blurb on the Trust’s website. Their mission is to construct a permanent marker in tribute to those who lost their lives on the No. 30 bus, at ‘the site most closely associated with the events of 7/​7’.1 This quotation from their mission statement clearly supports the spatial dynamic that underpins memorialisation, argued in this book as the mitigation of lingering mortality. In my conversations with Philip, he has described his organisation as 158

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Bombs without bombsites responding to a need for spatial proximity between a 7/​7 memorial and a 7/​ 7 bombsite. Reclaiming place is important, even if bombings leave no physical traces upon the earth. The Trust has so far achieved 50 per cent of its funding target for the new memorial, including a £10,000 donation from Stagecoach, the bus company that owned the No. 30 bus (interview with Philip Nelson 2015). While Carmody Groarke, architects of the national 7 July Memorial, have been commissioned by the Trust to design the Tavistock Square memorial, explicit designs did not exist at the time of writing. The Trust’s chair, Philip Nelson, explained to the author that a modernistic, bronze design is planned for the east side of the square where the bus came to its final resting point (interview with Philip Nelson 2015). Interestingly, Nelson also explained that the Tavistock Square project is intended to generate activity at the other three bombsites connected to the 7/​7 attacks. He discussed how the Tavistock Square development has been the first to generate action for a memorial given its spatial proximity to a visual site of the bombings and its situation in a wealthy district familiar with philanthropy, but explained that the Trust seeks to encourage and mentor sister projects at the bombed Aldgate, Edgware Road and Russell Square stations (interview with Philip Nelson 2015). He hopes that the Tavistock Square memorial might act as blueprint experience for other organisations, and ultimately result in dedicated memorials at each of the bombsites. Finally, our interview revealed that the annual 7/​7 lecture organised by the Trust, which has attracted speakers such as Dame Tessa Jowell (former government minister and Secretary of State for the Olympics), has been intended to reach out to the wider 7/​7 community and facilitate such cooperation for connected memorials at each site. What makes this activism so interesting is that there aren’t visible sites connected to the 7/​7 bombings. They occurred underground, or destroyed a bus that could be removed from the Tavistock Square area. There is no visible site of destruction to reconstruct in order to assuage public discomfort. The bombsites themselves are back in operation as roads and underground rail lines, and a national memorial has already been dedicated to the victims in Hyde Park. So why the need for a second (and potentially third, fourth and fifth) memorial? This activism can only be explained as the response to mortality’s incursion, its disruption of the symbolic order and the retrospective securing of event sites though architectural narratives and markers. Despite the absence of destroyed public space, the morbid resonance of the 7/​7 bombings is felt to require monuments on invisible bombsites to exorcise their disruptive potential. The lack of visible damage is unimportant; invisible sites of mortality still matter. In a sense, invisible bombsites become far more challenging for the performance of disaster recovery –​despite the lack of visual damage to the landscape. There is a security ambiguity to these violent deaths that disrupt the symbolic order but which cannot be seen. Invisible bombsites disrupt the performance 159

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Death and security of sovereignty upon the supposedly protected flesh of the population (Santner 2011), but there is no simple way to reconstruct the symbolic order of sovereignty and subjectivity upon such sites. There is no visual site of destruction upon which to perform recovery, reclaim place and assert a continuous perpetuity of sovereign community contra death. Death, as we have seen, continues to linger in the polity through memory and eventually provokes community activism for its mitigation ‘onsite’: generating spatial claims upon land that no longer bears the scars of explosion. And in this example of disaster recovery, state-​organised memorialisation in Hyde Park has failed to mitigate the event by ignoring the importance of place in the exorcism of mortality. Even though the London bombings were invisible, they will remain resonant until memorials stand in proximity to their sites. The return of the repressed: De Oppresso Liber Invisible bombsites can also become problematic for sovereign politics when the dead of one’s enemy refuse to remain unseen. This section interrogates the haunting of the WTC site in Manhattan by deaths that occurred during the war in Afghanistan, since the arrival of a statue named ‘America’s Response:  De Oppresso Liber’. The statue was not intended to make these Afghan deaths salient; rather it was commissioned to honour the exploits of US Special Forces during Operation Enduring Freedom in the early years of the War on Terror. This section explores the statue’s aesthetics and its Trojan-​horse-​like, accidental transportation of invisible deaths onto a site dedicated to the memory of sanctified lives lost in the Global North. ‘America’s Response:  De Oppresso Liber’ is a sixteen-​foot-​tall bronze statue of a Special Ops soldier, adorned with high-​tech weaponry, riding into battle on horseback. The statue commemorates the ‘horse soldiers’ of Operation Enduring Freedom, deployed by President George W.  Bush with intentional allusions to the classic Westerns of American cinema. These specialist Green Beret troops parachuted into Afghanistan in aid of the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and al-​Qaeda, commandeered the horses of local tribesman, and then rode into battle at Mazar-​i-​Sharif replete with their M4 rifles and GPS location systems (Doss 2013). In the early days of the war, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld often publicly praised these specialist teams through broadcast media, emphasising their ability to ‘blend in’ with the locals as a form of counter-​insurgency expertise. The US-​based artist Douwe Blumberg saw the images of the high-​tech warriors on horseback and was taken with their simultaneous representation of modern warfare and ancient battle. He produced a limited edition rendering of the Special Forces unit in bronze. As Erika Doss explains, these small figures were seen by a group of Wall Street executives who had lost friends in the 9/​11 160

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Bombs without bombsites attacks (Doss 2013). They decided to commission Blumberg to create a larger version of the bronze figure for the WTC site. These wealthy executives acquired the financial backing of a large contingent of backers (including Brookfield Properties (owners of Zuccotti Park), Cushman & Wakefield (a commercial real estate firm) and UBS (a wealth management firm), along with the film and TV producer Jerry Bruckheimer and the actor Gary Sinise) and commissioned Blumberg to create the statue. In subsequent interviews, the consortium explicitly explained their decision to commission ‘America’s Response’ in terms of gratitude to the armed forces for their expert service but also as a result of the aesthetic and ontological experience of staring into the destroyed space of the WTC every day:  ‘We wanted to do something for the special operations community and all military service branches, because every day since 9/​11, we’ve had to look at that hole in the ground’ (Quade 2011). The organisers juxtaposed their project against the visual insecurity incurred by being confronted with destroyed space: ‘that hole in the ground’. This explanation provides an interesting allusion to the relationship between death and security. Their attempt to re-​narrate the WTC site through the heroic, invulnerable and eternal ‘glory’ of the Special Ops soldiers serves the need to mitigate the trauma of the landscape. It is retrospective security. But the statue does not yet have a final abode in Lower Manhattan. The Wall Street consortium intended ‘America’s Response’ to be placed in either Zuccotti Park (which was hosting the Occupy Wall Street protests at the time of the statue’s arrival) or in the lobby of one of the many buildings undergoing construction on the WTC site. But at the time of writing, ‘America’s Response’ sits outside the entrance to the PATH station on the WTC site, behind wire mesh that obscures the view of the monument (Figure 6.2). The statue is hard to locate without knowing exactly where to look on the enormous WTC site. Veterans of the Afghan campaign have complained about the placement of the memorial, arguing that ‘America’s Response’ seems to be ‘hidden away and caged as if he had done something wrong’ and suggesting that the WTC site might not be the most suitable site for honouring the military, given that it is symbolically defined by the loss of civilian lives on 9/​11 (Murphy 2014). And yet the ideological purpose of locating the horse soldier statue at Ground Zero is abundantly clear when one considers the inscription concerning the steel that makes up the statue’s base. It describes, in language more appropriate for the description of a sacred religious relic, that the base is made from steel recovered from the twin towers: The steel girder protruding from beneath the rocks is an actual piece from the World Trade Center Towers and as such is considered a national treasure. It symbolizes the connections between the events of 9/​11 and the actions of the Special Operations heroes this monument honors. You are welcome and encouraged to touch it. (Quoted in Doss 2013)

