Collaboratory in Critical Security Methods
The International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies is an ESRC funded project (RES-810-21-0072)
The Falling Man: Affect, Images and Securitization Theory
The Falling Man: Affect, Images and Securitization Theory
Can Mutlu
Visuals from the 9/11 attacks, both moving and still, have had a profound impact on our collective memory as “representations” of a traumatic moment in our recent history – a destructive end to the so-called Pax-Americana. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, two sets of images came to represent the attacks in media: The first set consisted of visuals from the actual attacks and consequent destruction – falling buildings, crashing airliners and the encompassing plume from the destroyed towers of the World Trade Center (WTC), the second set of images were of resilience and heroism, captured in the still frames of firefighters risking their lives to rescue civilians. However, one thing was missing from these representations of 9/11: visual representation of death. While the first two set of images captured the trauma and affective register associated with this trauma – fear, anger, sadness, hope etc., human casualties that were at the core of the trauma, remained implicit in these images of “falling towers” and “crashing airliners” – we all knew that there were people in those planes and buildings! Yet we could not cope with the use of images that captured death – we deemed those images problematic or of poor taste; we couldn’t face with the explicit representation of death. Death, in those images, remained secondary, a consequence of the action of being attacked, rather than an end in and off itself. However another image captured death and hopelessness as well as the limit experience of death in such a way that it provoked an immediate affective reaction: I am referring to the photo of the Falling Man.
The image of the falling man captured a tragically human side of 9/11, one that consisted of despair, hopelessness and horror of being stuck in a floor inaccessible to any help from the outside. Taken by Associate Press photographer Richard Drew at 9:41 am on September 11, 2001, the frame captured a falling male – that remains unidentified, who presumably jumped from one of the higher floors of the WTC – inaccessible to emergency personnel due to fire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Man
While the image itself is part of a series of frames that captured the movement of the falling man and his rotation in the air as he descends, the photo that got published shows him suspended in air, falling down headfirst with the familiar look of the WTC’s façade on the background. The image alone, without context, is disorienting, it is hard to differentiate the bottom of the frame from the top. At first glance, it is not clear whether the image is upside down or not. This disorientation makes the photo especially traumatizing. The image was published in page 7 of the New York Times on September 12, 2001 – among other newspapers. While the NYT of that day had more than a dozen of photographs of the attacks, the Falling Man image was the only image that was deemed inappropriate and criticized for its used. This photo, however, did not capture an exceptional instance and sensationalized it; rather the unidentified person in the photo was among 200 people who jumped to their death on September 11th. So what was so different about this image? On the one hand, why did the public deem the use of it as poor taste? On the other hand, what made the repeated use of images with crashing planes or falling towers acceptable?
I believe different images of 9/11 provoke different traumas and different affective responses. Our collective memory is capable of dealing with some of these traumas, while we chose to forget or ignore others. Anger, fear, humiliation, these are “emotions” that connect with certain “affective impulses” which in return result in certain “actions” such as retaliation, war, exceptionalism etc. Whereas this line between affect-emotion-action is not as clear in instances of helplessness, hopelessness, disconnectedness – in the case of the falling man this was being out of the reach of emergency personal – don’t have actions that suppresses the trauma. Instead, in these instances we opt for a different set of (re)actions, we rely on forgetting, ignoring, or omitting these feelings and object associated with these feelings.
Especially in the case of Securitization Theory, the relationship between the referent object and the audience is essential. The role of affect in this relationship, however, remains under studied. To that effect, the connection between images, especially the (mis)use of images, and the selection process involved in this (mis)use of images is important. Visual analysis, combined with a mapping exercise that trace the process of editorial decisions leading to publication or censoring of images within the “journalistic field” as well as the public discourse around the use of certain images such as the “falling man” establishes an important connection between affect, visuals and securitization theory.
gabi schlag says
I really like how Can approaches this traumatizing image which has certainly become one of the icons of 9/11. I remember that the US-American writer Don DeLillio wrote a novel, entitled Falling Man (2007) where he described how daily life became unbearable for a man who had witnessed the attacks in NYC.
I guess there has been much discussion not only on whether it’s ethically appropriate to publish such an image, but also on its inherent aesthetic appearance. The photo is divided exactly in the middle by the contrasting background of one of the twin towers. The vertical stripes, altering in dark and light, give the image a depth effect and support the impression of falling down. The main subject, then, the falling man, exactly in vertical direction, was related by some commentators to the classical biblical symbol of the fallen angel. Such an iconographic genealogy, however, seemed to be quite perverse regarding the despair and actual death of so many people.
