Editor's Note

Headlines—textual headlights to the locomotive engine of history, they light its path. The trouble with headlines is they do not necessarily distinguish between an event and history's engine, and they tend to orient the eye, as they are meant to do, organizing the pages of our memory. On the other hand, journals, no less than newspapers, can find it hard to dismiss the movement of a headline across the discursive surface of public culture. More is at stake than missing out on potential sales. It is important to record the aspirations and distresses of the moment so as to provide the grounds, as uneven as they might be, for critical engagement and an archive for future reflection. How then to convey the immediacy of spectacular moments of public life without consigning the ordinary travail and fecundity of life beyond the gates of memory?

The editorial committee of Public Culture, along with the editorial staff, has decided not to publish a special issue on the recent and long-term global alliances and realignments arising from the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It is our suspicion that analysis of the social and political fallout of these events will substantially change as time unfolds, and we look forward to tracking—and publishing—this progression of public debate. Therefore, rather than publish a single special issue on the topic of September 11, Public Culture has decided, in this issue and future issues, to embed essays directly addressing the subject within the context of other essays reflecting on globally circulating life and death worlds that seem to have no direct bearing on this day, its protagonists, and its ramifications. It is our hope that the discursive cacophony that results will speak as powerfully to the force and fate of this event and situate it, without ignoring or worshiping it.