INTRODUCTION
Practices, technologies and objects of remembrance have stimulated a vast amount of contemporary scholarship across different disciplinary fields. Although not without criticism,Footnote 1 contributions to this “memory boom”Footnote 2 have sought to further our understanding, first, of the processes through which pasts are forged in the present, and second, of memory's association with core features of the social, not least the formation and negotiation of individual and collective identities.Footnote 3 In the context of 9/11,Footnote 4 more specifically, a sizeable body of work has already now emerged tracing how the attacks were remembered across social, political and cultural sites.Footnote 5 This literature dovetails, at times, with recent efforts to forge a new “critical terrorism studies” perspective from which to conduct the study of unconventional violence.Footnote 6 In this article, I contribute to these investigations of 9/11's retrospective construction through a discursive analysis of a particular, and distinctively contemporary, “memory project.”Footnote 7 To do this, I explore efforts to make sense of the events, their causes, and their impacts, within postings on the “Where Were You … September 11th, Two Thousand One” Internet archive – henceforth WhereWereYou.
WhereWereYou was launched on 15 September 2001 as an online repository for visitors to record their immediate impressions of 9/11.Footnote 8 During the single year in which it remained open to contributors, over 2,500 entries were amassed; many of them brief recollections of their authors' personal circumstances on first encountering news of the attacks. The site's explicit purpose, announced on its homepage, is the provision of a resource for subsequent historical reflection – a resource facilitated by technological capabilities unavailable at the occurrence of earlier magnitudinous events:
Wouldn't it have been wonderful to have known what everyday people felt when Pearl Harbor was bombed or what the nation was thinking when the word Vietnam was first introduced into our nation's psyche or when Kennedy was assassinated, and how those views changed as the events afterwards unfolded? It would be a great historical resource. The media records everything, true, but those records get lost and aren't compiled like these fresh ongoing thoughts from people of all backgrounds.Footnote 9
As the continuing preamble makes clear, the site's creators viewed WhereWereYou as a space, primarily, for reflecting on 9/11's consequences as experienced by “ordinary” people across the US and beyond:
How has your patriotism changed since the incident? What were you doing when you found out? What did you feel at first? How do you feel now? What do you want to see happen? Did you do anything to help? If you've lost somebody, were involved in the rescue, viewed it happening, or were of the many hoping, praying, and crying back home glued in front of your tv set, frantically trying to call yours, tell us your story, so generations and generations after will remember that it wasn't only a war on our buildings, our government, our economy, but of our hearts and lives and everything that makes us an American. These are the World's hearts and thoughts.Footnote 10
Although the above questions were answered, in large part, by (self-identifying) young Americans, individuals spanning more than twenty countries responded throughout the project's active life.Footnote 11
My engagement here with this particular memory project is motivated by four related concerns. First, as indicated above, we know a good deal now about the specific framings of 9/11 as terrorism, war, evil and so forth that dominated official discourses after the attacks.Footnote 12 Less well researched, however, have been non-elite interpretations of this event and the impact it had on the everyday lives of “ordinary” people.Footnote 13 A critical reading of efforts to understand 9/11 in WhereWereYou, therefore, offers one route towards addressing this imbalance. If not, perhaps, strictly a repository of “subjugated knowledges,”Footnote 14 foregrounding the accounts on this site does offer a useful exercise in countermemory, “a way of remembering and forgetting that starts with the local, the immediate, and the personal.”Footnote 15 Such an exercise is particularly important, I argue, because the aggregate of entries on WhereWereYou offers a far more complex reading of 9/11 than that often found within more authoritative claims about the attacks in their immediate aftermath.Footnote 16