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Death and security

Figure 6.2  ‘America’s Response: De Oppresso Liber’, 1 August 2014

This inscription shows us that this statue is an ideological device designed to reify the discursive association between the 9/​11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan –​as if the two were naturally connected and there was no other possible response available to the Bush administration when faced with attack. The incursion upon America was repaid and cancelled out by enormous military vengeance. Furthermore, Doss explains that the statue was commissioned at a time when the Iraq War was failing, when political-​military discourse was mired in partisan politics and the fallout from the Abu Ghraib scandal challenged any notion of an honourable, victorious campaign (Doss 2013). At a time when the American public was losing faith in the War on Terror, a new and simplistic image of mythical national valour was constructed to interpolate their perceptions of US identity and foreign policy. The thirty-​day period of cavalry charges during Operation Enduring Freedom was chosen as an image to define the war in Afghanistan, in an attempt to re-​narrate the War on Terror as a struggle between good and evil, between the brave and honourable US soldier and the despicable terrorist enemy. And yet the statue fails. Its placement jars with the context of the 9/​11 site. It is noticeably dissonant. It brings other deaths onto the sacred ground reserved for the victims of the WTC attacks. I will go further than Jack Murphy, the veteran who challenges the placement of the statue upon the WTC site, and suggest 162

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Bombs without bombsites that ‘America’s Response’ inadvertently brings Afghan deaths in the War on Terror into the public domain. It contravenes the logic of warfare by unsilencing the deaths of one’s enemy. It makes the death of the Other visible and is thus accidentally critical of the war it intends to reify. The subtitle of the statue uses the motto of the Special Forces, ‘de oppresso liber’ (‘to free the oppressed’), to directly address the population of Afghanistan. The mission of the soldier is determined, by this ideological discourse of liberal biopolitics, to serve the security and liberty of worthy populations. War (supposedly) occurs in the interests of defending and liberating the powerless. But by hitting these discursive notes, the dead of the Afghanistan War irrupt onto the WTC site. At the suggestion of the statue, dead Afghans begin to haunt the celebration of military valour made upon post-​terrorist space: the death of the Other enters the scopic regime of retrospective security. To explain the dissonance that results from the juxtaposition of dead American and dead Afghan lives, we must note that security discourse functions by according lives different values. Security is the performance of immortality and sovereignty through the violent destruction of totemic enemies –​the destruction of death through the deployment of death. The deployment of death upon ‘others’ consolidates the immortality and vitality of the biopolitical community. This should not just be understood as an argument within biopolitical security studies regarding ‘killing to make live’ (Dillon and Reid 2009; Evans 2011), it also underwrites the ontology of strategic geopolitics. To make this paradoxical security/​morbidity economy work, lives must be accorded different value. The person killed by us is surplus, collateral damage and was never entitled to life in the first place, whereas our person killed by them was irreplaceable. The death of our own generates war. But the bodies underneath the airstrike are construed as objects destroyed during the security mission, because if they were recognised as qualified lives then the farce of bombing to attain security would be revealed. Judith Butler develops this argument in Frames of War (2009), showing that lives cannot be understood as lost unless they were first constituted as living: you cannot ‘die’ if you were never alive. Politics constitutes some lives as unqualified, thus it disposes of them during military ventures without concern. Frames of war differentiate lives into forms we can recognise as living and those we cannot. Only qualified lives can be grieved. These differentiated forms of life enable contemporary security to take place:  the threat posed to qualified life enables policymakers to unleash death upon unqualified lives, vanquishing the ‘threat’ without the paradox of ‘killing to protect’ becoming apparent. The events of 9/​11 played an important signifying role within the frames of war that detained, tortured and bombed unqualified lives to ‘protect’ those in the Global North. The victims of 9/​11 were held up as grievable, sacred deaths requiring a massive security response as well as multiple memorials to their 163

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Death and security immortal honour. To mitigate the mortality that irrupted on 11 September, the United States (and coalition partners) rendered a totemic figure (‘the terrorist’) whose body could be destroyed and sacrificed in a staged performance of American invulnerability and immortality. The deaths that occurred during the 11 September attacks were cleansed of all morbidity through their insertion into a security discourse where they became props in the sacrificial, totemic defeat of death through the destruction of unqualified lives in war. And the memorialisation and reconstruction of the 9/​11 sites has performed a concurrent retrospective security to mitigate the visceral, visual memory of the incursion of mortality. A small component of this memory work, the commissioning and placing of the De Oppresso Liber statue, was intended to consolidate the aesthetic rendering of immortal, valiant life in response to 9/​11  –​banishing death through retrospective security design. However, the dynamics of placing the horse soldier statue upon the WTC site has unintentionally disturbed the differentiation of grievable and ungrievable lives. By invoking the conflict in Afghanistan, the statue unintentionally brings the deaths of Afghan civilians onto the site –​exposing, rather than concealing, the hierarchy of grief that enables security to function. This underwrites the undefined feeling of many commentators that ‘America’s Response’ has been inappropriately placed at the WTC. The airstrike and drone-​strike bombsites of the War on Terror are reliant upon invisibility. Populations of the Global North must not notice them, so that the paradoxical calculus of war (killing to prevent killing) is maintained. The distance of compassion between those lives lost in the Global North and South is a functional component of warfare, used to conceal the paradox of security. Otherwise, how could the logic that security and peace are served by aerial bombing ever enjoy public assent? Invisible deaths are the result of framing processes that constitute the life of the Other as ungrievable. But invisible deaths can inadvertently haunt the sites of mourning dedicated to qualified lives, such as the WTC site. As we have seen, the placement of the ‘America’s Response’ monument at Ground Zero invokes the liberation of the oppressed, by name (de oppresso liber), and generates a feeling of discomfort. Where are those addressed by the statue? This discomfort stems from the unintentional unsilencing of Afghan deaths and the haunting of the WTC site by ungrievable life. War frames are destabilised by a haunting morbid energy that emanates from the statue. In this case, invisible bombsites cause a disruption to the social fabric by accident. Contra the example of London, where invisible deaths remain politically salient, Afghan mortality was not felt as a lingering presence until it was made semi-​visible by the ‘America’s Response’ monument. Invisibility is a functional component of the everyday airstrike and its

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Bombs without bombsites perpetuation of the war paradox:  one currently exposed by the return of the repressed dead.

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Making invisible: memorials as commodity Having considered examples of invisible bombsites created by underground bombs, and those made invisible by frames of war, the third section of this chapter considers the active practice of making (previously visible) bombsites invisible through reconstruction. It draws the chapter to a close by reconsidering memorialisation as a process of making mortality invisible while also instantiating scopic regimes of cosmopolitanism, resilience and vitality. The functionality of disaster recovery, memorialisation and reconstruction is to rescript space and reassert the symbolic order. The horror and destruction of the bombsite is captured, cleared and reinvented. Sometimes, during this process, it can seem that death and absence are explicitly made visible upon post-​terrorist space. In Chapter  4 I  discussed the self-​harming architecture planned for Sørbråten peninsula in Norway, where a gash of sorrow will be torn through the land near Utøya Island to represent the unhealable trauma of Breivik’s slaughter in 2011. I  also discussed the postmodern monumentality of Michael Arad’s design for the 9/​11 Memorial Plaza, where the painful absence of the lives taken on 11 September is frozen within black marble reflecting pools sunk into the footprints of the twin towers. I argued that while these designs appear to reflect a shift in memorialisation practice towards the visualisation of eternal sorrow and mortality, their aesthetic is actually a charade. The responsibility for this often does not lie with the designers, but with the bureaucratic and business interests behind the reconstruction of post-​terrorist space. Abstract designs win the competitions established to determine the central aesthetic content of reconstructed space, but these memorial designs are then subsumed within landscapes that deliberately soften the aesthetic and that reify discourses of resilience, vitality and civic perpetuity. Chapter 3 explored how this has occurred through the landscaping and greening of the Manhattan Memorial Plaza and the sacralisation of relics such as the ‘survivor tree’, and Chapter  4 discussed the reinvigoration of the Oslo Government Quarter through steel and glass modernist architecture. Mortality may be referenced within memorial design, but the surrounding post-​terrorist space is reconstructed to silence death and instead promote a scopic regime of civic, cosmopolitan immortality. The content of the design is overpowered by the aesthetic and ideological imaginations of capitalism and sovereignty. Unfortunately, this overpowering of the artists’ designs does not only silence their interesting reflections upon loss and death, it also corrupts their memorials. The sovereign and capitalist

