Despite its potential for unification, language after 9/11 has proved to be more divisive than ever before, highlighting the gulf between expressions that explore cultural trauma and those that harness it for commercial or political ends. After the attacks, photographers and writers struggled to concretize what seemed unrepresentable into words and images that could make sense of what had happened. The process of representation, both in artistic expression and news media, was in many ways the cement that held local and wider communities together. Henry A. Giroux identifies a “dark side” to the renewed call to unity in the US, in that it has left the roots of our very conception of community exposed to corrosion by fear. Community after 9/11 is “organized not only around flag-waving displays of patriotism but also around collective fears and an ongoing militarization of visual culture and public space.”Footnote 1 While iconic images were played over and over in a search to form some coherence out of massive public incomprehension in the aftermath of the attacks, political and media sources took advantage of the rhetorical power of these repetitions, overlaying them with interpretations which received repeated reinforcement.
The rise of this mediated discourse of fear related to the “war on terror” is one that poets and theorists after 9/11 have sought to counter. The stage was set for cultural resistance well before the attacks. Poets such as Jorie Graham were already troubled by commercial and political uses of language, with their deadening effect on public sensibilities, and by the increasing passivity of the cultural consumer, while critics, Jean Baudrillard and Judith Butler among them, were commenting on the increasing virtualization of public conceptions of reality effected through the same media in the wake of the first Gulf war. After 9/11, these debates picked up impetus from a sense that the ethics of representation were now a topic for urgent address. 9/11 intensified the need for a reappraisal of how various modes of communication work to construct “reality.” The calculated use of fear was the focus of this renewed attention and, as David Altheide comments, for convincing reasons: “Fear promotes fear. Fear limits our intellectual and moral capacities, it turns us against others, it changes our behavior and perspective, and it makes us vulnerable to those who would control us in order to promote their own agendas.”Footnote 2 One of the least-noted and most ambiguous qualities of language is its capacity to become transparent. It so efficiently fulfils its task of conveying meaning that we become accustomed to seeing the process of verbal communication as a direct and unmediated transmission of information; we pay attention to the message without looking closely at the medium through which we receive it. This nebulous quality of words, their ability to disappear, masks the effects that they can have at the most fundamental level.
The discourse surrounding the concept of unity in the immediate aftermath of the attacks provides a useful example. Unity is one among many big ideas – including freedom, evil, terror and justice – identified by John Collins and Ross Glover in the wake of 9/11 as being “as powerful as they are abstract” and playing a dangerously instrumental role in generating and justifying public support for the equally abstract “war on terror.”Footnote 3 Targeted uses of these words implicate their subjects in an argument with only one possible conclusion. This kind of linguistic coercion depends upon binary habits of thinking and an attitude to language that sees it as elemental rather than contextual. Phrases such as those used in George W. Bush's address to Congress on 20 September 2001 – “enemies of Freedom,” “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” – do as much to undercut their own logic as to justify it when they are seen as ambiguous statements shaped by the shared history and context of the people they address. A call to unity that seemed intrinsically positive ironically often became divisive rather than inclusive in the years after 9/11, alienating anyone with doubts about the official line and attempting to silence critical voices rather than integrating them. While Americans united as victims, the same rhetoric divided them from other human beings: unknown and, as Judith Butler argues, ungrievable enemies.Footnote 4
The coercion that can be effected through language also depends on how we see its function. Social theories of language have led to an increasing awareness of its capacity as a generative process, rather than as a mere descriptor. W. J. T Mitchell points out that if we see every act of representation as an “intervention,” or “an interpretation of the world that amounts to a change in the world,” then the extent to which our perspective depends on how events are represented becomes clearer.Footnote 5 Many studies have revealed the factors such as ownership, funding sources and mutual interests that link the media to sources of power in advertising and politics, leading to a process by which consent can be manufactured through the media and in which certain phrases and images are “permitted” when others are not.Footnote 6
The images that represent 9/11 are complicated by the same semiotic ambiguity as the words they accompany. Their meaning is not stable unless we fix it with a verbal interpretation which, at best, only makes it seem so. In Camera Lucida Barthes remarks on this slippery and indeterminate quality of the image, which never attains the certainty of a sign: “photographs are signs which don't take, which turn, as milk does.”Footnote 7 The transparency and arbitrary nature of the connection between word and image are qualities that make representation an inherently unstable process, but at the same time they are the source of the power of the two media combined. Theory has long acknowledged and explored the role word and image play not only in defining but also in creating our reality, but how often are we conscious of this process in everyday life?