Second, and related to the above, by exploring the “vernacular memories” contained on this site,Footnote 17 this article also charts the public resonance of tropes and themes integral to more authoritative presentations of 9/11. By presenting visitors with a chronologically ordered archive of postings, WhereWereYou facilitates reflection on whether and which official interpretations of 9/11 entered public consciousness more broadly, how they did so, and when. An obvious corollary of this is the repository's related value for exploring moments of dissonance between official and other interpretations of 9/11. As demonstrated below, WhereWereYou offers an important opportunity for exploring challenges toward more authoritative efforts at “fixing” the meaning of 9/11, and the political and normative grounds on which such challenges were made.Footnote 18
Third, there is also a normative impulse behind my study of the testimonies recorded on WhereWereYou. The aftermath of 9/11 was marked, of course, not only by a wide-reaching, and disastrous, “global war on terror,” but also by a continuing dynamic of contestation over the logic and limits of political representation. This was a conflict between those claiming the authority to exercise military power on behalf of American and other publics, on the one hand (in the then-President's words, for example, “It is time for us to win the first war of the 21st century decisively, so that our children and our grandchildren can live peacefully into the 21st century”Footnote 19), and, on the other, those opponents of this conflict such as the Not in Our Name movement that organized (and self-labelled) around a rejection of such claims.Footnote 20 Against this background, it is valuable to explore public discourses on the attacks, not least given the controversies that continue to bedevil 9/11's passage into social memory.Footnote 21 WhereWereYou, I believe, presents one opportunity for doing this as an example of “an individual and vernacular form of memorializing, which highlights the interests of ‘ordinary people’ and their personally situated interpretations of national tragedy.”Footnote 22
Finally, WhereWereYou is of broader interest, I argue, for its location at the cusp of a potentially significant shift in the practices and technologies of social memory. Digital archives, such as this one, throw up new opportunities for accessing, transferring and circulating the content of memories.Footnote 23 They do so by providing new spaces for the storage and transmission of stories of the past, assisting individuals to record (and hence reconstruct) those pasts anew for disparate audiences. In Haskins's evocative summary,
Instead of only official accounts disseminated by mainstream media and the government, all kinds of stories can now become part of an evolving patchwork of public memory. Formerly limited in time and space, ephemeral gestures can be preserved in still and moving images, ready to be viewed and replayed on demand. Previously banished to dark storage rooms, mementos left at memorial sites can be displayed for all to see.Footnote 24
Thus, if we are interested in how events such as 9/11 enter social memory, we need to take seriously the range of practices involved in their remembrance. For this reason, I approach WhereWereYou as important not only for what it might reveal about the attacks and narrations thereof, but equally for what it might tell us about trends and transformations in social remembrance more broadly.
To develop these themes, the remainder of this article proceeds in four stages. I begin by exploring efforts to locate 9/11 within particular temporal horizons in postings on WhereWereYou. In so doing, I point to intertextual connections with more authoritative sites of discourse, and to moments of difference between these framings. A second section then traces representations of the attacks' causes and status. Here, I chart descriptions of 9/11 as an act of terrorism and war, before turning to claims over the attacks' referent object(s). A third section expands on this investigation of victims and perpetrators by tracing projections of the attacks' likely future effects. On this, I point to competing political and normative stances taken by posters, highlighting also evidence of reflexivity around the act of remembering itself. In the article's conclusion I locate WhereWereYou within wider contemporary debates over the archive's status. Here I argue that WhereWereYou is particularly interesting in its refusal to foreclose the meaning of 9/11 for either visitors or contributors.