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Death and security imagination conquers the artist by turning their design into a commodity. Reflecting Absence and Memory Wound become tourist commodities, to be photographed and consumed, while the state apparatus evacuates the wider scene of anything that might challenge the symbolic order of capital, nation and biopolitics. Post-​terrorist sites of the War on Terror stand outside the symbolic order for as long as they stand outside the capitalist mode of production. Bombsites remain in excess, and terrorist, until they are interpolated into modes of exchange, to paraphrase Baudrillard (2003). Memorialisation and reconstruction turn the site into a commodity that can be reproduced and exchanged, into a scopic regime of tragedy and recovery that can be photographed and reified. But at the same time memorialisation renders ‘the bombsite’ invisible. It removes all trace of horror, meaninglessness and death. At the reconstructed site, every detail is instead oversignified to speak of the disaster recovery brand: resilience in perpetuity. This process provides an interesting window onto dynamics of invisibility and visibility in the reconstruction of post-​terrorist space. The bombsite (or massacre site, in the case of Utøya Island) is problematised as a visual continuation of the emergency (see Chapter 2 for a full explication). It remains disruptive while it can be seen. The mission of disaster recovery is to reclaim and rearticulate the place-​meaning of that site through visual reconstruction. But this cannot be done through attempts to silence the dead, such as concreting over the site, as the public are sensitive to the heritage of the place and the need to properly mark (and thus mitigate) the resonance of death (see Chapter 5). As such, visibility is the solution to a visible incursion of destruction. Scopic regimes of life and memory must be constructed upon the bombsite to mitigate the presence of death and its disruption of both subjectivity and sovereignty, as was seen in the campaign of the Bali Peace Park Association to obtain and rectify the ‘problematic’ status of the ex-​Sari Club (Chapter 5). Capitalism is very important to this production of a scopic regime because it possesses a terrific capability for resignification through commoditisation. The resonance of mortality can be mitigated through the commodification of memorials as sights/​sites for the tourist gaze –​evacuating the aesthetic solemnity of their abstract designs. Tourism takes an interest in post-​terrorist sites and their reconstruction, with city guidebooks listing memorials as places of interest for the informed visitor. And, as I will argue here, this commodification of the post-​ terrorist site within a visual regime is extremely functional for the silencing of mortality and the rescripting of the landscape. Even if the artist designed a complex representation of mortality and horror, the tourist gaze can bypass the critical intent and resignify the site. Tourism is not the apolitical pursuit of relaxation and satisfaction. As John Urry demonstrated in his seminal book, The Tourist Gaze (1990), the practice of 166

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Bombs without bombsites tourism involves partaking in the consumption of a systematised and organised visual regime. We travel to gaze upon a landscape constructed for us through discourses of Orientalism and capitalism. Our gaze upon the Other found in this location constitutes a distinction between us and them predicated upon knowledge and visibility. Importantly, a tourist travels to consume signs of the other place and thereby ‘know’ it –​distinguishing home from abroad and consolidating the discourse of difference. Tourism functionally underwrites nationalism as a cultural practice of imagining communities. The throngs of tourists so common to beaches and cities worldwide are actually armies of semioticians (Culler 1981:  127). Finally, the development of mass-​produced cameras and more recently smartphones has enabled the extension of this signification work, consolidating and reproducing the meaning of the sign (and its situation within discursive structures of differentiation) at ever-​faster speeds. As Urry summarises: The gaze is constructed through signs, and tourism involves the collection of signs. When tourists see two people kissing in Paris what they capture in the gaze is ‘timeless romantic Paris’. When a small village in England is seen, what they gaze upon is the ‘real olde England’ […] People linger over such a gaze which is then normally visually objectified or captured through photographs, postcards, films, models and so on. These enable the gaze to be endlessly reproduced and recaptured. (Urry 1990: 3)

The insertion of post-​terrorist memorial sites into the tourist gaze does two things: it asserts the symbolic identity of the site as distinct from normal urban space and thus worthy of consumption, and then offers the site to the armies of semioticians who will then reproduce the signifier in endless photographs and social media postings. This consumption and reproduction of the post-​terrorist sign of resilience and recovery trades upon the exceptional rendering of the site –​it appropriates the excess that lingers after a mass killing and turns that disruption to its advantage. Tourists respond to the signification of the excessive space and visit –​then reproducing the sign in their own communications. The tourist gaze is an important component in the making invisible of post-​ terrorist space. It helps to elide the traumatic resonance of mortality from the past by participating in the deafening roar of commodification, where the site –​and its architecture –​can be visited as an exceptional sign, consumed and reproduced. It is important to note that the argument I am making here is at odds with most of the literature on ‘dark tourism’ (Foley and Lennon 1996; Lennon and Foley 2000; Stone 2006; Stone and Sharpley 2008; Tarlow 2005). This literature explores the (predominantly, but not exclusively, postmodern) phenomenon of pilgrimages and guided tours around sites of death and destruction. In explaining the attraction of dark sites to the tourist, a variety of explanations are made in the literature that centre upon the interaction between the tourist and mortality. It is argued that tourists visit sites of tragedy to increase their resilience to death anxieties. They engage with mortality as a form of entertainment experience –​where 167

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Death and security death is still semi-​taboo and yet reduced from its terrifying form –​to increase their ontological security with regard to death anxiety. Dark tourism, in this argument, aids the social neutralisation of death in an era where death is removed from view. It is segregated in hospital wards, out of sight, at the same time as cultural forms that previously alleviated the anxiety of death recede. The subject is left without a conceptual or social schema for managing death anxiety, so they engage in dark tourism to gain some experience of mortality, alleviate some of the fear of the unknown and bolster the reconstruction of a system of meaning around death from a safe distance (Stone and Sharpley 2008; Tarlow 2005). The important difference between my argument and the literature on dark tourism is that I have focused on the architectural mitigation of mortality before sites become touristed. Death no longer resides there. The tourist may be seduced by the promise of engagement with mortality, or ‘the real’, but (as Debbie Lisle has convincingly argued) they do not find it (Lisle 2004). Death cannot be integrated into the symbolic economy –​that is what makes it so terrifying. It is thus a contradiction to think that it can be visited and gazed upon. The visiting of the site and the reproduction of its signification bears no relationship to mortality but to the imagination of resilience. Indeed, rather than experiencing death as entertainment, the tourist is functional within the reproduction of signifiers connected to recovery, resilience, life, capital and sovereignty –​discourses that actively efface and mitigate mortality: an argument that runs in opposition to the dark tourism literature. The hyper-​visibility of bombsites effected through the tourist gaze functions to further bury the incursion of mortality underneath the reproduction of the bombsite as commodity. Conclusion In the commodification of post-​terrorist sites, visibility is an important tool in the mitigation of mortality and reassertion of sovereign authority. Upon visible bombsites, such as Manhattan, Norway and Bali, the evidence of mortality is captured, contained and reimagined through the assertion of new scopic regimes. The visibility of these images of recovery is crucial. But a bombsite need not even be visible to require such scopic reconstruction. The London bombings, for example, have stimulated a campaign for new memorials that bear a spatial relationship with the sites of destruction –​even though this destruction is hidden underground. Memorialisation exists as a place-​based technique of reclamation from death –​so it doesn’t work if the memorial is placed at a distance –​as is revealed in the Tavistock Square campaign to supplement the distant official memorial in London’s Hyde Park. Here, death disrupts the symbolic order through memory regardless of the visibility of destruction. Yet in the second section of this chapter, I  made the contrasting argument that invisibility is also functional within warfare. The invisibility of 168

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Bombs without bombsites bombsites and bomb deaths caused by our violence (and not directed at us) is actually functional; it props up ‘frames of war’. These frames construe the value of qualified and unqualified lives differently; they prevent the deaths of Others from becoming salient. If these deaths were to become visible, they might generate feelings of compassion and grief that challenge the calculus of war –​that we can kill Others to ensure security and defeat death; that we escape mortality by enacting death upon the bodies of Others. This chapter explored how the ‘America’s Response’ statue has unintentionally opened questions of grievable life by bringing the Afghanistan war onto the 9/​11 Memorial site. The dissonance caused by the statue, and the difficulty in finding it a permanent home on the WTC plaza, stems from its unintentional visualisation of Afghan deaths. It haunts the functionality of the WTC recovery initiative (and the pursuit of retrospective security) with deaths previously rendered invisible by frames of war. To conclude this chapter, we should remember that the destruction of urbanity has profound effects upon the constitution of ontological security because it is visual. We see destroyed sites and then we feel destroyed sites. As Martin Coward has shown, the destruction of buildings is a profoundly political violence that targets the political communities and identities inscribed within the structures; architecture, ontology and identity are mutually constitutive and thus the destruction of structures involves the preclusion of certain ways of life (Coward 2009). When we see the destruction of public spaces, we see the destruction of ourselves. It must never be forgotten, of course, that Osama Bin Laden studied to become a civil engineer (Eickelman 2002), and Mohammed Atta trained as an architect (Darton 2002:  90), before they became militants. One could suggest that their studies contributed to their understanding of the visceral power of the built, and destroyed, landscape. The destruction of buildings effects an experience of ontological collapse within the symbolic order, given that buildings are articulations of permanence, whereas reconstructing post-​terrorist space reconsolidates the performance of ontological security through architecture and public space. In both dynamics of destruction and reconstruction, the gaze of the witness is centrally important. Visualising the ruins, and visualising their reconstruction, is always implicated within security. Note 1 www.tavistocksquarememorialtrust.org/​index.html (last accessed 29 September 2015).