Not often enough, would be the answer of a generation of creative and critical thinkers who have begun to chart the difficult moral and ethical territory of the responsibilities inherent in any act of representation after 9/11. The viewing public's openness to certain messages, especially those that can be used to manipulate us, and our unwillingness as an audience to see the conceptual frames within which they are presented, are seen by many American writers as the symptoms of a dangerous tendency toward passive and uncritical spectatorship.
Slavoj Žižek highlights the potential dangers of any unwillingness to be attentive to the medium in which political, social or commercial messages are conveyed. Commenting in 2002 on the impact of political discourse on our perceptions of the conflict following 9/11, he notes that descriptors such as “war on terrorism,” “democracy and freedom,” and “human rights” are “false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it,” and that in “this precise sense, our ‘freedoms’ themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom.”Footnote 8 Perceptions of these conflicts, in other words, hang on an unstable and largely meaningless framework of political doublespeak. Such frameworks, provided by targeted uses of language in politics, the mass media, advertising and entertainment, and their role in creating our perceptual world, go largely unexamined in our everyday lives. This is partly a problem of how information is presented. American poet Jorie Graham, for example, takes issue with the format of the news in general and CNN in particular. As more and more images of the world outside our local sphere – a world of which we have little or no personal experience – are fed into our homes, as they become a commonplace part of our everyday lives barely worthy of note, we have essentially stopped questioning the rapidity of this presentation, the lack of time it leaves us to think and analyze. We tend, and are encouraged, to take media images as fact, as though we were seeing them at first hand with our own eyes, unmediated. Jorie Graham, as well as questioning the method of transmission, evokes the dangerous territory onto which this kind of unthinking and uncritical spectatorship can lead us:
The “multitasking” of the CNN screen is precisely geared to dissociating our sensibilities. It forces us to “not feel” in the very act of “collecting information.” But what value does information unstained by emotive content have, except a fundamental genius for manipulating dissociated human souls? Why, you can frighten them to the point of inhumanity. You can get them to close their eyes and let you commit murder in their name.Footnote 9
Those representations that strive to seem most impartial and most realistic inevitably have the most powerful effect on perception. Our world is mediated, then, by these re-creations of it, through discourse, through visual images and, most powerfully, through combinations of the two that appear to close down interpretive choice. Linked together, the two media create an illusion of semiotic completeness: words fix meaning to images; images lend justification to words, and so on.
Word and image, formed into acts of representational control over what constitutes the public sphere, decide the very parameters of our perception. According to Judith Butler, they decide “what ‘can’ be heard, read, seen, felt and known,” defining the boundaries of “what will count as reality, and what will not.”Footnote 10 As well as ringfencing our sense of reality, this frame also works to preclude dissent. Just as the frame legitimizes certain ways of seeing, feeling and thinking, it renders others unacceptable, dialecticizing any debate into a confrontation between “for and against” or “good and evil.” Words already overfreighted with dangerous symbolism in the American imagination – the word “fear” itself being a good example, along with “terror” and “victim” – are cemented to ideas about terrorism through their constant repetition in the news media. These terms become part of a discourse and a narrative of fear that is then picked up by popular culture, in films and television series, and is used to reinforce a certain set of beliefs and stereotypes, a crossover between “factual” and “fictional” mediations that has been analyzed by political theorist David Altheide:
Similar to propaganda, messages about fear are repetitious and stereotypical of outside “threats” and especially suspect and “evil others.” These messages also resonate moral panics, with the implication that action must be taken to not only defeat a specific enemy but also save civilization.Footnote 11
It would seem that the more we are exposed to and invest in this kind of framing narrative, the greater is its ability to “disappear.” Our perception becomes structured into habitual forms that are then difficult to escape, as they have become natural, or normalized. These ideas are then also reinforced by the inherently self-validating nature of mass-mediated experience and collective emotion, creating a narrative of identity which is often unified, as after 9/11, under symbolic images.
Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004)
Jamaican American poet Claudia Rankine taps into this wave of symbolized emotion in her 2004 long poem Don't Let Me Be Lonely, challenging political and formal conventions for representation. Rankine is an ekphrastic poet and mixed-media artist – her work focusses as much on the image as on the word. She uses her ekphrastic poems to expose how representations are made, and to reveal gaps and flaws in the representational process by re-creating it, a project which gained urgency in the chaos of representations that followed 9/11. Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an explicit poem of protest against contemporary targeted uses of word and image, focussing on media representation, its omnipresence in domestic and public spaces, and its effect on perception of events and people. It is multilayered and complex, a prose-poem sequence containing aspects of both the lyric and the essay, and representations of the images it describes – both personal to the poet herself and widely recognized, iconic images – as well as a set of generously detailed, factual endnotes. Whilst being essential to an understanding of the poem, the latter almost comprise a text in themselves, providing both sources and explanations but also interesting details and background material. They seem as much designed to engage the reader as is the main body of the text, necessitating a choice on the reader's part as to how to read them; they are at the same time a useful aid and a frustrating distraction that prevents the reader from apprehending the text as a complete unit. This intrusive use of multiple frames forces an interrogation of every position the reader occupies, disrupting any attempt to settle into a single reading of the text. Like many of her contemporaries, Rankine chooses to foreground visual and narrative frames as a comment on the fact that all representations, whether they acknowledge it or not, are framed.
The poem itself is a patchwork of different registers of language and competing images, an attempt to acknowledge a “total experience of being” and then to undermine the idea that such holism exists or can be represented. Rankine intended the notes and images as a challenge to the text: “to take away the ‘literal truth’ authority from the text,” undercutting her own narrative from the beginning.Footnote 12 The essay format and the style of the book – which, as Rankine comments in a radio interview, was intended to mimic the form of the newspaper column, and indeed uses a newspaper typeface – also challenge the relationship between truth and fiction in the text.Footnote 13 The gaps in the text force action from the reader. The reader inhabits the interstices between the different parts of the text, and has to make choices about how to link them, in what order to read them, how to interpret them as a whole. We also intuit, therefore, that the speaking “I” of the poem, however coherent it may seem, is not the “I” of the poet herself; it draws on her experiences and her sense of Americanness, amongst other things, to form a fictional “I” that explores “the self in a social space.”Footnote 14 It is an attempt at the formation of a communal “I” somewhere between the “I and I” of Rankine's Jamaican roots and her conception of “I as an American.” Even the cohering consciousness of the poem, then, is formed on unstable ground, swinging between lyric and epic.
Rankine's examinations of images form part of a warning against cultural passivity and a questioning of our roles as perceivers, something made clear by the introductory quotation from Aimé Césaire cautioning us to “beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator,” as well as by questions asked within the text:
If I am present in a subject position what responsibility do I have to the content, to the truth value, of the words themselves? Is “I” even me or am “I” a gearshift to get from one sentence to the next? Should I say we? Is the voice not various if I take responsibility for it?Footnote 15
Throughout, she uses her protagonist to interrogate our position and our responsibility as both perceivers and representers. The images she uses in this process are ones we see and interpret every day, images which are so common they have almost attained the transparency of truths, facilitated by the assumption that pictures do not lie. Not only does she use “fictional” images from films, but also television news, logos, signs, personal photographs and leaflets. She uses these images to examine the fragile balance between public and private, an aim toward which the cover of the book – a vast roadside billboard displaying the intimate plea of the title – testifies. The text is based on the images contained within it but, however public they may seem, Rankine shows that they are inseparable from the realm of the personal. Her work is symptomatic of the increasing focus on the incursion of media images into private life and the perceived need to write against this in contemporary American poetry.
The “I” of the narrator seems to function as a vehicle for both private and public thoughts, its compass widening throughout the poem from grief over a friend's imminent death, to the pain shared with the mistreatment of African Americans shown on television, to identification with the South African struggle to obtain antiretroviral medicine, critiquing finally the common fear of terrorism after 9/11. American poetry has frequently had a tendency to enter problems through the “I”/eye, and here the objective frame of a unified perspective is replaced with a wandering and fluid I/eye that is receptive to and defined by the images it perceives. Rankine is making the point that the outer world and the inner are made of the same things: objects, perceptions, representations, interpretations. After 9/11, the eye is often the wound through which traumatic representations enter: as Cathy Caruth puts it, “to be traumatized is … to be possessed by an image or event.”Footnote 16 Mass trauma is mediated to the individual through images. The atmosphere of witness surrounding the attacks makes it easy to forget that the events of 9/11, for most people, were primarily conveyed through media sources and that the omnipresence of these images was what fed most people's fear of the terrorist other. If we remember this simple fact, then Baudrillard's assertion that “the Gulf War did not take place” not only makes sense, but becomes more widely applicable to many of the most harrowing events of contemporary culture.Footnote 17 These events take place at first hand for a large number of people but, for the majority, they happen in a hybrid and hyperreal space where fact and fiction meet on equal terms, and where image is presented as experience.