LOCATING 9/11
The first and perhaps most enduring impression one receives on WhereWereYou is of 9/11 as a radical, and unforeseen, interruption of the normality of everyday life. Contributors from the US and beyond recount disruptions to, and cancellations of, school lessons and university lectures.Footnote 25 Others recall being disturbed from sleep or morning routines by family members bearing news of the unfolding, as yet uncomprehended, events.Footnote 26 Those already engaged in media consumption describe interruptions to normal broadcasting services, with Internet sites not responding,Footnote 27 radio stations suspending scheduled programmes,Footnote 28 and television networks broadcasting “breaking news” coverage described often in sophisticated depth.Footnote 29 Individuals commuting in the vicinity of the crash sites describe the confusion and fear they experienced on that otherwise most mundane of journeys.Footnote 30 While those even more proximate share their disbelief upon witnessing the attacks in person:
8:30 am I got to work on 22nd st. and 5th ave. It was a beautiful day, warm and sunny … 15 minutes later a co-worker taps me on the shoulder I turn around. There it was! Right outside my window! The first tower was hit. We all thought it was an accident, an unbelievable one at that. Other co-workers had heard the plane fly overhead. I was actually thinking of going down there to see it up close. Then it happened, the second plane hit. We all grew silent. We all knew it was not an accident.Footnote 31
What I saw as I ran to those windows was too much believe. The top of the first Tower was engulfed in flames and smoke! Even from 1 1/2 miles north of the buildings, I could clearly see that a large portion of the building was completely destroyed.Footnote 32
Most graphic still, finally, are those posts that relay the horror of the attacks' immediate aftermath as encountered by those caught up in the events:
I was stuck in a group of several hundred people one block from the Trade Center when building 2 collapsed. We tried running till the choking wall of debris overwhelmed us. I've experienced mortal fear. Near misses and car accidents narrowly avoided. Moments of panic. But not like this. In those minutes I was sure I was going to die. Absolutely sure.Footnote 33
If we take them together, this aggregate of individual recollections positions the events of 11 September 2001 quite coherently as a moment of abrupt rupture, at once temporal, cognitive and discursive. Routine behaviours and journeys were that day aborted or changed; the mundane ordinariness of daily existence – sleep patterns, habitual media consumption, commutes to work – put “out of joint” with unpredictable suddenness. This positioning, moreover, almost identically mirrors accounts of the attacks as a traumatic “breaking” of timeFootnote 34 that sprung swiftly from more authoritative sites of discourse.Footnote 35 In the words of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, shortly after the attacks, for example: “The only word to describe this is the word ‘indescribable.’”Footnote 36 And where attention turns in this archive to 9/11's likely status as viewed from the future, this intertextuality continues. Compare, for example, the then-Vice President's suggestion on 16 September – “things have changed since last Tuesday. The world shifted in some respects”Footnote 37 – to that of Sarah from Connecticut posting in early November: “I stayed glued to the tv for the rest of the day, and late into the night. It is something I will never forget. I don't think this world will ever be the same again.”Footnote 38 Compare also the reaction of Rainer Block writing from Germany – “September 11th 2001 caused a complete deadstop of my thinking … It took about a second to realize that there would be a before the 11th of September and an after from then on”Footnote 39 – to that described by Condoleezza Rice only three weeks before: “September 11th was one of those rare dates that forever divides history into distinct categories of before and after … We commonly hear the refrain that everything changed on September 11th. In many ways that is true.”Footnote 40
One route toward explaining this congruence is to posit the existence of a hegemonic discourse on the attacks' appropriate historical location.Footnote 41 So doing draws our attention not only to the multiplicity of subjects complicit in this construction of rupture, but also to this framing's reliance on tropes of exceptionality long associated with terrorism.Footnote 42 These tropes come to us, of course, not only from a “terrorism industry” of government agencies, think tanks and scholars responsible for discoursing on the threat of this violence.Footnote 43 Popular culture, too, has long thrived on worst-case scenarios in this context, complementing these with dramatic tales of heroic counterterrorist exploits. It is, therefore, perhaps unsurprising to find cultural forms employed regularly as narrative anchors on WhereWereYou. These anchors perform a number of functions for posters, from assisting in the description and understanding of 9/11,Footnote 44 to bridging the personal and public in the act of recollection as it takes place in this archive.Footnote 45 Thus we encounter here references to popular literature: “I'd just