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Conclusion: pathologising security through Lacanian desire

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book, we have observed the desperate attempts made to suppress mortality across multiple temporalities and contexts. To protect the integrity of the symbolic order, security targets the disruptive excess of death and performs multiple totemic charades to neutralise the incursion of absurdity upon meaning and power. This concluding chapter asks one simple question. Is this performance pleasurable? To understand this question, we must familiarise ourselves with psychoanalytic theory and its reading of pleasure. Such theory is dedicated to exploring the drives that stimulate action and mental activity. Building upon Freud’s discussions of the pleasure principle and the death-​drive, repetitive compulsion is linked to pre-​conscious desires. Freud explored repetitive compulsions with regard to his patients, but can we appropriate his insights to shed light upon the repetitive performance of security practices? This chapter extends the analysis of security’s ontological relationship to mortality through notions of desire, libidinal economy and the death-​drive. In the simplest terms, this chapter asks whether there is something thrilling and yet masochistic about the Sisyphean pursuit of the unobtainable condition known as security. Given that security pursues an impossible immortality, is it indicative of a fantasy of control and order, rather than a teleological, goal-​oriented pursuit? And, as fantasy, is this endeavour structured around an eternal recurrence and repetition, rather than the pursuit and possession of a discrete objective? There have been many analyses that compare the War on Terror project to fantasy (Zulaika 2012). Jean Baudrillard, for example, spoke of the fascination with the collapse of the twin towers as an ‘abreaction’ –​a psychoanalytical term for repeatedly reliving an experience, as compulsion, to purge its excess signification (2003). The 9/​11 event tapped into a psychic reservoir of desire to see the world’s collapse  –​pre-​witnessed in the repeated, staged imagination of the towers’ demise in multiple action movies. We dreamt hroughout this

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Conclusion about this event because, Baudrillard argues, it was impossible not to desire the destruction of a power so hegemonic. We fantasise about terror. Indeed it is our cultural complicity in these acts of destruction that drives the puritanical crusading nature of the resulting quest for justice against enduring evil –​otherwise we would simply pursue the criminals responsible and let the bureaucracy of the justice system process them. Our fantasy of destruction drives our hysterical crusade against the perpetrators because we are complicit and guilt-​ridden. The drama of crusade against terrorism belies our desire for terrorism, for Baudrillard. Other scholars have also commented upon the desire for the fantastic episode of destruction, considering the pleasurable state of anxiety associated with ‘waiting for terror’. In this vein, Richard Jackson has read the War on Terror as being constituted through an epistemological crisis (Frank 2015; Jackson 2015), whereby objects of threat can never be permanently conquered or sated. Instead, they seem to slip away at the point of identification and reconstitute themselves in other terrible formations. They are forever out of reach and the desire for destruction is frustrated. Terrorism is framed as being beyond knowledge so that its terror remains excessive, phantasmagorical and fantasised. Security can never attain its goals  –​growing tired of enemies as soon as it obtains them, waiting instead for the next event of terror and imagining it as a catastrophe beyond all previous experience. Can we argue that this frustration and prolongation of desire is functional within the War on Terror project? That the coupling of death and security functions as an eternal prolonging of satisfaction and resolution? Can we look at security as the endless pursuit of desire –​where fantasy elucidates a place where death is mastered and yet this object can never be obtained? Can we look at the pursuit of threat/​desire as an unquenchable drive that instead structures reality? This concluding chapter extends the analysis of the book, concerning the ontological connection between death and security, to consider security as a libidinal economy of social forces (Lyotard 2004). Security functions as a social fantasy of resolution, wholeness and completion –​contra mortality. In this fantasy, control and order are simulated over a world of terrifying complexity and horrific absurdity. But, attaining the object of desire would end the pursuit. As every child knows, the tower has to be rebuilt after it is knocked down, otherwise the game ends. Security is not just the simulation of dominance and resolution, then, but also the enjoyment of the pursuit as frustrated –​the repetition of the game, the tantalising wait for the promised next terrorist attack and the submission to the libidinal drive. Lacanian desire Answering these questions means reading security through Lacan. Lacan’s work is renowned for being complicated, but it will be used here to enable a 171

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Death and security reading of security as fetish, desire and fantasy. To begin:  Lacan builds upon Freud. Freud split the psyche of the subject into the topography of id, ego and superego. He analysed the unconscious and subconscious levels of subjectivity and their implication and situation within social contexts (Tomšic and Zevnik 2015). Lacan’s tripartite framework further illuminates the fictional nature of the boundary between subject and society, by bringing linguistics into the frame. His psychic orders of the symbolic, imaginary and real describe the enmeshment of the subject within the world –​combining Freudian psychoanalysis with linguistic structuralism. Lacan reinterprets the Freudian unconscious as a consequence of language (Tomšic and Zevnik 2015: 2). As we discussed in the Introduction to this book, pronouns (I, you) are fictions. They don’t identify subjects. Rather, modern linguistics understands that they refer to an act of utterance (Agamben 1991: 23). Language cannot account for subjectivity. Language folds the subject into the symbolic order but conceals the lacuna of discourse –​which floats rather than remaining stably attached to objects. The enmeshment of the subject within linguistic structures, for Lacan, constitutes subjectivity around a ‘split’. Structures of language split the subject. Following from this, Lacan’s tripartite framework reads the world in terms of its symbolic, imaginary and ‘real’ dimensions. The symbolic order relates to the realm of signification (language, sexuality, law); the imaginary relates to pictorial thinking; whereas the ‘real’ (paradoxically) relates to the intuition that more exists than can be incorporated into the symbolic and imaginary orders (Schroeder 2003) –​the excess of subjectivity beyond signification. These orders were always split; a state of unification between them has never existed. And yet because the subject is constituted through this tripartite split, she is always driven by desire for unification, wholeness and resolution. This is what follows from the ‘splitness’ of subjectivity. Our splitness in the world drives a quest for an impossible state of unity. As Jeanne Schroeder neatly explains, ‘it is easy to presume that the reason we feel lacking is that we lack something’ (2003). Desire, in Lacanian theory, revolves around a fantasy about a ‘thing’ that will resolve the lack. The subject responds to its condition by conceiving of an object, which Lacan named objet petit a, as the objectification of the lack –​something that, when obtained, would supposedly quench desire and unify subjectivity. Objet petit a can be an object of either delight or disgust (Schroeder 2003). If delight, then the fantasy narrates that the rift in ourselves and the social order is caused by the lack of a wonderful object. When the wonderful object is obtained, the rift is resolved. But if objet petit a is fantasised as an object of disgust, then the rift in subjectivity and the social order is explained by the presence of a polluting, dangerous object that needs to be removed. Integrity and unity would be restored if the problematic object could be removed (Schroeder 2003). Our desire, then, invents objet petit a in a fantasy about completion and unification. 172

