15.

      “Always historicize.” A trauma cannot be resolved until it has been constituted.  That is why one cannot write a play that will resolve the trauma of 9-11, for example, without being untrue both to drama and to history.  Which doesn’t mean we won’t be deluged with plays and productions dedicated to healing the national psyche. That has, after all, been the national mandate since 9-11.  As such it reveals the persistence of the root assumption we must deracinate: the assumption that trauma is only resolved through the restoration of guarantees; concretely, in this case,  through dramas of pathos followed by a triumphant reaffirmation of the a-historical ideals that constitute “the American character” and America’s unique role in history.  Therein lies the ideological formula for pseudo-drama:  our innocence, our unexampled suffering, our triumphant recovery.  Any representation of 9-11 that does not serve this structure is forbidden.  And so here, as prologue to a drama that will not exist, I offer these “fragments shored against” our “ruins”—a primer toward the recovery of what the image reveals about history and our collective unconscious. 

      Image is the native language of the psyche, the language in which the truth of history and the impact of history upon the psyche is expressed in a logic which, like the logic of the dream, establishes hidden and unexpected connections in which the present speaks to and reawakens the past in the re-emergence of everything that ideological consciousness strives to deny.  Ground-zero.  What’s in a name? The term now used to designate the rubble of what was once the World Trade Center was the term coined in Alamogordo, New Mexico to identify the epicenter where the first Atomic Bomb was detonated.  It was then used to locate the same place in Hiroshima and Nagasaki so that we could measure with precision the force of the Bomb and gauge its effects.  Through a grotesque and cunning reversal it now designates what was done to us.  But in doing so it also reveals an unwritten history.  Hiroshima, a repressed memory deep in the American psyche, returned on 9-11 as we experienced in diminished form what it must have been like to be in Hiroshima city on August 6, 1945 when in an instant an entire city disappeared abandoning the hibakusha, the walking dead, to a landscape become nightmare.  For us, however, repressed memory only returns to serve the defense mechanisms of projection and denial.  The term Ground-zero thus offers no entry into our past; instead, it gives us a new identity as the innocent victims of a terror we have the temerity to claim is unprecedented and that we demand the whole world acknowledge as such.  In doing so we reveal our relationship to history.  History is hagiography, the assertion of our virtue through our triumph over the forces of evil.  From which follows the parade of heroic images whereby we rise phoenix-like from the ashes, united as a Nation that has recovered its essence and thus goes forth to reaffirm the ideals it represents by undertaking the actions needed to cleanse the world of terror.  John Wayne lives—and he’s been called upon once again to provide the American imaginary with the images it needs to deliver it from images of another order.

      For the images blazed into our consciousness on 9-11 are terrifying precisely because they embody anxieties that open up the psychotic register of the psyche.  A plane embedded surrealistically in a building; bodies falling from the sky; that great granite elevator going down; the black cloud rushing forth to engulf a fleeing multitude; and then the countless dead, buried alive, passing in endless queue across the shattered landscape of the nation’s consciousness.  The dark dream of psychosis—of falling endlessly, going to pieces, collapsing in on oneself, losing all orientation, being delivered over to a claustrophobic world of inescapable, ceaseless suffering—found in 9-11 the objective correlative that awakened images buried deep in the national psyche; images of things forgotten, ungrieved, vigorously denied.

      For a historical consciousness incapable of agon, however, the only operation traumatic images permit is evacuation.  And so, for the media and those comfortably seated in the places of ideological power, the projector had already started running and on the screen of the national psyche flashed old, familiar images of a movie full of patriotic sentiment and patriotic gore.  Flags a-bursting, the heroic dead of ground-zero are resurrected in the acts of war we undertake in their name, their image blending and fading into the images of our triumphant military action in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in North Korea, in any place we designate a haven of “terrorism,” that term the blank check on which we draw to do whatever it takes to restore us the way we were restored by the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  And restored we were as witnessed by another image from the past that flares up here to confirm what Walter Benjamin defines as the mission of the dialectical historian: “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”  Navy Day, October, 1945, a crowd of 120,000 gather in the Los Angeles Coliseum to celebrate a simulated reenactment of the Bombing of Hiroshima, complete with a mushroom cloud that rises from the fifty yard line to the joyful cheers of that rapt throng.  The first Super-Bowl: the new American collectivity as it gains orgasmic release in hymn of praise to the burgeoning cloud that ushers in its hour upon the stage of human history, a collectivity in Hosanna before the image of its inhumanity as it blossom before them, big with the future.