recently read a Tom Clancy book where something similar happens, so as the news washed over me, I lay there thinking I was dreaming. It was a little too much of a coincidence to stand”;Footnote 46 to television: “I felt as if the Twilight zone had possessed my mind and led me on a Philip K. Dick ride of frantic activity and misinformation and altered reality”;Footnote 47 and, more commonly, to the silver screen: “Like everyone is saying, it was like watching a scene out of a movie … thinking none of this was real and that nothing like this could ever happen to our nation.”Footnote 48 Indeed, the sense of filmic unreality conveyed by numerous posters on this site evoked memories of movies ostensibly far removed from terrorist violence.Footnote 49 These spanned disaster epics such as Godzilla,Footnote 50 to fictive accounts of earlier incidents in American history: “I also remember thinking that this was scarily like Pearl Harbor, which I just watched a couple of weeks ago.”Footnote 51
This reference to the movie Pearl Harbor demonstrates WhereWereYou's capacity to negotiate the distance between autobiographical memory (one's memory of events directly experienced) and historical memory (those memories that reach one through historical records).Footnote 52 It also points toward a first ambiguity in the memories collected in this archive. For, alongside the above descriptions of rupture, many contributors also identified concrete historical precedents of 9/11. For some, previous aircraft crashes were the initial events recalled in the attacks' immediacy: “The first thing that came to my mind was the crash into the Empire State building.”Footnote 53 Others instead pointed to earlier political violences befalling America or Americans: “I remember the golf war [sic], the L.A. riots, the Oaklahoma bombing, and many other tragedies that we, as a nation, have had to endure”;Footnote 54 “It's not like I haven't experienced war before. I remember Bosnia, I remember Desert Storm and Panama. I just haven't experienced it in my back yard.”Footnote 55 For others still, chronologies of terrorism elsewhere were invoked: “I thought at first it must have been another attack by the IRA in London or a suicide bomber who walked into a building in Tel Aviv.”Footnote 56 While some, finally, sought to position 9/11 in, and around, the memory stores of others;Footnote 57 for example:
Even now, words escape me. It sounds trite, but words cannot express what I feel in the wake of this. Surely in 30 years, I will feel the same way, for this is a life-altering event. My generation's grandparents had Pearl Harbor. Our parents had Vietnam. We have thisFootnote 58
and, “i remember thinking ‘This was history right before my eyes.’ I'd only thought people like my dad and grandfater had memories like this. JFK, Pearl Harbor … wow.”Footnote 59
The ambiguity of this simultaneous positioning of 9/11 as unique and possessing precedents does not, necessarily, challenge the existence of a hegemonic discourse around the attacks.Footnote 60 Total discursive closure cannot ever be completed, and competing interpretations or memories of events will always be possible even where alternatives are actively discredited or hidden.Footnote 61 Because memory itself constitutes a process, collective remembrance always takes place through a dynamic of selection whereby the authority of recollections, anecdotes, practices and artefacts varies according to their resonance and their proponents' authority.Footnote 62 Yet, as I will argue below, it is the very explicit character of WhereWereYou's openness to competing voices – to difference – that renders this archive a particularly interesting site for analysis.Footnote 63 Before addressing this theme, however, I now explore competing descriptions of the attacks themselves as posted on this website.
UNDERSTANDING 9/11
In discussions of 9/11's status or meaning it is, unsurprisingly, accounts of terrorism that dominate WhereWereYou. Many posters simply describe the attacks in this lexicon: “I found such an accident incredible, and had no clue it was a terrorist act”;Footnote 64 “I remember saying that the world was ending. How could this happen in a country like ours? Then I saw it was terrorists; I knew we had enemies, but not to this magnitude”;Footnote 65 “I later began to feel that the terrorists must have been amazed at their success.”Footnote 66 Others engaging in these discussions echo wider discourses on terrorism,Footnote 67 for instance in depictions of those responsible as simply “other.” This takes place, for example, through constructions of irrationality:Footnote 68 “This was so sad. There is no rational reason to do this. Whatever they tried to accomplish, it won't happen by killing people.”Footnote 69 Or through discussion of the protaganists' apparent disdain for human life:
Why do people hate us so much and why would you go to this extent to express that hate? It obviously didn't matter to the terrorists that they were also taking their [own] lives … Why prove to someone that you despise them so much by taking your own life?Footnote 70