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Conclusion What if security were the context for this imagination? What if ‘security’ constituted objet petit a as both a wonderful desired object (a state of safety, totality and immortality) and the presence of a foul, polluting contamination that prevents unity (such as mortality, and all its totemic performances as threat-​ objects and enemies)? What if security is a Lacanian fantasy, constituting the world through fantasies of disgust and desire? What if the Lacanian notion of fantasy helped us to interpret the relationship between death and security? Security as objet petit a Thinking security as desire in the context of objet petit a enables us to make one important step forward in analysis –​we can finally explore the ridiculousness of security practice. We can grasp the compulsion to undertake practices that repeatedly fail to bring safety and peace and are actually more likely to foster the further alienation of other actors and thus counterproductively increase the likelihood of tension and attack. We can move beyond the assumption that security is a teleological project aimed at attaining safety or fostering population. Instead, we can frame security practices as a repetitive compulsion, the eternal recurrence of death totemically reimagined as threat-​object and the performance of temporary resolution. Security, as objet petit a, doesn’t make mistakes when trying to attain safety or stability. It is not haphazard. Rather security is made to fail; it is functional in failure. Security has to ‘fail’. Safety and resolution cannot be attained! Otherwise, the subject would be forced to confront a world in which they had attained their object of desire. This would involve the horrific realisation that doing so had not resolved the lack. So security functions by pursuing desire –​but also by making sure that objet petit a is always slightly out of reach. Because the game must go on. By realising this, we move beyond the tired discussion of security as a teleological endeavour. We can embrace the paradoxical nature of security practice that, in constituting threat-​objects as existential threats, actually creates and perpetuates unnecessary escalations and leads to counterproductive results. This is not accidental! Without thinking security through Lacan, it is difficult to account for such persistent counter-​productivity in security. There are many examples of this: for instance, during the dictatorial rule of the SED in East Germany during the Cold War, the security services could not conceive of their incredible power over the population (some estimates suggest that there was one informer for every six people in the state).1 Instead, the political economy of threat imagination continued to constitute ever-​more paranoid threats to authority from the 173

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Death and security people  –​generating ever-​more invasive surveillance and extended policies for detention. This escalation came to a climax when the regime rightly identified the potential for social opposition within Church-​based environmental groups in the 1980s. Young people were gathering to speak freely in East German religious structures. In response, the Stasi secret police agency infiltrated the Church movements to the extent that 65% of the leaders were informants by the late 1980s. Stasi files show the concern of agents that by swelling the ranks of the movement with informants and agents, the agency was giving the impression that the movement was much larger than it actually was –​and thus giving people the confidence to protest (Funder 2003: 197–​8)! Their intuition about the counter-​productivity of their security work was correct: the protests led to the fall of the regime. By securitising the movement, the security services managed to inflate its status and importance, and gave people the confidence to resist. By indulging their fantasy of objet petit a as disgust, rebellion and protest, the East German state imploded. How could security result in such a counterproductive scenario? Without reading security through Lacan, we have to rely on the notion that the East German regime was spectacularly incompetent –​which it was not, as we can see from its mastery of social control and Cold War political cleavages. The counter-​productivity of security has also been highlighted in relation to the prosecution of a ‘War on Terror’. Of course, the very notion of war against terror is paradoxical –​given that wars themselves cause terror. Fighting a war against terror is like screaming about your need for silence. But the most important paradoxes of the War on Terror run deeper than this particular ontological confusion. In particular, the deliberate rejection of knowledge within counterterrorism is indicative of a deliberate perpetuation of instability for security-​ pleasure. Security is an endless repetition of the pursuit of objet petit a, where the object will forever be placed slightly out of reach to ensure the continuation of desire. So what knowledge is refused to ensure the continuation of desire and repetition? Despite excellent studies of political violence, and suicide bombing in particular, as strategic responses to imperial domination and asymmetry (Pape 2005), political elites reject all knowledge of the connection between foreign policy and political violence. The foreign policies of states targeted by terrorist groups are removed from discourse, silenced and consigned to obscurity and redundancy. Even when political figures or militants assert that attacks are undertaken in response to invasions and bombing campaigns, this knowledge is immediately and deliberately forgotten. For example, the remarks of ex-​secret service chiefs in the United Kingdom on the increased risk of terrorism that resulted from the British involvement in the invasion of Iraq (Manningham-​ Buller 2011; Stella Rimington quoted in Aitkenhead 2008) have been silenced. 174

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Conclusion Instead, the discourse of ‘radicalisation’ totalises the space available for discussion of transitions to militancy and militant acts. This discourse describes the causes of political violence as vulnerability and ideology, ignoring testimonies to the contrary from secret service professionals and the bombers themselves. The knowledge that our own actions play a role in provoking terrorist violence is refused, so that the game of terror and counterterror may continue. Furthermore, the knowledge that military intervention and airstrikes never succeed in resolving militant struggles is also deliberately forgotten. Instead, the war machine displays a repeated compulsion to adopt airstrikes to resolve conflicts –​which previously went unresolved by airstrikes. In this pursuit of ignorance, security is nothing but tidy. It cleans all inconvenient knowledge from the table in order to replay the fantasy of flirting with death then sublimating mortality, over and over again. It is a fetish. Scholars have described the resulting policies and practices within the remit of an ‘epistemological crisis of counterterrorism’ (Jackson 2015), a counterterrorist ‘passion for ignorance’ (Zulaika 2012) and a ‘politics of anti-​knowledge’ (Stampnitsky 2013). And in this world of denial, strange things happen. Books on terrorism are repeatedly searched at airports and then X-​rayed, while their owners are delayed by security staff, in case the pages somehow contain terrorism (Fitzgerald 2015). Candy machines are securitised as potential targets for terrorists who intend to poison children. Nursery-​school-​age children are reported to deradicalisation programmes for demonstrating ‘extremism’ when constructing block towers from Lego and knocking them down with toy planes. Any bizarre extension of the hysterical logic serves the fetishist’s need to replay, repeat and reimagine. Security is pleasurable. Exploring security as the pursuit of objet petit a helps to explain the hysteria and fantasy of the security oeuvre. To understand this we must conclude that security isn’t actually a teleological pursuit of a goal; instead, it is a repetitive compulsion undertaken in response to lack, split and the sensation of the ‘real’ behind economies of signification. It is a way to conquer death by repeatedly flirting with threat-​objects and then sublimating them, toying with the negative foundation responsible for the split in our nature. I will now turn towards a summary of the preceding chapters to link the themes of negativity, mortality and security fetish in order to bring this book to a close. The introductory chapter of this book drew from phenomenological and poststructuralist philosophy to argue that death anxiety drives the creation of social structures, which then imagine stability, permanency and meaning (and, in so doing, sublimate death anxiety). Borrowing from Heidegger and Agamben, the human propensity for language was connected to the uniquely human cognisance of death –​and the argument was made that language functions to perform and assert the permanence of meaning and existence, contra the absurdity 175

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Death and security of living with cognisance of mortality. Language is the displacement, and temporary effacement, of anxiety. Building upon the work of Zygmunt Bauman on mortality as a negative foundation that forges symbolic systems to alleviate the disruption posed to political and social structures by absurdity, the book postulated that security might be productively analysed as a technique of mortality effacement. By engaging with literature from sociological and historical studies of death practice, we argued that death, security and the emergence of modern rationalism are connected. Death was not perceived as terrible in the pre-​modern era; rather it only took on those social characteristics during the rise of rationalism and modernity. Why? Working with the history of death in Western Europe provided by Philippe Aries, the book argued that the historical period of modernity dramatically altered the status of death by inventing the individual while simultaneously removing the promise of immortal salvation in Christ. Secular structures appropriated sovereign authority from monarchical and Church systems, but in transforming those societies they accidentally unleashed mortality. Death was previously constrained by the imagination of immortal sovereignty and life after death for the immortal political subject. In short, the Death of God created a problem of mortality for secular sovereignty. Why is death a problem for sovereignty? To understand the relationship between secular sovereignty and mortality, the book turned to consider the mutually constitutive (and multidirectional) relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity. To be sovereign, political elites must be recognised as such  –​ by those who are subjected. And, simultaneously, political subjectivity is constituted through subjection to a higher authority. The two are dependent upon each other. Population becomes the source of secular authority, once the divine mandate underlying monarchical sovereignty vanishes. The population’s recognition of sovereignty is constitutive. Once population takes on the status of the ‘flesh’ that substantiates the claim to sovereign order, to borrow from Eric Santner, violence enacted against that flesh causes a disruption to the performance of sovereignty. Damage inflicted upon the (qualified and recognised) population is damage inflicted upon the performance of sovereignty. Without divine foundation, secular sovereignty is reliant on a stable, undisrupted performance of its authority through the recognition afforded by its subjects. And subjects cannot recognise the sovereign as all-​powerful and authoritative if they are subject to violent acts and revolutionary struggles. Bringing all these strands of literature together, the introductory chapter argued that mortality –​as the force that disrupts claims to permanence, authority and foundations –​poses a challenge for secular sovereignty. In defence, political structures of modernity invented security. Where there is death, there is also the performance of security: a concurrent assertion of authority and meaning. 176