This incursion of evidently public language into the private sphere, more noticeable than the same intrusion effected in images, emphasizes how little division there really is between private and public. Images of violence, war and terror are now not only in museums and history books, but in front rooms and bedrooms, in every room where there is a television. What we seem to forget is that these images are not direct; they do not speak for themselves. For Rankine this raises the question of who speaks for them and through them. Rankine's protagonist testifies to the emotional effects of these intrusive images, seeing the eye as a permeable barrier that creates no real division between inside and outside and the self as created in part through the image/text context. This feeling is borne out in research into the effects of mediated representations of terror after 9/11 on populations both near to and far from the attacks in terms of “risk perception and fear levels.”Footnote 18
The title of the poem – Don't Let Me Be Lonely – however tangential it may seem, is a (literal) signpost to the poem's subject: in analyzing the effect of this omnipresence of the image on us, it is really seeking to know what these images do to our ability to connect as human beings, how they affect our relationships with one another, and especially the trust within them. As well as a poem, the text functions as a visual essay, each of its images inviting analysis of its historical and political context and the public reactions it has provoked as well as encouraging us to evaluate what part of the public consciousness, or the zeitgeist, it has tapped into in order to become an iconic image.
Rankine identifies where advantage has been taken of the ambiguous and arbitrary nature of the sign to construct meanings targeted toward the onlooker's vote, pocket or civil liberties. She puts to use the connection between word and image to expose how the act of compartmentalizing and framing sensory information makes a dangerous nonsense of every part of it; she uses the text, the images and the notes to make sure that no one component has a monopoly on the representation of “truth,” that there is no one version; instead there are multiple perspectives that acknowledge that there is no way of representing that is not, to some extent, manipulative. This forces us to let in the space for doubt that lies between these three skeins of representation that make up the text. This is where feelings come in, and the emotional response, filling “the gaps created by the indirectness of experience” (89). This fostering of self-consciousness in the observer is the difference between the creative image and the image used for media or advertising purposes: instead of analyzing the role of our feelings in interpreting the image, the media and advertisers have worked to choreograph these gaps, encouraging us to leave out the analysis and be led by the directness of our emotions. If we do not analyze how we respond, we will not realize when our emotions are being manipulated. Publicity takes control of our responses to create desire out of inconsistency for commercial ends, but also has a more sinister effect:
Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society. And it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world.Footnote 19
As John Berger so clearly describes, publicity disables our faculties of critical interpretation and takes away our free choice, replacing them with corporate interpretations and consumer choices. In a similar way, Mark Doty sees the advert as usurping our capacity to connect with our fellow humans, shutting out all those who do not fit into its sanitized and sanitizing vision, and Rankine sees it as hijacking our processes of self-identification and individuation.Footnote 20 The instinctive drive to participate in mass emotion, as she has shown us, works against us here: the shared nature of our responses, and their image fed back to us via the media, make them self-validating. Rankine uses the widest possible field of reference in order both to encompass the diversity of experience and to make us think about the everyday images that play on our feelings of identity and self-validation – to show us how images and objects have begun to stand in for aspects of what we are. She demonstrates this in terms of her narrator's individuation into American identity:
My flushing toilet, my hot water, my air conditioner, my health insurance, my, my, my – all my my's were American-made. This is how I was alive. Or I wasn't alive. I was a product, or I was like a product, a product of and like Walt Disney's cell animation. (93)
This confusion between being and being-like shows how deeply and inseparably the object has become both a symbol and a part of identity. However, this process of self-identification via the consumer image is not entirely represented as negative in the poem; rather it is just one of the things that make the modern American so vulnerable. If Americans self-identify through the objects around them, then any perceived threat to this American way of life can be manipulated into an identity based on the fear of its loss.
