Compelling Memory: 9/11 and the Work of Mourning in Mike Binder’s Reign Over Me

In New York, a block from the National 9/11 Memorial Museum, stands the 9/11 Tribute Center (opened in 2006 and previously known as the Tribute WTC Visitor Center), which aims to commemorate the victims and convey accounts of 9/11 and the earlier 1993 World Trade Center bombing through “person to person history.” When I visited, in 2010, the promise “We will never forget” was prominently featured on a wall in the exhibition, which also included video and audio recordings of personal testimonies, a time line of the attacks, and a model of the buildings and memorial planned for the WTC site. A large section of the Tribute Center was devoted to a gift shop selling, as the brochure put it, “Tribute items” that “allow visitors to take home and remember the Tribute experience.” The displacement from commemorating the attacks to remembering one’s experience at the Tribute Center is remarkable, all the more so because of the necessary relation established to material consumption; the implication being that only those who return home with Tribute items will remember.

According to Marita Sturken, 9/11 souvenirs envelop their purchasers in a depoliticizing “comfort culture” (2007, 5), while Karen J. Engle sees them as allowing Americans to narcissistically identify with the dominant patriotic narrative of the event (72). What I want to add to these perspectives is a focus on the expressive dimension of these souvenirs—the way in which, as material objects designed to be put on display, they not only provide their owners with a sense of decontextualized comfort or patriotic identification but also serve to certify to others that memory is taking place and that it is doing so in the “proper” socially sanctioned form.¹

This expressive dimension also manifests in a card distributed at the Tribute Center advertising the opportunity to sponsor a cobblestone on the National 9/11 Memorial Plaza by imploring: “Help pave the way to remembrance and hope.” As if there could be no remembrance or hope without conspicuous material signs pointing to their presence. The cobblestones, moreover, are not only conceived as initiating remembrance and hope (as opposed to embodying their preexistence) but also designed to endorse and display the sponsors’ participation in this production. Although “out of respect for the victims” the cobblestones themselves will remain unmarked, the card indicates that sponsors’ names will be “listed along with the locations of their cobblestones at Memorial Plaza kiosks.”²

The demonstrative, materialized form of memorialization that appears here represents both a continuation of and a shift in the “culture of memory” Andreas Huyssen sees accelerating and spreading across the globe from the 1980s onward (25).³ In the specific context of 9/11—which has local and global aspects, but is primarily tied to the consolidation of American national identity and the notion of exceptionalism bound to it—the obsessive drive to remember, proceeding from the immediate and ubiquitous promise to “never forget,” covers not only the event itself but also, vitally, its commemoration: the memory of memory. Thus, in addition to being characterized by a “rush to memorialization” that saw talk of how to commemorate 9/11 begin the day after the attacks (Sturken 2004, 321), the name of the National September 11 Memorial Museum and its exhibits indicate a resolve to also conserve and display this memorialization.⁴ The way “9/11 has created the powerful sense that one is a witness to one’s own experience and obligated to record it in some way” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 27) takes shape in the museum’s repeated solicitation of “your own” memories of 9/11. The phrase “never forget,” moreover, does not just loom large at the 9/11 Tribute Center but also inhabits the Virgil quote “no day shall erase you from the memory of time” inscribed on the wall of the repository within the National September 11 Memorial Museum harboring unidentified or unclaimed human remains, as well as on several items sold in the museum’s gift shop. The emergence of this demonstrative, materialized form of memorialization...