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Conclusion In the formulations of security policy prior to resilience, this performance often involved the assertion of a prophylactic barrier against a totemic enemy. The enemy was fashioned as the epitome of emergency, threat and excess –​taking on all the weight of death anxiety, like the scapegoat of Leviticus carrying the sins of the community away into the desert. The ‘enemy’ is then destroyed through military force, punished by sanctions and courts, and fulfils its totemic function in (temporarily) alleviating the anxiety wrought by mortality upon the edifice of secular sovereignty. After this introductory formulation of security as the ontological solution to death, the book turned to explore the era of ‘resilience’. In security policy, the rise of resilience has signified the removal of the prophylactic pretence. The UK Civil Contingencies Act 2004, and all subsequent policy manifestations of resilience, rearticulated security around the unpreventable event and the achievement of adaptive recovery. Security is postulated as a relationship between vital systems, complexity and the periodic challenges posed by disruptive events to the stability of interconnected flows. Reflecting on this policy shift, the book explored whether we can still consider security as the effacement of death anxiety when security policy now openly admits that prophylaxis is outdated. Can security simultaneously mitigate death while also admitting that it will always exceed preventative capabilities? Chapter 1 concluded that resilience contains a disastrous genius that allows contemporary security actors to unburden themselves of the responsibility to prevent disaster (by reclassifying events as unpreventable), while also rearticulating security and the defeat of death in a more complex fashion. Events will not be prevented, however disastrous their consequences will be. The referent object of security policies has changed from the individual constituents of the polity to the networked systems that are now considered to constitute the vitality of the country. Life is discursively reconstituted as the evolutionary and adaptive potential of digital, infrastructural and social systems when faced with crisis. Resilience policies have, in effect, dispossessed individuals of their capacity for death. Terrorist attacks and disaster events are no longer significant threats to those bodies that might suffer and die; rather emergency management takes systems as its object of protection and rearticulates communities as systems that must become prepared for adverse events. These systems are then secured from disaster by the application of preventative training, risk assessment and scenario exercises. A new pre-​emptive performance of prophylaxis secures vital systems from death by asserting their capacity to recover from disruption. Chapter 1 concluded by asserting that the resilience era has, as such, demonstrated no significant movement away from traditional security paradigms. Security still operates to efface and mitigate the presence of mortality and its disruption of foundational claims, authority and certainty. Security still exists in an ontological relationship with mortality and death anxiety. 177

Death and security But where contemporary policies of resilient security become interesting is their inclusion of disaster response and recovery as explicit temporalities of security practice. This dynamic set up the methodological premise of the book: If it can be shown that emergency response, memorialisation and the reconstruction of post-​terrorist space function to mitigate the resonance of mortality, then security exists in an ontological relationship with mortality.

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Specifically: If the existence of retrospective security can be demonstrated, then other theories of security –​which assert that security operates to prevent future dangers, or uses the imagination of threatening futures to constitute identity and population –​can be supplemented.

Other theories of security utilise an assumption of threat pertaining to the future, and the articulation of the polity with regard to that future. But if security also acts upon the past, then it must function differently. It must be performing a spectacle against mortality. And the subsequent empirical chapters of this book then demonstrated that retrospective security does exist; it functions to mitigate mortality and thus consolidate sovereignty vis-​à-​vis subject populations. The first of these empirical chapters explored emergency management. While policies of emergency management deploy the disastrous genius associated with resilience  –​effacing mortality by bolstering the pre-​emptive preparation of systems for disruptive events  –​the chapter argued that guidelines provided to emergency responders clearly demonstrate the retrospective and in-​the-​moment practice of mortality mitigation. These practices function to rapidly re-​establish the existence of a prophylactic barrier between society and the spectre of death. In terms of the Lacanian theory of security offered earlier in this concluding chapter, these practices reset the pieces of the game  –​ enabling the performance of threat and resolution to be staged once more. The re-​establishment of the prophylactic barrier by emergency management is the prelude to enjoyment. How was prophylaxis against mortality re-​established? Often these emergency management practices related to the reconsolidation of knowledge contra the excessive spectacle of the terrorist event. First, temporal and spatial boundaries were enacted to designate exceptional territory, preventing disruption from travelling by establishing timelines and cordons. These boundaries were then performed as receding –​establishing the restoration of ‘normality’ through the withdrawal of the emergency. Next, the bodies of those injured, killed and displaced by the emergency became the frontier in the mitigation of mortality and its excess. The application of tags, colour coding and suppression protocols curtailed the disruption of knowledge and certainty by the emergency event. Every body was known, reintegrated into the realm of the known. 178

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Conclusion In doing so, a prophylactic barrier was re-​established between the polity and the deathly underworld. Emergency management performs the suppression of the disaster event through the effacement of mortality and its disruption to rational, political edifices. Security is performed through reconsolidation of knowledge, authority and stability –​a barrier is reintroduced between the polity and the negative. The stage is reset for the pursuit of objet petit a to take place once again. This first empirical chapter showed that, outside the anticipatory temporality normally associated with security practice, we can clearly find security actions and policies that act upon the present emergence and its immediate aftermath. Threat, in this articulation, does not pertain to the future. Thus there is an ontological relationship between security and death. Chapters 3 to 6 then moved from disaster management (present-​tense security) to explore the variegated practices of disaster recovery. In these empirical chapters, memorialisation dynamics performed upon –​or near –​disaster space were interrogated for signs of retrospective security practice. Disaster recovery identifies danger as stemming from the past. Chapter  3 showed how security policies of disaster recovery prioritise both the ‘regeneration’ of bombed areas (as a performance of vitality, contra mortality) as well as the creation of a visual marker to absorb the trauma of mortality. Emergency recovery frames the event as ongoing –​resonant and dangerous within human memory and public space. To finally sublimate the excess of the death event, the state organises the creation of prophylactic barriers between the dangerous memory and the present. These barriers are memorials. Memorials assert that the event is spent. The chapter discussed the recent shift in memorialisation culture towards enormous abstract designs, rather than the plaques that followed bombings of old. It argued that the move towards postmodern monumentality in disaster recovery is related to the adoption of resilience metaphors by government. If prophylaxis is no longer interpreted as the protection of lives but instead as the recovery of infrastructural systems, then the population’s anxiety about death requires aesthetic sating. Individual people are excluded from the promise of immortality by the resilience discourse, but memorial aesthetics incorporate citizens into an idea of a resilient, immortal system of population. They are resituated with regard to immortality and death. Of particular relevance to the Lacanian theory of security postulated here, Chapter  3 looked at the shift towards the open representation of death and absence in memorial design. Rather than the stone obelisks deployed in war commemoration for most of the twentieth century, contemporary post-​terrorist aesthetics utilise images of loss and insecurity to –​paradoxically –​mitigate mortality. The chapter explored this turn through the commercialisation of post-​terrorist sites, arguing that they are touristed by those who are enticed by the prospect of 179

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Death and security the ‘real’, the excess. Using aesthetics that consolidate themes of excess and loss aids the commercialisation of sites. Visitors flock to post-​terrorist space in search of the ‘real’, but they are instead presented with a stylised memorial journey that represents ‘death’ as a moment along the journey to resilience and immortality. In terms of the Lacanian flourish added here to the conceptualisation of security, we can suggest that the misguided desire to consume the ‘real’ –​and the state’s attempt to cater to that drive –​is a function of enjoyment. The pursuit of the ‘real’ is an attempt to locate something responsible for the ‘lack’. And the stylised deception employed within contemporary architecture upon post-​terrorist space plays to this drive, tempting subjects to pursue an idea of the ‘real’ before reconstituting the performance of social resilience during their visit. Enjoyment is foreclosed but the stage is reset for the next round. Chapter  4 continued the exploration of memorials upon post-​terrorist space, looking at the performance of disaster recovery in Norway after Anders Breivik’s attacks of 2011. Jonas Dahlberg’s designs for the peninsula opposite Utøya Island (Memory Wound) were found to represent ‘self-​harming architecture’ –​an aesthetic representation of horror and loss, which paradoxically functions to reinstate a prophylactic barrier between the polity and mortality. The discursive environment around such designs repackages the representation of horror and excess, reframing it as evidence of resilience and immortality. But while the Norwegian state’s plans for the peninsula and for Oslo mirrored the Manhattan site, the plans of civil society groups for post-​disaster recovery did not utilise postmodern monumentality. Instead, the New Utøya project focuses on the recreation of ‘place’. The chapter explored how the efforts to modernise the island’s facilities and regenerate its functionality as a site for politics served to mitigate the trauma of the events that occurred there. The architects identified that danger remained active from a position in memory, and required aesthetic changes to be made to the island’s facilities that both rediscovered the original ‘place-​meaning’ of the island as a happy summer camp, and altered sight lines and perspectives so that New Utøya did not resemble the media images of the attack. To understand this reclamation of place as disaster recovery, the chapter used Heideggerian geography to contrast place with mortality. In such accounts, human societies generate place names and meanings to assert stability and permanence –​contra death. Geography is a practice of mortality mitigation. In the post-​disaster scenario of Utøya, security is obtained against the spectre of the past event by reclaiming the previous place identity of the site. In relation to the Lacanian frame of this concluding chapter, we should again consider the repetitive and compulsive behaviour of the Norwegian state –​which can never be satisfied that civil society groups are memorialising upon Utøya, and instead demands a role in disaster recovery by building its own memorial on the peninsula opposite the island. Why does the state feel compelled 180