      Einstein said “the Bomb changed everything except the way we think.”  It didn’t change that because no drama was written with the power to implode/explode the fact of that Event in the psyche so that the Bomb would be internalized as a crisis for the soul and not just another fact to justify, before capping that justification with the claim that the one nation that used the Bomb has the moral right  to determine who should have it.

      And so the parade of images that echo and exorcise other images creeps on apace.  As after Gulf Storm, the Nintendo war, a war represented on TV as a video game.  No images of the 100,000 Iraqui dead were permitted entry into the national conscience; nor subsequently any images of the million Iraqui civilians that have now died as a result of our sanctions.  (Yes, Saddam bears a lion’s share of the blame.  So do we!) Instead with victory the proclamation of George H.  Bush—“we’ve finally put an end to Vietnam syndrome”—and so can safely confine that war and its vast body of traumatic images to oblivion and the dust-bin of history.  We thus repeat over time the same Pyrrhic victory—a victory over those traumatic images that call the psyche to a knowledge of itself.  Which is why such images can only return from without as violent and unwarranted assaults on the “innocence” of a people who refuse to know their actual position in the world. 

      Five percent of the world’s population consume 25 percent of its resources—and they do so by exerting control over the destiny of other countries.  But that fact finds no image in our consciousness.  And in Rio de Janeiro, at the one ecological conference he attended, George H.  Bush delivered a proclamation even more chilling than his crowing about Vietnam syndrome: “The American way of life is not negotiable.  ” As long as that dogma remains in place, there will be many more ground-zeroes.

      And so for some of us traumatic images remain the weight that weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.  A drama that would be adequate to 9-11 would resolve nothing.  It would, instead, deliver the audience over to a history that would reveal the historical, dialectical connection of the pattern of images presented in this section in order to awaken that audience from its collective slumber.  For those of us who work in the theatre, Walter Benjamin’s great aphorism about the task of culture—“the dead remain in danger”—must be emended thus:  the dead remain in danger—of being sacrificed to the needs of the audience.

16.

      The previous sections have offered fifteen ways of making a single, complex point.  All are different and all are necessary.  For they are dialectically connected.  It is in that dialectic that theatre finds its rationale and its mode of being.  Our first job and our last is to cast the audience.  But the only way to do so is by first casting ourselves in a way that deracinates within ourselves everything that stands in the way of the most radical act—the engaging of  primary emotions in mediations that remain true to the agon that primary emotions activate within us.  For the ability to perform such an action on an audience is only given to those who first perform that action in themselves.  

17.

      All our efforts depend on a single circumstance.  Kafka at 24 offered this as the task of reading/writing.

      “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?  Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves.  But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide.  A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.”

We will get the kind of plays we need only when we have become the kind of audience who come to the theatre demanding plays that perform such an action within us.

Biographical note:
 
 
Walter A. Davis is an actor, playwright, and cultural critic.  His primary theoretical book on theatre is Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama and the Audience (U of Wisconsin P, 1994).  His plays include An Evening With JonBenét Ramsey (Authors Choice P, 2004).  His most recent work of cultural criticism, Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche since 9-11, (London: Pluto Press) has just appeared and may be ordered at http://www.amazon.com or by calling (800)621-2736. For further description of his work see http://www.walteradavis.com/.  He may be reached at: davis.65@osu.edu.

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