Reflections on the categorically “evil” nature of the attacks or their perpetrators surface too across the archive:Footnote 71 “My heart and support is with everyone that has suffered a loss at the hands of the evil people behind this”;Footnote 72 “I don't want to be less affected by this extraordinarily evil attack than I am now.”Footnote 73 So too, finally, do alternative, yet related, tropes of subhumanity,Footnote 74 for example: “I was ANGRY..Angry at the animals who planned and executed this, angry at our government for failing to stop a widespread and coordinated attack”;Footnote 75 “monstrous and senseless act of murder.”Footnote 76
Although this construction of terrorist “others” dominates entries on this archive, WhereWereYou also includes a number of references to 9/11 as a rather different type of event: an “act of war.” These descriptions offer a further example of the mimetic character of official and public discourse in this context, echoing the grammatical restructuring of the attacks – from terrorism to war – that occurred in the language of the Bush administration swiftly after the events.Footnote 77 Here, contributors either (re)describe 9/11 through the use of this alternative, militarized, language – “I turned to a colleague and told him this was an act of war”Footnote 78 – or they highlight the profound consequences likely to follow America's entrance into an unforeseen conflict:
We turned on the radio, and I started to cry. I cried for the fact that war had now reached North America, that it would result in more violence, that two beautiful examples of architecture had been ruined. It isn't fair for this to happen to the U.S., but it also wouldn't be fair for them to retaliate by killing innocent people.Footnote 79
Whether presented as terrorism or as war, these constructions of 9/11 all either imply or explicate a referent object affected by the attacks. In so doing, some contributors position 9/11 as a truly international event: “It is going to take a long long time for the world to recover from this tragedy.”Footnote 80 Others, instead, foreground the attacks' impact on those caught directly in their immediacy: “i will never understand why people intentionally hurt and kill one another.”Footnote 81 Many posters, however, position 9/11 as a distinctly national event. Here, we encounter readings of the attacks as an affront to the national security of the US (rendered, in this example, both benign and exceptional) – “I sat in shock wondering how someone could be so cruel to such an amazing country like ours”Footnote 82 – or as an attack on the American public: “We've lost so many … It's hard for me to comprehend the tragedy that has occured in this country… GOD BLESS AMERICA.”Footnote 83 Others still, finally, further extend this reading, depicting the attacks as an assault on American values:
The feeling of amazement overwhelmed me at first, this is the worst thing ever kept on repeating in my mind as any past acts of horror seemed to fade away in the impact of this attack on our nation's symbols and population … The magnitude of all the wonderful lives uselessly taken from us by the planes that were targeted at the American psyche will continue to hit hard every time I see, hear, or think of those two magnificent towers crumbling into dust and the stories of all the great people who died on Sept. 11. I hope no one else on the planet ever has another day like the one almost every American had on that Tuesday.Footnote 84
Although neither homogeneous nor uncontested, these “American” framings of 9/11 are complemented by invocations of the shared stock of cultural resources that characterize, and help constitute, the American nation. In some contributions, this takes place simply by invocation of great Americans past. As one poster wrote on 15 September 2001: “I want to thank the world for all their compassion, sympathy and support – we'll need every bit we can get. ‘United we stand..’ – Abraham Lincoln.”Footnote 85 In others, seemingly serendipitous encounters between the attacks and the cultural practices of nation building were noted: “When I heard what had happened, I was in the middle of band rehearsal … we were playing ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’.”Footnote 86 Many contributors posting from the US, moreover, pointed to a renewed sense of national pride sparked by 9/11: “My patriotism increased tenfold, and as I drove around that day and the following day, the sight of US flags waving from many porches and car antennas and flagpoles was more moving than I could have imagined”;Footnote 87 and
America was something we took for granted, but now we appreciate it as if every day were our first as an american citizen. I wear an american flag pin every day. I also get mad when I see people disrespecting the flag by wearing skirts or carrying bags that are made of an american flag pattern.Footnote 88
Those witnessing national figures respond to the events, finally, expressed similar pride. This was noted in relation both to civilians – for example, “If they ever put up another building there I hope that they will have a statue made of the firemen trying to put the flag back up in the middle of all the debris. I am proud to be American”Footnote 89 – and to representatives of the armed forces:
My heart now swells with pride each time I see Americans waving flags and singing in unity. It was a small thing to most, but I also felt a surge of pride to see four Marines remove our undamaged Marine Corps flag from the wreckage of the Pentagon. Amid the disaster, it remained untouched by flame.Footnote 90