The narrator expresses nostalgia for a 1990s consumer utopia before the events of 9/11 broke through the capitalist dream. This stanza, accompanied by the familiar image of the stars and stripes proudly displayed on a front porch, neatly hints at the sense of a fall from innocence, its references stretching from Hamlet to the Nike advertisement:
To have a new iMac or not to have it? To eTrade or not to eTrade? Again and again these were Kodak moments, full of individuation; we were all on our way to our personal best. America was seemingly a meritocracy. I, I, I am Tiger Woods. It was the nineties. Now it is the twenty-first century and either you are with us or against us. Where is your flag? (91)
The reduction of vision from a rainbow of multiplicity to the black and white of for or against shows how the possibilities for interpretation have been forced into a more narrow perspective. From this point onwards the poem focusses on images of life after the fall of the Twin Towers and how public emotion has been captured and used via images in the wake of 9/11. After 9/11 the bold consumer spirit of the 1990s shrinks into a defensive corner, unified under attack. The individual moments of self-realization and ambition, defined by the image of Tiger Woods in the Nike advertisement, are overwhelmed by the need to form a strong common identity through symbols such as the flag and the yellow ribbon. Rankine portrays the crisis hitting an audience already primed to be swayed by the mix of media, advertising, politics and fiction beamed into their homes 24/7. Those who do not participate in the communal wave of grief and patriotism are seen as suspicious, as the quality of each person's response is analyzed by those around them:
Nick, the super, tied a yellow ribbon but didn't do the flag thing. The distinction is not lost on anyone. The lawyer in 5B says the super should be careful he doesn't lose his job. (114)
The repeated images of the attacks ensure that they are always embedded in the present of the public consciousness, at the front of people's minds. Rankine shows evidence of this in the people her narrator encounters in the poem. When the narrator remarks to another woman at the bus stop, “It's hard to get a cab now” (113) – meaning at rush hour – the woman's response is more general: “It's hard to live now.” This is a tone with which the narrator is familiar:
Hers is an Operation Iraqi Freedom answer. The war is on and the Department of Homeland Security has decided we have an elevated national threat level, a code-orange alert. (113)
Americans are portrayed as united under this cloud of fear, created by manipulative use of images and the media, where:
Osama is Saddam and Saddam is “that man who tried to kill my father” and the weapons of mass destruction are, well, invisible and Afghanistan is Iraq and Iraq is Syria. (113)
Fear is depicted as an instrument of confusion and control, with the Hegelian idea that images of death are used by the government to keep citizens in a permanent state of fear for their own lives, thus seeing emergency powers as a legitimate and necessary intrusion.
Perhaps Rankine's most valuable contribution to raising consciousness is her challenge to the “truth” of media images. These hyper-real, supposedly self-authenticating images, placed as they are in a constructed narrative of America-under-attack and further validated by evidence of their effects in the viewers' own lives – the leaflets, alerts and security checks – come to stand in for reality. They appear to be the reality of the situation, rather than representing it. This is what Baudrillard sees as the danger of the media image:
It is a “recreating” illusion (as well as a recreational one), revivalistic, realistic, mimetic, hologrammic. It abolishes the game of illusion by the perfection of the reproduction, in the virtual rendition of the real. And so we witness the extermination of the real by its double.Footnote 21
The representation is so realistic that it appears to be real, the unmediated product of our own vision rather than someone else's. Seen in this way it is no longer open to interpretation or analysis; in its completion it seems to speak for itself. This is the power of the “real” in the media images that Rankine works to undermine with her parallel texts, using plurality of perspective to strip away their aura of coherence and self-completion.
One of Rankine's most important tools in exposing these images as representations as subjective as any other is the notion of absence – of gaps or incompleteness – and the acknowledgement of what is unknown or uncertain. The importance of revealing the gaps in the illusions we create is that this process naturally exposes totalizing narratives and “objective” impositions. Rankine shows us our tendency to naturalize media images, to unthinkingly see past the ways they work on us, and to seek the message without understanding the medium. Her portrayal of the media coverage of Saddam Hussein's capture – represented only in words and not reproduced visually in the text – shows it to be at best absurd, even Orwellian:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we got him.” Saddam Hussein has been discovered in a hole in the ground. Someone with latex gloves has a tongue depressor in Hussein's mouth. The inside of his mouth looks very red. She pauses because this is meant to be important. It is supposed to mean something about peace. (123)
Rankine shows that although it is hard to separate the supplied narrative from the images we are shown to validate it, especially with the shortened attention span of the media age when we may be given only moments to consider them, it is possible and indeed vital to identify and open up the gap between the two and to break down the twin role they are often given as logical signifier and signified in a narrative of truth.