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Conclusion to construct a memorial at Sørbråten, when it is already responsible for the Oslo bombsite and while civil society is taking care of reconstruction at Utøya? The blundering desire to be involved with the process, providing a design that is contested by the local people, provokes an image of a ridiculous child, desperately participating in a game, oblivious of its rudeness. The Norwegian state’s plans for Sørbråten represent its pleasure –​the security fantasy was enjoyed and now the pieces must be replaced on the board, awaiting the next enjoyable event. Chapters  5 and 6 then explored the performance of disaster recovery through memorialisation in contexts of ambiguous spatiality. In Chapter  5, the mutating ‘space’ of events was explored through examples of the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ controversy as well as the strange spatial delineation of the Bali bombsite. Bombsites move –​their spatial constitution changes through activism connected to sacredness and the threat of profanity. Chapter 6 then looked at the performance of disaster recovery when bombsites are invisible –​specifically, the underground devastation of the London bombings of 2005. This invisibility causes particular challenges for the closure of the event, given that there is no terrain upon which to perform recovery. To close the discussion of this chapter, we need only reflect on the Lacanian fantasy of this pursuit of closure. There is such desperation on the part of state and civil society to fold and conceal the trauma of a bombing that wholly specious spatial dimensions come into play. The fall of urine is microscopically analysed to make a determination of its contamination, or otherwise, of sacred land known as the ‘ex-​Sari Club’. But the construction of a surf shop upon an adjacent bombsite in Bali is not problematised by activists; rather it is frequented by the same activists who try to preserve the Sari Club site. Similarly, in New York, frustrated ideologues fantasise about the construction of a thirteen-​storey mosque upon Ground Zero, with towering phallic minarets, despite the lack of any such intention. Civil society is enthralled by the promise of the profane contamination of the sacred, inventing fantasy scenarios whereby the Other transcends the bounds of decency and pollutes the polity, requiring a robust disciplinary response. There is enjoyment at every turn. The prospect of the profane is fantasised until it constitutes a threat to bombsites, which must be vigorously enjoyed by activists in their defence of objet petit a. Death’s disruption of the polity provides the tableau for such scandalisation and enjoyment. The prospect of mortality and its exposure of sovereign deceit lends salience to this role-​playing around disaster space. But at the same time, we saw in Chapter  6 that the death of the Other is of absolutely no concern. Those invisible bombsites caused by our own violence do not figure in our discussions of memorialisation and appropriate respect. The chapter used Judith Butler’s ‘Frames of War’ argument to explore the contrast between the fantasised sacred reverence accorded to the victims of 9/​ 11, and the total disregard accorded to the dead of military interventions in 181

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Death and security Iraq and Afghanistan. The Other only matters to us, it seems, when she can be constituted as a threat-​object –​a harbinger of death. Once our violence pockmarks distant landscapes, creating thousands of the bombsites we supposedly oppose, we lose all interest in the Other. Once again we see the Lacanian shift whereby we can never be allowed to attain our goals, for fear that we realise their unsatisfactory nature. Our real enjoyment comes from the compulsion to repeat, but never obtain; to fantasise and pursue but never to reflect on our perpetual frustration. Security fetish is the defining characteristic of our era, enabling us to conclude that: In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and security. Note 1 SED: Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany).

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BIBLIOGRAPH Y

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Interviews Aly, Anne (2012) Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and International Studies, Curtin University, and Peace Park Activist/​ Researcher. Interviewed in Bali, 8 October 2012. Arad, Michael (2014) Partner at Handel Architects LLP. Interviewed in Manhattan, 19 July 2014. Davis, Steven (2014) Partner at Davis Brody Bond Architects and Planners. Interviewed in Manhattan, 18 July 2014. Eeg Tverbakk, Per Gunnar (2013) Director and Curator for the Office of Contemporary Art Norway, and principal member of the July 22 Memorials selection committee. Interviewed in Oslo, 16 August 2013. Fantastic Norway (2013) Founding Partners: Håkon Matre Aasarød and Erlend Blakstad Haffner. Interviewed in Oslo, 13 August 2013. Finn, Dallas (2012) Member of the first Bali Peace Park Association (unassociated with the professionalised organisation that currently exists). Interviewed in Bali, 10 October 2012. Frydnes, Jørgen (2013) Project Manager of New Utøya. Interviewed in Norway, 13 August 2013. Geller, Pamela (2014) Founder of Stop the Islamization of America. Interviewed by email, transcript finalised 19 July 2014. Halset, Lisbeth (2013) Partner at LPO Arkitektur. Interviewed in Oslo, 16 August 2013. Lengkong, Asana Viebeke (2012) Original recipient of USAID funding for coordination of Bali bomb commemorations and Peace Park Association activist. Interviewed in Bali, 13 October 2012. Lucas, Katerina (2014) Administrator at Park 51. Interviewed in Manhattan, 30 July 2014. Mortensen, Jørn (2013) Dean of Fine Arts, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and principal member of the July 22 Memorials selection committee. Interviewed in Oslo, 16 August 2013. Nash, Sharon (2012) Treasurer of the Bali Peace Park Association. Interviewed in Bali, 13 October 2012. Nelson, Phillip (2015) Chair of the Tavistock Square Memorial Trust. Interviewed via phone, 24 August 2015. Regenhard, Sally (2014) Chair of the Skyscraper Safety Campaign and prominent activist within 9/​11 family groups. Interviewed via phone, 30 July 2014. Seip, Elisabeth (2013) Professor of Form, Theory and History at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Interviewed in Oslo, 13 August 2013. Walker, Peter (2014) Partner at PWP Architecture. Interviewed via phone, 14 August 2014. Way, Nick (2012) Chairman and President of the Bali Peace Park Association. Interviewed in Bali, 13 October 2012.

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INDEX 1965 mass killings see genocide memory 1993 World Trade Center attack 69 7/​7 bombing see London bombing 9/​11 attacks 14, 23, 41, 52–​3, 60, 71, 73, 75, 81, 102, 123, 127–​9, 131, 157, 160–​3, 170, 181 9/​11 Memorial Museum and Plaza 7, 71, 74, 76–​91, 98, 118, 121n.6, 122, 133–​9, 156, 160–​2, 164–​5, 169 aesthetics (in design) 74, 79–​80, 82–​3, 97–​8, 102, 119–​20, 129, 136, 141, 153, 156, 158, 160–​1, 164–​6, 179–​80 Afghanistan war 156, 160–​4, 169, 182 Agamben, Giorgio 3–​5, 12–​18, 22, 67, 172, 175 America’s Response statue see De Oppresso Liber statue anniversaries of disasters 60–​4, 109, 129, 140–​1, 146–​8, 158 anticipatory security logics and exercises 24, 31, 35, 37–​9, 41–​4, 54, 111, 153, 179 Arad, Michael 71, 76–​84, 90, 91n.2, 98, 165 Bali 4, 7–​8, 63, 104, 122–​5, 140–​51, 152n.5, 156, 158, 166, 168, 181 Balinese Hinduism 8, 141–​2, 151 bare life 13–​14 Baudrillard, Jean 166, 170–​1 Bauman, Zygmunt 3, 12, 16–​17, 19, 22, 32–​3, 43–​4, 72–​3, 176 Bin Laden, Osama 156, 169 biopolitics 2–​3, 5, 9–​18, 29, 38, 150, 163, 166 Birmingham bombing 68 bodies (in politics and disaster recovery) 4, 6, 12, 32–​3, 48–​9, 66, 96, 147, 150–​1, 164, 178 Boston bombing 53, 85