Susan Sontag (and certainly many others) has been interested in the cruelty of such photos and the question why and how we are “regarding the pain of other” (2002). I think this image is so important and powerful because it imbues a tentative relation between sublimation and fear. One the one hand, it’s indeed a traumatizing depiction of what the events on September 11th meant to the people in NYC, in particular death, destruction and fear. On the other hand, it reiterates an aesthetic form that comes close to what Edmund Burke (1729-1797) called the Sublime which he distinguished from the beautiful:
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime, that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” (A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful, 1757)
Although the publication of this picture was criticized, it left a remarkable imprint in what we might call the collective memory of the US-American society due to the strong emotions Burke associates with the sublime. While pictures of heroic fire workers or President Bush standing on the debris of now ‘ground zero’ restored an image of US-American conviction and fortitude, they become even more reconciling before the background of the image of the fallen man.
I think it is very convincing that Can relates this photo to the question of emotions and affect (for a quite interesting project, see Languages of Emotions, http://www.languages-of-emotion.de/en.html). In this way, visuality might ‘speak’ to our senses in a different way than language does. It’s a way of seeing, appropriating and memorizing where time and space are simultaneously perceived.
However, I’m not sure whether we can judge if and when images are mis-used for other purposes than they (the image, the photographer, the publisher?) intended. I highly appreciate if we could continue this discussion in more detail, for example asking in what way images relate to questions of ontological security and identity, emotions and memory as well as aesthetics of the sublime.
30 September 2010, 09:59
Juha Vuori says
In this reading I’m focusing on the flow of signs, or rather the flow of iconic images.
While the flaming twin towers have clearly become an iconic image, it would seem that despite the attempts to “airbrush” the falling man out of the shared imagery of 9/11 it has also become a frame of reference. This seems apparent, for example, in the opening credits of Mad Men (ABC, 2007-), a show that depicts early 1960s life in the advertising world of Madison avenue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcRr-Fb5xQo
Even though businessmen jumping out of skyscrapers has been part of western imaginary since the Wall street crash of the 1920s, we have not had images of those actual businessmen jumping out (and the number of suicides by this method was low when compared to their enduring iconic status): representations of this modus operandi are more prevalent in comedy (e.g., Monty Python). Yet the imagery and idea are instantly recognizable.
The producer of the show Mad Men claims that he did not consciously think of the falling man as the titles were produced, but he does recognize that 9/11 is a part of the show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqX_WMNi_gM
This exemplifies how social artifacts have a life of their own: one person’s reassurance is another’s threat. In the 2000s at least, it is difficult not to read the falling man as a point of reference for the opening titles of Mad Men. Even beyond the image itself, the themes of the show would seem to coincide with symbolic readings of 9/11: symbolically, the falling man and 9/11 as a whole could be read as representing the fall of America, or even as the fall of masculinity. Despite the grand surroundings and status of both the falling mad man and the falling man, both are helpless in their descent. The props of affluence and promise fall together with the man in the sequence; the myth of untouchability of a nuclear U.S. fell with the falling man and the crash into the Pentagon (btw. why does the Pentagon crash not have the status of an iconic image?). Just as the show deconstructs the myth of the "greatest generation", the falling man and 9/11 deconstructs the myth of the U.S. mainland as a safe haven.
While the flaming towers can affectively work as a rallying-point quite easily (revenge and reconstruction), the falling man’s affective effect may not be as easily corralled: the helpless man may not be reconstructed after his fall, and even revenge seems moot. To securitize something when it seems apparent that there are no actual means to repel the identified threat (and thereby to guarantee security) could be a risky political prospect. Buildings may be protected, but a falling man cannot.
Furthermore, while the flaming towers can be considered to be sublime, a falling man cannot; the fall of the towers neared "unreal" whereas the falling man was a single tragedy and not a "rupture of reality". It is more difficult to use the falling man to stoke a forceful reaction than it is to use the flaming towers. Indeed, people who witnessed the fall of the actual towers were less willing to support U.S. use of force than those who have only seen the sublime imagery of their fall [Clark, Mary (2002): ”The September 11, 2001, Oral History Narrative and Memory Project: A First Report”. The Journal of American History, 88(3), 569–579.]. Revenge for an individual may cause more sympathy for the victims of the revenge than in the case of revenge for an attack on a "symbol".
***
On another hand, examining the falling man through the point of view provided by Baudrillard on 9/11 (in Spirit of terrorism), the falling man did something that is denied to the biopolitical system that works to deny death. For Baudrillard, the power of the individual terrorists came from their allowed possibility of self-induced death; the biopolitical system is powerless when confronted with this sacrifice, as it works to deny death in all its forms. For the biopolitical system then, suicide even in the face of agonizing death is not allowed (cf. euthanasia): the falling man represents a choice that is not allowed for the system, and thereby should be denied for the individual as well. The image is demoralizing as it reveals the system’s final powerlessness over death (even by choice).
-Juha
29 September 2010, 11:19