In Place of a Conclusion – Question?
If the anecdotal French fry story I told earlier illustrates the banal as a site of negotiation and exchange, the strategy of “coverage” in this recent war also makes apparent the tangle of complicity between the monumental and banal. This tangle asks us to continue to render the relations between monument and banal detail deeply complex. The grandiose terms of this war – “Operation Iraqi Freedom” – already bespeak the master narrative upon which monumentality has historically been erected. But this operation and this monumental narrative were also thick with detail: an oceanic build-up of minutiae of daily life on a constantly running televisual “reality TV-scape” in which “embedded” journalists sent back details of soldier life on the front. We were given to read this latest war through a screen of anecdote – like a sandstorm of stories – culminating in the dragging down of the monument of Saddam Hussein.
At a recent Brown University conference in memory of Naomi Schor, Christie McDonald argued that the soldier anecdotes performed a kind of flip-side response to the “Portraits of Grief” that ran in the New York Times for the year following September 11, 2001. The Times “Portraits” had attempted in every case to find something extremely ordinary about each 9-11 victim. The portraits excavated stories about the way X would put the toothpaste on his wife’s toothbrush every morning and leave it for her by the sink, or about the way Y would stroke his niece’s hair while he told her fairy tales. That is, these deaths were memorialized though an oceanic build up of daily anecdote in which each victim was remembered not by grand acts or professional accomplishments, but by incidental particulars usually overlooked. Similarly, the war that followed was waged on U.S. sentiment through a barrage of visual and anecdotal detail. So massive was the televisual stockpile of images that the larger, more monumental project (world domination?) was perhaps “overlooked” by U.S. citizens in sentimental thrall to X and to Y as particular suffering soldiers. Here, arguably, the monumentalizing agendas of the war were both propped and obscured by the sandstorm of affective, sentimentalized, details leveled at the televisual screen on the home front under the rubric “LIVE.”
Watching television, I began to formulate a question. Had we, the viewers, become monuments – rigidly fixed, seemingly unmoving, in front of our “sets” – overlooking what we saw (and overlooking the significance)? Had we, sometime voters, been bypassed? Before our screens, I felt myself rendered immobile. Seated on a sofa. Staring. Are images, now, the passersby and have we become forgettable sentinals of mythic actions past? If so, time to take action.
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