These disparate accounts of 9/11's meaning and historical relevance constitute, I suggest, a series of efforts to claim ownership of the events and their memory.Footnote 91 This effort is most overt, perhaps, in the preceding discussion on referent objects, where contributors explore the particularities of who, or what, was injured that day. In assertions of national victimhood, for example, this desire for ownership manifests itself via a claim to collective identity. Here, authors speak on behalf of others of the attacks' impact via a proclamation of shared national suffering. The same holds, of course, for those speaking from a perspective of globalism, albeit by recourse to a different “imagined community.”Footnote 92 Yet even those posts which appear only to describe 9/11 – as terrorism, as war, as unique, and so forth – participate also in an effort for ownership. They do so, individually, by seeking to close the attacks' meaning, to evidence possession of an intimate, personal, knowledge of that which had been witnessed either directly or otherwise. Here, ultimately, it is participation in the restoration of discursive coherence demanded by these posters. Their recording these memories functions as an effort to assist in taming the incomprehensibility, flux and disruption brought on by the events. And in this act of claiming 9/11 thus, each of the posts on this site helps to construct that which they claim only to represent. They create 9/11 by shaping and positioning the attacks in and through this very performance of remembrance, with the past here, “produced in the present, rather than preceding it.”Footnote 93 The constitutive dimension of this mnemonic process is not, however, unique to this context. As David Simpson has argued,
All verbal commemorations and material monuments work in this way. They put in place what they claim is already there, and in so doing pre-empt the possibilities for alternative acts of memory. This is one reason why the design of monuments is so keenly contested.Footnote 94
Simpson's argument has obvious resonance for the contestations that continue to envelope 9/11's remembrance away from this archive. It is instructive, too, for understanding the intensity of wranglings over formalized commemorations of other events such as those that dogged the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington.Footnote 95 In the case of WhereWereYou and similar sites, however, things become a little more complicated. For, in an aggregated tapestry of memories, each individual contribution lays claim to a 9/11 that is, necessarily, different from its predecessors and successors. In the process, each precludes different versions of the attacks to those precluded by others, with any authorial agency a subsequently dispersed and fragmented affair.Footnote 96 As visitors encounter the many 9/11's preserved in this archive, any illusion of the event's possession of a pure, singular, essence is thereby punctured.Footnote 97 The very form of the archive, as such, both encapsulates and demonstrates Devetak's observation: “We should not suppose that first there is an independent historical event and then follows its narration. Events do not precede narrative, but are articulated through them.”Footnote 98
To explore the significance of this multivocality further I turn now to stated expectations, hopes, and fears around the attacks' aftermath. These projections into 9/11's future ramifications, I suggest, highlight a spectrum of political and ethical interpretive frameworks employed by the attacks' witnesses. As such, they evidence further this archive's complexity and importance as a space of multiple efforts to negotiate 9/11's pasts, presents and futures.
REMEMBERING 9/11
The most belligerent of voices on WhereWereYou include those contributors either predicting or advocating an aggressive, unwavering, response to 9/11. Demands of this nature are presented, at times, as a mechanism for recapturing national pride within a traumatized US: “It really shocked me, but most of all it made me angry. Whoever is responsible will pay for this. You just don't mess with the U.S.”Footnote 99 Or they are viewed as an instrument for addressing the wounds opened by the perpetrators: “Without proper retalliation for this attack, our skyscrapers will forever remain a target to the hatred and blackened hearts of our aggressors.”Footnote 100 Still more forceful are those that seem almost to relish the prospect of violence befalling those responsible:
I now hope that whoever is responsible for this is punished. I don't want him or her to be killed outright, I would like to see him suffer. I am not a person who harbors hate easily … But this person has ruined many people's very lives, torn apart families, and thrown an entire nation into turmoil … This person needs to suffer like we all will for years to come.Footnote 101
And so, indeed, are those threatening participation in righting the wrong so recently suffered:
I have never been a fan of war or violence. Not surprisingly, I not only agree with the attacks on afganistan, If osoma ever admits that he had something to do with all of this, then i will join any military force that I can, and I will jump in every single cave until we find him. I will not rest until justice has been served.Footnote 102