Breivik, Anders 7, 93, 96–​7, 100, 104, 106–​7, 112, 116–​19, 165, 180 Brighton bombing 68 burial 49, 56, 70, 123, 134–​5, 143 Bush administration 160, 162 city planning 58–​9, 68, 73, 77–​9, 82, 95, 112–​21, 124, 133, 156–​7, 167, 169 Cold War 23, 29–​30, 40, 44–​5, 72, 173–​4 colonialism 8, 14, 26, 142–​4, 152n.5 Cordoba House see Park 51 development counter-​memorials 55, 65, 74, 76–​7, 82, 87, 91 counter-​radicalisation agenda 157, 175 critical infrastructure protection 28, 30, 40–​1, 54, 115 Dahlberg, Jonas 94, 98–​100, 180 dark tourism 167–​8 De Oppresso Liber statue 156, 160–​4, 169 death anxiety 1–​4, 6, 15, 34, 102–​3, 168, 175, 177 destroyed space 7–​8, 40, 67, 104, 112, 118, 124–​5, 132, 139, 146–​50, 153, 157, 161, 169 Dillon, Michael 12, 14–​15, 41, 44, 163 disaster recovery see security as retrospective emergency declaration 45–​7, 54 emergency (planning, management and response) 6–​7, 9, 11, 22, 24–​6, 29–​69, 72–​4, 91, 93, 101, 135, 153, 166, 177–​9 see also excess; spectacle excess 1, 4, 7–​8, 14, 35, 48–​56, 63–​7, 73, 87, 91, 124–​8, 131–​6, 139, 147–​51, 166–​7, 170–​2, 177–​80 failure 2, 5, 29, 31–​4, 39, 55, 93, 154, 173

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Index Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) 76, 79–​80, 134

families in disaster recovery policy 49, 61–​4, 73, 135 family member activism 69, 123, 131–​9 see also protest fascism 95 Foucault, Michel 5, 9–​10, 14, 18 freedom tower see 9/​11 Memorial Museum and Plaza Fresh Kills landfill site 123, 133–​6, 139, 149, 151n.1

Manchester bombing 47, 58, 68, 112, 118 Marxist thought 24–​6 media 32, 47, 50–​4, 59, 70, 73, 106, 109, 111, 116, 122, 128–​30, 132, 135, 140–​1, 144, 147–​8, 154, 157, 160, 167, 180 Memory Wound (design) 94–​102, 112, 118–​20, 166, 180

genocide memory 14, 74, 137, 142–​3 Gillard, Julia 147 Goldberg, Whoopi 84 grievable life 155, 163–​4, 169 Ground Zero see 9/​11 Memorial Museum and Plaza Ground Zero Mosque see Park 51 development Guantanamo Bay 14, 96 see also bare life

nation (concept and practices) 3–​6, 10, 18, 20, 22, 32–​3, 55, 63, 65, 67, 69, 72, 74, 81–​5, 89, 93, 117, 143–​6, 151, 161–​2, 166–​7 necropolitics see thanatopolitics neoliberalism and related practices 25–​9, 58, 72, 128 New Utøya project 100, 102–​9, 112, 120n.2, 180

Heidegger, Martin 3, 12, 15–​16, 22, 94–​5, 103, 124, 175, 180 Homeland Security, Department of 23, 30, 33, 42–​3, 50 homo sacer see bare life Høyblokka 112–​19, 121n.8 human remains 48–​9, 71, 123, 131–​9, 147

Obama, Barack 129 Oklahoma bombing and memorial 69–​72, 83, 92n.4, 97, 121n.5 ontological security 11, 44, 93, 156–​7, 168–​9 ontology 1–​2, 4–​5, 7–​9, 11–​16, 23, 33, 38, 44, 55, 93, 103, 156–​7, 161, 163, 168–​71, 174, 177–​9 orientalism 132, 142–​3, 145–​6, 167 Oslo bombing and redevelopment 93–​101, 104–​6, 112–​19, 121n.5, 121n.7, 165, 180–​1

immortality 3–​6, 12, 20–​1, 32–​3, 57, 163–​5, 170, 173, 179–​80 IRA (Irish Republican Army) 58, 68 Iraq wars 51, 70, 156, 162, 174, 182 Islamophobia 129, 132 Kantorowicz, Ernst 4–​6, 150 see also political theology KORO (Norwegian Arts Council) 94, 97 Lacan, Jacques 13, 126, 170–​82 see also psychoanalysis Libeskind, Daniel 74, 78–​9, 81, 89, 91n.2, 119 Lockerbie bombing 69 London bombing 53, 68, 153–​4, 156–​60, 164, 168, 181

Paddy’s Bar 123–​4, 140, 146–​9 Palin, Sarah 129 Park 51 development 122–​3, 127–​32, 139 peace park campaign 8, 104, 123, 140–​9, 166 Pentagon 122, 139 phenomenology 94, 103, 124, 175 see also Heidegger, Martin Picasso, Pablo 112, 114, 116–​17 place (concept and practice) 8, 15, 93–​5, 101–​12, 115–​20, 124, 126, 136, 139, 142–​5, 153–​60, 166, 168, 180

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political theology 2–​8, 11, 15, 17–​19, 71, 76, 150–​1, 160, 176–​7 postmodern monumentality 74–​5, 79–​80, 87, 93–​5, 97–​8, 102, 118, 154, 165, 179–​80 protest 16, 94, 101, 111–​12, 116, 119, 122, 128–​9, 132, 137, 140, 161, 174 psychoanalysis 13, 19, 73, 126, 170–​82 radicalisation see counter-​radicalisation agenda recovery see security as retrospective Reflecting Absence see 9/​11 Memorial Museum and Plaza reformation and counter-​reformation 17 relics 71–​2, 83, 89, 126, 128, 137, 161, 165 religion 2, 5, 7–​9, 11, 15, 19, 62–​4, 71, 83, 126–​9, 141–​2, 144, 151, 161, 174 see also Balinese Hinduism renaissance 21n.1 resilience 6, 9, 22–​35, 37–​8, 41–​50, 54–​5, 58–​61, 64, 67, 71–​3, 77, 80–​4, 87–​91, 93, 100, 116, 156, 165–​8, 177–​80 ritual 1, 8, 12, 18–​21, 44, 55, 62–​6, 71, 125–​7, 131–​6, 141, 151, 156

sovereignty 1–​8 , 10, 13, 20, 22–​3 , 34–​6 , 38–​4 0, 43, 45–​6 , 51–​3 , 56, 59–​6 1, 63, 65, 67, 70–​1 , 73, 76, 83, 89, 91, 93, 119–​2 0, 125, 127, 132, 146, 148–​5 1, 154, 157, 160, 163, 165–​6 , 168, 176–​8 see also political theology spectacle 3, 9, 52–​4, 73, 132, 157, 178 see also excess Statsbygg 112–​16, 119 Suharto 142–​3 Sukarno 142–​3 survivor trees 66, 72, 82–​7, 89, 165 Tavistock Square 153–​5, 157–​9, 168, 169n.1 Tea Party 128 thanatopolitics 3, 9, 12, 14–​15, 17 tourism 8, 67–​9, 73, 113, 116, 118, 123, 140, 142–​9, 152n.5, 156, 166–​8, 179–​80 see also dark tourism trauma 1–​4, 16, 19, 35, 52–​5, 59–​61, 64–​5, 67, 73–​7, 83, 87, 93–​8, 101, 106–​7, 111–​12, 118, 120, 125, 132, 135, 146, 150, 157, 161, 165, 167, 179–​81 trees (in landscape design) 72, 80, 82

sacred see excess Sari Club 104, 123, 140–​1, 143–​50, 151n.2, 158, 166, 181 scenario planning and exercises 5, 31, 37, 41, 43–​4, 72, 177 security as prophylactic 22–​3, 28–​30, 33, 36, 41, 45–​9, 53, 177–​80 security as retrospective 3–​8, 11, 36, 38–​9, 43, 54, 57–​60, 64–​7, 72, 84, 87, 93, 95, 132, 139, 144, 149, 153, 155–​9, 161, 163–​4, 169, 178–​9 Sloterdijk, Peter 15–​16, 22

United Nations 26–​8, 31, 42–​3 urban renewal and regeneration see city planning urination 148–​9, 181 Utøya Island 93–​111, 119, 120n.1, 165–​6, 180 Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial 65, 74, 81 vulnerability 2, 4, 6, 24–​7, 57, 70, 115, 151, 161, 175 war on terror 14, 52, 91, 132, 155–​6, 160, 162–​6, 170–​1, 174

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