The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity (review)

The American government's responses to the events of 11 September 2001 were predictably violent. Academia's responses to 11 September were mostly through the field of textual production. Many post-9/11 publications—both those already in print and those scheduled for imminent release—are embedded within the think-tank culture of political science, security analysis, and intelligence and can be read as simply more advice for how to kill more deliberately, more persuasively. The Selling of 9/11 (2005), however, is dominated by academics from the humanities and focuses on reading the way 9/11 has been articulated in consumer culture; it speaks very little about killing but closely examines some of the commodity minutiae and social discontinuities that the catastrophic events of 9/11 precipitated. It will be most useful for students of American Studies, but it also has some essays which speak to a broader audience.

One of the best is by communications professor Lynn Spigel, writing on “Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11.” Spigel is interested in how 9/11's searing images and cultural multiplicities were realized through television's unique capacity for dealing with unfixed culturail flows. Spigel finds that the catastrophe exposed a conflict between television's historical status as a public interest medium and its everyday commercial payload. She argues that American television responded by using its flows to communicate 9/11 across a range of genres including news, comedy, ads, and prime-time drama. Spigel analyzes the ways in which the television's scene of the imaginary articulated connections with the political and military scenes and posits that television played a distinct role in restoring the dominant social and cultural orders of “normalcy,” through its quite fluid manipulation of cultural media.

The introduction “Consuming 9/11,” by editor Dana Heller, focuses on consumer logics, reading consumerism as a modus operandi of identity, especially national identity. Heller finds in popular images of the firefighters at 9/11, a “process of reimagining social relationships” across lines of race, ethnicity, and gender into rewritten myths of national identity. Here, as throughout this volume, is perhaps too much of an emphasis on what happened in New York—in this context, no doubt functioning as the symbol of trade and capital—and insufficient attention to the Pentagon attack and the downing of Flight 93. The 9/11 Commission's substantial report is not cited, and thus an important object in circulation falls outside the ambit of this consumer analysis, even though it, too, is for sale. In positing a “market” of 9/11 culture, Heller highlights the practice of “hoarding” of pre-9/11 images of the World Trade Center towers, and criticizes the surfeit of “ritual” images which saturated America culture, citing Laura Berlant and ideas of repackaged emotions. However, since this volume too fails to come to grips with the forensic geography of 9/11, and some deeply felt practices of remembrance, that criticism seems a little beside the point. Heller's strength is in perceiving the wide field of commodity products and consumer demands and their relationship to catastrophe as a market relation and what this says about contemporary culture. In this sense, 9/11 is shown to have rendered visible the architectonics of American culture, in a way that the military and political responses perhaps did not.

Typifying this approach also are Jennifer Scanlon's ironic and stylish essay on flag decals and a joint-authored piece by Australians Mick Broderick and Mark Gibson. Scanlon's “Your flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore,” uses the massive uptake of the United States flag—actual flags and flag decals, slogans, and signs—to critique the cringe-worthy relationship between Wal-Mart, patriotism, and impoverishments of both symbolic and real capital. She shows how patriotism is performed through the purchase of goods, how retail stores laid claim to being patriotic sites, and how neatly...