Yet, as with each of the themes explored above, contestation is evident here, too, with a number of posts instead highlighting apprehension over the likely costs of any aggressive response. These costs are framed not only at the predictable level of US national security, but also in relation to individuals and communities located elsewhere in the world. Apprehensions of this nature centre, often, on the unknowable impacts of any retaliatory violence:
Now I am unsure of Americas future. We will strike back, but at what cost? That is the question looming over many of us in Dallas. I am still mortified, and still have lingering fear. Thoughts go out to everyone suffering today, the world over …Footnote 103
or indeed on the precarious lives lived by others beyond America's borders:
i hope the “people in charge” take heed to be extraordinarily careful in their actions. it will not fix the pain and sadness of all of the families that lost to make more families with losses on the other side of the globe.Footnote 104
In the words of one contributor, “Hopefully we will not see more innocent bloodshed on either side.”Footnote 105
In some instances, concerns articulated by contributors focus on 9/11's likely ramifications within the US. Here, posters counsel against hostility towards communities marked by an apparent equivalence to those responsible for the attacks. This takes place through a claim to an America constituted not by a singularity of purpose and identity; rather by a complex history of immigration, multiculturalism and ideals of tolerance. As one contributor noted only four days after the attacks: “let us not forget that most of us came from foreign families long ago. Save your anger for those involved in this act, not for their race and religion.”Footnote 106 This thought was echoed by another, posting on 6 October:
I get the most mad when people descriminate against Arab Americans or other minorities as a result of this. This is a time to band together, not fall apart. America is not just country of white christians. We must also accept and embrace those countries who offer their help and friendship.Footnote 107
When these fears of retaliatory violence turn outwards – beyond the United States' borders – a number of posters demonstrate a distinctively cosmopolitan ethics forged around a respect for, or celebration of, difference. As one fifteen-year-old author eloquently stated, “love to the victims. love to the survivors. justice to the perpetrators. but remember, hate perpetuates division. division perpetuates hate.”Footnote 108 The sentiment is paralleled in the following remarks:
As I watched the news I was so disappointed in human beings as a life form. Why is it so difficult for everyone to just enjoy how great it is to be alive and to respect everyone else's views, religions, opinions, cultures and lifestyles?Footnote 109
In yet other instances, this cosmopolitan sentiment is organized, more simply, around a universal respect for human life:
Palestinians celebrated in the streets. I don't care who you are or who you're fighting. You don't celebrate the destruction of human life. Why can't we take a moment to realize what we may be destroying before we take action? Why can't we look up and see things from outside our ever-limited perspective?Footnote 110
Those writing from a related, yet explicitly religious, standpoint, finally, invoke theological teachings and texts as a source of strength in the aftermath of the attacks:Footnote 111 “God Bless the Victims of Sept. 11, 2001. May those who were left behind find love, support and peace while accepting hugs and blessings,”Footnote 112 or “God bless you all, unless you are a terrorist.”Footnote 113
These divergent perspectives on the appropriate response to the attacks constitute, I argue, a debate over the appropriate way to mark the violence of 9/11. One of the more interesting tensions in this discussion, indeed, centres on competing perspectives on the value of remembrance itself as a practice of demarcation. Throughout WhereWereYou – a site dedicated to the preservation of the events' memory – there runs a discussion between those who answer this call in the affirmative, asking of us “Always Remember 9-11-01,”Footnote 114 and, on the other hand, those who advocate something of a bracketing of the events, appealing instead for a return to normality. The former perspective is grounded, at times, in a sense of respect for the magnitude of the events and their victims: “Im sorry for thoose who didnt know life before this, I promise to do all I can to not let this ever happen again, but also to never let this be forgotten.”Footnote 115 At others, it is grounded as a lesson to be heeded in our assessments of other violences: “We should take our feelings of horror as we saw our innocent civilians suffer, however, when we do the same to others. It does not only affect the USA.”Footnote 116 Those demanding a return to the normal, in contrast, make their case as part of a strategy, simply, for coping with what has occurred: “I feel now our country needs to go back to nomral. Even though the stock exchange plummeted today we need to continue to living a normal life.”Footnote 117 Or, indeed, as a technique of resistance for confronting the events' horror and their protagonists' motives: “Lets all work together to keep living our lives and not let terrorism win.”Footnote 118