The responsibility of the poem, then, is towards both disconnection and connection, encouraging us to unpick the links of the media narrative and retell it in our own ways as well as to assert our own sense of connection with our fellow human beings in the present. This means the ability to see images not only from a single perspective, that of the American fearful under attack, but from a multiplicity of perspectives, reanalyzing them every time we come to them. The poem must present images in a way that allows the reader to be aware of their frames; it must encourage “picturacy.”Footnote 22
The presentation of images to a receptive and fearful public can also influence how this audience sees itself and how it responds to the world around it. This is a case of word and image being mutually self-reinforcing – the two together create a self-evidencing narrative. The representation of “America under attack” is a key example of the drive to narrativize. The conversation with Rankine's character at the bus stop represents an America that sees itself framed permanently as potential victim of hate and terror rather than survivor of individual acts of terrorism. Reasons for this perspective are easily unearthed by a look at how Western contemporary culture sees survivors. The trauma theorist and psychologist Boris Cyrulnik makes the point that there are more victims' associations than survivors' associations because the role of victim is less ambiguous than that of survivor: he asserts that whereas we feel moral responsibility toward victims, we “have a tendency to be suspicious of survivors.”Footnote 23
The position taken – victim or survivor – and the self-image accordingly adopted, will affect not only how the subject feels but how they are seen. A survivor's focus is on moving on, on developing, perhaps on examining the encounter with death in order to avoid future ordeals. The victim's focus, in this case, is turned outward, breeding fear and anger. A survivor is an individual; a victim implies a perpetrator, situating his or her position on one side of a dialectical divide. Žižek shows that there are ethical implications inherent in this positioning. Taking on the role of victim allows for a “rediscovery of American innocence” that is anything but innocent.Footnote 24 Instead of choosing to engage with the complex roots of the terror problem, perhaps because some of them are firmly buried in American soil, Žižek saw the Bush government as using its position to encourage a “them-against-us” mentality: “out with feelings of responsibility and guilt toward the impoverished Third World, we are the victims now!”Footnote 25 Judith Butler argues that this rhetorical framing has a devastating effect on our capacity for empathy with other humans. We need to investigate our perceptions and interpretations of the world as it is mediated to us in order to “understand why it is we might feel horror in the face of certain losses but indifference or even righteousness in light of others.”Footnote 26 In other words, reality is established by how we interpret the frames of word and image through which much of our experience of the world depends. The sense of reality we arrive at through the representational process is the balance on which we weigh the value of lives other than our own. Our reality, constructed through visual and verbal media, is therefore largely a virtual reality, depending on our perception of events of which we have little or no experience. Jenny Edkins points out that even the public and personal perception of time has been changed by the state's extension of the immediacy and urgency of “trauma time” to produce a “curious unknown time, a time with no end in sight.”Footnote 27 Momentary urgency becomes endless, delivering its subjects into a permanent state of fear, and separate issues are easily conflated into one overarching theme of threat. Rankine describes the process of elision by which one threat becomes another, a process that David Simpson identifies as following “a traditional logic of scapegoating at the service of a ruthlessly presentist political opportunism.”Footnote 28 Similarly to Rankine, he sees the root of this problem as stemming from a “resistance to complexity.”
The various elements of these responses come to characterize the world, the various texts that surround us, creating “not only knowledge, but also the very reality they appear to describe.”Footnote 29 The point here is that images rarely mean what we think they do. Sontag's assertion that photography has done “at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it” rings particularly true in the years after 9/11.Footnote 30 The tendency of the image to be taken as directly interchangeable for the experience itself – a direct and unmediated communication of reality – has proved to be at least as dangerous as it is useful.
What Rankine does in response to this is to expose fictions that pose as reality with competing representations. This simulacrum forces the reader to contemplate the potential reality of multiple fictions. As Žižek argues, the twenty-first century's obsession with reality is profoundly ironic in the sense that the real we pursue so avidly is no more than another special effect.Footnote 31 Rankine shows us that in order to understand the effect called “reality” we have to attend to how all fictive effects and representations are created. It is in the process of re-creating narratives and images that we can learn to appreciate the rhetorical strategies by which one dominant picture or version of events is established and validated. Rankine's work implicitly encourages its readers to see any words or images as expressions of a shared way of seeing, a public projection of reality that can have profound effects on the ways in which we respond to each other. Her message is that only awareness of our position as interpreters, rather than passive consumers, of cultural images, and an acceptance of the possibility of multiple interpretations, can lead us to connect in a genuine and compassionate way with the world around us and the other people who inhabit it.