Perhaps more than any theme explored in this article, these projections of 9/11's futures at home and abroad point us to WhereWereYou's significance as a contemporary memory project. Its openness as a forum for contributors to participate in retelling 9/11, to share their own personal reflections on that which should follow, stands, ultimately, I suggest, as a refusal to foreclose the attacks' meaning and import. This openness leads, of course, to instances of mimesis with more authoritative discourses, as noted above. Yet, as we have seen, it also facilitates an opportunity for the airing of peripheral voices and their own messages of lamentation, decrial and resistance.Footnote 119 In this sense, WhereWereYou not only offers a space for “ordinary” people to posit competing visions of the attacks' meaning, referent and likely consequences – a space, in other words, to negotiate and renegotiate the social in these gestures of remembranceFootnote 120 – it also provides its contributors an opportunity to reflect on the ethics of remembering – and forgetting – as evidenced in the tension between those calling for 9/11's mnemonic persistence and those advocating a return to normality.Footnote 121 By expanding the range of voices that could be heard in the attacks' aftermath, therefore, the site works to facilitate the expression of new forms of collective and political attachment. It does so, not least, by providing a space for its contributors to reimagine the dynamics of identity, violence and history as experienced by themselves and others.
CONCLUSION
My aim in this article has been to explore competing efforts to make sense of 9/11 and its aftermath in the vernacular memories stored in the digital archive, WhereWereYou. In so doing, I have attempted to foreground the diversity of perspectives taken therein particularly in discussions of the temporality, status and likely consequences of those events. To locate this archive in broader social and political dynamics, I have sought, first, to highlight moments of discursive proximity between these acts of remembrance and more authoritative attempts to speak on the attacks' meaning, and, second, to illustrate moments of ambiguity or tension both internal to this archive and in relation to mnemonic practices elsewhere. Underpinning each of these immediate concerns, however, is a broader effort to convey something of the multiplicity of interpretive frameworks that were available to, and employed by, those witnessing, and remembering, 9/11.
As suggested in my introduction, I believe WhereWereYou important not only as a conveyer of discursive and mnemonic complexity in relation to the events of 11 September 2001 with which we are here concerned. More than this, this archive also offers an opportunity for reflecting further on two important dynamics. The first, much discussed, of these is the contemporary obsession with memory that traverses society. In Pierre Nora's justly famous account,
Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image … Fear of a rapid and final disappearance combines with anxiety about the meaning of the present and uncertainty about the future to give even the humblest testimony, the most modest vestige, the potential dignity of the memorable.Footnote 122
Given the aptness of this description for WhereWereYou, Nora's remarks point us both to this website's location in contexts that precede and exceed 9/11, and to its social import for posters confronted with (and discoursing on) this uncertain and dramatic event.
Second, despite Nora's scepticism toward the humble and modest, WhereWereYou's collaborative character does offer evidence, I suggest, of the democratizing potential of digital memory technologies. Contributions to this archive are, importantly, formally equivalent to one another: their efforts to recall 9/11 are uniformly numbered and dated, and decoupled from any trace of external authority. Moreover, their emphasis on the autobiographical offers an opportunity, perhaps, to recentre humans within the geopolitical dynamics and discourses of an abstract “war on terror” that followed the attacks.Footnote 123 The overlap between these testimonies and others should, of course, caution us against celebrations of individual agency here. As we have seen, these acts of remembrance emerged in, were structured by, and perhaps even helped shape, broader political and cultural codes.Footnote 124 That said, WhereWereYou – and sites such as this – do serve as facilitators of a mnemonic pluralism which is particularly desirable in contexts characterized by the stifling of dissent and opposition such as that which followed 9/11.Footnote 125 For this reason, I argue that WhereWereYou represents a significant social memory project precisely as a refusal of efforts to forge one, singular, narrative on the attacks. If nothing else, we have here a cacophony of stories each competing to narrate the attacks from individualized and highly personal standpoints. And this cacophony is to be celebrated as a rejoinder, at least, to the incessant recycling of straightforward binary logics – with us or against us, good versus evil – that marked that day's aftermath.
